The Ents would disapprove

[selenak]

Busy rl means comparatively little online time, but next week is the Frankfurt Book Fair, which means even less, so, in haste:

The Good Wife season opener: haven't seen it yet, hope I'll manage before Frankfurt.

Homeland season opener: I did manage this one. With some caveats (for example, can't imagine the CIA not having camera surveillance in

Comments

[selenak]

I think you'll enjoy it. It's not BB level great, but it's good and does some great character development. Including presenting us with two leads where the man starts out sympathetic (a deeply traumatized wounded man played by a excellent actor, he would be) and the woman, as I once joked, is fourth season of BSG Kara Thrace (if you've watched the show), doing lots of things guaranteed to alienate the audience from her in the first few episodes - but by the time the season is over, it's turned around and not because Carrie gets easier to take but because we know both of them a lot better, and seen what each is capable of. Claire Danes really deserved that Emmy.

[frenchani]

Carrie is the reason I watch a show that is entertaining but is far from being as good as Breaking Bad - either in the writing department or in regards to its cinematography. Clare Danes killed it with that smile!

[selenak]

And it's such an unafraid performance. In this opening episode, when you could see that Carrie's short term memory was indeed affected, and how she was simultanously scared and viscerally excited to be back in the game..

[frenchani]

Great review by Todd Van Der Weff here on the AV/TV Club.

[abigail_n]

On Jessica's reaction to Brody's conversion: I don't think her coming off badly is an unintentional effect, nor do I think her reaction is purely about wanting to keep her new status. That's there, but it's bound up with the valid concern that her husband has kept such a huge part of his life from her for months, and with the invalid one that she is, let's face it, not a little Islamophobic. Consider Jessica's situation - she spent eight years in limbo, only allowing herself to consider letting her husband go at their end, and then when he finally came back she spent months in agony, wondering if her marriage and family weren't worse off than before. Now, as she tells Brody at the beginning of the episode, she's got a loving husband who is also a congressman and perhaps a future vice president. And then she finds out something that threatens to destroy that beautiful life, and which also reveals that the newfound stability of her marriage is a lie, because it turns out that her husband has been concealing a change that she simply

[selenak]

You make a good case, and I agree that it all makes sense characterisation wise, but what I feel worried about is that the episode doesn't offer anything re: Jessica to balance it with; i.e. it doesn't give her any scenes, even small ones, where she comes off sympathetically.

And maybe I'm just projecting, but let's face it: wives who are perceived as impediments to what the protagonist husbands want to do and what the audience wants to see them doing get a bad deal from the audience and sometimes from the writers - I remember you writing about this phenomenon when it was Rita in Dexter and the idea of her "spoiling our fun". Skyler in Breaking Bad is a more complicated case in that the writing and the (part of) the audience reaction are severely at odds with each other. And while I didn't see beyond the first two seasons of the Sopranos, I'm told Carmella was also hated for a similar reason. Last season, I appreciated that we were put in Jessica's pov on occasion (with the contrast between her scene with Mike at the start and her

[abigail_n]

I don't know, I tend to feel that if the husband is secretly a terrorist, his unsuspecting wife is automatically sympathetic, especially in scenes where she's coming across some evidence that all is not well with her husband and actually following up that evidence up and asking inconvenient questions. And while I understand your concern about playing into the audience's tendency to hate the wife, I think there's a limit to how responsible you can hold a show for having misogynistic fans (my problem in the case of Rita was more that it was professional reviewers, not some MRA yahoo, repeating the hate-the-wife line). And I'm also not sure that Homeland plays into the impulses of those fans in the same way that Dexter and Breaking Bad do. Brody isn't the show's hero; Carrie is (and she's also the person most directly in his path, not Jessica). I'd be surprised if there's a significant portion of the audience that wants Brody to succeed the way that there are fans who want Dexter to get away with murder, or Walt to become a drug

[reverancepavane]

can't imagine the CIA not having camera surveillance in a director's office

Well, firstly it's often a case that you don't really want any record of what goes on in a room (beyond which you create in reports and minutes).

Secondly, if top secret documents are handled in the room (and I imagine that would be the case in a CIA Director's office, then you cannot have any recording devices in the room at all (or windows for that matter) by US government regulation.

You can, and will, record access to the area containing the room. But the internal surveillance tends to stop at the border between secret and top secret. Or so I presume.