Manhattan 1.11.
In which people's love lives take a turn for the worse, and keeping secrets is a lost art.
Seeing Liza - on psychopharmaka - cheerful and calm at the start of this episode was more disturbing than if we'd opened with her still crying. Because things are wrong at Los Alamos, and Liza-on-drugs later gets another demonstration when her inner botanist is horrified at the prospect of one of the few trees getting uprooted, only to be told that it's a done deal and the army always wins. Still, the breakfast scene has Frank continuing to act like a good husband, which feels odd, but his next interaction is with Akley which means he goes right back to jerk default mode and Manhattan feels familiar again.
Before I get to the other couples who make the meat of the episode, a word about the teaser scene: sigh. Manhattan, I wish you wouldn't do scenes in Germany. Last time we got the superlab at a point when everything ought to be in shambles and moving to provincial southern Germany. This time, the corridor through which Magpie walks at least doesn't look very glitzy, but the enfolding scene is straight tv type of Nazi violence. Complete with beheading order which feels like a sop to current day events. Here's what would have likely happened to a caught spy (or suspected spy, for that matter): a lot of non stop interrogation first, to find out which of his colleagues were also spies. (Since all the German scientists were themselves under surveillance, including Heisenberg.) (What, you think Nazi Germany was less paranoid than the US?) During this time, his wife and blood relations would also have been arrested and put into Sippenhaft. His wife most likely would have ended up in Ravensbrück, the camp for women, as happened with some of the wives of the July 20th 1944 conspirators. (Since Magpie probably would have known about what what was happening in Ravensbrück, at least the general gist, this would have been an even more awful thing to do than to shoot her in front of him.) Also, in late 1943 or even if we're now in early 1944 already (which I don't think, the show would have done a new year's party, surely?) there would definitely have been one of those awful trials which consisted of nearly nothing but Roland Freissler humiliating the accused as badly as possible in public, with the sentence never in question.
But instead we get a generic "spy of good guys is caught, violence by bad guys ensues" scene from tv stock. Eh. Not worthy of you, show. The best I can say is that you hire people who at least speak German as if they know what they're saying, so one can understand them, as opposed to Sleepy Hollow et all.
Anyway. Betrayal is the theme of the hour. The Magpie discovery triggers more worries about leaks from Inquisitor!Schiff, who finds out the Colonel told Frank, who tells no one he told Charlie, who swears he didn't tell anyone, either. (To my knowledge, he didn't. Or am I forgetting something?) (But please, show, don't let Akley be a Nazi spy instead of a Russian one. That would really be caricature.) But the two co-conspirators have additonal worries which leads Frank to suggest framing Charlie's arch nemesis (aka the groper and molester Elodie is married to, Tom) who is on to them. Charlie offers only token resistance as to the ethics of this idea, which emotionally is understandable, and then as his first take on how to accomplish the framing as good as tells Helen she ought to do it by sleeping with Tom, which is not. Thankfully, Helen doesn't consider this for a second, but this leads Charlie to his next brainwave: asking Abby. Not to sleep with Tom, but to use her friendship with Elodie to plant incriminating material at the house. The enfolding events are what makes the core of the episode.
Abby has been growing closer to Elodie and more distant from Charlie through the season. At this point, when Elodie suggests in a way that's only a pretend joke to run away together, Abby is seriously considering it. And I think this is precisely why she eventually ends up planting the material. She doesn't do it for Charlie. She does it because she was about to run off with Elodie, and the sight of the other women and their children she caught through the window reminded her that she'd have to give up the existence she'd been aspiring to all her life because she was taught to, the wife-and-mother-of-respected-husband. And if Charlie has brought her to the middle of nowhere to the bizarre situation of Los Alamos, Elodie's idea - going to Tangiers - in practical terms isn't that much better (leaving aside travel difficulties in the middle of a war). And that's why she does go through with the framing. To stop herself. It's another example of "sympathetic regular doing awful thing" this show does so well.
Meanwhile, Paul, having decided he's in love with Helen as opposed to the sexbuddy relationship she thought they had, proposes to her. Here I'm not sure the show sold me on the Paul having fallen in love part previously, because it's mostly tell (lilterally: during the mushroom interlude, Fritz tells him "You're in love with Helen"), not show. But Harry Lloyd plays the proposal scene beautifully. And because Paul is easily the most bad-tempered of the younger scientists on Frank's team, it's not a surprise he takes Helen's refusal and the affair with Charlie he thinks she's having really badly. Having figured out what Frank and Charlie are up to (worst kept secret ever, or what?), he therefore tells Akley.
Speculation: Akley, because he's been hinted to be a spy (please, show, please let him be a spy for the Russians, not the Germans, because of the godawful cliché the alternative would evoke), will not report this for his own reasons, but will try to use it for whoever he works for. Which is why Frank and Charlie will end up coming clean to the administration (Oppenheimer and Groves) after some more dilemma. Parallely, Abby will finally tell Charlie about Elodie (and possibly that she's leaving him anyway). What will happen with Liza, though, I have no idea.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1019467.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Seeing Liza - on psychopharmaka - cheerful and calm at the start of this episode was more disturbing than if we'd opened with her still crying. Because things are wrong at Los Alamos, and Liza-on-drugs later gets another demonstration when her inner botanist is horrified at the prospect of one of the few trees getting uprooted, only to be told that it's a done deal and the army always wins. Still, the breakfast scene has Frank continuing to act like a good husband, which feels odd, but his next interaction is with Akley which means he goes right back to jerk default mode and Manhattan feels familiar again.
Before I get to the other couples who make the meat of the episode, a word about the teaser scene: sigh. Manhattan, I wish you wouldn't do scenes in Germany. Last time we got the superlab at a point when everything ought to be in shambles and moving to provincial southern Germany. This time, the corridor through which Magpie walks at least doesn't look very glitzy, but the enfolding scene is straight tv type of Nazi violence. Complete with beheading order which feels like a sop to current day events. Here's what would have likely happened to a caught spy (or suspected spy, for that matter): a lot of non stop interrogation first, to find out which of his colleagues were also spies. (Since all the German scientists were themselves under surveillance, including Heisenberg.) (What, you think Nazi Germany was less paranoid than the US?) During this time, his wife and blood relations would also have been arrested and put into Sippenhaft. His wife most likely would have ended up in Ravensbrück, the camp for women, as happened with some of the wives of the July 20th 1944 conspirators. (Since Magpie probably would have known about what what was happening in Ravensbrück, at least the general gist, this would have been an even more awful thing to do than to shoot her in front of him.) Also, in late 1943 or even if we're now in early 1944 already (which I don't think, the show would have done a new year's party, surely?) there would definitely have been one of those awful trials which consisted of nearly nothing but Roland Freissler humiliating the accused as badly as possible in public, with the sentence never in question.
But instead we get a generic "spy of good guys is caught, violence by bad guys ensues" scene from tv stock. Eh. Not worthy of you, show. The best I can say is that you hire people who at least speak German as if they know what they're saying, so one can understand them, as opposed to Sleepy Hollow et all.
Anyway. Betrayal is the theme of the hour. The Magpie discovery triggers more worries about leaks from Inquisitor!Schiff, who finds out the Colonel told Frank, who tells no one he told Charlie, who swears he didn't tell anyone, either. (To my knowledge, he didn't. Or am I forgetting something?) (But please, show, don't let Akley be a Nazi spy instead of a Russian one. That would really be caricature.) But the two co-conspirators have additonal worries which leads Frank to suggest framing Charlie's arch nemesis (aka the groper and molester Elodie is married to, Tom) who is on to them. Charlie offers only token resistance as to the ethics of this idea, which emotionally is understandable, and then as his first take on how to accomplish the framing as good as tells Helen she ought to do it by sleeping with Tom, which is not. Thankfully, Helen doesn't consider this for a second, but this leads Charlie to his next brainwave: asking Abby. Not to sleep with Tom, but to use her friendship with Elodie to plant incriminating material at the house. The enfolding events are what makes the core of the episode.
Abby has been growing closer to Elodie and more distant from Charlie through the season. At this point, when Elodie suggests in a way that's only a pretend joke to run away together, Abby is seriously considering it. And I think this is precisely why she eventually ends up planting the material. She doesn't do it for Charlie. She does it because she was about to run off with Elodie, and the sight of the other women and their children she caught through the window reminded her that she'd have to give up the existence she'd been aspiring to all her life because she was taught to, the wife-and-mother-of-respected-husband. And if Charlie has brought her to the middle of nowhere to the bizarre situation of Los Alamos, Elodie's idea - going to Tangiers - in practical terms isn't that much better (leaving aside travel difficulties in the middle of a war). And that's why she does go through with the framing. To stop herself. It's another example of "sympathetic regular doing awful thing" this show does so well.
Meanwhile, Paul, having decided he's in love with Helen as opposed to the sexbuddy relationship she thought they had, proposes to her. Here I'm not sure the show sold me on the Paul having fallen in love part previously, because it's mostly tell (lilterally: during the mushroom interlude, Fritz tells him "You're in love with Helen"), not show. But Harry Lloyd plays the proposal scene beautifully. And because Paul is easily the most bad-tempered of the younger scientists on Frank's team, it's not a surprise he takes Helen's refusal and the affair with Charlie he thinks she's having really badly. Having figured out what Frank and Charlie are up to (worst kept secret ever, or what?), he therefore tells Akley.
Speculation: Akley, because he's been hinted to be a spy (please, show, please let him be a spy for the Russians, not the Germans, because of the godawful cliché the alternative would evoke), will not report this for his own reasons, but will try to use it for whoever he works for. Which is why Frank and Charlie will end up coming clean to the administration (Oppenheimer and Groves) after some more dilemma. Parallely, Abby will finally tell Charlie about Elodie (and possibly that she's leaving him anyway). What will happen with Liza, though, I have no idea.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1019467.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.