http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/02/big_love_recap_bird_gang.html
Here is another look at last night's episode of Big Love.

Fallen and Risen Again

First of, just two questions because we all love to speculate, right? So what about JJ? Whose babies is he planting, or if that is not it, what is the evil plan behind it all? The creepy son did seem to show emotion right there when he looked at Nicky, but there is no doubt he will do whatever the plan is asking for. Right? There is just that quick flutter of his eyelids, the close up holding on that moment. Nicky is not screaming, but begging, pleading, for her to be allowed to claim her life as a woman. This show knows how to pull our strings and play them beautifully, although Nicky will possibly remain a psychological miracle to me forever. Her actions so unexpected at times, make this series so good, so realistic, too. For the broken is erratic, is full of logic that destructs itself, bit by bit by bit.
And then there are the Greens. I retract my earlier statement. Their evil has for the first time reunited what was broken, or so it seems. They came back at the right time, and for a long enough while, with potential for the future? Mom, Dad, Bill, Joey, and Ben all at their lowest, ready to rise to the occasion and try again to make things right. But then Mommy steps up to save her son and that, well, that was just pure genius. She demonstrated her motherhood, gave quick-thinking Bill an edge, and single handedly saved them all. The genius in the scene lied with the simple tones, the music that did not push the action, the quiet that allowed us to hear single calls for action, not screams, not tumult, just shock and surprise.
But all this is taken back to zero in the shows final moments today. Margene is ignored by Ben, and Barb stands alone, in thought. Pondering why she was not trusted again? Protection? But there is no argument. We are past family meetings and talking things out. This is where we are: the brink of the end. Ultimate loss of communication. Each one to deeply concerned with saving their own life, in whatever form necessary.

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It does not matter if we talk about business security, fertility, fighting for acknowledgment, love, or the right to be in the open. They all strive to make their life sustainable in a world that is hurting them. It hurts them by conventions, social norm, laws, regulations that protect no one, and religious pressure. It keeps them trapped in a past within their present. No real life, just an image of it, a faint promise ringing in your ears of that which is not and may never come.
What strikes me here is that the future they work towards, no matter how often they call upon ‘heavenly father’ no longer is in the afterlife. That was the struggle they faced last season, last year, last opening credits Then, marriage, and babies, priesthood, family and Roman still most often preoccupied their minds. Nothing is light now, no heaven to aspire to. All of their wishes now lie right here, on earth. And didn’t we see it coming, when Bill turned his back, on his knees, to the Holy rising behind him. His eyes firmly fixed on the ground. Who he now makes peace with is the man he blames for all the bad in his life. That, is acknowledgment. This season is the awakening.
Only few episodes left this season. Much is unresolved. Where does Alby go from here? Does he get that his wife did this or will he blame Bill? AGAIN: What is up with JJ and that creepy Walker family from Kansas?
9 Episodes is all they gave us this time around. But it works. The story is streamlined, straight forward, no deterrence, no new churches, just a few lose ends I believe they will resolve or bring to the next season. Just a good old fashioned burning all bridges. The less they carry over, the better, I think.
I sure hope this, in my eyes best season, will not be diminished in the aftermath by becoming redundant. For it would be to easy, to send the family through another trauma induced reunion once again. So momentum has to keep up. Only one question then remains. Where do we go from here?
-I can hardly wait.

Lost

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I am not sure where this last season is going, but am afraid there is no other way, but sit and watch.

surfacing

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Alhtough a necessary move to bring Barb to finally take charge meeting Anna once again, no less with a baby did not much but diffuse today’s episode. The Hendrickson’s just never have a minute of private rest. After all, how could you even in prime time soap drama, losen on the conflict. But this episode was finally the awaking of what bubbled under the surface for three, long, often painfully Bill driven seasons.

How cheap does the struggle of Viagra now look, how farcical in hindsight? How unbelievingly light this serial started, the foreshadowing never reaching a point of solution. Now is when true struggle finally finds its way to the surface, the pain of those following a screaming, illogical, more-then-struggling patriarch, who appeals to emotional weakness in his family, time after time. Today, after all is pointing towards the women understanding their own suffering in the face of promised after-lives for the first time, he tells them that all he wants and all they need is to no longer hide. But look at the problems arisen.

Many of them do not stem from having to hide. Not Bill’s struggle with a female power figure (yes, I will remind you that he mistook her for a secretary and that is how all started). And neither does his problem with Barb, where the hypocrite himself betrayed the promises he made before, unable to hold himself to the same standard as his wives, no matter how often he promises. Margene wants to be herself within the family, not the lowest one in the food chain. That, we are reminded of by Anna’s reappearance. Not the horrible events at the motel, where no one really hides anything. Not Nicky’s past, not Bill’s. Nicky has it just right: they are broken. The homosexual love ended so brutally (and in harsh contrast to religion), electroshocks and re-orientation manipulation, Nicky realizing, finally, what she really has lost (well, okay, I am not so sure why she had to lose the eighties), and most terrifying: the singing J.J. and the frightened eyes of a woman you thought had seen it all before, her horrors beginning again, looking no older then the child that almost was turned into nothing but number seven. A number on the ladder to god.

And in all of this, the Mormon church is REALLY beginning to look like a cult. One wonders how controlled, smart, and forgiving the authors, raised in Utah, struggling probably themselves to grow up, must be to have so slowly built up to this. What is this? A simple truth, when religion and religious believes become excuses, illusions, and fetish, they should be called for what they really have become.

On a side note, the side note: Mexico, more gayness, smuggling and old fiends returned… Could have lived without. Hope it doesn’t muddy the waters.

But here we are: Barb is in power, Nicky is a savior, and Margene is the advocating the right to individuality.

Sorry guys, all Bill had was: “You, of all people?”

Let's start a revolution

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So what is CBS doing? Undercover Boss is a new reality series that sends a boss, CEO, president into his/her own company, working as one of the workers. Working with their hands. Working. Then, after he/she sees what life is like for the everyday Joe, everything will be made better.
Is this the benevolent master of the slaves that removes what shackles their lives? Is this a sign that corporate America can change? Is this a promise? If so, is this designed to keep the masses at bay? Is this telling everyone to stay put, waiting for the high and mighty to see the wrongs and change their lives? Almost like the lottery, well, and much of TV, it lulls the subjects into place, into calm, into hope? Like a fairy tale. A big promise, or just TV without relevance? I'd love to hear what you think about this.

Missing Link

While I first was taken aback by the overflow of story-lines and subplots provided in Caprica - after all BSG had taken a little longer to introduce all players, questions, trajectories - I now, after only two episodes, am intrigued, fascinated, and 100% committed to the twelfth world. This is a place, a show, filled with all what makes humanity both good and bad, with all that has happened before, all that will happen again.

This society is advanced, in many ways. Students staying out after curfew occupy the time of cops, nothing bigger on their plates until this bomb that brought us here.

Homosexuality isn't argued about, but is so accepted that it is there but hard to catch in episode one. A friend had even to point out to me the subtle: "I would hit at a hot guy and your dad would leave with his sister", comment, so unimportant, it is something so trivial here, what better statement could the writers have made? Hooray for humanity that can see beyond something as laughable as a discussion of who someone else is allowed to enjoy live with. In this world, questions of right and wrong, and seemingly a full set of rules apply that tell your children thow to move about the day, or night. Rules, regulations...what else do we yet need to know about pre-cylon Caprica? Caprica before it's first hit in the stomach, its first loss of power?
What about the need to be part of this world? Adama,..., Adams, conformity, belonging. I am going to wait and discuss Adama-bad-ass in a later blog, so much yet to see.
Caprica

The show brings us law, order, science, family drama, teen drama, class clashes, religion (or religious insanity), and drugs/holo-bands that allow the cut from reality, polygamous life styles (not a problem for the old religion here again), and a teacher that weirds me out. It seems it all started because of the STO. The need to lay claim to a single god, to only one right answer, one way to reach the goal of higher moral existence that allows for whatever it is one seeks to find. Aaaah, we're back at the beginning. Once again. Arrogant human creature.
Now, as a good friend pointed out, we have a human avatar, knowing nothing of why, what, and where she is, surrounded by the very root of humanity's downfall. All that is within the seven mortal sins is lived in this space, that much we know from the pilot. It is the pit of human want. How will that make humanity look; a humanity that is far ahead of us, yet precedes the war?
There is much, we are not privy to as of yet. Why would they need all the robots if the worlds are at peace? How regulated are the worlds?
What happened to make Caprica what it is, brought together the 12 worlds? There is yet another missing link in all of this.

I am in.

Meet Caroline

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So I luckily have fallen sick and am forced to stay under covers for a little while. Else I may never have been able to finally catch up with my DVR related 'work' and thus the Dollhouse double features.
I have just finished "Stoploss" and "Attic" and am more than satisfied with the treasures the attic held. If you've given up on the series during the break and because it will finish as a completed series tomorrow you should give this show another chance. Coming full circle with its apocalyptic scenario it has married the dystopian fantasies of many great minds and given it the high-speed adrenaline kick of again very smart Joss Whedon.
For those of you that have not seen the series financed in part by Eliza Dushku (wanting to show she is more than a pretty face), the show is the ultimate foreshadowing in corporation exploitation, but not by brute force, at least not at the beginning.

Rather, you are being sold a promise of a better life for five years of yours. A classic devil trade, but not in the afterlife, your soul is not what is wanted, but your body. Your mind can be exchanged. Your mind can be altered to fit whoever pays for it. You're a doll dressed up to play make believe but don't know you're doing so.

Isn't that almost like reality is now. We trade our selves to bosses, friends, neighbors... so few chances to be one self.

But what is at stake on a grant scheme? I can hardly wait to see what the future will be like in Whedon's nightmare. I will now keep watching, and hopefully not be 'disengaged'. But after the doll announced she'll now meet her soul, I think I might not be let down.

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.