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selenakThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel just finished its fifth and last season. I kept enjoying the show throughout; it was frothy fun, it had interesting characters, they certainly milked the late 50s/early 60s fashion for the biggest eye candy factor, and while I wouldn't call it a must watch, I, personally, am glad I did. Sometimes you're in the mood for something that's neither trash tv nor deeply challenging thought provoking stuff, with snappy dialogue and engaging actors, and it definitely delivered on that front to me.
The last season got a bit experimental in its framing as it kept interminging its "present day" timeline with flash forwards that showed ups how Midge & Co. were doing through the decades after the show finale. At first I showed, hm, you're not Lost, show, are you sure you want to do this?, but then it kept paying off. Not least because it settled (to my mind) various concerns I kept hearing voiced. No, Joel and Midge would not get back together again as endgame, though they'd always care very deeply about each other. (Joel is one of those characters who because they start out screwing up and in something of an antagonistic position which the protagonist has to overcome keep being hated by much of the fandom no matter how much they redeem themselves later, but I think much of this Joel dislike was caused by the fear he'd be Midge's romantic endgame in lieu of the fandom preferred partners (i.e. Suziie or Lenny). Now that this fear doesn't plague anymone anymore, I wonder whether Joel will undergo some fannish reevaluation, because as exes go, he turned out to be a pretty good one, and not in a way that handwaved his original misdeeds (leaving Midge in a mixture of hormones and self esteem crisis) away.
Midge herself turned out to be that rarity, an intentionally flawed female protagonist who still gets to fulfill (most of) her dreams. This is another thing where the flash forwards came in handy; unsurprisingly, Midge's relationship with her adult children isn't stellar (neither is it House of Atreus stuff), and no, we were never supposed to see her as "good" mother, or overlook her egotism - but she's still a fabulously loyal friend to have, none of her relationships are one sided in that way, and the show gives her just enough setbacks to demonstrate one of her greatest virtues is her ability to pick herself up again. Plus, of course, her main relationship during the show wasn't with Joel (though that was always an important relationship) or her children (definitely not) or her parents (always important, though, and her parents and their storylines were part of what made the show so watchable) - it was with Suzie. Another thing that made my eyebrows go up and inwardly wonder "Show, are you sure you want to do this in the last seaosn?" was the reveal via the flash forwards that Midge and Suzie will have a mighty argument plus years long enstrangement starting the mid 80s. I mean, that's really not what yours truly wanted to hear about their future. But lo, not only did the show reveal the reason fo rtheir breakup, and it was one that actually had its seeds in various developments over the last few seasons, including this one, and made character sense, but the show also got them back together (also in flash forwards) before the finale and in the finale itself showed, both in the Midge & Suzie and "old Midge & Suizie in 2005" scenes which conclude the series how deeply they care about each other through the decades. From the moment Suzie the brash worker spotted the potential in the fashion obsessed perky Midge, their odd couple partnership/friendship/love (in an unromantic but still deeply felt way on both sides) was the emotional axis around which the series revolved, and the series knew it. It also knew that Midge's success would not be rewarding to the audience if Suzie didn't make it to the managerial top as well (and stayed there).
(Oh, and the last season finally provided Suzie with some textual romantic backstory in the form of Hedy, wife of Gordon the talk show host. I mean, nobody was under the delusion that Suzie was straight anyway, but "asexual or lesbian?" was still debated.)
Midge/Lenny Bruce, otoh, was the show's unexpected Fiction/RPF ship that somehow not only worked but also benefited from the impendiments RL threw at it. I mean, Amy Sherman-Palladino isn't Quentin Tarantino, so it was obvious she wouldn't let Lenny Bruce survive and florish and end up with Midge from the get go. (As it is, we don't see or hear about his death, either, but the finale both gave us a flash forward to Lenny in decline that said it all about his later years and a (new) flashback scene showing him and Midge chatting, flirting and soulbaring which emphasized why his rare but always great appearances on the show and in Midge's life through five seasons from the moment they found themselves locked up together in the same cell in the pilot were such a treat. They had great spark and incredible chemistry, and were far too similar to ever have worked out as a couple, and definitely not willing to play out "A Star is Born".
In other news, I've been marathoning Mike Duncan's podcast "Revolutions" (which covers, in this order: The English Civil War, the American Revolution, the (first) French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the 1830 (second) French Revolution, the 1848 Revolutions across the European continent (German, Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, and kicking it off, the third French one), the South American Revolutions, the Mexican Revolution, and for a grand finale, the Rusisan Revolutions. I've just finsihed season 10, Episode 68, wherein Nicholas II FINALLY is forced to abdicate, and let me tell you: I knew he'd been a bad ruler, but I was not prepared for the utter, utter incompetence and stupidity both he and his wife Alexandra displayed. (Yes, they're going to die tragically later on, and nobody deserves to be shot with their families, but good lord, neither of those two should ever have been anywhere near a position of power in the first place given all the damage they did. If they'd emigrated right after this episode, I think people would feel about Dear Nicky the way they feel about his first cousin Dear Willy, aka Wilhelm II, who as the last Emperor of the short lived German Empire displayed much the same infuriating mixture of bigotry, favouritism of sycophants, stubbornness when compromise was needed and spinelessness when backbone was needed and utter refusal to acknowledge reality until the house came crashing down. I mean, even hardcore monarchists and Hohenzollern fans during the Weimar Republic didn't want to bring him back from his Dutch exile. Of all the royal couples brought down in revolutions covered in this podcast, you get the impression that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would have been fine in another era (they wouldn't have been great monarchs, but they wouldn't have been regarded as terrible, either, just as unremarkably mediocre), Charles I and Henrietta Maria probably would have ended up unpopular in every era they reigned in, though not necessarily gotten overhtrown - but Nicholas and Alexandra as anything but private citizens who at no point are given any responsiblity or authority over anyone would have been a catastrophe. Even had they been the headmaster of a school and his wife. (The competent teachers would have been sacked, the sycophants hired would have been incapable of doing anything, and Nicholas and Alexandra would have refused to talk to the parents but would have said it's just a few disgruntled former teachers but their students all adore them even at a point when the students where smashing stones through their windows and setting the house on fire.)
All this said, it's not a little creepy to hear the 19th century Czarist manifesto of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" (as a counter creed to the 18th century French Revolution slogan "Libery, Fraternity, Equality" that kept making the rounds through the subsequent century among various nations) and consider how well alive it is in Russia today. For all of Putin's self professed trauma of the Soviet Union dissolving, it's the 19th and early 20th Century Russian Empire he's really the heir of.
The last season got a bit experimental in its framing as it kept interminging its "present day" timeline with flash forwards that showed ups how Midge & Co. were doing through the decades after the show finale. At first I showed, hm, you're not Lost, show, are you sure you want to do this?, but then it kept paying off. Not least because it settled (to my mind) various concerns I kept hearing voiced. No, Joel and Midge would not get back together again as endgame, though they'd always care very deeply about each other. (Joel is one of those characters who because they start out screwing up and in something of an antagonistic position which the protagonist has to overcome keep being hated by much of the fandom no matter how much they redeem themselves later, but I think much of this Joel dislike was caused by the fear he'd be Midge's romantic endgame in lieu of the fandom preferred partners (i.e. Suziie or Lenny). Now that this fear doesn't plague anymone anymore, I wonder whether Joel will undergo some fannish reevaluation, because as exes go, he turned out to be a pretty good one, and not in a way that handwaved his original misdeeds (leaving Midge in a mixture of hormones and self esteem crisis) away.
Midge herself turned out to be that rarity, an intentionally flawed female protagonist who still gets to fulfill (most of) her dreams. This is another thing where the flash forwards came in handy; unsurprisingly, Midge's relationship with her adult children isn't stellar (neither is it House of Atreus stuff), and no, we were never supposed to see her as "good" mother, or overlook her egotism - but she's still a fabulously loyal friend to have, none of her relationships are one sided in that way, and the show gives her just enough setbacks to demonstrate one of her greatest virtues is her ability to pick herself up again. Plus, of course, her main relationship during the show wasn't with Joel (though that was always an important relationship) or her children (definitely not) or her parents (always important, though, and her parents and their storylines were part of what made the show so watchable) - it was with Suzie. Another thing that made my eyebrows go up and inwardly wonder "Show, are you sure you want to do this in the last seaosn?" was the reveal via the flash forwards that Midge and Suzie will have a mighty argument plus years long enstrangement starting the mid 80s. I mean, that's really not what yours truly wanted to hear about their future. But lo, not only did the show reveal the reason fo rtheir breakup, and it was one that actually had its seeds in various developments over the last few seasons, including this one, and made character sense, but the show also got them back together (also in flash forwards) before the finale and in the finale itself showed, both in the Midge & Suzie and "old Midge & Suizie in 2005" scenes which conclude the series how deeply they care about each other through the decades. From the moment Suzie the brash worker spotted the potential in the fashion obsessed perky Midge, their odd couple partnership/friendship/love (in an unromantic but still deeply felt way on both sides) was the emotional axis around which the series revolved, and the series knew it. It also knew that Midge's success would not be rewarding to the audience if Suzie didn't make it to the managerial top as well (and stayed there).
(Oh, and the last season finally provided Suzie with some textual romantic backstory in the form of Hedy, wife of Gordon the talk show host. I mean, nobody was under the delusion that Suzie was straight anyway, but "asexual or lesbian?" was still debated.)
Midge/Lenny Bruce, otoh, was the show's unexpected Fiction/RPF ship that somehow not only worked but also benefited from the impendiments RL threw at it. I mean, Amy Sherman-Palladino isn't Quentin Tarantino, so it was obvious she wouldn't let Lenny Bruce survive and florish and end up with Midge from the get go. (As it is, we don't see or hear about his death, either, but the finale both gave us a flash forward to Lenny in decline that said it all about his later years and a (new) flashback scene showing him and Midge chatting, flirting and soulbaring which emphasized why his rare but always great appearances on the show and in Midge's life through five seasons from the moment they found themselves locked up together in the same cell in the pilot were such a treat. They had great spark and incredible chemistry, and were far too similar to ever have worked out as a couple, and definitely not willing to play out "A Star is Born".
In other news, I've been marathoning Mike Duncan's podcast "Revolutions" (which covers, in this order: The English Civil War, the American Revolution, the (first) French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the 1830 (second) French Revolution, the 1848 Revolutions across the European continent (German, Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, and kicking it off, the third French one), the South American Revolutions, the Mexican Revolution, and for a grand finale, the Rusisan Revolutions. I've just finsihed season 10, Episode 68, wherein Nicholas II FINALLY is forced to abdicate, and let me tell you: I knew he'd been a bad ruler, but I was not prepared for the utter, utter incompetence and stupidity both he and his wife Alexandra displayed. (Yes, they're going to die tragically later on, and nobody deserves to be shot with their families, but good lord, neither of those two should ever have been anywhere near a position of power in the first place given all the damage they did. If they'd emigrated right after this episode, I think people would feel about Dear Nicky the way they feel about his first cousin Dear Willy, aka Wilhelm II, who as the last Emperor of the short lived German Empire displayed much the same infuriating mixture of bigotry, favouritism of sycophants, stubbornness when compromise was needed and spinelessness when backbone was needed and utter refusal to acknowledge reality until the house came crashing down. I mean, even hardcore monarchists and Hohenzollern fans during the Weimar Republic didn't want to bring him back from his Dutch exile. Of all the royal couples brought down in revolutions covered in this podcast, you get the impression that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would have been fine in another era (they wouldn't have been great monarchs, but they wouldn't have been regarded as terrible, either, just as unremarkably mediocre), Charles I and Henrietta Maria probably would have ended up unpopular in every era they reigned in, though not necessarily gotten overhtrown - but Nicholas and Alexandra as anything but private citizens who at no point are given any responsiblity or authority over anyone would have been a catastrophe. Even had they been the headmaster of a school and his wife. (The competent teachers would have been sacked, the sycophants hired would have been incapable of doing anything, and Nicholas and Alexandra would have refused to talk to the parents but would have said it's just a few disgruntled former teachers but their students all adore them even at a point when the students where smashing stones through their windows and setting the house on fire.)
All this said, it's not a little creepy to hear the 19th century Czarist manifesto of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" (as a counter creed to the 18th century French Revolution slogan "Libery, Fraternity, Equality" that kept making the rounds through the subsequent century among various nations) and consider how well alive it is in Russia today. For all of Putin's self professed trauma of the Soviet Union dissolving, it's the 19th and early 20th Century Russian Empire he's really the heir of.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-27 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-27 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-27 08:08 pm (UTC)Speaking of Russia, I did find this neat video "The Russian Conspiracy Theory That History Isn't Real" by Mia Mulder that has a section that explains some of the imperialist mindset that has a grip on the rulers and some of the culture. To find the specific section, it's 25:26-38:43, though you're free to watch the rest of the video.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-29 10:29 am (UTC)That sounds pretty accurate. Good and loving father and husband, check, flaming racist, check, even beyond what's avarage for his era, and above all terrible political decision maker in a position of near unlimited political authority. I mean, Nicholas' cousin George V. of England may have regarded himself seriously as the Lord's Annointed, too (I have no idea, am not very familiar with G5), but regardless whether or not he did, he was a constitiutional monarch and thus it didn't impact his country's politics. Cousin Nicky seriously believing the Lord had chosen him and that therefore anyone critisizing him was an evil heretic in Czarist Russia, otoh.... plus he believed stuff like the "Secret Protocols of Zion" despite the fact his own secret service had forged them, and thought reconquering Constantinople from the Turks for Christian Orthodoxy after 500 years was a valid WWI aim. Seriously.
Thank you for the link! I'll watch as soon as I can.