Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

[gollumgollum]

After two or three weeks of schoolwork and stalling, Surly and i finally sat down and watched the end of The Sandbaggers Season One Monday night, and last night we watched the first episode of Season Two.

A couple of things struck me, since this is the first time i've gone back and rewatched Sandbaggers since swan_tower and kniedzw gleefully introduced it to me.

Comments

[kniedzw]

It really is an amazing show.

[swan_tower]

It's important to remember that Willie was Sandbagger Two to Burnside's One for quite some time. No surprise they're friends, then -- but you can easily imagine how that kind of friendship could have screwed up the D-Ops/Sandbagger One relationship they had to shift to. That it didn't is testament to how professional they both are. (And an interesting note that I think I picked up from a special feature on one of the DVDs -- Willie always calls him "Boss" in the office, and "Neil" outside of it.)

The work to re-humanize Burnside goes on beyond the first episode of Season Two (things like showing what happens after Tom dies), but you're right about how critical that one is. And in a sense, it redeems Mackintosh, too; he's a right bastard for killing off another one so soon (good god, there's less than three full episodes in the entire series where you have a full complement of Sandbaggers, and they're virtually never all onstage together) -- anyway, Mackintosh is a right bastard, but that plot makes Burnside work as a character

[gollumgollum]

And thanks for your reply

[swan_tower]

Peele's best moment I can recall is the episode -- can't remember the title -- when Mike gets screwed over in Warsaw, and it's his word against the station head's, and Peele gets sent out to investigate. The station head is an old pal of his, etc, etc, etc, of course he'll believe the guy, and it's set up perfectly for you to hate Peele, and then he comes home and says "oh, the guy's clearly lying, he'd sell his own grandmother given half a chance." And you want to cheer Peele, for the first time ever.

And yeah, things like Diane -- she could easily have been "just a secretary," but there's no "just" about it. I love it when she points out to Burnside that she's been in the ops directorate longer than he has. She really was the character who first made me realize that a good secretary is worth his or her weight in diamonds.

What turns me green with envy, as a writer, is the way that the relationships between the characters always inform their actions. The show doesn't achieve Firefly's decentralization, where there's as much of

[gollumgollum]

Peele's best moment I can recall is the episode -- can't remember the title -- when Mike gets screwed over in Warsaw, and it's his word against the station head's, and Peele gets sent out to investigate. The station head is an old pal of his, etc, etc, etc, of course he'll believe the guy, and it's set up perfectly for you to hate Peele, and then he comes home and says "oh, the guy's clearly lying, he'd sell his own grandmother given half a chance." And you want to cheer Peele, for the first time ever.

That's it. It's truly a fantastic moment.

And yeah. Diane is probably the only sane one of the bunch. The dressing down she gives Burnside is probably one of my favorite moments ever. There's a great moment (maybe in At All Costs?) where Burnside asks for, like, three things, and they're already there.

I think that's the mark of a good show, really--the fact that characters aren't just pawns to make a plot go, or vice versa. Sandbaggers, as you pointed out, has it in spades, and really manages to fit it in within seconds, sometimes