Watching Too Much Television 18/8/12: “You guys thought of everything.”

Breaking Bad

“Dead Freight” (S05/E05)

In keeping with the chemistry motif running through the series, what drives the plot in Breaking Bad is most often simple action and reaction. From the first seconds of the pilot episode, Walt has been scrambling to get himself out of one deadly situation, only to find himself catapulted into another. So it goes for Jesse, Saul, Mike, and anyone else caught up in his wake: any move made to extricate themselves lands them in an even bigger hole.

(Spoilers below)

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Watching Too Much Television 17/8/12: “I thought you were the danger.”

Breaking Bad
“Fifty-One” (S05/E04)

In some ways Breaking Bad is a show all about objects. Seemingly random things become incredibly significant in the visual and thematic scheme of the series; they are Chekhov’s guns or red lines underneath the most important elements in the story. (Season 4 even had a number of episodes titled for significant objects that featured in them.) And the cold open to this episode features not one but two of them.

(Spoilers below)

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Watching Too Much Television (18/7/12): “None of those involve Miller Time.”

Breaking Bad
“Live Free Or Die” (S05/E01)

One of the greatest aspects of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan’s increasingly masterful exploration of a seemingly mild-mannered chemistry teacher turned increasingly sociopathic meth baron, is the way its dangling plot threads always turn out to be potential nooses around our “hero” Walt’s neck. Nothing is ever over; every apparent resolution only creates more problems down the road.

(Spoilers after the jump)

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Watching Too Much Television (29/4/12)

Homeland
“Representative Brody” (S01/E10)

I’m torn on whether Homeland aims at being an insightful commentary on post-9/11 America but is not as smart as it thinks it is, or whether it’s a pulpy thriller that achieves moments of transcendence by accident. It’s no secret that its two best aspects are Damian Lewis and Claire Danes, playing respectively returned-PoW-maybe-turned-terrorist Richard Brody and dogged CIA agent Carrie Matheson, who is the only one to suspect him. The standout episode of this season so far has been “The Weekend” (S01/E07), most of which was essentially a two-hander between Danes and Lewis; the show works best when it lets the leads’ faces do the talking, every expression wrestling with the conflicts felt by these two people who are obliged to lie to themselves and everyone around them.

Lewis is handed what could have been a rather cliched role — the good, honest soldier who was lied to by his country — but twisted a few degrees so that he is also lying. At its best, Homeland makes the point that there are millions of people in similar situations, forced to assume the role of proud, patriotic citizens of America At War. Ignoring the news full of terror alerts and distant flashes of bombs, going through the motions, shopping and spending, trying not to think about the pervasive fear that things will never be the same.

Now that the terrorist plot storyline is kicking into high gear, a lot of that resonance which comes to the fore in the show’s quieter moments seems to be going to the backburner. I see the reason for that, but it’s still disheartening to see Homeland go for “the thinking man’s 24” when it’s shown occasional flashes of something much smarter.

Mad Men
“Far Away Places” (S05/E06)

Mad Men After Dark is always a strange beast, a time for revelations and catharsis (see; “Nixon vs Kennedy” (S01/E12), “The Suitcase” (S04/E07), and “Mystery Date” (S05/E04)), and this is no exception. A three-stranded episode showing Don, Peggy and Roger’s respective trials over a day and a night, “Far Away Places” is a superb display of confidence, of a show firing on all cylinders and refusing to acknowledge that it isn’t the best show on TV right now.

There’s a little of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey here. And also of the fairytale, with characters venturing into the unknown — Don actually does head into the woods — to do battle with sinister forces, whether outside or inside themselves.

In a way, this harks back to last week’s excellent “Signal 30” in its portrayal of characters wrestling with their idealised self-image versus messy reality and coming away chastened. Roger and Jane’s unhappy marriage seems to dissolve painlessly in drug-induced mutual insight, but the morning after all the ugliness comes back to the fore.  Peggy tries to pitch like Don, runs up against the institutional sexism of the era and seeks solace in very Don-like consolations (playing hooky to go to the cinema, meaningless sex, sleeping on the office sofa).

Don is the ghost hanging over this episode, his absence kicking off the other storylines and weighing on everyone’s minds (see Roger’s LSD-induced encounter with his spirit guide, which, hilariously, takes the form of Don). His trip with Megan to a Howard Johnson’s upstate is an attempt to recreate some idyllic honeymoon state, which suffocates under his overbearing need to control the present rather than try to live in it.

One of the big questions for this season seems to be whether Don and Megan can survive beyond the honeymoon period (as Bert Cooper’s pointed remark at episode’s end highlights). They go through some terrifying peaks and troughs, but the visceral emotional force of Don on his knees clinging to Megan gives you hope that he’s trying to fight through the alpha-male bullshit he was raised on, and he may even succeed. Maybe that’s what the whole episode is about. Taking what you can find in the real world, no matter how difficult and complicated it can be. Because it’s the only thing that matters.

Comic book scribe Grant Morrison is teaming up with “Push” director Paul McGuigan for a currently untitled television series to be filmed in Scotland, according to McGuigan himself.

In an interview with Live For Films, McGuigan revealed that he’s developing a seven episode television thriller alongside Morrison and actor Stephen Fry, who comic book fans will remember as talk show host Gordon Deitrich in “V for Vendetta.”

“It takes place over seven days around an event that happens in Scotland,” said the “Push” filmmaker. “It’s a modern take on an old fable or fairy story. If you know [Grant’s] work you might have an idea of what it will be like. It’s like Twin Peaks meets Brigadoon! It’s off the wall and smart but in a watchable commercial way. It’s still in the early stages but I’m very excited about it.”

Grant Morrison, Paul McGuigan And Stephen Fry Team Up For Scotland-Based Television Series

This story came out in February. In May, Bleeding Cool learned that the project is named “Bonnyroad,” and it’s connected to a poem called “Thomas The Rhymer” by Thomas Learnmouth.

Bleeding Cool also has a piece on Bonnyroad that goes back to November of 2009.

(via fuckyeahgrantmorrison)

Lost and the machinery of storytelling

More on Lost, inspired by the Shades of Caruso take on the finale:

The finale also put the rest of the series into a new perspective, now we can stop fretting about whether the show would answer all of the mysteries, and instead revel in the game that can now be played with its Swiss Cheese structure. Instead of a solid block of story we got something riddled with holes, but though critics would charge the holes go nowhere — a consequence of the show being made up on the fly with no coherent mythology inside it – I think it’s just like that cheese in that the holes connect with each other, and we’re able to use those links to get a better idea of what the island is.

In addition to the Island-as-show metaphor I floated below, what if the narrative itself also functions as a kind of machine? The thematic and character connections provide the electrical impulses across gaps that provide the energy to drive the plot forward. Looking inside the holes in the cheese allows us to see the machine’s inner workings.

And given all the flashbacks, flashforwards, and time travel throughout the show’s run, I’m reminded of the Hand of Glory from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles: “Its moving parts are the days of our lives”. The Hand features in the comics as a cross-section of a very complicated machine protruding into three-dimensional space. The Island in Lost is home to a overwhelming and overlapping number of myths and stories, from Egyptian gods and Biblical allusions to Star Wars. Can it be a protrusion into “normal” space from a place of pure fiction, where narrative is made real? Its moving parts are the stories we tell ourselves.

On the Island, wounds are healed, the characters can work through their tormented pasts, and they can find the role they were born to play. They get to write their own, better, endings to their stories. That was the overall point of the Alt-Verse storyline - to bring our heroes to the point where they “fixed” themselves. The fan theory that Hurley, blessed with his new powers as guardian of the Island, “wrote” the Alt-Verse to give all his friends a chance at happiness, fits neatly into this interpretation. For a show that thrived on fan speculation and interpretation, thinking of its most prime location as a home of all stories adds resonance to all the discussion and debate that took place outside the show. The “Light” that can’t be allowed to go out is the original fire, in a Promethean sense - that of invention and creativity, that has influenced human civilisation up to this day.

End of Series Review: Lost (Part One)

shadesofcaruso:

Before I get into why I think the final episode of Lost was the perfect capper for an incredible series while also being an exasperating near-failure that seemed determined to grasp defeat from the…

Excellent piece. I heartily agree that the eventual resolution to the Alt-Verse was a misstep - I felt it detracted from the importance of the resolutions to the characters’ stories in the “real world”. I never really thought of Lindelhof and Cuse as geniuses, but I expected them to write a decent story: the care and attention they’ve put into the show and characters shines through from first to last. 

An odd thought: perhaps the “no one really understands what the Island is/does” thread running through Season Six is an oblique commentary on Lindelhof and Cuse’s experience as showrunners? Two guys tinkering with a complicated and unpredictable bit of kit, unsure of what results will be produced, but knowing there’s a lot of pressure on their shoulders…