1500th Post: The History of Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions And How The New Tournaments May Be The Most Controversial Changes to It

 

Leading up to the 2022 Tournament of Champions and especially due to recent announcement, long time fans of Jeopardy have been increasingly up in arms in the changes that are being proposed for the upcoming 2023 Tournament of Champions.

Among the controversial decisions have included the choice to have all pre-Tournament events (referred by producers as the ‘post season’) to be run consecutively at the start of the fortieth season rather than have them spread out throughout the course of it as has been the case for decades. It is estimated that this may last as long as ten weeks before regular play begins. The producers have also announced the return of the controversial Second Chance Tournament, which this season let eighteen players who had never previous won a game, for various reasons, compete for two spots in the Tournament of Champions. Finally there has been the announcement of the Wild Card Tournament which will apparently do the same thing for several other players who have won a couple of games but who would not qualify for the Tournament under normal circumstances.

Obviously there is a lot to unpack from these decisions that would no doubt upset the longtime fans of Jeopardy. But I think it is worth taking these decisions in context both in terms of Jeopardy and how the Tournament of Champions has evolved over time before I come to my conclusion about these particular changes.

The phrase ‘Tournament of Champions,’ like ‘Daily Double’ and ‘Potpourri’ are terms that Jeopardy has introduced into the lexicon. It now exists in various formats for other competitions and even popular culture. The sequel to Escape Room had the surtitle Tournament of Champions which just shows how far it has advanced in popular culture. Despite all that, it’s worth noting that like almost everything about Jeopardy over its nearly four decades on the air, it has itself been in near constant flux since the show had its very first in 1985. This has ranged from the amount of money won to when it would air to the qualifications of the participants. So as an expert on the show and indeed this very subject, I think we need to explore thoroughly the history of the show to see just how the Tournament has changed.

From the debut of the tournament in 1985, the basic structure was the same for next thirty six years. Fifteen quarterfinalists would play five games. The five winners and the four high scorers (known as wild cards) would then play three semi-finals and the three winners would play in a two game total point affair for $100,000 until 2001, and $250,000 from 2003 until the present today. While the structure would essentially remain the same for thirty six tournaments, everything else would be in flux, starting with the participants.

The first tournament featured for perhaps the only time in the shows history fifteen five game winners. From that point on the tournament always let in four game winners, perhaps because the show’s producers had already realized how difficult it was to win five games.

Then the show began allow winners of other Tournaments to participate in the upcoming of Tournament of Champions. The first such Tournament is one whose memory have been lost to those but the oldest viewer of the show: the Seniors Tournament. Alex Trebek had noticed that players over 50 were having difficulty winning games against younger participants, so to remedy this the Seniors Tournament was created where players who were over fifty would have the option to compete in either regular play or the Seniors Tournament. The rules followed the foundation of every Jeopardy tournament that followed, with the winner getting at least $25,000 and being able to participate in the next Tournament of Champions.

This Tournament ran from 1987 to 1995, when it was discontinued. No reason has ever been given by the showrunners. My theories have ranged from the idea that the show did not think it was commercial to have a tournament where only ‘old people’ played t0 the equally likely possibility that older people eventually began playing in regular competition because there was a chance of winning more money. There is more evidence that the latter strategy is the correct one because players in their fifties and older have been playing in regulation games and have often done quite well. It is worth noting that many of the winners of the Seniors Tournament were more than capable of playing the show against younger players in Tournament of Champions in their own right: Lou Pryor, winner of the  1991 Seniors Tournament and Marilyn Kneeland who won the 1993 Seniors Tournament, both made it into the finals of their respective Tournament of Champions and competed very well against some of the greatest of that era.

In any case the Teen Tournament was also created in 1987 to basically allow high school students to also compete for the same level, with a $25,000 cash prize and a spot in the Tournament of Champions. The Teen Tournament has continued until 2019 (since the pandemic, it has yet to resume) but it stopped being a factor in the Tournament of Champions in 2000 when for reasons that have never been clear, Teen Tournament Winners have never appeared. This is a bizarre rule because in Tournaments such as the Ultimate Tournament of Champions several Teen Tournament winners after 2000 were allowed to participate and in the Jeopardy All-Star Games in 2019, Leonard Cooper the winner of 2013 Teen Tournament was one of the competitors.

The last major tournament introduced in the early years of the show as the College Championship in 1989. As I may have written in a previous article, Tom Cubbage, the first ever winner of that Tournament went on to win the Tournament of Champions. No one has duplicated his feat since several College Champions have done well in both Tournaments of Champions and future Tournaments. However, there has never been any rule prohibiting college students to compete as regular contestants and several have done so.

From 1985 to 1996, the Tournament of Champions was held every November. Even then, there were fluctuations in the rule. From 1985 to 1993, you could only participate in a Tournament of Champions if you won your games in the season involved. If you won five games in the 1985-1986 season, for example, you would play in the 1986 Tournament of Champions, but if you won five games, in October of 1986, you couldn’t compete until the 1987 Tournament. This could be a nuisance in some cases as in every season, there were always players who were winning four or five games before the November cut off and had to wait a year. Eventually the shows recognized this problem, and at the start of the 1994-1995 season, that restriction was lifted. Steve Chernicoff became the first beneficiary of this: he won his fifth game on September 7^th 1994 and was allowed to complete in the 1994 Tournament of Champions two months later.

Then in the 1997-1998 season, the Tournament of Champions was moved from November to February of 1998. There has been no hard and fast place for it in the Jeopardy season ever since. It has been Novembers some years, February in others, May in still more (in 2004 it aired in September). Usually it gets played when there have been more than a sufficient number of winners to fill all fifteen slots, which has sometimes taken more time than others – and leads us, naturally, to a problem that has slowly but surely become an issue.

In the 1993 Tournament of Champions David Tiemann became the first three time champion to qualify for a slot in the Tournament of Champions. He lost in his quarterfinal match. This fact pointed out just how difficult it can be for a Jeopardy player to win four games, let alone five. That became clear in 1994 when Rachael Schwartz became not only the first woman to win a Tournament of Champions but the first Tournament of Champions winner who’d only won four games in their original run, a feat Ryan Holznagel duplicated the following year. Jeopardy has always been the sort of the show where the best player in a season does not always go on to win a Tournament of Champions, and it may come as a surprise to those who have grown up in an era of super-champions to know such was not the case while  the show capped the winnings at five games – and indeed hasn’t significantly made much of a difference now that they can win until they are beaten.

Indeed the first post Ken Jennings Tournament of Champions in 2006 demonstrated this to an extreme. Of the fifteen competitors, only four  won five or more games at all and five won three games. That year Michael Falk became the first – and to date, only winner of a Tournament of Champions to win three games. And in the 2007 Tournament of Champions, Doug Hicton, who also only won three games, finished second in that year’s Tournament to Celeste DiNucci. Indeed the 2007 Tournament is the only one in the era of after the rules changes where all of the participants won five games or less. And as we know in recent history, Emma Boettcher, the three game winner who dethroned James Holzhauer in the 2019 Tournament of Champions came within an eyelash of defeating him in the Finals of that one.

Now I will acknowledge that such occasions have been more or less aberrations among the statistical norm; in the post Ken Jennings era, it has been extremely rare for three game winners to qualify for the Tournament of Champions at all. But the prevalence of four game winners remains fairly constant even within the era of super streaks. The 2009 Tournament of Champions featured four and in 2021 (to date the last Tournament of Champions to follow the old format) featured five, as well as another three game winner, Steve Moulds. One of the four game winners,  Veronica Vichit-Vakadan went on to compete in the finals that year before losing to Sam Kavanaugh. Four game winners have been prevalent throughout all the tournaments in the intervening years and its hard to imagine a Tournament that would have at least one. ( commented last year about how four four-game winning female champions deserved to compete in that year’s tournament over a six game winner who’d won less money that three of them. At the time, I was unaware of the rules changes that were in effect but even with them, I still believe that had the earned the right to compete.

So when you consider the constant flux within the participants (I haven’t even included the Teachers Tournament) as well as the fact that it is rare for the greatest champions of a given year to win regardless, it is tempting to dismiss these complaints as little more than a variation of the aggressive trolling of the show that has been, if anything, more toxic since the passing of Alex Trebek nearly three years earlier. In addition to the haranguing of the contestants, there has been aggressions towards the relative difficulty of certain clues and Final Jeopardys and barbs against people like Ken Jennings. So one could just consider this frustration against the recent new Tournaments as more barbs from the ridiculously conservative group of Jeopardy watchers and internet trolls.

The thing is in this case, I’m inclined to agree with their complaints and not just as someone who generally has problems with change in a general. All of them have points that are more than valid and in some cases troubling. I will go through with my issues with them in descending order of difficulty.

When it comes to the Second Chance Tournament, I am in complete agreement with those who think it is bad for the show. Those of you who follow my column know that I did a deep dive into the eighteen players who ended up coming back for the Tournament this past November, and that even by the most generous of standards I could only find a justification for two-thirds of the players involved. And even those qualifications had a very big asterisk. A fair amount of the players involved happened to have been in very close matches with many of the super-champions over the course of Season 38, being among the very few to come close to defeating Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, Mattea Roach and Ryan Long. The argument was valid because there were so many super-champions. We’re now nearly two-thirds of the way through Season 39 and there have not been nearly that many and honestly there have been fewer players who came close to doing so to the ones that won.

While I’ll admit the play in the Second Chance Tournament this year was exciting, it does not change the fact that it operated under a cloud that I was only willing to overlook on the idea of the extended gap due to both the pandemic and the number of champions. I don’t think I can justify it as a yearly event, considering how loose the standards were the first time.

The Wild Card Tournament I will have to withhold judgment on until we are made aware of who those participants will be, which we won’t know for certain one way or another until at least the end of the season. I am, however, inclined to more or less agree with those fans who are opposed to it on principle. At best, it is only a slight improvement over the standards of the Second Chance Tournament, and if one of those standards involves players who won three games – well, you might as well let them just qualify for this next tournament without having to play their way in. It’s not like you’d be breaking any rules by those standards. You could see in the vaguest of justifications for a second chance tournament; the Wild Card Tournament just seems superfluous.

As to the idea of starting every season with what amounts to ‘the postseason’, I have the least problems with this as an idea. The hopping around from one month to the next over the last thirty years has become one of the least enjoyable things about waiting for The Tournament of Champions and there’s a lot to be said for streamlining the process. The set up of the Second Chance Tournament immediately being followed by the Tournament of Champions was a highlight of the entire season. That being said, I do understand those would be frustrated by it: fans might very easily become exasperated for having to wait weeks, if not months to see regular play again.

Looking overall at the ideas for these new Tournaments, you can’t help but be reminded of the decision to add wild cards races to baseball at the end of the 1993 season. Purists hated the idea from the beginning, saying that it permanently destroyed the last remnants of the pennant race in a great sport. There is a certain truth to that: while this had led to some great moments in the postseason over the past thirty years, there is something fundamentally diminished about seeing some teams that would finish third in their division end up winning the World Series and the excitement that the owners thought it would add to the game overall has never truly panned out. At the end, one can only view it as a change to give the illusion of competitiveness without fixing the larger problems.

The changes that the producers of Jeopardy are going forward are not quite as drastic but they have the potential to do great harm. It is defeating the perfectly logical dictum of qualifications for tournaments and giving losers not just a participation trophy but a chance to prove they can win by, more or less, defeating other losers. What makes this fundamentally more superfluous is that you truly wonder what is gained by this: some of the best Jeopardy champions are forgotten until they return for a Tournament of Champions months later. Are people really going to tune it to watch people whose sole qualification was that they lost one game to a great player? And I have to remind that was the best case scenario of many of the players in the Second Chance Tournament. Considering that Jeopardy ratings have increased by more than thirty percent over the past two years without any tinkering at all, the logic to much of this escapes me: it is a solution to something that no one ever thought was a problem.

I’ve made suggestions over the years as to ways that could help resolve an unwieldy process with the Tournament of Champions. I don’t think anyone in the history of watching Jeopardy ever said: “This show is great, but you know what would make it better? Having contestants who lost invited back.” To be on the side of the internet trolls, many of whom seem to have some fundamental opposition to any change at all is something that fundamentally repulsing my very nature. But these fundamental changes are ones that I don’t see any benefit for and do a lot to tarnish a brand of a show that has lasted for decades and that was doing just fine with people rooting for the winners.

 

 

Sober But Still A Hot Mess: Single Drunk Female Returns for A Second Season

 

 

Two of the more unexpected comic delights of 2022 will be back in my life by the end of this month. The first came from a more unexpected source than you might think. Last January, I gave a tentative rave to Freeform’s Single Drunk Female, an intriguing comedy series about twenty-eight year old Samantha, who in the pilot episode ends up being fired from her job, going to rehab, moving back in with her mother in Boston, getting wasted after thirty days of sobriety, ending up jail and being forced to go to AA.

My doubts about the series had more to do with one of the key members of the production staff Jenni Konner, most famously associated with HBO’s Girls, a series I utterly loathed but millions loved. Samantha was more or less the same age as the leads in that series and she initially started out as just as unlikeable and initially very hard to imagine you could build a series on. But as Samantha began to make an uneasy march towards her first sobriety, both she and the series continued to grow on be a big way. Sofia Black D’Elia slowly became more appealing as she continued to struggle through a mess of her own making, as we saw her build her friendships with her bestie Felicia (Lily Mae Harrington steals every scene she’s in) her complicated relationship with Brit, whose boyfriend she had crushed on and tried to steal (and was now married to), her complicated relationship with James, initially her sponsor who over the course of a year she became more and more attracted to and the one solid relationship she had with her sponsor Olivia (Rebecca Henderson)

The season finale ended with her in the rare space of being whole and almost everyone around her broken in someone. Brit had broken up her marriage with Joel on their wedding day, and James had gone off the wagon hours after the two of them finally hooked up. That she looked at him as a fellow alcoholic and not a love interest is a scar that has not healed.

It's been six month since the first season finale, and for a change things are going Samantha’s way. She’s got a good job at a web magazine where she seems to be having career mobility and she gets her first promotion at the start of the season premiere. (Because everything comes with a cost, her desk is on top of the men’s room.) She has been promoted to ‘greeter’ and her local AA meeting and is  celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday. In typical Samantha fashion, her birthday is a disaster. Naturally her mother (we will get back to her trust me) does everything she can to humiliate her on the day of her birthday. Everybody gives her a journal as a birthday present. James reappears at her first meeting as an AA greeter and she invites him to her party to try to rebuild her relationship within him even though they haven’t spoken in six months. James gives her a whisky glass from the bare they met at, and then tries to kiss her. It’s hardly a surprise Samantha ends up in her closet before the party’s over.

Things only get negligibly better in the next episode when her new boss turns out to be Nathaniel, who she managed to get fired from her last job in the midst of a drunken rage. She immediately quits her job to protect her sobriety, which Olivia admonishes and her mother uses the words to say: “You’ve made the right choice” in the way that you do when you want to tell someone you’ve screwed up. Naturally she goes back to her job and is put in an even awkward situation, and then comes back to thank Olivia – who then tells her that she’s about to move and can no longer be her sponsor. Olivia has been Samantha’s rock through all this and she doesn’t know how to move forward: the last scene of the second episode is her trying to tearfully sing her favorite song in the same closet she hid in the previous episode.

Felicia is actually doing better and continues to be hysterical; she is now progressing in her relationship to the first point that she agonizes over a celebratory gift. (One of her friends at the salon she works at suggested oral sex, which definitely would have been better than the chose she made.) Brit has spent the last six months since her marriage ended refusing to actually divorce her husband or even tell her parents, something that Joel keeps telling her to do, to the point that he finally forces her hand at a lunch with her parents. Joel is justifiably unremorseful in this, and Brit who was one of the most sympathetic characters in Season 1 is starting to look bad.

Of course the character who you can never look away from is Samantha’s mother because she’s Ally Sheedy. Carol Fink is the kind of obdurate woman who genuinely thinks she has to be the center of everything and sees her daughter’s failings as a reflection on her and  successes that she has never earned. We want to be sympathetic to Carol – her husband has died of cancer a few years ago, her daughter is going through major struggles – but every time Carol’s in the room, you’re amazed that Samantha only became an alcoholic. The fact that in addition to this she seems to have lapped her daughter – she now has a serious boyfriend (Ian Gomez, adding yet another memorable sad sack to his resume) and is now just as likely to be a shoulder to cry on as her daughter is – is another one of the long list of grudges that Samantha has been carrying her whole life. When she announces to a group of seriously bored prisoners that “my life’s not perfect, I still live with my mom” it’s a big laugh not only because we know who Carol is but because we know if the situation were reversed, Samantha would have no problem leaving Carol to stew in prison. This is a funny series in its own right, but Sheedy’s presence truly elevates and I can’t wait until Molly Ringwald, her old Breakfast Club school mate, comes to guest star as has been promised.

Not even I would dare rank Single Drunk Female among the great comedies on television today; shows like Abbott Elementary and The Bear, whose characters are from the closest echelon of working class citizens are light years above it in quality. But the series demonstrates yet again what a great utility player Freeform can be when it comes to superb television if you know where to find it. With its signature comedy grown-ish about to end its run, this is the kind of series that could well take its place as a flagship show for a network that may be the best single source for female led series overall since Lifetime abandoned the field several years ago. And in all honesty, by the time it did, the kind of solid female shows that made the network superb – Any Day Now and Army Wives – had long been abandoned for kind of over-the-top series that still populate its movies. Single Drunk Female might very well be the title of a Lifetime movie someday, but there’s no way it could be as funny, entertaining or grounded as what Samantha is living through right now.

My score: 4.5 stars.

A Tribute to 2012 Movies, Part 2: Bernie and The True Beginning of 'The McConnaissance'

 

Throughout Matthew McConaughey’s run to his Academy Award for Best Actor, the phrase that both he and the presenters kept saying was: “Alright, alright, alright.” No one needed clarification. After all, that iconic line had been associated with McConaughey since his breakthrough performance in the landmark comedy Dazed and Confused which had been released exactly twenty years prior to McConaughey’s Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club.

By that point, ‘The McConaissance’ was in full bloom. There have been many people to this day who seem to think that as fine as McConaughey’s performance in Dallas Buyers Club, he essentially won because around the same time as Oscar season was warming up, the legendary first season of True Detective was debuting on HBO. To this day, viewers are still uncertain as to the overall quality of the series as a whole and the first season in general: what has never been denied by anybody is the extraordinary work by McConaughey as Rust Cohle, one of the most iconic characters in the 2010s. Watching every moment of McConaughey from his legendary description of ‘Time is a flat circle’ and every single interaction he had with his brother-in-arms Woody Harrelson, it remains one of the greatest performances of the entire decade. The fact McConaughey lost the Emmy to Bryan Cranston that year was entirely due to a flaw in HBO’s own branding: while the series was essentially an anthology series, they labeled it as a drama instead and McConaughey ending up going home empty-handed, which would be a travesty had it not been for the fact that the final season of Breaking Bad had cemented itself in the pantheon of greatest television of all time and an Emmy for Cranston was practically inevitable.

Leaving aside whether True Detective helped lead McConaughey to the Oscar (a case that has been bolstered by Mahershala Ali winning his second Oscar the same year as he starred in the third installment of the series) is the fact that the year before the ‘McConaissance was already in full bloom. In fact had the supporting category not been so ridiculously front loaded in 2012, there is a very real chance McConaughey could have taken an Oscar home for either of the two films he made that year.

McConaughey had spent the last several years walking away from the brainless rom-coms he had spent the previous decade making. In 2011, he had starred as a hit man in the NC-17 rated Killer Joe where he agrees to kill a man in exchange for sex with the virgin sister of the man who hired him. That year, he had also played the lead role in Mud, a film by the brilliant indie director Jeff Nichols, a fugitive trying to avoid two vigilantes on his trail. Of course the most famous role he had was in the legendary Magic Mike,  Steven Soderbergh’s now classic film about male strippers. The movie should have been considered something of a joke from the start but the absolute visceral nature of the performance’s – McConaughey’s in particular – made it go above the exploitive nature of the movie.

Indeed, throughout 2012 it seemed more a question of which film McConaughey would get his first Oscar nomination for rather than if. Indeed, that year he won the Best Supporting Actor prize from both the New York Film Critics and the National Film Critics Society for his performances in Magic Mike and Bernie. It is just as likely that so many great performance caused the Oscars to do what they do so many times and split the vote for the films, and that as well as the high quality of the other nominees, led McConaughey to go home with nothing. He had a measure of revenge though, when the Independent Spirit Awards gave him their Best Supporting Male prize for Magic Mike.

It is interesting that he won the prize for that film because Bernie, his other major role, was the movie that got more recognition from the Independent Spirit awards: it received nominations for Best Film and Best Lead Male for Jack Black. And honestly, it would have been more fitting for McConaughey to win for that movie as it was directed by Richard Linklater, the director of Dazed and Confused.

Linklater, like McConaughey, is from Texas and is one of the greatest filmmakers in history as well as one of the hardest to quantify. He has directed the Before Sunrise series, the lowest grossest trilogy in history and almost certainly the best. He has directed one of the most remarkable animated films of all time Waking Life, a movie that Roger Ebert considered one of the greatest ever made and that defies any summarization. McConaughey had worked with him. McConaughey and Ethan Hawke are among the most famous names who have worked with him constantly: they were two of the title Newton Boys the most famous bank robbing team in history and the reason you’ve never heard of them is because they got away with their crimes and lived to a ripe old age. He spent his career working in the independent film industry, but on the rare occasion he makes a big budget film they can be memorable: The School of Rock was one of the greatest children’s films of its era, eventually inspiring a Broadway musical and a Nick TV series,  something you would not expect from the man who also directed Me and Orson Welles.

Announcing Bernie as a nominated film, Black joked that when Linklater had come to him about another project, he had hoped it was School of Rock 2.. I don’t blame him; the film features one of Black’s greatest film performances. And I have to tell you while Black being attached to the project no doubt helped secure financing for the story Linklater planned to tell, I’m pretty sure not even Black could have imagined that when the film came out, you couldn’t imagine anyone other than him as the title character.

No one denies that Black is one of the great comic performers in history: the problem is he has spent far too much of his career doing work that is unworthy of him. For every High Fidelity, there is a Saving Silverman, for every Tropic Thunder, a Nacho Libre. Like Adam Sandler, Black is more than capable of giving performances that have depth that you wouldn’t expect of him – Peter Jackson’s King Kong  and Margot at the Wedding would more than demonstrate it -  but his exuberance always seemed better suited to his work in Tenacious D or animated films like the Kung Fu Panda franchise. Prior to starring in Bernie, his last two live action films had been Year One and the remake of Gulliver’s Travels – which certainly couldn’t have prepared anyone – certainly not the critics – for his work here.

The plot of Bernie has such bizarre characters as its leads and such a weird story that we know even without Linklater having to tell us that its true. Indeed, it is Linklater’s approach to the film that fundamentally confirms that. With the exceptions of Black, McConaughey and Shirley MacLaine, there are no other actors identified at the start of the movie. The film is intercut between scenes involving action with the three leads at the center of them and narration from residents of Carthage, the small Texas town where the events of the film takes place. It is not until the end credits roll that Linklater tells us which of people narrating events are actors and which are actually residents of Carthage that lived through everything that happen. I have to say part of me isn’t entirely certain that Linklater is entirely being fair with us; he has spent much of his career casting films with non-professionals to begin with that for all we know the ‘actors’ could have just been local Texas residents whose experience is in local theatre to begin with. It’s irrelevant to one’s enjoyment of the film because, like every character in a Linklater movie, he draws authenticity out of all of them.

Bernie Tiede is the pillar of the Carthage community. He sings in his local church choir; he directs high school productions and senior pageants. He is liked by everybody in town so much that when he eventually is tried for the crime he’s accused him, the DA has to move for a change of venue to find one because it would be more disposed to believe in the accused’s innocence.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of Black’s performance is the way he channels his traditionally boisterous behavior into pure and utter niceness. He seems like a powerful personality but never an overbearing one. The closest you ever see to him cutting loose comes when he is singing ’76 Trombones’ in the rehearsal for a local production of The Music Man. The rest of the time he’s just pleasant and likable. You would say the only people he couldn’t like him are the dead, but since his job in Carthage is working in the town funeral home, you get the feeling he treats them with even more pleasantness than he does the living.

It is in that capacity that he meets Marjorie Nugent. Marjorie is almost certainly the most disliked woman in Carthage. Her husband was the president of the local bank and was apparently a prince of a man. When he passed away, she took over his job and began throwing loan applications in the wastebasket and offending everyone she meets from the moment they meet her. Bernie meets her at the funeral and behaves like a perfect angel to her.

Shirley MacLaine plays Marjorie absolutely perfectly. Ever since she won her Oscar for Terms of Endearment, she has been a master worker at the level of playing curmudgeonly women who a younger character manages to bring out the goodness in her. Bernie would seem to be the perfect person for this job except Marjorie seems to be the only living person Bernie has ever interacted with who has no heart. No one knows exactly what the real Bernie ever got out of his relationship with her. Throughout their relationship he never asks for anything at all, which may be what attracts someone as wealthy as Marjorie to him in particular. It wasn’t money, though every so often he suggests that she could occasionally spend more of it then she does. And it certainly isn’t sex, although one gossipy woman says they were on ‘a cruise together and were in bathing suits!”  The rest of Carthage doesn’t believe that’s the case, some because they think he’s a little ‘light in the loafers’ and some, like his co-worker, believe he was celibate. Perhaps one woman puts its best that the main reason Bernie stayed near her as long as she did was because he may very well have been the only person Marjorie ever met: “who was too nice to tell her to fuck off.”

At one point, the movie takes a time jump of a few years and at this point, the only person who tolerates Marjorie is Bernie and even his demeanor is starting to wilt. You have to hand it to MacLaine for creating a character so mean and spiteful that you’re actually rooting for Bernie to just kill her already. It’s a credit to Bernie that when he snaps about the last of what have to have been thousands of aggression over the years, he is immediately remorseful and bursts into tears.

It is worth noting that Linklater is very clear that no one discovered Marjorie’s death for as long as they did because everybody knew the victim and no one particularly missed her when she was gone. Bernie goes about his life as normal, keeps giving excuses that most people would see through if they actually gave a damn about the victim, and dismissing the people who worked for her with messages that seem out of character for him but perfectly in keeping with Marjorie. Nor does he spends beyond his means, indeed the only use he makes of Marjorie’s wealth is to redouble his charitable donations and help failing businesses. You really do get the feeling that if Bernie had confessed to killing Marjorie immediately afterward, he might have very well gotten a parade in his honor.

What eventually brings him down is the local district attorney Danny Buck (McConaughey). Everything Bernie is, Danny Buck isn’t. He is a ruthless politician who claims to be a devoted public servant but who everybody knows only cares about getting reelected. He is also the only character who narrates the story who we know for certain is an actor; he’s also the only person we see who clearly has an agenda from the start. While he clearly gets suspicious early on, you get the feeling this is the kind of thing Danny would let go of if this were an off-year.

McConaughey plays just generally likeable characters overall that its interesting to see that this movie as well as Magic Mike, showed just how well he could play utter heels. At a certain point when he discussing Bernie’s sexual history, he adds: “Three of his lovers were homosexuals.” He pauses. “Were.” You get a feeling in a town that is listed by one of the inhabitants as the ‘gateway to the South.’ This is what he finds the most contemptible about Bernie and what he hopes the others will too.

Certainly no one thanks him when Bernie is finally arrested: all of his donations are retracted and all the businesses he saved are foreclosed on. Perhaps that is another reason he wants a change of venue; if the citizens are too lenient towards the accused, they will definitely be too hostile towards his accuser.

It’s worth noting that Bernie is such a good person that he manages to keep up a perfect front all the way through the investigation, his arrest, and the trial. Even the verdict and sentence, as ridiculously harsh as it is (though not by Texas standards) only seems a momentary setback for him. The last time we see Bernie he seems to have moved on the best he can – certainly better than most of us would in this scenario.

After Bernie, Linklater released his masterpiece, the remarkable Boyhood a film that you can’t imagine any other writer-director making. An early favorite for Academy Awards, its momentum eventually curtailed and it lost Best Picture and Director to Birdman, a movie that for all its virtue seems more a recognition of an artistic trick than one of the humanity that Linklater did with his film.

This has not stopped Linklater in his path of making his brand of films that are only unlike in that they bear no resemblance to the previous one. After Boyhood came Everybody Wants Some!, his ‘spiritual sequel’ to Dazed and Confused. Late on came Where’d You Go, Bernadette, another bizarre true story centered on Cate Blanchett playing the title character. He is currently working on the film version of Stephen Sondheim’s cult musical Merrily We Roll Along. This musical famous unfolds backwards over a period of more than fifteen years, so naturally Linklater is filming it in real time starting at the end. His most recent film is another animated moving: Apollo 10 1/2 : A Space Age Childhood in which the grown up narrator is, of course, Jack Black. The film was nominated for Best Animated film by every critics group imaginable but didn’t get nominated for an Academy Award.

Linklater made his first film when he was thirty years old. He has written almost every film he has directed, created the South by Southwest film festival and is perhaps one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I remember a documentary about his films being airing on Showtime in the summer of 2014, right before Boyhood came out. It might have seemed humble considering that everyone might consider it his masterpiece. But Linklater no doubt would have argued its just another film. Unique among all of the movies he’s made, even his remake of The Bad News Bears, is that none of them is bad, or even mediocre expect perhaps by the high standards he sets without even having to try. Everyone says that they want to work with Spielberg or Scorsese but no one says that they want to work with Linklater. Perhaps because in their hearts of hearts, he has to see them in the role. Ending his rave for Bernie,  Roger Ebert says that anybody could have read the story that was the inspiration and known it was a natural movie. “His genius was to see Jack Black as Bernie Tiede,” something I don’t think even Black could have seen when he read the script.

 

 

I'm Not Saying Everything I Wrote About Succession Was Wrong, But Last Night's Episode Sure Made Me Think Otherwise

 

 

Warning: This reviews contains a massive spoiler for last night’s episode of Succession. I imagine by now the entire world knows what it is, but I am going to honor the tradition of all my fellow critics and tell them that if you haven’t seen it yet, you will get a massive revelation.

 

A TV critics hardest job is admitting he made a mistake. Let’s not kid ourselves, that’s tough for anybody but its even harder for critics as I’ve made clear multiple times in this column. And I have been far from immune from these blunders.

I was unable to understand for much of The Sopranos run what David Chase was trying to tell us and became disenchanted with it over time. I initially rejected Breaking Bad because I could not get into the pilot and over three years I viewed the Emmys Bryan Cranston ending up winning as an act of the awards shows laziness than any credit to Cranston and the show. In the latter case I finally watched the series and then I realize, like all of you, what a masterpiece it was.

I have spent a similar amount of time calling certain series overrated because of unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things with no consequences. However, in a few cases, the final episodes of the series did much to resolve my issues with the overarching problems with the show. I still think Scandal was a hot mess from beginning to end, but the two part series finale where Olivia and most of the regulars at least acknowledged how broken the system was and the part they’d played in breaking to the world, did resolve some of my issues with it. I spent the entire run of Ray Donovan watching it with the fascination of a trainwreck in action, wondering what all these good actors were doing in this miserable a series. When the TV movie was announced after the series was unexpectedly cancelled, I couldn’t understand what they hoped to accomplish. Then I saw the movie, and not only did I think it was one of the most brilliant TV movies of 2022 (it should have won the Emmy in that category) seeing it made me rethink the entire show and realize what the writers had been trying to say all along. I think the series was messy, but I admit it may have been due to my lack of comprehension.

This brings me, naturally, to Succession. I have railed against this series for more than two years, utterly incapable of understanding why so many people liked it. I’ve written perhaps more pieces on it than any series I considered overrated over the years and I was fundamentally glad that Season 4 was going to be the last one more because I wanted the series to stop being another overblown Emmy disrupter.

A week ago, however, I had an interesting in exchange with Nikki Stafford, one of the best TV critics working today, and along with Roger Ebert and Marvin Kitman, one of my greatest influences. She wrote a column urging everyone to watch Succession. I wrote was for me a measured response explaining my frustration, mainly because I respect her opinion more than most, I wanted to hear her explanation, and by this point, I thought she might actually answer me.

She did. She said that King Lear was her favorite Shakespeare play, and that she considered all the characters within insufferable as the Roy family. She acknowledged my criticisms were valid, and that she has dealt with similar series that have characters that are detestable. She thought it in this sense a modern day King Lear. I told her that I acknowledged her criticism and that I thought an ending might change my opinion. I didn’t believe it for a minute. I thought at the end of the day everything I hated about the show – the insufferable characters who didn’t deserve to run Waystar Royco would end up being disappointing, that nothing would fundamentally change at the end of the series just as nothing had for three straight seasons.

Then came ‘Conor’s Wedding.’ I was wrong. (That’s an in-joke Nikki will appreciate if she gets it in this context.)

Now to be clear, I still think many of my fundamental critiques about Succession are still valid. I still think all of these people are insufferable and none of them deserve to control Waystar. I think that Succession had aired on any other network than HBO it wouldn’t be the award darling it is. And I’m still not certain that the argument I made in last week’s article about the subtle racism that the Emmys have towards dramas and HBO series didn’t influence it become the successor to Game of Thrones as the HBO Emmy powerhouse.

 But the thing is, after last night’s episode, not even I can pretend that Jesse Armstrong and his fellow writers haven’t answers some of the biggest problems that so many people (and even fans are not alone in this) haven’t been address in a major way. I can’t pretend that last night’s episode wasn’t one of the biggest shockers in the history of television, certainly in this decade. And what I find the most remarkable about what happened is that both Armstrong and Cox in the interviews leading up to the final season and much of the writing in the first two episodes of Season 4 have essentially been telling us exactly what was going to happen – and everybody, not just me, basically dismissed it as red herrings.

We’ve been hearing in interviews and theories that everyone was pretty sure that Logan Roy (Brian Cox) was going to die in Season 4. Armstrong admitted that he’d thought of killing him off as early as the first season and Cox had discussed the idea quite a bit in the interviews leading up to the show. But because so much of the series has been built on the idea that Logan Roy is invincible, I think the fanbase and the critics thought it wasn’t going to happen and if it did, it would happen in the series finale.

Then came the series premiere. Logan is at his birthday party and none of his children except Connor (I’m going to get to him specifically a lot in this review) were there. He looked miserable. He went on a walk with his bodyguard, who at one point he said was basically the only friend he had. For Logan, that was something perilously close to self-awareness. Then he asked him about the afterlife. Logan said basically he thought this was all we got. Pretty big hint, in hindsight, but I’m pretty sure everybody shrugged it off.

Then came last week’s episode and the worst bachelor party and rehearsal which ended with Conor basically arranging it so that Logan would end up in the same room as Kendall, Shiv and Roman. In his ham-handed way, he tried to apologize without apologizing. His children, particularly Shiv and Kendall, absolutely exploded at him. I can’t say for sure, but I think this is the first time in the entire series that they finally acknowledged just how horrible a father he’s been and how messed up he’s made their lives. Logan basically took this in, and then said: “I love you all, but you are not serious people.” Then the three of them basically gave variations on telling him to burn in hell.

Conor then unloaded on his siblings. He was completely hammered but he was more honest with them in his whole life. He told them that everything they’ve been doing their whole lives has basically been a perverted version of trying to win ‘Daddy’s love.’ Because he’s Conor and because their not capable of it, they ignored him.

Now let’s be clear: any other show, the viewer’s alarm bells would have gone off. We’ve watched enough TV even in the Peak era, to know that this is the kind of revelatory moment that generally follows something massive happening, usually the death of a major character. Remember, everybody had just revealed a lifetime’s worth of baggage and abuse to the man who made their lives miserable. But because this is Succession, the viewer shrugged it off. I know for damn sure all the critics did last week. Most reviews focused on the fact that Logan was essentially gaslighting Roman, and that Roman was now a threat to anything Shiv and Kendall had planned.

TV history note. In June of 2013 Game of Thrones aired one of its most famous episodes: “The Rains of Castamere.” Even I, who was never a fan of the show, had been hearing rumors of an event so famous that to even write the initials of it anywhere would come as a major spoiler to anyone who’d read the books. Then in the penultimate episode of Season 3, that episode aired – and we all attending the most infamous wedding in TV history. Let’s not pretend that Armstrong did not have that in mind when he titled last night’s episode: ‘Conor’s Wedding.” Though let’s be fair, this time the wedding actually happened, but just as in the Game of Thrones episodes, that’s not what anyone in the world remember that day for, certainly not anyone at Waystar Royco.

I think I should now admit that while I find every character on the series loathsome and without any redeeming qualities, I have always managed to find a certain degree of sympathy for Conor. Part of is because I have admired Alan Ruck, and he has had a way of making even this repellent character more pathetically amusing than anything else.

I also think that everyone who has dismissed Conor as a worthy successor to Waystar may be suffering from the same major bias as the rest of the Roy family. Because unlike every other character on these series, he has some awareness of just how horrible his life is and how little respect anyone will ever give him. Maybe that’s the real reason he ran for President in the first place: he thought that if he got into the White House, his siblings would at least have to pretend that he was important or at the very least not easily dismiss him.

One of the most painful memories I have of the Season 3 finale is when Shiv and Kendall try to engage in an ‘intervention’ for Kendall. Shiv begins it by saying: “You’re the oldest son.” Conor immediately interjected: “I’M the oldest son!” and storms off. None of the other three children even think of talking to him for the rest of the episode, and its very telling that Shiv confides in Tom rather than Conor about what’s happening at Waystar and what they plan to do. Conor doesn’t even make an appearance in the rest of the finale, and I imagine it never even occurred to any of his fellow children to tell them what happened until weeks after the fact. I really think that the only reason they attended the wedding at all was because they were certain A) Logan would not be there, and B) they saw this as a chance to network their own opportunities. Conor may be the oldest son but he’s still an afterthought. Such was certainly proven to be the case here.

And it’s not just that Armstrong killed off Logan Roy, it’s the way that it was done. I don’t think there’s been a death this genuinely shocking on TV since Will Gardener was killed of in Season 5 of The Good Wife. In both case, there was a similar absolute media silence on this, but the fact that it happened after a decade in social media advances is a credit to everyone connected with the show.

Logan Roy, the most imposing character on the series, who was basically immortal, was killed off-screen and basically died alone. Full credit to all the actors involved in their reactions to this. Matthew MacFayden, whose trying to measure both a balance of sadness and just how utterly screwed he is, while telling that the most important person in their lives has died to a family that’s basically rejected him. Jeremy Strong, trying to find the right words, and still not able to let in one quiet dig at his father before it ends. Kieran Culkin, who has been the most abused by Logan and still the one who clearly loves him the most, in utter denial. And Sarah Snook, broken at first, and truly miserable.

These people are broken so badly they can’t even grieve properly to each other or even go through the proper channels of comforting each other. And then they prove that, at the end of the day, they are Logan’s children because they then go about their business taking the death of their father as if he were just another corporate problem to deal with. They can’t mourn, they have to move on to their next opportunity.

Perhaps in a sense the winner of this whole mess is Conor. As he marries his bride in front of an almost deserted crowd,  he has been yet again upstaged by his family and his father has destroyed his life again. But it’s worth noting that for everything he has put Wendy through, he’s still the only sibling – maybe the only Roy in generations – who has something remotely resembling a healthy relationship (at least by the very low standards of his family) I really hope Ruck gets some Emmy nomination for his work here for that last moment. I saw an expression on his face of pure happiness – something that Succession never lets happen.

Now to be clear, none of the Roy children deserve to run Waystar any more than they did before last night’s episode. What’s changed is now for the first time in their lives, they don’t have the power they’ve had because they’re Logan Roy’s children. It’s pretty clear throughout the series that everybody the Roy family interacted with only tolerates them because they are related to Logan Roy and because they all think he’s invincible. Now he’s dead. And the company no longer belongs to a Roy.

I think we all know that before the funeral baked meats get cold, there’s going to be a major shift against anyone who even had Roy blood in them getting anywhere near running Waystar. I can very well see all of the people who have spent their lives toiling around the horrible Roy clan  - particularly the ultra-competent never appreciated Geri (J. Smith Cameron) negotiating a way so that they only have to deal with Roy children in public functions. Its been very clear in their half-hearted attempts to ‘break free’ in the first two episodes as to just how incompetent the Roy siblings were as a unified force. None of them have ever had a vision for Waystar beyond running it themselves, and I’m pretty sure that something everybody who worked for them knew but was afraid to say because they were terrified of upsetting Logan. He’s gone. They don’t have to pretend to be civil any more (not that they were doing that good a job to begin with.)

The Roys have spent the better part of three seasons trying to negotiate better positions for themselves at the company, and as we all know, for their father’s approval. Even when they wanted to hurt Dad, they thought it would impress them. Now all of their problems have been revealed at the worst possible time for them. Succession might very well end with the Roys out on their asses of Waystar or Waystar completely collapsing. That may have seemed a possibility throughout the series, but as long as Logan was there, nobody thought it a realistic one. Now it very much is.

My opinion on the series hasn’t completely changed, for the record, but I’m not going to pretend that what happened last night hasn’t radically shifted my opinions on what Armstrong and the writers have been trying to do for seasons. And when it inevitably leads the way in Emmy nominations this year as has been predicted ever since, it’s going to be hard even for me to pretend it doesn’t deserve them. I’ll admit part of me will be happier that Brian Cox is pretty much out of the running for Best Actor in a Drama, making the field a lot clearer for Bob Odenkirk. I still want Rhea Seehorn to win Best Supporting Actress but I can’t pretend that Sarah Snook won’t be a worthy adversary. And while part of me still hopes that Giancarlo Esposito or Jonathan Banks can be a winner in Supporting Actor, I can’t exactly pretend that Kieran Culkin isn’t just as deserving. (Yes, I know, there will be other series than Better Call Saul contending, can we at least acknowledge that show still deserves to win more?)

Hell, I may even have to rethink my entire opinion towards Succession. I’m not going to pour over the final season live like all of you fans (I still think Yellowjackets is at least as good as Succession and will be just as dominant at the Emmys this year). But maybe sometime in the near future, I’ll watch the entire show from the beginning. See if I can see what everyone else saw in it now that I have a greater understanding of the whole. I have little doubt I’ll still have my issues with the characters and I have a problem with the lack of forward movement throughout the series. But now that I understand Armstrong did have a plan and was going somewhere, maybe I can be more patient. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to completely reverse my stance on certain shows: I’m not going to mourn the departure of Westworld and I’ll never watch of Game of Thrones. But at this point, when they talk about Succession in the terms of the most daring and greatest shows in history, I can’t give a categorical denial any more. I’ve always admired shows that swing for the fences even if they fail. ‘Conor’s Wedding’ showed that Succession was more willing to swing and it connected.

Lost Rewatch: Adrift

 

As I mentioned before the abduction of Walt was something that was basically forced on the writers in Season 1. The fact that Walt spends much of the season gone was an inevitable consequence and it was just as likely that Michael was going to have disappear at some point. What I find far more reprehensible – and even the most devoted fans of the series found annoying – was how much this destroyed Michael’s character in the process.

This becomes clear immediately in this episode. Michael should be focused entirely on the possibility of surviving – they are, after all, adrift in the ocean and there’s now a fricking shark beneath them. Sawyer is bleeding from a gunshot wound (which he makes works in one of the most gruesome scenes on the series so far) and Jin is nowhere to be found. Yet all Michael cares about is what has happened to his son, which while understandable takes all of the characteristics about him that are already hard to deal with and magnifies them exponentially.

Look at this from the perspective of Sawyer. He just tried to protect Walt from being kidnapped and took a bullet for his trouble. Michael just began to drown and Sawyer manages to pull him out of the wreckage. He then performs a poor man’s CPR and Michael finally starts breathing. In the last five minutes, he’s done more selfless things than he’s done in the entire first season. And the first thing Michael does is start screaming for his son, admonish Sawyer when he tells him to save his energy and do everything for the rest of the episode to blame all of his troubles on Sawyer. Sawyer screams for Jin? He’s wasting his energy. Sawyer tells him he took a bullet trying to save his kid? He was trying to save himself. The shark shows up. It’s because Sawyer’s bleeding. He tells Sawyer to get off his raft, and then acts like a petulant child when Sawyer gives a very logical explanation as to why Walt was taken. If Sawyer were to put a bullet in Michael during this episode, I honestly wouldn’t have blamed him – it would have gotten Michael to stop whining.

At the time of Adrift’s first airing many fans complained that the flashback didn’t really add anything new to Michael’s backstory. I disagree. What it tells us is that Michael, unlike what we saw in Special, did not just go quietly when Susan wanted him to surrender his parental rights, and he was willing to put up a fight. The scene where Michael is being deposed fundamentally shows just how dirty Susan is willing to play when her lawyer asks questions that she knows for a fact that Michael can’t answer because he hasn’t been in his son’s life. The attorney is doing a lawyer’s trick and baiting Michael into trying to say he’s an unfit father when in fact Susan is the bad guy here – she’s trying to take the child away from his father because she knows just how badly this will look in court when it comes out exactly why Michael is filing the injunction. Similarly the scene in the episode is another example of why Susan is a great attorney (but a horrible mother). She knows how bad things looks for her and rather than fight it out in court where she knows she’ll lose, she is attempting Michael into guilting him into doing ‘the right thing’. There is, of course, nothing right about what Susan is doing: we already know her maternal plan amounts to providing Walt with the best nannies. She wants to do what’s best for her; Michael wants to do what’s best for his son. Susan manages to sell him that they are one and the same.

In that sense, the final scene where Michael says goodbye to Walt makes much more sense: Michael did not want to give up his son then any more than he did here. Both on the island and in the past, Michael did what he thought was best for his son and in both cases all they have brought him was pain. That is why we see this flashback so that when Michael collapses in grief at the end of the episode, we understand the full context of it.

Admittedly the more interesting story that is being told is back in the hatch, where we now see what happened after Kate screamed for help. Locke went down the hatch after her and now he and Kate run into Desmond. Henry Ian Cusick gives the first of what will be many extraordinary performances on Lost as Desmond. In this case, the viewer is trying to figure out how this lighthearted man we saw in Jack’s flashback not only ended up on the island, but now is apparently stir-crazy and perhaps not that far removed from actual crazy. In that sense, Locke is the perfect man to talk to him first. (Though seriously, John? Anyone who grew up on a playground knows the answer to that ‘password.’)

Locke ‘betrays’ Kate (though in this case, it’s because he knows she’s more qualified than him to break out of restraints) and both of them start getting a look at parts of the hatch. (Yes, I know it’s a station, but the writers call it hatch, move on.) Kate happens to have been put in the pantry and the look on her face as her urge to escape and her urge to take in all of this food do a battle on her face. Eventually, she does what anybody in this situation would do: she grabs a candy bar, wolves it down and stuffs as many chocolates as she can in her pockets, and then she tries to get through the vent in the wall.

Locke is in the meantime basically telling Desmond about more or less the last season of the show and trying to deal with Desmond’s very strange questions. He handles ‘the world’s still out there’ fine but is baffled by ‘Has anybody gotten sick?” (As we shall learn at the end of the season, those were actually perfectly reasonable questions for Desmond to be asking.) Then we hear that beeping that opened the season, but this time we see the source. It’s a computer that looks like you would have used to play The Oregon Trail when you were in grade school and Desmond orders Locke at gunpoint to type in six very familiar numbers and then press ‘Execute.’  Locke for the first time so far seems incredulous and asks a logical question: “What happens if I do that?” but chooses not to argue with the man with the gun – something we shall see, Jack has a problem with (and in fact we’re about to see it again.) It’s worth noting that Locke genuinely seems surprised that Jack has shown up; for all his talk that Jack believes in destiny and just doesn’t know it, he’s pretty convinced that the latter would prevail over the former. This may be the only time in Season 2 it does.

Adrift ends with the current taking them back to the island, and Sawyer saying resignedly: “We’re home.” This is one of the larger themes of Season 2. The survivors spent much of Season 1 trying to escape the island; for better or worse, they will spend almost all of Season 2 trying to get used to their new home and see what – and who – are on this island.

There is one exception to this rule: Michael. One of his last lines is: “I’m gonna get him back.” This will be Michael’s drive for all of Season 2 and its worth noting he does achieve it. The cost will be any redeeming any aspects of the character, his relationship to the rest of the survivors and by the end of the season, his soul.

The last theme comes in the last minute. Jin appears on the scene with his hands tied to a plank of wood, hollering in Korean until he repeats one English word that they all understand: “Others.” The last shot of the episode tells us that Jin is right – as he knows it. There are other people, and the viewer has everything reason to assume that this is our first real look at the enemy and perhaps that Michael and his son will be reunited sooner than we think. This is misdirection as well, but its one that will take a series in a different direction for much of Season – one that you genuinely hoped the writers would have been more willing to follow through with.

The trailer for next week’s episode reminds us that Lost is the Emmy winner for Best Drama. The fact that this would be the only one it ever received was less of a mystery considering some of the other TV series that were airing around this time.

Rewatch Notes: Ads for the new dramas Commander In Chief, Invasion (both of which initially received critical raves and huge ratings) are prominent. We also see an ad for what the final season of Alias (Sydney’s pregnant!) and the new series will be The Night Stalker. The most interesting film preview we see is for David Cronenberg’s silently disturbing and underrated thriller A History of Violence, which released for Oscar contention but went most unrecognized by the Academy.

Lost Rewatch On VHS: Man of Science, Man of Faith

 

The teaser of the Season 2 premiere is, in a way, an example of what every season premiere of Lost will be until the end: classic misdirection as to where we are and to what we are going to be focused on. The opening minutes of this episode seem to follow a complete stranger whose face we never see in what appears to be some kind of bachelor pad going through what appears to be a morning routine, complete with what will seem to be discordant theme music: Mama Cass’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music.’  (Many of the characters who have tunes associated with them do so mainly out of irony that anything else; this will be true here.) Then there’s this blast, the record goes off the needle, and everything shifts. This stranger moves towards a safe, arms himself, starts looking through a series of mirror until we realize that, yes, we never the island. In fact, we’re right back where we left off at the end of Season 1.

It's fitting that the first faces we recognize this season are Jack and Locke because this episode is essentially about them both, the increasing divide between them as well the commonality that they have but are ignoring. The hatch door is gone and even though Jack has dismissed its original purpose, Locke is just as determined to get down it as before and actually seems bemused at the idea of going back now. He asks Jack why he’s afraid to go down there, omitting the fact that Jack was only interesting in going down in to save everybody. This is still Jack’s priority when he comes back to the caves and he tries to offer assurances he can’t realistically feel that when the sun comes up, they’ll all be okay. Locke then does what he has done before and will keep doing, immediately and deliberately undercutting him.

The shift in Locke’s character in Season 2 is one that has been fiercely debated by fans over the last eighteen years: why did this powerful warrior begin to shrink so much and seem so diminished throughout Season 2? The major speculation held by Nikki Stafford was that Locke was suffering a crisis of faith. I’d actually like to make a counter-argument that, in fact, Locke’s character is more or less the same as he was throughout Season 1 – and it brings up the major character trait he and Jack share: a narrowness of vision.

Locke has always been separate from the survivors throughout Season 1, and none of that changes after the hatch is opened. It just becomes more obvious. Take the scene with Hurley where Hurley demands to know – very reasonably, why John blew up the hatch door after he started running that “We can’t do this.” Locke more or less seems to first laugh him off, and then give an excuse along the lines of: “Maybe because I was tired of waiting.” Similarly when Kate goes after him into the jungle to see him still at the door, he says simply: “I was waiting for you.” While he is lowering Kate down the hatch, Kate shouts out: “Maybe we should stop,” and Locke doesn’t wait until she finished speaking until he keeps lowering her. After Jack gives his speech about being safe not only does Locke start going in the woods, there’s a very dismissive, almost sarcastic tone when he discussed what the sane and safe thing is to do. In later seasons, many commentators will say that Locke’s behavior becomes more detached and crazy. I’d argue that in fact that is completely consistent with what we see in this episode. (I’ll have more to say about other aspects of Locke’s narrowness of vision in future episodes.)

What’s interesting that while Jack claims to be the voice of rationality in this argument, he shares a similar narrowness of vision that Locke does. The only difference is, as the title suggests, Locke’s has to do with faith and Jack has to do with science. This is crystal clear when Jack and Hurley are walking back to the caves and Jack wants to know why Hurley kept shouting ‘The numbers of bad.’ Hurley deflects but Jack says he wants to listen. So Hurley essentially does what almost never happens on this show: he tells Jack every single aspect of his story (most of which we saw in Numbers) and then points out that he saw those same numbers on the hatch. Jack’s first question is: “You were in a psych ward?” He then does what everyone else has done when Hurley has discussed the numbers before and dismisses him. In a rare case of pique, Hurley actually gets pissed to tell Jack his bedside manner sucks. Yet even with this information Jack seems completely unwilling to accept that there is any correlation between the numbers Hurley’s heard in the psych ward and their later connection to the hatch. Locke is determined to believe that everything is destiny, no matter what evidence to the contrary. Jack is just as determined to believe there is a rational one.

And there is a similar level of blindness when it comes to what he believes he should do. Locke goes into the jungle; he doesn’t even bother to move. Kate says she’s going after Locke and Jack waits maybe two seconds before going in after her. (The irony that for a change Jack is the one trailing after Kate can not be lost on the viewer.) Throughout his trek down the rabbit hole of the hatch, Jack just takes all the strangeness in with complete neutrality, even after the key around begins to show a strange attraction. Then Locke shows up with a gun to his head and Jack seems more concerned with proving Locke was an idiot than whether or not Locke (or even himself) gets killed.

What makes this even more interesting is Jack’s flashback. After this episode Jack’s flashbacks will increasingly take on a strident and irritating tone, but this is not the case with the one here. Perhaps it is because, based on the time line we will see, the one here is chronologically the first one in Jack’s flashbacks. (Interestingly enough, I think the flashbacks for all of the castaways we meet in the first season take place within in a very short period of time, a theory I’ll elaborate on as we go forward.) It is clear this flashback takes place before the one we saw in Do No Harm, which based on what we here is at most a year before that.

We see Sarah being wheeled into the ER basically as she described, claiming to Jack that she wanted to ‘dance at her wedding.’ We get some additional knowledge here: Sarah was engaged to someone else first and that in a sense Jack’s marriage was based on that additional sense of obligation. There’s also the fact that Jack fundamentally believes that the operation he is about to perform will ultimately do nothing to improve her mobility.

Christian, as you’d expect, appears in this flashback to ‘chew Jack out’ (from his point of view.) It’s interesting though that his advice is essentially that Jack has to work on his bedside manner and at least try to offer hope, even if, in the eyes of Jack, it’s false hope. Jack scoffs at it, but before he performs Sarah’s surgery, he looks at her and says: “I will fix you.” (This was referred to a few times in Do No Harm; the viewer is still not clear yet how much this truly applies to Jack.

It's interesting that in the scene in the stadium, Jack’s encounter with Desmond is based on the idea that he is trying to face the fact that he can not follow through with his promises. Desmond challenges Jack on this idea, using pretty much verbatim the kind of phrasing Locke will use in White Rabbit, and in a way Jack pays it pretty much the same heed. Even when he has performed the miracle, he has to see it to believe it. The tears and joy that appear on Matthew Fox’s face are remarkable, mainly because they seem to come from a place of innocence in a way that we will never see again.

And in it’s the last minute of the episode that we realize what the true misdirection of the Season 2 premiere has been. We have spent the entire season thinking that this will be the episode that reveals what’s in the hatch after a summer of wanting to know what was down there. And while we do seem to get that, that’s not the real revelation of the episode. Because in the last minute, we learn who was in the hatch from the beginning – and it’s none other than Desmond. That is the biggest WTF of the entire episode and is also critical to what will become one of the most crucial characters in the entire series.

It's also part of what will be the larger theme of Season 2. Throughout the season we will spend a lot of time in the hatch, learn its mysteries and try to figure out what exactly its there for. However because so much of what we see about it seems to have a scientific explanation (however mysterious) we will spend a lot of the episode thinking that there is a scientific explanation for what we are seeing.

The flashbacks, however, will tell a different story one that fundamentally bears out Locke’s point of view that they were all chosen to be on the island. With almost every flashback that unfolds in Season 2, it will becoming increasingly clear to the viewer that the passengers of Oceanic 815 had links between them that they were unaware of, suggesting that they were connected in ways that they did not know long before they got on the plane. During Season 2, publications and online blogs would begin to highlight these links for the viewer who might well have missed them because the writers were deliberately subtle in many of them, and quite a few some freeze-framing was involved if you weren’t paying attention. The action on the island might persuade some that Jack was right about mocking Locke. The action in the flashbacks would convince us that Locke was right about destiny.

 

VHS Notes: There are many ads noting the future premieres of Commander In Chief and Invasion on this tape. Invasion was the first of far too many series to try and building on the phenomena Lost had become. In my opinion, it was by far the best and I still miss it.

Historical Figures Series: The Presidential Campaigns Of George Wallace, Part 3: The 1972 Primary Campaign And The Attempt on Wallace Life

 

Lurleen Wallace had passed away from cancer in May of 1968. George had spent much of his presidential campaign in the space of mourning her. Not long after the campaign ended, he would resume both his public life in Alabama and begin to court the woman who would eventually become his third wife Cornelia Snively, who would not be 25 when they got married in January of 1971.

By that time, Wallace was running for Governor of Alabama for the second time. The campaign against incumbent Albert Brewer is considered by many, including Jimmy Carter, the most racist campaign in modern southern political history. During the primary Brewer received the most votes but not a majority and as is the case in Alabama state law, it went to a run-off. Wallace, who had already proven himself to be a nasty campaigner, was even more so in this campaign.

Brewer had unveiled a progressive platform and had worked to build an alliance between blacks and the white working class. Wallace turned on this using slogans such as: “Do you want the black bloc electing your governor?” and an ad showing a white girl surrounding by black boys with the slogan: “Wake up Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama. He personally maligned both Brewer and his family. His tactics were effective: he narrowly won the Democratic nomination and won the general election in the landslide.

Brewer had used Wallace’s ambitions against him, saying that ‘Alabama needed a full-time governor.” Wallace had promised not to run for President, but the day after the election flew to Wisconsin on a campaign trip. The sole purpose of his run for governor was to maintain his Presidential prospects.

After the 1970 midterms, Nixon’s prospects for reelection looked grim, and while events in 1971 would improve them nationally – his recognition of China, taking the country off the Gold standard, the start of détente with the Soviets –  he still faced a quagmire in Vietnam, and a sharp recession -  and the fact that he had to negotiate with a heavily Democratic Congress not inclined to like him. Considering how narrow his victory had been two years earlier, Nixon knew his chances of reelection were remote if the Democrats could unite around a strong candidate, something that the party had no shortage of. And he was well aware of the threat a strong candidate could be.

Nixon was convinced early on that his greatest threat would be Ted Kennedy, even after the events at Chappaquiddick two years earlier. This thought remains high in his thinking well after Kennedy ruled himself out early in 1971. By that point George McGovern, who had taken up the banner of Robert Kennedy’s campaign, at the Democratic Convention in 1968 had declared his candidacy. But no one was taking him seriously. The favorite of the establishment was Edmund Muskie, a moderate Senator from the once reliably Republican state of Maine, and Humphrey’s running mate in 1968. He had proven himself an able campaigner during that stretch, and in August of 1971 lead Nixon in preferential polls.

A dozen candidates would declared for the nomination, including the groundbreaking run of Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American of either gender to run for the White House. Eugene McCarthy also made a run that ended up going nowhere. Eventually the campaign would come down to six men, McGovern, Muskie, Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, Hubert Humphrey, John Lindsay, the Republican Mayor of New York who had switched parties to run for President and George Wallace.

The primary rules would change the campaign strategies for everybody but few would feel the benefits more than McGovern and Wallace. It is worth noting that, with the exception of Muskie, no candidate planned to campaign in all twenty-two primaries. Indeed Muskie has chosen to run such a campaign because he believed it would prove his national appeal. This idea would break down very quickly.

McGovern would plan what amounted to a targeted strategy of certain states over others. Wallace’s would benefit from two critical factors: first the existence of crossover primaries, which would allow Republicans to vote in Democratic primaries. It also helped that the state of Florida, which had basically been a non-factor in Presidential primaries to that point, elected to have its primary surpass New Hampshire to be the first in the nation. It ended up being second, but that would be good enough to help Wallace’s prospects.

Prior to his campaign Wallace had announced that he was no longer in favor of segregation and his campaign slogan for 1972 was somewhat more moderate: ‘Send them a message.” Underlying this was the fact that his previous campaigns had sent the nation a message and it was one that they were all aware of.

Wallace knew even with the new primary system, gaining the Democratic nomination would be a longshot at best. His best hope was to have enough delegates when the primaries were over so that if there was a brokered convention (a very real possibility) he could negotiate getting the nomination on perhaps the second or third ballot. Few thought this possible, and there is every indication that if this failed, Wallace was planning to run as a third party candidate yet again. Nixon was more concerned by this prospect than him getting the nomination: Wallace’s third party campaign had hurt his ‘Southern Strategy’ and nearly cost him the White House. There was no reason for anyone to suspect it would not do so again.

Wallace’s campaign would also get a boost from an outside factor in January of 1972. In Richmond Federal Judge Robert Merhige had ruled a decision that had to do with the busing of African-American students from predominantly African-American public schools to predominantly white schools until the percentage was proven correct. This decision would be overturned by June, but its message would resonate throughout the Democratic campaign.

Most contenders would follow a middle ground, even McGovern favored an amendment before the Senate that favored moderating the issue. Only Lindsay favored it with no restrictions at all. By contrast, this position perhaps more than anything else would electrify Wallace’s primary campaign.

After Muskie stumbled in New Hampshire, given life to the McGovern campaign the nation’s attention turned to Florida. Both Wallace and Lindsay had determined that this would be the state where they launched their campaigns to national prominence. During much of the leadup, everyone believe that Wallace would probably win but no one thought that he would get more than twenty percent of the vote. The most prominent figures thought that he would barely be able to make an edge between Humphrey and Muskie.

All of them were proven wrong on March 14^th. Wallace swept the state with more than 41% of the vote taking 75 of the 81 available delegates. Lindsay, who finished with less than eight percent of the vote, was dead in the water. Humphrey, hoping to start off strong, finished a distant second with less than nineteen percent of the vote, Muskie’s at 9% was officially sinking, and other candidates like Jackson and Chisholm were running on empty. McGovern had campaigned solely to serve as spoiler and take votes away from Lindsay. He finished with seven percent of the vote and was dismissed. No one seemed to notice at the time.

Though Muskie would try to hold on for a few more weeks, by April he was essentially finished as a candidate. The race dropped to three men: McGovern, Humphrey and Wallace. Wallace’s organization was strong on the ground but not when it came to organizing at the delegate level. In many states where he had strong showings, his failure to file for delegate slates would keep hurting him. In Wisconsin, where he managed to upset Humphrey for second place, he got no delegates. In Pennsylvania, he would finish a surprise second to Hubert Humphrey but would only end up two of the 137 delegates in play. (McGovern who finished third got 37 and Muskie who was effective out of the race, got 29.) On May 16^th Wallace was leading all candidates in the total number of votes with more than 3.3 million. By contrast, McGovern had only gotten 2.1 million and was in third trailing Humphrey who’d managed 2.6 million. But because McGovern’s campaign had been better organized, his campaign had already amassed 560 delegates to that point while Wallace only had 324.

Still it was clear that Wallace had national appeal, he had narrowly lost to Humphrey in Indiana while winning big in Tennessee and North Carolina. And May 16 loomed like a huge day for him: the Maryland and Michigan primaries were that day. He had nearly upset Lyndon Johnson there in 1964 and Michigan was a crossover primary where more than 300,000 had voted for him four years earlier.

On May 15^th Wallace was staging a rally in Laurel, Maryland. Not long after he finished it, he took off his jacket and started to shake hands with the crowds. What he did not know was that a man named Arthur Bremer was in that crowd. The previous November, Bremer had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. A court appointed psychiatrist had declared him mentally ill, but stable enough to continue to live in the community. That January he went to a gun shop in Milwaukee and purchased a snub-nose.

In March, he wrote in a diary that he planned to assassination either Richard Nixon or George Wallace when he campaigned in the Wisconsin primary. He attended two Wallace rallies during that period, then traveled to Ottawa where Nixon was visiting. After realizing that the security was too tight to get to Nixon, he wrote that it was his fate to kill Wallace, though it should be noted he never seemed as enthusiastic for as for Nixon. “I won’t even rate a TV interruption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks,” he wrote. Despite his lack of enthusiasm, he went to Michigan and visited the campaign headquarters in Silver Lake. The Kalamazoo police would receive an anonymous call telling them of a suspicious character sitting in a car near the National Guard Armory. He would be questioned but released. He had a clear opportunity to shoot his target but children were nearby and he did not wish to wound him.

Bremer had been at a previous rally in Wheaton which had turned rowdy. When Wallace refused to shake hands with the crowd, Bremer aborted his plan.

After he finished speaking, against the advice of his Secret Service agents, Wallace began to shake his hands. Bremer pushed his way forward and opening fire, hitting Wallace four times. One bullet would lodge in Wallace’s spinal cord, the others him in abdomen in chest. Three others were unintentionally wounded. Bremer would be tried and convicted in August of 1972. He would be sentenced to 53 years in prison.

Wallace would be in surgery for five hours and had to receive several units of blood to survive. He would be visited by his political rivals Humphrey McGovern, Kennedy and even Shirley Chisholm, who despite the opposition of her constituents in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, believed it was the only humane thing to do. It remains to be known if sympathy was a factor, but the next day Wallace triumphed in both Maryland and Michigan, receiving a remarkable 800,000 votes in the latter state. Despite that, his near assassination effectively ended his campaign.

It is hard to know how Wallace’s campaign could have progressed even had he not been shot. Most of the states that remained were not the kind that contained ‘Wallace voters’ and it was only in New Mexico that he would receive any delegates any all. That said, it is likely much of the South would have been loyal to him had he gone to convention, certainly the five states that he had managed to carry in 1968 – Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Georgia – and perhaps he could have managed to get states like Kentucky and Missouri on his side. Combined with the 324 delegates he’d already won; he could very well have gone to the convention with anywhere between 450 and 500 delegates – more than enough to negotiate if a brokered convention had indeed happened. Considering the anti-McGovern feeling that would pervade the DNC well beyond his actual nomination, one could see him being at the very least a power-broker and perhaps being able to win a spot on the ticket if that had been the case. McGovern had made it clear he would strike no deals with Wallace; Humphrey had not been far vaguer.

And its worth noting that McGovern’s prospective path to victory had included Wallace as a factor. He had been depending that Wallace, when he was inevitably turned away, would run as a third party candidate and therefore draw votes away from Nixon in the South. Nixon was certain who could beat McGovern in a two-man race, but he knew given Wallace’s strength in the south – and just as importantly, the Northeast -   he could very well lose states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Humphrey had taken four years earlier, and struggle in New Jersey, Illinois and Ohio. When Wallace was shot on May 15^th, the Nixon campaign was certain they would win a landslide against any candidate. McGovern was still focused on winning the Democratic nomination so it did not enter into his thinking. There would be far too many factors that worked against McGovern’s eventual landslide defeat that November, but any remote chance he had of winning was demolished with Wallace’s shooting in Laurel.

Wallace would live but would end up being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But initially his supporters were not convinced that his political life was over. The night he was undergoing his surgery, Jules Witcover remember the vigil held by members of Wallace’s entourage: “alternating between the yet unidentified ‘they’ who had gotten their leader, and almost gleefully anticipating the political future.” When word came down Wallace would live, Witcover heard one supporter say to another: “Now we got us a candidate!”

Indeed, not long after Wallace’s speech at the DNC that July, many were certain that not only Wallace would rise again but that in four years the political landscape would be such that the presidency would be a certainty. Indeed, the political tides would undergo an earthquake in the next two years, enough to make many on both sides think this was inevitable.

In the final entry, I will cover the lead up to the 1976 election, the preparation for the Wallace campaign, the actual run and how it a very indirect way affected the futures of both political parties for that election and perhaps beyond in ways not even he could have imagined.