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The Giver: For a Movie About Feelings, It Left Me Cold

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Let's start out with the all-important confession: No, I have not read The Giver. In all honesty, I probably would have, had I ever even known what it was about, but I didn't. I find it a bit baffling, too, because this book seems to be right up my alley. Dystopian fiction about the overthrow of a totalitarian society focusing on the plight of the youth? Kind of my jam.

But no, I never read it, and when I heard the movie was coming out, I actually made a conscious choice not to grab a copy of the book. Why? Because it's a rare experience for me to be on the other side of the book versus movie debate, and it's even rarer that I have to take the movie on its own merits. Since I haven't ever read the book, I have nothing that I can compare the movie to, and therefore I only know what the movie tells me.

So, based on that understanding alone, I will say that the movie is pretty successful. I didn't really lose track of any of it, nor did I feel bogged down in the exposition. It was a fun and relatively interesting movie, and I was fairly emotionally invested in how it was all going to turn out. So, you know, good job. Right on. Pat yourselves on the back, you made a movie that is officially accessible to non-book fans. Hurrah!

The problem I have with this movie, though, is kind of really nitpicky, but it matters to me. Simply put, this movie is nice. It's fine. It's okay. But it's not spectacular in any real way. It doesn't make you gasp and shiver and scream. Ordinarily, I think that might be fine, but given the point of the story here, that feels like a very real problem.

Let me back up, for those of you who have neither read the book nor seen the movie. The Giver is set in a dystopian world very similar to our own, but dystopian and stuff. Basically, in a plot eerily similar but less cyberpunk than Equilibrium, this world has seriously limited human emotion. In an effort to get rid of strife and sadness, the community has found a way to rid humans of feelings and choice and all that stuff that makes life actually worth living. 

You're assigned a family. You're assigned a job. You're assigned a time to die. Everything is set and regulated. Heck, they don't even make babies the old-fashioned way. They use artificial insemination. (Sort of like Brave New World, as it happens.) Even the colors of the world are gone - in a very literal sense. The whole world is in shades of gray, because everyone is colorblind. Race and religion and dreams are gone, and everyone is equal because everyone is equally bereft.

In this world of conformity and control there's one kid who doesn't fit in. Shockingly, he's a white, middle-class guy, who just feels like there must be something more, man. Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) is a sweet kid who feels unprepared for his future. All his friends - Asher (Cameron Monaghan) and Fiona (Odeya Rush) - are completely confident in the community elders and their ability to choose a good future for everyone. But Jonas isn't sure. He doesn't doubt, exactly, he just is sort of uncertain about where he could possibly fit.

Turns out that this uncertainty is right on the money. During the graduation ceremony, Fiona is named to work as a "nurturer" and Asher as a drone pilot, but Jonas isn't told to do anything until the very end. And his job? It's a bit more unusual. He's been selected to be the "receiver of memories." And no one really knows what that means. They just know that the previous Receiver (Jeff Bridges) is kind of weird and crazy, and that this is a very big deal.

Jonas finds out quickly what it all means, though. See, the receiver of memories literally means the person who has to carry the entire collective consciousness of humanity up until this point. Because memories are dangerous and could give people ideas (perish the thought), only one person is designated as safe enough to hold them all, and this person is exiled from the community and carefully watched. They're only allowed to speak up about this when the council of elders needs help with a decision and can use the wisdom of the past.

Sounds like a fun job, huh?

The actual process involves the old receiver psychically transferring memories over to the new receiver, piece by piece. And the results are startling, at least for Jonas. He starts to see colors again. More feelings. He stops taking his daily injections. He gets memories of riding a sled and dancing and war and fear and human courage. It's a lot. He tries to share it. That's a bad idea.

There's other stuff that happens in the story, from Jonas' budding yet somehow stunted relationship with Fiona to the mystery of what happened to the previous receiver (Taylor Swift) to a whole thing with a baby, and all of this stuff is great. But the bulk of the story really deals, thematically at least, with the question of whether or not we are human if we don't feel anything.

And that's a good question. A question I think is worth asking. Are our emotions what make us human? And if not, then what does? Even more pointed perhaps is the question, "What cost is too high a price to pay for peace?" At what point have we taken too much away, and life is no longer worth living?

Those are really valid questions to ask, and I'm glad the movie addresses them. This is, however, where my criticism from the top comes in. The Giver is an entire movie about how necessary emotions are to life and life to the full. In that sense, then, shouldn't the movie have been more emotionally affecting? If the whole point is that deep and powerful emotions are the core of our humanity, then shouldn't the movie give us these feelings?

Instead of deep emotions, what I really got from it was some nice entertainment. It's interesting, it asks valid questions, and it's not terrible to sit through. But the movie isn't great. It's really not. It's just fine. Okay. And that's not something a movie that ostensibly dealing with the vast spectrum of human experience ought to be.

There were moments that stood out. The moment when Jonas entertains the baby Gabriel with funny faces was actually really excellent and made me bust out laughing in the theater. And the part where the giver bolsters Jonas with memories of human resistance and protests and courage and sacrifice - well that got me pumped up like that kind of thing always does. But those moments were few and far between.

For the most part, the movie worked and functioned, but it never soared. It never really got past just kind of working and started being good. You know?

Also, I had a handful of plothole problems with it that vastly dampened my appreciation of the film. Yes, they are all nitpicky, so I won't list them here, but suffice it to say that the logic of the film was pretty terrible, and I honestly feel like a lot could have been done to tighten it up. Also, for a movie that mentioned in the narration how race was no longer a thing, that was a heck of a white cast. Get Morgan Freeman to play the giver, get Shay Mitchell to play Fiona, get Sinqua Walls for Jonas, just do something or other to make this movie less hella white.

Overall, like I said, I think this movie is fine. But fine doesn't cut it. In a very real sense, the most damning criticism you can make of a film is that it's "okay". Because that means that the film has failed its most crucial task: it has not transformed you, either for the better or for the worse. 

Film is a transformative medium. I believe that strongly. The point of film is to tell a story that will change the viewer. You tell a story because you have something to say. So say it well. We tell the stories that matter to us, and I'm totally down with The Giver being an important story that matters. That's great. I agree with so much of this movie ideologically. Where it fails, though, is in the execution.

If your film does not impact the audience, if they do not remember it, it has failed. The Giver is about the importance of memory and of feelings and of human passion. It should absolutely not be a throwaway summer tentpole like this. It shouldn't be lowest common denominator. It could have been more. That's all, really, that I have to say. It could have been more, and it should have been more.

Is there a more damning criticism than to call a movie "fine"?



Veronica Mars And The Movie That Should Have Been

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When you make a sequel, or a revival, or a new anything, there’s always a careful line to walk. On the one hand, you want to make fans of the original happy. These are your most dedicated fanbase, and therefore the people you really don’t want to piss off. But you also, as a bigshot movie producer or director or writer, want to appeal to new fans as well. You want to bring in people who probably would like the original, but just haven’t heard of it.

This is your biggest hurdle, the tension between these two goals. Because, let’s be real, if you only manage to appeal to one side of the fanbase, your movie (or book or television show or broadway revival or whatever) won’t be a hit. Sadly, that’s just the way it works. The only real way to make sure that your project appeals to fans both new and old is to figure out why it’s popular in the first place, and then work from there. Not the superficial things that are fun, but not necessary, no, I mean that core of the project. What is it about? Why does it matter? Why do people love it?

I mention this for a few reasons. First, news has recently hit that there will be some kind of Pushing Daisies revival. That’s awesome, because Pushing Daisies was a freaking brilliant show full of incredibly talented people. But I also mention it because a few weeks ago I was stuck on a plane, bored out of my mind as I usually am on planes, and ended up rewatching the Veronica Mars movie. That movie? Didn’t know why people loved it.

I covered this a while back, but I do have to admit that at the time, my brain was kind of fogged by the intense powers of nostalgia and joy wafting up from the project. I love Veronica Mars, in the kind of uncomplicated way that one loves a female-centric, original, clever show that happened to be airing during one’s high school/college years. In other words, a lot. I was waiting for this movie with baited breath and more than a little anxious hyperventilating. So obviously when it came out, I failed to be objective.

Not that I really think objectivity is humanly possible. I tend to believe that there is no such thing as an objective report. But that’s a larger, more philosophical point that we’re not going to get into now. Anyway.

Upon a repeated viewing, months later, I have to admit the truth. It’s not a very good movie. Sure, it serves its purpose pretty well, as long as you believe that its purpose is to remind everyone of how much they liked the show, and appease the Veronica/Logan shippers. If that’s all you wanted, then bravo! That’s pretty much all you got.

But the movie lacked something crucial that the show had, and without it the movie suffered. It wasn’t very good. It could have been better. The thing it was missing was simple, but vital: class tension.

Now, this might seem like kind of a weird point to make, since class tension was never explicitly the point of Veronica Mars. The show’s premise - teenage girl private eye solves murders in a film noir California town - was weird, but pretty straight-forward. I wouldn’t be surprised if the class (and race) commentary in the show was largely accidental. Just a sort of thing that happened as the show was going along. However it happened, though, it did, and it was great.

While the arc-plot of the first season dealt with the death of a rich, beautiful, privileged teenager and the luxurious lives of her potential murderers, the real subtext dealt with a meatier topic: race and privilege in a community with an extremely wide income gap. Veronica and her father, having once been considered part of the upper crust but now fallen to the lowest of the lows, were perfect exemplars of this, and Veronica even went so far as to openly address her former privilege. In the voice over she talks about how she never noticed the poverty around her until her family was the one struggling to make rent.

But it’s not just about Veronica versus her former friends. The show also opens up a variety of conversations on race and class issues. There’s her friend Wallace, a lower middle-class African-American teenage nerd who has a job at the school and thinks about money issues and loves his family but worries about them sometimes. There’s also the local gang leader, Eli Navarro (Weevil), a Latino high schooler who frequently refers to the racial discrimination he experiences at the hand of the police, and points out that there really isn’t a whole lot for him to do in Neptune that isn’t crime.

Or we could talk about Mac, Veronica’s very intelligent friend whose low-brow, low-income family feels like a foreign planet to her. She finds out at one point that she was actually switched at birth, and should have grown up in a cultured, rich family. Mac understandably struggles with this, but eventually comes to realize that while her family is codedly lower-class, they’re also good, and she loves them.

Heck, there’s even an entire episode in the first season about class passing. That same episode? Has Weevil accused of stealing, a bunch of white rich boys banding together to implicate him, and several frank discussions of race.

What I’m saying is that while class tension wasn’t technically the point of the show, it became clear early on that it was the focus. No matter what story Veronica Mars was telling, class and race became vital aspects. Which is good. Class and race inform huge amounts of our lives, and this combined with the show’s unflinching portrayal of rape narratives is a huge part of why we love it.

And a huge part of why the movie didn’t work.

See, when the writers adapted the Veronica Mars show into the Veronica Mars movie, they got confused about why we love it. Instead of giving us a hard-hitting narrative about police corruption and racial tension and class warfare, we got a scandalous story about yet another dead rich girl and her super rich boyfriend and some rich people doing rich stuff. Worse still, Veronica was no longer our working class heroine of the poor, but a rich lawyer lady who can actually afford to push her plane tickets back indefinitely, clearly isn’t hurting for a job because she’s willing to turn down a good offer, and just generally seems to have no memory of how the other half lives.

That’s a problem. It feels like the writers figured that all we are looking for in a Veronica Mars story is a load of quips, Veronica deflecting sexist remarks (which is great, don’t get me wrong), and some juicy juicy murder. But that’s not what we (what I) want at all. What I want is Veronica Mars, avenging angel of the downtrodden. Veronica Mars, who understands rich people but can never be one of them. Veronica Mars, who sees the corruption in the police force and burns it out like the fires of justice. While being cute and quippy.

This Veronica Mars, the one we got in the movie, was less of an avenging angel, and more of a marshmallow. She was very witty, of course, but her wit lacked the necessary punch of justice. Veronica was kind of cranky, but not righteously pissed off about something, and I would argue (am arguing) that Veronica is at her best when she’s really really angry. She just is.

Imagine with me for a second the movie this could have been. Instead of getting a phone call from Logan Echolls asking for help, what if Veronica received a call from Eli Navarro, her former-gangbanger friend, asking for her investigating help to clear him when he’s accused of trying to mug Celeste Kane, in what is clearly a police frame-job. As a sidenote, this is actually a subplot in the movie, it is way more compelling than the main story.

Weevil’s been shot by Celeste Kane, simply for going up to her car window and asking if he can help her with her car. Weevil’s turned his life around since high school - he’s married now and has an adorable daughter. He hasn’t been on a motorcycle in years. By all accounts, Eli Navarro is a success story, the tale of a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who managed to put his life of crime behind him and live straight. But all of that gets changed by a white lady with a gun and a police department happy to plant evidence and “clean up the streets”.

This movie could have been amazing. Veronica’s left her seedy life behind her, but as she’s interviewing for a major position at a major firm (where they coyly ask about her gangland associations in the interview), she gets a call from an old friend in trouble. And Veronica never was one to turn down a person in need.

So she flies all the way across the country, bailing on her boyfriend and her job prospects in order to help a lower-class Hispanic man with a juvenile record. That? Is a much stronger story. And as she uncovers pieces of the crime, she finds that Neptune’s sheriff’s department is at the center of a web of racial discrimination in law enforcement. That the department is taking bribes from white developers who want to “reclaim” the waterfront, and so are targeting the Hispanic community and trying to drive them out of town. What if Veronica had a cause, and pursuing it forced her to go straight up against the sheriff’s department?

That would be an amazing movie. She gets shot at, she gets framed for crimes, she tries to go public, they retaliate against her father and her friends, Veronica has to sacrifice heavily, etc. Weevil, in the face of a criminal trial and the loss of his legitimate job, has to go back into a life of crime. His relationship with his wife is strained. He's afraid of what will happen to his daughter. It’s a story with much more gravitas than what we got, and frankly it’s just more interesting. Veronica’s interactions with Weevil were always more compelling than her with Logan, for all that she and Logan had sexual tension coming out of their ears. Weevil’s interesting. This story is interesting. And timely.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing here is how easily it could have been this. Because there were little moments in the movie that hinted at a bigger story. When Veronica first comes to town, she and her father are driving at night when they stop at a police checkpoint. Ahead of them, the cops are searching a car with several Latino teenagers in it. They find a can of spraypaint, and decide to taze and cuff the guys right there. When one of them protests, they hit him.

But Veronica’s father is on this. He gets out of his car, holds up his phone, and announces loudly that he’s filming. He then uploads the video to the cloud (so it won’t be destroyed if his phone is “accidentally” broken) and calmly gets back in the car as the officers let the boys go.

It’s this little moment that hints at a much more important plot. How casually Keith deals with the situation. How unnerved Veronica is by it. How fearlessly brutal the cops are prior to realizing that they have a white audience. It’s powerful and one of the best moments in the film. 

Look, I’m not saying that the Veronica Mars movie isn’t entertaining. It is, definitely. If you love the show, you’ll enjoy the movie. But I am saying that it’s not the same. It’s not as good as the show, because it fails to recognize what the show was about. 

It may have seemed like Veronica Mars was always about scandals and soap operatic plots and Veronica outsmarting everyone, but it was really about identity, and class, and race, and all that messy junk that comes out when people are put under pressure. It was about a teenage girl forced to reckon with her place in the world, and her determination to make this world a more just one for everyone.

That’s the Veronica Mars I love. Accept no substitutes.

Adorable.

What's On My Pull List? (Hawkeye, Chew, Bodies, and More!)

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Also Gwen as Spiderman is coming up in Edge of the Spiderverse!
This is now the thirdinstallment in the ongoing series of articles where I tell you what comics I pre-order at my local comic book shop. I really hesitate to call this the last article in the series because, let's be real, comics are a fluid and changing medium. Some of these comics will be cancelled before the year is out. Other comics have been announced, but will later come out and I will love them and put them on my list. Still other comics have yet to be announced, or even thought of, and invariably I will love some of those and put them on my list too!

What I'm saying is that a pull list is a changing thing. Some comics you love, and then you get over, whether because they switched writers or because you're just kind of done with them. Some comics you find you can't quit no matter how hard you try. And some comics end before their time. But there are always new comics coming, and to my great and visible delight, a lot of these new comics are much more visibly diverse than their predecessors. In fact, I would say that on a whole, comics are becoming increasingly inclusive and representative as an art form.

And that's rad.

So, with all of that in mind, as well as the understanding that this list is probably incomplete because, as with everything I do, I consume a lot of comics*, here's the some more of my pull list!

1. The Wicked and the Divine (Image)

I have absolutely no idea what to make of this comic, and I'm kind of okay with that. I know that's an odd start, but it's very true. For all that there are now three issues of this comic available, I still don't feel like I fully grok it. But I'll try to explain it anyways.

Wicked and Divine takes place in an alternate universe of sorts where the gods are real, and they are reincarnated every ninety years into the bodies of a group people in their late teens/early twenties. The group is completely random each time, but suddenly, they are gods, and they are worshipped and revered for two years. Then they die.

No one really understands why the cycle exists, or how to get out of it, and for the gods trapped inside it's a terrifying existence. They know they're going to die, they just don't know what happens next. But it seems that they have bigger problems: one of the gods (presumably) is killing people and framing gods for it. Why? They don't know. But it's definitely a problem.

I like this because it's just so stinking weird and confusing and weird, but also because it's a truly compelling mystery, and because the writing is pretty good. It doesn't hurt that the art style is nice, and the writers have chosen very intentionally to make their characters multi-racial and multi-lingual, so as to avoid cultural centrism. I like that. But mostly I'm keeping reading until I figure out what the heck is going on, you know?

2. Bodies (Vertigo)

And, speaking of stories that I don't really understand but am intrigued by, Bodies is another weird one. It's brand new, but I can tell it's going to be amazing. It had better be amazing, because I'm hooked, and I hate being hooked on things that turn out to be terrible. Anyway, the story is actually four stories, told each issue and illustrated by a different artist. The stories each revolve around a cop in London discovering a mysterious body. The stories take place in four very distinct time periods, and the one link between them is that the body they all find is exactly the same.

Cool, right?

The four time periods also make an effort to discuss real and important issues of self, identity, and what it means to protect the people even when they hate you. There's one story set in Victorian London, with a gay male detective trying to investigate crimes and not be outed and then executed, and another story about a German Jewish cop trying make a new life for himself in London during WWII. There's a female Muslim detective inspector in present-day London, facing off against race riots and nationalist backlash, and there's a really weird story set in the future where everyone has been hit by an amnesia pulse, including the cop. That one's kind of confusing. But fun.

I like the story because it very explicitly deals with questions of identity and duty and sacrifice, but also because these characters all feel very real to me (except amnesia cop lady). They're real people, in real situations, and those real situations are pretty messed up. And I would like to know what's up with the bodies.

3. Sensation Comics (DC)

This is also a brand new comic (surprise!), but kind of a really old one too. Basically, way back when, Wonder Woman had two titles coming out every month. There was the Wonder Woman comic, which we all know and love, and then there was also Sensation Comics, an anthology series featuring Wonder Woman, that got to tell all the weird different stories about her.

It's just been revived and started printing again, and I for one am thrilled. Not just because I like reading Wonder Woman one-shots (though this month, when she basically fixed Gotham forever was pretty rad), but because it gives the writers a lot more leeway to explore her character and find compelling angles to her characterization.

Plus, Wonder Woman is one of the most recognizable superheroes on Earth. She deserves a second title so she can strut her stuff. Who knows? Maybe some of the material from this book will be compelling enough to finally be made into that movie that we know must happen someday please oh please come on.

4. Hawkeye (Marvel) - Trade Paperbacks

Like it says above, I came late to the Hawkeye train, and so I've opted to collect the trade paperbacks instead of the floppies. If this were a female-lead comic I'd probably buy the floppies just because, but it's not, and it doesn't need my help. Hawkeye is a pretty popular comic in its own right, and I think it's doing just fine without me.

Also it's hilarious and wonderful and I love it. For reference, this is sometimes called Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, and it's not hard to see why. Just like Kelly Sue Deconnick has largely defined Captain Marvel in recent years, and Gail Simone is who everyone thinks of in terms of Wonder Woman, Matt Fraction has developed the definitive take on Hawkeye. And I am okay with that because his take is amazing.

Basically, remember all the sass and snark we got from Jeremy Renner in Avengers? Well that's the comic. Clint Barton is a human disaster who thinks the best way to infiltrate a party is by wearing a suit and repeating the word "casual" under his breath. He has a one-eyed dog fondly named "PizzaDog", and his young mentee, Kate Bishop, is a more functional adult than him any day. Which is funny, because she's like eighteen.

Technically the comic is about both Clint and Kate, but it's pretty clear that Clint is where the real story lies. And it's a good story. It's about what Hawkeye does when he's not being an Avenger. He doesn't have a swanky life or some big mission. Mostly he hangs out and gets into trouble with the Russian mob or accidentally pisses off some supervillain when he goes out for more pizza. He's smart (really smart), but also kind of dumb when it comes to common sense. And score one for representation, this Hawkeye is deaf and wears hearing aids, a piece of continuity I wish they would bring into the movies.

Basically Hawkeye is the best like pizza is the best. It may not be the best thing in the world for you, but damn if you're not going to eat it anyway.

5. Chew (Image) - Trade Paperbacks

I have listed my deep and abiding love for Chew elsewhere on this site, but suffice to say that I really like this comic. It's weird and fun and cool and has deep and interesting characters and also a lot of science fiction insanity. It's about a world where chicken has been outlawed because of a bird flu epidemic. Our hero, Tony Chu, works for the FDA, investigating chicken-related crimes. He's a perfect candidate for the job because he's cibopathic: he has a superpower where whenever he eats something, he knows everything about how it was made and who made it. So he solves crimes. Occasionally by eating dead people.

But that's really only the very basic gist of the show. For starters, there are a ton of food related superpowers revealed, including but not limited to: a woman who can write about food so vividly you can actually taste it, a woman who can see the future of anyone she bites, a man who gets smarter when he's eating, a man who can sculpt chocolate into realistic and usable weapons (including guns), and so on. It's deeply bizarre, and very fun.

Right now the plot has expanded across the universe, something about how the thing with the chickens and this strange alien writing in the sky is actually about the end of the world? Also there's a minor character who is a cyborg rooster that happens to be the FDA's most decorated and efficient agent. POYO! It's a good book. You should read it.

6. Pretty Deadly (Image) - Trade Paperbacks

Finally, another book by Kelly Sue Deconnick (she also writers Captain Marvel), this one is, you guessed it, super duper weird. It's like a Spaghetti Western kind of a book? The first trade paperback, which is the only one available so far, follows the journey of "the girl in the vulture cloak" as she and her mentor try to escape Death and his henchmen, eventually seeking the aid of Death-Faced Ginny, who is Death's daughter and kind of a reaper and also warring against Death...

It's complicated. But good. That's what I'm saying. I can't really explain it to you in more detail, unfortunately, because I'm not convinced I understand it in more detail than that, but it's very entertaining, and honestly? The art is some of the most beautiful I've seen in a comic. Hands down. Emma Rios, the artist, is amazing and needs more work. Also she needs to keep drawing this comic too, because she's so good at it.

I'm not really sure where the story's going to go from here, though. That's the one downside. I mean, I love the first volume, but it ends on a pretty resolved note, so I'm not sure what else there is to say. Still, I'm curious. And if you like surrealist takes on the Old West and also death mythology, then you should like it too.

7. BONUS: Coming Soon! ThorBucky Barnes: The Winter SoldierSpiderwoman, and Secret Avengers (Marvel) and Batgirl (DC)


I don't have much to say about these yet, because they haven't come out, and therefore I cannot vouch for them, but I am eagerly anticipating each and every one of these stories. (Okay, technically, Secret Avengers is already out, but I'm waiting for the trade paperbacks, and it could be another few months for that.) So yeah. Very excited. And, once again, feel free to note how much of this list is made up of Marvel and independent titles, and how little is DC. Interesting, eh?

Favorite character in Bodies. Hands down.
*Stories are wonderful and I will take them in whatever medium I can get them.

The Inescapable Goodness of Teen Wolf's Scott McCall

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If you’re not currently watching Teen Wolf, then I’d like to take a minute and suggest that you start. Not because it’s an amazing show and you’re missing out on world-class storytelling, or even because the shirtless dudes are really that amazing. I mean, they’re nice, but they’re not quite enough to compensate for the plot-holes, marginalized characters, and frequent tonal shifts that plague the series. The reason I think everyone and their mother should watch Teen Wolf has very little to do with the show itself, and everything to do with a single character: Scott McCall.

Now, this might seem super obvious to state, since Scott (played by Tyler Posey) is the nominal protagonist of Teen Wolf. I mean, he is the “teen wolf” that the show’s title is referring to. It’s Scott’s life that’s transformed when he’s bitten by a crazed werewolf, it’s Scott who has to man up and learn how to be a supernatural creature in a banal world, and it’s Scott who has to do all of this while trying not to fail all of his classes or lose sight of what makes him human.

It’s all about Scott.

But the real reason why Scott makes the show work isn’t because he’s the main character. At this point that role is largely in name only - Scott has been the central character but not the “main” one for a few seasons now. No, the reason everyone should watch Teen Wolf and marvel at Scott McCall is actually a lot simpler than that. Simply put, Scott McCall is a really, really good person. Like a really, really, really, really good person. 

Scott is the kind of person that Sunday school teachers coo over and little old ladies know by name. He’s a Disney prince of a guy, and he’s so incorruptibly wonderful that the entire arc of this most recent season dealt with the fact that you literally cannot make him a bad guy.

He is also, and I feel like this is where the show gets really interesting, a biracial teenager from a “broken home” living with his Hispanic mother in a house where the power gets shut off because they can’t pay their bills and where he has to take extra hours at his after-school job so they can buy groceries. This kid is basically the werewolf messiah, and he’s not an upper-middle class white boy. He’s from the exact demographic that we would consider “at risk youth”. Scott’s a lot closer in socioeconomic status and cultural image to Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin than he is to the original Scott McCall of the Teen Wolf movie. And that? Makes the show worth watching.

Now, I really shouldn’t give Jeff Davis, the showcreator, too much credit here. Or really any credit. From what I’ve been able to tell, Davis has been ambiguous at best and downright irritated at worst regarding Scott’s racial and economic background. The majority of this development has actually come because of the actors. Tyler Posey is biracial, and very open about the fact. After finally being confronted one too many times about having cast a non-white actor in the lead role, Davis decided to make it an intentional choice, but Scott’s race actually remained a non-topic for the first few seasons of the show.

Additionally, one gets the impression that Scott was not always intended to be the best boy ever. In the first season, it seems like the show is going to make Scott heroic, but complicated, like the usual television heroes. It wasn’t until the second season (the agreed upon worst season) that the show started to build Scott up as a great person, and it was in the third season that everyone just sat down and agreed that Scott is basically the best person to ever live. So it’s been a long process.

And don’t get me wrong. When I say that Scott is, on this show, pretty much the best person to ever live, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. 

So far he has somehow managed to become the Alpha of a werewolf pack simply by being a really good leader and inspirational and pure of heart (something so rare that there is literally a plot where another werewolf pack tries to steal him), as well as being the kind of guy who doesn’t just stay friends with his ex-girlfriend, he stays best friends with his ex-girlfriend.

There are scenes where Scott tells his friends how much they mean to him and how much he loves them. There are scenes where Scott tells his enemies how much they mean to him and how much he loves them. There is literally a scene where Scott breaks through a magic spell with the power of love. Actually there are a bunch of scenes where he does that. Because Scott McCall is magic.

And it’s not just that he’s sappy and cute and magically gifted. Scott McCall would be an angel if he didn’t have any supernatural powers, and from what I can tell, that’s the point. He’s like Steve Rogers that way. What happens if you give superpowers to a person who has a weak constitution (interesting because both Steve and Scott have debilitating asthma for most their lives), but an infinite ability to care for others? Well, it appears that you get Captain America and True Alpha Scott McCall. Becoming a werewolf didn’t make Scott a good person, it just gave him the power to be the best good person he could be.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I love Scott. In the first season he’s a little annoying, sure, but honestly I blame the writers for that. They didn’t yet know how to write him, and they were portraying his defining feature (his ineffable goodness) as a liability and frustrating weakness. Once they realized that Scott’s actual flaw is that he’s pretty much incorruptible, the show really picked up and got more interesting. They doubled down on Scott’s niceness, and the result is awesome.

Which is why it’s all the more important to note that Scott? Not your average white teenager. Not a white teenager at all. While the circumstances of Scott’s life are actually probably the result of the writers trying to create a scenario where it’s plausible for a sixteen year old boy to spend most of his nights running around the woods fighting monsters, the facts remain the same. 

Scott’s parents are divorced, and at the start of the show at least, his father is completely out of the picture. It is implied several times that his father was an alcoholic, and borderline abusive. Scott’s mother, on the other hand, is a genuinely amazing and wonderful woman, but she’s busy providing for her teenage son (and the occasional love-starved foster kid that her son literally brings home to live with them because that is an honest to goodness plot point). Melissa (played by Melissa Ponzio) is a fantastic mother, but she’s not around a lot, because she’s always working. She’s a nurse, and while it’s a profession that pays pretty well, it’s clear that it doesn’t pay well enough.

And, I mean, I just can’t get over how interesting Scott’s background is from this perspective. Because his father, who we later discover is an FBI agent, is a codedly upper-middle class white man, but Scott chooses to live with his working class Hispanic mother. Nursing, though an important (very) and difficult job, is generally considered a lower-class profession. It’s something working class people do. Higher income people with the same interests become doctors. 

It’s hard to think of a more positive representation of a Hispanic teen in pop culture. It’s hard to think of a more positive representation of any teenager in pop culture. Scott’s one of a kind. Because while he is a rather static character (he is good and he stays good), Scott isn’t by any means boring, nor is he a bad character. Like I mentioned earlier, he’s a lot like Captain America. Just because he’s good doesn’t mean everyone else is, and a great deal of really interesting conflict can come from Scott and his idealism butting up against the world.

This one quirk, too, pretty much saves the show. Without Scott and his magical werewolf amazingness, the show would quickly disintegrate into a series of teen trauma tropes. I mean, the other characters are great and all (Allison was amazing, Malia is hilarious, Lydia is a gem, Derek is my squishie), but Scott is the reason why the show is worth watching.

So even if you don’t like Teen Wolf, and think it’s cheesy or bad or kind of offensive sometimes (all of those being perfectly reasonable things to think), remember Scott McCall. Remember that one time that he asked, in perfect earnestness because Scott is never not earnest, why his mother hadn’t kept her maiden (Hispanic) last name. He wanted to know so he could understand, and made it clear that he would support her no matter what. Remember the time that Scott took time away from hunting the supernatural creature of the week to help his best friend who was going through a rough time.

Remember the time that Scott risked his life to save his high school bully from being hurt. Repeatedly. Even when it became clear that said high school bully was a real and honest threat. Remember that time that Scott allowed himself to be tortured in order to save someone who wasn’t even technically in his pack.

Remember all of the times that Scott has proved he has a pure heart, and then remember the way that the media usually shows us Hispanic (non-white in general) teenagers. Teen Wolf does a lot of things wrong. A lot. But this is one thing that they do consistently right.

Remember Scott McCall.

He's made of puppies and sunshine and rainbows and love.

RECAP: Outlander 1x05 - Claire of the Wild

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First, I should probably address my lingering absence from this blog. It's nothing to worry about, not really, it's just that last week I moved into a new apartment, and the internet won't be hooked up until Thursday because Comcast has decided to abuse their power by raising prices and lowering our expectations about customer service. Still, it's quite nice to live in a cute little apartment with two of my favorite people in the world (even if we do bicker a lot like good friends are apt to do). None of this is particularly important or anything, I just thought I probably ought to explain where the hell I've been. I miss you all and also the internet like burning.

The second thing to address is, of course, last week's episode of Outlander. In a surprising turn of events, this is the first episode of the show that I didn't really like. While that sucks, I should point out how rad it is that all of the episodes up until now have been awesome enough to avoid this. Yay!

The reason I didn't like this episode is a bit harder to nail down, but I think it comes from a combination of a couple of things. On the one hand, I am anxious for us to reach a certain plot point that I know is coming and that I know I'm going to enjoy the everloving crap out of. On the other hand, I also found that in this episode the changes they made to the book narrative actually worked against the story and not for it. More on that in a bit.

So the episode opens on a pensive Claire staring out over the loch and reciting poetry. A little bit pretentious, sure, but a girl needs to have a hobby. And when she's stranded in a group of wild Scottish fighting men who are at that moment actively fighting, well, it's not hard to see how Claire might fall back on some prim and properness. On the plus side, she's not the only one who likes the intellectual pursuits. As you hopefully recall from last week, Claire has been dragged along on Dougal's trip across the countryside, collecting rents for the MacKenzie clan. 

Claire and Jamie have come along, for reasons unknown so far to both of them, but so has Ned MacGowan, a lawyer from Edinburgh who works for the MacKenzie. Claire and Ned become good friends by virtue of being the only educated people they know. Also because Claire is a bit of a miracle-worker and manages to find a treatment for Ned's asthma quickly and easily, which would make anyone appreciate her.

The trip across the countryside is a long one, and while Claire enjoys discussing the ins and outs of collecting rents with Ned, there's not much else for her to do. She still can't go anywhere unsupervised, she still doesn't speak Gaelic, and she's still a Sassenach, so no one really ever talks to her. She's isolated and miserable and stuck camping in Scotland in the late fall. Claire needs a hug. Or at least to not have to eat roasted squirrel for a few days and sleep in a real bed.

Unfortunately, while the show makes it clear how unhappy Claire is, it also somehow makes her seem a bit spoiled and ungrateful and whiny, which isn't on. It's not like Claire asked to be dragged around, and then given nothing to do for weeks on end. The show gives her this sort of air of acting like she's better than them, but that seems out of character and also a bit silly. She doesn't think she's better than them, she just thinks she doesn't belong and she's sick of trying to convince everyone that she really really does. Also she is very understandably done with listening to the men making sexist jokes about women. 

Oh well.

In town, we get to see a little of how the MacKenzies collect their rents, and it is unmitigatingly dull both for the audience and for Claire. Incidentally, this is a bit they changed from the book, I think, where instead of just sitting around watching, Claire actually did a service by seeing to any of the villagers who needed healing in all the towns they passed. It's a valid reference point, because having her sit idly here just compounds the weirdness of her presence there, where in the book it actually made quite a bit of sense.

This does lead, however, to the most interesting bit of the episode, where Claire finally finally gets to spend some time with other women, and the setting is very unusual but very interesting. Wandering around the village, Claire happens upon a group of women chanting and working the wool, which means setting the dye in a plaid by working it back and forth on a table. Also they set the dye by soaking the wool in pee, which is gross, but very clever. Claire joins in, and it's clear that even though she has no idea what they're singing, she's glad to be part of something for once.

After the wool's been worked, the women take a break inside and drink some moonshine (that the men aren't to know they have) and have a bit of a gossip about their lives. Claire finds herself incredibly sympathetic to these women, especially when she learns that one child is going hungry because his family had to use the goat to pay their taxes to the MacKenzies, and as a result they have no more milk. The child will likely die.  Claire's heartbroken, and also still drinking, when they ask her to pee in a bucket to contribute to the wool-working fund. As she obliges, Angus barges in, grabs her, and drags her back out.

It seems that Claire has disappeared, freaked everyone out, and earned herself a righteous bitching out from Angus. Also she's clearly a little drunk (like usual, let's be real), and her normally low emotional barriers are completely nonexistent. She tries to take the goat back to the women to save the baby, Dougal catches her, and Claire is in trouble. Dang it. Why is she even here? Basically she gets told off for interfering in business she does not understand, but there's a moment of hesitance when all of a sudden she hears a very English voice.

There's a redcoat in the village, Foster, and he wants to know if Claire is all right. Her argument with Dougal is super loud, after all, and an English lady in the Scottish highlands is a rather odd thing to see. Foster, who seems quite nice, actually, is just trying to make sure she's okay. Dougal assures him that she is, and that's that.

Later that night, though, it seems the matter's not over. Dougal and his men take over the local tavern. And while Claire hasn't got a lick of Gaelic, she knows that what they're doing now isn't collecting MacKenzie rents. It's something else. Something more inflammatory. Something that involves ripping Jamie's shirt off his back and displaying all of his scars to the audience. And then Dougal collects another round of coin from the locals.

Something deeply hinky is going on, and Claire does not like it one bit.

Neither, it should be pointed out, does Jamie, but that's because he was not told his back was a display here, and he did not consent to that. It's only when Claire angrily bitches out Dougal and then prepares to mend his shirt that Jamie speaks up, taking the shirt, and stalking off. So now Claire has even more things to hate Dougal for. Hooray!

The next morning Claire basically tells Ned off for participating in what she thinks is common theft/conning. Ned does nothing to correct her, but happily accepts the charge. He seems weirdly okay with it, too, which bothers Claire the most. No crisis of conscience here! Besides, it's not like they're doing it just the once. From here it's a long slog through town after town, where the pattern keeps repeating.

At one town, they ride up and find a house burning as a group of Scots stand perimeter around it. This is the Watch, a group of Scots who patrol the lands, and they're burning the house of a Redcoat sympathizer. Dougal does nothing but ride down and pick up a few pheasants from the Watch, a payment from this family, because the MacKenzie must be paid, no matter what.

Obviously this sits very badly with Claire, and she nearly causes and incident when she refuses to eat the plundered birds at lunch. Jamie and Murtaugh intervene on her behalf, but it's clear that Angus, Rupert, and the other men are just about ready to string Claire up in a tree and leave her there. Not even a quick chat from Jamie, her favorite person on this freaking trip, can cheer Claire up.

And the train continues to depressing-ville! The next town they visit has been hit hard by the English, just a few days ago. They have nothing with which to pay their taxes. They're apt to starve. But Dougal isn't going to let that happen. In what is probably the nicest thing he does all episode, Dougal hands out some of the profits from his previous taxes to the town, and helps them stave off starvation. Yay?

That night they do the usual song and dance with the coins and the speech and Jamie's back in the tavern, but this time Claire picks up something she'd been missing. They're not stealing the money. They're raising money. For a rebellion against the English.

Well crap.

When she thinks about it, Claire remembers that Frank was blathering on and on about the topic. She's in 1743 - in 1745 there will be the Second Jacobite Rising, and the devastation from the war (which the Scots lose badly), will lead to the end of the clans. Forever. Done. Gone. Suddenly she realizes that the men she's with aren't thieves, they're revolutionaries. But they're also going to fail. And most of them are going to die.

Later, unable to sleep while thinking about the future, Claire hears Dougal and Jamie arguing at the edge of camp. She sneaks up to investigate, and hears that they're talking about Jamie's status as a prop and Dougal's liberties with his body. Blegh. But it's honestly kind of nice (in a depressing way) have these issues addressed and mixed into the narrative as regarding a male person and his bodily autonomy. It doesn't feel out of nature or anything, but it is definitely an important moment about individual rights and all that jazz.

After Dougal leaves, Claire comes down to chat with Jamie, who's punching the trees and generally acting his age (the dude's only 23, after all). Claire asks why he's letting Dougal use him like that, and Jamie doesn't really answer, he just makes it clear that he doesn't like it, but he is choosing his battles. Not much else happens in the scene, but the sexual tension is positively stifling.

Knowing their real purposes on this trip does a lot to make Claire more sympathetic to the men around her. Sure, she knows they're doomed, but she does support their choices. They want to be free. Who doesn't? And when the company rides up to find a pair of Scottish "traitors" hung out on crosses by the English, she mourns with the rest of them. Dougal has them cut down and buried. Claire is silent.

The campaign continues as planned, but there is a distinct downside to being the only English person traveling with a company of men riling people up against the English. While Dougal did a great job at stirring things up downstairs at the inn, Claire's not all that safe sleeping in her room upstairs. She hears a noise in the hall and, grabbing a candlestick to defend herself, rushes out into the hall to confront it.

She steps on Jamie, winding him, and they both have a moment of utter confusion. It turns out that Jamie had the same fear Claire did, and decided to sleep in the hall outside her door to keep her safe. Claire is touched, but thinks he's being weird. Why not just sleep on the floor in her room where it's warm? This suggestion adorably flusters Jamie, who is absolutely horrified by the thought that he could damager her reputation like that. Claire doesn't give two craps, but she knows he does. So, with the sexual tension still blistering, she hands him a blanket, thanks him, and goes back to bed.

In the morning, they all take breakfast in the inn, but something weird is going on. While Claire asks Ned why he let her believe they were thieves rather than the truth, some men in the corner start to shout Gaelic insults. A few more rounds of this, and suddenly there's a full on brawl on her hands. Ah, the Scots.

Claire wastes no time in patching everyone up when it's over, nor does she skimp on the recriminations and chastisements. She basically berates all of them for being idiots who fight. But then Murtaugh calmly points out that she is the reason they were all fighting in the first place. Those other men called her a whore. And while the MacKenzie men may not always like Claire, she's theirs. They're the only ones who get to insult her.

It's touching. In a weird and kind of insulting way.

So Claire decides to reach out to them a little. As they're saddling the horses, and the men are making jokes and ribald comments, Claire, with her battlefield honed sense of humor, fires an insult back at Rupert. The men stand there, stunned, as Claire smirks and Jamie just beams at her. And then they all bust a gut laughing as Rupert proclaims that he's "never heard a woman tell a joke before!" Which is really more an indictment of Rupert than of female humor.

The mood is quickly broken, though, when Claire realizes where they are. They are standing at Culloden field, the spot of the Battle of Culloden, where the clans were finally defeated. It's the spot that ended the hope for Scottish independence for two hundred years. She's not so chipper now. She's grown to care for these men, and they for her, and they're going to die. 

Down at the stream, where Claire is trying to get a wash, Dougal walks down to confront her yet again about her origins and purposes. After all, she's been asking Ned some very suspicious questions. Claire comes back by trying to warn him about the uprising, but Dougal has the faith of the revolutionary, and can't hear her points.

Just as she's about to just give up and start yelling the future at him, a band of Redcoats emerges from the trees, surrounding them. It's Foster, again, and this time he has reinforcements. He asks her, once more, if she's all right.

And that's where the episode ends.

I found this to be my least-favorite episode so far, but on rewatching it, it's not so much bad as it is not as good as the others. This one is straight politics and very very slow character development. I wish there had been more scenes like the women working the wool, but no, it was mostly about Claire's internal political views, and that's a bit dull for a show to cover. Important, true, but dull.

I will, however, point out that this episode is very timely. The referendum on Scottish independence is coming up very soon, and while I have my own particular opinions on that subject, it certainly seems appropriate to take this moment to ruminate on the past.

Just saying.

A very picturesque cliffhanger...

RECAP: Orphan Black 2x09 - What Kind Of Mother Am I?

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It’s been a while since I recapped episode eight, and even though I did finish watching the second season of this show, I found myself incredibly reluctant to finally finish recapping it. I couldn’t really say why, I just didn’t want to. But now, having taken some time to think about it, an enforced mental time out that has resulted from the internet in my new apartment not being hooked up yet, I think I know what’s up. Simply, I didn’t want to finish recapping the second season, because I didn’t want the second season to be over.

I am aware that this is weird, crazy magical thinking, but it’s true. I love Orphan Black. It’s legitimately difficult for me to contemplate how much I love it. So much. But it’s not just that Orphan Black is a good show that tells a compelling story, or even that it’s one of the best science fiction stories we’ve seen in years, though both of those are true. It’s really because of how innately satisfying it is to watch a show that is entirely explicitly about women and how they relate to their bodies. How the world relates to their bodies. And the tension between those women and the world.

I’ve said that before, but it really does bear repeating. Orphan Black is exception not in spite of the way it focuses on female reproductive issues or bodily consent or medical terminology, but because of all of those things. It is crucial to our understanding of this show as a work of literature - because let’s be real, it’s a work of literature - that we see how intertwined this show and its stories are with our cultural understanding of who owns women’s bodies.

And with that, let’s get into the episode. What happened?

As you hopefully recall from the previous episode (though I’ll forgive it if you don’t, because I recapped that literally months ago), we left on one of the most shocking events of the series to date: Leekie’s accidental murder, courtesy of Donnie freaking Hendrix. If you don’t remember why this was stupidly surprising, you should probably just go back and rewatch the whole series. I’ll wait. Donnie had taken some time to deal and managed to confess his crime to Alison, who reacted not with horror that her husband committed murder, but disgust that he did such a bad job at it. Because Alison is terrifying.

Anyway, we come back to Alison and Donnie dealing with the body and cleaning up the scene of the crime (Donnie’s car). Alison is completely matter of fact about the entire thing, again, frustrated not because there’s a dead body, but because Donnie didn’t properly cover him in a tarp and she had to clean the interior carpet of the car.

What we get is a fantastic montage of Donnie and Alison rolling the body up in a plastic shower curtain, shoving it into the freezer in the garage, and trying to figure out how to permanently dispose of this whole thing. It’s probably the most function we’ve ever seen them in their marriage, and that tickles me.

The transition here is jarring, going from the virtual screwball comedy that is Donnie and Alison, to the dark, intense dystopian nightmare that is Helena’s entire life. We come in on her, having returned to the Prolethean ranch so that they can give her back her “babies” - the eggs that they harvested from her when she was unconscious and then fertilized without her consent. Helena, interestingly, is obsessed with the idea of becoming a mother.

The Proletheans are happy to implant the eggs in Helena (though that’s probably not all they’re going to do with them), and Helena is relatively happy to have them implanted. The consent issues concerning Helena’s body are, for the moment, not rearing their ugly heads. This is her choice. For now.

I will admit, though, that I already miss Helena’s almost boyfriend, Jesse, from that truck stop a few episodes ago. He was cute, and he was totally into Helena even if she seemed utterly bonkers, and I want him to come back. Not important, but I do.

Also worth noting is the actress who plays the nurse in the implantation scene, and later the women in charge of the nursery at the ranch. The woman’s name isn’t important, but the actress is Kathryn Alexandre. The name should be vaguely familiar - she’s the person who plays opposite Tatiana Maslany whenever there’s a multiple clones scene. Maslany credits her as the best person to act against, and from what I can tell Alexandre deserves it. It’s nice to see her get a speaking role, since her usual one, for all that it is completely vital to the survival of the show and all that, is by its nature invisible.

On a different level entirely, Rachel is the kind of threatening, toxic person who makes one uncomfortable even when she’s doing something as simple and non-confrontational as sitting on a couch with Delphine. Delphine, of course, being the human equivalent of a cocker spaniel puppy with a PhD. Rachel’s not just pouring tea, of course, she has a motive to this conversation. She needs Delphine to convince Sarah to bring in Kira for medical testing. 

Since Kira is the only known descendent of the clones, and therefore has the only usable bone marrow/stem cells/healthy immune system, it is actually necessary for DYAD to get their hands on Kira’s genetic material in order to stop the immune disorder that’s killing Cosima and everyone else. Blegh. That’s a lot of exposition. Props to the show for making you forget the exposition is there by couching it in a vaguely threatening tea party.

Delphine also understands that if she does this, she will get a hell of a promotion - to Leekie’s old position as head of DYAD’s research division. This is literally what Delphine’s entire career has been leading towards. She wants that freaking job. She’s willing to do a hell of a lot to get that job.

Including, it seems, actually showing up to Mrs. S’ house to talk to Sarah, who we already know scares the crap out of Delphine. She has to make the pitch not just to Sarah, of course, but also to Mrs. S and Ben (the driver dude played by the guy who plays Death on Supernatural). Heck, Kira’s probably listening somewhere too.

The pitch is simple: because it’ll take too long for Duncan to uncode his original DNA sequences, the ones that gave the clones their immune disorder in the first place, it makes more sense to get some bone marrow from Kira and stockpile a cure for the lung disease that’s killing Cosima now, before anyone else dies or anyone else falls sick. Makes sense. But then, it is Rachel who came up with the plan, and one can pretty much guarantee that there’s more behind it than just self-preservation. Or at least there’s more self-preservation than there currently seems.

Sarah, for once, decides not to act unilaterally, and takes the chance after Delphine leaves to catch up with her clone-sisters. Cosima is in rough shape, hooked up to an oxygen tank, and Alison is of course incredibly tightly wound, but they’re all happy to see each other. It’s a really fascinating character development for all of them because, as you may recall from the beginning of the show, none of them was all that interested in being a sisterhood. They were all there to solve the mystery or figure out the science, but not actually for each other.

Ages ago in character development.
Now? Now they’re in it together. They’re a family. And that is perhaps my favorite development on this show. So often when you have a serialized drama like this, you see characters fracturing apart, destroyed by lies or drama or what have you. Here, we see our characters coming further and further into a state of understanding and love for each other. With each passing season they become more unified and devoted to each other and that is just so wonderful.

Guys, take a minute and appreciate Orphan Black. Imagine the world that we might have had if this show weren’t made, and then cry a little in joy that it was.

Cosima and Sarah agree that Kira shouldn’t go into DYAD, but that they do need her help. Alison feels sad that she’s so caught up in her own crap - her marriage and rehab and oh yeah those murders - but the other assure her, in a great moment of solidarity, that her problems matter too. Speaking of which, Alison takes the moment to ask if anything’s been heard about Dr. Leekie?

She gets the party line, that he died of a heart-attack on a private jet, and while everyone understands that it’s a total lie, it seems that no one knows what actually did happen to him, and no one’s looking to find out. They did it. They’re in the clear. They have literally gotten away with murder. For now. As long as no one finds the body.

Donnie thinks they should dump it in the lake, with weights and stuff, but Alison quickly shuts that down. She’s seen Dexter. She knows how easy it is to dredge stuff up. They can’t transport the body, so they’re going to bury it in the garage.

Which brings us to yet another moment where Alison’s children are oblivious to an extent that real children would not be. Like, I appreciate the idea that they’re kids and they’re watching cartoons and stuff so they might not notice the mad vibrations coming from the freaking jackhammer their parents are using the in garage, but, um, no. No.

Great moment, though, when Donnie’s trying to drill a hole with the jackhammer, and can’t really manage it, so Alison takes over and proves, once again, who the dominant personality is in this relationship. Also who is better at murder and coverups. In case we were ever in doubt on that one.

Another tangent, but this entire storyline makes me really wish that Orphan Black was the sort of show to indulge in flashbacks. I mean, I love that it doesn’t, that it demands that you take it as is, but I really want to see some footage of college-age Donnie and Alison, with Alison planning how Donnie will propose to her, and Donnie trying to pretend that it was his own idea, and all that stuff. I want it. I want to see Alison as a Bridezilla, because it would make me so happy.

Back at the (Prolethean) ranch, Helena is recovering from the egg implantation, and that woman from before (the one played by Alexandre), comes to show her around. She takes Helena to the nursery and preschool, where all the Prolethean children are raised communally. She reminds Helena that she’s “part of our family now”, and that Helena can come visit the children whenever she wants. For a child raised in deprivation like Helena’s, and with so little human contact, this must feel frightening and amazing and baffling. But she rallies well, and even makes a few faces at one of the little girls there. Adorable.

Almost cute enough to make you forget how incredibly violent and feral Helena can be. Almost.

The scene is also almost sweet enough to cover over the hideous violence and disturbing lack of personal autonomy that the Proletheans feed on. But the next scene reminds us admirably, as we focus in on Gracie, her mouth still red from being sewn shut, pouring her father and Mark a drink. Gracie doesn’t get her own drink, nor does she get to sit in on the conversation (that likely involves her future). Instead, Gracie pours the drinks and then gets the door literally shut in her face so that the men folk can discuss business. Not that this is a super pointed scene or anything.

For all that, though, this is a very interesting scene. We finally get a hint as to Mark’s backstory - first that he’s only nineteen, which is a lot younger than I thought, and second that he was in the military already, he saw combat, and he went AWOL. Which begs the question, how did a nineteen year old veteran end up a member of a technology cult? I really hope they answer this. It seems important.

Henrik has a point here, at any rate. He knows that Mark and Gracie are sweet on each other, and while he thinks that’s cute, he wants to make sure that Mark will stand by while Gracie “bears fruit”. In other words, yay, Mark and Gracie get to bear children, boo, the condition for that is that Gracie bear children that I have a sneaking suspicion will be a combination of her father’s DNA and that of the clone she literally tried to murder. Awkward.

And, again, a point where the show makes it clear that when men take bodily autonomy from women, it is always wrong. The show doesn’t try to make these men sympathetic, for all that they’re complex (well, Mark is sympathetic, but not Henrik). They are the bad guys. 

It also illuminates what I think is going to be the theme of this episode: the terms of our agreement. You know? Delphine can have Leekie’s job, if she convinces Sarah to give up Kira’s bone marrow. Mark can marry Gracie, if he agrees to farm out her uterus. Sarah can save Cosima, if she’s willing to risk her daughter. Helena can have her babies, if she agrees to raise them in the Prolethean way. Alison and Donnie can get away with murder, if they can hide the body. Rachel, of course, has no conditions put on her future or actions, because in this moment, Rachel has all the power.

Undoubtedly that will change.

Back in Toronto, Sarah is torn. On the one hand, she really loves Cosima. Out of all of the clones, and despite Helena’s best efforts, Sarah likes Cosima best. It’s not hard to see why. Cosima is pure in a way that most of them aren’t. She wants to save her sister. But she loves Kira, and she doesn’t want to risk it. Mrs. S is even less fond of the idea of risking it, while Felix, who’s finally in this episode because Felix makes everything better, is undecided. However, as Mrs. S so amazingly points out, it’s not Sarah’s decision, or Felix’s, or hers. 

Hell yes, it’s Kira’s decision. For all that Kira is still a child, the show has made it clear that she is capable of making bodily decisions on her own, and they seem determined and happy to emphasize the point. Women should have the right to determine what happens to their bodies, no matter what the stakes. Kira is the one who decides what happens to her body. Not even her mother has the right to take that away from her.

And so we get the heartbreaking scene where Sarah and Mrs. S have to explain the stakes to an eight year old. Admittedly, it’s an eight year old who is written like a four year old because in what seems to be the show’s only flaw, the writers can’t do child dialogue to save their lives, but still. Kira’s afraid of the potential pain involved, but she loves her “Auntie Cosima”, and she wants to save her. So save her she will. Mrs. S and Sarah have a moment of, “How the hell did we raise such a selfless and kind child? Have you met us?”

The procedure itself will happen in a hospital not under DYAD’s control, with a doctor that Mrs. S just happens to know, because of course she does. Delphine is there to supervise, but it’s largely out of her hands now. Still, that doesn’t stop Mrs. S from giving her the death stare, and Felix and Sarah from shutting her out. The message is clear: Delphine is not family, while the rest of them are.

Speaking (obliquely) of Cosima, we now cut to the DYAD laboratories, where Duncan, Scott, Cosima, and a DYAD flunkie are trying to start uncoding Duncan’s files. Unfortunately the files are written on some ancient 5” floppies, and they have to ship in an old computer just to run them. 

The moment lets Scott geek out a little, and Cosima get in an uncharacteristically sharp barb: she says “He’s a virgin, in case you couldn’t tell”, referring to Scott’s enthusiasm, and it’s kind of mean. Interesting, though, because it highlights the ways that illness can sort of change a person. Cosima’s getting sharper as she gets sicker, and less tolerant of the people around her (remember her epic fight with Delphine a few episodes back). This doesn’t make Cosima’s comment more acceptable, but it does suggest that the writers are doing something intentional here. I hope.

For a second it looks like the code won’t run, but then it does, and the music swells, and we finally have hope of a cure. The genetic code is, of course, in code, but Duncan is ready with a cypher. Everything is going to be okay. And then Cosima coughs.

Back in the garage, Alison and Donnie are digging a suspiciously coffin-shaped hole in the floor, and bickering about the proper way to distribute dirt. Donnie sarcastically apologizes for not being as comfortable with manslaughter as Alison is, and she retorts that at least she had the sense to “leave mine where she dropped.” Just as they’re about to get more heated, their kids walk in, for once seeming to take an interest in their parents’ lives.

Alison immediately shoos them away (from the active crime scene), but Gemma tells her that there’s a man there to see her. Which can’t be good. Alison and Donnie sprint for the house, where they find…Vic. Oh good. Vic.

The kids are shuffled upstairs (probably to disappear for another few episodes), while Alison and Donnie yell at Vic. He’s there to “talk things through” for his “recovery”. And he wants to talk about what happened with Aynesley, and also Sarah, and he seems oddly intent on making Alison say what exactly is up with both of those situations. On any other show, that would feel like bad scriptwriting, but here? I trust these writers. Something is going on.

That something of course being that Vic is colluding with someone who drives an unmarked black van. Oh good.

At the Prolethean creche, Henrik tells the children a story (the story of Frankenstein, of course) while Helena and Gracie listen and watch. The media references on this show are usually pretty pointed, but this has got to take the cake. Referencing Frankenstein while Helena is in the room? I’m not sure if I like it, or if it’s just too far past subtle for me to stand…

Helena and the little girl from before make cute faces at each other as the story concludes and Henrik comes up to ominously tell Helena, “Someday this room will be full of your children.” The little girl plays with Helena’s hair as the other children are herded off for naptime. It’s very cute. They bond.

Until the girl, Faith, is dragged off by the child-minder, who is absolutely a terrifying disciplinarian. She threatens the child with a beating just for being a little late going to naptime, and spanks her. Helena is not okay with this. She waits for the woman to pass her, then reaches out and reminds everyone why Helena is not someone to be trifled with. She grabs the woman by the neck, chokes her, and points out that if the woman touches Faith again, Helena will “gut you. Like a fish.” Gracie looks on in awe.

Sarah and Felix stand with Kira as they prep her for surgery. She’s scared, and all hooked up to tubing and it’s a little alarming. The anesthesia puts her out pretty quickly. After that, the operation is pretty routine, if scary to watch. And Sarah has to question what kind of mother she is. Delphine’s answer? “The best, the bravest. And a very, very good sister.”

They get the bone marrow they need. Everything was fine. It’ll take a bit for the anesthesia to wear off, and she’ll have to stay overnight, but everything went right. Which is never a good sign, let’s be real. 

At the Hendrix residence, Vic tries with increasing desperation to see what’s happening in the garage, but it seems that Alison and Donnie wised up and put trash bags over the windows. He can’t see in, nor can he figure out what’s going on. And while Alison uses her handy craft tape measure to figure out how big Leekie’s body is, Donnie pulls up behind Vic and pulls a gun on him. “I’ve used this before.” Dammit, Donnie! Stop admitting to stuff.

They bring him into the garage, lean him over the giant, coffin-sized hole, and hold a gun to his head while Alison berates him. It’s a good interrogation tactic, to be fair. Donnie plays the crazy person very well, and Vic quickly admits that there’s a cop outside. As in, Angela D’Angelis, who has continued to not give up the case she was ordered to give up.

Vic thinks she’s crazy anyways. She’s convinced there are five dopplegangers. And Donnie, in a moment of continued stupidity, actually holds him down and growls, “There’s eleven!” Dammit Donnie, stop admitting to stuff. Fortunately, Vic thinks that they’re just messing with him, and Donnie reveals that the safety was on the whole time. He’s not going to shoot Vic. Well, not accidentally at least.

The van door slides open, and Angie greets Vic vaguely, only to be shocked when Donnie follows him in. What follows is hard to explain, but absolutely hilarious to watch. Basically, Donnie Hendrix takes matters into his own hands and blackmails Angie off the case, proves that she’s using police equipment for a personal vendetta, accuses her of harassment, and settles this once and for all. Then he takes a picture and says, “Have a shitty day.”

At the ranch, in a total tonal shift, Gracie actually is having a shitty day, as her father implants fertilized eggs straight into her uterus, and she has to lie there and take it. The background music makes it sound like a magical moment, but one look at Gracie’s face shows the lie. She’s miserable, and she has no power. She might have started out a villain, but as per usual on this show, she’s become one of the most sympathetic characters.

They put her in a bed next to Helena’s, and Helena tries to emotionally empathize. She’s confused, though. Gracie is sad to be pregnant, but doesn’t she like Mark? Gracie then explains. She’s not having Mark’s babies, she’s having Helena and her father’s babies, and she had no choice in the matter.

This Helena understands, and this she does not appreciate. See, Helena was okay with being implanted, because they were her children, and she wanted them. She’s still royally pissed about them taking her eggs in the first place, but she’s been slightly mollified at the chance to be a mother. Still, that doesn’t mean she isn’t very protective of others’ rights to bodily choice. 

In another great transition, Cosima and Duncan are discussing the reason for the clones’ sterility in the first place. Why an autoimmune condition? Because it was the least invasive solution. It just has a problematic result where it kind of kills the clones. The sequences are decoding, but Duncan has made sure to keep the keys separate, just to make sure that DYAD can’t get control. And that means that Duncan had better stick around.

Mark comes to see Gracie, and he’s as awkward and adorable around her as ever. For her part, Gracie is as biting and angry as ever. Helena is only slowly coming to understand that Henrik is seeding the community with his children and his children alone. Mark tries to defend Henrik’s actions, but Gracie won’t help with that, and it seems that even Mark is coming to understand that Henrik’s behavior is unacceptable. Gracie deserved a choice. Everyone does.

Marion, who we met at the end of the last episode, is waiting for Rachel in Leekie’s office. Marion thinks Delphine is an interesting choice for Leekie’s chair, and that Rachel’s reasons for picking her (she’s telegenic, brilliant, and “has scope”, whatever that means), are flimsy. 

Delphine, for all her virtues, is primarily associated with the clone project, and that’s not all that DYAD does. Marion is worried that Rachel’s reeling from the recent revelations (her father still being alive, her infertility being intentional, Leekie’s murdering her mother and then also dying), but Rachel assures her to tell “Topside” that she’s fine.

Gonna take a wild guess and say that Topside is not a euphemism, but an actual company or project name. It seems like something this show would do.

Still, Marion’s there for a different reason. She’s there about Sarah. Sarah is interesting. She’s a complete outsider, a “product of chance”, and yet she still manages to keep threatening DYAD. Rachel assures Marion that Sarah is in hand. But she’s not, is she?

And now we get the single creepiest scene this episode. Rachel, holding a martini, sitting in a dark room of floor to ceiling screens, watching home movies of her childhood and laughing hysterically. Then crying. Then slapping herself. Then laughing. Then looking at surveillance photos of Sarah and Kira. Then putting on a leather jacket and trying to imitate Sarah’s accent. So, that can’t be good.

Delphine comes in, confirms that the marrow is processing, and Rachel signs over her office. But as Delphine opens up the computer, she gets an alert about “Benjamin Kertland.” As in, the guy working with Mrs. S who is apparently also working for DYAD. Delphine casually freaks the crap out.

At the hospital, Kira is awake now, and Sarah has her take some medicine before she goes back to sleep. And continuing on that theme, Helena watches over Gracie as she sleeps, before abruptly deciding something and putting on her shoes. 

This wakes up Gracie, who’s confused and a lot nicer than usual. Helena’s leaving. She’s going back to Sarah, her family. And she makes sure that Gracie knows before she goes that, “You’re a good girl, Grace, but if you don’t want to have my babies, don’t have my babies.” Everyone gets a choice. Even people who tried to murder you that one time.

Gracie insists that she would never get an abortion, but she also knows that she can’t stay at the Prolethean ranch either. So she tells Helena the words that Helena has probably never heard in her life, at least not uttered in kindness, “I’m coming with you.” Helena looks like she’s about to cry. 

It’s also helpful, since Gracie knows a faster way out of the ranch. Or maybe not so helpful, since said faster way is being guarded by Henrik and his shotgun. He’s disappointed in them, and wants them back in bed. He is determined to protect that genetic code and his legacy, because he is terrible. 

He knocks Helena out with the butt of the gun, then drags Gracie by her hair into a stall and locks her in. He goes back for Helena, but Mark appears, horrified at Gracie’s treatment. On the one hand, Henrik gave him a purpose and he owes the man his life (or so he views it). On the other, he loves Gracie. So he pauses, and looks at Henrik full in the face. Did Henrik really have to put his own child in his daughter?

This is all the distraction that Helena needs to creep up behind Henrik and incapacitate him. Sidenote, but I love the music cue they use for Helena’s violent tendencies. It’s less music and more noise, a machine-made screech of metal, almost exactly like the cue used for the Winter Soldier in Captain America: TWS. It’s very striking, and honestly just amazing to listen to. It puts you immediately on edge, and you know that crap is about to get real. 

Mark grabs Gracie and they run, while Helena savagely beats Henrik. Gracie doesn’t want to leave Helena behind, but Helena seems okay with it. She’s the one with the power now. Gracie shouldn’t be frightened on her behalf.

It’s late at night - this episode all takes place pretty much within a single day, which is crazy - and Alison and Donnie are finally done hiding Leekie’s body. They put it in the hole, cover it with dirt, pour in cement, smooth it over and boom! It’s like nothing ever happened. Except for the part where it definitely did totally happen. Minus that.

Donnie even takes a moment to draw a heart in the cement, and Alison has a moment. “I have never been more attracted to you than I am right now.” Which is apparently the cue for them to have spontaneous, intense sex on the freezer where they just hid a dead body for a day. I love that the cure for Donnie and Alison’s marriage seems to be murder. Or rather, scheming together. They’re a couple that works best when it’s them against the world, and now they have a reason to be suspicious of everyone, so they’re in great form. I’m happy for them. It’s super weird, but I’m happy for them.

And Helena is finally ready to enact some Greek-style poetic justice on Henrik. She has him in the stirrups, the same stirrups that he put her in when he stole her eggs, and that he put Gracie in when he impregnated her against her will. She has him in the stirrups, naked from the waist down, utterly vulnerable, and then grabs a giant insemination needle and some cow eggs. Like I said, poetic justice. 

Henrik screams, and Helena doesn’t care. She’s inflicting on him the exact same depredations inflicted on herself and Gracie, but even that is insufficient. He has done this not just to them, but to dozens of women, we are implicitly told, and he would keep doing it for years if allowed. She doesn’t just stick the needle in him, she stabs with it. And then we see a shot of her running across the fields, looking back on the ranch. It’s on fire. Completely. There will be nothing left.

So, maybe next time we don’t try to con the crazy Ukrainean chick out of her biological material? Seems like that’s not ended well for anyone on this show.

Mrs. S comes in to Sarah and tells her that Delphine is there, outside. Not sure why. Sarah reluctantly leaves to meet her. Felix is asleep in Kira’s room with her. Downstairs, Sarah hops in the car with Delphine, and Delphine reveals that Benjamin is working for DYAD. Sarah does exactly what Delphine told her not to and freaks out, running into the building.

Back upstairs she tells Mrs. S that Rachel’s making a move and to “make sure the elevators are secure.” Which is funny, because that doesn’t sound like Sarah at all… Also she makes no comment about Benjamin. In Kira’s room, she grabs the kid, and when Felix protests, she stabs him with a syringe. Because that is not Sarah, it’s Rachel. Who has kidnapped Kira.

The real Sarah races upstairs to find that Kira’s gone, and Benjamin isn’t really a traitor. It was a trick for them and for Delphine. Rachel’s taken Kira, and they have no idea what Felix was dosed with.

Delphine, realizing what she’s done, albeit while trying to help, sobs at Cosima’s bedside until her girlfriend wakes up. Cosima asks what’s wrong, and Delphine is forced to admit that she made a terrible mistake.

And Kira wakes up in a sterile and yet somehow cluttered pink bedroom, with Rachel watching her creepily. Kira asks after her mother and Mrs. S, but Rachel assures her that “You’ll get used to it. You may even grow to like it here, just as I did.”

So, yeah. Kira’s now kidnapped by DYAD, in the same room that effectively drove Rachel crazy, while Felix has been drugged with something or other and might be dying. Helena just burned down a cult, and Alison successfully hid a dead body while fixing her marriage and blackmailing the cops. Cosima is still sick. All in all, an interesting week.

How the heck is the finale going to top this?

RECAP: Outlander 1x06 - "A Delicate English Rose"

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If last week’s episode bothered me with how dull it managed to make the actually pretty interesting source material (Claire’s journey through countryside in the company of a bunch of MacKenzie fighting men), then this week absolutely blew me out of the water with how much story and tension and excitement the show could wring out of an episode that is pretty much Claire sitting at a table for an hour.

Seriously, that’s the majority of what actually happens in this episode. But, obviously, it’s not the sum total of what happens. If you get my meaning. Which was worded badly. 

The episode picks up, as it should, with last week’s cliffhanger. As Dougal and Claire stand by a stream and argue about politics, a gaggle of redcoats ride up, and Foster, the sympathetic redcoat who is worried about Claire, steps forward to ask, once more, if she’s all right. Claire’s long pause signaled the end of the last episode, and now we come back in to hear her answer. Which is, as it turns out, that yes. She’s fine. No real problems here.

And, if you think about it, there really aren’t anymore. While Claire is convinced that the MacKenzies are going to get themselves killed in this Jacobite rebellion, she’s reasonably sympathetic to their cause and reasons. Sure, she’s still attempting to get back to the stones, but at this moment, Dougal isn’t so much a threat to her as he is really irritating.

So no, Claire’s not in need of any real assistance. It’s okay.

Unfortunately for Claire’s decision, Foster isn’t going to let her go with this. He’s still under the impression that she’s being coerced, and so he insists that she (and by extension Dougal, who refuses to leave her side) come with him to the local garrison, under the pretense of meeting with the commander there. After all, it would be so improper if the local commander didn’t take the time to dine with and greet a lovely English lady in this foreign land.

The voiceover tells us that, no matter how much she might disapprove of the English occupation, it is incredibly comforting to once more be surrounded by English accents and behavior. She even takes a minute to gloat internally about how Dougal gets to be the outlander now. He’s the one in a foreign culture, for all that they’re technically still in Scotland.

Looking at the shot of them riding through the town with a company of redcoats, I want to tip my hat to the costuming team on this show. Because here we have Claire with her own people, the English, but her costuming reads very Scottish. In fact, she looks more like Dougal and the Scottish villagers she sees, than she does like any of the English we meet in this entire episode. While we intellectually know that Claire is English, in this moment, with these clothes, Claire is effectively aligning herself with Scotland. She’s even dressed in the MacKenzie plaid, for crying out loud.

This is in stark contrast to last week, when Claire wandered through a Scottish village wearing a starched white shawl around her dress, one that made her stand out as much as humanly possible. There, the emphasis was on how English Claire really is, with her saying “Bottoms up!” when given a drink, and saluting before she peed in that bucket. Here, among real Englishmen, we see all of a sudden how foreign Claire has become to them. Claire has changed. And the costumes reflect that.

It’s also interesting how Foster, easily the nicest redcoat we’ve met so far, is casually dismissive of the Scots who happen to inhabit the village the English have commandeered. These people are ostensibly their subjects (at least as far as the English think), but Foster makes clear that he doesn’t trust them with the garrison’s horses. No matter how nice he is, we can’t forget that Foster is part of an invading and colonizing army.

And continuing on the theme of a colonizing force, Claire enters the garrison to find a group of English officers, in full regalia and wigs, dining at a disgustingly well-laden table. There are wine goblets, massive platters of food, and starched white napkins for all. Note the stark contrast to the local Scots outside (whose house this probably actually is), and remember last week when we met multiple characters who were in danger of starving to death. Food is a political statement, or it can be, and in this moment, the bounty of the Officer’s Mess is a clear sign of how they have pillaged Scotland for its natural resources, without giving any of it back to the people, as would be fair and just.

Incidentally, but not that I’m biased or anything, it’s worth pointing out that the main reasons why England wants Scotland to remain a part of the United Kingdom rather than vote for independence has more to do with their massive natural resources and strategic value (huge stores of fossil fuels off the coast and the location of the British Navy) than it does with any particular love for the Scots themselves. History might be in the past, but humans are humans whenever they are. Which seems to be the message of the show.

The Lord (whose name has not been given by this point) is absolutely delighted to see Claire, and kisses her hand before he insists she sit down and eat with them. He calls her an “English rose” and goggles at her in a way that is both kind of funny and also deeply creepy. While Claire is seated at the end of the table (a place of honor), Dougal is left to stand, and is completely ignored at first. Partly we can put this down to how long it’s been since these men have seen a woman of “appropriate” social standing and nationality, a woman they are comfortable being attracted to, and partly we can assume this is just sheer racism.

I mean, by the political structures of the day, Dougal is a war chief and second in command of the clan whose lands they are currently on. They should probably acknowledge him before they talk to the random woman who just walked in. But they don’t. Some of this is probably because she’s super pretty, but more, I would guess, is because Claire is English, and therefore worth their time. Dougal is a Scot, and therefore a godless heathen who must be treated as a savage.

Sir Oliver Lord Thomas, as we eventually find his name is, finally does acknowledge Dougal, but only to poke at him and insult him. The joke at first is that Dougal’s Scottish brogue is completely unintelligible to English ears, and Claire has a little smile at that. It’s an important note for the audience, though, because like Claire we’ve now been listening to this for weeks. I actually understood everything Dougal said, because his language is no longer foreign to me. Our perspective lies with the Scots, and so to hear someone say that their speech is hard on the ears sounds jarring.

It also brings about a little bit of a debate. Lord Thomas asks Claire how she’s managed to be surrounded by such rough accents all her time in Scotland, and wonders aloud why the world can’t just speak the King’s English. When Claire points out that many parts of England itself are virtually unintelligible to the Londoner, the men chuckle weakly and agree that everyone should indeed speak like Londoners. Which was not Claire’s point at all.

Language, like food and clothes, is being used here to highlight a stark difference between the colonizing force of the English and the Scots that they are trying to subdue. The English view their version of events, their accents, and their food as superior to the local choices, but as an audience we are asked to question whether or not that’s really true. After all, we are in Scotland. Shouldn’t the English be trying to speak like Scots rather than the other way around?

Also it’s important to note that Lord Thomas refers to Dougal as a “creature”, and the men talk around him like he’s not there. Because to them, he isn’t. He’s an animal to them, not a person, and they all make that clear.

Claire, for once, is the one diffusing the situation. Funny, because usually she’s the one inflaming it. But here, because of her status as a “delicate English rose” she can shame the men into acting with regard for her “sensibilities.” Which, of course, she does not have. Hell, she’s a combat nurse. A couple of men talking about what’s under a kilt isn’t likely to rattle her, but Claire does know enough to stop them before the talk turns actively violent. 

Her great strength is in being underestimated - like when she and Jamie helped that young boy by having Claire pretend to swoon. Claire’s got nerves of steel, but she can’t let anyone know that, or else she’s lost her ace trick.

Thing is, she didn’t have to intervene. I mean, it cost her nothing to do so, but still. Dougal has been keeping her prisoner for months now, dogging her steps, and accusing her of pretty much everything he can think of. Now she’s in a room full of English officers who will do pretty much whatever she says. She could just let them go and enact bloody revenge, then swoon and beg them to take her to Inverness and therefore back home. But she doesn’t.

Lord Thomas is so taken with Claire’s ability to stop them all in their tracks, that he idly comments about making her a colonel in the army. “You do know how to order men about.” Dougal’s fond agreement, however, bothers him. Claire’s an Englishwoman. She shouldn’t be so familiar with a Scottish man. It’s not decent, or so Lord Thomas thinks. He insults Dougal again, and Dougal just sort of shrugs and tells Claire he’s going to be downstairs in the tavern. He’s leaving on his terms, not theirs.

The music picks up (a lovely piece of Bach, I think, but I’m no expert) as the room goes hazy and we see a quick montage of Claire entrancing the officers with her story, having a nice meal, and continuing to drink her liver into an early grave. With at least one plot point every episode devoted to Claire’s love of alcohol in all its forms, one could easily assume that the grand love story in Outlander is really that of one woman and booze.

At the end of her story most of the room is half in love with Claire (as they should be), and are completely willing to agree to accompany her to Inverness so that she can “join her family in France.” They all drink to it, and Claire is finally happy when - 

Black Jack Randall storms in the door, covered in dirt, and yelling at Lord Thomas. Claire’s face immediately falls (with good reason, since this is the dude who tried to rape her, flogged Jamie nearly to death, and happens to wear her husband’s face). He’s as disgusted with Lord Thomas’ priorities as we the audience are, but the man is his commanding officer, and he does at least pretend to heed. But then Randall catches sight of Claire, and we all take a big deep breath, because this is not going to be good.

They stare each other down for a long time, while Lord Thomas gets very uncomfortable, until Randall says that he doesn’t know Claire, she just looks familiar, and Claire agrees. But, you know, that’s obviously not true. They both remember precisely how they met, and neither of them is apt to bring it up at the moment. So not good.

The next thing that technically happens is that Randall goes to the doorway and shakes the dirt off himself, but that’s not really what happens. He stands there in the door and kicks against the wall, savagely, making a huge noise, while maintaining stonefaced eye contact with Thomas. As with everything (most everything, rather) that Randall does, his actions have a kind of contained violence to them. Threat just seems to radiate off this man.

Randall’s at odds with Lord Thomas, it’s clear to see. While Thomas values honor and dignity and considers himself above these savage Scots, Randall is a brutal soldier who doesn’t particularly think himself better than anyone else, but is happy to repress the Scots anyway. He despises Thomas, you can just tell, because Thomas is obsessed with class and show and a good claret. Randall doesn’t have time for any of those things.

In other words, they kind of pee all over each other for a while. And Claire is caught right in the middle.

Randall also isn’t okay with how comfortable Claire is with the Scots. She’s an Englishwoman, she should be loyal to her own tribe. He even brings up a recently killed English soldier to make the point. The boy, and he really was just a boy, was found tied to a tree and decapitated for no seeming crime other than being English in Scotland. (And all that colonialism stuff I mentioned before, of course.) Claire’s sympathetic to the loss, because she’s human, but she also points out that the English do far worse, and she’s seen it.

It’s funny, because the men at the table are shamed (Randall isn’t, but that’s Randall for you) at this mention of their brutality, but they refuse to acknowledge the idea that they are in the wrong. Their action are right because they are right. The Scots shouldn’t be rebelling because they are subjects of the British Crown. It doesn’t matter if they wanted to be or not, they are, so if they rebel, they’re traitors. But that’s not super politically relevant today or anything.

The men don’t want to discuss politics with Claire - because it’s unseemly and she’s winning - but Randall has his trump card. He calls Claire a whore, insinuating that she’s sleeping with Dougal. Claire is immediately incensed, and all of her frustration at the way the English have been treating the Scots, and particularly Dougal, this whole time boils over. She sort of rages for a bit about Scottish independence, sits down, and realizes that she’s just effectively committed treason in a room full of British officers.

This is the Claire we know and love.

No amount of butt covering statements she makes after the fact can take back her treasonous statements, and the men are getting ready to roast her over a slow fire when a report comes in of an ambush. A man is injured downstairs, and Claire races off to help. This too shocks the men, who aren’t expecting her to have any value to add. They’ve fetishized her and shipped her off in their minds, her political outburst aside. Her insistence on being taken on merit bothers them.

It also gives her an opportunity to warn Dougal that he’d best make a swift getaway. Things are going south fast. Again, Claire could take this opportunity to slip off, but she doesn’t. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but Claire is the kind of character who can’t not heal someone. She has to help, even when it’s to her own detriment, as it is here. We, the audience, get to enjoy an amputation scene. They use a saw. It’s super gross.

Afterwards, Claire comes back upstairs, hoping to find Lord Thomas and convince him he really should just let her go. Instead, she finds Randall in a weirdly intimate moment: being shaved by a lower-ranking soldier (who is implicitly either Randall’s servant or mentee). This is another moment when the seeming innocuous moment is riddled with violent tension. Claire has a flashback of when she gave her husband a shave during their brief furlough in the war, but she’s rocked back to reality when the soldier nicks Randall’s cheek.

Again, it’s not a scene where much really happens, but there’s this undercurrent of terror, both Claire’s and the soldier’s. They have literally no idea what Randall will do now, and when he has the soldier sit down, and hold the razor to his throat, then proceeds to just shave him, it’s like someone squeezed your lungs.

In other words, this is great writing, and the person in charge of this episode deserves an Emmy. Not that they’re likely to get one, since this is a female-lead genre show, but still. Keep the faith.

Then the soldier is dismissed, and it’s just Randall and Claire, in that same room, eyeing each other. He doesn’t believe her story. She knows enough to understand that she’s trapped in a room with a tiger. It’s very compelling. To recap exactly what happens in this whole sequence would be to do it an injustice, really, since not very much actually technically happens, but all of it is important and character building and amazing. The two characters sit in a room and talk. Sometimes that’s all you need.

The whole scene is quite reminiscent of the opening to Inglorious Basterds, where Christoph Waltz spends fifteen minutes speaking casually to a French farmer, and the entire time you know that there’s a Jewish family under the floorboards, and it’s the most agonizing thing in the world.

Here, the conceit works, the idea of having two characters literally just talking for half the episode, because we know precisely what Randall is capable of. We’ve seen him with Claire, and we know from Jamie that his behavior wasn’t a fluke. So when Randall insists that he’s going to “reveal my true nature” to Claire, we pull back. There’s a danger here, and because the danger is implicit and not paid off for a very long time, the scene holds its tension perfectly.

The little things he does, like pour a bottle of Lord Thomas’ beloved claret out the window, or tell the story of how he felt inside when he whipped Jamie, or sharpening a pencil and drawing a portrait of Claire, have an incredible menace. And when Randall reaches the end of their conversation and looks at Claire like he needs absolution, the audience isn’t sure whether or not to give it, but like Claire, we’re too emotionally exhausted to really think about it.

Which makes his next action all the more horrifying. As Claire stands up to offer her forgiveness, Randall savagely punches her in the stomach, knocking her to the ground and pushing all the air from her lungs. As Claire gasps and sputters on the ground, he drags her head back and insists that she tell him exactly what Dougal has been doing to raise money for the Jacobite rebellion. Then he has his soldier kick her in the ribs as hard as he can, all while waxing poetic about the joys of beating a woman.

The violent threat is finally realized, but not until after we’d started to think it might not be coming. Thus, when it does come, it’s all the more shocking and painful. Like I said, this is great writing. Better than the book scene, even, where the threat was vivid the whole time, and the entire scene had much less emotional turmoil. In that version, Randall just beats Claire senseless, and without the buildup it’s not as scary.

Claire refuses to give Randall any information on the MacKenzies, and it seems for a moment that Randall will kill her. But here comes Dougal, racing to the rescue! He strides in, helps Claire up, and points out that if the British soldiers draw on him there, on MacKenzie land when he’s trying to help a woman, they will very literally start a war. Randall withdraws, but makes it clear that Dougal has only one day to turn Claire over to his custody - wherein she will presumably be taken to Fort William to be tortured for information. If he doesn’t, Randall will be within his rights to raze Clan MacKenzie to the ground.

Claire and Dougal don’t just ride out of the town, they flee.

After a few miles, Dougal has them stop and takes Claire up to a spring. Weird timing, but whatever. He leads her through, pointing out that she could probably use some water and a moment to clear her head. The spring itself is brown, and smells odd, but Claire drinks anyway, ignoring Dougal as he stares at her. Then Dougal, again, asks Claire if she’s a spy. He insists this is the last time he’ll ask. When she says no, he waits a moment, then lets it go. Okay. She’s not a spy.

Apparently this spring is known as the Liar’s Spring, and Dougal insists that if Claire had lied after drinking from it, her throat would have burned out. So that means that whatever secrets Claire is keeping, she’s not a spy, and therefore Dougal’s going to protect her. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many ways for him to do that. The only real way to keep her safe is to take her out of Randall’s realm of influence. In other words, make her a Scot. As an Englishwoman, she’s bound to obey him, but as a Scot who has committed no crime, she isn’t. So it’s time for Claire to change her nationality.

And by that, we mean that Claire has to marry a Scot and be brought in under a 1743 green card, basically. Claire assumes this means she’s got to marry Dougal, which bothers her, but Dougal insists not. Sure, he thinks Claire’s hot, but he’s already married. Instead she’s going to marry…

Jamie. Of course. Obviously. Didn’t we all know this was where the story was heading? As Claire sits at the camp staring at her marriage license, contemplating the weird direction her life has taken, Jamie comes up to give her a drink and toast the marriage. She’s a little disconcerted at how happily Jamie is taking all this, their arranged marriage and her new outlaw status. Jamie assures Claire that he’s really fine. He could probably say no to the idea, but he likes Claire and doesn’t want her to be tortured at Fort William. They’re friends.

He’s not a good marriage prospect, he points out, because for all that he’s very cute, he’s still an outlaw with a price on his head, has very little money, and frankly terrifies the fathers of most eligible daughters. Claire’s an educated woman capable of earning some money to add to the meager family coffers, and she’s pretty too. It’s not unreasonable to think that he might view this as a good match. 

Also there’s that thing where Jamie is clearly head over heels in love with Claire and has been since the very first episode where she sat on him and swore at him for a while as she bound his wounds. That too.

There is one more matter to settle, though. What about the wedding night? Does it bother Jamie that his wife won’t be a virgin? I mean, she was married before, and it was a much consummated one. Claire figures this is the dealbreaker, but she’s not expecting Jamie’s reaction.

“No. As long as it doesna bother you that…I am.”

Claire was not expecting this. Claire has no comfortable way of dealing with this. Claire has not been raised to anticipate having this problem. And she takes a nice long moment to look up and down Jamie’s body as she resets her expectations. Jamie’s explanation is actually priceless. “I reckon one of us should ken what they’re doing…” Man, Claire has had one hell of a rollercoaster of emotions today. 

Her reaction to this news, to the understanding that whether she likes it or not, she’s definitely got to get married, to Jamie, who she will then have to sleep with to consummate it, is par for the course for Claire throughout the show. She stalks up to the group of laughing MacKenzies, grabs a bottle of whiskey, and stalks back off again.

End of episode.

This episode as a whole works as an inverse of last week. There, we saw Claire being the odd woman out as she was surrounded all day every day by Scots. The setting changed rapidly, the emotional stakes were low, and she felt like she was dead on her feet. As the episode progresses, though, she finds herself changing her opinion of the Scots surrounding her, from criminals to revolutionaries. They go from indifferent strangers to good friends. 

This week, Claire is actually with her own kind, only to find that they are not the affable chums she thought they were, but really racist, sexist colonizers, who are happy to resort to violence on her person and unwilling to respect her opinions. Where the MacKenzie men ended last episode fighting an inn for Claire’s honor, the Englishmen end this episode beating Claire herself for no one’s honor at all. Because they can.

In short, the episodes work as mirrors of each other, and each serve to progress Claire’s emotional journey. At first she was an Englishwoman in a world of Scots, completely out of place and without friends. Then she found herself a Scottish sympathizer in a world of Brits, equally out of place and unwelcome. This leads up nicely to next week, when Claire will actually become a Scot, completing the cycle.

I love good arc-writing. It’s so rewarding. And next week is the wedding! Finally!

Tense is an understatement for this scene.

The Maze Runner Is Still Confusing, But Now It's Boring Too

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In general, I don't believe that objective reporting is a thing that can happen. I don't believe it's actually humanly possible to be completely objective about, well, anything. As humans we always have opinions and beliefs that influence who and what we like or dislike. Every opinion we have is subjective, because it's always filtered through our personal experiences of the world.

So, that disclaimer in place, I'd just like to say that I know, I know that I am not objective about The Maze Runner. I have read the books, and I absolutely hated them. Seriously. I wrote a whole big long thing about it. I found the books to be poorly written, sexist, and generally disappointing. They never delivered on the coolness of the premise, and like a lot of shows that I could name, they never managed to sufficiently explain all the weirdness or wrap up the conspiracy theory in a satisfactory way. It just did not work for me.

Obviously, then, I was skeptical going into the movie. On the one hand, this movie contains some of my favorite up and coming actors: Dylan O'Brien (Teen Wolf), Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Game of Thrones), and Kaya Scodelario (Skins). Also, the promotional pictures look encouraging: a racially diverse cast that looked realistically dirty and sweat-stained, with a setting that looked convincingly rural and makeshift. Encouraging all around.

On the other hand, though, the source material is a badly written, badly sexist book that has a couple of good moments, but  overall never really works. It's like James Dashner was writing without an outline, and when he got to the end of the book, he realized that he didn't have the answers for any of the important plot questions. So he wrote another book, assuming that he would be able to answer them at the end of that one. But he couldn't. So he wrote another book, and managed to avoid answering them satisfactorily in that one too.

In order to be safe in writing this review, then, I brought a friend with me to the movie. Mostly because she's my friend and I like her, but a little bit so that I could get a non-me opinion on the movie. See it through someone else's eyes. This friend has not read the book, and I was hoping that she would be able to provide a contrasting view. The conclusion?

Yeah, neither of us liked it very much. 

The movie, if you're not aware of the source material, is yet another young adult dystopian narrative. Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) wakes up in an elevator with no memory of anything but his name. He's arrived in a Lord of the Flies-esque land - it's a giant field in the middle of a bunch of massive walls. The inhabitants of this land are all teenage boys, all of whom only remember their names, nothing else. As far as they know, they've been abandoned there, in a field in the middle of an endless maze full of monsters. No idea why.

The boys have formed a sort of society there, dividing duties and trying to keep themselves alive. Every month another boy comes up in the elevator, along with some limited supplies. But mostly they make do on their own. 

Thomas is apparently the first boy to come up who immediately questions the status quo. While the leaders, Alby (Aml Ameen) and his second, Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), are reasonably content to keep the boys alive and safe within the walls while sending runners out to try to map the maze and discover an exit, Thomas immediately assumes that there must be something else they can do. He goes about trying to prove that, breaking every rule they put in front of him, and repeatedly running out into the maze in a hope of finding some way back...to wherever it is they all came from.

Also there's this thing where the monsters in the maze can sting you, and when they do, you go a little crazy and then die. Unfortunately for Thomas, everyone who's been stung by a Griever immediately tries to kill him, for reasons that he does not understand because he cannot remember. And to make matters even more complicated, the day after Thomas arrives, the elevator comes back, but this time with a girl who says Thomas' name and then immediately passes out.

I don't want to get too deep into the plot, because to be honest, there's not a lot of plot to get into. There really isn't. It follows a very predictable formula, with one or two twists, but it's essentially the plot you get from knowing the premise and from understanding that Thomas is the "chosen one" or whatever. 

And for all that I hate the book, I give the filmmakers here a lot of credit: they created a perfectly reasonably okay movie out of it. The film is visually stunning, has excellent effects, and the dialogue is halfway decent if boring as all get out. The actors are clearly very talented and trying their hardest to be interesting. It's just that there isn't a whole lot to work with. In adapting this book to film, the writers very shrewdly cut out a lot of the more cracktastic elements of the plot (bio-engineered surveillance camera bugs, telepathic connections, inexplicable medical mysteries), but the problem is that without the crack, the story is oddly bland.

Dashner has gone on record saying that he wrote The Maze Runner as a reaction to the idea that a group of boys left to their own devices would go feral, as in The Lord of the Flies. I respect the idea of trying to repudiate that, but the problem is that it doesn't work. A group of boys would go feral. When he tried to create a world that's perfect except for the external monsters, Dashner made a world that is fundamentally dull and does not reflect true human nature. It just doesn't work.

Additionally, for all that I greatly appreciate two of the most important characters in the story (Alby and Minho) being played by actors of color, I think it's a little problematic that Thomas is the white-boy savior, one who Minho immediately defers to and Alby is willing to give almost limitless lee-way. It's like because Thomas is white and curious, the other characters know that they need to step back because the protagonist has arrived, and that's just bad writing.

The writers did do a good job in removing most of the terribly sexist elements from Theresa's plotline, getting rid of her obsession with Thomas and her basically being a super-genius macguffin, but like with a lot of this, when they got down to it, there's not much left. Theresa as a character is mostly made up of tropes. If you get rid of them, all you have is a very bland girl-character who does virtually nothing. 

That's not an exaggeration, either. Theresa does almost literally nothing in the entire movie. Her character could have been cut without a single problem. She doesn't even spout off any necessary dialogue. It's nice that she's no longer there as part of a romantic subplot, but now she's barely there at all.

For the most part, I really appreciate the changes made to the story, and most of them are more cosmetic and logical than anything, but there is one shift that really bothers me. In the books, (SPOILER), the character Newt walks with a pronounced limp. We learn that this is because Newt used to be a runner, but got hurt while he was out in the maze, and now he just works back in the glade. It's not a huge deal or anything, but it's an extra bit of character development for one of the leads.

As the books progress, however, we get more detail on that incident, and eventually Newt discloses that he did not break his leg by accident - he broke it when he decided that he had had enough of running, and climbed a wall so he could jump off. He didn't manage to climb high enough before he jumped, and so the fall only broke his leg, not his neck.

It's a pretty grim subplot, but there's something incredibly moving about it. It was one of the only subplots from the book that I liked. Not because it's overly depressing, but because it answered a very important question: What about the people who, unlike Thomas, don't want to fight to survive? In a story about survival no matter the personal cost, it's very important to see characters like Newt, who have struggled with depression and who seriously question the point of their survival at all. Is it worth it?

It bothered me, then, to realize that the movie has completely cut this subplot out. As far as I could tell, Newt didn't walk with any discernible limp in the film, and they certainly never talked about his past like that. So I wonder whether it will come up in the sequels at all.

All that having been said, it's a perfectly competent movie. The problem is that when "perfectly competent" is the best thing you can say about a film, that's a terrible sign. Without the really absurd flourishes that Dashner stuck in the original novel, and without some intense revision of the storyline, the movie just sort of goes through the motions. It's tense in the moments when you feel it ought to be tense, and vaguely emotional in the moments when you think that feelings should be happening. It's fine. But there is absolutely no fire or verve or deeper anything to this movie. 

The real problem comes back to the source material. It's just not a very good book. Worse, it's a beloved book, and so the screenwriters felt beholden to/the studio felt the need to pander to the fans of the original work. And so the writers were not allowed to make any substantial changes, for fear of angering the mighty fan. Unfortunately, this is a story that needed a lot of changes if it was going to be halfway palatable, and it didn't get them.

I think my friend put it best as we were hanging around my apartment after the film. She'd been quiet for a few minutes, and when I asked her what was up, she said, "I'm still thinking about the movie. Or, well, I'm think about how there's nothing to think about." Because, in the end, there wasn't. There was not enough depth in that movie for us to come out of it having any kind of conversation. It just happened, then we forgot all of it.

That's a very bad sign.



RECAP: Outlander 1x07 - A Consummation Devoutly To Be Avoided

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Finally, finally, finally, it's the episode that I, at least, have been waiting for since the show began! I'm really not kidding about that either. The show has really surprised me with how high quality it is and with the masterful job that Ron Moore and company are doing at translating the source material into a compelling and condensed format. It's spectacular.

But the whole reason I started watching in the first place is because I read the book, and it was fine for a while, but once we hit upon the part where Claire has to marry Jamie in order to save both of their lives and they have this arranged marriage, growing to love each other, have to pretend the relationship is more legit than it is in case the English ask thing...Well, that's where the book really hooked me in.

It's also worth noting that the wedding happens relatively early on in the book, but here it's happening in the penultimate episode of the first season of the show. Since we know that this season (consisting of sixteen episodes, eight aired now and eight in the spring) will cover the entire first season, that does make me wonder if the latter half is going to really cut out the chaff. I mean, that's eight episodes, and there are still four major chunks of the book to go. Actually more like six, when I think about it.

Not to say I wouldn't be amenable to the show deciding that they want to save a bit of this for later and not go through the whole book in the first season. From what I can tell, the next book in the series, Dragonfly in Amber, is kind of not as good as the first one, and very different in tone and scope. So I might be okay with us avoiding that for a bit. Still, like I said before, Ron Moore and company have been doing really well by me so far, so I think I'll keep on trusting them.

For now.

Anyway, this week's episode started off with a bit of a time jump. We left off last week with Claire reeling from the information that she would have to marry Jamie in order to save herself from being brought to Fort William under accusation of being a traitor to the English crown. If Claire marries Jamie, she becomes a Scottish citizen, and then Randall can't legally torture her for information. I mean, he can still do it extra-legally, but it's a little better.

While Claire is totally on board with not getting hate-murdered, though, she's less okay with being forced into a marriage. Yes, Jamie is sweet and kind and exceptionally, alarmingly attractive, but Claire's still in love with her husband, Frank. They had a good marriage, and she's still convinced that she can find a way to get through the stones and return to her own time and her own husband. Jamie's cute, but he's not cute enough for Claire to want to give up the entire life she has waiting for her in 1945.

Plus, we can't forget that Claire is being literally forced into this. It's marry Jamie or die. There are no other options. And the fact that they are both being thrown into this doesn't eliminate the fact that it's a horrible situation. Heck, the fact that Claire and Jamie are friends and attracted to each other doesn't make this situation any more okay. It's not okay. It's gross and a little rapey. But the show trusts us enough to let it stay that way, instead of trying to spoon-feed us Claire's emotional journey.

We open on a flashback to Frank and Claire walking through the streets of Westminster, probably. It's almost strange to see Claire in her natural getup, after so long of seeing her in gowns and tartan. The matching suit and hat are super cute, and she and Frank make a lovely couple. Frank pulls Claire to a stop outside of the Westminster Registry Office, and asks her if she's "ready". 

Claire's confused, naturally, since as far as she knows, they're on their way to meet his parents, whom she has never before encountered. Frank, however, is thinking marriage. It's clear from their conversation that the two of them have discussed it before, and Frank is perfectly comfortable suggesting that they get married. Right here, right now. Claire will never meet Frank's family as anything other than his wife, and the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with. Awwwww.

Obviously Claire says yes, because she and Frank have discussed marriage and are on the same page. Because this is a show about realistic relationships and people. Claire's not being ambushed by a proposal, it's more of a joyful spontaneous thing. 

And then we cut straight to the exact opposite of that moment. Where Claire's first wedding was a celebration of love and deeply private, her second marriage is literally all for show. A big church wedding, a fancy dress, a husband she barely knows, and a threat hanging over her head. No wonder Claire's not as enthused about this one. The ceremony is over in a blink, and Jamie kisses his bride while Claire wonders how she got here.

With all of that buildup, it seemed logical that we would follow straight through the wedding, right? Instead, the show jumps ahead wildly, landing on Claire and Jamie's wedding night. We get a quick shot of them kissing at the altar, and then it's straight to bed. Literally, in this case, since they are stuck in a room with very little furniture, and the knowledge that they have less than twenty-four hours to consummate their marriage, or else Claire will be tortured. Definitely not a sexy situation.

Jamie's just as uncomfortable as Claire is, to be fair, albeit for completely different reasons. As we've known all along, Jamie is attracted to Claire, strongly, and now he's married to her. Plus, we now know that he's a virgin, and has no idea what his wedding night actually really entails. I mean, he's got a vague and decent idea, but no details.

Given their different emotional states, then it makes sense that the two are on vastly different pages. Jamie starts out by pouring them both some whiskey and toasting to his wonderful wife. Claire drinks the whiskey, and then pours some more. Jamie smiles, thinking that she's going to toast him back, but she just chugs the whiskey, pours another, chugs that, and then gets some more booze ready just in case. Honestly, I'm reminded of a script I once wrote that mentioned drinking so many times that the main note I got on it was "It made me have to go to the bathroom". Claire drinks a lot. I feel like I'm going to start getting sympathy hangovers.

After a minute, Claire stops trying to drown herself, and faces Jamie straight on. "I have questions," she says, and Jamie nods, agreeing that she probably does. He'll answer them, because he knows it's important to her. He even sits down and waits, which is a relatively innocuous action, but in this context it's worth noting that he puts himself in a non-threatening, submissive posture, and let's Claire be the one to call the shots. She's standing, they're approximately equally dressed, and he's given her full access to ask any question she wants.

The first question? "Why did you marry me?" At least that one's got a straight answer, even if the answer he gives is incomplete. We flash back to the day before, and see the moment when Jamie actually decided to go through with it. His reasons? 

Well, simply put, Jamie was protecting Claire. As Ned and Dougal made eminently clear in the flashback, either Jamie marries Claire, or she's done for. We're all very well versed in the stakes by now. Of course, Jamie has conditions of his own. First that all the MacKenzie men stop talking about Claire as a whore, as well as others to be determined later. But mostly, as Jamie tells it, he married Claire because he knows precisely what sort of man Randall is. Better than most.

This answer? Pleases Claire. So does the information that Jamie considers their marriage to be as sacred as any made not under duress. Whatever the circumstances, Claire is now his wife, and he will die to protect her. Knowing this makes Claire a little more at ease - though not much - and she allows Jamie to get closer. Just as he goes in for the kiss, though, she pulls back and says, "Tell me about your family."

What's really interesting here is that Jamie doesn't growl or groan or push forward and just kiss her or any of the other tropes we are accustomed to seeing in this situation. Instead he sort of laughs and then answers her with, "How many generations back?" Rather than this being a scene about a callous woman toying with a man's desire for sex, like it would be on nearly any other show, this scene is really all about consent. Jamie wants to have sex with Claire. He really really does. But he understands that she is not comfortable, is not consenting, and is only there under protest. So he never pushes, he never demands, and he never even complains about her hesitancy.

It would be very easy for this scene to turn and become all about Jamie, but it doesn't. We stay firmly fixed on Claire and her sexual desire or lack of it. Since this is a show firmly rooted in Claire's point of view, as well as in her head, this makes sense. But it also matters from a sociological standpoint, because, again, this is the show demonstrating that it takes the issues of consent and power dynamics seriously. 

By having Jamie cede power to Claire visibly and openly during a scene where he is ostensibly in the more powerful position (by dint of being bigger and stronger and the absolute necessity of sex happening), the show is clearly stating that a good sexual dynamic is one that is safe, sane, and consensual.

It's so awesome.

Anyway, Jamie takes Claire's invitation to talk about his family as the distraction it is, and we go into a very prettily lit montage of his storytelling and Claire's rapt fascination. Because here's the thing: for all that Claire and Jamie have been friendly up to this point, they really don't know anything about each other. Or rather, they know only the deep, heart-level stuff, but absolutely nothing of the basic facts that make up a person. As Claire very shrewdly points out, it might be a distraction, but it also is important. They need to know each other if this marriage is going to work. 

Plus, there's the handy bit where this cuts out like ten pages of straight description that was in the book. I'm not kidding. During the scene of Jamie and Claire's wedding night, Jamie talks about his family for a very long time. It's all interesting to know, but not really that compelling in the moment, and it kills the tension. So good choice to go to montage here. 

Sadly, the moment and the slow growing peace between the two of them is shattered when Rupert and Angus, our favorite drunken Scots (who really have grown on me, weirdly), barge in the door demanding to know if Jamie's still a virgin. Both are absolutely tickled to find the couple still mostly dressed, and proceed to mock the living hell out of Jamie. As he shoves them out the door, it's clear that both he and Claire have been very effectively reminded of the stakes present here. They really need to have sex.

Still, Jamie lets Claire initiate things. And she does. Jamie is all over the awkward, horny virgin who has no idea what he's doing, and Claire is caught somewhere between amusement, arousal, and vague horror at his ineptness. Also we get to enjoy a scene of Jamie trying to get Claire out of her 1743 undergarments, which are delightfully complex and incomprehensible to him. 

Then they have sex. While still mostly clothed. It seems...short? Which makes sense of course, but it's still kind of funny to see. Most shows wouldn't be comfortable making their leading man look bad at anything, especially not sex, but the message here is pretty clear: Jamie has no idea what the hell he's doing. He even collapses on Claire afterwards, and she has to push him off because he's like twice her size and she's suffocating.

Afterwards it is positively adorable, as a sort of shell-shocked Jamie admits that he thought sex would take longer, and also that he thought people did it back to front, like horses. Claire pretty much busts a gut laughing, because, well, that's hilarious. But it mostly just demonstrates the fullness of the show's reality. Jamie's seen animals have sex, but never humans, and no one ever told him how it worked, because he's a boy and he's just supposed to figure it out. Technically at this point, he's never even seen a naked woman up close, because Claire is still in her shift.

At least the marriage is now officially consummated, and Claire is now officially a Scot. It's like that one event has changed the tenor of the evening. It was a duty they had to get over with, and now they have. So what now? It's a very palpable relief to both of them, but they still have a whole night to get through. A lifetime, actually, if their marriage vows are to be believed. What now?

It's apparently time for Claire to have a crisis of conscience, because despite Jamie's inexperience, she really did enjoy the sex. And she's not okay with that about herself. So to sublimate her guilt, she decides to go downstairs and get some food. It's the middle of the night. Clearly no one will still be awake and sitting outside their door in order to embarrass them. That would be weird.

By which I mean that everyone is still downstairs, and they let out a series of shouts and screams and jests at her appearance. Jamie takes one for the team, sending Clair back inside and rounding up some food for them both. He puts up with the comments and threatens them all with violence, but it's a stray comment from Dougal that stops Jamie in his tracks. Dougal wants to be thanked. After all, he's the one who set the two of them up. He also tells Jamie to be a bit slower in getting back, so Claire doesn't think she's got the upper hand in their relationship.

What makes this interesting and not just sexist is that we only hear the second half of what Dougal said as Jamie is relaying it to Claire. He's not trying to hide what Dougal said or take it as advice. He rejects the idea that he should be playing games with Claire. He even tells her that she has him wrapped around her finger, and he's fine with it. Again, Jamie demonstrates clearly that he is giving Claire control of the situation. Which seriously just makes him even more attractive.

Claire clearly thinks so too, but she's not quite over her freakout. She lets Jamie touch her hair, which he does with utter reverence. She's giving him opportunities to woo her, the way he would have if they had married in the normal way and not with less than a day's warning. Just as the moment is about to turn really sexy, she turns away and comments that Jamie wore a new kilt today. It's the Fraser colors. Where did he get that?

Cue another flashback, where we see Murtaugh coming through as Jamie's awesome uncle. He refused to see Jamie wed in anything other than his own tartan, so he scoured the countryside for the plaid. They have a touching conversation about Jamie's mother and what she might have thought of Claire, and it becomes eminently clear that Murtaugh is super in love with Jamie's tragically deceased mother. Huh. Not sure Jamie realizes that.

At any rate, Murtaugh approves of Claire (which we've known since episode three or so), and he thinks Jamie's mother would have liked her too. Claire is both surprised and touched by this information. She's even more touched by the information that Jamie made a few demands of Dougal before they could get married. First, that they be wed properly, in a church, before a priest.

There's not a lot of super important plot stuff in this flashback/flashsideways (since Jamie wasn't actually there and is just relaying what he was told), but it's very funny. Dougal and the young MacKenzie whose name I've forgotten dig up the local priest and demand he perform a wedding. Said priest has a nasty cold, is super cranky, and outright refuses. He finally gives in when Dougal offers to put glass over the windows in the church, thus making the sanctuary a genuinely good place to worship. It's funny, but also a reasonably important point about how money matters, even to a priest.

The second condition is a bit more obscure. Jamie wanted a wedding ring made for Claire, but not just out of anything. He wanted it made from a specific key that he had in his sporran. We don't know why, and Jamie denies having any special reason for it (utter lie). Rupert and Angus were the ones slated with doing that task, and the scene is both hilarious and touching. They might be huge, gross, crude weirdos, but those guys truly love Jamie and Claire. They're just terrible at showing it.

The third condition, my personal favorite, was that Dougal somehow dig up a wedding dress for Claire to wear. The problem with this being that they are in the middle of an impoverished Scottish village, with no dressmakers for miles, and no noble ladies to borrow from either. The solution? Ned Gowan goes to a whorehouse and asks to borrow a wedding dress. It's just so entertaining. Seriously. Eventually the women dig up a dress that was never worn, that they took in payment from a nobleman who'd gambled away his money already. Ned takes the dress, and also gets a date for the wedding. 

There are two noteworthy points about Jamie's conditions. First is that they all, to some extent, are about Claire. He wants their marriage to be legitimate, hence the priest, but he also wants to honor Claire, hence the ring and gown. Second, all of these requirements take time. Sure, Dougal sped it up by outsourcing a lot of the legwork to his men, so most of these things were happening simultaneously, but still. Jamie stalled for time, because he knew that Claire wasn't ready. He gave her as much time as he humanly could.

Claire, of course, used that time in the most Claire way possible: she got super duper drunk.

Jamie's more than a little horrified that Claire remembers almost nothing of her own wedding, but Claire comforts him with the knowledge that by the time they go to the wedding, she wasn't actually drunk, she was just hungover. She remembers most of it. Totally. Probably. Like definitely at least half.

He, of course, remembers everything. And it's through Jamie's adoring eyes that we finally see the whole wedding. The moment he first sees Claire outside the church (wild-eyed and kind of baffled to find herself there). When they walk inside, Claire leading the way and walking herself down the aisle as Jamie follows close behind. Standing before the priest. The vows. The ring. The handfasting. The kiss. 

The only part we see that Jamie doesn't remember is the part that Claire can't forget. Right before they walk into the church, Claire takes a moment, composes herself, and then slips off her wedding ring. Her other wedding ring. Because Claire cannot forget, even for a moment, that she is already married.

And then Jamie and Claire have sex again. This time it's not contractual or obligatory. It's because they want to. As with all other steps in their relationship, Jamie lets Claire set the pace, and obligingly strips for her so that she can see his naked body. We the audience get some gratuitous butt ogling, but the focus of the scene is on their interplay. They're learning how to work as a couple. They're learning what they each like. It's sweet.

Also steamy and sexy, as it is a sex scene that's well shot and involves two very attractive people being very attracted to each other. I'd describe it here, but that would be gratuitous. And I have it on good authority that I can't write a good sex scene anyway. Suffice to say that they have lots of sex, seem to be enjoying it, and Claire is definitely in control. Yay!

After, Claire finally does venture downstairs, and finds herself alone for the first time in a while. The room is mostly deserted now, complete with mangy cat eating the leftovers from the wedding feast. Then the spell is broken as the inn's door opens and Dougal stumbles in, just back from his meeting with Randall. While Randall is extremely displeased to know he can't haul Claire off and torture here, he is going to abide by the law. Claire is happy to know that, like an enormous weight is off of her. It wasn't in vain.

Of course, Dougal spoils the moment by reminding Claire that even if she is married now, she can still "sample other pleasures." Gross. Claire responds, shocked, that she's married to Jamie. His nephew. Isn't this kind of super weird? The whole moment just underlines that while Claire does have some allies in this time, she's not out of the woods yet. It also shows how important Jamie's insistence of Claire initiating their relationship really is. Because Dougal doesn't wait. He kissed Claire without her consent once, and now he's touching her face and caressing her without her consent again. 

The only thing that really saves Claire's dignity in the moment is the arrival of Rupert, who offers her congratulations and best wishes on her wedding day. She thanks him for that, and for the ring. It's like these two characters, who've hated each other for so long, suddenly are seeing each other as people. I like it.

I also like the symbolism of Claire, wrapped up in the Fraser plaid, being faced with intimidation from Dougal, war chief to the MacKenzies. It makes clear that even though she's now legally a Scot, Claire is still an outsider. She does not belong. 

As Claire goes back upstairs, Rupert returns to form and makes a comment about how "well-ridden" Claire looks. Claire basically shrugs it off and keeps walking, because she's heard worse and it's just Rupert, but Dougal is incensed. He smacks the hell out of Rupert while Claire watches, and then banishes him from the room, staying behind to swig at wine and be generally very threatening. Clearly this bit about Dougal being obsessed with Claire is going to come up again.

Back in their room, Claire can't sleep, and her angst wakes up Jamie. He has one more revelation for Claire before the night is through: a wedding present. He gives her a beautiful pearl necklace that his father gave to his mother. Claire's touched, and they have sex again. Claire's still on top. Just saying.

The morning is all sweetness and light until, as Claire is picking up her wedding dress so they can pack and go, she hears a clink. It's her other wedding ring, having fallen out of the bodice where she stuffed it. The ring nearly falls through a crack in the floor, but Claire saves it, only to stare in horror at her hands. She has two wedding rings. With shaky fingers, she slides the loose ring onto her right hand, and then sits there, staring.

She is not okay with this.

End of episode.

Pilot Season: Selfie (Terrible Premise, Great Actors)

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Well, having now seen the first episode of Selfie, ABC's blatant attempt to reach a Millennial audience by pandering to what they think we like, I can confirm that yes, it is exactly what you think it is. Broadly written, full of comic gags that were obviously written by writers in their forties or so who are only vaguely aware of the inner-workings of Snapchat, and probably first heard about Instagram from one of their younger, cooler friends. It's instantly dated, snidely pandering, and weirdly enjoyable.

I really do mean that last part, as much as it makes me deeply uncomfortable to admit. Because I wouldn't go so far as to say that Selfie is a good show. It's not. But it is strangely fun. I think part of the reason comes down to the fact that, no matter how insultingly the thing is written, the show cast Karen Gillan and John Cho as its leads, and those two are virtually incapable of not being charming. 

The basic plot of the show is simple. Very simple. Insultingly simple, if we're being candid. It's a loose translation of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, where the crusty, upper crust Henry Higgins teaches poor, uneducated Eliza Doolittle how to be a lady. Despite the obvious problem that Higgins is not actually a lady himself. The two fall in love, because of course they do, and Eliza transforms into a beautiful and convincing member of high society. Hooray!

It's pretty much just been loosely modernized here. Our main character is Eliza Dooley (Karen Gillan), a high school loser who compensated for her low self-esteem and social standing by getting super hot and becoming "insta-famous" as a blogger on Instagram. She's the sort of shallow, crudely drawn character who assumed that becoming physically attractive would solve all of her life problems. The thing is, she's right. To an extent.

Being hot has led her to her job, which she's great at, as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company. She shamelessly uses her wiles to succeed and climb the corporate ladder, while sublimating all feelings of loneliness and misery by looking at her phone or her reflection in a mirror. Think Gina from Brooklyn 99, but less happy about everything.

All of this works really well, until the day it doesn't. First, Eliza finds out that the man she's dating is actually married and has been lying to her. Then she gets food poisoning. On a plane. Surrounded by her coworkers. And she ruins her dress, as well accidentally spilling multiple bags of vomit all over herself. The whole thing is immediately captured for all time by her heartless colleagues (most of whom hate her because she's kind of a terrible person), and Eliza finds herself both trending on Twitter, and more miserable than she's ever been in her life.

Speaking as someone who has actually had food poisoning on a plane, all of this was uncomfortably real. Yes, it really is that awful. Trust me. The show was weirdly accurate.

Anyway, while lying in a puddle of sadness and food poisoning in her apartment, Eliza comes to an important realization: she doesn't have any friends. I mean, she has lots of Facebook friends, but no actual real life friends who will bring her ginger ale and hold her hand while she cries. She doesn't like this realization. But she also doesn't know what to do about it.

Which is where we bring in Henry (John Cho). Henry is a marketing executive at Eliza's work, and while they know each other tangentially, they've never interacted before. Henry is uptight, intense, and weirdly formal. No one really likes Henry, but he's amazing at his job, so they tolerate him. But even his boss thinks he's weird and lonely and he makes them all feel awkward.

During a meeting where Henry is publicly lauded for saving the firm's reputation when a toxic product was banned by the FDA, Eliza realizes that a marketing specialist might be exactly the person she needs to rehabilitate her image. So she asks Henry for help. Begs, really. Begs completely shamelessly and with more than a couple insults.

At first Henry says no, but when he's reminded that he absolutely must bring a date to his next work event, because the president of the company is uncomfortable with him, he decides to give Eliza a shot. After all, he's an egomaniac, and he was just given permission to dictate every aspect of a woman's life. He's in!

Wacky hijinks obviously ensue, where Henry tries to teach Eliza basic manners and interpersonal relations (like how to have a genuine conversation that's not about her with the receptionist). It doesn't go particularly well, but they make enough progress that Henry feels comfortable asking Eliza to come to the wedding.

And that brings in a new problem. Henry hates all of Eliza's clothes, and refuses to let her wear anything short, tight, or racktastic to the wedding. So Eliza is forced to ask her neighbor, Bryn (Allyn Rachel) for help. Bryn, of course, being Eliza's social media opposite: a Pinteresting, DIY, top-knot wearing hipster. Bryn, surprisingly, says yes, because she's a sucker for a "make-under", and the girls actually get to bond when Bryn and her book club come to Eliza's apartment and turn her into, well, one of them for a day. Eliza's a little weirded out, but she also can't believe what's happening. Real life people are in her apartment, asking about her feelings, helping her get ready, even cleaning her kitchen. Is this what having friends is like?

Henry is genuinely blown away when he picks Eliza up for their wedding date, and we get the first real implication (though who actually doubted it) that they will be the ultimate ship on the show. I mean, obviously, but it's nice to know that the actors can play convincing attraction.

At the wedding, though, everything kind of goes to crap again. Eliza holds it together for a while, but while the bride (their boss' daughter) says her vows in the form of a really weird poem, she starts to fall apart. It might be a deeply cheesy sentiment, but Eliza has the sinking realization that no one is ever going to look at her the way that couple at the altar is looking at each other. And she can't deal with these emotions. They're too much. So she does what she always does, and turns to her phone. 

Which of course immediately makes a ton of noise, disrupts the ceremony, and makes both her and Henry look terrible in front of their boss, Mr. Saperstein (David Harewood). Eliza and Henry have a huge, raging fight after the ceremony, where he calls her immature and self-involved, and she calls him out on being a sanctimonious jerk. It's ugly, and they both leave miserable.

But the next day at work, Eliza finds herself having an honest to goodness real conversation with the receptionist, Charmonique (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). She realizes that whatever Henry was doing worked. She is incrementally a better person. Heck yes she wants to keep going! Being a good person feels great!

So she tracks down his house (somehow, probably creepily) and shows up in the rain to bang on his door and ask him to take her back. There's some hilarity involved where Henry pretends he can't see her, and Eliza points out that he literally lives in a glass house. Anyway, Eliza apologizes and asks Henry to start helping her again. She likes being better. And Henry apologizes too, because he realizes that she was right. He is taking out his dissatisfaction with the world on her. 

Then they fall down in the rain and laugh at each other and it's very cute and romcom. But the point is clear. Both Henry and Eliza need to change, and they need each other's help to do it. That, as far as I can tell, is the series in a nutshell.

So you see what I mean, right? It's pretty insultingly written, at least at first, but as the pilot wears on, you start to realize that these characters are too well-defined and emotionally engaging to be stereotypes. Eliza's shallow and silly, but she doesn't want to be, and that somehow makes her very compelling. Henry might be an uptight egomaniac, but that's a problem and he's called on it. 

In fact, it seems that the whole point of the show is that these two characters deeply need each other, and need each other to call them on their bad behavior. Neither of them is better than the other. And that's pretty great.

Also great? The show's casting, which is both well done and also surprisingly diverse. Three of the main characters are non-white, and only two (maybe three if you stretch it) are white. Plus I don't think I can name another network sitcom starring an Asian-American actor. I really can't. And it's a show where the main couple for which you are meant to root is an interracial couple? Just great.

It does seem a little funny to watch two titans of genre fiction acting in such a mainstream show. Gillan (Doctor Who and Guardians of the Galaxy) and Cho (Star Trek and Sleepy Hollow) are great actors, but it's still strange to see them performing in a show utterly devoid of time travel or phasers. I mean, it's really good to see them getting recognition, but also a little odd. Just like it's kind of funny hearing Gillan doing a very convincing American accent.

The point is this: Selfie is a cynically conceived sitcom from a mainstream network that is clearly trying to draw in more young viewers by pandering to what they think our interests are. But it's also a really sweet show about two broken people trying to fix each other. So even if it is a little insulting and tactless, I think it's worth watching. It has heart.

Also it's fun watching them judge everyone together.

Pilot Season: Gotham (A Show With Everything But Yul Brenner)

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In news completely unrelated to Gotham, I've been listening to the Chess soundtrack a lot lately, and as you can tell, it's kind of stuck in my head.

But in more related matters, there's a new show about Batman. Or rather, as the promotional materials make eminently clear, that's not about Batman. Indeed, Gotham is very intentionally a show that isn't about Batman, it's about Commissioner Gordon, and how he became the mustachioed badass we all know and love. Except for the part where it is clearly completely about Batman.

The pilot episode starts off with some clever shots of a young Selina Kyle (Camren Bicondova) skulking down the streets, doing petty crime, when her quiet night is interrupted by the loud and emotionally traumatizing murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. Selina sticks around just long enough to definitely know who the murderer is, before bugging off for the rest of the episode. That's when we're introduced to our actual main characters, Detectives James Gordon (Ben McKenzie) and Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue). 

They come in to investigate the crime scene and talk to the witness (young Bruce, of course), and from the start we know what kind of cops they are. Gordon is young and idealistic and tough and exactly the kind of cop you want investigating a murder. Bullock is clearly dirty, rough, rude, and tries to get out of investigating the Wayne case because he knows that it's a one-way ticket to pissing off the Gotham crime scene. Needless to say, they don't get along.

The episode then consists of Gordon trying his gosh-darndest to solve the case by conventional, staid, solid police work, and Bullock using his network of CIs, mob connections, and weirdly sexual relationship with Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith), a local crime boss with mafia ties. Bullock's way works better, and finds them attempting to arrest, and then shooting dead as he tried to flee, the Wayne's killer. Yay! All's well that ends well, and now young Master Bruce totally won't have crippling emotional problems, right?

Wrong. 

No, it turns out that the Waynes were not killed in a random mugging, as was previously assumed, nor was the man Bullock just shot involved in any way. But at least he's dead now so that his daughter Ivy can grow up with crippling emotional problems like literally everyone else in the Batman universe.

As we learn when Fish Mooney's second in command, Oswald Cobblepot (Robin Lord Taylor), goes to two detectives from Major Crimes, the mugging was a setup. Fish Mooney was involved in taking out the Waynes, as was Carmine Falcone in all likelihood. This means that the takedown of that random mugger involved planted evidence, and means that the cops were in on it. We as an audience know the Gordon was innocent, but Bullock? Yeah, he totally did it.

Unfortunately, Major Crimes, which seems to consist entirely of Detective Renee Montoya (Victoria Cartagena) and her partner, think Gordon was in on it, and they decide to make his life hell. Gordon reacts precisely the way we expect and takes this as a personal challenge to solve the case. Because of course he does. He even goes and tells Bruce Wayne that they didn't actually catch the man who killed his parents, and that justice isn't served yet. Good job, Gordon. That's not going to screw the kid up like whoa.

Gordon's attempts to investigate the crime eventually reach Fish Mooney's attention, as well as the attention of Carmine Falcone himself. Mooney realizes that Oswald must have sold her out, and decides that the best way to handle this situation is to kill him. Or rather, since Major Crimes is closing in on her and Falcone is none to pleased at the moment, to have Gordon kill him. This way Gordon is just as dirty as the rest of them, and Oswald is handily out of the way.

Obviously Gordon doesn't kill the guy. Instead he pretends that he did and lets Oswald get away, so he can live to become a supervillain who wreaks horrible havoc on Gotham and totally does not deserve the leniency Gordon just showed him.

All of that happens in literally the first episode of the show, so I hope you understand that I really meant it when I said this show has everything. The plot is positively jam packed, and sheer number of characters introduced was kind of dizzying. 

That's not to say it was a bad first episode. It wasn't. It was pretty fun and watchable and reasonably entertaining. Just that it was a lot. Everything in this show is busy, from the plot to the character arcs and interactions to the freaking set direction. It's all so much to take in, like the executives are afraid they'll offend a fan if they leave anything out.

Overall, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. I can understand the executive's desire to make the most of their right to use all of these characters, but it feels false and weird to assume that everyone here is going to be a superhero or supervillain in about twenty years. And while I like the idea of doing origin stories for some of the lesser known characters, there's a flawed premise when it comes to creating an origin story for Commissioner Gordon. I mean, what kind of story is there? Once upon a time there was a really honest cop in a city of not very honest cops. He solved crime and was generally disliked, then one day he met Batman. The end.

I'm just saying, it's not really cinematic.

And the argument that this isn't a Batman show would be a lot more convincing if it weren't a complete and utter lie. Not only is this definitely a Batman show, the first episode revolves around the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Bruce's emotional problems, and whether or not there was a big conspiracy about the whole thing. By the end of the episode it's clear that the search for the Wayne's real killer will be the arc for the rest of this season (at least) and that anyone claiming Gotham isn't about our favorite angsty superhero is just straight up lying.

It's not just that the show is openly obsessed with the Waynes. There's also the minor fact that of all of the characters introduced in the first episode, only one major figure isn't a big player from the Batman comics or cartoons. And that means that while this show is arguably about the rise of James Gordon, it's more about the creation and expansion of the Batman universe. 

If this show were really honestly truly about Gordon, then the pilot would be so bold as to include other characters not explicitly ripped from the pages of the Batman comic, in the idea that probably other people were doing crime in Gotham twenty years before Batman became Batman.

Except they didn't do that. Nearly every single figure from the first episode, from a low level mob lackey like Oswald Cobblepot (The Penguin), to a socially awkward and generally unliked CSI tech like Ed Nygma (The Riddler), to the daughter of a random criminal who's barely even in the episode (Poison Ivy), to the detective on Major Crimes who keeps investigating Gordon (Renee Montoya/The Question)... You get the point. Nearly every character in this episode fits somewhere larger in the Batman mythos. The only original character we meet is Fish Mooney, and she's really there so she can expedite the rise of The Penguin. It's all coming up Batman.

I'm not entirely sure yet if this is a criticism of the show. Because on the one hand, it's pretty cool that they're including so many characters from the DC canon. We've not seen many quality live-action versions of these characters so far, and while it's only been one episode, so far it looks very promising. On the other hand, it's a little bit alarming that the writers of this show seem to have so little regard for their ability to come up with new characters that even the background is populated with familiar figures. It also creates a weird sense that the world of Gotham is incredibly small and claustrophobic. Everyone knows everyone else and by the time Batman starts Batmaning they will have all been at this for twenty years.

That's kind of weird.

There are, however, a lot of positive things I can say about the show. For starters, the actors really are fantastically cast. Ben McKenzie is phenomenal as Gordon, and Donal Logue continues to bring a weird amount of pathos and dimension to a traditional scumbag character. Cartagena is great as the straight laced Renee Montoya, and her interactions with both Gordon and Barbara Kean (Erin Richards) are crackling with tension. 

Jada Pinkett Smith, Robin Lord Taylor, and Cory Michael Smith (who plays Ed Nygma) are all fantastically threatening, each in their own way. Heck, even Sean Pertwee knocks it out of the park playing a much more down-to-earth Alfred than we usually see. So right on.

It's also worth noting that this show seems quite intentionally diverse, like the writers and casting directors paid a lot of attention to including diversity. Yes, the canonically non-white characters are still non-white, but also a lot of new characters invented for this show are also non-white, like Fish Mooney and Captain Sarah Essen (Zabryna Guevara). It even passes the Bechdel Test in its first episode, albeit only by a few lines. This is all very promising.

In general, I think that's where I fall on Gotham. It's all very promising. While the first episode is frenetic at best, and downright hectic at worst, and the show seems determined to cram Batman backstory down my throat, it's doing it all very well. I feel relatively comfortable with the show because at least it seems to have a basic grasp of the premise and the characters and the ideology here. It's not really a show about James Gordon, but it is a show about Gotham itself. And that has the potential to be just as interesting.


Returning Shows: Brooklyn 99 (It's Out of Your Control, Jake)

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If I have to put my finger on the theme of last night's episode, and what will probably be the general theme of season two, I'm gonna go with control. Or, more accurately, a lack of control. From Jake realizing that no matter how much he wishes something could happen between he and Amy "romantic-styles" it's just not the right time, to Holt opening up about his fears for what might happen to the squad when the new Police Commissioner takes command, to Gina and Boyle and their accidental horizontal mambos, it's clear the the whole precinct is dealing with some serious control issues.

It's great. I missed this show so much. Can you tell?

Look, Brooklyn 99, like its spiritual predecessor, Parks and Recreation (where a lot of the writers and producers got their big break), is a sitcom that thrives on real-world situations. Well, real-world might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but let's go with it for the sake of argument. While the crimes and criminals and general life of the precinct at Brooklyn's finest station are pretty bizarre, they're also grounded in a full emotional reality that makes them relatable, convincing, and totally hilarious.

I should know that, for the record, because just last week I finished rewatching the first season with my roommates, and trust me. It holds up to a second, third, and even fourth viewing. As a bonus, after you've watched the episodes a couple of times, you can stop laughing long enough to realize all of the character work that's going on. 

It's the same in this season premiere. The first time you watch it you're distracted by all the shiny, shiny jokes (which are excellent), but if you go back and watch it again, it's kind of amazing how much emotional feelings stuff they've managed to pack in.

The episode picks up six months after the last episode (which handily aired about six months ago). At the end of that episode, our hero, Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), got himself fired from the NYPD so that he could go on an undercover sting infiltrating the Ianucci mob family. Coming back in, we now get to see the very end of Peralta's operation. He's very popular with the mobsters now, gladhanding and giving a toast at some mafioso's wedding. The old men of the family even give him some traditional on-the-mouth kisses to signify that he's "one of us now". Which means it's time for Peralta to give his codeword and for NYPD to bust the wedding.

Jake is dragged off kicking and screaming about how much he hates cops, just so that he can get to the police van and give Captain Holt (Andre Braugher) a giant hug. Which Captain Holt hates, so all is right with the world. Jake's back!

It's almost like nothing happened while he was gone too, aside from Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) and Santiago (Melissa Fumero) accidentally wearing the same outfit to work one day, Gina (Chelsea Peretti) single-handedly got headphones banned from the precinct, and Terry (Terry Crews) chipped a tooth and spent a week interrogating perps with an adorable lisp. In other words, business as ridiculous usual. And, for the viewers just joining the show now, a handy recap of who these characters are and how they relate to each other. I mean, that's some good writing. It's quick, hilarious, and easily communicates the major character dynamics of the show. Right on!

Before Jake can just fall back into the usual routine, though, he has to address the confession he made to Amy Santiago before he left six months ago. At the time he had no idea what was going to happen on that op, so he admitted that he had feelings for Amy and wished something could happen between them, but also acknowledged that she had a boyfriend and he respected that. It's one of the best love confessions I've seen on television, for the record.

That moment, after which Jake pretty much fled for the hills, is putting a teensy awkward tinge on their reunion, so Jake decides to take Santiago aside and tell her that...he didn't mean any of that and she should forget all about it. Right. That's totally not just a last-ditch effort for Peralta to save his dignity. Nope.

But Jake isn't the only one trying to deny something happened in order to save face. See, last season ended on a positively hilarious shot of Gina and Boyle in bed with each other, both screaming in horror. They'd both like to pretend it never happened, but they've run into a big problem. Boyle loves Jake. Boyle tells Jake literally everything, and there is a 100% chance that Boyle will tell Jake he slept with Gina some time in the next two days. 

Gina, her self-worth spiraling as she realizes that people are going to find out she slept with someone below the physical level of a bike messenger (oddly specific, but that's Gina for you), declares that her spirit animal is now a naked molerat, and even goes so far as to try befriending Hitchcock and Scully. It's sad watching her in such a downward spiral.

And on the other side of the bullpen, Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz) and Amy are trapped doing situational drills with Terry and Holt. Terry gets to wear a placard that lists him as an "angry prostitute" or "unattended backpack" or "seven year old boy". He then pretends to be said person or thing, using a script written by Holt, and Amy and Rosa have to deal with the situation in a proper, procedural way. It's annoying at first, and then straight up maddening because Holt won't let them stop running drills. They just keep going. 

So clearly everyone in the office is dealing with a situation that they can't control, and they deal with those situations in variably healthy ways. Gina spirals into a very Gina-esque depression. Amy and Rosa decide to use Terry pretending to be a seven year old as an excuse to play in the bouncy castle (though why their precinct has a bouncy castle is left unexplained). 

And Jake decides that the best solution to his mild disappointment at Amy still being with her boyfriend is to sublimate that disappointment into the search for one single mobster who got away.

The three storylines dovetail nicely, and they all come to the same conclusion. Amy, Rosa, and Terry are caught by Holt, but a subsequent conversation reveals that the reason Holt is being so hard on them is because Holt himself is trying to deal with a new commissioner coming in soon and how little he knows about or can control the situation. And Jake pursues the fleeing mobster to the airport - with a little help from the absolutely amazing Jenny Slate as a mob mistress - only to find that the guy's flight left an hour before.

In other words, really nothing works out in a satisfying way in this episode, and strangely, that's satisfying in and of itself. Like I said above, this show really isn't about solving the crimes, it's about watching the characters change and evolve. Sometimes, especially with a character like Jake's, it's actually best if he doesn't get the win. I mean, he still was involved in a RICO case that brought down fifteen high level mobsters. But in this one case he really did have to accept that there are some things you can't change.

Which pays off nicely when Jake meets Amy at the bar later for his surprise party (that Boyle told him about, unprompted) and tells her that, no, he really does have feelings for her but he isn't going to press because he's not that guy. And then they go back to normal. Some things you just can't control. 

Even the freaking tag on this episode plays into that, with Boyle confessing to Gina that he hasn't told Jake about their sex, nor will he, because it would hurt her feelings. Awwww. And immediate cut to Boyle and Gina in bed together again. I hope this is a thing this season. It feels like a thing, and it's such a good thing.

Okay, other little stuff that I like about the show and that I hope will continue to develop this season. Well, in terms of maintaining a diverse, compelling show that finds humor without relying on stereotypes or offensive material, it's still going great! Admittedly, this episode had a lot less emphasis on Rosa, Amy, Terry, Holt, and really everyone other than the white people, which is unusual for this show, but there's some cool setup for season arcs with all of them. 

That is what definitely sets this show apart from most of the other FOX sitcoms: every character on here has an arc and a flaw and a point that the story is carrying them towards. That is weirdly rare in comedy overall, and it's virtually unheard of that a sitcom is so invested in its characters that it demands that they change.

But it's also cool that this show isn't afraid to let them all stew for a while either. 


Pilot Season: Forever (The Weird Grandpa We All Wish We Had)

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I have a guilty confession to make. Out of all of the new fantastic shows that are premiering this year, by far the one that I am enjoying the most, the one that I actually kick my roommates off the TV so that I can watch when it airs, the one that I am alarmingly pumped for is...Forever. A show that I literally had not heard of before I stumbled across a pre-air version of its pilot on Hulu. 

It's not the most original show in the world (I can give countless examples of other shows that have tried this premise), but for some reason, some arcane and kind of spooky reason, this show is incredibly addictive.

If I had to guess, I'd say that's because it's fun.

Okay, so backing up here, because I just threw a heck of a lot of material at you, Forever is a police procedural with a twist that airs on ABC. In other words, it's a rather blatant ripoff of the wildly successful Castle, wherein a devilishly handsome man who is not a cop but happens to be good at solving crimes is paired up with a by-the-books all business lady detective who happens to be stunning and have a tragedy in her past. Together, they solve crimes and have sexual tension.

I'm really not kidding either with the similarities. Aside from a wild difference in the situations of the male leads, these two shows are virtually identical. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. As I said above, Castle is wildly popular. Why fix it if it ain't broke?

The twist, of course, comes in who our leading man is. In this case, he's Dr. Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd), a medical examiner for the NYPD who happens to be over two hundred years old. Henry Morgan is immortal - sort of. He died back in the early eighteen hundreds (I think), and has been coming back from the dead ever since. It's not that he can't die, it's that he can't stay dead. And so he's decided to use his medical degree (he was already a doctor before his first death) to study his "affliction" and figure out how to reverse it.

His partner of sorts is Detective Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza), a detective for the NYPD who is great at solving cases, but has kind of a mess of a personal life. Her husband was killed by a drunk driver less than a year ago, and she's been going through a rollercoaster ever since. From binge-drinking and random hookups to becoming a workaholic, she's trying everything she can to forget the love of her life. Awww.

Together, they solve crime! Aided by Henry's creepy and extensive knowledge of death (most of it firsthand) and Jo's general being a good cop-ness, they manage to solve some pretty weird and impressive murders. There are only three episodes out so far and already we've seen attempted mass poisoning, standard fake suicide murders, and a case involving illegal pharmaceuticals trying to be the fountain of youth. In three episodes.

The pilot episode actually introduces them when Henry is caught in a train derailment and dies. His blood is found at the crime scene, as is his pocket watch, and Henry instantly becomes a suspect for causing the accident. He manages to prove he didn't do it and help catch the real killer, only to have to die again in order to stop the guy. Man. Dying is so much work. And it introduces one of the chief mechanics and gags of the show: Henry dies. A lot.

The show really isn't about the cases, though, for all that it is a procedural. Like Castle and NCIS and many other shows before it, the point here is the characters, and how they interact. The longrunning arc of the season involves Henry trying to figure out why he can't die, and in the first episode we get a bit clue: He's not the only one who can live forever.

For the rest of the episodes he's been trying to figure out who this other mysterious immortal is. Helping him is the only living person who knows his secret, his adopted son, Abraham (Judd Hirsch). Abe and Henry have a frankly wonderful relationship, mostly due to the oddness of it. 

I mean, Abe is visibly older than Henry. A lot of people think he's Henry's father. But he isn't. Abe, in the way of many grown children, worries about his father and hopes that he won't just stew like the grumpy old man he is. Henry freaks out when Abe goes on dates, teases him incessantly about his foibles, and worries obsessively about what kind of trouble his son's gotten into.

In fact, this is a huge part of why the show works while others that have attempted this same premise before (New Amsterdam springs to mind) crashed and burned. Forever is fun, light-hearted, and a bit weird. Henry blithely solves crimes by killing himself to see exactly how the victim died, and every time he comes back to life it's with him popping out of the Hudson River, stark naked, and calling his adult son for a ride home. Heehee.

It also works because the show refuses to make categorical statements (so far) about the virtues or evils of immortality. While Henry is always decrying his fate and trying to figure out how to die, Abe is sitting right next to him, reminding him loudly that getting old and dying isn't all that great either. There's a very strong current of "don't forget to live" that I quite like. Besides, this week's episode ended with a seventy year old man skateboarding a half-pipe while is father looked on in horror. It's a show that knows precisely how ridiculous it is, and I love that.

Also nice to see? The female lead here is a Hispanic detective, clearly well-respected and good at her job. Her boss is an African-American woman (Lorraine Toussant), who admittedly we haven't seen much of but who I generally like so far. It doesn't pass the Bechdel Test every episode, but it has passed, and that's great. 

There's only one regard in which the show could use some work: class. So far class has played very little role in the show, with all of the characters, criminal and law enforcement, solidly middle to upper class. Henry himself has lived a life of pure privilege, as a member of the British aristocracy and then a well-respected doctor for a few hundred years. As a white, privileged man, it does feel a little weird for Henry to be going on about the struggles of life. But that's honestly the biggest complaint, and I have hopes that the show will deal with that soon.

I will say that the show has some work to do if it wants to convince us that Henry and Jo are into each other and are going to end up together. The actors have fantastic chemistry with each other, but none of it is even a little sexual, and honestly the idea of Henry dating anyone feels weird. He's a grandpa. He can't wind up with a woman that much younger than him. It's creepy.

One of the most promising details of the show actually is the characterization of Henry. Instead of going the route usually taken, where the immortal character is rather immature, or else dour and unimpressed, Henry feels like a favorite great-uncle or grandparent. Kind of grumpy, but he secretly adores you and always has some hard candies in his pocket. As he himself says, he's the "least judgmental person you will ever meet", because he's seen it all before, and he's found it in himself to be compassionate.

In short, this show works because the people in it are kind and loving and lovable. It feels weird to say that on a police procedural, but it's true. One of the episodes already aired ends with Henry actually hugging a criminal, and it is not out of context or weird. Yes, there is wacky immortality stuff and insane flashbacks of Henry's lives plus lots of gruesome crimes. But the heart of the show is Henry. He's a good person. He's the sort of person you actually would want to live forever, and for some reason, that makes a hell of a fun TV show.

Also we're still waiting to find out what happened to his wife...

Gone Girl Subverts the "Woman in Peril" Genre. I Love It.

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I would like, for a moment, to transport you all back two days to Saturday, when I was leaving my local movie theater and walking the fifty feet to my car after having seen Gone Girl. As I gently stepped through the wooded parking lot (setting the mood, okay?), I found myself softly repeating a single word.

"WHAT. What. What? WHAAAAAAAAAT? What."

Exactly like that. This continued through the process of unlocking my car, sitting down, turning the key, and starting driving. I think I realized I was doing it aloud about five minutes into the drive. I still have no idea if I was saying this audibly while I was still in the theater. If I was, I like to think that the people there understood and forgave me.

Suffice to say, I found the ending of Gone Girl a little bit perplexing. Awesome, to be sure, but kind of strange. Good strange. I really liked it. I just sort of...you ever come out of a movie feeling vaguely like you've been hit over the head with a steel pipe and you have a rather pleasant concussion? Like that. Exactly like that.

Now, admittedly, I haven't read the original novel by Gillian Flynn. I'll be honest and say that I didn't read it in part because it was (is) super popular. I rarely read realistic fiction to begin with, and a novel about a nice white lady who disappears and whose husband is suspected of murdering her sounded precisely not up my alley. Also I might have kept getting it confused with Wild, which I am now aware is totally different, and the real life disappearance of Laci Peterson. I'm not good at remembering this kind of stuff.

Anyway, I hadn't read the book, so everything in the movie came as a complete shock to me, and I mean that in the best possible way. As I'm sure you've realized, I watch a lot of movies, and I have my Master's degree in understanding them. It's pretty rare for a story to take me by surprise these days. And I don't mind that. I take pride in guessing the endings or twists of books. It's fun.

But it's more fun when someone really does manage to get me. There's this sense that I'm in expert hands. I like it. I feel safe. Or rather, pleasantly unsafe. If that's a thing.

That's about all I can say about this film without starting to give away the major spoilers. For those of you out there who, like me, didn't read the book and have no idea what you're getting into, I'll just say that, yes, it does feel like your average "woman in peril" movie, but only for the first half. The second half is pure psychological thriller/black comedy, and it's amazing. So stick with it.

For those of you who've either seen the movie, don't care about spoilers, or have read the book, meet me after the page break.




So, I hate "woman in peril" movies. They're a big pet peeve of mine, if a film genre can be considered a pet peeve. I really hate the idea of a whole form of storytelling that revolves around the outdated concept of feminine weakness and danger. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy a good movie about a female protagonist in tough situations. That's a different matter. What I mean is that I really don't like movies that are about sweet, nice women whose terrible husbands/boyfriends/fathers are abusive and bad and mean and they're in danger until some nice man can come along and save them. I hate those movies.

Gone Girl takes those movies and rips them to shreds, then uses the same cliches and tropes from those films to create a moving and surprising narrative that completely subverts the genre expectations.

I'm in love.

The first half of the movie really isn't worth talking about in any real critical sense. Not that it's not good - it serves a clear and necessary purpose - but because it's not nearly as interesting as the midpoint on. Still, let's get this clear. The first half of the film establishes this movie as existing within the woman in peril framework. It sets the stage. 

Amy Elliot Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is a sweet, gentle, lovely woman. She's beautiful, blonde, Ivy League educated, polite, and missing. On the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappeared while setting up a cute scavenger hunt for her husband, as per their tradition.

Her husband, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), is a schlubby, spineless, brooding beta male, who makes it clear from his first line that he really doesn't like his wife. He has just enough heft to look really threatening if he wants to, his marriage is fraught with money troubles, and he's cheating on his wife with a college student. 

Nick Dunne looks super guilty, and only continues to look moreso throughout the first half. From smiling during a press conference about his wife's disappearance to hiding evidence to the voiceover narration from Amy's diary, it's clear that Amy Dunne was a nice sweet lady whose terrible brute of a husband might have done her in.

That is, of course, until Nick manages to put the pieces together and the audience realizes that not only is Amy not dead, she's just messing with all of us. Literally. She faked the whole thing, the crime scene, the disappearance, the blood on the floor, to make Nick look guilty and to make him suffer for what she considers her "murder". That, of course, being the horrific sin of asking her to move to Missouri and to love him unconditionally. Also the cheating on her thing, but that seems mostly an afterthought.

What makes this transition work isn't just that it's shocking, which it is, but also that it throws into question all of the facts we've previously been accepting as rote. The voiceover from her diary? Mostly lies that she wrote in order to implicate Nick. The clues he's been hiding? A twisted game she was playing with him all along. The money troubles? Created by Amy in order to give Nick a motive. Heck, the pregnancy that made her incredibly sympathetic and even more archetypal? Faked, with the unwitting help of a pregnant door neighbor and her urine sample.

In other words, all of the woman in peril tropes that we'd been casually checking off on the list were actually machinations of the woman in question. Amy Dunne isn't in peril. She's completely in control of her situation, and also a freaking psychopath.

As the movie goes on, and devolves into a terrifying cat and mouse game where both Nick and Amy are trying to take the other down from a distance and without revealing what they're doing to outsiders, the use of tropes to dismantle the narrative becomes even more skillful. At one point, Amy, having been robbed of her cash reserves, calls an old boyfriend for help.

It's a scene you've watched in dozens of these movies (usually based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, right?), where the woman tearfully tells this handsome rescue stud about her abuse and how horrible it was, and he tells her that she's safe now. Only, instead of being relieved, you're terrified as an audience. Not for the woman, but because of her. She is the single most threatening person in the film. You have no idea what she's going to do next.

By the time the movie has dragged you, screaming, to its conclusion and the existential horror has fully gripped your numb body, the trope has been very successfully subverted. Where in your usual woman in peril movie a final shot of the lead actress, blonde and beautiful, laying her head on her husband's chest and gazing dreamily up into his eyes would evoke calm, because she's finally found the right guy, in this movie, it's horrifying. That shot, with Amy's big eyes gazing up at Nick, is the single most frightening moment in the film. Because you have no idea what is going on in her head. And you really don't want to.

So, yeah. This movie is an alarmingly successful destruction of the trope. But it's also, impressively, not a sexist screed against women. It would have been easy for the film to fall into that trap, but it doesn't. Yes, Amy is a man-eating harpy who needs to be stopped, but that's not because she's a woman, it's because she's crazy. Fortunately, there are a lot of other women in the movie. Amy doesn't stand in for all of woman-kind, she's just a person.

I mean, you've got all of these different representations of femininity. From Nick's awesome sister Margo (Carrie Coon), to the lead detective on the case (Kim Dickens), to Amy's overbearing and aristocratic mother (Lisa Banes), to Nick's college age girlfriend (Emily Ratajkowski), to the Nancy Grace style newswoman committed to taking Nick down (Missi Pyle), to the nosey pregnant neighbor that Amy "befriended" (Casey Wilson), to the talk show host who finally gives Nick a chance (Sela Ward), to the girl who'll sympathize with you and steal your money (Lola Kirke). 

All of these women are complex, interesting, and completely different from each other. So Amy doesn't feel like a statement about the nature of women, she just feels like a statement on the nature of one woman in particular. One very scary, very messed up woman.

See, the real reason I hate woman in peril movies isn't so much that the women are kind of wussy or that they need to be rescued, or even that I find the tropes kind of grating. No, the real reason is that when I watch those movies, the women in them never feel like people to me. Like, they're so pure and so innocent and so good, they clearly cannot be human.

And it's important to remember that putting someone on a pedestal is another form of dehumanization. It's got a better face on it, but it's still degradation. When you idolize someone or when you demonize them, in both cases you are denying that they are human, like you. You are making them other. I hate woman in peril movies because they're not about human beings. They're about beautiful mirages that need to be saved. And that's just not healthy.

By making Amy the acting agent in her own disappearance, by making her almost preternaturally good at controlling her circumstances, the movie does more than make a really good thriller. It shows that women are capable of evil too. In most woman in peril movies, the women are uncomplicatedly good. Amy Dunne isn't. She's kind of basically the devil, but it's a compelling evil. She shows how much we need to see everyone, for better or worse, as human.

I have so much I could keep saying about this movie, but I really need to wrap it up. A few final points: Tyler Perry is great and hilarious in his role as Nick's defense attorney, and I hope he does more roles like this in the future. Neil Patrick Harris is alarming and sad as a jilted boyfriend vying to win back the girl of his dreams. Also, Patrick Fugit is surprisingly good as a dubious detective, but I spent most of the movie marveling at how much he looks like Jerry O'Connell now. It's weird, right? 

All of the actors are doing basically the best performances of their careers, and the direction and writing are freaking awesome. David Fincher as usual makes the film look and feel as creepy as it should, and Gillian Flynn seems to be the rare novelist who can write a decent screenplay. So props to her. 

I'm sure I'll write more about this movie at some point. It's that kind of film. But for now, I think this is what I've got. Gone Girl really, really surprised me. It deconstructed a genre I've always hated and explained to me exactly why the genre is problematic. And it left me standing in a parking lot saying, "What?"

What's not to love?


Pilot Season: How to Get Away With Murder (Anti-Heroines FTW)

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Look, we all know it's true. Television - good, buzzy, high quality television - is populated almost entirely by male anti-heroes, usually white and middle-class, revolting against the strictures placed on them by their jobs, their families, and their wives. We've got Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White, Jax Teller, Vic Mackey, and all their clones telling us how incredibly hard it is to be a middle-aged, middle-class man in America. Those are the stories we hold up as good television. The ones we trot out when we want to argue about how television is clearly a storytelling medium that can rival movies or novels any day. We talk about all these white dudes.

So trust me when I say that any change from this pattern is deeply welcome. But if Carrie on Homeland, Patty on Damages, and Nancy on Weeds were breaths of fresh air, Annaliese Keating on How to Get Away With Murder is a freaking hurricane.

I'd heard that How to Get Away With Murder was going to be good as far back as last June, when a friend who actually works in TV tipped me off to it. But I was skeptical. For all that they're pretty cool shows, I never managed to get into Grey's Anatomy or Scandal - the late night soap a la Shonda Rhimes just never really did it for me. Until now, that is. Because let's get one thing clear before we go any further: I love How to Get Away With Murder. I'm in. I'm obsessed. I set it to a season pass on my DVR. I might do recaps. That's how in I am.

The show follows the exploits of a class of first year law students taking Criminal Law 101 under the impressive and frightening Professor Keating. As she explains, this class isn't about theory or the nuances of law. It is, simply, "How to get away with murder." And that's how she likes it.

The five main students are a pleasantly diverse, predictably attractive, and fiercely intelligent bunch. Each of them gets their own introduction in the pilot episode, introducing their basic character traits, though there really isn't enough time to go deep on any of them. 

Suffice to say that all of them are very interesting, and the group as a whole (consisting of a Hispanic woman, an African-American woman, a gay white man, an African-American man, and the token white guy) is full of tension and compelling interpersonal relationships. I mean, this being a drama about law school most of those relationships revolve around rivalry and hatred, but it's great material for a show.

Out of all of those characters, Wes Gibbins is probably the closest thing to a protagonist that the show has - he's the aforementioned African-American man, played by Harry Potter alum Alfred Enoch. Alfred Enoch played Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter movies, and is a contender for "most blessed by the puberty fairy". He's attractive, is what I'm saying, and he does a heck of a good American accent.

His character, Wes Gibbins, is our road into the world of the show. Wes is a latecomer to the prestigious Middleton University, a guy who only showed up two days before class started because prior to that he was on the wait-list. He's a hard worker, blissfully naive, and has a raging savior complex that rears its head in the very first episode. He's nice, like Elle Woods trying to get through Harvard Law, but he's also got this tiny tinge of evil in him that makes you just know that he's the one to watch. Also he might not be so pure and innocent as he seems. I like that in a protagonist.

But even if Wes is technically the protagonist, he's by no means the main character. That honor goes to Annaliese Keating, the aforementioned law professor played by Viola Davis. I hesitate to call her the protagonist, because her emotional journey isn't really the point of the show, but she is absolutely the main character. The whole show revolves around her. Heck, the whole school revolves around her. 

Keating is set up as the uber-lawyer. A defense attorney so good at her job that most people think she's secretly evil. A professor who has absolutely no qualms with making her students hate her. A married woman who is more than willing to sleep with a cop in order to invalidate his testimony in a murder trial.

She is not a good woman. She's an antihero. It's wonderful.

And the show isn't afraid to make her unlikable. It's not trying to play it safe or give us an edge where she just might be a good person after all, and she's only doing all of this because she's really misunderstood. No. No, she's a terrible human being. That's kind of the point. Her being a terrible human being doesn't make her a boring or badly written character, it just makes her a terrible human being. That's it. 

There seems to be some sort of a mental block, culturally speaking, preventing us from wanting to see female characters who just honest to goodness aren't very nice. I mean, there are lots of stories about shrews and whores and vixens and bitches and all kinds of other unflattering portrayals of women, lots of women who are the villain, the bad guy, the witch. But it's still relatively rare to see a depiction in our culture of a woman who is, well, bad, and not punished for it.

Annaliese Keating lies, cheats on her husband, defends clients she flat out knows are guilty, discredits witnesses just to win the case, and literally calls her class "how to get away with murder". But she isn't the bad guy. She's allowed to be this person, and she isn't vilified for it. Villainous, sure, but not vilified. I feel like that's progress.

Also, she's allowed to be sexy. I mean, it would feel disingenuous if she weren't as Viola Davis is a freaking gorgeous woman, but it's still worth noting that this show allows its middle-aged African-American female main character be portrayed as a desirable and freaking hot woman. That also feels like progress.

Plus there's all of the really interesting questions that come up when you think about her age, race, and probable backstory. Like I talked about with Suits'Jessica Pearson (who would totally be friends with Ms. Keating), Annaliese Keating is a much more interesting character as a black woman than she would be as a white woman or a black man. Because we can infer from her age that she had to start going to law school thirty years ago or so, which means that it was back when that was still a surprising thing for women to do, and right on the tails of the Civil Rights movement and second wave feminism. She had to go to school in probably less than ideal circumstances, and work her way up in a very male-dominated, very white field. Now she's at the top. Hell yes she's cutthroat and terrifying. She has to be.

Actually, it's worth noting that this show is very intentionally diverse, and seems committed to dealing with issues of race and sex and class division without getting preachy, but also without letting anyone slide. In fact, the thesis on the show seems to be, "No matter who we are, no matter what our backgrounds, we are all capable of terrible things." Not super chipper, sure, but definitely interesting.

It's interesting because it's very different from the usual discussions of race and sex in our culture. We have a tendency to go two different (bad) ways. Either there's the racist view that black people and women and gays and Hispanic people (etc) are all bad and inherently less than human, or there's the liberal view that black people and women and gays and Hispanic people (etc) have all been treated badly by the system and are complete innocents who must be cared for. Neither of these options are good. Both of them dehumanize minorities by assuming that they can be either good or bad but not both.

Spoiler alert, people are both. Human beings are both good and bad, and while the circumstances of your race and gender and sexual orientation will have a big impact on your circumstances, underneath all of that, people are still people. And that means we are both good and bad. To deny that is to dehumanize us. Annaliese isn't a victim or a saint or a whore or a mother just trying to do her best. She's a person, and that really matters.

I should point out that the show does have a plot too. I'm not recapping it here because it's incredibly intense and complicated, and I still haven't decided whether or not to recap the show formally yet. But it does have a plot. And, predictably, given the show's title, that plot deals with murder. I mean, there's an episodic arc where each episode Annaliese and her teams of students (the ones I listed above) as well as her associates Bonnie (Liza Weil, aka Paris from Gilmore Girls) and Frank (Charlie Weber) defend murderers and try to get them the "right verdict".

But there's also a season plot, and that seems to revolve around two different murders: that of a Middleton college student whose body was found in a sorority's water tank (ew) and a flash forward to our heroic law students covering up the murder of Professor Keating's husband, Sam. Presumably both of these murders are related. I look forward to finding out how.

If I've gotten anything across here, though, I hope that it's that this is a good show and you should watch it. Not just because we should always support well-written, diverse television (even though that is totally true), but also because it's fun. It's soapy, pulpy fun. What more do you need?

Yeah, I don't know either, dude.

Think of the Children! Tuesday: Amelia Bedelia and Neuroatypicality

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Man. It's been a while since I got around to making a kids' media post. For a minute there I thought that I might have said all of the things about kids' media that I had to say. But I was wrong! Of course I was wrong! I genuinely have trouble imagining a world in which there are not more things to say!

So today I want to talk about the Amelia Bedelia books, and how they went from a series that helped early readers but kind of just recycled the same tired joke, to a series that is still all about helping early readers, but seems to be intentionally addressing neuroatypicality. And that's a pretty cool transition.

The books as I remember them from my childhood were fine, but nothing super memorable. Written by Peggy Parish between 1963 and 1988, the books featured a lead character, Amelia Bedelia, who was endlessly literal. If asked to dust the living room, she'd find some dust and sprinkle it everywhere. If asked to draw the curtains, she'd sketch out a lovely still life of them and present it to her bosses. When asked to create baby food, she'd just make tiny versions of normal food. 

Her one saving grace as an employee (she was a housekeeper, complete with a cute little uniform) was that she was an amazing cook. So she miraculously never got fired, despite being almost dangerously incompetent.

In the original books, the implication in this is that Amelia Bedelia comes from a family of people who take everything literally. They talk about "undusting" the furniture, and make sure to elaborate on every request in order to avoid misunderstandings. Eventually her employers, the Rogers, catch on and help her with this, and the whole thing is silly, but at about the right level for a kid just learning to read. It's fun, none of the words are too challenging, and you kind of want to keep reading so you find out what she does next. What more do you need?

After Peggy Parish's death in 1988, however, the series was taken over by her nephew, Herman Parish. He started writing in 1995, and from then until 2009 he wrote pretty much the same usual stories. In 2009, though, he decided to start writing more traditional children's books about Amelia Bedelia as a little girl, and those are the books I want to talk about today.

See, the premise is still basically the same. Amelia Bedelia (now about six or seven years old) is an incredibly literal child who will misunderstand pretty much any direct instruction unless it is sufficiently explained to her. But the twist here is that it's not presented as a frustrating inconvenience to her coworkers, nor is it really explained as just "because her family is weird." It's a part of who Amelia Bedelia is, and the people in her life, her teachers and fellow students, accept that.

In other words, the original Amelia Bedelia character was kind of comically terrible at everything, but the new Amelia Bedelia really isn't. It's much more clear that Amelia Bedelia's literalism is a big part of who she is and not a result of intentional mishearing or not being a native speaker of English (as some people theorized). No, the most common interpretation of her character is actually that she's probably on the autistic spectrum. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

Now, I'm not an expert on autism by any means. I really know very little about it. But I do know (having had several students with high functioning Aspergers and having nannied a boy with rather low functioning autism) that literalism is a big part of how autism usually presents. So Amelia Bedelia rather good-naturedly misunderstanding everything because she takes it literally seems like a rather convincing portrayal of a kid on the autistic spectrum. If you want a better explanation of why she's probably on the autistic spectrum check it out here.

The point I'm trying to make isn't so much proving that Amelia Bedelia is autistic, that's a matter of interpretation. I'd more just like to point out that whatever Amelia Bedelia's deal is, the books treat her in an incredibly compassionate and loving way, especially the ones where she's a little kid.


Like, in Amelia Bedelia's First Day of School, Amelia comes into school that first day, and her teacher tries to give her a nametag. Amelia thinks that her teacher wants to play tag, and immediately takes off running through the classroom. As a teacher, I would probably be super annoyed by this, but instead her teacher smiles and explains her mistake. Later in the day, Amelia is asked if she wants to jump rope, so she puts a rope down on the ground and jumps over it. The girls who wanted to play with her don't make fun of her or even correct her. They just start jumping over the rope too because it seems like fun.

That's what I want to get at. No one in these books ever reacts to Amelia by telling her that what she's doing is wrong, even when it inconveniences them. When it's no big deal, they go along with it, supporting her. When it's something that needs to be corrected, the person always explains themself and helps Amelia figure it out.

In other words, these books aren't about teaching kids on the autistic spectrum how to behave, they're about teaching everyone else how to properly interact with someone whose got a different perspective on the world. And that's freaking wonderful.

Not only that, but the Amelia Bedelia books, particularly the ones where she's a little girl, give neuroatypical children a book hero of their own to look up to. Amelia Bedelia isn't ostracized or criticized in these books, she's the main character and everyone likes her. She has tons of friends, and no one minds that she's a little strange sometimes or gets confused. Everyone just smiles and accepts her. I can only imagine how much a book like this can impact a little kid who feels different and like no one understands.

And even when the thing that Amelia Bedelia has done actually impacts other people negatively, like in Amelia Bedelia's First Field Trip when she's asked to toss the salad and she manages to toss the whole thing before her teacher can lovingly intervene, no one gets mad at Amelia for ruining their lunch. No one even comments on it. Instead, her teacher takes responsibility and everyone works together to make a new salad.

What this says is that the onus isn't on Amelia to be better at understanding, but that the onus is on everyone else to work harder to be understood. And that's a really important statement. It gets away from the idea that you have to overcome your differences, and suggests that we should all be working to meet people where they're at instead of insisting they come to us.

I've written before about how important I think it is for little kids to read books about children who are other races and nationalities and genders than they are. Well, the same thing goes for this. It's important for kids who are neurotypical to read about children who aren't. Stories and books are a huge part of how human beings develop empathy, and creating an environment where neurotypical kids can look at a literary character and see a totally different perspective on life is really valuable. 

More than that, though, the Amelia Bedelia books give those kids a framework for when they actually meet another child who is neuroatypical. If they've learned anything from the books, those kids would probably actually react really well, reacting with understanding and good humor to any misunderstandings and trying to make sure everyone always feels included.

Isn't that what we want our kids to grow up like? 

This is, of course, still iconic.

Returning Shows: Sleepy Hollow (Still Bonkers, Thank Goodness)

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This show is absolutely bananas. I can think of no other way to explain it. Last night my roommate walked into the room while I was watching the latest episode (third episode of season two), and I made a vague effort to catch her up on what she'd missed since she stopped keeping up with it in season one. 

That conversation featured such gems as "Yeah, so his son is an old man and also the Horseman of War," and "Irving is in a mental hospital now because he tried to tell the truth about demons possessing his daughter and using it to blackmail him and everyone thinks he's crazy," and "Katrina's out of Purgatory but now she's the Headless Horseman's prisoner and he's trying to date her." And the thing is, that wasn't even half of what had happened.

It's a really weird show. But when we get down to it, isn't that Sleepy Hollow's main selling point? It's so intentionally and blissfully bizarre, like a bunch of studio executives played mad libs to come up with their flagship series, and it just really really works. It's a network dramedy about the Biblical apocalypse where one of the main characters is a black former foster kid whose family has a history of mental instability, and the other one is a Revolutionary War soldier risen from the dead. And it works.

Normally this is the part of the review where I'd write a vague summary of the first couple episodes of the season and give my opinion on them and the probable season arc, but the thing is, if you're going to watch Sleepy Hollow, I don't want to spoil it for you. And if you're not, then you're really not going to care anyways. This isn't a show particularly well suited to recaps or even really analysis. It's intentionally racially diverse, intentionally has a lot of really compelling female characters with depth, and intentionally the weirdest freaking thing you've ever seen. It's hard to analyze that, honestly.

Still, there are a few things about the new season that I feel are worth mentioning. Like I said above, there have been a lot of surprising developments since last season. The season finale left Abbie (Nicole Beharie) stranded in Purgatory, Ichabod (Tom Mison) bound up and buried alive in his son's old grave, and Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood) presumed dead. 

Captain Frank Irving (Orlando Jones) had taken the rap for things his daughter did while possessed by a demon and was relieved of his command, while the kindly old sineater, Henry Parrish (John Noble) was revealed to be both Ichabod and Katrina's son and the Horseman of War. Also Katrina (Katia Winter) was finally let out of Purgatory, only to immediately be kidnapped by the Headless Horseman who also happened to be her ex-fiancee.

It was a really tense nine months waiting for the show to come back. Just saying.

Now, in the second season, Abbie and Ichabod are both safely back in the land of the living, though I won't say how, and Jenny actually never died in the first place. Katrina is still with the HH, sure, but she's there mostly as a spy and dissenter, so it seems she finally has some agency in her story. And while Frank Irving is still taking the blame for a bunch of crimes he didn't commit, at least he's no longer in prison, having been committed to the local psychiatric hospital after deciding to tell prosecutors the truth.

All that being said, the biggest narrative impact so far this season has come from Irving's removal and the introduction of a new character, Sheriff Leena Reyes (Sakina Jaffrey). Reyes is just as no-nonsense as Irving was at the beginning, with the big difference that she hasn't yet fallen into the world of the weird and wacky. (Give her time.) She's a little terrified at how badly the department was being run under Irving's watch, with an undocumented "history professor" having full access to police files, an escaped mental patient hanging out in the armory, and all those decapitations.

Reyes puts her foot down and forces our heroes to go through a lot of hoops that they're not used to. While it's easy to hate her, narratively she's very useful. She creates a new character dynamic, spices up the more procedural episodes, and has a little layer of mystery around her as we discover that she knew Abbie and Jenny's mom. Yay! Plus, she's a woman of color who comes in as a solid authority figure and seems to be a well-rounded, non-stereotypical character.

Overall the gender and racial representation on the show remains strong. Last season saw a lot of character attrition, with Morales and Andy both being men of color who were written out. But the show seems committed to keeping this from becoming white night - the two major new characters aside from Reyes are admittedly both white men, but they're the bad guys. Sleepy Hollow is a diverse place, and that's awesome.

Plus, the show hasn't forgotten what made us love it. Partially it's the bizarre end of the world mixed with Revolutionary War history thing, and partially it's the never-ending saga of Ichabod Crane versus the modern world. This season has featured Ichabod railing against the tyrannies of the banking system (he really hates credit cards), how much he hates Ben Franklin and is annoyed that he's been so culturally significant, and the hilarious revelation that Ichabod Crane watches Glee

But the real pull of this show, at least to my mind, is the relationships. While other series, like Once Upon a Time, can really pull in mythologies and character relationships, and have a huge sprawling family drama tree, Sleepy Hollow keeps it relatively simple even when the actual relationships are very complex. Like, Abbie and Jenny both play key rolls in the coming apocalypse, but they're also two relatively young women figuring out who they are to each other now.

Ichabod and Katrina were deeply in love, but a lot has happened since then, and now they're still separated, and now they have a son who's much older than either of them. It should be ridiculous to watch them all trying to suss out their family dynamic, but instead it's heartbreaking. You feel their sadness at seeing what has become of their son, and you mourn with them. You hope Henry can be saved. 

When it looks like Frank Irving might sway to the side of badness, you're immediately on the edge of your seat. It matters that he get a chance to talk to Ichabod and Abbie, because it matters that all of these people stay friends and stay on the same side and fight evil together. No one is the loose wheel that you kind of forget is there. Everyone is vitally important to the story, and that's wonderful.

In this most recent episode, at the very end as Ichabod and Abbie are having their victory drinks at a bar (beer for her, white wine for him), Ichabod reminds us all what the show's really about. It's about trust. It's about the very human need to know that the people around you love and trust you. For all that this is a show about the apocalypse and time travel and other dimensions and demons, it's also really a show about how important it is to love and trust the people around you.

Also it's just positively bonkers fun. To quote Welcome to Night Vale, "Weird at last, weird at last. God Almighty, weird at last." This is a show where the demons speak German, where Ben Franklin was a nudist and tried to dispose of profane artifacts by getting them struck by lightning, where the headless horseman's head is a bargaining chip, and where our heroes hug it out every single episode. It's an insane show, and we wouldn't have it any other way.


Pilot Season: Mulaney (Standup Comedy Makes Bad Sitcoms)

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About six months ago, while scanning randomly through Netflix on a quest to watch something funny and enjoyable that I wouldn't have to think about too hard, I ran into John Mulaney's standup special, New in Town. I loved it. I laughed so hard I had a mild coughing attack (though not as hard as I laughed at Patton Oswald this one time that...I should not finish that story). It was great. When I put two and two together, I realized that this was the same John Mulaney whose show had just been picked up by FOX, and I was very happy.

I mean, super talented standup comedian, network sitcom, cast that included both Elliott Gould and Nasim Pedrad, what could go wrong?

Everything. Everything could go wrong. Mulaney, the show, is horrible and bad and just almost painfully cliched. Please do not watch it. We need its ratings to be low enough for a mercy killing so that John Mulaney can go back to doing standup before his reputation is permanently damaged. Just. It was so bad. So. Bad.

But this actually highlighted another problem, as I thought about it. Aside from Seinfeld, which is a solid show, if not quite as ridiculously amazing as people keep saying it was, I really can't think of any sitcoms based on a standup comedian that have worked. A few years ago we saw Whitney, which was painfully bad. Sure, Roseanne and King of Queens and Home Improvement were all based around a standup comedian, but when they wrote the show, they wrote it to be slightly different from said comedian's act. The comedians weren't playing themselves. In Mulaney, John Mulaney is playing himself. Same name, same personality, same character.

And, worst of all, exact same stories. For starters, the fictional John Mulaney, like the real John Mulaney, is a standup comedian. All of his friends and roommates are standup comedians. About half of the plot of the pilot episode comes directly from New in Town. And I don't just mean that he has some storylines based on jokes from that special, I mean that he literally recites the jokes from the special word for word. There aren't actual plotlines, it's just him doing standup comedy while pretending to have a real conversation with someone.

Which, as I hope you all have gathered, really doesn't work. It's not funny. While his story about that time he accidentally got his prostate checked is amazingly hilarious in the comedy special, it's dumb and gratuitous in a sitcom. In a sitcom, it's weird as hell, because there's no setup. It's not well written, it's just John Mulaney and another actor pretending to act out a story with Mulaney reciting the same jokes from the standup bit, out loud as though the doctor can't hear. 

It's so bad.

The "plot" of the pilot episode nominally followed rising standup comedian John Mulaney as he got his first big comedy job: writing jokes for aged and failing comedy legend, Lou (Martin Short). Lou is insulting and mean and horrible, and John quickly regrets getting a job working for him. It is unclear whether or not the job is paid, but it's not living up to his expectations of getting his work out there and improving his career.

To incentivize John to keep writing jokes and showing up for work (where he mostly has to sit around and listen to Lou talk about the good old days, which is pretty realistic and yes I have had that job), Lou promises to let John open for him at a charity walk to end breast cancer. Only when it comes to that day, all John gets to say is that Lou is canceling his appearance, sorry everyone, bye. John is very upset and miserable, until he gets a chance to talk to his aging hippie neighbor, Oscar (Elliott Gould), who tells him that he should wait long enough to see if there's something in it for him in this job.

And, of course, there is. While Lou is still a terrible horrible boss, he is going to use John's jokes in a piece he does on television, thus giving John some exposure and also money, and John decides that this is enough and he will stick it out. Yay, happy ending, the end.

The thing is, that's not a very good, interesting, or inventive plot. If the best you can do for your pilot episode is make twenty minutes about a guy sitting around talking, then that's not a good sign. Worse, all of the minor storylines are absolutely terrible and insulting.

Like, John's two best friends and roommates, Jane (Nasim Pedrad) and Motif (Seaton Smith) are just horrible stereotypes. Jane is a psychotic stalker obsessed with her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. She spends the whole episode stalking him, burning his things, reading his emails because she knows his email password, and generally being an MRA's idea of how women work. Motif, meanwhile, is a fellow standup comedian, who makes jokes about being a "problem bitch", and generally is obsessed with promoting himself and selling merch and being a big sellout who talks about "bitches". Because he's black. Omg, so edgy.

But the biggest problem with the show remains how it doesn't feel like a show. It doesn't feel like there's any story here or any interesting point of view on the world. It just feels like some studio executive watched New in Town, and decided, "Yes, I would like to see the prostate scene acted out for me. And maybe a couple of others." But the actual good material in there, the really interesting stuff John Mulaney talks about in his standup, the stuff that really has the potential to be compelling artistically and comedically, gets ignored. Because it actually is edgy.

The best part of New in Town isn't the prostate joke, nor is it his joke about finding an abandoned wheelchair, or even his bit about growing up with two lawyers for parents. It's when he talks about being an alcoholic, and all the weird crap he got up to. It's funny because the stuff he did really was ridiculous, but it's also a little bit deeper. We're hearing a man talk about a time in his life when he did things he is genuinely ashamed of now. 

John Mulaney is a recovering alcoholic. He talks about going to parties with people his age (late twenties, early thirties) and how no one knows what to offer him to drink. He talks about the stuff he doesn't actually remember doing but heard about later. He talks about how awkward it is to be in his late twenties and have that kind of past, when he looks like the kind of person who just "sat in a room eating saltines" for twenty years.

Mulaney doesn't work because it has absolutely no emotional depth. It's all surface and laugh track. If it were to work, it would have to actually deal with stuff. Sitcoms don't avoid emotions, they delve into them. Good ones do, at least. I mean, the reason we all love the first few seasons of How I Met Your Mother isn't because they avoided emotional confrontations and realizing that the main character had some issues. They didn't. Those seasons are full of deep dramatic, genuinely moving things happening. Same thing with Friends. They work because they're rooted in the genuine flaws and problems of the characters.

So yeah. Save John Mulaney from this show. Or at the very least, let the show become a reflection of what's really worth hearing in his standup. Because I can watch a dozen specials about funny guys with interesting reflections about New York City. But there's only one John Mulaney who became an alcoholic at like fifteen and barely remembers high school. There's only one John Mulaney who can tell me about how hard it is to be a standup comic at bars and comedy clubs, making people laugh and drink and knowing he can't join in. That's emotionally affecting. And I guarantee that if the show figures out how to tap into some deep emotion, it'll actually manage to be funny.

But seriously, until that happens, don't watch this show. It's terrible.

Dear Nasim Pedrad: You deserve better. Love, me.

Returning Shows: Supernatural (Wheezing Towards Bethlehem)

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So this is a thing that happened.
Oh man. So, as some of you may remember, Supernatural really used to be my favorite show. It feels weird to type that now, but it's the truth. Way back in 2008 I watched the first three seasons in about two weeks while I pretended I was working on my summer research project (my advisor probably wasn't very convinced), and I fell in love. Sure, it was terrible at retaining female characters and characters of color. And sure, the first two seasons were pretty rough. But it had potential! The arc plot kept compounding on itself and revealing new depths to the mythos and amazing new character development for the boys every season.

It was a train that could only go up.

I watched season four in real time, along with all of my housemates. By season five I'd moved to California along with my best friend, and we watched the apocalypse arc on my couch in Sherman Oaks, biting our nails and shushing each other as Sam and Dean and Cas all sacrificed and bled and saved the world. At the end of season five, I cried like a little baby.

And then the show just kept going. Which was fine. I liked it well enough. Season six was okay, not great, but I figured I could give them a little leeway. It wasn't actively bad, and there were a lot of interesting one off episodes. Season seven was fun, if you like jokes about male genitalia and seeing your favorite characters die for realsies this time. Season eight was interesting. Season nine...well, by then watching Supernatural had stopped being something I did on purpose and become something I did because I might as well do it.

Like having dinner with a racist grandparent or eating a potato chip because it's the only one left in the bag and it might feel lonely otherwise, but it's kind of stale and you're not hungry, watching Supernatural last season didn't really do anything for me. Occasionally it annoyed me, sometimes it made me giggle, but on the whole it was just kind of there. Which is awful.

Still, we're going into the tenth season now, and we've been promised, yet again, that this is absolutely totally definitely the final season. We'll see how that goes. At this point, though, it's been over half a decade since I started really seriously watching, and I figure that giving up now would be like letting the bad guys win (even if the bad guys in this case are the show's writers). I refuse to do that. Supernatural and I will limp along together, all the way to the end.

When I say limping, I really do mean limping. The season opener, while better than what I was expecting based on last season, was still pretty crappy. Last season we left off with the angels back in Heaven, Castiel near death because of a depleted grace, and Dean officially now a demon, thanks to the Mark of Cain. Sam was disconsolate over Dean's death, all major female characters were either dead or in another realm, and the only interesting person left was Crowley. Oh Crowley.

So, this season starts six months later, with Crowley and Dean the Demon on a bender, hitting up karaoke bars, trying to win at foosball, screwing waitresses, and generally being demons at and around stuff. It's a real vacation of bros. Meanwhile, Sam is still freaking the crap out and trying to track them down. Cas would like to help, but he's got some bigger problems, what with being almost dead.

In the first episode, Sam tries to track down Dean and Crowley and gets a lead when he finds security footage of Dean viciously killing someone with the First Blade in a convenience store. Cas offers to help, but then gets his own quest: Joining Hannah to track down some renegade angels and drag them back to Heaven because we absolutely can't let angels live happily on Earth. Nope.

Dean and Crowley continue their carousing, but Crowley begins to imply that he actually helped Dean become a demon for a real purpose. So that they could return to Hell and rule over it in the way that Crowley has always wanted. After all, with Abbadon dead, and most of her supporters being murdered by Dean, there's very little to stand in their way.

Sam does not manage to catch up to Dean and Crowley, though he does meet up with a "friend" of Dean's. Said friend knocks him unconscious, ties him up in a barn, and calls Dean to taunt him about the impending death of his brother, you know, the one that Dean will do literally anything to save. Only this time, after Dean has had an entire episode to think about what it means to be a demon and who he really is, man, he decides not to save Sam. Weird. Instead, Dean weighs the option of actually helping Crowley take over Hell. I mean, he is a demon. Isn't this what he's meant for?

Also Cas and Hannah find the renegade angels, make nice with them, fight them, and then have a deep and meaningful conversation about whether or not some angels deserve freedom at the cost of having pure consensus in the host. It's interesting, but after two seasons straight of pure angelic focus, I'm about done with the Heaven storylines. And while Hannah is funny when she's around Cas, she's not a sufficiently compelling character to pull me into the plot, not like Naomi was back in season eight.

It's not that this episode wasn't funny. There were lots of great jokes. From the convenience store clerk referring to Dean as "porn guy" when interviewed by the police to Dean's horrific attempts at karaoke to Hannah getting carsick from Cas' awful driving - there was a lot of comedy going on. The problem with this episode is that it all felt, well, soulless. Like the whole cast and crew and writers were just going through the motions of making a Supernatural episode, and that they all knew it was kind of crap, but at this point, who cares?

And that's a terrible thing to accuse them of, I know, but that's the vibe this episode gives off. While last season I was incensed at the continued sexism and racism and homophobia of the show, this season I'm just pretty much over it. In general. And that really sucks.

But. I refuse to give up all hope. There are still a couple of interesting ways that this season could go, dramatically speaking. While the idea of Dean as a demon is kind of funny when you think of him just basically being his regular self but without a filter, the dramatic meat of the show would come if they decided to really delve into Dean's past. This isn't the first time he's been a demon, after all, and he was a master torturer in Hell for a decade. I want to see real demon First Knight of Hell Dean. I want to see Dean being the monster that monsters fear. And I love the idea of him being horrible and evil and gross and the most effective hunter you can imagine.

I would also love it if the show were to really explore Sam's disconnect with Dean. If his brother was the only thing keeping Sam hunting and Dean is now something that needs to be hunted, then what is Sam still doing there? Is his mission to take Dean out and then that's it for him? Or is this going to be the push Sam needs to go back and finish the ritual to seal the gates of Hell once and for all?

Furthermore, what about the gates of Heaven? It seems a bit like the show is setting up a world where all of the angels are actually back up in Heaven, and if that happens, it would make most sense for the gates to close. Thematically it also works really well, because if we remember the intense "profound bond" that Dean and Cas share, it's almost poetically depressing if they end up eternally shut away from each other.

Actually that's my ideal ending. I want the show to end with Cas shut up in Heaven, the gates forever sealed, and Dean as King of Hell, permanently sealed in as well. Then there's Sam, left alone on Earth, the world finally saved but at the cost of the only family he had left. Sam then goes on to live a normal life, and it's super freaking sad and amazing.

I'm really not kidding. That is my ideal ending at this point.

Look, I loved Supernatural a lot. I still do, at least the early seasons. I still think that those first five seasons, especially three through five, are genuinely amazing television. I just also think that there's a point at which you have to stop. Sam and Dean aren't really making any character progress anymore. They're stale, stagnant, dead in the water. 

At this point the only narrative direction to go in is, well, sad. How could these characters possibly have a happy ending? Heck, even the show they tried to backdoor pilot as a spinoff was sad and full of sad things.

I will say though that I would be down for seeing more television set in this universe. Just not like Supernatural was. What I want is a show full of diverse characters, interesting backstories that aren't just tragedy and gloom, and a really compelling world. My ideal spinoff involves Charlie and Dorothy, who are canonically adventuring together in Oz if you recall, going on a series of adventures through the realms, hunting demons and monsters and horrible things. Heck, maybe they take along some of the baby hunters we've met throughout the show, like Ben or Claire Novak or Lucas.

Or there could be a show just about the baby hunters. What if all of those special kids or boring kids or hunter kids that the boys have run into over the years found each other and started hunting. Dean's in Hell, Cas is in Heaven, and Sam is completely done, but there are still monsters to fight and people to save. What if these kids took over?

What I'm saying is that I don't think Supernatural is all bad or all done. I just really think that there's nothing left to say about the Winchester Brothers. It's been nine seasons, and we've said it all. What's left now is to wheeze our ways to the finish line, and pray that the resolution we get there was worth the trek.

This is also a thing that happened.

Geek Girl Con All Weekend Pass, Baby!

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Image shamelessly stolen from GeekGirlCon.com
Yeah, that's right. This weekend, as in Saturday and Sunday, I will be at Geek Girl Con in Seattle. I will be wearing a series of striped dresses, a press pass, and my best nerd enthusiasm, so feel free to come over and say hi. But in a nice and not creepy way, please.

Super pumped about all of the panels, the amazing cosplay, the fantastic art, and the just generally wonderful feeling of being surrounded by talented, happy, nerdy women and rad dudes who support women. 

Hope to see you there!

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