Censorship Series: Toxic Hollywood Culture Does Not Mean We Must Turn On The Art Produced By It

 

I have always been a huge fan of Lost. I rewatch it regularly every two years like clockwork. Over the years I have bought numerous action figures and bobbleheads of the characters involved, multiple books about the series,  the DVD collection and VHS recordings of the series when it originally aired on eBay. One of my first forays into writing TV criticism was an attempt at an episode guide for Lost a decade ago that I never published, and I am currently at work on another one.

I am telling you this because I have written multiple articles in this series about how everything that anyone does or writes is never purely altruistic and that everybody has an ulterior motive for doing what they do. I’m being up front about mine and I want you to keep that in mind.

Now even as a fan of the show I am not unaware of some of its flaws and not just the ones in the plot. During the run of the series, several major characters would be introduced with great fanfare and often killed off before they could realize their full potential. The lion’s share of these characters were either women or people of color.  I am also aware that many of the major characters who were underwritten or underutilized were women or people of color. While I’ve had suspicions of this disparity over time, it was not until recently something precariously close to proof of this has come to light.

In next month’s Vanity Fair, a columnist named Maureen Ryan published an article called Lost Illusions as an excerpt from her upcoming book Burn It Down which hits shelves next week.  In this article Ryan has interviewed many actors and writers from the series accusing show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse of creating an atmosphere of toxic racism and misogyny both on the set and in the writer’s room.

I should add that while she quotes many sources for this material in this excerpt the only actor she quotes directly is Harold Perrineau, who played Michael Dawson, who has already been publicly quote for his problems on the set of Lost over the years. All the other writers and actors are only quoted by aliases. This does not make them unreliable, of course, and I suspect that based on my own suspicions that there is a very high possibility of accuracy in this article.

Ryan’s book’s full title is Burn it Down: Power Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood. To quote the description on Amazon, it is “An expose of patterns of harassment and bias in Hollywood” that shows the deeper forces sustaining Hollywood’s corrosive culture.”

How do I put this gently? If you were change the  medium and era, this summary could have been written at point in the history of Hollywood of the last century. It could also be written to describe any major aspect of society -  the board room, the political world, the publishing world. None of this new. None of this is groundbreaking.

Even the idea that “It is never just One Bad Man’ is nothing new. In his groundbreaking book on the new Golden Age, Brett Martin made it very clear that all the showrunners behind the TV revolution David Chase, David Simon and David Milch, Matthew Weiner and Shawn Ryan, all had ways of being unpleasant, rude and at times outright abusive to their employees. He didn’t cover Buffy The Vampire Slayer, so I suspect that’s why Joss Whedon escaped unscathed.  The only man who has escaped intact was Vince Gilligan, who over thirty years doesn’t seem to have a stain on him.

I should also add that in recent years as much as we want to argue that the toxic behavior is solely the business of white males, recent events have demonstrated it has not been. Frankie Shaw was given a major deal with Showtime in 2017 to create her comedy series SMILF. It was abruptly canceled in the second season after it was reveal that Shaw, who wrote and directed every episode, was exploiting the actors behind the scenes. There are also rumors to this day that Ruth Wilson resigned from The Affair after the fourth season because showrunners Hagai Levi and Sarah Treem, who constantly used nudity for the sex scenes on the series and Wilson found it exploitive. (Strange that neither of these shows are mentioned in Ryan’s book.  Well, I’m sure people would rather read about the horror stories behind Sleepy Hollow.)

I’m not denying that Peak TV has not produced more than its share of horror stories about the toxic environment that actually unfolded behind the set years after the fact.  But this is nothing new. Ever since the dawn of television, we’ve heard just how much hatred there was between the cast on I Love Lucy or The Twilight Zone, the daily horror stories we learn every day about Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey, and we keep learning new things about showrunners such as Alex Kurtzman.   Ryan might argue that her book is to reveal a new course for how change is coming, which is noble if it were true but we keep hearing these stories every time some scandal like this happens in some aspect of our society and nothing fundamentally changes. And even if Ryan does really believe this, she wrote this book for a second motive – and it’s the same reason she made sure that the excerpt in Vanity Fair was on Lost and not The Goldbergs or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof might be toxic as they are accused of being, but she could just have easily written her book about the behavior on Bates Motel or The Leftovers. Indeed, the former would have done more to prove her thesis as its essentially Cuse’s solo project. She picked Lost for one reason only: she wants you to buy her book. Lost was an event series for twenty years and she’s trying to cash in on it.

Am I being too cynical? Maybe.  But I think its worth remembering again that in our society, the major motive for anything is either attention or money. And the easier way to get either in today’s society is outrage, whether its real or faux.  Ryan titled her book Burn it Down for a reason: it fits in perfectly with the outrage market that propels so much of today’s society. I have a feeling that some model of it is the first title for so many outrage based stories over the years.

As I keep writing and will keep writing, outrage is an easier way to get attention than proposing change. I guarantee you without reading it Ryan’s book is eighty to ninety percent horror stories slanted to devote the reader to feeling anger and guilt and maybe ten percent about hopeful things that are being done.

And as we all know, outrage is far more part of what motivates attention to pop culture than the artistic values and this is something both sides are more than willing to do, whether its one side decided to review bomb Amazon’s Lord of the Rings or the new Wonder Years because it features minorities in the major roles or boycotting Buffy the Vampire Slayer because Joss Whedon was a monster. It’s about rejecting The Little Mermaid because obviously mermaids can’t be black or about saying we shouldn’t watch Chapelle’s Show reruns any more because we don’t like what he has to say any more.  And  neither side has any room for nuance about their point of view. Twenty years ago, so many parents groups and church groups wanted Harry Potter off shelves because it seemed to embrace a ‘Satanic Lifestyle’. Now many of the next generation want us to stop reading J.K. Rowling because of her views on the transgender community. She might very well have had those same views while her books were being torched by the far right twenty years ago and no one bother to asked the question, but that is not an argument the other side wants to hear.

I have long since argued that on both progressive and conservative sides the Overton Window for what is acceptable keeps shifting at a way that anyone who might get left behind and uses the wrong term is considered guilty of hate speech without even being allowed the possibility of just being mistaken. Similarly, books like the one Ryan has written are not written because there is anything new to say about the toxic culture in Hollywood. It is part of the culture of shame and outrage that says we cannot enjoy anything – a book, a TV show or a movie – unless not only the series but the showrunners and cast of that series meet a standard of purity that no human being could measure. Joss Whedon may have been a monster, but that doesn’t mean the viewer should feel guilty for watching an episode of Buffy and enjoying yourself. Yet that is the fundamental message that too many of today’s ‘journalists’ seem to feel. Should I feel guilty when I read Harry Potter? Or when I see Crimes and Misdemeanors? Or watch an episode of House of Cards? Should we remove all of these works that have some kind of flaw, either because they don’t meet the 21^st century standard of equity or because the creators were monsters? Many of these columnists don’t say so directly, but that is the implication that so many of them make.

Now I know everybody in the Lost community is reeling from this. Let me give you some advice. Ignore it. I know how horrible it is and I know how terrible it makes you feel that another work of art you love has been stained by a toxic culture. At a certain point we have to realize that all of these articles and stories are not being written just to tell us ‘the truth’ but to create clickbait and to sell something.

I’m not denying that it is hard to bear. I am dealing with it to in my own way. But at a certain point, we can keep letting the art we love be tainted forever because of what the actors or writers did on the set or the culture involved. The guilt of the creators is not something that should be borne by the fans. Indeed, many of the writers of these books and articles want to use our guilt to get them to buy or read their books and articles.  At some level, they don’t care about our feelings.

I learned the hard truth about this when I’ve been dealing with so much doomcryers clickbait over the years. They don’t want to solve the problem or raise awareness. They want to make money. They drink our tears and relish in our pain. A book like this is not being written to indicate a solution to a problem or to raise awareness of it. It might do something to shine a light on the environment or tell the stories of those who suffered from this corruption. But at a certain level, there is exploitation here too. None of the people whose horror stories she is telling will make money from her book. The author always get more attention than the subjects.

When I heard the horror stories about Joss Whedon I went into a period of denial for more than a year, and I never thought I could watch Buffy again. But I’ve been watching reruns and its still a great show. When I saw the article online, I don’t think it even bothered me. Not because I’m numb to these kinds of revelations or because it doesn’t hurt but because I finally realized it doesn’t matter what I think. No work of art is every creating painlessly and with no suffering. No artistic creator is a saint, and indeed some of them are monsters. But just because of that fact, we should not enjoy the art any less.

I’m going to keep rewatching Lost. I’m going to keep writing my new book. Maybe I’ll include some of these new developments in it; I haven’t decided it yet.  But I will not let the current mood of the mob reflecting what I like and why I like it.  At the end of the day, they don’t care what I think. So why I – or any of us – care what they do?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2023 Season and Series Finale, Part 2: Barry Gets The Hollywood Ending It Deserves

 

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence one of the most iconic lines in movie history is spoken: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That line could just as easily speak for movie history as much as the world that Barry has inhabited for four glorious seasons.  After everything that I had watched – particularly after the last four episodes - I knew that the series finale was going to end in bloodshed and death and that is in fact what we get.  Barry gets the ending he deserves – and the redemption he wanted. That the latter was a complete lie is fitting because Barry has spent the entire series lying to himself, as has every major character. The series finale showed that some characters accepted who they were, some went to their deaths still lying to themselves, and that the innocent were punished far more than the guilty.

I don’t know what I expected from the final confrontation between Noho Hank and Fuches, but the last thing I expected Bill Hader to do in this series was for Monroe Fuches, who has spent the entire series being in a very real sense being the biggest monster of them all, have both the clearest realization of what he was and redemption. Yet that’s exactly what happened. Fuches admitted in the final confrontation that he had been lying to himself his whole life and that in reality he was just ‘a man without a heart.”  And I never expected Fuches to give Hank the opportunity to just walk away from all of this if he could just admit to himself his greatest sin – that he had let Cristobal die.

Anthony Carrigan has been by far the greatest revelation of this series, particularly in the last season. And the last few minutes he had on Barry were a powerhouse level of acting as Hank seemed to admit the truth: that he had loved Cristobal, that he was weak and that all he wanted was to be safe.  For the briefest of moments, you almost thought Hader (who wrote and directed the series finale) might actually let this violent series end in a peaceful resolution as Hank genuinely seemed to realize who he was. But in the end, Hank could not drop his façade and the violence we anticipated erupted: there was blood and bullets everywhere and Hank – and the statue of Cristobal he had put up as a monument to the man he loved – and a reminder of the monster he was – were both riddled with bullets. In Hank’s last moments, he grasped the hand of the statue of Cristobal, assuming the position we had seen him at the end of Season 3, chained to the radiator. Was he looking to the statue for forgiveness? Hoping that he would be with his lover again in the afterlife? Or did he think he was going to be a prisoner for eternity? We’ll never know.

When Fuches had learned that Barry had a son, his interest was peaked in a way we hadn’t seen. Given everything we knew about Fuches and Barry’s connection in the flashbacks in several of the early episodes, I’m pretty sure that the viewer, like me, naturally assumed the worst when Fuches asked for the boy. When he managed to rescue John from the carnage that had followed away from the pleading of Sally for John, I think everybody expected that Fuches had every intention of turning John into another killer.  Perhaps the biggest shock of the episode was that at the end of the day, Fuches’ last action on Barry was to basically give John back to his father unhurt and reunite with his family.  The two men did not exchange a single word in their last exchange and you couldn’t read either’s expression. Was this an act of atonement for Fuches? We all remember that just before Barry escaped from prison, Fuches had done everything in his power to save his surrogate son and was overjoyed when he managed to escape.  We’ll never know why he wanted to see Barry again, and perhaps that’s for the best.  Given all the carnage that unfolded in the aftermath, I don’t think we could have taken it.

Before the confrontation Sally finally looked at John, who she had not shown a single iota of love for throughout the last three episodes – and probably her entire life – and probably did the hardest thing she’s ever done. She told John the truth about everything: that she and her father were fugitives. That his father was a murderer and a horrible person. She admitted that she was a horrible person, but that her son wasn’t. I’ve always loved the work Sarah Goldberg did on Barry but she was at a whole other level in the series finale on Barry. In a perfect world, she’d get an Emmy for this episode – but as we all know, this isn’t a perfect world.

Barry was clearly prepared to die when he went to that meeting, and I think the prayer he gave before he got out of the car was genuinely honest. But when his family walked away perfectly fine, he did what he has done the entire series: he took the wrong lesson from it. When Sally tried to convince him to do the right thing, he naturally took as a sign from God and when he learned that Sally had gone to LA to see Gene, he took as a kind of betrayal.  Sally finally managed to show the courage she had been lacking throughout every relationship in her life when she took John in the night and left Barry alone. And because Barry is incapable of seeing anything other than beyond the narrow scope of his vision, he naturally assumed the only place Sally and John would go to was Gene.

Gene Cousineau has done much to wreck his entire career and life throughout the run of Barry but no one would dare assume that he deserved what happened to him in the last two episodes. How exactly Janice’s father could look at everything that happen and somehow reach the assumption that Gene was somehow the mastermind behind everything that happened is completely inexplicable but Gene has spent his entire career being an egotistical, unreliable narrator, willing to change his story if it did him any good.  His actions in the final season were horrid to an extreme, but it’s very clear he came back from being off the grid to try and do the right thing. But like everyone else on the show, he couldn’t change his nature. And in Hollywood, that sealed his fate.

I don’t think I assumed that the series would end with Gene being the one to kill Barry, but I think given everything that has happened between the two men in the series that when Barry came to Gene’s house, one of them wasn’t leaving alive.  Admittedly Hader had set us up to believe that Gene was going to kill himself while Barry was at his home, with the dramatic irony that Barry had just decided to turn himself in.  Then again, perhaps Hader had foreshadowed exactly what was going to happen in the third season premiere when Gene had tried to kill Barry with the same gun, only for it to fall apart at the last moment.

I have to say I don’t believe in Barry’s good intentions at the end.  Perhaps he thought it was his final act of forgiveness, but Barry has always been very good at listening to messages when they didn’t suit his nature. And even if he had, I don’t think Gene was in any condition to accept it. He knew the town he lived in, and he knew that the retraction always gets filed at the bottom of the page.  When Gene kills Barry in his final scene, there is a look of pure and utter exhaustion in a way we’ve never seen him show on this series. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t turn the gun on himself at the end of the episode. Maybe Hader thought that was a bridge too far – or perhaps he had an idea that there was a crueler fate in mind for Gene.

The series ended with yet another flashforward. Now Sally is a high school theater teacher,  accepting the praise for a production of Our Town. There’s a look of happiness on her face we haven’t seen all season – perhaps not since Joplin debuted on what she really thought would be her career launching.  We see her in scenes with her adolescent John, and they truly seem more content than they ever were when she was a child. Her ‘I love you’ is one of the few genuine signs of happiness in the entire last season. There’s a moment when she has a potentially flirting conversation with a history teacher, but when he asks for a cup of coffee, she turns him down. The last scene of Sally in Barry is of her driving home, and looking fondly at the flowers she was given by her class. I think this may be as happy an ending as any character on Barry gets, and considering everything Sally’s been through, she’s earned it.

Of course, that’s not the final minutes. John is having a sleepover with a friend and seems nervous about something. He’s told to never mind what his mother tells him: “You deserve to see this.”  And then we see the title ‘The Mask Collector’

The comic highlight of the series finale is the movie that they made about Barry’s life because it is so horribly done, not just by the standards of the truth but by the standards of moving making. It plays like a cross between a Lifetime Movie and Mark Wahlberg’s production company. You get the feeling that at the end of the day Warner Brothers dropped their production and this is essentially a straight-to-cable release given the cheesy nature of the script, editing and acting. All of the scenes are filmed in such a method that Ed Wood would think were badly filmed, the performances are hammy all the way through (including the fact that like every major villain, Gene is given an English accent) and the climax plays almost like something out a video game movie. Even the credits revealing the fates of the characters play the kind of thing that you would see on an Oscar bait movie and you know that this movie would never get that type of screening.

Does John know that this isn’t the true story of Barry’s life? Has Sally withheld the exact nature of Barry’s crimes from him? Does he even remember how his real life rescue ended up playing out? In a way, this matters immensely. In another, it doesn’t.  Barry has gotten the kind of redemption he always hoped for: posthumous and in a version that would know doubt be the exact story he would have told John had Sally and he not gotten away from him at the last minute.  The redemption he hoped for is the cheesiest kind of Hollywood pulp possible. In other words, it’s exactly the right legacy for Barry Berkman to get.

The series finale for Barry was titled ‘Wow’. It’s the last word a mortally wounded Barry gets before Gene shoots him in the head. But it’s the perfect title for not just merely a magnificent final episode but Bill Hader’s magnificent creation which now stands as one of the greatest series of all time, not merely among comedies such as The Good Place and Insecure, but among dramas such as Breaking Bad and yes, Succession. Barry had a hard act to follow when it followed Succession’s final episode but Hader stuck the landing just as magnificently as Jesse Armstrong did, perhaps more so.

When Barry debuted on HBO in 2018, expectations were not that high for this show. Five years later,  he has created one of the most magnificent accomplishments in the history of television  having won nine Emmys, including two for Hader for Best Actor in a Comedy series. Hader has also won many other Best Actor prizes, has shared in two WGA awards and has won three Directors Guild Awards for Best Director in a Comedy. It has also won a Peabody in 2019. There will doubtless be many more nominations in the next couple of months: it is likely Hader will be nominated in all four categories.

And he has earned it in all of them. In an interview after the series finale aired, Stephen Root who has starred in several of the Coen Brothers movies, called Hader the equal of the Coen Brothers and Jordan Peele in terms of directing. It is hard to argue that fact when you consider the magnificent command that Hader holds whenever he is directing an episode, whether it is the incredible choreographed ‘ronny/lily’ the brilliant motorcycle chases and fighting in 710N, the horror movie like balance of Sally’s (nightmare? Hallucination?) in ‘It Takes a Psycho’ or the final gunfight that unfolded in the series finale.  If Hader never does another work for television for the rest of his life, his work for Barry is enough to get him listed among the Vince Gilligan and Matthew Weiner as one of the greatest showrunners in the 21^st century.

I don’t know if I have any superlatives left to praise Barry after the last four seasons, save for this. At this moment Barry ranks as one of the three best shows of 2023 with only Abbott Elementary and Yellowjackets certain to be above it. It’s one of the greatest accomplishments that television is capable of when everything fires on all cylinders. It was dark, it was hysterically funny – sometimes within the same minute. It had some of the most memorable characters played by some truly incredible actors. It had some of the most astonishing use of camera work I’ve seen in TV since Breaking Bad and Mr. Robot ended. It showed a level of character depth that few dramas, never mind comedies are capable of. And it continued to shock you all the way to the end. I have thought over several things about Succession in the past several months, but when I wrote last week that I would miss Barry more than that show that opinion has not changed and it has increased exponentially.  And I know this series will last – I will rewatch it again someday in the future, hoping that there was a way I could watch it for the first time. Not bad from the guy who couldn’t keep a straight face as Stefan.

My score: 5 stars.

 

 

 

2023 Series And Season Finale Watch, Part 1: As The Series Ends, I May Have Completely Misjudged Succession

 

Last night, to say the least, was an epic night for television. Three series that will be among the major contenders for many of the Emmys for Best Comedy and Best Drama came to end, two of them airing their series finales.  It was one of those nights that Peak TV, every so often even in the age of streaming, is still capable of. Speaking of streaming, I spent much of last night finishing off a Limited Series that is very likely to be a major contender for Emmys this year as well.

I intend to give fair coverage to all of these shows, and I think it’s fitting that I do so with the one that I had the least connection with but will likely resonate the most. I had no intention of watching the series finale of Succession last night because despite my recent discovery that it is a better show than I have given credit for, I still felt it was immensely overrated. However, even in all of my disparaging comments about it the series of articles that I have written in the last several months, I admitted I might be willing to reconsider my opinion if, like Ray Donavan and Scandal managed to do in their final episodes, they could somehow redeem themselves in the final episode.

And the thing is, even as someone who could not stand the series even as I admired some of its better qualities, I think the series finale did. And I also have to admit watching the last half-hour, I sort of got why so many people have been watching the series even though it had none of the things that most great TV have had.

No one who has ever watched Succession would dare say that any of the Roys were likable people or even competent ones. They were horrendous from the moment we meant them, emotionally stunted by their wealth and the abuse that Logan had spent their childhoods and adulthoods forcing on them, completely unable to relate with even their own family on anything but a transactional level. None of the Roy children ever deserved to run Waystar Royco because none of them had the ability to do it: they were also just children of privilege who had no moral compass or even the competence to run their own lives. In a way Logan acknowledged as much in what would be his final conversation with them when he told them he loved them all “but you are not serious people.”  And everything we’ve seen during the series fully demonstrates that. The death of their father showed that, if anything, they had no capability to rise to the occasion: as we saw in America Decides, they were willing to essentially destroy America if it meant gaining a momentary advantage to help their own immediate interests.

No one thought any of the characters on Succession was capable of any great realization by the end of the series. But maybe in his own way Logan had. Perhaps that is why he sold the company to Gojo in his final betrayal of the children: he knew that at the end of the day, none of them were qualified to lead his c0mpany.  Maybe it’s too much to think that a part of him realized just how poisonous a father he had been and how much he had destroyed his family, and the only way for them to be free of him was to get rid of it. Given their last conversation that’s probably giving Logan to much credit; there’s a good chance that to the very end he still wanted to manipulate them and selling Waystar was the only way he saw to protect his legacy.

But it is clear in the final episodes of the series that all of them did, in their twisted and messy ways loved their father and will be empty without him. The problem is, they have focused all their lives on winning their father’s approval and the only way they knew how was to handle his company. (There is one exception which I’ll get to at the end of the article.)

Now let’s not kid ourselves. No matter how Succession ended there were never going to be any winners or losers in the traditional sense. The Roys are all still wealthy and powerful people; they are still as emotionally stunted at the beginning of the series as they were at the end. Indeed, they’re all worse off then they were at the beginning of the series as they have all basically burned and destroyed every one of the emotionally healthy relationships they ever had, and that includes the bonds between them as siblings. (Again, there is one exception.)  The idea that they would ever get what they deserved seemed impossible at the beginning of the finale as it was at the end.

Except, in what may be the most surprising twist of all on Succession, that’s kind of what happened.

After spending the better part of an hour maneuvering themselves so that they could kill the merger with GoJo and set things up with Kendall running Waystar it came down to a final board vote. With the vote tied six to six, Shiv who had promised to kill the merger…walked out of the room. Kendall and Roman frantically followed her. Shiv spent several minutes trying to figure out why she couldn’t carry out their plan and finally just said it: “I don’t think (Kendall) would make a good CEO.”

What followed was as close as the three Roys could to realizing just how horrible they truly were. Shiv reminded Kendall that he had confessed to killing a man. Kendall told them he’d been lying and then said it didn’t matter.  Kendall and Roman got into a shouting match when Roman told Kendall, whose family has been deteriorating and is on the verge of imploding, about his children. The two of them tried to beat each other up and like everything the Roys do, they couldn’t even do that right. Shiv continued to realize that this was just who they were. Kendall pleaded with her, telling him that he had been raised to be CEO of Waystar – “It’s all I know how to do.”  Roman, resigned told the truth: “We’re shit…we’re nothing.” And Shiv walked out the room and voted to go forward with the merger. None of the Roys get to run Waystar.

The cynical among the viewers might think that Shiv did this because Tom, still her husband, is now the CEO of the company and as long as she is married to him, she still might have a seat at the table. I think anyone who was watched the last season, never mind the whole series, knows that the marriage between Tom and Shiv by now is in name only. They are bonded by the child Shiv is carrying and little else (and God help whoever that child is when they are born) and even then, there is no indication that Tom will stay married to Shiv even after this. At this point Shiv needs Tom far more than Tom needs Shiv – and he’s spent enough time in the Roy family to know better than to care for people who are supposed to love you.

At the end of the day, the three Roy siblings are still as rich and miserable as they were at the start of the series, but without Waystar and their father, they are essentially powerless. No one will ever pretend to take them seriously any more.  All of the influence they had was tied to Logan and now that he’s gone, no one will listen to them: they’ve spent the last several years proving how incompetent they are.  All of them are, in a sense, in their own private hells. Roman is even more wrecked emotionally than he was at the start of the series and will probably end up spending the rest of his life in bars like this. Shiv has burned all her bridges with her liberal friends as a part of the family business and for being part of helping Mencken become President, no matter what the final result of the election story that will not be forgiven.  Her marriage is emotionally empty and being a mother is something she just can’t do. And Kendall, whose entire path since the end of the first season has been bent on both self-destruction and running Waystar, now has nothing. I am told there was an alternate ending discussed where Kendall tried to kill himself in the final shot but Jesse Armstrong decided against it. It would have been superfluous. Kendall has been barely been existing for much of the series run and death in a way, would have been the easy way out for him – and something he doesn’t have the courage to do.  He seemed emotionally dead in the final moments of the series anyway; regardless of what happens, he will probably remain so.

Was there a winner at the end of all this? For those of you who might think that Tom came from behind and managed to outsmart the Roys to climb to the top, I don’t believe it for a second.  Tom is a survivor, nothing more, and I don’t think he’ll survive as long as he thinks.

Remember how Tom casually mentioned how the new ownership was planning to get rid of the old guard? Tom doesn’t realize he’s part of the old guard himself. He’s a holdover from the Logan Roy era. The merger succeeded despite his incompetence, not because of it.  He tells Tom in the last exchange he has with Cousin Greg on the series that he’ll be safe. Tom should be worried about himself. I think the highpoint of his career as CEO will be the photo-op of him signing the papers. Everything else will be downhill.

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a winner at the end of Succession. We just didn’t notice because his character was only in this episode in a recording.

Connor Roy was never considered  seriously by anyone, either by the world, the Roy family, or even viewers of Succession. Perhaps that was to be expected as it seemed to be his fate in life to be tangential to the Roy family. He was never seriously considered as a potential CEO of Waystar Royco and really never considered it as an ambition of his.  His entire arc on Succession was a completely foolhardy and doomed run for President where even Cousin Greg mocked him for how poorly he was performing.  When the Roy siblings staged their intervention, Shiv started it by saying to Kendall: “You’re the eldest son” and Connor indignantly reminded them: “I’m the eldest son” and then stormed off.  In the final confrontation, Kendall repeated those same words and no one still corrected him. Connor Roy spent the entire series little more than a joke and would always be unimportant and it is for that very reason, I think he may very well have emerged from Succession as if not with the possibility of a happy ending, then at the very least, with the potential for happiness.

Regardless of what might actually come of Connor’s marriage, the fact remains that he is the only Roy sibling to have anything resembling a healthy relationship with a significant other at the end of Succession.  One of the images that will stay with me (albeit considering I have less experience with the show than most viewers) is the final shot of ‘Conor’s Wedding’ where Connor kisses his wife in front of a nearly empty ceremony.  I remember it because it was one of the few times I’ve ever seen any major character on this series look genuinely happy or free.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence it took place in the aftermath of Logan’s death.

During the disastrous bachelor party, Connor made a concerted effort to try and get his father to reconcile with his half-siblings. It ended in disaster, for obvious reasons, but no other character would have been capable of the effort. I also remember the heavily drunken monologue Connor gave in the aftermath in which he made it very clear that his siblings were doomed because they were so determined to win Logan’s love and he could live without it – or indeed any of it. Given the series finale, it’s kind of hard not to see that he was correct in that assumption.

Alone among the Roys, Connor emerged with his reputation intact. You can argue he never had one to really lose but since he never had any real connection to Waystar the way his siblings did, it’s hard to argue that he’ll have the same odor as the rest of them going forward.  Maybe he won’t necessarily have a happy marriage but now that his political ambitions are done with,  I think there’s an easier path to healing for him than any of the rest of his half-brothers. Some have compared Succession to King Lear, and I would remind you the Fool basically survives when the rest of his children are destroyed. If there is any hope for the Roy children healing their wounds, it will come through Connor, and if it doesn’t I think he’s self-aware enough to know he can survive without them.  In the world of Succession, that has to count for a happy ending.

It looks inevitable that Succession will win its third Emmy for Best Drama this year, and while I will not be thrilled with it I can live with it more than when I started this series a couple of years ago.  There will no doubt be Emmy nominations for every single Roy sibling – since Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin have moved into the Best Actor category, I’m relatively certain that Alan Ruck will get his due as a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  I imagine at the very least ‘Conor’s Wedding’ and the series finale will receive nominations for Writing,  ‘Church and State’ will certainly be nominated for Best Director (I can’t say which others will) and many of the other actors, including J. Smith Cameron and Nicholas Braun will compete in the Supporting nominations.

As for actual awards, that’s a different story.  Culkin and Strong will split the vote, and Bob Odenkirk was a heavy favorite for Best Actor for Better Call Saul anyway. I understand why Sarah Snook submitted herself for Best Actress in a Drama, but it’s really looking like Melanie Lynskey will win for Yellowjackets (as I’ll write in another article, she basically locked it up with the season finale last night). Snook would have had a much better chance of winning if she’d stayed in Best Supporting Actress.  Matthew MacFayden may very well repeat last year’s win for Best Supporting Actor, but it will depend on how crowded the field gets. Braun will get nominated, Ruck is very likely to be there as well, and it is very possible Alexander Skarsgard could emerge as a dark horse.  The irony of a divided field costing MacFayden the prize is an irony that would not be lost on him; beside he has an Emmy.

 I don’t know how the Emmys will handle Brian Cox; if he were to be nominated for Best Guest Actor, he’d finally get the Emmy he’s been owed since the series started, but I don’t think anyone would dare to consider Cox a guest actor. If Cox were to submit himself for Best Actor, he might very well get crowded out: I’m pretty sure that at no point in the history of the Emmys have either lead category had three nominees for Best Actor or Actress. Besides, it’s going to be a crowded field even with his two sons. In addition to them and Odenkirk, it is a near certainty that Pedro Pascal will be nominated for The Last of Us, Jeff Bridges for The Old Man and Diego Luna for Andor.  Then there’s a deeper bench of nominees: Matthew Rhys for Perry Mason, Dominic West for The Crown and Kevin Costner for Yellowstone. The Roy bloodline only carries so far.

All I know for show is that Succession may have been a far better series than I was willing to give it credit for being. And who knows? Now that it has ended, I might be wrong about the rewatch value too. Maybe all the time we spent with these miserable people will be worth it for the viewer. Now you’ll get to enjoy them all suffer even more, knowing that the misery they’re living through will end with none of them getting what they deserved. For the viewers who’ve watched them be miserable, they’ll get a happy ending.

 

 

2012 Movies Tribute: Moonrise Kingdom

 

There are many filmmakers whose work I admire from a visual standpoint, some from that of the characters they create, some from the dialogue. But if you were ask me if there was a director’s whose filmography I wish was real, I don’t think I’d hesitate a moment before I said Wes Anderson’s.

Anderson is one of those moviemakers whose style is so distinct that he is one of those directors whose work is so easy to parody – I remember Saturday Night Live telling a  Halloween story he made and I understand that there are some online artists now trying to see what The Hunger Games and Harry Potter would like if he was director.  Anderson’s films have such a distinct appearance to them – both in his repertoire of actors, his visual style and his methods of direction – that they seem to take place in a universe all their own. That’s not a slur on them, but it does give so many of them an appearance than I don’t think that Anderson’s ability as a writer and a director have ever been given their full due. Many critics – not Roger Ebert, who always seemed to be one of his greatest admirers – had a lot of trouble accepting the style of his movies and even the ones that were clearly brilliant were regarded as too ‘stylized’. This has always struck me as an odd position for those same critics who worship at the altar of Tarantino and Spielberg; these men have films whose style you can recognize automatically but they rarely receive the derision that Anderson has.

The tone that one hears so often with an Anderson film, usually in a derogatory fashion, is ‘wistful’.  One of the synonyms for wistful is melancholy, and beneath the good humor, lively direction and characters is indeed a sense of melancholy. In Rushmore, Jason Schwartzman plays a student who is so determined to be active it hides how horrible an academic he is and how much he is ashamed of his blue-collar roots. The Royal Tenenbaums  involves a family of child prodigies who in adulthood have wasted their potential and are all suffering from an air of depression. Darjeeling Limited involves three siblings who are traveling through India trying to bond though they are reeling from abandonment from their mother. This sense of depression certainly pervades the two youthful protagonists at the center of Moonrise Kingdom. Sam the boy is a foster child who has been constantly rejected and returned by foster parents over and over throughout his young life.  Suzy is the only child of two parents in an unhappy marriage, and it is clear that she can sense this.

In his rave review of the movie Ebert writes: “Wes Anderson’s mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born.” It is also a world where he seems determined to create an endless supply of detailed props that the viewer so wishes were real just so they could experience them. The Royal Tenenbaums gave the impression of being a story told from a book, even though it was original. Who would not want to read that book? Who would not want to read one of the plays written by Max Fisher or Margot Tenenbaum, both young playwrights in the world of Anderson, experience an actual episode of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, or read another article of The French Dispatch? In this book, Susy is constantly looking at or reading young adult books that our purely fictional. Anderson could have had her reading A Wrinkle in Time or The Catcher in The Rye; he created these books for the sole purpose of the viewer to see them and wonder.

Anderson films always have their own atmosphere. In many of them there is a narrator, telling us outside events. In this film, there is one and he is played by that brilliant character actor Bob Balaban, who tells us that we are on an island off the coast of New York in 1965, just a few days away from one of the biggest storms of the century.  There are many ways to tell this story or it could come as much a surprise to the viewer as it does to the people in the films, but Anderson does not believe in suspense as much as mood.

Like all Anderson films by this point in his career (this was his seventh movie) the cast had several performers who had become part of Anderson’s ensemble, most notably Bill Murray, whose late career renaissance was almost entirely built on the movies of Anderson. Murray, for all the stories we have heard about him recently, always seems perfect for an Anderson film, in Ebert’s eyes, “because the two seemed to share a bemused sadness…his eyes which have always been old eyes, look upon the world and waver between concern and despair.”  He was perfect in being trapped in an eternal loop in Groundhog Day and in some kind of perpetual holding pattern in Lost in Translation. Here Murray plays Susy’s father who seems only slightly surprised to learn that his daughter has run away from home, and only slightly more surprised when his wife tells him it might be because how miserable she is.

Owen Wilson, who to this point had been one of Anderson’s co-writer and frequent co-star does not appear in this movie: Anderson co-wrote with Roman Coppola, Sofia’s brother who became the sixth member of the Coppola family to receive an Oscar nomination for this film. Jason Schwartzman, who was always in Anderson’s film also makes a brief appearance in it as Cousin Ben. But Anderson who by now had gathered the ability to attract an extraordinary cast (by this point Anjelica Houston, Adrian Brody, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett had all appeared his movies) expanded his repertoire to bring in a new group of performers, who have since become recurring performers in his cast of players. Here is Frances McDormand, playing Susy’s mother, trying to deal with everything that is unfolding. Here is Edward Norton, the by-the-book scoutmaster whose reaction to the escape of one of his scouts is “Jiminy Christmas. He flew the coop.” and starts looking through his handbook for the correct procedure. Here is Bruce Willis, again demonstrating his ability for comedy, as the sole police presence on the island and the only person who seems to have the children’s best interest at heart. And sweeping in with all the abilities of a villain is Tilda Swinton, identified in the movie only as Social Services. Most would return to Anderson’s world in the movies he has subsequently made.

The adults are surprised to know that Sam and Suzy even know each other, and indeed when we find out how they do.  Children themselves are rarely fully developed in an Anderson film and indeed much of the first part of the movie deals with everybody realizing they’re missing before they even start to talk. We are aware, however, of Suzy’s presence in the opening credits.  In a title sequence that I will never forget, Suzy is listening to Benjamin Britten’s ‘A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra as the action takes place; we hear all of it before we see Suzy.” We note her aquiline features and her long distant stare; somehow it doesn’t surprise me that the first time that Sam and Suzy meet Suzy is in the costume of an eagle for the church’s story of Noah’s Ark.

 Sam and Suzy spend much of the next year writing each other letters, which initially go on for a while and Anderson keeps cutting over the narration as we see the two talking. Eventually the letters get shorter and shorter to the point the last two just say: “When?” and “Tomorrow.” The first time we see the two in the same scene they are staring across a meadow; Sam burdened with all the camping and survival gear they will need, Suzy with the books I described, her kitten and the portable record player she was listening to Britten too, with of course, extra batteries.

The two follow an Indian trail to a secluded cove that they name Moonrise Kingdom. There they make their camp, which a scout later tells Sam is ‘the best pitched tent he’s ever seen,” read their books, look at the water and where Suzy asks Sam to pierce her ears.

Sam and Suzy, I should mention, are both twelve, the age where love is nowhere near sexual and in the era in which the movie takes place, may not have even been discussed to them.  Nor is romance in the traditional sense, although at the climax of the film the two ask if they can be married.  All they want is to have an adventure where they can live outside the realm of adults, if only for a few days. They are aware that this is the last summer they can do it. Next year, they will have to give up childish things.

I think that is the reason, despite Ebert’s insistence that this movie could be set at any time, Anderson sets in 1965. America’s innocence is not yet lost and isolation from the world is still possible. Technology in the traditional sense does not exist in the world of Wes Anderson (I can’t perceive for a moment his character even using something like a pager) and this is one of the few times when a child could get lost on an island and parents would only start to panic when they did not come home for dinner. Moonrise Kingdom would not have the same effect if Suzy listened to her music on even a Walkman.

It is worth remembering several things about an Anderson film. Everything about it fundamentally is ridiculous if you think about it and it is basically a comedy. But none of the actors play it for laughs or treat the material with anything less than other seriousness. Even when Sam at the climax of the hurricane demands that he will not come to safety unless he and Suzy are allowed to wed, no one dares call him a fool or to be reasonable. They just find a way to accommodate it. And because the actors and the dialogue take it seriously,  one does not laugh the same hysterical way one would if we were to encounter this situation if it were to play out in the hands of a ‘typical’ teenage love story.  These events are far more ridiculous than they would be a Judy Blume book and the entire atmosphere is that of a fantasy.  The thing is a fantasy can often be more involving than real life.

Because of the fact that Moonrise Kingdom premiered in July of 2012 and because it is fundamentally a comedy, it did not do particularly well at the Oscars, getting only a nomination for Best Screenplay. It did fairly well at the box office, though, making $45 million on an investment of $16 million, which in a summer of The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises was frankly incredible.   The nomination was his second for Best Screenplay after The Royal Tenenbaums more than eleven years earlier. His next film The Grand Budapest Hotel  was his most well received film to date: it received nine Oscar nominations  and won four of them; Anderson received his first Best Director nod.

Anderson has also been far more well-received for his ventures into animation. His stop-motion films show a far clearer ability to adapt to Anderson’s visual world. Both of his animated features Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs were nominated for Best Animated Film and are in my opinion, two masterpieces among the world of animation in the 21^st Century. One of my fondest memories is when a group of friends and I went out to see Isle of Dogs in the theaters in the winter of 2018. It is one of the more glorious times I’ve had in a theater.  Anderson is, if anything, just as accomplished at getting voice talent for his movies as Pixar does, almost all of his regulars showed up to do voice roles, even for a few moments. I never knew until that moment that Bryan Cranston playing the voice of a dog was something my life desperately needed; I’m so glad that Anderson achieved it.

Later this year Anderson’s next film is scheduled to debut on Netflix. It is one of the few times he has chosen to adapt someone else’s work and I know it because I am familiar with it.  I read The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar when I was nine years old, thinking that because the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the author, it was a book for children.  It is the story of a man who, when he is excluded from a card game, finds himself reading a book that tells the story of an Indian mystic who manages to find a way to see through any object possible, including to look at a playing card when it is face down.  Sugar naturally focuses on this part of it and spend the next several years training himself to do just that to become the richest man possible. However, after his first night, he goes through what amounts to a spiritual growth and decides to do something different.

This story is set at least in part in India and 1920s England, is set in casinos across the globe and eventually involves Sugar hiring a great Hollywood makeup artist and costume designer to help him. It is, in short, the kind of story that, if Wes Anderson did not exist, he would have to be brought to life to do it justice.  I expect Anderson to make Roald Dahl’s vision his own and create another world that the filmgoer wishes were real even if they know better.

 

 

Lost Rewatch: The Whole Truth

 

Note: From this point on, I’m resuming watching the series on VHS.

 

In the last minute of the episode Henry has been let out of armory for the first time for some breakfast. He gets his ‘first’ look at his surroundings  and does what most normal people would do in those scenarios. He asks about the computer and everything in the Swan. When he doesn’t get any answers, he says: “If I were I’d be asking all kinds of questions. You don’t even seem that curious.”

We will soon learn that Henry is a complete and total liar about everything, though not the full extent for a while but he’s hit upon a key point of Lost: the survivors have been on the island for more than two months, repeatedly encountering bizarre situations on an almost daily basis and nobody seems to even be that interested in trying to figure out what it means. This was understandable in the first season when they were spending so much time trying to be rescued but they now seem to have settled in for the long haul. And they seem to have just accepted this as the new normal that they basically don’t seem to even care about how weird everything is. This, frankly, is one of the most frustrating things about the characters of Lost: they are maddeningly incurious about sharing information or even dealing with how strange their situation is.

Henry also points out that these people have trust issues which considering who he’s talking too is the understatement of the century.  It’s ironic that this episode is titled The Whole Truth because very few people are telling it. Locke entrusts Ana Lucia with the truth about Henry but it seems to be done as much to outmaneuver Jack as anything else. He only tells him about after he’s made the decision. Ana Lucia clearly recognizes this and decides to circumvent them both.

It’s interesting that she chooses to go to Sayid instead but Ana Lucia seems to be more practical than either Jack or Locke is.  She also knows that if she told either of them what she found they’d spend more time worrying about each other than doing anything. So she takes the map that she is gotten from Henry and the unlikely team of Sayid, Ana Lucia and Charlie go out try and find Henry’s balloon.

That night Ana Lucia actually does tell the truth to Sayid. She is honest about how most people don’t like her, and its obvious she’s not just talking about the island. It’s been clear for a while that Ana Lucia has been damaged by life – how much of it was because of her nearly being killed and the murder she committed will never be known for sure – and she has basically decided to be solitary. In a move not keeping with her tough exterior, she apologizes to Sayid – and Sayid finds it in his heart to absolve her.  Of course he makes it clear very quickly that he has found someone else to hate and that is in fact the real reason he is on this pilgrimage. He does not want to find this balloon, and Ana Lucia has to talk him into searching for it.

However, most of the story is dealing with Sun as she struggles with a new truth. Up until this point Sun has been one of the most sympathetic characters on the show. She has been hiding from her husband that she speaks English but based on what we saw of Jin in her flashbacks, we know she had a reason to hide it from him even after the plane crash. She didn’t know about Jin’s secret, but since they haven’t been talking to each other for a while, that has been forgivable. Unfortunately in this episode our sympathies for Sun are about to take a dip.

In Sun’s flashback we see that she and Jin have been trying to have a baby for awhile and its pretty clear that Jin wants it more than Sun does. Part of it is because Jin may think this will change things between him and Mr. Paik, but we’ve seen enough scenes with Jin on the island to know that he is a caring man and would probably make a good father.  Sun sees it differently: she knows that once she has a child she’s tied to Jin forever and there may be no chance to get away.

Now we see her in a hotel with Jae Lee meeting secretly to…learn English. Now obviously Sun probably doesn’t have a lot of friends or people she could turn to get English lessons from. It does not change the fact that the man she has turned to is someone who was a potential husband – and who makes it pretty clear that his marriage has not been a happy one.  Jae Lee actually points that out in their last meeting when he asks: “Why are you here?” It isn’t just to learn English; Sun’s marriage has deteriorated to the point where she is practically alone. The camera cuts away from the two of them before we see what happens after Jae Lee makes his final confession, so for now we are left to live in the illusion that nothing happened. The writers will break that image in the next episode centered on them/

Now Sun is facing the fact that she might be pregnant and she’s clearly unhappy about in ways that have nothing to do with having to deliver her child on the beach.  She reacts unhappily when Kate sees it and seems very reluctant to tell Jin when Jack confirms it.  Jack gives what is probably his best bedside manner yet when he advises Sun that it’s in her best interest to tell the whole truth. Of course, he then heads back to the hatch and lies to Kate about anything being wrong.

Jin’s reaction in the garden seems out of character for him, but in retrospect it seems like he’s still reeling from his wife’s attack and he doesn’t know the right way to show it. When he comes back to the garden near the end of the episode to ‘fix his mistake’  he is more honest and sad than we’ve seen him since he was about to get on the raft. He makes it clear that he feels truly isolated and he doesn’t want to fight with Sun anymore. In a sense, he is acknowledging what Sun told him when she learned that she knew English: they stopped a long time ago and he’s sorry for that. So Sun tells him that she’s pregnant and she shares the whole truth.

The fertility doctor they see in the episode has told them that Sun is incapable of having children. But in the last flashback, he tells her that it is Jin who is sterile. (You’ve got to admire the sexism of this culture: if the son-in-law of a powerful man knows he’s infertile, you have to protect yourself from his wrath, but if the daughter of that same man is infertile, whaddya gonna do?)

The thing is, Sun still isn’t telling the whole truth and she’s revealed that she knows more than she’s telling even if she’s being honest about not being with another man.  When Jin asks hostilely if she had hidden it from he, she fires back that she did it “to trap the son of a fisherman.” At this point Jin has told her his father is dead and nothing about his background. So how does Sun know this? It is possible that Jin did tell her at some point, but in another flashback we will learn that Sun has been keeping even more secrets than that.

We don’t care for the moment because we love Jin and Sun and it’s clear that this is truly a turning point in their relationship. Watching the two of them speak fondly about their child, joking about whether there’s anyone left to tell, is the happiest we’ve seen them on the island. And its profoundly moving when as Jin is about to walk away Sun almost casually says “I love you” and they both stop. Unspoken is the fact that its been a long time since either of them said to each other. Jin then leans over Sun and says it back to her in English. Sun looks worried for a moment (as she well might; this is going to be a major storyline for the next two seasons and have more ramifications than the viewer can think of) but the last scene we see her, there’s an unguarded smile on her face. It’s the first we’ve seen on it perhaps since the series began.

We will have reason to forget for a while, of course. Because our focus is now on Henry.  There have been scenes throughout his first two episodes that there is more to him than meets the eye but the final moments are the first time its very clear that we can not trust him. In retrospect, considering what we learn about him later, his final speech to Jack and Locke is out of character: the last thing he wants is for them is to suspect they might be right. However, its more logical when you consider that originally Henry Gale was supposed to only be around for a few episodes and then a different character was going to take over as the major figure for the Others going forward. Naturally, it took only a few episodes from Darlton to fall in love with the work that Michael Emerson was doing as Henry and not merely keep his character around but make him the center of the show.

So even though it doesn’t quite keep in with the rest of what we will learn about him, it is logical that Henry does this.  We need real evidence that this man from Minnesota really is an other and this is by far the best way to do it. It doesn’t matter that what he’s telling Jack and Locke is a lie (though as we shall see it’s completely keeping in with his character), what matters is that they believe it could be true. And when he finishes his speech with: “You got any milk?” we truly realize that they are locked in with Henry, not the other way around.

The teaser  for the next episode of Lost reveals that there will be no less than five revelations that change the game. Believe it or not I counted and they are right. Some of them are more important than the others (ha!) but all of them have a major impact.

Lost Rewatch: Maternity Leave

 

This episode doesn’t have the best reputation either. There is some justification for this. Last week, we were dealing with the arrival of Henry Gale and this week we’re suddenly dealing with Claire for truly seems to be the first time in all of Season 2. Furthermore, the impetus for the action – Aaron’s sudden illness – is dealt with by the end of the episode as if Claire worried for nothing, and the discovery of this new Dharma Station appears to be pointless because there is no vaccine after all this time. The flashback that we see is non-traditional in the extreme, and while eventually viewers will be more in favor these kinds of stories, the fact that we question the fundamental reality of what happen is off-putting.

But while I don’t think this episode is a masterpiece, I don’t believe it deserves to be considered one of the worst episodes of the series or even Season 2, as one major book on Lost does. In many ways, it’s actually more ambitious than a lot of the episodes we will get throughout the series because it’s another one of the frustratingly few ones that is, as Sawyer puts it, girls only.

It makes sense in a sad way that Claire has been essentially regulated to the background for Season 2. We’ve spent almost all of the episode in the Hatch or with the Tailies and Claire has been on the beach all that time. The few times she’s actually had more then a few minutes of screen time have been more based on her interactions with Charlie and Locke rather than as a character in her own right.  So I do admire, however heavy-handed the execution, the way that the writers try to put Claire at the story front and center.

The main reason I think Maternity Leave works as well as it does is because it is one of the few episodes where almost all the female regulars are used as characters in their own right and not extensions with male characters. After Jack sees Claire on the beach (and really does a half-assed job of reassuring her Aaron will be fine) Claire is worried about an infection. To be clear, she has been infected – by Rousseau.

Claire has been dealing with the fact that she can not remember what has happened to her during her abduction – and now she seems to be having flashes of repressed memories.  She ends up going to see Libby, the clinical psychologist. This is one of the only times we will see Libby independent of Hurley since she joined the camp, and its another example of what seems to be a wasted opportunity. We will never know one way or the other whether Libby is telling the truth about her psychology background, but in the few scenes she has with Claire she demonstrates a remarkable calm and detachment towards her and has a much better handle on how to deal with a frantic patient then, say, Jack has under similar circumstances.

Libby also claims that what Claire may be going through are essentially amalgams of several groups of memories, and there’s an excellent chance she’s right. Much of the interaction we see between Claire and Ethan does seem to have a dream-like quality to it, and many of the questions that he asks her are close to the ones Jack did when he talked about her pregnancy. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that there was a mobile with planes like there was in Claire’s dream in Season 1, much less that it played Catch a Falling Star.

The most likely explanation of what we are seeing is that Claire is that what Claire is being injected with is some kind of sedative or drug to keep her docile and suggestible.  Ethan is clearly taking on the attitude of a friendly physician, and based on what we will later learn about the Others, he’s trying to convince Claire that giving up the baby is her idea. This is, to be clear, being solely because they have every intention of cutting her child out of her and throwing her away afterwards.

The part that is almost certainly real are the two last flashes when we see this black-haired girl wake Claire up, try to get her out of the Staff and then drug her and get her outside.  The girl never identifies herself but she is a teenager and looks around sixteen. We’ve already heard Rousseau had a daughter and in The Hunting Party Mr. Friendly told ‘Alex;’ to bring out Kate.  The implication is pretty clear and Rousseau herself seems to think this is a possibility even before Claire tells her about the girl who rescued her.

These memories, of course, come in flashes and the second one convinces Claire she has to go into the jungle after Rousseau. Kate goes to Sawyer and demands a gun (his reaction is one of the highpoints of the episode) and its interesting that it looks like Sawyer’s turn to villainy was never as deep as he intended. He immediately offers Claire medicine when he learns Aaron is sick and he doesn’t put up a fight when Kate asks for a gun. Admittedly, it’s the reminder that this story arc was pointless but will let that go.

This is also another one of those gems that Mira Furlan will constantly be capable of. We know that at the end of the day Rousseau is insane but there are always signs of the woman she once was. This is also one of the occasions where she seems to have the self-awareness of her condition that she almost never demonstrates.  When Kate threatens to shoot her unless she gets away with Claire, Danielle walks up to Kate and almost begs her to be put out of her misery.  It’s a heartbreaking moment, compounded at the end of the episode when she tells Claire that she didn’t find what she was looking for either.

The Staff seems to be another false flag operation, but as it turns out this will end up paying off later on. When Kate goes into one of the lockers, she finds the ragged clothes and makeup that we saw Friendly use in his previous encounters. This more or less confirms that the meeting Claire overhears between Ethan and Friendly is genuine and that this is the first time we see what he really looks like.  It also adds a wrinkle we haven’t considered: we’ve assumed to this point the Others dress in rags and pretend to be disheveled, but it appears that too is an act.

Which brings us back to ‘Henry Gale’. Jack’s ‘plan’ when it comes to dealing with the presence of him is apparently to cut everyone except himself and Locke off from using the hatch to hide him.  This is yet another example of Jack’s inability to think beyond the short term. He basically forgets any of his idea for an army in favor of containment, and we know he isn’t including Locke because he trusts him but because he doesn’t want to let him out of his sight either. Locke calls him on this and Jack’s reaction is to use the button against him. It’s a level of just how much the button has tested Locke’s faith that he doesn’t even bother to put up a fight.

Even in this episode there are signs that this will come to nothing. Eko ends up finding out about Henry and confronts Jack on it.  He refuses to listen to Jack’s spiel and makes it clear – gently – that unless he talks with ‘Henry’, he will make this public. Jack doesn’t mess around with him the same way he has with Locke; he already knows that Eko is not someone you can bully.

The scene between Eko and Henry is magnificent  in part because of how different it is from not only all the scenes with Henry but in all the scenes we shall see between the Others and the Losties. Eko is polite to Henry but does not for a moment try his sob story on him. The speech that he gives is both clearly a menace and apologetic. It’s the only time that one of the survivors apologizes for something that they have done to the Others (the Others have already made it clear that they have nothing to be sorry for and will keep doing so for much of the rest of the series). It will be a long time before we are ever able to read Michael Emerson’s poker face, but in the scene where Eko takes out his machete, and then cuts of the knots of his beard, I genuinely think he’s terrified.  Everyone else will spend much of Season 2 trying to figure out if Henry is telling the truth. Eko doesn’t even have to hear him to know he’s lying.

There has already been much written about how easily the Others seem to manipulate John Locke, but its worth noting that when Henry starts his mind games, Locke is pretty much open to manipulation. He doesn’t know what the button does but he has to keep pressing it anyway. He thought that he had saved Charlie; it now looks like he lost. He trusted Sawyer and Sawyer used him to take the guns from him. And in the previous episode, Jack forced him to choose between his determination and the button – and the button won.  Honestly trying to turn Locke against Jack is barely worth the head games; Locke has been a loner from the start, and he needs any ally he can get. That he has chosen to place that trust in someone who isn’t trustworthy shouldn’t really surprise considering just how susceptible he was to his father’s manipulations (and we haven’t even gotten near the worst of them)

The crisis that leads Claire into the jungle is averted when she returns to the beach and she is now more devoted than ever towards being with Aaron. But when she makes it clear that the two of them will never be apart, our heart does a lurch. We already known what happened to Rousseau and we know this island is not kind of mothers.