Top of the Lake (final two episodes)
Ep 5 The Dark Creator
In one sense, this episode was a series of heartbreaking, disturbing vignettes. Matt is crazy! Robin is obsessed with getting rid of him in the hope that doing so will make Tui come back! Of course, Robin is hardly balanced after just losing her mother (and finding out Matt owned her mother’s house - hey, does this mean that the incest suspicion was unfounded? I’ll grasp at that straw, but it doesn’t make EVERYTHING ELSE less harrowing). Where was Robin’s brother in all this? Even in this land of unreason, he didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral? Is he dead too and I missed it?
So Robin’s obsession is threatening her relationship with Johnno or Johnno’s reaction to Robin’s obsession is.
But hey, there are threats to her life to be considered too.
THE KIDS. All the kids (whom Robin barely interviewed) from disturbed Jamie - and oh boy, Al. ‘INAPPROPRIATE?’ I mean, in a place where girls are drugged, raped, photographed in those states and killed, and I mean girls as in underage females, where drugs are freely available and most men walk around thinking they can take what they like, maybe slapping a clearly disturbed boy to teach him ‘respect’ warrants more than an ‘inappropriate’.
But to go back to the kids and how they were just kids - that’s what I took out of the whole camping trip and Tui’s behaviour, and her questions and response to her pregnancy were so heartbreakingly child-like. Sure, she could wield a gun, but she needed Jamie’s help and protection to stay alive. And she needed better advice than GJ was giving (I hope GJ does something other than make gnomic utterances in the final episode.)
Robin was asking the right questions - ‘what about the kids?’ - at least. I thought the falling body was Tui (and Johnno’s response threw him off the list of suspects, not that he’d been on it seriously. Al is kind of on top these days, what with Jamie’s moment of poetry.)
Which reminds me, why, when Robin was blocking his bizarre comments, had seen him slap Jamie and been generally untrustworthy, did Robin let him set the parameters of their conversation? However curious she was, why go on a boat with him (even if she’d taken a weapon, which I don’t think she had) where she was vulnerable? What did she think she was going to get out of it? I’ve talked about the unreason affecting most everyone, but that was egregiously stupid. And it’s hard to sympathise with your protagonist when she’s being that stupid.
I am trying to go along with the flow, because where Robin/real life steps in amid the absurd savagery of the top of the lake (I was reminded of Vikings a lot) I’m rooting for her, but some things still jump out at me. And at the end I was almost giggling at how horrible it all was, except for the scenery.
And Jamie sacrificed himself, but in this episode, we saw that his innocence had been violated along with Tui’s too. He didn’t have a chance.
I presume that Tui’s line about not knowing how the baby got there means drugs.
Ugh, still presuming. Still invested.
Ep 6 No Goodbyes Thanks
I was laughing at scenes that weren’t exactly funny, which is most scenes, in this episode.
So, Robin and Johnno went through the incest angst, and if I were Johnno I’d check again about his mother, because Al was clearly lying about Matt being the father of Tui’s child(although he actually showed Matt his info; if the other two were thinking straight, they might have questioned Al’s basis for saying that baby Noah was healthy). Having suspected the worst after episode 4, I wasn’t quite with the characters, although I loved Robin and Johnno’s relationship - it was one of the few happy things on the show. But the handling in the end didn’t satisfy me...although it was interesting that he was left holding the baby and craving normal, reversing gender roles.
Too many times there was good reason to ask ‘why are you doing this?’ about Robin’s behaviour, even if she were traumatised. Even if she didn’t suspect Al, couldn’t count what he’d done to her because she was so broken, she should have remembered what he’d done to Jamie. But she kept trusting him.
Of course if she’d investigated Tui’s disappearance properly, instead of feeling bad about it and identifying so much with the girl that there was no space for Tui’s birth mother in this episode (so her half-sister got to step in?), there wouldn’t have been a six-part series. I’m not saying that this had to play by the rules of procedurals (although we saw why the procedure of not treating Matt differently to anyone else was a good idea) but there were too many unreasonable developments for me, have been for most of the series, however gripping and atmospheric it is.
Tui giving birth to Noah made me laugh; I suppose the incompetent shepherd was meant to be funny, but was the actual birth? I’ll just pop behind these rocks and silently, ta-dah, produce a baby!
At least she had a gun. I cheered when she shot psychotic Matt and was all feral. I cheered that Robin took a gun and shot Al and then got worried for her when she put it down. Fortunately she picked it back up and the phone (more of that type of behaviour and the Robin I thought we were going to see from the first episode one, the better the show would have been).
Even though we knew it was coming, all the pieces had come together, the kids’ state was distressing. This is why I haven’t watched The Fall or Southcliffe and all these other hyped shows...when you’re left saying ‘at least it probably wasn’t incest’ and ‘at least they only drugged the thirteen year old who’s just given birth and not raped her again’, beautiful scenery doesn’t cut it. We’re overdue some lighter, happier stuff on TV.
But the actors all enjoyed playing up the weirdness or the drama. And the scenery really was beautiful. But if Jane Campion and co. decide to follow GJ to give tough gnomic advice to a commune of women in some other part of the world, I probably won’t be watching.
This entry was originally posted at http://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/66143.html.
In one sense, this episode was a series of heartbreaking, disturbing vignettes. Matt is crazy! Robin is obsessed with getting rid of him in the hope that doing so will make Tui come back! Of course, Robin is hardly balanced after just losing her mother (and finding out Matt owned her mother’s house - hey, does this mean that the incest suspicion was unfounded? I’ll grasp at that straw, but it doesn’t make EVERYTHING ELSE less harrowing). Where was Robin’s brother in all this? Even in this land of unreason, he didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral? Is he dead too and I missed it?
So Robin’s obsession is threatening her relationship with Johnno or Johnno’s reaction to Robin’s obsession is.
But hey, there are threats to her life to be considered too.
THE KIDS. All the kids (whom Robin barely interviewed) from disturbed Jamie - and oh boy, Al. ‘INAPPROPRIATE?’ I mean, in a place where girls are drugged, raped, photographed in those states and killed, and I mean girls as in underage females, where drugs are freely available and most men walk around thinking they can take what they like, maybe slapping a clearly disturbed boy to teach him ‘respect’ warrants more than an ‘inappropriate’.
But to go back to the kids and how they were just kids - that’s what I took out of the whole camping trip and Tui’s behaviour, and her questions and response to her pregnancy were so heartbreakingly child-like. Sure, she could wield a gun, but she needed Jamie’s help and protection to stay alive. And she needed better advice than GJ was giving (I hope GJ does something other than make gnomic utterances in the final episode.)
Robin was asking the right questions - ‘what about the kids?’ - at least. I thought the falling body was Tui (and Johnno’s response threw him off the list of suspects, not that he’d been on it seriously. Al is kind of on top these days, what with Jamie’s moment of poetry.)
Which reminds me, why, when Robin was blocking his bizarre comments, had seen him slap Jamie and been generally untrustworthy, did Robin let him set the parameters of their conversation? However curious she was, why go on a boat with him (even if she’d taken a weapon, which I don’t think she had) where she was vulnerable? What did she think she was going to get out of it? I’ve talked about the unreason affecting most everyone, but that was egregiously stupid. And it’s hard to sympathise with your protagonist when she’s being that stupid.
I am trying to go along with the flow, because where Robin/real life steps in amid the absurd savagery of the top of the lake (I was reminded of Vikings a lot) I’m rooting for her, but some things still jump out at me. And at the end I was almost giggling at how horrible it all was, except for the scenery.
And Jamie sacrificed himself, but in this episode, we saw that his innocence had been violated along with Tui’s too. He didn’t have a chance.
I presume that Tui’s line about not knowing how the baby got there means drugs.
Ugh, still presuming. Still invested.
Ep 6 No Goodbyes Thanks
I was laughing at scenes that weren’t exactly funny, which is most scenes, in this episode.
So, Robin and Johnno went through the incest angst, and if I were Johnno I’d check again about his mother, because Al was clearly lying about Matt being the father of Tui’s child(although he actually showed Matt his info; if the other two were thinking straight, they might have questioned Al’s basis for saying that baby Noah was healthy). Having suspected the worst after episode 4, I wasn’t quite with the characters, although I loved Robin and Johnno’s relationship - it was one of the few happy things on the show. But the handling in the end didn’t satisfy me...although it was interesting that he was left holding the baby and craving normal, reversing gender roles.
Too many times there was good reason to ask ‘why are you doing this?’ about Robin’s behaviour, even if she were traumatised. Even if she didn’t suspect Al, couldn’t count what he’d done to her because she was so broken, she should have remembered what he’d done to Jamie. But she kept trusting him.
Of course if she’d investigated Tui’s disappearance properly, instead of feeling bad about it and identifying so much with the girl that there was no space for Tui’s birth mother in this episode (so her half-sister got to step in?), there wouldn’t have been a six-part series. I’m not saying that this had to play by the rules of procedurals (although we saw why the procedure of not treating Matt differently to anyone else was a good idea) but there were too many unreasonable developments for me, have been for most of the series, however gripping and atmospheric it is.
Tui giving birth to Noah made me laugh; I suppose the incompetent shepherd was meant to be funny, but was the actual birth? I’ll just pop behind these rocks and silently, ta-dah, produce a baby!
At least she had a gun. I cheered when she shot psychotic Matt and was all feral. I cheered that Robin took a gun and shot Al and then got worried for her when she put it down. Fortunately she picked it back up and the phone (more of that type of behaviour and the Robin I thought we were going to see from the first episode one, the better the show would have been).
Even though we knew it was coming, all the pieces had come together, the kids’ state was distressing. This is why I haven’t watched The Fall or Southcliffe and all these other hyped shows...when you’re left saying ‘at least it probably wasn’t incest’ and ‘at least they only drugged the thirteen year old who’s just given birth and not raped her again’, beautiful scenery doesn’t cut it. We’re overdue some lighter, happier stuff on TV.
But the actors all enjoyed playing up the weirdness or the drama. And the scenery really was beautiful. But if Jane Campion and co. decide to follow GJ to give tough gnomic advice to a commune of women in some other part of the world, I probably won’t be watching.
This entry was originally posted at http://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/66143.html.