Love is in the air--now where is my allergy medication?
Wow, LJ, way to make my eyes bleed with the pink.
But on a happier note, thank you so much, sweet_ali, for the virtual candy hearts. Aw.
And to return the favor, and because I want to share the love, I present to all of y'all the valentine my parents sent to me this year. It's really disturbing touching.
This thing is going to give me nightmares. And this is perhaps the best explanation I can give for why when people meet my parents, they often turn to me and say, "I see now. It all makes sense."
* * * * *
Veronica Mars 3.13 - "Postgame Mortem"
This episode made some promising inroads into the O'Dell mystery arc, and I'll be interested to see if the MoTW is tied to that; previous characters and situations showed up again to add to the clues; Veronica and Keith have a legitimate emotional connection to this case that was just reinforced by Dean O'Dell's glowing recommendation of Veronica; these things generally make me happy. Wallace made an appearance, which was lovely. Cliff made an appearance, which was also lovely. And Dick's marital trainwreck is the kind of Dick plot arc I can get behind. And the MoTW had interesting echoes of mysteries past: the vehicle over the cliff, the teenaged son who showered before the police got there.
I probably could have spent a little less time on Logan wallowing, but I like that a connection to someone besides Veronica (or Dick, who rightly should be absolutely no direct help in this regard) is what started snapping him out of it. That elevator ride was horrifying, but it's very eleven-year-old girl to believe in the power of love, especially if you think it's what will get your own parents over their rough patch; given Logan's own family history, I'll bet he once harbored similar illusions, and was broken of them less gently.
I'll be willing to bet that Josh has a peanut allergy; he made a point of asking Veronica for peanut butter, she brought him what looked like peanut butter cookies, and if he escaped after going to the hospital for treatment for anaphylactic shock, that would give Lamb the pretext to arrest her for assisting.
On a less positive note, the backdrops they use for the windows and balconies in the sets for this show are awful. "Las Vegas" looked like it was Photoshopped by a five-year-old.
* * * * *
Stargate 10.16 - "Bad Guys"
After last week, I told asta77 that the show had nowhere to go but up for the rest of the season. Her: "You hope." Me: "Good point." So with those expectations firmly in place, I've got to say that this was a farcical romp I could get behind. They've already shown what disastrous consequences first contact can have on a society where it plays into existing civil strife, so I don't mind that they came at it from the accidental museum caper angle at all. I can't quite quantify when wacky works and when it doesn't on this show, but it takes a certain amount of emotional truth, which was what I think was missing from last week's episode but that episodes like "Wormhole X-Treme!" and "Window of Opportunity" and "200" have in spades.
* I can't believe Landry was actually being smug that he was President Stalin McHitler in an alternate reality. Yes, Landry, go you.
* The setup is classical farce--they've stumbled into an established situation and have to play out their roles to get out of it. Wacikiness ensues. Setting aside the fact that Daniel has participated in drafting complicated intergalactic agreements, he's a terrible negotiator when he doesn't believe in the cause, or when his heart's not in the lie, and here, he's clearly fighting his natural instinct to come clean and open negotiations. I love that Cam didn't even try to take the radio when the hostage negotiator asked who was in charge, just let Daniel fumble. And I also love that Vala's cynical take on the situation--they have to play along or else they'll be slaughtered--horrifies Daniel, but that she's right, and that the others agree with her. And I especially love that Daniel finally gets into the act, embraces it enthusiastically, but that he's still REALLY BAD at it, because it's not the kind of bluffing that comes naturally to him.
* Aw, Cicero is the planet's Daniel, and like Daniel, his belief in truth over politics or expediency is a troublesome thing at times.
* I'm glad the show remembered that Vala was a thief, that she was a host, and that she's quite proficient with the technology she's learned. Cam sent her to work on the museum's security system right away, as if that were her natural role;, and she was much more nonchalant than the rest of them when they discovered that the DHD was a museum replica because she understood the technology and still has the instincts to fly by the seat of her pants; she was a credible stand-in for Sam because of that, and since they were using a Goa'uld device to power the gate. (And did they have a snarky little reference to some of the past wacky things they've used, like the trucks and the plant-based cold fusion, or did I mishear?) Of course, unlike Sam, she actually activated the bomb, because she's a gambler with few instincts for caution.
* The rent-a-cop with dreams of glory could have gone in a terrible direction, but he wasn't much more than a distraction, and the radio conversation he had with Daniel during his brief moment of control--him posturing into the radio, Daniel responding with a hilariously polite and conventional set of phone conversation standards such as "Speaking" and "To whom am I talking?"--amused me far more than it should have.
* Teal'c, once again, didn't have a ton to do on his own, but when he zapped the high-ranking dignitary and then loomed over the rest of the terrified crowd, menacing as hell, bared his teeth in that frightening smile, and asked them to "Please remain calm," that was excellent. Christopher Judge does dry-as-a-bone deadpan so well.
* Cam's big talk-down speech, and the planet's politicians' willingness to cover up the incident and make the bumbling security guard a hero, were predictable. But, as Daniel's shrug indicated, it wasn't the worst first contact they've ever made; the place will still be standing, and that's more than you can say for some planets SG-1 has visited.
* * * * *
I want to write up due South as I watch, because I am so delighted with the show, more and more with every episode. I'm a little behind where I'm actually watching, but last week sucked. So, .
1.08/1.09 - "Chicago Holiday"
* In my continuing quest to figure out why this show works when it shouldn't, I am trying to figure out why Fraser's one-sided conversations with Diefenbaker are so funny when they should clearly be sappy and trite. I think it's the fact that it's not played straight as a conversation between a man and an anthropomorphic genius wolf who answers back; it's equal parts the wolf having a personality and Fraser being incredibly invested in believing that Diefenbaker is talking back to him for his own complicated reasons.
* Things of beauty: everyone thinking Fraser is a valet at the reception; the medium-speed taxi chase where Fraser runs down the rebellious Christina; Fraser in the fetish club, relentlessly not getting it, coming face to face with the leather "Mountie," getting swept up in the raid (Huey and Louie do love just bringing everybody in, don't they?); the shopping mall chase scene with the escalator tobogganing; Elaine drawing sketch after sketch that unintentionally looks like Fraser in drag, because she's not having one-track-mind-problems at all, no sir. I also give bonus points for creative use of a garbage chute in the final chase.
* Thing I can't handle: seeing Apophis as the wacky Caribbean taxi driver. Disturbing. The matchbook's elaborate journey is also symbolically neat but literally incredible, and pushing it a little.
* I thought two things in particular worked well in this two-parter. One was that the teenager was never obnoxious, and actually became sympathetic once she thought she'd ended up killing someone; she wasn't as world-weary and experienced as she pretended or wanted to be, there was a whole adult world that was scary and she wasn't quite prepared for. The other was that while Fraser doesn't twig to some things very quickly, he's not actually naive--he just sees the world really differently than the average bear. So, for example, he's not the least bit phased by bringing Christina along with him and Ray on their murder investigation; I suspect that's a reflection of his own upbringing and relationship with his father, and I love the hints we get in this episode that teenage Fraser was stubborn and maybe a little angry himself.
1.10 "A Cop, a Mountie, and a Baby"
* With a title like that, how can this episode not be excellent?
* The episode starts out with a fairly black-and-white premise--when even the leg-breaking thug is disgusted by the way you're going to get the money to pay him back, that's a bad sign, Vinnie--and that's something Ray takes at face value, as he takes everything at face value, while Fraser doesn't read human motivations that way at all. And that's why Ray, halucinating Oliver Twist, gave the cash to the grifting little orphan, in a hilariously sardonic twist on a very hokey scenario. Everybody else sees Vinnie and Louise as a lost cause; Fraser sees them as two kids who made a mistake--but it's their mistake to make, and I love that he's willing to intervene after Vinnie has decided not to go through the adoption but not before that, because he's right, you can't make people's decisions for them.
* PUFFIN FACE!
* Diefenbaker was generally excellent in this episode, and I also appreciate the luggage fight at the baggage train. They do try to mix it up on this show.
1.11 - "The Gift of the Wheel Man"
This episode was an epiphany for me. Sometimes shows have these episodes in their first season where all the threads come together and the show discovers the stories it was really meant to tell, and in this show's case, the cop plots are the vehicle for telling stories about Benton Fraser and his haunted interior life, fathers and sons, what shapes men in the past and the things they carry with them far into the future. So there's Porter and his son, the father wanting to give his son the cash, the son wanting only to be proud of the father; Ray, whose father taught him how to duck and to never hit a kid because it doesn't teach him anything; Fraser, who despite his spit and polish and gleaming ethics is still living in the shadow of his father, still trying to learn from him through his journals and even more importantly to learn about this distant and larger-than-life figure who was off being everyone else's hero instead of raising his own son, and who in the end accepts this vision and the possibility of insanity it implies because he has the proof of it with his own eyes, because its impossibility doesn't negate it. I love that for all of his community spirit and belief in human kindness, Fraser is a loner, having Christmas dinner in a diner with the ghost of his father, and that an angle that wouldn't have occurred to his father--that his father couldn't have taught him, that's all his own--solved the case. Fraser's big speech to Porter, talking him down from a terrible act that would have left his son a gift of destruction and death, should have been hokey, but it tied so well into the rest of the episode, to inheritances both intentional and unintentional.
Also, Baby Ryan Phillippe is cute as a button! What is he, 14 here? Goodness. And another thing that shouldn't have worked was the wacky Christmas hijinks going on in the background, but the squad room full of impatient Santas and tired, cranky elves was great, and the elves/Elvis mixup and the reindeer were both bizarre and random enough to be hilarious.
1.12 - "You Must Remember This"
Ray is a hopeless, old fashioned romantic with SUCKER written across his forehead in black magic marker and I love him for that. The flip side of his tendency to hone in on the obvious rather than questioning it is that the well-worn narrative of damsel in distress is deeply engraved on his primal brain, and it led him so very, very awry here, into chasing after a woman and ending up in the middle of an ATF bust, all because he believed that yes, she may have hit him with a car, but only because she needed saving. Oh Ray.
And in an episode that is very much about how opening yourself up to love is dangerous, the very excellent session of poker and true love confessions between Fraser, Ray, Huey, and Louie gave them all a chance to tell of past heartbreaks and disappointments and future hopes--all except for Fraser, who told his story only to Ray, when Ray was asleep and nobody would actually hear it, and it's a sad and deeply weird tale of love and death and the Arctic north, told to a reflection in a window. It's a place where Fraser's experience diverges so deeply from that of the other men, and one that makes him look incredibly alone.
I must say that, for a 13-year-old show, a lot of it is surprisingly un-dated, especially if you can get past the women's hairstyles. But the cell phone technology gets me every time; the huge, blocky phones, their rarity, the way in this episode it was difficult to track one.
Also, while Ray might think Fraser doesn't get his romantic theories because Fraser doesn't know women, I think it's because Ray's romantic theories are CRAZY.
1.13 - "Hawk and a Handsaw"
This episode is an interesting mix of deeply strange and profoundly human. Fraser often runs down clues by taking people at their word when others--especially Ray--dismiss them as crazy or misguided or lying, because to all outward appearances they are. Fraser tries this approach in the beginning--he lies to the man on the ledge, treats his ravings as illusions--and spends the rest of the episode trying to make up for it, because it was wrong, because those disconnected ramblings held the truth. Fraser in pyjamas--with Mountie hat--is a pretty funny sight, but I love the way he relates to the other patients, gives them his respect and earns their respect in return, and seeing him in that hospital, talking to the people the outside world dismisses as crazy, meditating on how reality is often what people agree to believe, is when I realized the thing about Fraser that shapes his unusual view of the world, the way sanity isn't an absolute state, a yes/no proposition, but rather a continuum of agreement about reality, and Fraser, for all his hard-headed practicality, does not agree with a lot of the reality that everyone else around him takes for granted. And that lack of agreement, which is terribly isolating, is what keeps him from being a quirky and naive do-gooder, and the show from failing. He basically got himself committed to a psychiatric facility by telling the truth, by telling stories from his own life.
This is also the episode where Fraser's relationship with Diefenbaker takes on additional shades of meaning. Because Diefenbaker may have his own personality, his own agenda and interests, but half of what Fraser attributes to him, we have only Fraser's word on--like the fact that Diefenbaker needs a ride home, and would the medical examiner mind?--and it may not be Diefenbaker who is the manipulative one.
And then there are the fabulous and frightening little windows into the life of Benton Fraser, who advises Ray mattery-of-factly that the key to holding a pill in your mouth for several hours without dissolving it is controling your saliva ducts, and all you have to do to get out of a straight jacket is relax completely, dislocate your shoulder, and pull your arm out of the sleeve. The man sharpens the buckle on his hat.
I should probably find some icons.
But on a happier note, thank you so much, sweet_ali, for the virtual candy hearts. Aw.
And to return the favor, and because I want to share the love, I present to all of y'all the valentine my parents sent to me this year. It's really disturbing touching.
This thing is going to give me nightmares. And this is perhaps the best explanation I can give for why when people meet my parents, they often turn to me and say, "I see now. It all makes sense."
* * * * *
Veronica Mars 3.13 - "Postgame Mortem"
This episode made some promising inroads into the O'Dell mystery arc, and I'll be interested to see if the MoTW is tied to that; previous characters and situations showed up again to add to the clues; Veronica and Keith have a legitimate emotional connection to this case that was just reinforced by Dean O'Dell's glowing recommendation of Veronica; these things generally make me happy. Wallace made an appearance, which was lovely. Cliff made an appearance, which was also lovely. And Dick's marital trainwreck is the kind of Dick plot arc I can get behind. And the MoTW had interesting echoes of mysteries past: the vehicle over the cliff, the teenaged son who showered before the police got there.
I probably could have spent a little less time on Logan wallowing, but I like that a connection to someone besides Veronica (or Dick, who rightly should be absolutely no direct help in this regard) is what started snapping him out of it. That elevator ride was horrifying, but it's very eleven-year-old girl to believe in the power of love, especially if you think it's what will get your own parents over their rough patch; given Logan's own family history, I'll bet he once harbored similar illusions, and was broken of them less gently.
I'll be willing to bet that Josh has a peanut allergy; he made a point of asking Veronica for peanut butter, she brought him what looked like peanut butter cookies, and if he escaped after going to the hospital for treatment for anaphylactic shock, that would give Lamb the pretext to arrest her for assisting.
On a less positive note, the backdrops they use for the windows and balconies in the sets for this show are awful. "Las Vegas" looked like it was Photoshopped by a five-year-old.
* * * * *
Stargate 10.16 - "Bad Guys"
After last week, I told asta77 that the show had nowhere to go but up for the rest of the season. Her: "You hope." Me: "Good point." So with those expectations firmly in place, I've got to say that this was a farcical romp I could get behind. They've already shown what disastrous consequences first contact can have on a society where it plays into existing civil strife, so I don't mind that they came at it from the accidental museum caper angle at all. I can't quite quantify when wacky works and when it doesn't on this show, but it takes a certain amount of emotional truth, which was what I think was missing from last week's episode but that episodes like "Wormhole X-Treme!" and "Window of Opportunity" and "200" have in spades.
* I can't believe Landry was actually being smug that he was President Stalin McHitler in an alternate reality. Yes, Landry, go you.
* The setup is classical farce--they've stumbled into an established situation and have to play out their roles to get out of it. Wacikiness ensues. Setting aside the fact that Daniel has participated in drafting complicated intergalactic agreements, he's a terrible negotiator when he doesn't believe in the cause, or when his heart's not in the lie, and here, he's clearly fighting his natural instinct to come clean and open negotiations. I love that Cam didn't even try to take the radio when the hostage negotiator asked who was in charge, just let Daniel fumble. And I also love that Vala's cynical take on the situation--they have to play along or else they'll be slaughtered--horrifies Daniel, but that she's right, and that the others agree with her. And I especially love that Daniel finally gets into the act, embraces it enthusiastically, but that he's still REALLY BAD at it, because it's not the kind of bluffing that comes naturally to him.
* Aw, Cicero is the planet's Daniel, and like Daniel, his belief in truth over politics or expediency is a troublesome thing at times.
* I'm glad the show remembered that Vala was a thief, that she was a host, and that she's quite proficient with the technology she's learned. Cam sent her to work on the museum's security system right away, as if that were her natural role;, and she was much more nonchalant than the rest of them when they discovered that the DHD was a museum replica because she understood the technology and still has the instincts to fly by the seat of her pants; she was a credible stand-in for Sam because of that, and since they were using a Goa'uld device to power the gate. (And did they have a snarky little reference to some of the past wacky things they've used, like the trucks and the plant-based cold fusion, or did I mishear?) Of course, unlike Sam, she actually activated the bomb, because she's a gambler with few instincts for caution.
* The rent-a-cop with dreams of glory could have gone in a terrible direction, but he wasn't much more than a distraction, and the radio conversation he had with Daniel during his brief moment of control--him posturing into the radio, Daniel responding with a hilariously polite and conventional set of phone conversation standards such as "Speaking" and "To whom am I talking?"--amused me far more than it should have.
* Teal'c, once again, didn't have a ton to do on his own, but when he zapped the high-ranking dignitary and then loomed over the rest of the terrified crowd, menacing as hell, bared his teeth in that frightening smile, and asked them to "Please remain calm," that was excellent. Christopher Judge does dry-as-a-bone deadpan so well.
* Cam's big talk-down speech, and the planet's politicians' willingness to cover up the incident and make the bumbling security guard a hero, were predictable. But, as Daniel's shrug indicated, it wasn't the worst first contact they've ever made; the place will still be standing, and that's more than you can say for some planets SG-1 has visited.
* * * * *
I want to write up due South as I watch, because I am so delighted with the show, more and more with every episode. I'm a little behind where I'm actually watching, but last week sucked. So, .
1.08/1.09 - "Chicago Holiday"
* In my continuing quest to figure out why this show works when it shouldn't, I am trying to figure out why Fraser's one-sided conversations with Diefenbaker are so funny when they should clearly be sappy and trite. I think it's the fact that it's not played straight as a conversation between a man and an anthropomorphic genius wolf who answers back; it's equal parts the wolf having a personality and Fraser being incredibly invested in believing that Diefenbaker is talking back to him for his own complicated reasons.
* Things of beauty: everyone thinking Fraser is a valet at the reception; the medium-speed taxi chase where Fraser runs down the rebellious Christina; Fraser in the fetish club, relentlessly not getting it, coming face to face with the leather "Mountie," getting swept up in the raid (Huey and Louie do love just bringing everybody in, don't they?); the shopping mall chase scene with the escalator tobogganing; Elaine drawing sketch after sketch that unintentionally looks like Fraser in drag, because she's not having one-track-mind-problems at all, no sir. I also give bonus points for creative use of a garbage chute in the final chase.
* Thing I can't handle: seeing Apophis as the wacky Caribbean taxi driver. Disturbing. The matchbook's elaborate journey is also symbolically neat but literally incredible, and pushing it a little.
* I thought two things in particular worked well in this two-parter. One was that the teenager was never obnoxious, and actually became sympathetic once she thought she'd ended up killing someone; she wasn't as world-weary and experienced as she pretended or wanted to be, there was a whole adult world that was scary and she wasn't quite prepared for. The other was that while Fraser doesn't twig to some things very quickly, he's not actually naive--he just sees the world really differently than the average bear. So, for example, he's not the least bit phased by bringing Christina along with him and Ray on their murder investigation; I suspect that's a reflection of his own upbringing and relationship with his father, and I love the hints we get in this episode that teenage Fraser was stubborn and maybe a little angry himself.
1.10 "A Cop, a Mountie, and a Baby"
* With a title like that, how can this episode not be excellent?
* The episode starts out with a fairly black-and-white premise--when even the leg-breaking thug is disgusted by the way you're going to get the money to pay him back, that's a bad sign, Vinnie--and that's something Ray takes at face value, as he takes everything at face value, while Fraser doesn't read human motivations that way at all. And that's why Ray, halucinating Oliver Twist, gave the cash to the grifting little orphan, in a hilariously sardonic twist on a very hokey scenario. Everybody else sees Vinnie and Louise as a lost cause; Fraser sees them as two kids who made a mistake--but it's their mistake to make, and I love that he's willing to intervene after Vinnie has decided not to go through the adoption but not before that, because he's right, you can't make people's decisions for them.
* PUFFIN FACE!
* Diefenbaker was generally excellent in this episode, and I also appreciate the luggage fight at the baggage train. They do try to mix it up on this show.
1.11 - "The Gift of the Wheel Man"
This episode was an epiphany for me. Sometimes shows have these episodes in their first season where all the threads come together and the show discovers the stories it was really meant to tell, and in this show's case, the cop plots are the vehicle for telling stories about Benton Fraser and his haunted interior life, fathers and sons, what shapes men in the past and the things they carry with them far into the future. So there's Porter and his son, the father wanting to give his son the cash, the son wanting only to be proud of the father; Ray, whose father taught him how to duck and to never hit a kid because it doesn't teach him anything; Fraser, who despite his spit and polish and gleaming ethics is still living in the shadow of his father, still trying to learn from him through his journals and even more importantly to learn about this distant and larger-than-life figure who was off being everyone else's hero instead of raising his own son, and who in the end accepts this vision and the possibility of insanity it implies because he has the proof of it with his own eyes, because its impossibility doesn't negate it. I love that for all of his community spirit and belief in human kindness, Fraser is a loner, having Christmas dinner in a diner with the ghost of his father, and that an angle that wouldn't have occurred to his father--that his father couldn't have taught him, that's all his own--solved the case. Fraser's big speech to Porter, talking him down from a terrible act that would have left his son a gift of destruction and death, should have been hokey, but it tied so well into the rest of the episode, to inheritances both intentional and unintentional.
Also, Baby Ryan Phillippe is cute as a button! What is he, 14 here? Goodness. And another thing that shouldn't have worked was the wacky Christmas hijinks going on in the background, but the squad room full of impatient Santas and tired, cranky elves was great, and the elves/Elvis mixup and the reindeer were both bizarre and random enough to be hilarious.
1.12 - "You Must Remember This"
Ray is a hopeless, old fashioned romantic with SUCKER written across his forehead in black magic marker and I love him for that. The flip side of his tendency to hone in on the obvious rather than questioning it is that the well-worn narrative of damsel in distress is deeply engraved on his primal brain, and it led him so very, very awry here, into chasing after a woman and ending up in the middle of an ATF bust, all because he believed that yes, she may have hit him with a car, but only because she needed saving. Oh Ray.
And in an episode that is very much about how opening yourself up to love is dangerous, the very excellent session of poker and true love confessions between Fraser, Ray, Huey, and Louie gave them all a chance to tell of past heartbreaks and disappointments and future hopes--all except for Fraser, who told his story only to Ray, when Ray was asleep and nobody would actually hear it, and it's a sad and deeply weird tale of love and death and the Arctic north, told to a reflection in a window. It's a place where Fraser's experience diverges so deeply from that of the other men, and one that makes him look incredibly alone.
I must say that, for a 13-year-old show, a lot of it is surprisingly un-dated, especially if you can get past the women's hairstyles. But the cell phone technology gets me every time; the huge, blocky phones, their rarity, the way in this episode it was difficult to track one.
Also, while Ray might think Fraser doesn't get his romantic theories because Fraser doesn't know women, I think it's because Ray's romantic theories are CRAZY.
1.13 - "Hawk and a Handsaw"
This episode is an interesting mix of deeply strange and profoundly human. Fraser often runs down clues by taking people at their word when others--especially Ray--dismiss them as crazy or misguided or lying, because to all outward appearances they are. Fraser tries this approach in the beginning--he lies to the man on the ledge, treats his ravings as illusions--and spends the rest of the episode trying to make up for it, because it was wrong, because those disconnected ramblings held the truth. Fraser in pyjamas--with Mountie hat--is a pretty funny sight, but I love the way he relates to the other patients, gives them his respect and earns their respect in return, and seeing him in that hospital, talking to the people the outside world dismisses as crazy, meditating on how reality is often what people agree to believe, is when I realized the thing about Fraser that shapes his unusual view of the world, the way sanity isn't an absolute state, a yes/no proposition, but rather a continuum of agreement about reality, and Fraser, for all his hard-headed practicality, does not agree with a lot of the reality that everyone else around him takes for granted. And that lack of agreement, which is terribly isolating, is what keeps him from being a quirky and naive do-gooder, and the show from failing. He basically got himself committed to a psychiatric facility by telling the truth, by telling stories from his own life.
This is also the episode where Fraser's relationship with Diefenbaker takes on additional shades of meaning. Because Diefenbaker may have his own personality, his own agenda and interests, but half of what Fraser attributes to him, we have only Fraser's word on--like the fact that Diefenbaker needs a ride home, and would the medical examiner mind?--and it may not be Diefenbaker who is the manipulative one.
And then there are the fabulous and frightening little windows into the life of Benton Fraser, who advises Ray mattery-of-factly that the key to holding a pill in your mouth for several hours without dissolving it is controling your saliva ducts, and all you have to do to get out of a straight jacket is relax completely, dislocate your shoulder, and pull your arm out of the sleeve. The man sharpens the buckle on his hat.
I should probably find some icons.