"Why is this so hard? That's what she said."
The Office 3.17 - "Cocktails"
This episode was full of people asserting themselves in unexpected and illuminating ways.
First there was Pam, who I could not love more for taking that criticism of her art to heart, understanding what it means, understanding the importance of changing this about herself, and not only deciding to be more honest but actually doing it. Not letting people walk all over her on petty everyday stuff was a good first step, but telling it straight to Roy was a huge achievement--telling him what he had to do to be with her, wanting to clear the air and tell him about the kiss with Jim so that she wasn't hiding anything important from Roy, so that their relationship would have an honest foundation.
And then there was Michael Scott, of all people, who may be clueless and inept in the romance department but wasn't willing to just be Jan's destructive kink. He wants it all--the house, the picket fence, the ketchup fights, and his honesty and sincerity leave Jan no cover, because she has to either give him up or embrace the full implications of what she's doing, he won't let her have it both ways. I love how helpless Jan is against the force of Michael's feeling, because she knows it's real, as much as she wants this to be a game. The scene between the two of them in the bathroom was surprisingly disturbing, because Jan was so desperately self-destructive, and Michael was so frightened by it, and read it so right--"Something's wrong with Jan." Oh, Michael.
And then there were Karen and Roy, who in their own unique ways let it be known that they were not okay with what had happened between Jim and Pam on Casino Night no matter how much water has passed under that bridge since then. Karen's pranking of Jim had an insecure, mean edge to it, one that Jim lost patience with. And Roy's homicidal rage was a thing unto itself, a sign of how little he's actually grown, of the way he still regards Pam as a trophy and an accessory rather than a person with her own feelings and history. He's been connecting the dots, trying to check off the list of Good Boyfriend Behavior, but it's not enough, and Pam saw it, and she ended it again, cleanly and without elaboration. (I sort of love that Roy's brother has been a participant in the bad parts of Pam and Roy's relationship right from that first date at the high school sporting event, and that Roy is a different person, feels more comfortable being "himself," around his brother, that they both react to setbacks with violence and understand that perfectly about each other, that they both immediately started throwing things at the bar when things went badly. It's a great example of how a few well-placed details can describe so much about a character.)
And as always, this show is a terrific example of how everything is relative; Michael may be a social trainwreck, but he was Mr. Suave compared to Dwight, whose idea of a fun party is inspecting the home for structural soundness, who had these few rigid areas where he feels like he has the expertise to participate in a conversation, and channels others ruthlessly toward them--the square footage of the home, the viewership of Battlestar Galactica.
"I run a small fake ID company out of my car with a laminating machine I swiped from the sheriff's station." Oh Creed, you are so deeply strange. And criminal. And criminally strange. And strangely criminal.
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BSG 3.16 - "Dirty Hands"
This week on Battlestar Galactica: Oppression Is Bad, Y'all. It's so bad that the writers have to make the characters totally unrecognizable to make the point. On its own, it wasn't a terrible hour of television--the pacing was good, the exposition was handled well, it juggled multiple developments and characters with some grace. But it featured a bunch of people I didn't recognize.
Where to begin? The four huge WTF moments, for me:
* That anybody is listening to Baltar at all at this point. Perhaps some kind of oppression-related collective amnesia caused everyone to forget that Baltar was trying to crush the unions on New Caprica even before he became a horrible Cylon collaborator? Cally and Tyrol seem to have a particularly bad case, since Baltar signed the order for Cally's execution.
* Setting aside the utter ickiness of Laura and Adama, clean, wearing fresh clothing, sipping wine and surrounded by books and rugs and nice furniture, making self-righteous pronouncements about how everybody's working hard and they've all just got to suck it up, their utter lack of concern for at least the practical if not the moral aspects of the problem--the fact that an exhausted workforce and run-down equipment had just caused a Raptor to explode, almost taking out Laura herself as well as the Raptor's crew and costing the fleet an irreplaceable ship--was just bizarre.
* I can't believe that Laura, someone who has never failed to grasp the larger implications of all her small decisions, and who has had a strong commitment to a healthy civil society in the past, and who above all else was a teacher, needed Tyrol to point out to her that raising children up to take over their parents' work is a poor use of resources and a guaranteed way to create a hereditary underclass. Good lord.
* Adama ordering Cally and the rest of the deck crew shot was just... I was hoping he was bluffing, but it looked like he was serious.
Seelix's story, by contrast, was fairly obvious and device-ey but a much more effective way of showing how talented people being stuck in permanent roles is a waste of resources and kills hope. And Laura at the end of the episode, acknowledging that the workers needed representation, that not all of their grievances were trivial, that some of them were even the keys to keeping Colonial society recognizable and giving people something to live for, was once again the Laura Roslin I've grown to know over the course of the past three seasons. But wow. Maybe the writers are suffering from collective amnesia instead? I'm afraid that Baltar's book and fleet sympathy for him is going to play a major role in whatever his trial does to tear the fleet apart, and I'm not buying the Baltar Man of the People movement the show is selling.
Mostly, though, I remember when the show was able to show two sides of an issue with some degree of subtlety, characters making mistakes and behaving badly for understandable reasons. I think of "Flesh and Bone," and the fact that Torture Is Also Bad, Y'all, but it's a solution that frightened people who are trying to avert a crisis might grasp anyway, and sometimes the person being tortured really is awful, and part of what's so bad is what it does to the torturer. I'm hopeful that next week's episode moves away from the Big Issue plots that the writers have been flubbing so badly recently. I'm very conscious of the fact that I haven't had much positive to say about the show for a while, and I don't want to become a bitter fandom hag.
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1.18 - "The Deal"
I love the way this episode draws connections between Ray's past and his present through the neighborhood--the church, Ray's familiarity with it, the way he seems to have slyly and deliberately used Fraser to bring out choir volunteers, which he certainly does in spades, and the way the initial crime there, the theft of the poorbox, unwinds into past wrongs, into the shoemaker's loss of his business, the neighborhood association that's been operated for decades by the same family, the childhood bullying over the basketball court. Ray didn't stop Zuko when they were kids, stood by while his friend got beaten; he can't stop him as an adult, hampered by the inability to pin a real crime on Zuko, and ends up seeing another friend get beaten; and then he makes a different decision, one that shows how well he learned those lessons about power and fear.
And Ray's story of the childhood bully ties into Fraser's past, though of course Fraser's own bullying experience involved a dead otter, which is so bizarre it has to be true. Beneath his polite exterior, Fraser is quite capable of sizing people up and delivering the cutting blow; he makes the opening sally against Zuko by pointing out the difference between being respected and being merely feared, and Zuko throws it back to him with the gift of the furniture, the gratitude for putting the thief in his hands, the basketball foul, and finally the beating. (And the beating was so awful, Fraser's resignation, the way he turned inward to get through it, his powerlessness against the bully.) In general, the way they establish the menace of Zuko in this episode is incredibly effective, because it's all very small-scale and mean--the way he uses his power, the threat of the violence he can command, to win at basketball, and to dominate and humiliate those around them and make sure they understand that he's in charge--until suddenly it's big and life-or-death, and it all comes from the same wellspring of petty ugliness.
I love Ray so much for going into that gym and teaching Zuko the lesson he'll understand, on his own terms, turning that carefully tended aura of fear back on him and making it a vulnerability, because as Fraser pointed out, Zuko was never respected, just feared, and that's a flimsy foundation for an empire built on violence, where the slightest sign of weakness is like blood in the water.
And still, it managed to be funny--Fraser three-deep in admiring choir volunteers and clueless, Francesca talking herself into taking action, confessing to something that hasn't even happened yet; Fraser in the lingerie store, embarrassed and successful beyond anything Ray can believe; the fairytale confusion, Ray wondering about Pinnocchio's dad and the elves and the shoemaker, Huey, Louie, and Elaine puzzling through vague missimpressions about ruby slippers and Rumpelstiltskin and trolls and dwarves; and Fraser rejecting the lock only to have his worst nightmare burst in--and it wasn't an Italian mobster.
Best of all, though, from an arc point of view, was the fact that the law couldn't help them. The law couldn't help young Fraser when swinging a dead otter wasn't a crime and it couldn't help either of them when Zuko had kept his own hands nominally clean of the violence. Ray had to take matters into his own hands, and Fraser let him.
1.19 - "An Invitation to Romance"
This was a silly but fairly entertaining episode. The Jane Krakowski character was annoying in just the right way, oblivious and sincere and self-centered to such a degree that she absolutely flattened Fraser; he had no way of getting through to her without getting rude and assertive, and in the end he was fighting himself more than anything. I loved that Ray cared about Fraser's duty and what it meant to him, filled in in the uniform but with his own Ray rudeness and attitude, and that he has totally started talking to the wolf and hearing the answers back. And the ending was satisfying, because the ditzy blonde who got swept off her feet by what she thought of as romance finally recognized that Nigel's possessive obsessiveness wasn't love, and that Fraser let her make that decision, just as he'd let Vinnie make his own decision, because you can't decide for people, you can just help them once they've figured out what they want.
1.20 - "Heaven and Earth"
I am not generally a fan of "the show treats psychic phenomenon as real" storylines; it's hard to explain why they bug when I'm totally on board with Bob popping in on Fraser. I guess the latter is metaphor and internal dialog while the former is just cheese. But Fraser does know more than a little about behind haunted by ghosts, and about listening when someone says something, because chances are, no matter how crazy it sounds, there's a kernel of truth in there.
Fraser's stuttering fear over the Francesca situation, his inability to reassure Ray and his uncharacteristic cowardice--there is running! There is confrontation in the closet! Diefenbaker wants no part of it!--is pretty funny, but I loved the conversation in the end between Ray and Francesca, where Ray tells her that guys like Fraser don't marry girls like Francesca, don't even notice them the way they want, because Fraser is oblivious. He doesn't want to be--he doesn't want to be unkind, he'll make an effort to do what he thinks is right once the situation is brought to his attention, but it's not what he naturally notices. But there it is, and when Ray reminds Francesca of this as a brother, as someone who cares about her, she listens.
1.21/1.22 - "Victoria's Secret"
I don't even know where to start with this episode. It's structurally really interesting, with the opening back up in the frozen north, where the story began, and with the destruction of Fraser's father's cabin, one of his remaining ties to his past, and ending with Fraser's decision to abandon yet another phase of his life, this time voluntarily and knowing it's the wrong thing to do, renouncing the duty that had carried him to Chicago and the values of the father who had built that cabin, and ending up having the matter taken out of his hands entirely by the friend who accidentally shoots him and saves him from himself. It's beautifully filmed, with the dark and the cold and the polar bears swimming in luminous windows behind conversations about things you can't go back and change, and Paul Gross is just amazing. It's an entirely different story the first time through and the second, once you know the purpose behind Victoria's actions and they take on such a sinister cast, but that somehow doesn't tarnish the emotional truth of her reunion with Fraser, the fact that she's capable of monstrous acts and the fact that she's as helplessly drawn to Fraser as he is to her aren't contradictory, she really does want him to come with her even though it means destroying most of what makes him him. They have that supremely selfish, insular, all-consuming kind of love, the kind that makes Fraser blow off work, and exile Diefenbaker to the hall, and blow off Ray, and those are all such accumulating bad signs of where this is all headed, a snowball rolling down a very steep hill, gathering speed and volume.
And then there are the threads of family running through the episodes, and the fact that Fraser and Victoria are such loners, and Fraser is less of a loner than he thinks. Fraser can't live with that kind of regret again, rejects the pronouncement of his father, who tells him he did the right thing when he turned Victoria in the first time, did his duty--but Bob ticketed his own wife for speeding, warned her that he would and met her defiance and frustration with rigidity. Ray's father was a lousy father, but he could play pool, and Ray can pick and choose those pieces of the past now, bring out the pool table and ignore the ghost who rails against him for mortgaging the house for a friend. Bob was an indifferent father and a bad husband, but boy was he a Mountie, and those values aren't quite enough any more, they don't quiet the regret or stop the longing. Fraser has another kind of family, though he doesn't quite get it yet; Ray brings Victoria into his home, into his sister's room; and Welsh protects them both as best he can, in his dour, taciturn, incredibly excellent way; and Ray mortgages the family home for Fraser's bail. Diefenbaker gets shot. Victoria sets Ray up, and sets Fraser up, and Fraser doesn't even hesitate before he takes the diamonds and runs. He's prepared to turn his back on everything that made him him, because unlike Ray, he hasn't quite learned how to pick and choose the things from his past he wants to carry forward, it's all or nothing for him. He would have abandoned it all, until Ray unintentionally took the choice away from him, in an act that looks so much like an accident and a betrayal until you realize it's also a favor.
1.23 - "Letting Go"
It would be impossible to top "Victoria's Secret," but this epsiode does a good job of bringing Fraser back from that edge, reconnecting him with the things that define him--helping people, working with Ray, solving a mystery. Ray by himself isn't enough to do it, though he's trying so hard with his offer to help Fraser rebuild the cabin, this time with indoor plumbing, and his visits and his constant patter. There's too much guilt and baggage there--one of the cuttingest things I've seen Fraser do is tell Ray that Diefenbaker is whining because Ray's in his chair, using the wolf to push him out so that Fraser can wallow alone in his grief and regret, and I love that Ray persists, that he's not fazed, that this is too important to him. (Another excellent example of projecting on the wolf--when Fraser admonishes Diefenbaker that it's unethical and illegal to watch the neighbors through the windows, trying to talk himself into stopping. And then there's the moaning about how Diefenbaker likes the hospital more than Fraser does--the nurses feed, water, and walk him--when Fraser is clearly not prepared to get up from the hospital bed and face the world again.) And in the end, Ray took a bullet in the back for Fraser, and Fraser was just petty enough to find some satisfaction in that, and that was excellent, because he's so far from the stereotypical do-gooder at this point, he's the walking wounded, and it's only human to want others to share in your misery.
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There were some very exciting film awards this weekend! Yes, I'm talking about the Razzies, where Basic Instinct 2 cleaned up. Sadly, I doubt that Sharon Stone has the grace of former Razzie winner Halle Berry, who basically wiped out all of the bad karma she'd ever earned for Catwoman in one fell swoop. I saw part of that movie on a plane once with no sound and it still sucked.
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This excessively long post was brought to you by dinner at work. Yay, dinner at work! Yay, waiting out horrible rainy-day traffic on the 101 by eating dinner at work! Now to finish my thing and go home and watch Heroes and possibly, if there's time, The Black Donnellys. I have totally kicked Jericho to the curb; someone tell me if it gets interesting.
