Yesterday Cris Panullo Became The Latest in A Long Line Of Upsets In The Tournament of Champions

 

In my more than thirty years of watching Jeopardy, I have watched nearly as many Tournaments of Champions. And one of the things you learn after enough time has passed is that how any of these champions did in their original appearance will have nothing to do with how well they’d do in the Tournament.

During the era when the limit was five wins and the dollar figures ran from $100 to $500 in the Jeopardy round, it was somewhat easier to expect the unexpected. That didn’t make it any more shocking when it happened. One of my earliest memories of a major upset in a Tournament of Champions came in the semi-finals of the 1994 Tournament when Steve Chernicoff and John Cuthbertson, who’d each won over $82,000 in five games were defeated by College Champion Jeff Stewart in Final Jeopardy. That tournament was eventually won by Rachael Schwartz, the first female to win a Tournament of champions. Of the three female players who qualified, she had by far won the least amount of money, so I’m pretty sure that anyone who thought a woman would win the TOC that year, Rachael would have been third on the list.

There were similar upsets over the next several years, albeit none quite as striking. The one that had the greatest context was in 2001 when Doug Lach, who’d won $85,400 in five games – one of the highest five game totals to that point - was absolutely demolished in his quarterfinal appearance by a 23 year old recent college graduate named Brad Rutter, whose $55,102 in five games was one of the lowest totals of any of the participants in that year’s Tournament. Anyone who told you, even after he won the TOC in 2001, that they thought he was going to win more money in Jeopardy history back then, would have been lying through his teeth. I certainly didn’t think so.

When the dollar figures were doubled and the five game limit lifted, if anything, it became harder to predict how was going to win a Tournament of Champions.  This was made clear in the first Tournament of Champions in the post Ken Jennings era when David Madden won 19 games and just under half a million dollars, both of which would be the second to Jennings for more than a decade. I remember thinking that the 2006 Tournament of Champions was an exercise and that David Madden would waltz to the $250,000 grand prize. Instead, he didn’t even make it to the finals where he was beaten – flattened is really more accurate – by Bill MacDonald, who’d won four games and $75,399 the past November.

Over the last ten years, even  as we have seen the slow but steady rise in the number of super-champions, we have seen this play out time and again. Arthur Chu, who won eleven games and Julia Collins, who had managed to win 20 in the spring and summer of 2014, respectively, did both make it to the finals of the 2014 Tournament of Champions. Both, however, ended up losing to Ben Ingram who back in 2013 had ‘only’ won eight games and ‘merely’ $176, 413.

The following September Matt Jackson began to put together a run that reminded many of Jennings when he won 13 games and $411,612. He got to the finals that year – and was absolutely destroyed by Alex Jacob, who’d only won six games and just under $150,000 (albeit in a similarly destructive fashion.)

Two years later, the 2017 Tournament of Champions featured a pair of 12 game winners Seth Wilson who’d won $265,000 and the more dynamic Austin Rogers who’d won $411,000. Admittedly the field of competition that year had some of the most impressive champions in a very long time, and few could argue that Buzzy Cohen, who ended up the ultimate winner, was not a similarly impressive player.

In the first Tournament of Champions in the post Alex Trebek era in 2021, many thought that Jason Zuffranieri, who had managed to win 19 games and more than $500,000 in the midst of what would be the last two full seasons of Trebek, would waltz to the finals. He only qualified for the semi-finals via a wild card and in his semi-final match was defeated by Jennifer Quail, who’d won eight games and just over $228,000.

So you’d think by this point in my history of watching Tournaments of Champions I would be prepared for these kinds of upsets. The thing is, no matter how many times it happens, no matter how much you know about Jeopardy, you still go in to every tournament with a narrative that the biggest winners are going to dominate. Like all of you who watched in 2022, I was certain we were going to see Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach face off in the finals. The idea that any of them would lose in their semi-final match – and in the case of Mattea be flattened by an opponent – was unthinkable. Yet that is what happened to Matt in the case of Sam Buttrey and Mattea in the case of Andrew He. (Though considering how last year’s Masters Tournament played out, both of them got revenge on the players who’d beaten them.)

Similarly I was sure that last night Cris Panullo – who in the fall of 2022 had won 21 games and just under $750,000 – was going to dance all over his two fellow champions Ben Goldstein and Jared Watson. I might have been willing to give shorter odds had he been facing Ray LaLonde or Stephen Webb, but a five game player who hadn’t cracked the $50,000 mark or a three game winner who I had dismissed just last week? Not a chance. It was in the bag. I had every reason to keep thinking this in the first half of the Jeopardy round as Cris built up an early lead. I kept thinking until Jared managed to get to the Daily Double near the end of the round. At the time Jared had half Cris’ total so he bet everything he had in a $400 clue in ALL THINGS DISNEY:

“At Walt Disney World in 1975, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper and Jim Irwin attended the grand opening of this ride.” Jared knew it was Space Mountain and the game was tied. It was still tied at the end of the round: Jared and Cris had $8800 apiece. A temporary condition, I thought.

I was right on that. Absolutely wrong as to how it would play out. Cris couldn’t even manage to ring in until the twelfth clue of Double Jeopardy. By that point Jared had found both Daily Doubles. The first was in WORLD CITIES:

“Fittingly, this capital is the Yukon headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police.” Jared somehow knew it was Whitehorse and gained $6000. Two clues later he found the other in ALLOYS: “This 7-letter word for an alloy used in dentistry is also used to mean any combination of 2 or more substances.” He knew it was an amalgam and gained another $5000. By that point Jared had $27,000 and there was no possibility that Cris could close the gap even had he been at peak condition.

For the record after his return, he wasn’t. He managed to give 22 correct responses to Jared’s 21. But Cris also gave a whopping five incorrect answers where as Jared didn’t make a single mistake. In all the games watching him, I don’t remember him making this many errors, even in the game he eventually lost. The end result was that by the end of Double Jeopardy Cris Panullo had been flattened in a way I’d never seen. He had just $14,000 to Jared’s $32,000.

And as a further sign of how much he had lapsed, he also got Final Jeopardy wrong. The category was ART HISTORY: “The Royal Academy of Arts has this man’s ‘La Fornarina’ & in the 1800s the RAA’s love of him made some artists retreat to an earlier style.” Cris thought it was Botticelli, which was wrong. Jared knew the correct response: “Who is Raphael?” (the pre-Raphaelites)

What happened, I imagine millions of Jeopardy fans are asking? Was it simply a level of fatigue due to having been absent from the show for more than a year? Jared did win his 3 games comparatively recently (the summer of 2023) but Ben’s five wins game two weeks after and he played horribly in comparison to Cris.

The answer is…there is no answer. Cris has merely fallen victim to the same rule of every Tournament of Champions since they began; that trying to handicap them based on their previous performance is a fool’s errand. It played out to a similar extent in the previous tournament even before we got to the semi-finals. Not only did Jonathan Fisher, who had managed to win eleven games (and had defeated Matt Amodio to begin his streak) end up losing in Final Jeopardy to none other than Andrew He, but in the previous quarterfinal match Ryan Long, who had managed to win 16 games that year could never truly get started against Megan Wachspress or Maureen O’Neill. He ended up getting into the red early in the Jeopardy round, was in third by the end of it, and never managed to get going. He was essentially out of it by the end of Double Jeopardy.

The fact of the matter is that even the best Jeopardy champions will one day have a mediocre day or run into a player who is significantly better than them. Frequently that will happen in the Tournament of Champions when the best of the best are all assembled. No one manages to qualify for a Tournament of Champions because they are a terrible player. (Well, you know that I think the Second Chance Tournament may be damaging that concept but the recent play of Juveria Zaheer is causing me to rethink even that.) Is it difficult to believe that Cris, who as he told us was an alternate for the first Masters Tournament, would end up meeting his demise this early in the Tournament of Champions? Perhaps, but no less unbelievable than what has happened to David Madden and Jason Zuffranieri in earlier Tournaments and Mattea Roach and Matt Amodio in the one just past.

Like with all sporting events, every Jeopardy champions knows that somewhere out there is a player who will end their streak. Even Brad Rutter, who for eighteen years was the only undefeated player in Jeopardy history, had moments in his career where there were players (some of whom I’ve even listed above) nearly unseated him before he finally met his demise at the hands of both Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer. That is equally true in the Tournament of Champions as was proven just last night and will no doubt be proven a few times more even before we get to the semi-finals. I’ll give a full report on that when the first round ends next Wednesday but we should be prepared for the fact that we can’t be prepared for things to go as planned.

Justin Hartley Returns To TV In Tracker

 

Before we were deluged with superhero movies, even before the Arrow-verse began, Justin Hartley was Oliver Queen. He debuted on the sixth season of Smallville, which was about to move from the introductory phase of the life of Clark Kent into a more advanced version of the world of DC, something that either immensely improved or ruined the show, depending on who you ask.

What I do know is was that in many ways Hartley was a brilliant Green Arrow, less troubled and more congenial then the version Stephen Amell would make his own, a contrast to Lex Luthor who in this show had been an old friend of his growing up. Even at that age Hartley had the good looks and leading man status that he’s always had, and there were supposedly plans for a Green Arrow spin-off that never came to fruition. Instead he was one of the few stalwarts during the final three seasons of the show.\

After Smallville ended, Hartley spent the next five years with semi-regular roles either in series that failed (Emily Owens, M.D.) or in later seasons of shows that were on the decline (Revenge). He spent a couple of years on The Young and the Restless and then landing the role of the lifetime as Kevin in the classic This is Us. Hartley was, unfortunately, one of the only actors in the series to never get an Emmy nomination for his work (though the Critics Choice Award nominated him four consecutive years, so go us) but his work was at the level of Sterling Brown and Chrissy Metz, his siblings. Struggling with his career, dealing with alcoholism, a constant string of failed relationship and the most complicate relationship of all with Randall, Hartley had demons in a way his fellow siblings did but that they often never realized and that his mother never seemed to get.

Now a full year after This is Us came to an end; his co-stars have been moving on to other projects. Brown has been working more in movies (he has been recently nominated for Best Supporting Actor for American Fiction); Milo Ventimiglia had a moment of brilliance in the gone-too-soon The Company You Keep and now Hartley has finally been cast in the lead in Tracker, one of the few new broadcast series that will likely air in what remains of the 2024 season. CBS has been willing to put its weight behind it in a way that most networks don’t: it aired after this year’s Super Bowl, the first time in decades a network has been willing to debut an untested project rather than a favored series. (How many people stayed up to watch it after the series went into overtime is an open question.) CBS is known for formula shows and I have little doubt that many would consider it just some variation on it. Still, having watched three episodes I can say it has more than its merit.

Much of this comes from the presence of Hartley, who in a sense is tweaking the persona of his Oliver Queen – and possibly the kind of character Kevin Pearson would play – enough in the character of Colter Shaw. Colter calls himself a ‘rewardist’  (he is told repeatedly that’s not a thing, something he keeps saying is). Colter lives out of a trailer in the West – the first few episodes have seen him in Colorado, Idaho and Montana – and his job is tracking down missing persons who disappear and claiming the reward that’s offer. He is not exactly a bounty hunter, but he has the same level of willingness to bend the law to the point where it might snap in order to help the missing people.

Colter has a firm grip on how things work to a statistical science, something he has no trouble using to comfort people in their moments of trauma and try to talk people with guns from using on him. He also has the ability to handle himself in a fight, which he does to defend himself  - or causes depending on how you look at it. He is aided in his work with his partners’/ surrogate big sisters a lesbian couple played by Robin Weigert and Abby Mcenany, neither of whom are stretching the kind of characters they play that much. Colter is also aided. He has a tech expert Bob Exley (Eric Graise) and his frenemy Rennie Green, an attorney who once shared his bed and now thinks he’s a piece of detritus. Colter has the great ability to get women to sleep with him on a moment’s notice, but he also doesn’t form attachments easily – which makes sense when you learn how he grew up.

During his childhood, his father (Lee Tergesen in flashbacks) went a little crazy and took their family off the grid. He basically raised them in the wilderness but was also bipolar convinced people were out to get them. One day when his mother was late coming home, his father was trying to get them to leave without her and both he and his elder brother ran off. By now Colter, who was the best student of the siblings, tracked them down – and found his father dead, and his brother running away. They haven’t spoken in twenty years.

Going through the episodes is the fact that his brother has spent the last three episodes calling him. He went to see his mother in the pilot and asked him if there was something he needed to know about what happened that night. His mother told him just to block the number. His brother has been calling Rennie recently and he gave the same instructions. In the second episode, it seems very clear that someone visited the family home but his mother chose to say she got nervous. What exactly is going on is not clear, but I hope that this is not yet another fine procedural that gets bogged down in an underlying mythology. (Then again Tracker is based on Jeffery Deaver’s The Never Game so there is a very real chance that this backstory may be part of the canon.)

The more Hartley ages, the better a performer he becomes. There’s a tough façade that he shows the rest of the world as well as many of the people who try to stop him. However when it comes to the people he tries to save, he shows warmth and compassion along with his honesty. His mindset is statistical and he is a realist. In last night’s episode when a woman told him that her sister had been missing for more than fifteen months, he told her it was almost certain she was dead. The woman told him she’d made peace with that but she wanted to know for sure. Halfway through the episode when they found her sister’s van, Colter kept trying to talk her out of coming, but she insisted.

Colter has an ability, almost superhuman, to know when he is being lied to. Sometimes, he’s direct about it – like in the pilot, when after talking to a missing teenager’s family, he asked his mother why he was lying to her – but most times he keeps it in check. He doesn’t pretend to be the smartest guy in the room or the strongest; but he is determined to do his job. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Tracker is set in what used to be the frontier; it’s not much of a stretch to see Colter Shaw as some version of Shane or Paladin, only in his case, he does not bring about death but tries to save lives before moving on to the next small town. In that sense, Tracker is a formula but it’s closer to a modern western that a crime drama.

I won’t go out of my way to say that Tracker is as earth shattering as Found or as genre-breaking as So Help Me Todd. But as entertainment goes, it’s more than solid. How much of a future it will have is an open question – it’s airing on Sunday nights against American Idol – but it is on a network that’s in better shape than ABC was when The Company You Keep died. It’s entertaining and I’m glad to see Hartley finally got the leading man role he’s deserved for twenty years. When will Christy Metz grace us with her presence?

My score: 3.5 stars.

1900th Post: How Aaron Sorkin and Adam McKay's Movies Show How Each Views The World - And Why McKay's Movies Are Less Entertaining

 

There are some things that you can’t get out of your head even years after the fact. For nearly three and a half years, I’ve been trying to understand a remark that Adam McKay made in a New York Times Magazine Article three years ago in which he was being ‘interviewed’ in regard to his film making and politics. (Interview is a loose term; McKay interrupted him more than once.) When asked to discuss his politics McKay said something I’ve never been able to get out of my head. He claimed that if he had an equivalent on the right in Hollywood, it was Aaron Sorkin.

My head all but exploded. Aaron Sorkin? The man whose West Wing was at the time and twenty years later still considered by the right as prove of the leftist messaging of Hollywood? The writer whose follow-up show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was essentially a political harangue on Hollywood in a post-9/11 world which occasionally had to do with the making of a sketch comedy show? The man who had the first season finale of The Newsroom climax with Jeff Daniels’ character, while claiming he was not ashamed to be a Republican, referring to the Tea Party as ‘The American Taliban?” That Aaron Sorkin has been a closet conservative all this time?

I actually wrote an article about this back in 2021 dealing with Sorkin’s movies and McKay’s as a comparison trying to understand if there was something going on that I didn’t see. That served as a reason as to why Sorkin’s movies were more entertaining than McKay’s but it still didn’t make it clear how any rational person could reach that conclusion.

Now, having spent three years and far too much time among the leftists in this country, I think I finally understand how McKay could say something like that and genuinely believe it. It has nothing to do with Sorkin’s films or even his politics but the way that leftists see the world.

As I think I’ve made clear throughout my articles on both Sorkin’s movies and several pieces on The West Wing, Sorkin’s politics are clearly Democratic but throughout his TV shows he has never gone out of his way to antagonize or dehumanize Republicans or the people who vote for them. That was probably enough for McKay to consider him conservative right there. But Sorkin’s TV shows and many of his movies are stories about having faith in institutions and that if people work together towards a common goal,  you can win out. This is idealism which leftists think is irrational.

  In movies like A Few Good Men and Molly’s Game, Sorkin tells the story of defendants who are being railroaded by an unjust government but with the work of their counsels they manage to prevail against impossible odds. This is anathema as to how leftists see the world, in which if good triumphs over evil it must be a mistake or not a real triumph. You’d think given his stories of The Social Network and Steve Jobs some on the left might at least consider he can see the malevolence in Silicon Valley but as we all know he tried to make these men human beings and that’s too much.

And all of Sorkin’s characters are literate, intelligent, well-spoken and entertaining because of how clever they sound. If you have watched McKay’s movies with Will Ferrell, you know the common theme: from Ron Burgundy to Ricky Bobby, the characters played by Ferrell and John C. Reilly are charitably speaking morons and proud of their stupidity. In The Campaign, he tells a political satire of a campaign for a House Seat in the South where everybody from the idealistic Zach Galifianakis to the people running the campaign are ridiculously, incredibly stupid and proud of it. McKay’s comedies are popular because of how brainless the characters are. That should tell you a lot about his approach to people and it’s pretty prevalent in the left.

I think if we can compare McKay’s more ‘serious’ movies with a similar Sorkin film you can see just how both men view the world. Both men adapted a Michael Lewis best seller, books that most considered unfilmable and turned them into movies that received Best Picture nominations. But while McKay won an Oscar for his adaptation of The Big Short, I am still inclined to find Sorkin’s Moneyball the superior entertainment, even though Sorkin lost to The Descendants.

With Moneyball Sorkin tells what should be an impossible subject – how Billy Beane used sabermetrics to help the A’s contend – and turns it into a funny and gripping film. He does so by creating composites of characters to a fictionalized version to make a point,  makes the film about Beane rather than the A’s and goes out of his way to build to a climax, even though Beane’s character never succeeds at his goal.

By contrast The Big Short never makes you forget you are watching a movie. McKay constantly has his characters breaking the fourth wall, lecturing to his audiences rather than telling them what is happening through subtext and goes out of his way to make sure that even the people we are rooting for are essentially profiting off a financial disaster. While I grant you Big Short deals with a far darker subject than Moneyball, it is conditional of McKay’s approach to filmmaking. In his comedies, he thought the subjects were stupid. In The Big Short, he assumes his audience is.

One could draw a parallel, albeit a less exact one, between McKay’s next film Vice and Charlie’s Wilson War. In the latter film Sorkin decides to tell the story that goes against the nature of the conservative narrative that Reagan won the Cold War by arguing that it was actually done by a Texas Congressman, a CIA operative and a Republican fundraiser. In this film Avrakotos, the CIA man has a very low opinion of the fundraiser and only a negligible one of Wilson. He considers Julia Roberts’ character a dilettante but he knows there’s a larger goal. And the movie makes it very clear, very subtly, that Avrakotos knew that this is a long game and that despite Wilson’s best efforts, our government refused to play it. We are living in the aftermath of that.

Vice by contrast is essentially everything that is a part of the leftist’s repudiation of the Republican party during Dick Cheney’s tenure in it. It goes out of its way to make Rumsfeld and W. look life buffoons and Cheney look like a man climbing the rungs of power. It does so with the same methods that The Big Short did but they are less subtle, if possible. At one point Dick and Liz Cheney talk to each other in Shakespearean blank verse. There are false endings to show to make us think were watching a different kind of film when we know we’re not.  By the time McKay gets to W’s administration, the viewer has already been convinced that Cheney is a monster. The creation of ISIS basically unfolds almost as an afterthought. In McKay’s mind I have little doubt Charlie Wilson was just a tool as part of the American war machine.

Then we get to Don’t Look Up. By the time this movie came out Aaron Sorkin had already been nominated for writing The Trial of the Chicago 7. I don’t need to remind you that the Chicago 7 themselves featured some of the most famous leftists of their era, among them Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin, along with the infamous Black Panther Bobby Seale. These men were very deliberate in how they felt that their trial was a mockery to justice and went out of their way to make it a circus. One of Sorkin’s own line says as much:

Judge: “Are you familiar with contempt of court?”

Abbie Hoffman: “It’s practically a religion for me.”

Hoffman says the government has contempt for him and he says he’s on trial for his faults. He says that his bringing ideas across state lines has gotten him punished. These are the ideas that leftists love to berate. It’s hard for anyone to hear some of the dialogue Sorkin has his characters say and still consider him a conservative. He makes it clear of the rage that Bobby Seale justifiably has towards white America and some of the 7.

I think the reason that McKay can hear this and still consider Sorkin conservative is that these days, those on the left consider the Chicago 7 sellouts. After all, Hayden became a Congressman and that’s the worst thing to a leftist. Plus he has Sorkin give this exchange between William Kunstler and Hoffman:

Kunstler: How do you overthrow or dismember, as you say, your government peacefully?

Hoffman: in this country, we do it every four years.

To say something in favor of the peaceful democratic process is anathema to the left who either believe that democracy is a fraud or that both parties are fundamentally the same.

I have written many columns in this blog referring to doomporn but Don’t Look Up (which I admit I have not seen) actually seems like the first ever cinematic equivalent of it. McKay uses the story of two astronomers discovering that an asteroid is coming to destroy Earth to tell a ‘satiric’ tale of how if this were to happen, the media, the corporations, the politicians and the internet would make sure that the world did nothing to stop it. Ostensibly this is supposed to be a metaphor for climate change but this film is too over the top for any metaphors to be expressed.

McKay goes out of his way to show that every single character in his film – except the scientists – are too stupid, self-involved, or corrupt to do anything to solve the problem. The scientists are idiots because they naively think that the world will galvanize to save themselves which is another form of contempt. The movie ends with the asteroid destroying the Earth, all of the rich and powerful people escaping to another planet – and once they get there, all of them are quickly devoured by aliens. Most films about the apocalypse actually have some tenor of regret or sadness at the end. Don’t Look Up takes the approach that it might actually be a good idea. I have sensed a similar vein of contempt in the future in basically ninety to ninety-five percent of articles written by the left. I have a feeling Don’t Look Up was made for them alone.

The reason that McKay can say with no real irony that Sorkin is a conservative filmmaker is the same reason that some leftists say that there is no difference between both political parties. Sorkin believes in institutions, the free-flowing exchange of ideas and that there are some good and smart people out there who can solve problems. In the minds of the left, his movies are no doubt just propaganda for ‘the man’ because they don’t lecture the audience, consider all people who don’t think like them beneath them, and believe we’re all doomed no matter what we do. I imagine McKay thinks those are his people.

McKay was able to start making ‘serious’ movies because he built his career on making ‘brainless’ comedies about idiots. His serious movies show that he seems to view all his viewers – and humanity in general – the same way. Perhaps this is why I always prefer Sorkin’s work to McKay’s. For all the heavy handedness of his subjects, he never tried to insult his audience’s intelligence. His films all have a brain. McKay’s assumes that no one does. Sadly, that explains a lot about the latter’s ideology too.

Constant Reader Valentine's Day 2024 Bonus: The Last Girls Standing By Jennifer Dugan

 

Note: I am aware that my entry for February was just last week. However, at the time I was in the midst of reading this book as well and had I not finished Wilder first, this book would certainly have been listed. As you’ll see the book I’m about to review lists many of the larger themes that have been part of many of previous reviews – and does have a love story at its center. So for that reason, I’m breaking my own rule.

 

Throughout my reading of The Last Girls Standing, I couldn’t help but think that Sloan Allison, the protagonist at the center of the story, might have been best served in she had been able to avail herself of the services of Mulder and Scully. After all, the overarching action involves the ritualistic slaughter of eight people by a cult that considers themselves eco-terrorists and commits suicide after their crimes. This is the kind of thing the FBI investigates and has elements that are pertinent to the X-Files.

I can see that if Sloan went to see them, Scully would be all too aware  - because it’s obvious to everyone in the book – that Sloan is understandably suffering from massive amounts of both PTSD and survivor’s guilt and that this kind of trauma can lead to the paranoid beliefs she has almost from the start. Mulder would naturally suspect this as well, but he would do her the courtesy of a further investigation before telling her that there are no connections.

If Sloan went out of her way to point out the ‘connections’ she sees, Mulder and Scully would no doubt be gentle and tell them that some of the scariest cases they ever investigated seemed to involve paranoid conspiracies but at their cores involved just ordinary people. Scully would tell them how she had been certain that an ordinary death fetishist appeared to her as a monster when he was just an ordinary man. Mulder would tell her how he can be called in by his former profiler to tell them that there was a possible a supernatural being was committed murders when in fact his old mentor had spent so much time in the killer’s head that he could not get out of it and became a killer himself. Scully (not Mulder) would tell her that she once went on a date with a man who believed his tattoo was telling him to kill people when in fact it was just his built in psychosis. And both would say that there are things that go bump in the night out there, but in this case the people who killed eight counselors and left only Sloan and Cherry alive were just crazy people who had lost their way. They would conclude by telling Sloan the best thing she could do for herself was find a way to move forward and try to get help from the people who loved her and supported her.

If you look at the cover and book jacket of Last Girls Standing, you would assume that what you are about to get is some kind of horror novel. Sloan and Cherry have been bonded by their trauma and that Sloan is learning that there is a chance the teenage girl she had fallen in love with is part of the cult that killed her. I don’t know if Jennifer Dugan, who is a writer of lesbian love stories, made this decision deliberately or whether it was a decision of her publisher to lead the reader to think that’s what we were getting. It’s certainly what I assumed when I began to read this novel. But as it unfolded, I realized that Dugan was doing a trick that The X-Files sometimes did to great power – have a story with the atmosphere of supernatural trappings with a great conspiracy to reveal at the center something more banal and painfully, ridiculously simple. The result is a story that is more frightening than any conspiracy theory could ever be because it is one of the stories I’ve ever read of a descent into madness.

When the novel begins it has been months since the tragedy but Sloan is still there. Her parents (mostly her mother) have spent an infinite amount of time and patience trying to get their daughter to find a way to move forward. Sloan has refused. She has not agreed to go to any kind of therapy that has been suggested to her. She has only agreed to see someone who isn’t a therapist but rather part of regression hypnosis. She has stopped seeing all of her friends from before the killings. She has ‘deferred’ going to NYU for one year, but as we see in a sad scene halfway through the novel Sloan clearly has no intention of ever going to college. She hasn’t tried to get a job. She barely interacts with her parents. The only person she has any relationship with at all is Cherry, the other survivor of the massacre.

No one is happy with the relationship. Sloan’s parents believe that it is holding her back from moving forward with her life. They’re right, to be clear. What they don’t get is that is a toxic and one-sided relationship – for Cherry. Sloan has not been able to remember what happened to her after a certain point in the massacre but Cherry has. Sloan has been making Cherry tell her this story over and over. Most of their interactions when we meet them in the novel involve Cherry picking Sloan up from therapy which is the only part of the session Sloan looks forward to. They have spent weeks and months googling the crime and putting it on the wall of Cherry’s room as part of a collage. The two of them treat it as a game which at the end they get to make out. Cherry has also been doing a lot of things to help Sloan – she has been making flower arrangements for all the funerals they’ve gone too, she made a story up about one of the counselors to make him the hero, even though it’s clearly something that bothered her. Sloan has been sleeping at Cherry’s house because it’s the only time she can sleep at all. As the novel progresses, it’s increasingly clear how much wear this has been putting on Cherry, but she is doing this because she loves Sloan and wants to help her.

The problem is that Sloan has gotten to the point that she doesn’t want help, not really. There are numerous occasions throughout the novel that Sloan makes it clear she wished she had been killed to, which is sad but not uncommon. The old Sloan Allison effectively was killed along with everyone who actually got murdered, something she’s willing to acknowledge. The problem is there is no sign that Sloan has any interest in trying to move forward. She has fixated on the idea of the missing time because she thinks that if she remembers what happened to her, she can move on. But as the novel progresses, it increasingly becomes clear that’s just an excuse to stop her from doing anything to get better.

In the scenes with Sloan’s mother, Sloan sees how much damage she has done basically wearing her down to a nub. By this point only one of her friends from ‘before’ is still reaching out to her because she’s been shutting them out. Sloan has no interest in any part of her old life. She only cares about Cherry and that is clearly because of her connection to what happened. When Cherry increasingly tries to get her to move forward, and when she begins to take steps to get past the horrors, Sloan takes this as a betrayal even though there is never a moment in the entire novel where Cherry is anything but supportive of Sloan.

And the thing is Sloan knows it, but she doesn’t have the capacity to move forward. So she does what far too many people do in the aftermath of a tragedy: they go down a rabbit hole. In this case, it’s more literal. Sloan finds a box in Cherry’s home that has a rabbit carved on it. Cherry doesn’t want to share it with her. This starts a splinter in Sloan’s mind. When the lone survivor of the murders – “The Fox’ as they have nicknamed him – takes a plea, his sister reaches out. Sloan is convinced that she knows something about what happened. Cherry tells her nothing good can come from this. Under the guise of reconnecting Sloane convinces one of her friend Connor to drive her to an out of the way meeting place, something he clearly does not want to do.

Sloan meets with this woman who tells her about her younger brother and how he got involved with the group that called itself Morte Hominus and a man named Marco. It’s clear that his sister doesn’t believe any part of their rituals and thinks they were lunatics. But when Sloan learns that the leader of the cult called himself The Rabbit, Sloan goes catatonic and is now convinced that Cherry’s mother is part of the cult. Connor is horrified by her reaction – and even more horrified when she tells him that even if Cherry is part of the cult, that isn’t a reason to end the relationship.

Sloan begins to read a book which is Morte Hominus’ Bible. The moment she sees the first page she passes out. Cherry tries to convince her to leave the book alone and she agrees – but then notices pages are torn out.

By this point in the book Sloan is almost certainly beyond help. The final straw comes when Sloan learns that ‘The Fox’ has been reaching out to the survivors’, something everyone has gone out of their way to avoid mentioning to her. Sloan wants to accept his invitation. Not for closure or any kind of therapy. She wants to know if Cherry was part of the cult and she was left alive for a reason. When you are so far gone that you think that the person who killed eight people and utterly destroyed your life has anything constructive to say to you, there may be no way back.

As the novel continues Sloan’s mind has clearly fractured to the point that even when reality violates the narrative she has built for herself, she keeps trying to twist it to mean something that isn’t. She keeps acknowledging even to herself how gossamer thin the strands she’s weaving are for this conspiracy. The thing is, the longer the novel goes on, it’s clear that Sloan just can’t do it:

“She would come to terms with the fact she wasn’t special…That she survived a mass murder because of a random roll of the dice. That it could just have easily been (one of the other counselors sitting her with Cherry.”

But each time she refuses to turn away. Sloan is constantly being offered help throughout the novel. The last time her therapist sees her she tells her: “I can only help you if you want to be helped?” When Sloan says she does, the therapist asks: “Are you sure about that?” And by this point we know she doesn’t.

In the final act of the novel, Sloan is alone in her home going to see the Fox. Her mother is working early and staying late. Her father is constantly taking their brother to see friends.

“Sloan understood what they were really doing.

They were running. Running away from the monster in their house, the memory of what was lost. The shell of what remained. They ran from Sloan…and now Cherry was running too.

It was fine, Sloane thought, it was fine.”

The prison the Fox is being held in is in the town where the camp where the murders took place in. We understand going in just how horrible this must be for Cherry and how much she must love Sloan to be willing to do this for her. When they arrive at the prison, Cherry is clearly horrified just being there and Sloan is so detached she almost thinks of it as ‘disappointing’

I won’t reveal the ending of the novel, though at this point you might well be able to figure it out for yourself given Sloane’s degeneration to this point. There are certain elements that do fit the model of the horror film but the only monster still around is the one that made herself. In perhaps the most twisted way imaginable, you might even consider the final pages a happy ending. I have little doubt Sloan does.

The ending its worth noting would not be out of place on an episode of The X-Files – or Criminal Minds or Law and Order or any of so many procedurals we’ve become familiar with over the years. That said I am reminded of the conclusion of so many episodes of The X-Files over the years: the final bloody conclusion of a case and either Mulder or Scully in a detached fashion, narrating their final case notes to the viewer. They would be able to make sense out of what happened at the end of The Last Girls Standing far more than a liver-eating mutant or a giant bloodsucking worm or an alien conspiracy. Because we’ve met people like Sloane Allison before, even if they haven’t survived a trauma like this. We run into people who get lost in the dark and thinks that the people with flashlights are just their to lead them even deeper.

 

 

Progressive Presidential Campaigns, Part 2: How Robert La Follette's Failed Campaign for the 1912 Nomination Shows The Many Flaws Progressive Had and Still Have Today

 

 

During the battle between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt for the Republican nomination a principled but arrogant Senator from Wisconsin hoped to serve as a compromise candidate and take over the roots of the progressive movement.

His name was Robert M. La Follette and he had already been the proud leader of the Progressive movement for more than a quarter of a century and would carry the banner long after most members of his party – and the country – abandoned the cause.

La Follette was born on June 14^th 1855, the son of a pioneer couple in the new state of Wisconsin. His father Josiah as well as most of the La Follette family were members of the barely hatched Republican Party and full-fledged abolitionists. Josiah died before his son was a year old and he was essentially raised by his mother Mary.

The state of Wisconsin was quickly beginning to grow and Wisconsin quickly became one of the most Republican states in the country. His new stepfather, a prominent merchant, lost money in the business of and took his wrath out on his stepson. Though his mother took his stepfather’s name of Saxton, La Follette refused too.

He eventually studied at the University of Wisconsin, at the time the eleventh state to found a public university. During his tenure he would meet Belle Case, his future wife, who would become critical to his political life in a way that few political wives had been to that point. At the time the University President was John Bascom whose progressive principles became a guiding force for La Follette the rest of his life. Bascom promoted organized labor, the distribution of wealth, women’s suffrage and social and economic justice.

From an early age he became known as a gifted orator and in an era where oratory was as essential to politics as policy Robert La Follette was practically without peer. He was such a gifted speaker that he considered a career in the theater before moving to law. He became an attorney and in December of 1880 won his first elected office, District Attorney of Dane County. He made an aborted run for Congress two years later, but because of ill-health had to withdraw.

La Follette spent his entire political life plagued by illnesses, many of the common, some related to his gallbladder. Throughout his career he would work until exhaustion from the illnesses overcame him, then frequently rest for extended periods.

Two years later La Follette was elected to Congress for the first time, representing  Dane County. From the start of his Congressional career he advocated fully for the rights of African-Americans, taking up the bar by previous Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler. He also advocated for women suffrage, an issue that the newly settled Western states were beginning to consider seriously. He also spoke avidly for the rights of indigenous people and began to put his principles into action. In 1890, he was one of the votes for the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But even then he had a reputation as a trouble maker. Not long after Benjamin Harrison was elected to the Presidency, he wrote a long letter protesting the tariff which Cleveland had campaigned against. La Follette’s self-righteousness was one of many factors which would cost him a better chance at winning the Presidency later on.

He lost reelection in 1890, but one year later after an incident that involved bribery, he determined that he would fight against corruption in every form. In the 1890s, he began to take on the cause of the direct primary, then considered a blow against the party machines that controlled every aspect of the government across the country. He declined a position in William McKinley’s administration to fight for his ambitions in Wisconsin. In November of 1900 those ambitions were realized when he became the first Wisconsin-born governor.

La Follette’s ambition – known as ‘The Wisconsin Idea’ – was the most progressive any governor had tried for their state to that point. It called for the restriction of lobbying and campaign activities, the improvement of public education, the regulation of food, child labor, and workman’s compensation, and the curbing of monopolies. An ambitious agenda, it showed some of La Follette’s far more unattractive side as he got the reputation as being a browbeater and a messiah complexes, refusing to accept responsible for the enemies he made, calling it betrayal. As a result the majority of his reforms would not be adapted in Wisconsin until after his tenure as governor.

The ascension of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House after McKinley’s assassination gave La Follette and his fellow Progressives hope that his agenda would soon receive nationwide interest. In 1906 he was named to the Senate and returned to Washington where he would reside for the rest of his political career.

Almost from the moment he arrived, La Follette would clash with Roosevelt, a pattern that would last with every subsequent President. It had not helped that while La Follette had been governor, he had refused multiple meetings with the President and found most of his policy – while revolutionary to the Old Guard – tepid reforms and called him an insincere grandstander. In this we see what would become a constant problem of the progressive never satisfied with the White House no matter what the circumstances, though at the time it was more built on professional rivalry. Roosevelt believed that leadership came from preserving order between the old guard and the radicals like La Follette. When La Follette presented a bill and spent two hours defending to TR, the President pointed out that it would never get through Congress. La Follette told him that passage of the bill was not his first consideration. “But I want to do something,:” TR said. The clash between idealism and pragmatism has been something that the extremists have never been able to reconcile, and it was certainly true in the case of La Follette. The idea of half a loaf, the whole purpose behind democracy and government, was something that La Follette refused to accept.

In 1908 with TR announcing he would not seek a third term, La Follette began a campaign to win the Republican nomination. However, he refused to delegate any responsibility for it, choosing to fight for it in the Senate by attacking multiple bills. At one point he engaged in a record setting filibuster that lasted more than nineteen hours against a bill that was an emergency currency reform. When the bill passed anyway, he refused to acknowledge defeat. His campaign was a disaster as he received only 25 votes at the Convention (all but one from Wisconsin).

Halfway through Taft’s term, the number of elected Progressives were beginning to grow, particularly in the Senate. The movement he had been advocating for was growing nationwide and he was becoming one of the biggest voices for Progressives in elected office. But even then some were beginning to think La Follette was taking on a messiah like complex. Hiram Johnson, a California progressive who would run with TR in 1912 on the Bull Moose Ticket summed it up: “There were those with us who thought the pain of the world was in their special keeping and that we did not with sufficient rapidity apply the remedies that should eliminate this pain. There were others who believed they bore the weight of the world on their shoulders and after 1910 in their omniscience desired to direct the exact political course we  should steer.

La Follette spent much of 1911 trying to convince TR to join the National Progressive Reform League, a League that despite having many noble principles (including the direct primary, direct election of Senators and amendments for the initiative and the recall) was also meant to keep Taft from winning the Republican nomination. La Follette constantly cancelled meetings with TR out of envy of Roosevelt and his reluctance to share the limelight with anyone. The two men were too much alike to ever get along, but because Roosevelt had a nationwide popularity that La Follette could never match, he refused to compromise.

La Follette declared his candidacy in July of 1911 and for many months it was thought he had a real chance. However, he could not avoid the specter of TR who had not yet declared but for whom many considered La Follette a stalking horse. Then in January of 1912, at a dinner for the Philadelphia Publishers, La Follette gave a speech that almost certainly killed any chance of winning the nomination.

He was already nervous about it, and his anxiety was not helped by his young daughter’s impending surgery. Before he began the speech (after giving a pleasing reference to Woodrow Wilson who was in attendance)  he took out his speech and told everyone he was going to read it for two reasons. The second was the most harmful: he was constantly upset at being misquoted by the press. It was a tactless and insulting remark to the newspaper heads that were there, and he instantly lost any respect from his audience.

Observers described the speech of La Follette, normally a master orator as tedious, inappropriate and extreme. He used his platform to attack the newspapers whose heads were in attendance, and he repeated himself multiple times . At a certain moment, his hostile audience began to put him and chant for him to ‘get out’. Ill from exhaustion, La Follette left the stage and vomited. He then got on a train back to DC to make sure he could observe his daughter’s surgery. The reception in the papers in the aftermath was worse, with many thinking that he was drunk or even insane.

La Follette’s campaign was crippled and was enough to convince many wavering moderates to go to Roosevelt. Despite that La Follette insisted on continuing his campaign for the nomination, hoping that the existence of the Presidential primary which twelve states had adopted might be enough to help him.

He won the North Dakota primary (the first one) with nearly 58 percent of the vote to TR’s 39 percent. In Wisconsin, he swamped Taft by a margin of nearly three to one. He also campaigned well in Illinois and Oregon. But many of his fellow progressives were unimpressed. When La Follette arrived in California – where his decision to keep his name on the ballot had already cost him influential supporters -  he ran a bitter campaign against Johnson and George Norris, fellow Progressives who thought there was a better chance winning with a united party.

In the space of a few months La Follette had sacrificed the general but less devoted approval of the powerful many for the passionate, even fanatical support of the devoted few. This appeal, sadly, has become the driving force of so many primary campaigns run by the extremists of members of both parties. He continued his behavior at the Republican National Convention. With only 36 delegates, he refused to ally with the Roosevelt forces at the convention. When the convention was over, he insisted to the press that neither Taft nor Roosevelt had honestly won enough delegates. Even after Roosevelt left to form the Bull Moose party, La Follette refused to endorse him or Taft, essentially sitting the campaign out.

La Follette’s unwillingness to bend was as much a factor in the breakdown of the Progressive coalition in the GOP as TR’s decision to form his own party. His decision not only cost him a leading role in the Progressive movement that followed but any chance he might have ever had in the future of becoming President. Had he been willing to merely sit out the battle between Taft and TR, he very likely could have been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. He might have been able to help his own ambitions had he been willing to reconcile with Roosevelt in the aftermath. But he refused to acknowledge the limited support of his agenda, was unwilling to compromise or delegate authority and his dedication to principles whatever the cost would lead to his political undoing.

That said La Follette’s ambitions for the Presidency were not done nor was the Progressive campaign over. In the next article in this series, I will deal with the remainder of La Follette’s career in Washington, and the circumstances that led to his own third party run in 1924.

 

Lost Rewatch on VHS: The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

 

VHS Notes:  Most of the film ads in the commercials are for horror movies including The Haunting in Connecticut yet another Amityville Horror movie rip-off and a detestable remake of The Last House on the Left. We also see a preview for the Clive Owen-Julia Roberts caper duplicity. There is also an ad for a two hour ‘movie’ of Brothers & Sisters, which featured among other things Rob Lowe’s character suffering a heart attack and the series of events that would lead to Balthazar Getty’s departure from the series.

 

At some point I will probably write a column about how much difficulty I have recognizing episodes that, even among the classic series of the era, were among the greatest ever made. I am somewhat better at these days then I was when I began following television with a critical eye twenty years ago, but when I was watching Lost, I was still hit or miss.

I believe this book has shown some of my flaws and strengths in this regard – I recognized how remarkable Walkabout was right off the boat but on first viewing of Through the Looking Glass I didn’t get what was brilliant about it. I could tell there was something remarkable about The Constant but I’m not sure that I would have ranked it above The Shape of Things to Come that year. But when I fist saw this episode, I realized that I was watching something remarkable, even by the admittedly high standards of Lost. Indeed Entertainment Weekly would rank ‘The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham’ as one of the ten greatest episodes of 2009 and Alan Sepinwall considered it one of the high points of the entire series. Curiously that opinion was not necessarily held by Lost fans in Hidden Treasures; while three episodes from Season 5 were among the ten greatest in the show’s history, this one missed the list. (In fairness Season 5.)

Like so many episodes in Season 5, Jeremy Bentham is unique to what we have seen before. For one thing, it is the only series in the entire run that does not have a single scene on the island. (The only scenes after the crash take place on Hydra Island.) Like 316, the episode is mostly focused off the island, though unlike that one it is basically one huge flashback. And of course the real reason it is remarkable is because it does what the episode tells us: it shows us how ‘Jeremy Bentham’ was born, how he lived off the island and how he died. Because it is framed that way we look it as the journey of Locke off the island after he turned the wheel, how he visited the Oceanic 6, how he failed and how he died. And because the episode opens with the survivors of Ajira 316 walking and meeting a man in a suit named John Locke, we naturally assume that death was a temporary condition.

It is a tribute to Darlton (who wrote the episode) that the resurrection of John Locke, which would have been something remarkable on any other series is marked with almost no surprise by the fan base. When we saw Locke in the coffin in the Season 4 finale Ben told Jack that they were going to ‘need to bring him’, we naturally assumed that Ben was insisting on it because he expected this to happen as much as the audience did. After all, considering how important Locke was through the first four seasons, it seemed that his death, if it came, would happen in the last season. The fact that he was in a coffin and apparently embalmed seemed a minor setback.

Ben has spent the lead up to the Ajira flight making it seem essential that John be on the plane and in the last episode Eloise gave instructions to Jack that implied it. We’ve been told over and over – and we hear it multiple times throughout the episode – that Locke is important to the island, and so much of the story on the show has been about that idea.

But since this is the time that we say goodbye to Locke as we know him (not giving anything away yet), it’s actually worth trying to figure out what John Locke has meant to the other characters. Jeremy Bentham’s purpose is to bring the Oceanic 6 back to the island and we already know this is a mission doomed to failure. So let’s discuss why it was probably doomed from the start, and that has to do a lot with John Locke.

I don’t deny the assessment of how incredible John Locke is or how magnificent a job Terry O’Quinn has done portraying him throughout the series. Nor can I deny that Locke has been right about the island practically from the start. But there has always been a flaw in Locke’s character and ironically it has to do with what he is known for the most: his faith.

Nikki Stafford has already done a magnificent job in Finding Lost of reminding us of Locke long hard road before he got on the plane, the fact that he was never loved, that he never trusted himself, that he always made the wrong decision, that he trusted the wrong people. He was broken in spirit as well as body when he got on Oceanic 815. Everyone else who survived the plane was broken in spirit themselves. When the  plane crashed Locke knew that a miracle had happened here and what a blessed place the island was. But because he had spent his life not trusted people when he opened himself up, while in the aftermath of the crash everyone else was slowly forming bonds with other people, the only thing Locke ever trusted fully was the island. And because he only shared this with a relative few when he was on the island – and those people either died or never shared the secret – Locke’s often beatific attitude in the midst of a struggle for survival isolated him from almost the start.

You watch the first season of the show Locke is always smiling and at peace in a way none of the other characters are and you can tell that they all are extremely uncomfortable around this. If one of the issues of Lost is science versus faith, then there’s clearly a message of how isolated blind faith can be to others and its clear this was picked up by everybody, not just Jack. Locke was right about many things on the island, but he always phrased in such talk and at often such inopportune times, that the natural reaction was to think of him as crazy. Throughout the first three seasons of Lost, even when he is among the leadership ranks, people rarely want to turn to him as their first choice. After he ostensibly goes to rescue Jack, but really to blow up the sub, he breaks with the survivors and no one even missed him. Even during Season 4 when he was right about the folks on the freighter, no one truly went with him willingly and he was as isolated as before. Locke said that all he had ever done was act in everyone’s best interest, but unlike everyone else who either wants rescue or survival, Locke always puts the island first and everyone can sense that.

Alone among the Oceanics Locke never formed a real bond with any other survivor and was in fact openly antagonistic with many of them. He shares this trait with Charles Widmore and Ben Linus who like him, feel the island is essential above everything else in their lives and are willing to do anything in their power to get it. I don’t know if these men are good or evil, but both are ruthless and master manipulators. We already know that of Ben, and it’s clear that Widmore is too. Which is why just days after Widmore sent a freighter filled with men whose sole purpose was to kill everyone on the island, Widmore can appear by Locke’s bedside in the Tunisian Desert and tell him he’s on Locke’s side.

Locke emerges in the desert and is rescued by Widmore’s men. Widmore claims the cameras were there to find Locke, but it’s obvious he knows that’s where Ben came from and is trying to see who else will show up. Widmore’s trying to find the island and he knows the best way to do is it is through the Oceanic 6.  Sun clearly hasn’t confronted him yet, so he’s hoping to use Locke to get to them.

Locke is clearly recovering from everything that has happened but he’s still as much a pawn as before. All he needs is for someone to tell him he is important and he will forget who he should trust. Now admittedly he doesn’t have much chose when he comes to his allies and he knows that Widmore’s resources are the best way to complete his mission. The problem is this was always going to be a difficult sell, particularly if you remember what his relationship was like with the Oceanics before they left the island.

Sayid is rightfully scornful of him; the two of them were antagonistic when he learned that Locke had destroyed the radio antenna. It got worse when he blew up the Flame and then the sub and the last thing Locke did to Sayid was trick him and hold him prisoner.

Even if that were not the case Sayid was always more committed to getting off the island than almost anyone else, and considering what the last two years were like for him (he’s clearly trying to atone in Santo Domingo by doing humanitarian work) the last thing he wants to do is go back to the island.

It’s never been clear why Locke went to see Walt, but it is worth remembering that Locke by far had the best relationship with him than any of the survivors with the exception of Charlie. No doubt he remembers that Walt burned the first raft because he liked living on the island and perhaps he did think he would come as a substitute for Sun. Walt clearly is glad to see him but Locke does remember what this child went through and just says he wanted to say hi. (This is the last time Malcolm David Kelley appears in an episode on the show.)

As we know Hurley wanted to go back to the island even before Jack did, so the question is why didn’t he jump at the chance? It helps to remember the last time he saw Locke. Hurley always got along with everybody but he was dealing with the death of Charlie when Locke found him and he knows that Locke used him to manipulate everyone who went to the Barracks. (He told Jack that he was sorry for that when he was first committed to Santa Rosa.) Then after the barracks were attacked Locke told Hurley that he was coming with him and Ben to see Jacob and Sawyer and Locke might have shot each other had Hurley not agreed. Then after they were told to move the island and Hurley could see there was danger and wanted to leave, Locke told him it was too late. Maybe Abaddon might have tipped the scales, but it wasn’t going to take much to convince Hurley that John was evil.

In the scene with Kate, she seems particularly hurtful but she has every right to be. She was as opposed to staying on the island as Sayid was, which meant they were diametrically opposed. Kate spent a lot of time giving Locke the benefit of the doubt, but after he used her to get to the Barracks to blow up the sub it’s hard to imagine she could forgive him. When he killed Naomi at the radio tower and pointed a gun at Jack, she was more infuriated. And when she  went to the Barracks and gently asked Locke for a favor, he basically treated her with scorn and when she went around him, he forced to walk back through the jungle in the dead of night. I’m honestly surprised Kate let him get that far in his argument; I would have slammed the door in his face. (She probably hasn’t forgiven him for the fact that Claire disappeared under his leadership too.)

Locke spends much of the episode being berated by the mysterious Matthew Abaddon, whose role when it comes to the island will be one of its minor mysteries. He clearly knew about Locke’s destiny, but he baited him to take a walkabout knowing he’d be turned away. He helped assemble the freighter team which had instruction to kill everybody on the island – even though he knew Locke was alive. Then he greets Locke with a wheelchair, knowing all too well what it means to the man who was paralyzed. And he gives Locke nothing but scorn – until he finally tells him about Helen.

This is a sad scene because at that point Locke clearly is considering just giving up. This gives him nothing to work with but bringing everyone back. Abaddon is shot and Locke drives off in fear and he ends up at Jack’s hospital/

Jack has clearly lost everything by this point: he’s clearly drunk or stoned during the scene, he’s lost Kate, and he’s been seeing Christian repeatedly. But faced with his chief antagonist he goes right back to their old roles. He refuses to accept the very real fact Locke ended up at his hospital as anything other than science. He calls Locke a crazy, old man. And when Locke tells him that his father says hello, rather than try to accept what this might mean he goes back into the denial he did all the time he was on the island. Locke is desperate in a way he’s never been with Jack, but even now Jack will never admit he’s right.

The scene in the hotel is one of the great pieces in the entire series. I don’t know for sure but I don’t think Locke is thinking about having to die to bring everyone back. The despair on his face as he methodically writes his suicide note, throws Widmore’s phone in the trash, takes out the cord from the hardware story and dully prepares to hang himself shows a man who truly believes that his life has been a failure.

And then Ben breaks the door down. Like every other time they are onscreen together, Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn bring out their best work. Ben is clearly appalled when he says Locke up there and Locke is at the end of his rope (metaphorically and physically). When he shouts out “Answer the question!”, it’s clear Locke has finally run out of patience for games. When he says with tears in his eyes: “There is nothing remarkable about me. I’m a failure”, sadder words were never spoken.

Much has been written ever since the episode aired as to what happens. Ben uses every bit of his power to persuade Locke to get down from the table and take the rope from around his neck. And then just one minute later, he strangles him to death. He gives an explanation to Locke later this season as to why this happened but like everything else Ben says it’s almost certainly a lie.

I think the truth is ridiculously simple. Like Widmore, Ben wants to get to back to the island. But I also think that to this point he doesn’t know how. He thinks the Oceanic 6 are his best way back but he knows they’d never listen to him. We also see the moment Locke tells him that Jin is alive and that he has no intention of going to see Sun and that this could be an obstacle to his plans. I’m pretty sure Ben was going to kill Locke at some point. But the moment he learns that Locke knows of Eloise Hawking, he clearly decides to do it then. He knows that whatever trust he and Locke have will never last long – they have too much of a history. And let’s not forget that just before he left the island it became very clear that Jacob had chosen Locke over him. He knows if Locke goes back to the island, that will likely still be the case.

So Ben kills the man he has been jealous of for the past three seasons. Then he stages a suicide, cleans down the room so no one will know he was there, takes Jin’s ring, and walks out. When he tells John’s body: “I’ll miss you, John. I really will.” I actually think he’s being honest; what’s the point of lying to the dead? But he thinks his problems have been solved and that the hard part’s over.

And as we can see at the end of the episode Ben has realized his dream and made it back to the island. He has no idea what’s waiting for him when he wakes up. And in a real cliffhanger, we have to wait another four episodes before we find out – because there’s another more important reunion coming in the next episode.

So Help Me Todd Is Back For Season 2!

 

Almost concurrent with the arrival of Peak TV came the emergence of what has become known as the ‘dramedy’. I trace its origin to the rise of Ally McBeal and Sports Night and since then, it has essentially been one of the major products that basically every network, service and streaming has run with – much to the dismay of millions of Emmy voters.

With some series – Weeds, Nurse Jackie, The Big C – they get considered comedy as a basis of their half-hour format, even though the longer the series continue, the fewer laughs there are. I remember spending a lot of time an energy trying to understand how Tony Shalhoub won three Emmys for Monk when I was certain it was a drama rather than a comedy. Similar protests went on for the early seasons of Glee, throughout the era of Orange is the New Black and Shameless (which were ultimately nominated in both the drama and comedy categories by the Emmys) and in the last few years some of the most brilliant comedies of all time, I speak of both Barry and Atlanta in particular, pushed the boundaries so much that by the halfway point of their runs they didn’t seem to fit any definition.

Perhaps that is why, even after I realized just how exceptional So Help Me Todd was when it debuted in the fall of 2022, I still considered it more of a drama with comedic elements and could not understand why Marcia Gay Harden was being nominated in comedy categories in some awards shows,  I acknowledged the series was often hysterically funny (in a way that the final season of Barry almost never was for all its brilliance) but because of the format, because it was an hour long, and because it was on CBS, I was still inclined to view it more in the dramedy category. Having spent more than eight months waiting for it to return, I am now pretty sure I’ve been reading it wrong all along. So Help Me Todd is a pure comedy much in the way that Monk was and Poker Face clearly is. There are occasional elements that are serious to be sure, but the show has decided to completely lean in to the comic elements that made it work so well, and it’s really showing how brilliant is.

When we left Margaret Wright (Marcia Gay Harden) at the end of Season 1 she was about to finally be made a name partner at her firm and finally had decided to get involved with Gus, the rumpled messy, attorney she spent most of Season 1 hating and has now realized is perfect for her. The two of them were about to go on their first date when Margaret arrived home to find Harry, who had abandoned her in the pilot and whom she had divorced in absentia last season, saying: “Iceland was terrible.”  Meanwhile, Todd (Skyler Astin) had finally gotten his P.I license back, had received a promotion and had learned that Susan (Inga Schlingmann) his former girlfriend was about to elope with her fiancée and was headed off to the airport.

The season opener took place a few days later. Margaret was in bed with Gus but had not been home since Harry came back. By contrast Todd, who spent all of Season 1 essentially a mess, was completely put together. In a wonderful reversal his sister Allison (the wondrous Madeline Wise) is now living in his apartment having spent the previous year with Todd living in her garage. (We’ll get back to this.) He walked proudly into his office more put together than we saw him most of last season. Margaret, by contrast, comes to her office to find that on her first day as name partner, they have messed up the lettering on the sign and that as ‘managing partner’ she has learned the firm is facing financial problems and that Beverly Crest (I hope we see more of Leslie Silva) has essentially decided to lay off  all of the problems on her, starting with all the layoffs.

So when Margaret needs help dealing with a murder (which we saw took place on TV but that Margaret missed because she was having sex with Gus) she decides to see Todd, who decides to make her wait for his help. This leads to the always wonderful byplay where Todd brings out her a contract for her to sign, and after she tears it up, he produces another one…and then another one. Todd is now in a position with leverage that he hasn’t had all season and Margaret, who is still a control freak but now having less control then she had before, doesn’t like it.

Margaret also has to deal with the fact that she has forgotten her son’s birthday which is at her condo and comes there to find the entire family…being served dinner by Harry. This leads to a wonderful scene when eventually Gus comes over with flowers and the two men in Margaret’s life have a perfectly civilized conversation completely unaware of who the other is. Then Todd shows up, walks in the door and sees Harry…and his first act is to break a champagne bottle and go at Harry with it.

Margaret eventually has enough forthright control that she kicks Harry out of her condo and tells him she is done with him. Harry, however, has not gotten the hint and spent the last episode constantly calling Margaret. Beverly, it’s worth noting, has no more respect for Margaret then she did before; in last night’s episode, she essentially dumped a huge case on Margaret at the last minute for a case involving a billionaire client (believe me I will get to that), with the sole extent because she knew it was a loser and she wanted Margaret to fail. Todd spent the day working through the courthouse, soliciting clients (who naturally kept rejecting him) and while he was there, picked up on the fact that there was a scheme among the bailiffs to commit credit card fraud and identity theft. Meanwhile, as the case kept getting worse against Margaret, the two stories came together and Todd managed to bail his mother out as well as realize the larger fraud.

Now the case that Beverly was there is the exact kind of case that could only happen in America. Gus was representing a billionaire client who was suing a puppeteer who had performed at her five year olds birthday party and who she claimed had traumatized her son. The major concept of this case seemed to be the idea that puppets were somehow human. This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on TV in years, and what made it so hysterical was that everybody was taking it perfectly seriously. Allison got called as a medical expert and in her deadpan way when she realized what the case was about said: “Puppets aren’t alive, are they?” When she left the witness box, she actually began to wonder about this. (Allison is, for the record, an ER doctor.) Beverly then chose to show this case was false by eating cake in front of a five year old. The case ended in a mistrial because the jurors could not agree if puppets were human. This billionaire socialite had done all this, for the record, because she is seen as a corporate ghoul and she staged this whole sham of a trial, wasting taxpayer dollars on a day when everybody was watching a big publicity murder case, to do social rehabilitation. That Beverly indulged this whole affair  - and dumped a murder case on an unprepared Margaret – shows just how utterly immoral a person she is; it’s beginning to seriously look like no one but Margaret at this firm has anything resembling a conscience. Beverly is annoyed that Margaret is trying to save the firm by pinching pennies rather than firing people, something she would have no problem doing on her own but doesn’t think its worthy of her time: I particularly love how Silva does not seem to show emotion for any part of her life.

So Help Me Todd is one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in a very long time. One is reminded of so much of David E. Kelley’s work in the 2000s, but whereas Kelley during that period loading every one of his frequently ridiculous cases with politics (albeit brilliantly) Todd’s cases are ridiculous, full stop. It’s impossible to look at the season premiere any other way: Margaret and Todd are working together to clear a client of a murder and eventually they realize that the man who killed a news anchor by dropping a light fixture on him was one of the grips. Who worked in the shadows and was the man’s lover. And his ringtone was Phantom of The Opera. And who had a cowl on his face when he was confessing. The capture involved chasing him through the ceiling to the title tune. I think that is what clinched it for me that this was a pure and unadulterated comedy.

And the show made that clear with the character of Allison. Alison spent all of Season 1 as the perpetually put upon Wright child, the only one who was a solid citizen but who no one respected. Everyone loved her husband more. She spent much of Season 1 realizing what a disaster her marriage was and finally left her husband. Immediately afterwards she went on a retreat, had her identity stolen and her house and credit cards had a lien put on it.  She’s now living in her car, which has a ridiculous number of parking tickets on it. (That’s why she was at the courthouse that day.) Wise has been wonderful at performing like someone who views the entire world with a kind of confused surprise and we felt sympathy for her because of how everyone treated her. In a daring move, the show has decided to double down on the confused part of Allison, as if she is still sleepwalking through her life. Throughout last night’s episode, Todd led her by the hand through everything that went on, and she never asked a question. When Todd asked her to come up with a fake name, she said: “June Allison.” Then she wrote Todd’s name when she went through the court. Todd reacting into his watch: “Subject is confused…about everything.” At this point every line that Wise says is hysterical and she can steal every scene that she’s in.

Which is remarkable considering that in the lion’s share of them she is with two pros. Perhaps the reason it took me so long to realize that Todd is a drama is the presence of Harden who while one of the greatest character actresses in history, almost never does comedy, certainly when it comes to television. (Film’s a different story). From the second season of Damages to her recurring role in The Newsroom to her recent role on The Morning Show, I have always associated her with dramas. Her job in So Help Me Todd has not been so much to play straight woman but to play a control freak who in every episode things spiral out of control. Harden has been delightful in this way, but her character takes herself so seriously that even when she is (frequently) making herself a buffoon, you honestly think she’s playing its straight.

Skyler Astin, in retrospect, should have been a dead giveaway. Indeed, he has had a critical role in two of the greatest hour-long comedy series in the last decade: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. In both series, he was more than willing to humiliate himself in the face of impressive female protagonists and he was just as willing to do the same thing as Todd. The difference is that for all his lunacy, there is a method to his madness and it has bailed Margaret out time and time again. Astin is hysterically funny to watch every moment he’s on screen because he takes himself too seriously all the time.

And the reason So Help Me Todd is such a joy is because we realized by the time the first season was over that these two deeply flawed people, when they work together, can conquer the world. Because they’re related and because they’re who they are, neither will admit it to the other but watching them over and over, it’s clear that when Todd and Margaret Wright are on the case, the innocent will be set free, the guilty will be punished and the high will be brought low. That they do this by utterly humiliating themselves shows that they will do anything to help their clients – and each other. At the end of last night’s episode Lyle, the all too serious investigator who both rely on, says to himself: “I will never understand this family.”  The viewer does and we are grateful for everything they do.

My score: 4.75 stars.