Big Love is Big Drama

Incest (kind of), Racism, Sexism, Homosexuality, Bigotry, Religion, and ...Dr. Jekyll?

This was the season's defining episode, if I have ever seen on. Filled with promises that may be hard to keep on the tight schedule of a show with so few episodes per season. Conflicts wherever one looks, dealing with most any conflict there is to deal with, both new and old within the parameters of the series. Margie and Ben, re-igniting the incestuous side of their relationship, blackface on TV, and within the freeing speech at the Casino (who wouldn't want to yell the FU at Barb?), a story of one of their own, whom the tribe does not welcome. Ahhh, there goes the worst form of racism, the idea of having noble repressed natives, thankful to the white man. They have their own ups and downs, now even on TV, who would have thought.

The reappearance of Mr. Stockwell, however, I found was a poor choice. Too many dead dad's are haunting their children and our screens and have been, especially in connection to HBO, pointing outside the frame, ripping me right out of the story, in an unpleasant way. Alby is a character so transparent, I feel I personally did not need help in understanding his paranoid broken mind.
And while I love a good villain, I would like Joey to get a break from playing a man that is so trapped in his childhood, that he acts before thinking still. He killed, came back, and lost it again. J.J. playing him like you play a little child.

Tonight's episode of Big Love, while shock full of ... well, shock-ing moments -Nicky's holding the gun once again regaining her power and losing it immediately was wonderful- may have slipped one by some of us. or my mind is again in imagination overdrive, which is quite possible.
What is up with J. J. performing a biopsy on his cancer (?) ridden wife? When they market him as the 'baddest villain', are they talking about someone who enjoys keeping his wife sick, cutting into her? Actually, cutting into himself also maybe? Or how the heck does he lose all his fingernails?

Vent Your Spleen

Though an old-fashioned phrase as such, I often feel it is quite adequate when surrounded by my dear friends, all TV and Film geeks and buffs, talking about their beloved and hated shows on TV, films that should never have been made, or need to be seen by all.

I needed a place to collect my thoughts, a place where I can write about the shows not part of my dissertation. Series, serials, quality TV and even reality, which are part of screen culture today and all need discussion.

Since most of my colleagues are in the same position, fruitful intelligent talk on many shows is cut short, because we are running off to interview these or those people, are archiving this snippet of research material, only have thirty minutes before we return to our dissertation scripts.

BUT - everyone takes breaks, here and there, short and long, on their computer. We all know the facebook status: writing my dissertation / working on paper etc. mmmmh...so why are you on facebook???

So this will be my break. Write about things I love, note ideas that may lead to papers for me or, should I have any, readers of my blog... we'll see.