Episodes I Can't Stop Watching, A New Series: Major Crimes: 'Boys Will Be Boys'

 

Before streaming existed there was a time when – almost always late at night – you would be channel chasing. Surfing through hundreds of channels looking for something to hold your attention before you went to bed.  Usually it was a movie, sometimes it was a late night show, you know, just something to kill time.

And then, usually by accident, you found it.  An episode of a series you had watched long ago (or in the recent past) that was now being syndicated on a network you didn’t know existed. You stopped changing channels and with laser like intensity, you watched that channel alone for thirty minutes or an hour.  It had been a show you watched, sometimes with intensity, sometimes your devotion flagged.  Some of these series were among the greatest ever made, some of them merely very watchable.  But for whatever reason, this episode in particular was one of your all-time favorites, one that you never got tired of watching no matter how many times you’d seen it before. It might be a comedy, it might be sci-fi, it might be a procedural. It might even be one of those serialized programs that have made television great in the last decade.  

And it might not be the best episode of that series in the conventional sense – other episodes might have won more awards or been fan-favorites in a way that this episode just didn’t. But it’s your favorite episode of this series and you will never get tired of rewatching it.

The Internet and many publications are always fond of ranking the greatest episodes in TV history. TV Guide seems to do every decade or so; there’s are blogs about online, most of them having to do with fan ratings and they will be broken down often by genre.  I’ve done more than a few over the years. In a way, this series of articles will be a variation of this. In a more important way, it won’t be.

I have been reviewing TV for nearly half my life. I can tell you why an individual series is a classic and why I think some are overrated. I can tell you why I love some genres more than others. I can tell you what series are the greatest of all time. But one thing I have never attempted – and very few critics have tried to do – is what makes an individual episode of television rewatchable. Not necessarily one of the greatest of all time – though some of the ones that will be part of this series will fit in that meter – but why we are drawn to them again and again.  This is true in some of the most iconic series of all time which have several extraordinary episodes. I know that critics and fans consider the ‘Once More, With Feeling’ episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer one of the greatest of all times and it is but there are reasons I would prefer episodes such as ‘Hush’ or ‘Fool For Love’ more watchable. (Are either of those going to be an episode I talk about here? You’ll have to keep reading this column.) Similarly Law and Order has been going on forever and has so many individually great episodes that I seriously doubt anyone can agree on a consensus.  The episode I always am drawn to, no matter how times I’ve watched it already, is one of the very first one they ever did and that is because it’s one of the most powerful.

Some of these series are not classics in the way television views them: they are merely very good shows that every so often produced an episode that, no matter how many years have gone by, I can’t get them out of my head. I don’t think anyone would shows call Major Crimes or Chicago Hope masterpieces but they were capable of producing episodes that were searing or left an impression I’ve never been able to shake.

I may have mainly given reference to drama in this column, but comedies do have the same hold on me. In this case, the lion’s share of them are real classics and some merely underrated. All of them are screamingly funny, even if they aren’t the episode that most fans love when they think of it.

This series of articles will go into detail some of the episodes that have given me the greatest pleasure or fondness over my more than a quarter of a century watching television. A couple of provisos: with one or two critical exceptions, none of these episodes are of streaming series because they do not fall under the same concept as what I am discussing. That being said, there have been a couple of streaming series over the years that have produced episodes that I have repeatedly come back to in my life and I feel they do merit discussion.

I should also add that while I consider several of these episodes rewatchable, if you want to seek them or the series they’re on out, it’s going to take a major effort. Some of them aren’t on streaming, only DVD and in a few cases you may not be able to find them on American made DVDs. I list them here because when the series in question was in syndication, I never missed a chance to watch the episode if I came across them.

And it goes without saying that all of these articles will contain spoilers. It’s a necessity given that the only way to explain why I consider them rewatchable is to give away every reason. Then again, most of these episodes are decades in the past, and the whole point of this series is to explain why you’d rewatch them even if you know what’s going to happen.

Anyway, here we go.

 

Major Crimes:

‘Boys Will Be Boys’

Those of you who have read my blog over the last few years in particular know that I have gone through a major reassessment of TNT’s The Closer. While I initially thought the Kyra Sedgwick series was an undervalued masterpieces, I know consider her character of Brenda Lee Johnson as the prime example of everything that is wrong with policing in America today.  I believe I once considered her a Karen before the term was founded, and that’s actually putting it mildly: she was a control freak, a habitual liar to everybody, who never listened to anyone, including her fellow detectives or her eventual husband, who basically thought her badge gave her a license to put people in jail – and if she couldn’t do that, arrange it so they died rather than face justice.  I often wonder if the Innocence Project could have set up a branch dealing with the cases that Priority Homicide investigated.

I have also made it clear that the spin-off – really, a follow-up – Major Crimes was an infinitely superior show even though it essentially had the exact same cast with a few minor additions and Sedgwick completely absent. And indeed, the writers and creative forces were essentially the same. Why do I think this? Because the moment Kyra Sedgwick left the series, every other character on the show somehow managed to gain at least twenty IQ points and another dimension. In The Closer every character was more or less a cliché, only there to make Sedgwick’s character shine brighter. On Major Crimes, the unit worked as a team with each detective having more layers than they were ever able to show under Sedgwick’s tenure.

There are several episodes of the series I have enjoyed rewatching in the nearly six years since Major Crimes ended in 2017 but the one that has the greatest hold on me, even a full decade after it aired is Boys Will Be Boys. This episode was edgy because it dealt with an issue that was only starting to become gradually discussed in 2013 – gender identity issues – and deals with the very real horrors it can lead to, not merely for the person involved but for the nearest and dearest.

The episode opens with a missing child. A hysterical parent calls 911 and tells them frantically his daughter Michelle is missing.   Major Crimes, led at first by Detective Flynn (Tony Denison) and the videographer, Buzz (Phillip Keene) go to the Brand house. There they meet John, the father (Craig Sheffer) and Michelle’s older brother, Matt. Both of them are certain that Michelle has been the victim of an online bully, who earlier that same week sexually assaulted her in a mall bathroom and posted the pictures online. Buzz looks at the photos and asks the obvious question: “Is Michelle a boy?”

The center of the story is clear divide between the parents about Michelle. John is warm and supportive, while admitting his initial resistance. Anne (Gail O’Grady) keeps referring to her as ‘Michael’ and keeps snarling at John, blaming him for what’s going on. Eventually Lt. Tao, the tech expert tracks down the bully who posted the pictures and Detective Sanchez (Raymond Cruz) chases him down at his house.

 Sanchez is almost always habitually angry towards the people in the interrogation room, but there have rarely been few subjects who deserve it than Lewis Gates. He continuously refers to Michelle as ‘it’, feels no remorse for what he has done, even though it constitutes not just on-line harassment but sexual battery of a minor.  His attitude would almost seem one-dimensional were it not sadly so typical even today.

Provenza (the always wonderful G.W. Bailey) considers a critical missing. Provenza is by far the senior detective on this force and has always had difficulty dealing with so many of the changes in today’s world. Often this is a source of comedy. Here it isn’t. Provenza clearly has an idea going forward what he is going to find, and we’re not entirely shocked when the first act ends and he and Flynn have found Michelle’s body, with her skull smashed in.

The entire squad is saddened by this but Provenza and Flynn, who have been here the longest, very quickly see that there is something even darker afoot. Michelle’s body has been buried. Her eyes have been closed. Her body has been positioned to look like she has gone to sleep. These are not the actions of someone who is the victim of a hate crime.  There is something terribly sad in the way Provenza tells them to search the house. “Family first, as I always say.” Then he orders one of the detectives to go to the Brand home, gather the shoes and bag them separately.

Sharon Raydor, the head of the division (Mary McConnell, who is always incredible) has been doing her level best to maintain authority, but its clear this crime has already hit her hard. When she goes to see her ex-husband (Tom Berenger) and asks him to watch over her foster son, he asks her what happens. He gently says: “So it’s a hate crime.” And she says: “Every crime is to somebody.” Later on, looking over the body, the ME says: “I can never get used to this.” Raydor says: “Let’s hope we never do.”

She then notifies the family. Their collective reaction is troubling. Anne and John immediately begin to start yelling at each other, blaming each other for their daughters death. An infuriated Todd shouts at them to stop pretending this was all about Michelle.  John’s reaction is very strange, at least to the detectives. He wants to see Michelle’s body. The second act ends with him shouting that demand at a closed door.

They find inconsistencies in John’s story. He was not stuck in traffic at the time of Michelle’s death; he was in Santa Monica looking for an apartment. He also moved $80,000 out of his account. Sharon is trying to hit him, so she agrees to his request to see his daughter’s body. Flynn takes John  to the morgue and tries to talk him out of it. John walks in, sees his daughter on a slab, and collapses in grief.  Watching from outside Sharon asks Flynn if that changes his opinion. His response is cold: “He looks guilty. Most murderers break down when they see what they’ve done.”

Sheffer is a good actor whose career started out like gangbusters in A River Runs Through It but never received the same respect or prominence as his co-star Brad Pitt. In the scene afterward, you get a sense of just how good he is and he seems completely numb to the questioning. “Time’s come to a complete stop,” he tells the cops. Then he explains his actions. He was moving to Santa Monica to establish residency in order to change schools for Michelle. She hadn’t wanted to go back after being bullied. He cashed in his retirement fund to pay for hormone replacement therapy.

We now cut back to Anne, who is maintaining her level of barely held contempt for what Michelle wanted, saying that’s it was expensive and not the kind of decision ‘a child whose only thirteen should make’. She says she was just trying to be a good mother. At this point Provenza, who is interviewing her with Sharon says: “This shovel calls your parenting skills into question.”

He and Sharon tell her they found the shovel in the trunk of her car, and that it has the same dirt found on her daughter’s grave. She continues to dig a hole for herself, eventually saying: “I am a good mother.” Provenza then says: “Mrs. Brand, we have reached the point in our relationship where the lying has to stop.” Anne says: “I am a good mother, and I want a lawyer.”

In the penultimate act, Provenza, Raydor and DA Rios (Nadine Velasquez) are discussing the problems with the case. Rios has already proven herself to be squeamish around blood (she attended the autopsy but didn’t look at the corpse). Provenza shows the pictures of the positioning of the body and compares it to that of Michelle lying in bed. Rios looks away and Provenza loses his patience. “No you look at it!”  It’s rare he gets this angry at anyone.  Rios argues that the case will put the victim on trial. Provenza snaps and demands another DA “who isn’t afraid of losing in a good cause!”  He then shows a rare sign of humanity, admitting that he’s having trouble wrapping his head around on it and he understands the jury will too, but he doesn’t care because this child has been beaten to death and deserves justice.

However at this point Raydor, who has been looking at the phone logs of the service, has made a connection that throws everything open – and if anything makes the ending even more heart-wrenching. Provenza and Raydor go to talk with John and Todd (Anne has been arrested and is waiting a hearing). Then Sharon tells him a truth that a mother would know. Teenagers don’t call, they text. But Todd called Michelle’s cell phone nearly a hundred times while she was missing. And then fifty times more after she was dead. “So you could hear her voice again.”

The look on Mr. Brand’s face when this is revealed is heartbreaking. And in a way what happens next explains why Major Crimes was a better show than The Closer was. While Brenda always saw the world in binary terms, every so often Major Crimes would see that there were more levels.

Todd went to pick up Michelle when she called him. And Michelle started telling Todd that she and her father were moving to Santa Monica. Todd unravels saying that everything in his life has been about Michelle and he has been living in the chaos.  This action will snap the final thread that has been holding the Brand family together – and Michelle (who we see in a flashback) doesn’t seem to care. “She thought I’d be happy for her!” he shouts.

I don’t pretend that Todd’s actions aren’t horrific – he beat his sister to death with a bat, and his final remark to his father is singularly cruel. (I won’t repeat it here.) But the viewer can’t help but feel the tiniest bit of sympathy for him, if not his actions. We hear so much about the horrors that those who need gender affirming care need, the violence that they must go through, the prejudice that they have to live through every day. We never hear about the collateral damage that their families have to go through. Is the story of the Brand family more extreme that all the ones we hear about it? Honestly I think it was the norm more than the exception, and it probably still is now. How does a father, a mother, a sibling, live in this world and keep their sanity?   I honestly think the reactions of all three survivors of Michelle’s death are mirror images of what those with the families of gender identity disorder have to live through every day.

I think that’s why every time ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ airs I watch it. We can’t say its any less relevant than it was ten years ago. In a grim irony,  some channels took it out of syndication because some people believed the terms in the episode amounted to ‘hate speech’. That’s the very reason we need to watch it over and over. We need to know not only those people are out there, but so much of the issues that are involved are never easy to deal with.

 

 

Constant Reader Book of the Month July 2023: Roxy by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman

 

 

At this point in literary history the narrative of drug addiction has been told by so many sources that you’d think the reader would have grown as numb to it as one eventually does by a certain point taking drugs.  We’ve heard in non-fiction, we’ve heard it in fiction; we’ve heard in biographies, we’ve read in autobiography; we’ve read in adult fiction; we read it in YA fiction.  You’d think at a certain point we’d get tired of hearing the same story told a different way a thousand times but perhaps the reader is as addicted to the format as the subjects of the stories are addicted to narcotics. You’d think the literary world would have realized their has to be an inflection point for this, if for no other reason then the fact that addiction has existed in some form for thousands of years and no matter what we do it’s not going anywhere. Perhaps the publishing industry keeps pushing these stories as a way of an answer to a government that doesn’t have any interest in coming up with a solution to the problem that doesn’t involve prison. Or perhaps because publishers are making as much money off of these stories as the dealers and pharmaceutical companies are by selling the drugs in the first place.

I’ve read my share of these narratives over the years – who hasn’t? And while these stories are often compelling on the silver screen or the small one, I’ve become tired of reading them over the years. Because they have nothing new to say.  It’s the same story over and over again. The subject takes their first pill or snort, they slowly but surely become addicted, they become strangers to their family and friends, they drain their back accounts to feed their habit; they hit rock bottom; they find salvation – or they don’t and die.  In that sense Roxy  a young adult novel written by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman essentially stick to this formula:  the novel opens with paramedics standing over the body of a teenager who has OD’s, there is a tag applied to their body bag labeled I. Ramey and the story then flashes back two months and we find ourselves looking at the lives of Isaac and Ivy Ramey, two teenage siblings. The formula is pretty standard, we know one of them going to be dead at the end of the novel: the only surprise left is  which one.

Except that’s not entirely how the novel opens. Because the first chapter is told from the perspective of Naloxone, the paramedic drug that is used on overdose patients as a last ditch effort to save them. Naloxone tells the story; he knows how this saga has begun and is trying to fight a futile battle against those he refers to as ‘the others’. “Who only care for you as long as they have you locked in your embrace… They promise you deliverance and reward you…with this.” When the attempt to resuscitate failed, Naloxone curses the ‘soulless clan who brought you to The Party. And that if I had a voice, I would tell your story.”  

The narrative in the story is told from two very different sets of narrators. The first two are Isaac and Ivy. Ivy is the perpetual screw-up, who at the beginning of the novel has been fighting with her scum boyfriend Craig. Isaac shows up to rescue her and injures himself in the process. Their parents have determined labels for them: Ivy is the perpetual loser; Isaac is the ‘good’ son.  They spend half of the time yelling at Ivy – and as we see, the rest of it yelling at each other.  In a very real sense a lot of what happens in this novel is indirectly their fault.

The second part of the story – the part that in a way is revolutionary – is told from the perspective of Roxy and Addison.  I imagine the idea of the allegory is something that most teenagers – and indeed, most adults in this era – have all but forgotten.  In a very real sense Roxy is essentially a version of Pilgrims’ Progress told in the way of addiction. In many ways, particularly the names of the characters here, it isn’t subtle. In a much more important way, it doesn’t matter because by choosing to tell the stories of addiction by anthropomorphizing the drugs  it tells an angel that a thousand tell-all biographies can’t.

As you’ve probably guessed Roxy is Oxycontin. One of the hippest members of The Party. Roxy spends her life bringing ‘plus ones’ to The Party’ which has the appearance of the hippest club that all addicts want to come to but is actually where they go to die. The rest of the members are not subtle either but when it comes to addiction sometimes you need to hit your audience over the head. Al is the bouncer, who hands everybody a champagne flute “it’s how we shake hands’, always slurring his words. Crys is small and unassuming, but up close he’s larger than life.  Charlie and Dusty are the Coke brothers. Molly is always floating around. Hiro is the back office and rarely comes out. Mary Jane doesn’t get invited that much since she went legitimate. Lucy is always flying around, never quite there, talking about transcendence.  There’s also Vic, who travels in similar circles with Roxy but neither likes each other.

Addison is, as Roxy puts in when we first meet them, came up with Roxy with similar ideas. “Born to help others rather than help themselves. The problem is Addison never outgrew that stifling idealism.” He works mainly with children and adolescents and mainly works with his ‘older sister’ Rita. Addison is jealous of Roxy because as he puts it “their upline gets to do whatever they want” Rita seems indifferent to this but Addison is in part jealous because he knows how these things work. “They gorge themselves on what we grow.” Rita says that it is not their concern, but it is worth noting that the writers never let us forget the repercussions. At one point in the novel Addison is watching a student of his play chess and then sees a homeless man who was once a prodigy of his, demolish a teacher. It takes a moment for him to remember his name.

Early in the novel Addison makes a wager with Roxy that he, without any help from his ‘upline’ can bring someone to the Party, something he has never done. Eventually the two make a wager: if Addison can bring someone to the party, Roxy will leave it for one year.

By this point Isaac, who injured his ankle during his struggle to help Ivy, has taken his first Oxycontin. His grandmother, worried about his pain, gave him one. In a sense Isaac’s story is the more familiar one, though it is slightly different. Isaac wants a career in science but his grades aren’t good enough on their own. He is a skilled soccer player, but the injury has hampered his ability to play. He takes the Oxy to recover quickly.

Ivy’s story is more interesting. She travels in a worse crowd than Isaac does, who has friends who care about him. She’s in danger of flunking out of high school and she wants to help herself. She starts taking Adderall in order to help her concentrate and improve her grades. It works so well that she’s soon organizing very extensively and can barely sleep. She begins drinking heavily to balance that effect.

Roxy’s approach is essentially that of a seductress, trying to convince Isaac to do the wrong thing if it makes him feel good. Addison tries a different approach, trying to convince her to keep using her to improve herself. In a sense, he does the right job: he convinces her to finally dump the boyfriend who has destroyed her life and improved her grades. But his path is far harder to navigate than Roxy’s because there are far too many more tempting drugs. Throughout the book he goes to desperate lengths to make sure that the Coke brothers and Crys do not lure her in. This is not out of idealism but to win his bet.

I found myself responding to Roxy not merely because of its approach but because the Shustermans have a wonderful way of playing with language and fonts that I did not realize – and indeed, the reader may not until they’ve gotten several chapters in. The chapters are all titled, but several of the letters within the title are written in bold type. Sometimes its obvious, sometimes its subtle. Both the title and the highlighted word have a critical message to the theme of the chapter.

There are also interludes in which several of the secondary characters who we see mentioned in the world of Roxy and Addison keep showing up. Mary Jane is paying a visit to a reverend who is recovering from cancer (he is having visits with Kimo, as she puts it) and even as he recovers his nature causes him to curse her. Charlie and Dusty are having session with a rock star. Lucy is attending a party of Ivy’s friends. Phineas, who all the other drugs dislike, is at a nurse home where Isaac’s grandmother is residing. Vic ends up talking to Isaac at a critical point in the book. It may not exactly be a spoiler that the final visitor is named Hyde, and that if you read his entire chapter carefully there’s one last hidden message for the reader.

All of these interludes serve a purpose to the larger story, some plot related, some just as character related. I found the narrative of Phineas the most fascinating because ‘his cousins despise him’  and consider him a vulture’. The irony is, unlike Oxy, he does not destroy but brings relief. He is also aware of what he is, that he has been there long before most of them and has no illusions for what he is. In a way, he is the most sympathetic of the entire group.

There is also the awareness of the danger that they live in. Throughout the early stages of the novel, there is reference to what happens when a member of the party goes to far. “Remember Lude’ keeps coming up over and over. It is likely that the younger audience may never have heard of Quaalude. Roxy is told of him after a visit with Hiro who is upset with how much times she’s spending with Isaac. Finally late in the novel, she climbs a plant that leads off the ceiling and to the roof. Lucy comes with her, in her own dazed way, and both of them are increasingly terrified. What they discover is the circle of hell that so many pharmaceuticals fear. A flash of lightning reveals dozens chained to roofs, and the metaphor is heavily religious. Lucy finds herself playing Dante as she recognizes some old friends. The metaphor should be enough to warn Roxy of her inevitable fate but in a horrible way it spells doom.

The saga of the Ramey siblings is conventional but no less interesting.  Isaac’s addiction manages to escape the interest of his friends and family because he’s the good kid. Paradoxically, Ivy’s problems are ignored because the people she’s improved so much that she doesn’t want to hang out with her friends any more.

 In the last two days of the novel, everything comes to a crisis. Isaac finds himself realizing the horror of his situation and tries to escape – and then finds himself looking for drugs in the last place he would have thought. Ivy’s fate is different when she is ironically blamed for something she did not do and goes on her own spiral, where she avoids the obvious pitfalls but comes back to find everything that is wrong with Isaac. That the two of them could have saved each other had they been the people they were before the novel began is just one of those ironies of addiction.

I won’t reveal which Ramey sibling ends up going to the Party and not leaving, even though you may think you know the answer in advance. The more interesting parallels are the stories of Addison and Roxy.  Addison’s path is one more borne of desperation, chafing at his nature and essentially wanting to be one of the cool kids that so many of us do. Roxy’s is more interesting and sadder.

In both cases, Addison and Roxy have conversations with Ivy and Isaac respectively.  This is actually logical, as how many times we’ve heard variations on the theme that the voice of the drug is louder than anything else. What Roxy does is argue that this is not a one-way street. That the drugs themselves interact, may even be capable of feeling something for their charges. In a real sense, Ivy and Isaac have as much a hold over Addison and Roxy as they do on them.

The ending is devastating, not only because we see the death of a teenager who had a bright future but was lost to addiction. In the final pages we see something infinitely sadder.  For one horrible moment, Roxy comes to realize her true nature and we see that in her own way, she’s trapped in a cycle as vicious as the addiction that drives so many others.  She realizes her inevitable fate and it’s horrible but not as horrible as how we see her the final pages. Roxy is an incredible read for all of the reasons I’ve already discussed but there’s something more astonishing that I felt when it was over. For the briefest of moments, I felt sympathy for the personification of one of the leading causes of the opioid crisis.  Perhaps some people will take a different way to view it as a happy ending when they consider Roxy’s inevitable fate. For the millions whose lives have been destroyed just like the Rameys have been, it can’t come soon enough.

 

Lost Episode Guide on VHS: The Glass Ballerina

 

There are many complaints about Season 3 of Lost  that I don’t think have any merit. There is one, however, that holds a considerable amount of weight, particularly in the first six episodes. During that period and indeed much of Season 3 as a whole, the writers had a great deal of difficulty finding a balance between what was going on with the Others and what was going on back on the beach. This was slightly understandable at the start of the series considering how divided the Losties were at the end of Season 2. The problem was they never really managed to adjust for almost the entirety of the season and it greatly hurt the dynamic of the show.

This is particularly telling when you consider the controversy that has now arisen about the set of Lost never treating minority characters well throughout its run. This opinion was picked up by many fans during the original season even without knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes. In her Season 3 volume of Finding Lost Nikki Stafford remarks that even though Jin and Sun were put at the center of the second episode of the season, they would essentially be non -factors for much of the first half of the show. And Sayid, who had been one of the driving forces of the show the first two seasons, is far more in the background in Season 3 than he has been before (and as we shall see, in the second half of the series). This is particularly maddening because of all the potential that the central situation of The Glass Ballerina has.

Sayid, Jin and Sun are the most prominent foreigners in the cast, yet until this point they have had next to no interaction. This is in part because Sayid is fluent in English and Jin and Sun are not (at least that’s what we thought at the start of the series) but even after Sun’s fluency was revealed, Sayid has had almost no real contact with them, either on their own or as a couple. This is in part because they represent separate functions on the island. Sayid is a soldier and has skills that are more useful towards their survival while Sun and Jin do not seem to have those kinds of skills. This is a gross underestimation of their value; Jin’s ability as a fisherman has kept the island fed, Sun’s ability as a gardener has been invaluable to Jack and she was vital to him during the failed effort to save Boone’s life.  Jin was critical to the second raft being built and was willing to potentially sacrifice his life for the greater good. But despite that Sayid – and much of the rest of the survivors – tend to rank them in the background with most of the other women and characters like Hurley, who seem more for comic relief then their inherent value. Sayid is only now interacting with Sun and Jin because he does not know how to sail.

Critically though he clearly needs their help going forward, Sayid spends much of the episode lying to both of them about what his true actions are. Ironically he seems to have the same opinion of them as so many of the white people on the island because he dismisses their demands and doesn’t seem to realize that Sun knows he’s lying until she calls him on it – and that Jin might be an asset until he reveals he’s more savvy then Sayid thinks.  You could make the argument that Sayid is doing to try and keep them safe – until you hear exactly what his plan is.  We’ve known just how brutal an individual Sayid is in so many of his flashback and his interactions with ‘Henry Gale’ but there’s something truly frightening about him when he reveals to Sun that when the Others come he intends to keep two ‘and kill the rest’.  In this moment we realize that Sayid is just as angry at the Others as Jack is and may indeed have gone along on this mission with as much determination for revenge as Jack did.

The critical element of The Glass Ballerina is deception. As we see in the flashbacks, it is becoming increasingly clear that Sun has been just as capable of lying to protect herself as the rest of the survivors and even at a young age was capable of lying to hurt others to protect herself.  It does not come as a shock in this episode when we learn that she was having an affair with Jae Lee and it has apparently become serious enough that she wants her to leave Jin for him.  Then, however, Mr. Paik shows up at the hotel and learns the truth (though knowing him, he has probably known for a while.)

Mr. Paik is considered an unquestioned villain in Lost lore for good reason; we know the things he’s capable of and we can see just how big a monster he has been to Jin. But it’s interesting to watch the interaction he has with Jin. For the only time on this series, he seems genuinely upset.  Perhaps it is because he considers his daughter’s infidelity a stain on him; maybe he realizes that there’s something deeper going on with it and he feels guilty. Whatever the reason he seems in real pain when he expresses that he needs Jin to ‘end it’. When Jin takes a stand and actually intends to quit, Paik is angry but he actually seems compassionate to Jin. This is the first time he calls Jin ‘son’; does he really think or is it a manipulation?

The scene between Jin and Sun is painful because Sun seems frightened in a way we haven’t seen in the flashbacks. (I’m not sure when this flashback takes place exactly, but I think it’s not that long before Sun starts deciding to make her escape from Jin.) Sun makes an effort to try and persuade Jin to run away; the same argument Jae Lee made. Jin is conflicted, perhaps because he fears Paik, perhaps because he’s thinking the same thing.

The scene in the hotel is frightening, particularly because there is little doubt Jae Lee is sure Paik has told Jin what he has done and because Jin doesn’t know but still seems capable of violence. It’s never clear what happened immediately afterward, but I have always assumed that Paik did not trust Jin to do what he was told and sent another thug to finish the job. The fact that Jae has the necklace he was going to give Sun in his hand is one sign, and the way Paik speaks about his jumping as ‘he must have felt great shame’ convinces me that’s what happened.

Now in a similar situation Sayid has underestimated both Jin and Sun – and critically, so have the Others. Colleen Pickett is the leader of the operation to find the boat, which has Ben very concerned when he hears about it.  Part of me wishes that Colleen had stuck around more than this episode. In what amounts to two scenes Paula Malcolmson (yet another Deadwood alumnus) demonstrates the ferocity that she brings to almost every character she plays.  She doesn’t seem to have much use for Juliet and while she takes Ben’s orders, it really looks like she would have done it without them.

Colleen’s speech to Sun is another one that speaks to the smug certainty that the Others have and will continue to demonstrate throughout Season 3. Again she takes the party line that ‘we are not the enemy’. This is in contradiction to everything that they have done, and I’m pretty sure that they have no intention of letting Sun leave of her own volition. (If they’d known she was pregnant, she wouldn’t have left either.)  The thing is the Others seem certain that because they have read the files on the survivors they know exactly what they will do, but they’ve already been proven wrong on this before and will be again. Colleen thinks that, even though the Others clearly know who her father is and that she is capable of deception, that Sun isn’t a killer. Sun proves her wrong and it cost them.

Now as much Collen argues that they are not the enemy, we’ve already seen a lot of evidence that many in their camp view them exactly that way. Indeed, in this episode we are reacquainted with her husband Danny who we met very prominently when he abducted Michael and was pretty much a bastard then.  It’s fitting that he serves as essentially a prison guard in this episode; everything we will see of Danny is that of a man who is brutal, views no one with respect (we’ll see later on that this also applies to some of his fellow Others) and is just itching to take out his rage on his captives. He’s already showing hostility towards Sawyer, for reasons that are never clear,  and Sawyer is more than willing to return the favor.

It's becoming clear at this point that whatever reasons the Others arranged for this kidnapping, the only one they really seem to have wanted is Jack. Kate and Sawyer are more or less given the kind of busy work that the Others themselves are doing and its just as clear that they were fundamentally taken together so that one’s safety could be used to manipulate the others. (Ironically, that’s exactly why Sayid intended to take two hostage.) This is Sawyer and Kate’s first interaction with Juliet and its interesting looking at her reaction to them compared to Jack. Sawyer is clearly holding a grudge from the season premiere and when he makes his break, he is only stopped by Juliet pointing a gun at Kate. He isn’t underestimating Juliet at all: he very bluntly tells Kate that Juliet would have shot her without a second thought.

Danny isn’t the only familiar face we see. Alex shows up while Kate is working and is clearly concerned about what has happened to Karl. Even more than with Juliet, it’s clear she not onboard with what’s going on (which given that she is almost certainly Rousseau’s daughter is understandable). There’s something poignant about when Alex asks about the dress Kate is wearing and tells her it used to be hers (and its going to sting even more when we learn exactly what her connection with Ben is) Sawyer and Kate think that they might be able to maneuver around the Others: they don’t know that they’re being watched.

For all of the action going on with the boat, the great scene of the episode comes when Ben walks into the prison he’s holding Jack in.  Ben tries to put a humorous spin on the situation (there is an irony to it) but he has a considerable credibility gap and we don’t exactly blame Jack for barely tolerating it. Jack has every reason to treat Ben with contempt and not believe a word he says. (Ben says he’s going to tell the truth but when he introduces himself to Jack, he’s lying about something very important.) That said when Ben asks Jack: “Why wouldn’t we leave?” it’s actually a relevant question, one that none of the survivors have asked themselves in two seasons.  Jack is sure Ben is lying, and understandably doesn’t take Ben seriously when he tells him the Red Sox have won the World Series. (I know what we already know about Christian’s saying it and how Jack has decided to take it, but I’ll level with you: in 2004, if I’d been in Jack’s situation and I’d heard Ben say that the next words out of my mouth would have been: “Who’d they beat? The Cubs?”)

 In her book Stafford tried to argue that Jack’s reaction to seeing the final out of the World Series was someone who can not accept his world view anymore.  I didn’t buy that at the time, and indeed Jack’s view wouldn’t start to change significantly for more than a season. I think that Jack’s reaction was that of the rational man he is. He’s the prisoner of the Others, the people who he’s spent the last month trying to protect his people from. For the last two months, he’s been arguing essentially that this is where they have to survive and hasn’t really put up much of  an effort for rescue. He truly believes this is where he will spend the rest of the life. Now for the first time, he gets a real sense that home is just on the other side of that glass. He knows that the man now offering it to him spent weeks lying to him and is the leader of  a force that has done everything to keep them on the island. He knows he can’t trust a word Ben Linus says.  But he wants to go back home. He knows this devil is going to offer him a deal. The question is, what will it be, can Jack do it, and, most importantly,  will Ben keep his promise?

Lost Episode Guide: A Tale of Two Cities

 

A lot of people have problems with what would be the first part of Season 3 of Lost in particular. I think a large part of this reason is that fans of the show had not yet caught on to what the writers did in the teasers of every season premiere since the second one.  In the opening teaser, Cuse and Lindelof would essentially tell us without telling us where most of the focus of the season was.

In Season 2 we opened in an unfamiliar location that appeared to be some kind of bachelor pad in the 1970s.  Then there was an explosion, the figure in the pad began to prepare himself and we realize that we were still on the island and in fact we had been in the hatch whole time. The writers told us effectively that Season 2 was going to be predominantly about the hatch and everything connected to it and while there was considerably more to it than that, we did spend the lion’s share of the season in it.

The teaser of A Tale of Two Cities takes a similar approach. We open on the eye of an attractive blonde woman who appears to be a modern house, but she’s also listening to a retro classic Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’. She seems upset, but goes about her business, burns her hand on her cooking and then sets up for a book club. When she opens the door, we think we’re in the suburbs.  As the book club goes on, the woman involved seems to be taking abuse about the novel in question – I wasn’t sure at the time, but it turned out to be Carrie – and she seems particularly upset when she hears ‘Ben’ wouldn’t read this on the toilet. Then just as she reaches her threshold, the house starts to shake and it looks like an earthquake. Then everybody starts running outside. Ethan comes out from under the house, we see Goodwin appear and out of his own home comes – Henry Gale.  They look in the sky and we see Oceanic 815 split apart in the sky.  Everyone looks stunned at this, but Henry snaps into authority, orders Goodwin to run to the beach and Ethan to go to the fuselage.  He makes orders to not get involved and to make ‘lists’.  Then he looks at this woman who we now know is Juliet and says: “I guess I’m out of book club.”  The leader is Ben, and just to make sure of it, we now realize we’re going to be spending much of the season with the Others.

Juliet is, with the exception of Kate, the only female character on the series who from beginning to end is fully formed, has a meaningful character arc and who seems completely realized.  Yet for reasons I never comprehended, she received the same amount of hostility that Kate did over the series. There is clearly logic to this – we know up front Juliet is ‘One of Them’  and based on everything we’ve seen in the first two seasons, we have absolutely no reason to be anything other than evil incarnate. (With one exception and we’re going to see her again real soon.) But the writers make it clear from the moment we first see Juliet that she seems like an outsider here. We know nothing of her backstory and won’t for a bit but based on everything we see in the teaser; you get the feeling that Juliet seems as unhappy to be on the island as all of the Oceanics.  She might live in a house, having electricity, a gas stove and even a book club but we get the feeling right away that she seems to be a prisoner as much as the three people who were taken captive in the Season 2 finale.  Her cage is just a little nicer.

Like so many fans (and critics) I instantly trusted Juliet, though in this case it was because I knew the actress who played her. Elizabeth Mitchell had been working in Hollywood for awhile before she appeared on Lost – she had played Kim Legaspi, the psychiatrist who eventually helped Kerri Weaver realize her sexuality on ER (still a big deal when it happened in 2000) and had played the eventual Mrs. Claus in the sequel to The Santa Clause. I’d been a fan of The Lyon’s Den, an intriguing NBC legal drama that had been cancelled after merely eight episodes and I’d seen her in intriguing guest roles on House and Boston Legal. Her work as Juliet on Lost, however, would launch her to the fame she deserved and she has worked on several brilliantly done series over the next decade.

Perhaps that is the reason, even though I should have known better, that I thought Juliet was trustworthy from the start. I kept thinking that even through her conversations with Jack when, like him, we should have thought she was the enemy no matter how sympathetic she seems. We definitely should have thought it her first encounter with Sawyer after his attempted escape when she says: “Hey” and that tases him without a second thought.  We should have thought that when she calmly looks at Jack’s file (the first sign we have gotten that the Others are not so much omnipotent but connected to the outside world) and tells him his entire life story.

What made me believe that Juliet was a good person was her interactions with Ben.  There’s clearly some hostility between them in the teaser and it becomes very clear when Jack has a knife to Juliet’s throat and Ben seems indifferent to her being killed. (Granted both he and Juliet do know something Jack doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that when Juliet tries to escape drowning, Ben essentially locks the door in front of her.) And its very clear in the final scene after Juliet has managed to have broken Jack a little and Ben tells her he’s done a good job. Juliet just says: “Thanks Ben” in a tone that’s ice cold.  Whether she hates herself for what she’s just done or whether its because she doesn’t like that Ben’s happy she did it isn’t clear, but we can tell the last thing she wants in Ben’s praise. In hindsight, this is the first clear sign we get that Juliet is not onboard with anything going on.

After the teaser we spend much of the opening finding each of the three captives. Each wakes in an unfamiliar place. Jack fins himself in a glass cage, sees an open door and immediately tries to walk to it before he bangs into a glass wall. He then bangs on it, starts yelling and hanging from the ceiling. (We’ll get back to him.) Kate wakes up in a bathroom, where Tom is around and asks her to shower, and then provides her with a change of clothes. Sawyer wakes up in an actual cage – but he’s not alone. There’s another cage across from him, and another person in it. The cage is clearly designed for a scientific experiment, which Sawyer finds out the hard way. Eventually the kid – who we find out is Karl – helps break out of the prison and Sawyer and he go their separate ways. The jailbreak ends up with both being recaptured, Sawyer is returned to his cage and Karl is forced to apologize before he is hauled off to parts unknown. (We will not find out who he is or where he is, but its worth noting near the end of the episode we get a very big hint, particularly if you listen very hard to the noises when Jack wakes up. We will hear them again.)

Kate gets handled with kid gloves when she is taken to see Ben.  Ben provides her with a nice breakfast and is polite about it when he tells her to handcuff herself. However Kate hasn’t started eating when he starts the head games. “Why did you mention Sawyer before Jack?” he says casually when she asks for her friends.  Ben clearly knows something about the triangle which he couldn’t have learned while he was in the hatch. And when Kate asks why she’s been brought her, he is honest – for Ben.  He says that he wants to give her a nice memory because the next two weeks will be very difficult. He’s not telling the truth about the timeline, but he’s not kidding about the rest of it.

By this point in the series’ run, a lot of people were frustrated with Jack’s character and his behavior going forward would, if anything, make people think less of him. And it’s hard not to watch him in this episode and not see why they’d be irritated. It was one thing to watch Jack being self-righteous, dismissive of everyone’s concerns as immaterial, refuse to share information and be a total jerk in Season 2. In a very real sense that attitude more than anything helped lead him to this very point.  But at the very least (and it is least) it could be justified by the fact that he was in charge.

Now Jack is being held prisoner. He has no leverage to negotiate; nothing to bargain with. Juliet has all the power, and she spends most of the episode trying to be polite to him, offering him food and water, telling him that he is dehydrated and that its in his interest to eat and drink. And Jack spends the entire episode somehow acting like he’s in charge, that somehow he can irritate Juliet into giving him information. Even when Ben tells him that if Jack opens the door he will kill them all, he still does it.  I have to tell you when Juliet clocks him near the end of the episode, I was on her side: Jack’s behavior deserved more than a punch in the face.

Many people argue that the flashback we see in this episode is another one in the long saga of Jack flashbacks that don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about him, particularly in relationship to Christian.  I thought so for a long time myself, but I’m now inclined to think otherwise. We’ve seen in the last two seasons that Jack is stubbornly self-righteous, but this is the first time we’ve gotten a real sign of his obsessive nature and how it blinds him to reality.  Sarah has made it very clear she is leaving Jack, but Jack wants to know who she’s leaving him for. He calls every number on her cell phone. He even suspects his own father of infidelity and refuses to listen when Christian tells him to let it go. And you really wonder what Jack is hoping to accomplish. What good does he think will come of this? It won’t change Sarah’s mind and it won’t bring him any satisfaction.  Even when Sarah comes to see him in the final flashback, it’s as if he thinks that after everything he’s done, this will change her mind.

It's also the first sign we’ve seen of Jack’s utter determination not to believe the evidence of his own eyes and for the first time, we actually question how much of the problem between Jack and Christian is in Jack’s own head.  When Christian tells him how bad he is getting, Jack doesn’t believe. When Christian tries to mitigate things by saying he knows something about being obsessive, Jack calls him a drunk. He follows Christian in his surgical scrubs to an AA meeting and berates his father in front of them.  Even when he hears Christian has been sober for 50 days, he mocks this accomplishment and actually seems like he’s a drunk himself.  There’s a very good chance that after this interaction Christian crosses over from being a functioning alcoholic to one that can barely exist: it certainly sounds that way based on Sarah’s tearful description of his phone call. When Sarah tells him to look on the bright side “now you have something else to fix” there’s a rage in her voice that we’ve never heard from her before.  And the irony is, of course, that Jack has given up on trying to fix his father long ago and has no intention of doing so in the future.

When Jack asked Juliet if the Others are what’s left of Dharma she says: “It doesn’t matter who we were. What matters is who we are.” Jack told Kate a variation of this way back in Tabula Rasa, but as we all know he didn’t mean it, at least as far as Kate went. Now nearly two months later, Juliet tells Jack who he was.  Jack is given the opportunity to know the truth about Sarah, about what broke up his marriage, about what caused him to assault his father. The only thing he can ask is: “Is she happy?” Jack hasn’t believed anything Juliet said, but when he hears she is, it breaks him in a way we last saw when Desmond asked him what happened to Sarah.

The final flashback ends with Jack being bailed out of prison, but we know when it ends that he’s still in one. Now on the island, he’s in another prison and there’s no one coming to bail him out.  Perhaps part of the reason he is broken is that he realizes that he has no control over events and that his fate is in the hands of the people he has spent a season scheming against.

By contrast, when Kate is led into the cage opposite Sawyer at the end of the episode, the two looked relieved. They joke with each other, and Sawyer throws Kate the fish biscuit he worked so hard to earn. Their situation will change faster than Jack’s but at the end of the season premiere, they seem freer than he does.

 

VHS Rewatch Note: Some exceptional movies were being promoted on this episode. Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s debut in the rebooted James Bond was being promoted but hadn’t even be rated yet. Christopher Nolan’s underrated masterpiece The Prestige was advertised, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and the eventual Academy Award winner for Best Picture The Departed.  There were also advertisements for several new ABC series. A lot of promotion was done for The Nine an intriguing series that followed Lost but wouldn’t last. Other series that were being promoted that would have a longer shelf-life were the Anne Heche vehicle Men in Trees, Brothers and Sisters and Ugly Betty. The latter two were critically acclaimed hits that would win Emmys for Best Actress for Sally Field and America Ferrara respectively in 2007.

Reese Witherspoon and Alexander Payne, Your Reunion Film Has Just Become a Paperback!

  

Reese Witherspoon burst on the scene in the exceptional The Man in the Moon when she was just fourteen. She then spent the next seven years mostly in the kind of films that were unworthy of her, occasionally showing her brilliance is smaller films like Freeway and Pleasantville that were overshadowed by her work in more superficial movies such as Fear and Cruel Intentions.  Then in 1999, she played Tracy Flick in the incredible comedy Election and she has never truly looked  back.

The character of Tracy was unlike any teenage character at the center of a movie of the 1990s and few since.  Tracy was the ultimate overachiever, determined to walk over anybody to get what she wanted. In the battle for class president one of her teachers, angry at her (I’ll get to why below because in the last quarter-century, our way of looking at it has changed) ran the high school quarterback against her and ended up sabotaging the election to defeat her before it all came unraveled.

Witherspoon received the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Actress, beating out among others Hilary Swank, who was dominating the awards for her eventual Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry. Witherspoon received her first Golden Globe nomination but to the shock of many she was ignored for Best Actress. That would be rectified five years later when she deservedly took home every award in the book – including an Oscar – for her performance as June Carter Cash in Walk The Line.

Election was also a landmark film because it launched to the stratosphere the career of one of the most extraordinary writer-directors of the 21^st century Alexander Payne. Payne had received high praise for his first film Citizen Ruth, a movie where the title character, a pregnant glue sniffer (an incredible Laura Dern) becomes the center of both the pro-choice and pro-life movements to make her the center of their cause. A satire that was clearly a quarter of a century ahead of its time, the film was more or less ignored by awards shows in an already crowded year for independent films.

Such would not be the case for Election.  Both Witherspoon and Payne’s screenplay (co-written with Jim Taylor) would walk the critics circles. The screenplay took several prizes, including the New York Film Critics.  But its finest hour came at the Independent Spirit Awards where it took the prize for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. (Witherspoon was nominated for Best Female Lead but ending up losing to Hilary Swank. No argument there.)

With the exception of Aaron Sorkin, Payne has become one of the most awarded screenwriters in the history of film.  While he did occasionally debase himself by writing movies such as Jurassic Park III and the very badly done I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry the films that he has written and directed are among the greatest of the 21^st century, almost all of them in the independent film world, all of them impossible to define as genre, sometimes even to the actors in them.  The next four movies he wrote or director were divided evenly between drama and comedy at the Golden Globes (About Schmidt and The Descendants in the former; Sideways and Nebraska in the latter) but all of them have such a mood of underlying despair beneath the humor that they don’t seem to belong in either.

However having seen all four movies, I am certain that they all masterpieces, something that the world has agreed to as well.  Payne has shared in two Oscars for screenwriting (for Sideways and The Descendants) and has been nominated for direction three times (the previous two films and Nebraska) With the exception of About Schmidt, which was not considered an Independent film, he has also won multiple awards from the Spirit Awards, taking another directors prize for Sideways and two more writing awards for both Sideways and The Descendants.  Collectively he has won over seventy awards for writing from various critics organizations. Curiously enough, even though he won several awards for About Schmidt, including the Golden Globe, it is the only one of his films that did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay even though it was one of the most profoundly emotional films of 2002 and featured one of Jack Nicholson’s last truly magnificent performances. He takes his time between projects: there was a seven year gap between Sideways and Descendants a four year gap between Nebraska and Downsizing (a rare critical failure for him at the time) and it is only now we are going to get another film from him The Holdovers due to be released later this year.

The film was an adaption of a brilliant short novel by Tom Perrotta, and in a way it helped launch him to more popular success.  Todd Field’s extraordinary adaptation of Little Children received three Oscar nominations (I’ve raved about it myself at this column) and while Perrotta mostly wrote novels for several years, in 2014 he would adapt and executive produce his best-selling The Leftovers for HBO with Damon Lindelof. The series is justifiably considered one of the masterpieces of the 2010s. He then adapted another of his short-novels Mrs. Fletcher to HBO with Kathryn Hahn in the title role. I thought it was a minor masterpiece though few agreed with me.

Essentially all three of the extraordinary creative forces had their careers in Hollywood launched with election. Was Perrotta thinking of that when he decided to write a sequel for the first time in his long career? I don’t know and I don’t particularly care. Because last month I finally got around to reading Tracy Flick Can’t Win, his sequel to Election and if there was ever a property crying out for a movie adaptation and a reunion of these great forces, I don’t know what else would.

I basically devoured the novel over the course of a weekend. It would not have been difficult to do so even if I were a slower reader: the novel is 257 pages long. (Perrotta has never been one to believe in padding). But this is one of those novels that you are sorry that its such a quick read because, like with Perrotta’s work, you want to savor it.

Would Mr. McCallister be upset or amused to learn that Tracy Flick’s ambition basically never went anywhere? It’s a moot point; McCallister doesn’t show up in the novel and is barely mentioned.  But the novel does take a closer look at Tracy and we find a basic truth: her teenage years, which were clearly lonely in the book and movie, have led to an equally empty adulthood.

It wouldn’t surprise anyone that yes, Tracy did want to be President someday. But as you might expect, life got in the way and in the worst way possible. Tracy was in her first year of law school when her mother (who we barely see in the book or film)’s health began to deteriorate. She has sacrificed everything to get Tracy to the finish line and had been hiding it to keep it that way, but it became too much. Tracy had to drop out of law school to take care of her mother. She worked in a series of dead end jobs before she ended up becoming a substitute teacher and now, in a grim irony, is the assistant principal at her old high school. At this point, her only ambition she thinks she can realize is to become principal.

In the film version of Election, McCallister’s rage against Tracy was precipitated by the fact a colleague of his had an ‘affair’ with Tracy, her mother found out about it, and he lost his job. Even before the sequel came out, critics have realized the villainy of McCallister and the fact that Tracy, who was only fifteen when the relationship began, could not consent and was essentially molested.  One of the characters in this novel is the principal Jack Weede, and when you hear how he tells the story what is remarkable is that anyone lost their job the first time. Based on what we read in the novel to horrified ears, is that relationships between students and teachers were the norm  in Green Meadow. Jack talks about it fondly, says he never had an affair with a student and one sentence later tells us about an affair he had with one after she turned eighteen. McCallister no doubt knew this kind of thing was going on at his school; his anger was probably more than this time it hurt a friend.

The overarching message throughout Tracy Flick is a decision to look backwards. Tracy has found out very hard that Green Meadow has no interest in changing to the future. We hear of a measure to build a more advanced high school that failed despite all of the problems with the building that everybody is aware of.  The head of the school board, who is a vital character, became a tech millionaire and has returned to come back to his hometown. He is ultimately superficial but it is worth noting he and his ideas are regarded with the same brutal dismay as any improvement Tracy wants. He floats the idea of a Hall of Fame for the school, and the only candidate anyone can agree on belongs is Vito Falcone, who was the most successful athlete in Green Meadow history. By success, he was drafted by the Dolphins and ultimately played four games in the NFL.

Tracy is regarded with the same disdain as an adult as she is as a teenager.  Tracy learns the hard way that all of her myriad accomplishments in high school – all of the things that annoyed McCallister  - mean nothing compared to playing on a truly mediocre sports team.  Tracy is continuously admonished, more than anything else, because she never liked football something that every other authority figure worships and cares about more than improving the computer lab or test scores.

Now Tracy may be feeling bitterness about nearly losing the high school presidency to the ex-head of the football team, but as we see she has a valid point. Much of the novel involves looking at the life of Vito, the high school football star everybody has worshipped because of what he means. Vito is an alcoholic, has had two failed marriages, abused one of his wives and is suffering from brain damage. Throughout his backstory we learn that he was allowed to get away with murder as a child: he got two girlfriends pregnant and did nothing to speak up for a teammate of his whose life was destroyed because of a police incident that Vito himself was in part responsible for and was a bully throughout his time at school.  When Vito eventually returns to Green Meadow, no one really cares about Vito now, all they care about is what he represents.

I’ve revealed as much about the book as I’m going to for this piece; this will not be a review in the sense of most of my  book reviews. The reason it’s clear Tracy Flick Can’t Win needs to be filmed (or turned into a limited series; Perrotta did just as well with that with Mrs. Fletcher) is because its clearly just an important story as Election was.  The novel has the same themes that Election did – rampant sexism,  homophobia, grooming – and even more relevant storylines. The idea of racism, the desire to look back to the past rather than the future, the idea that the world is a meritocracy when is not, that the truly mediocre need more helped because the intellectually gifted will be fine, and the way our worship of idols glosses over who they actually were and are.

Reese Witherspoon has spent much of the last decade either helping produce adaptions of novels into brilliant limited series that feature her in a key role (Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere) and creating a book club where she recommends novels that the world might otherwise ignore (Where the Crawdads Sing). I realize that you’re very  busy right now, Reese, but seriously, this a story with a character that was literally written for you to play. Do the world a favor and option Tracy Flick Can’t Win already.  There doesn’t seem to be a character for Nicole Kidman to play, but there are a couple that Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern  would be great for. I bet Alexander Payne would love to work with them again to

How A Throwaway Line in A Classic West Wing Episode Foreshadows a Recent Troubling Trend By Progressives

 

Every year since it debuted in 2000 on Thanksgiving by family will always watch ‘Shibboleth’ a Thanksgiving episode of The West Wing.  There are by far superior episodes of the series – as a matter of fact, the Christmas episodes of the Aaron Sorkin era are among the creative highpoints of the show – but ‘Shibboleth’ is the one we have turned too well after the original series aired.

There are many reasons for this, most of them having to do with Allison Janney and how she finds out that the press secretary has the job of choosing which of two turkeys is more photogenic for the ceremony. As with almost everything Janney did during much of Sorkin’s tenure, she is utterly hysterical and serious at the same time and how it ends up playing out in the end will always make you laugh. The underlying storyline  - Chinese nationals who have smuggled themselves in a container ship and claim to be Christians fleeing persecution – is always relevant and profoundly moving, and the secondary plot involving Toby’s decision to put Josie McGarry – Leo’s sister – forward for a recess appointment has relevance to this day. I could and perhaps someday will write a much longer article about why this is one of the greatest episodes in TV history, but that, sadly, is not the purpose of this article. Rather I have chosen to write it because of a storyline that unfolds during this that is, in a sense, a throwaway but in reference to today’s politics and certain aspects of the left and the right, is always relevant.

A little background: Josh and Sam are about to have a meeting with representatives of the Christian coalition that are a Democratic ally at times. Sam keeps mentioning something about a threat to blow up a theater and Josh keeps saying don’t bring it up. Sam says: “It may slip out,” which we all know means it will at an inopportune time.

Among the ministers is a woman named Mary Marsh. We met her in the Pilot in which she got into a fight with Josh on TV and at an Oval Office meeting where Josh apologized, Mary didn’t accept it and made it an anti-Semitic slur. She has shown known  signed of modifying her attitude and makes another motion to threatening Josh. (Josh casually reminds her without saying so he was nearly killed in the Season 2 premiere by an assassin aiming for the President.)

During the meeting two of the representatives present a factual argument as to why Christians are being persecuted in China. Mary does to an extent, but her tone is derogatory and threatening. After the facts are read, Mary says that the scores of millions of Christians will not stand idly by when religious freedom is threatened. This is Sam’s opening.

Sam: “Sure they will. Christians will stand idly by when religious freedom is threatened. They’re just not doing it this time.

Mary doesn’t have to ask. “This is about the play.”

Sam: “Guy rights a play called Apostle, where Jesus is gay and you protest. Fine. But when a guy threatens to blow up the theatre, you are nowhere to be found.”

Mary just says this: “That play was disgusting.”

Sam: “So you’re okay with freedom as long as its something you like to say. Don’t look now, but I think the playwright’s headed to China.”

The story moves on from this point, there are more important things afoot. I’ve heard this discussion and what it implies for over twenty years and I guess it’s only recently that the darker implications have hit home. It shouldn’t have; this kind of hypocrisy is something we are constantly made aware of, particularly when the left always accuses Republicans, or Fox News, or conservatives, or really anyone in general they don’t like, of this kind of hypocrisy. But over the last several months I have increasingly become aware of just how often the left and other minorities openly engage in this practice themselves. Perhaps the most recent, glaring example of it has come over the recent controversy when transgender influence Dylan Mulvaney made an Instagram post for Bud Light and the right reacted with fury.

I mention this because I have read so many articles in the past several months by the left arguing about the hypocrisy of the right-wings reaction and their threats towards Mulvaney. They have constantly arranged to engage in counter-protests against Budweiser for them not standing behind Mulvaney. That’s fine as far as it goes. But threats have been made against Anheuser-Busch factories ever since, including bomb threats. I have yet to hear a single mention of that from any column on the left.

Nor is this the only time where this has happened in the past month. Earlier in June when Target gave ad campaign for gay pride, the right protested and the attitude from the left was far similar: corporations deserve what they get and they moved for counter-protests towards Target for not standing up to hate. Just as with Budweiser, several Target locations have received bomb threats. Progressive columns have not mentioned this at all.

Silence against violence against corporations is bad enough but it becomes far worse when there’s a similar incident to a noted official. Progressives were all over the mysterious powder that Alvin Bragg, the New York DA who is currently prosecuting Donald Trump, received in the mail a few months back. Last month, several notable Republicans, including Trump and Clarence Thomas and several GOP elected officials, received similar powders sent to him. Funny how progressives, who never miss an opportunity to throw venom at those two men in particular, don’t seem interesting in revealing a death threat towards either of them, or indeed so many of these elected officials.

The most charitable explanation for this radio silence by the left for these threats of violence – especially from a group that has no problem reacting whenever there’s a mass shooting or a minority death in police custody -  is that because there is no evidence of anyone on their side being responsible, they don’t feel that they have to comment on it. It seems very hypocritical an organization that has no problem condemning right-wing violence at any opportunity, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt in this occasion.

The other explanation is a variation on the way that we hear in The West Wing about not condemning the bomb threat. “That play was disgusting.” Given the smugness in how so many on the left and of their coalition look down on anyone who disagrees with them or have a message contrary to theirs, they feel that these people or organizations deserve what they get.  They are reaping what they sow, so why should we even bother to offer thoughts and prayers for them? Besides, we’ve spent so much time and energy condemning every single action that they take, arguing that they might be victims of this would humanize them, which would disrupt the narrative we have spent so much time forming.

From the moment The West Wing debuted in 1999, it was predictably enough condemned by right-wing media and conservatives as being yet another example of Hollywood liberals promoting a leftist agenda. In fairness to the right, this critique had merit when President Bartlet began his reelection campaign. From the moment his opponent Florida Governor Robert Ritchie was described, Sorkin made no effort to conceal that he was the worst aspect of the Republican party and had many of the characters – particularly Toby Ziegler – argue that Bartlet should denounce both Ritchie and the people who might vote for him as a complete and utter moron.  They spent the next year essentially arguing that Democrats are smart and Republicans are morons, that anyone who even considers voting for a Republican is an idiot by proxy, and the campaign came to a climax with Bartlet humiliating Ritchie in the Presidential debate essentially by proven he was smarter than him and by implication if you voted for Ritchie, you were contemptible. (I imagine Democrats today would essentially call that fanfic for every election campaign going forward.)

Progressives and leftists over the years, while they do not directly condemn the show or the writing,  they overall mock Sorkin’s idealism and spirit for compromise as essentially fake.  I don’t deny that much of his writing on the series (and both his subsequent TV shows) do argue for a mythic ideal that can not exist in reality.  But I still prefer his idealism to so much of the dialogue of the left these days who think that tribalism trumps compromise and governing and prefers talking at people and calling them morons then to listening to them. Just today on a progressive website, I read an article just today of someone who posted front page ads in a Florida newspaper on two separate occasions blasting Republicans as pretty much close to traitors – and was disappointed that he only received praise and no hate mail or death threats.  This is not an attitude that is conducive for governing or the health of the republic. Indeed, it’s pretty close to the idea that conservatives are more interested in ‘owning the libs’ than governing.

Coincidentally, this exact argument comes when Josie shows up in the White House and tells her brother: “I won’t shrink for a fight.” Leo counters, not positively: “No. You look for them.” When Josie points out Leo is similar, Leo argues: “I don’t look for fights. Enough of them look for me.” In that sentence Sorkin has summed up perfectly the difference between so many progressives and Democrats, elected or otherwise.

In conclusion, I return to Shibboleth and think about everything that unfolded there if it were viewed from the leftist mindset. If this were to happen, they would insist the Chinese be granted asylum but leave out the fact that they were Christian fleeing religious persecution. (I can just see some ‘good hearted’ leftist saying to some ‘good people’ “Seriously, don’t we have enough home-grown Christians?”) When Josh announces this he tells the President: “China’s gonna say send them back. (The Christians will) say that they have to stay. INS is going to say the law’s the law.  Then Josh and Sam spend the next two days talking to representatives from China and the INS. Josh tells Bartlet that they broke international law by fleeing the country and accordingly should be sent back to their country of origin. The INS also tells them that they have to be serious about enforcing customs and immigration laws.

Progressives and those who argue unabashedly for immigration would not hear any of these nuances. Their attitude, ironically, would be that of Mary Marsh when Josh tells her that the INS judge decides to grant asylum. “The INS judge will do what the President wants, and if he doesn’t grant asylum, he’s going to wish he had.” To many on the left, there is no room for nuance or shades of gray.

I will not reveal how this is resolved if you haven’t seen the episode, save to say that while Bartlet does the right thing for everybody, he does so without pissing off China and without granting asylum. I have little doubt that this solution would make some on the left angry. In their mind, the only reasonable thing to do would be on Thanksgiving day for Bartlet to have all of the Chinese refugees on the White House lawn, the President essentially giving his final monologue, which he does in private to the full White House press corps  and have one of these  refugees (who for the record are starving) actually pardon the turkey.  For them, it’s not about the right thing being done, it’s doing it for the right reason and in a public forum. That Bartlet and everyone on his staff have been struggling with this issue for three days, trying to come up with the nuances and find out an equitable solution – and came up with one – is irrelevant.

The West Wing resonates to me in several ways because it believes in equality, not in the abstract but in reality. That means that every aspect of the Constitution applies to everyone, that Republicans are entitled to a point of view even if you completely disagree with it, and that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not something that applies only to your tribe. In other words to those who will advocate that Dylan Mulvaney’s safety is important, but the people who work for Budweiser deserve what they get, well, to paraphrase Aaron Sorkin: “Don’t look now, but I think Dylan Mulvaney’s moving to China.”

 

I Wonder Why It Took So Long For It To Come Back: The Wonder Years Season 2 Review

 

When the reboot of The Wonder Years  debuted on ABC in the fall of 2021, I instantly hailed it as a classic, putting it on my top ten list for that year. Critics similarly reacted just as happily as I did, with the series being shortlisted for a Peabody award and getting nominations galore from the Image Awards. When the first season ended in April of 2022, mirroring the circumstances that led to the season finale of the original, I was overjoyed it had been renewed and couldn’t wait for the second season.

Then September came. 2022 ended. The 2022-2023 season ended outright. ABC produced a superb number of original series. Big Sky and Alaska Daily came and went. So did The Company You Keep.  And there was no sign at all of The Wonder Years.  I knew there had been outside factors -  a harassment scandal that had forced executive producer Fred Savage to leave the team; the looming writers strike that came on May 1^st and shows no sign of ended – but there was no logical reason for the delay of this kind.  Why had ABC lost faith in a series that was so brilliant it’s first year, renew it for a second season and then essentially leave it to air in the summer, when it is one of the few original series on broadcast television at all? It is troubling to think of the long-term implications.

It certainly has nothing to do with the quality of Season 2 which has been no less marvelous than the first one after five episodes. Dean (EJ Dionne) spent the summer in New York with his father (Dule Hill, just as exceptional as ever) as he tried to become a songwriter for Marvin Gaye and basically kept Dean indoors. (It is a measure of how Dean’s father views the world that he can barely be bothered to watch the moon landing with any real conviction.) Dean eventually ends up going out on the street, and as you might expect, gets his ass kicked. But he also meets his next door neighbor,  a transvestite from Alabama (Titus Burgess) who finds common ground with both Dean and his father.  Meanwhile, Dean’s mother is dealing with the arrival of her sister into the world, who has always been the black sheep of the family but seems to be making an effort to reform. In an amusing side note, they go to a concert together in a stolen car, but it turns out Dean’s mother also has a police record.

When Dean returns to New York, he is dealing with his romance with his long-term crush Kasia while still trying to be friends with her boyfriend Brad. As you can expect this ends disastrously on multiple levels, especially when Dean joins the football team and Brad finally finds out.  That story has been on the backburner as Dean proceeds with life as normal, having a sleepover with his Jewish best friend, Richie (where they fall all over themselves to show what good allies they are) and developing a crush on Richie’s mother.  This leads to a hysterical argument and fight when both try to prove how ‘realistic’ their chances are and a truly pathetic fight.

By now, in case you had forgotten, I am legally obligated to remind you that the family in The Wonder Years is African-American. I have little doubt that the internet trolls were hoping the fact that another one of their precious childhood memories, tainted by being made woke (because as we all know the 1960s had nothing to do with race at all) is actually back for a second season.  They are no doubt aware, without having to actually watch the series, that it is just as relevant as ever. The adult Dean (played by Don Cheadle) has no problem leaning into this whenever possible and does so right from the start. (It was 1969. Russia was engaged in a war on the Eastern front, people clashed over drugs and women did not have the right to choose. Thank God those days are over!”)  Dean makes it very clear that as a child he was completely unaware of so many of the subtleties going on that are going on below the surface. When his aunt tells him about some of the forbidden romances she been going through, he reveals that he clearly didn’t get that in the first case, she was talking about sleeping with a married man, and in the second case with a white man. Adult Dean is clear very much about the awkwardness, often in hysterical ways. When Dean’s mother and Richie’s mother awkwardly discuss the idea of their sons having a sleepover, neither comfortable with the idea but just as uncomfortable with the idea of being called racist,  adult Dean comes to the conclusion of their argument: “And that exchange led to the formation of the current behavior of the Democratic party.”

But the relevance of race, then and now, are shown very clearly in other ways, most prominently in last week’s episode ‘Block Busting’. In it  the Williams parents are tempting by a slick real estate agent to move in to the first publicly integrated neighborhood in Alabama.  The agent (a wonderful Donald Faison) is a silver-tongued devil who says the right things and points out that much of these neighborhoods were the sights of former slave plantations. The 40 acres and a mule metaphor is very clear. The Williams family and their close friends are publicly invited to this open house and are proud of being there. But when Mrs. Williams and Richie’s mother have a discussion later on, she tells her that this a strategy of block busting (the process of white flight forcing real estate developers to buy and sell it back at a tidy profit). She points out painfully that a variation of this happened to them – they were among the first Jewish families to move in. The Williams family turns on the salesman, but adult Dean has a poignant coda. Bill kept the house in the family until the day he died, but by then most of his neighbors were white. “Integration didn’t get him out, but gentrification did.”

The second season of The Wonder Years is every bit as hysterical and heartwarming as the first. It features superb acting and incredible guest stars (Patti LaBelle makes an appearance as Bill’s mother-in-law), has brilliant aspects of fantasy, remembers how awkward it is to be an adolescent, and just what it was like to grow up the 1960s. You really have to wonder – pun not intended – why ABC decided that we had to wait a full year between the end of one season and the beginning of the next.  And considering just how willing they were to scorch the earth of so many series, current and prospective because of the writer’s strike, we have a reason to be justifiably concerned if there will be a third season. You’d think the network where Abbott Elementary  which gave the network sitcom not merely relevance but revolutionized would want to give this series, which is just as relevant and excellent, more of a future than say The Connors.  But when it comes to how any network these days, it makes you…well, let’s just say I’ll relish it while it’s here.

My score: 5 stars.