Manhattan 2.10 Jupiter
And thus, it ends. The season, for sure, and I think also the series.
Honestly, at this point I would be far more surprised if there was a season 3. The later half of the season feels like it was scrambled together in haste knowing that cancellation was on the horizon. Maybe I'm unfair, because the season does start with a flash forward to what we're now in this episode catching up with, the Trinity Test, maybe the time jump was always meant to happen, I don't know. But while some storylines worked for me, some truly didn't, and they started not working post time jump.
From the bad to the good:
I. Frank. And Frank and Liza. Frank started out well (from a Doylist pov - from a Watsonian pov, he was in a prison camp), and for the first half of the season, I found his story compelling, and of course I loved that Liza, who'd been rarely focused on in season 1, had a central storyline for the first half of s2. I also for the first time was well and truly sold on the Winters marriage as a great partnership.
Unfortunately, the time jump meant not only an episode of bewildering characterisation (Liza suddenly being so naive as to assume Frank could just go back to the Hill, deliver his message, and they'd be free once more, Frank having no immediate back up plan beyond "must tell Charlie there's no impending German bomb and that the government is lying to us"), it also meant the off screen estrangement between Frank and Liza just after they'd reunited again and her mostly off screen presumed affair, or not distanced me again from Frank and Liza as a couple. (I hate off screen important developments.) Even worse, Liza slid back to s1 status in terms of screentime, and stopped having interesting scenes; even the very few she got re: warning from nuclear fallout etc. felt like scraps in terms of what had come before.
As for Frank: on the one hand, the show practically made him the sole father of the bomb, by letting him have the initial idea that got the ball rolling, making his scientific contribution indispensable etc, on the other, post time jump it wanted on the one hand to let him be heroic in trying to stop it, but on the other hand somehow wildly swinging between inefficient at that (it takes him six months to talk to anyone about the falsified intelligence and start a protest?), and far too efficient (Frank's sabotage of the pre-test). Now I think at the back of at least some of the writer's mind might have been something like "Frank wants to stop the bomb, but it's also his baby, so a part of him just wants to know it works", but if Frank has mixed feelings like that, they didn't come across very well (at least to me). (And it didn't help that to the end, he and everyone else kept treating the "bombing civilians" thing as a new moral line to cross when the Allies at that point had been doing it for years. No, I'm not going to let that deceased equine go.) That said, I bought his conversation with Jim Meeks and his argument why Jim sabotaging the Trinity Test, dying while doing so and being exposed as a Soviet spy thereafter would heighten the likelihood of WWIII instead of preventing it, and I also bought that Frank felt responsible enough for his team members to try and save Jim. (Ototh, the Liza scenes unfortunately fell emotionally flat for me for the earlier named reasons. "I don't know whether you are still my wife but I am still your husband" would have moved me if I had watched their new estrangement happen on screen.) More about Jim later.
II. Helen. Helen was such a vital, interesting part of season 1, and I was very frustrated by the way most of her s2 scenes were about her love life. Those that weren't, like her scene with Frank in the last episode, really stood out. They and her scene with Oppenheimer in this episode both delighted and frustrated me because they teased at a theme which would have worked great for Helen. Of all the younger team members, Helen was the one most into the project for its scientific possibilities, with no thought or emotion to its practical use in war, which fits her as a theoretical physicist. Oppenheimer promoting her again and sending her to head to head the group supervising Little Boy on the Indianopolis means Helen will be replacing in this 'verse Hans Bethe (I think it was Bethe, at least, but could be wrong, I haven't looked it up) as the Manhattan leading scientist who got to study Hiroshima immediately after. This would be a perfectly blackly ironic counterpoint for Helen's storyline to conclude on, IF she'd have one that was more than teased at in this regard. But instead of her having conversations or arguments with her fellow physicists about the use/not use of the bomb, we got nothing at the sort until her scene with Frank in the previous episode. Instead, we got her starting as the Other Woman for Charlie, the One Who Got Away for Paul, then had her briefly involved with Stan aka Perseus offering the lure of patents and ended with her telling Charlie she didn't blame him for choosing his family. Which had me go "oh no, you don't, writers", because it made absolutely no sense for Helen to say that at this point. Her romantic/sexual relationship with Charlie had been over for eons. He, not she, had been the one to let the "exes" factor go in the line of work afterwards. That line would make sense if we had assumed Helen had been sincerely in love with Charlie and was still smarting about the breakup, and until now, there was absolutely no indication for this.
The sole reason why that line was spoken was a Doylist one, and it had nothing to do with Helen. It was spoken so Charlie could feel guilty/guiltier about having lost his wife and son due to his moral decline and call his parents-in-law in order to try to speak to his son, thereby starting the reveal to the audience (though not himself) that the kid isn't with the grandparents at all. And frankly, you could have achieved all of this by letting another character muse out loud about how important family is (starting Charlie's thought process), instead of giving Helen such an ooc line.
Now, on to the good stuff.
III. The other young ones, i.e. Jim, Fritz and Paul. To me, their storylines were far more interesting and moving than any of the Frank scenes (and sadly also of the Helen and Liza scenes) in the later half of the season. Paul's idea of saving Jim via turning him into a double agent (and his pointing out to Frank they'd have to prevent the sabotage first because while a spy would be considered an asset, a saboteur would be shot on sight) was a neat mixture of pragmatism and friendship, paying off his crash course in spying in the previous episode but also his ability to feel affection and do something about it. Fritz had been always the most optimistic, sunny natured of the original team, the one most ready to show affection, and the relentless tragedy of losing his wife via his best friend, and then to find out the truth via said best friend, was heartbreaking. It was also a masterstroke to have this storyline climax at the moment of the Trinity Test, because while just like the audience, the characters have been building towards the test forever, at that very moment they were distracted by the emotional horror of the revelation, and so the endlessly foreshadowed moment, the "light of a thousand suns" bursting , still came as a surprise. And then Fritz, unable to kill Jim (who wants to die) , kills himself as the light fades to make room for the mushroom and the fallout. it's absolutely devastating, and wisely without any words at all.
Jim Meeks went from least fleshed out member of the original team in season 1 to fascinating John Le Carré character. By which I don't mean, btw, that he's just a good guy who meant well and got in over his head. Telling Fritz the truth after Frank had already covered for him was, if you ask me, not so much because Fritz "deserved the truth", but because Jim couldn't live with it anymore (and his planned suicide method had just been taken away). In other words, it was selfish. There was no way Fritz would have been better off with this particular truth than he'd been with the lie, Jim knew that, but he couldn't bear lying anymore, he wanted to die, and so he told Fritz. It's the same selfish core that enables a spy to live at the expense of others, ironically enough, and that was foreshadowed when he let Nora kill Jeanie.
Jim killing Stan/Perseus in order to save everyone from Nora's revised plan (i.e. test killing scientists) in order go through with his original plan (test doesn't work but only kills Jim Meeks himself) also wrapped up a development that started when a shocked Jim observed the late Viktor kill Inquisitor!Schiff aka Fisher at the start of the season and realised for the first time viscerally what espionage entailed. This was the first time Jim killed someone with his own hands. I could complain and say it would have been a more shocking scene if the show had been given any reason to care about Stan/Perseus other than him romancing Helen, but you know what, not really, because it's Jim's development I care about. Also, in order for the later scenes to work it had to be crystal clear that Jim had no intention of killing anyone but himself with that sabotage.
"See you on Jupiter" as the last line of the season, spoken by Jim to Fritz (on the assumption that Fritz would kill him as he wanted) is echoed in the title of the episode, "Jupiter", and that's fitting, because this was by far the best and most moving of the storylines this season.
Nearly as good, though: Charlie's storyline, about which I already said a great deal in the review of the last episode, and Abby's. Frank in his conversation with Jim says it "it all started with Sid Lao" and gives him as an example of the "lesser evils" he rationalized to himself in order to achieve the final goal, but Frank stopped getting this storyline in this season; instead, Charlie had it, and how. Charlie, vows to his bewildered parents-in-law on the telephone notwithstanding, has put it all on the use of the bomb to justify everything, and his storyline already climaxed in the previous episode with his big speech; here, he's just living the essential epilogue.
Meanwhile, Abby has just two scenes, but they not only wrap up her seasonal story but that of the last two seasons. On one level, she ends the season as she started it, determined to leave Charlie, this time going through with it. On the other, she ends it far wiser, not least about herself, and accepting responsibility in the way a younger Abby hadn't yet been able to do. As I mentioned, Charlie's phone call is the first hint that she didn't simply send their son to her parents, as she told Charlie he had; later, when we see Abby, it turns out she has planned her own escape from the hill, not as spontanous outburst but as something strategically organized. Since everyone important (especially Charlie and Darrow) is at the test site, she can bluff her way out of the camp by using Darrow's religious bonding with her efficiently. She's sent her son ahead with Juanita the maid, because this isn't Abby going back to her parents (in her old existence as spoiled daughter), but Abby starting a new life with her son. In California. I dimly seem to recall Elodie wanted to go there, but I could be wrong. It could simply be California to make it clear Abby isn't heading towards the East Coast and her parents. At any rate, it's a good way for her to finish the season, and the show; I like the idea of Abby heading towards the horizon, not to a guaranteed good new life (maybe she'll cope, maybe she won't), but to something genuinely new and her own.
Trivia:
- The rainstorm at the test site mixed with the calm weather on the hill, and the episode cutting back and forth between the two, made for bewildering viewing
- Oppenheimer early on reads the passage leading up to the famous quote from the Bhavaghad Gita, but the quote itself isn't, in the end, spoken, and doesn't have to be, because, see above re: Jupiter
- While on the one hand I'm all for Darrow getting his comeuppance, I don't think Truman & Co. will care about falsified intelligence fed to the scientists in order to motivate them , Charlie; also, Darrow didn't show up until season 2, and the whole Magpie thing was a season 1 affair, so quite how this is supposed to incriminate him in particular is a tad illogical.
In conclusion: a good show, if somewhat uneven and wobbly in its second season.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1127809.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Honestly, at this point I would be far more surprised if there was a season 3. The later half of the season feels like it was scrambled together in haste knowing that cancellation was on the horizon. Maybe I'm unfair, because the season does start with a flash forward to what we're now in this episode catching up with, the Trinity Test, maybe the time jump was always meant to happen, I don't know. But while some storylines worked for me, some truly didn't, and they started not working post time jump.
From the bad to the good:
I. Frank. And Frank and Liza. Frank started out well (from a Doylist pov - from a Watsonian pov, he was in a prison camp), and for the first half of the season, I found his story compelling, and of course I loved that Liza, who'd been rarely focused on in season 1, had a central storyline for the first half of s2. I also for the first time was well and truly sold on the Winters marriage as a great partnership.
Unfortunately, the time jump meant not only an episode of bewildering characterisation (Liza suddenly being so naive as to assume Frank could just go back to the Hill, deliver his message, and they'd be free once more, Frank having no immediate back up plan beyond "must tell Charlie there's no impending German bomb and that the government is lying to us"), it also meant the off screen estrangement between Frank and Liza just after they'd reunited again and her mostly off screen presumed affair, or not distanced me again from Frank and Liza as a couple. (I hate off screen important developments.) Even worse, Liza slid back to s1 status in terms of screentime, and stopped having interesting scenes; even the very few she got re: warning from nuclear fallout etc. felt like scraps in terms of what had come before.
As for Frank: on the one hand, the show practically made him the sole father of the bomb, by letting him have the initial idea that got the ball rolling, making his scientific contribution indispensable etc, on the other, post time jump it wanted on the one hand to let him be heroic in trying to stop it, but on the other hand somehow wildly swinging between inefficient at that (it takes him six months to talk to anyone about the falsified intelligence and start a protest?), and far too efficient (Frank's sabotage of the pre-test). Now I think at the back of at least some of the writer's mind might have been something like "Frank wants to stop the bomb, but it's also his baby, so a part of him just wants to know it works", but if Frank has mixed feelings like that, they didn't come across very well (at least to me). (And it didn't help that to the end, he and everyone else kept treating the "bombing civilians" thing as a new moral line to cross when the Allies at that point had been doing it for years. No, I'm not going to let that deceased equine go.) That said, I bought his conversation with Jim Meeks and his argument why Jim sabotaging the Trinity Test, dying while doing so and being exposed as a Soviet spy thereafter would heighten the likelihood of WWIII instead of preventing it, and I also bought that Frank felt responsible enough for his team members to try and save Jim. (Ototh, the Liza scenes unfortunately fell emotionally flat for me for the earlier named reasons. "I don't know whether you are still my wife but I am still your husband" would have moved me if I had watched their new estrangement happen on screen.) More about Jim later.
II. Helen. Helen was such a vital, interesting part of season 1, and I was very frustrated by the way most of her s2 scenes were about her love life. Those that weren't, like her scene with Frank in the last episode, really stood out. They and her scene with Oppenheimer in this episode both delighted and frustrated me because they teased at a theme which would have worked great for Helen. Of all the younger team members, Helen was the one most into the project for its scientific possibilities, with no thought or emotion to its practical use in war, which fits her as a theoretical physicist. Oppenheimer promoting her again and sending her to head to head the group supervising Little Boy on the Indianopolis means Helen will be replacing in this 'verse Hans Bethe (I think it was Bethe, at least, but could be wrong, I haven't looked it up) as the Manhattan leading scientist who got to study Hiroshima immediately after. This would be a perfectly blackly ironic counterpoint for Helen's storyline to conclude on, IF she'd have one that was more than teased at in this regard. But instead of her having conversations or arguments with her fellow physicists about the use/not use of the bomb, we got nothing at the sort until her scene with Frank in the previous episode. Instead, we got her starting as the Other Woman for Charlie, the One Who Got Away for Paul, then had her briefly involved with Stan aka Perseus offering the lure of patents and ended with her telling Charlie she didn't blame him for choosing his family. Which had me go "oh no, you don't, writers", because it made absolutely no sense for Helen to say that at this point. Her romantic/sexual relationship with Charlie had been over for eons. He, not she, had been the one to let the "exes" factor go in the line of work afterwards. That line would make sense if we had assumed Helen had been sincerely in love with Charlie and was still smarting about the breakup, and until now, there was absolutely no indication for this.
The sole reason why that line was spoken was a Doylist one, and it had nothing to do with Helen. It was spoken so Charlie could feel guilty/guiltier about having lost his wife and son due to his moral decline and call his parents-in-law in order to try to speak to his son, thereby starting the reveal to the audience (though not himself) that the kid isn't with the grandparents at all. And frankly, you could have achieved all of this by letting another character muse out loud about how important family is (starting Charlie's thought process), instead of giving Helen such an ooc line.
Now, on to the good stuff.
III. The other young ones, i.e. Jim, Fritz and Paul. To me, their storylines were far more interesting and moving than any of the Frank scenes (and sadly also of the Helen and Liza scenes) in the later half of the season. Paul's idea of saving Jim via turning him into a double agent (and his pointing out to Frank they'd have to prevent the sabotage first because while a spy would be considered an asset, a saboteur would be shot on sight) was a neat mixture of pragmatism and friendship, paying off his crash course in spying in the previous episode but also his ability to feel affection and do something about it. Fritz had been always the most optimistic, sunny natured of the original team, the one most ready to show affection, and the relentless tragedy of losing his wife via his best friend, and then to find out the truth via said best friend, was heartbreaking. It was also a masterstroke to have this storyline climax at the moment of the Trinity Test, because while just like the audience, the characters have been building towards the test forever, at that very moment they were distracted by the emotional horror of the revelation, and so the endlessly foreshadowed moment, the "light of a thousand suns" bursting , still came as a surprise. And then Fritz, unable to kill Jim (who wants to die) , kills himself as the light fades to make room for the mushroom and the fallout. it's absolutely devastating, and wisely without any words at all.
Jim Meeks went from least fleshed out member of the original team in season 1 to fascinating John Le Carré character. By which I don't mean, btw, that he's just a good guy who meant well and got in over his head. Telling Fritz the truth after Frank had already covered for him was, if you ask me, not so much because Fritz "deserved the truth", but because Jim couldn't live with it anymore (and his planned suicide method had just been taken away). In other words, it was selfish. There was no way Fritz would have been better off with this particular truth than he'd been with the lie, Jim knew that, but he couldn't bear lying anymore, he wanted to die, and so he told Fritz. It's the same selfish core that enables a spy to live at the expense of others, ironically enough, and that was foreshadowed when he let Nora kill Jeanie.
Jim killing Stan/Perseus in order to save everyone from Nora's revised plan (i.e. test killing scientists) in order go through with his original plan (test doesn't work but only kills Jim Meeks himself) also wrapped up a development that started when a shocked Jim observed the late Viktor kill Inquisitor!Schiff aka Fisher at the start of the season and realised for the first time viscerally what espionage entailed. This was the first time Jim killed someone with his own hands. I could complain and say it would have been a more shocking scene if the show had been given any reason to care about Stan/Perseus other than him romancing Helen, but you know what, not really, because it's Jim's development I care about. Also, in order for the later scenes to work it had to be crystal clear that Jim had no intention of killing anyone but himself with that sabotage.
"See you on Jupiter" as the last line of the season, spoken by Jim to Fritz (on the assumption that Fritz would kill him as he wanted) is echoed in the title of the episode, "Jupiter", and that's fitting, because this was by far the best and most moving of the storylines this season.
Nearly as good, though: Charlie's storyline, about which I already said a great deal in the review of the last episode, and Abby's. Frank in his conversation with Jim says it "it all started with Sid Lao" and gives him as an example of the "lesser evils" he rationalized to himself in order to achieve the final goal, but Frank stopped getting this storyline in this season; instead, Charlie had it, and how. Charlie, vows to his bewildered parents-in-law on the telephone notwithstanding, has put it all on the use of the bomb to justify everything, and his storyline already climaxed in the previous episode with his big speech; here, he's just living the essential epilogue.
Meanwhile, Abby has just two scenes, but they not only wrap up her seasonal story but that of the last two seasons. On one level, she ends the season as she started it, determined to leave Charlie, this time going through with it. On the other, she ends it far wiser, not least about herself, and accepting responsibility in the way a younger Abby hadn't yet been able to do. As I mentioned, Charlie's phone call is the first hint that she didn't simply send their son to her parents, as she told Charlie he had; later, when we see Abby, it turns out she has planned her own escape from the hill, not as spontanous outburst but as something strategically organized. Since everyone important (especially Charlie and Darrow) is at the test site, she can bluff her way out of the camp by using Darrow's religious bonding with her efficiently. She's sent her son ahead with Juanita the maid, because this isn't Abby going back to her parents (in her old existence as spoiled daughter), but Abby starting a new life with her son. In California. I dimly seem to recall Elodie wanted to go there, but I could be wrong. It could simply be California to make it clear Abby isn't heading towards the East Coast and her parents. At any rate, it's a good way for her to finish the season, and the show; I like the idea of Abby heading towards the horizon, not to a guaranteed good new life (maybe she'll cope, maybe she won't), but to something genuinely new and her own.
Trivia:
- The rainstorm at the test site mixed with the calm weather on the hill, and the episode cutting back and forth between the two, made for bewildering viewing
- Oppenheimer early on reads the passage leading up to the famous quote from the Bhavaghad Gita, but the quote itself isn't, in the end, spoken, and doesn't have to be, because, see above re: Jupiter
- While on the one hand I'm all for Darrow getting his comeuppance, I don't think Truman & Co. will care about falsified intelligence fed to the scientists in order to motivate them , Charlie; also, Darrow didn't show up until season 2, and the whole Magpie thing was a season 1 affair, so quite how this is supposed to incriminate him in particular is a tad illogical.
In conclusion: a good show, if somewhat uneven and wobbly in its second season.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1127809.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.