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selenakLiots of things to do, and places to see (there willl be a pic spam), but I did catch up on the two shows.
For All Mankind 5.06:
Aaaaand the Mars Revolution has started. The episode also answered my questions from last week with the Aleida and Dev scene, i.e. he knew, she did not (but can’t say so out loud to anyone else because that would make her look terribly incompetent as a CEO). As the subsequent Dev and Alex scene also brings up, Dev not seeing the problem in making 98 n% of the workforce superfluos because presumably, his Mars Utopia was never meant for them anyway is very him. Mind you, it’s also of course echoing real life current problems and is less clear cut than at first sight. Working in space is incredibly dangerous. In both timelihnes. And for all that Mars is now harboring lots of people, it still is such a hostile environment that no one survives it without a working space suit, all the time, if they’re outside a settlement. Does it make sense, under these conditions, to replace human work with machines that are not in danger of dying if anything goes wrong as easily? It sure does. But the people currently working on Mars were for the most part coming on a promise of not short but long term employment and the chance to live decades or even their entire lives there. It will be interesting to see how this plays out on a show that’s neither cynical nor rosy-eyed about its alternative timeline.
The episode also atches us up with Irina and what happened to her in the fallout of last season’s finale. Sibiria, prison, abuse and interrogaton, and then Irina successfully executing a masterful bluff. (The last one was my interpretation of what we saw in the opening sequence, i.e. her tapping to morse with a fellow prisoner. I’m assuming this is how she found out all the intel about the prison commander’s background and family, making him believe that she still has outside connections able to get her these informations and thus could blackmail him into releasing her. That she ended up working for Kuragin - i.e. goes from KGB to Russian Oligarchs as employers - figures. The short, terse conversation with Aleida was fantastic, culminating in Irina asking about Margo. To mindmess with Aleida? Because she really cares? Both are possible and not mutually exclusive. Irina is a great villain, and I’m glad she’s back. (Doubly so, I hear, because yesterday I found outi belatedly we have a spin-off coming in May ittled “Star City”, which will go back to the Sixties and show us how the Russians managed to beat the Americans to the Moon and presumably ensueing events from the Sowyet, with both Sergeii and Irina among the characters. (I suspect p part of the creative team treasured the chance to go back to the 1960s and the early days of space/moon exploration, too.)
Oleg the Governor whose actual in show name I can never remember sent his wife off Mars just in time, and my current speculation is that the reason why we got all the scenes emphasising their closeness is that he won’t survive what comes next after the cliffhanger ending, and she will be instrumental in the Kuragin/Sowjet part of whatever the M6 will do to get control on Mars back.
My new fave Boyd is still on the case, with the reveal about the ijmpending plans for automatisation providing her with a key missing bit re: motivation, but she also has to discover that her pal Stanislaus is not only involved in the murder but the one who actually did the did, as the late Korean worker flipped out when discovering what was coming and tried blackmail. As if this is not crushing enough, Celia Boyd has also to fin dout (what the audience already knows) that her boss is involved as well. And she finds out in the middle of a riot pitching the Peacekeepers (never a reassuring name in any genre show) against the demonstrators in a riot that quickly turns bloody. (Btw, it is of course inevitable to associate current events when watching armed to the teeth security forces go violent against demonstrators, and For All Mankind isn’t the only show right now with these echoes (see also: Daredevil: Born Again, about which I’ll do a seasonal review once it’s done). Given her initial mission is now fulflled in the worst way yet very fitting for a noir detective - i.e. she discovered the killer who is a friend, and the motivation involvng the incredible corruption of the system she’s a part of -, I’m curious about her next steps. She clearly thinks the crashdown on the demonstrators was unjust, but the tide has just turned, the rebels are winning, and I think her changing sides at this point would be too easy. Maybe she’ll try to mediate between rebels and (surviving) adminstration?
The Testaments 1.05:
The show continues to flesh out supporting characters with more than was in the book; the interplay between Shulamite and Hulda as well as between Becca and Daisy (and earlier Shulamite, Daisy and Becca) is all unique to the show while fitting with what was in the book. Shulamite shows a bit more than her usual Mean Girl attitude here, genuinely concerned for Becca earlier, and upset beyond getting upstaged when her tea helped Hulda but not herself to menstruate near the end. Becca due to the alcohol blurts out her feelings for Agnes to Daisy, and her deep horror at the idea of marriage, something Daisy responds sympathetically to while not blowing her cover. But mainly we’re spending this episode in Agnes’ pov, as her narrative voice provides her perspective from thje fiuture, when she knows just how cynical on the part of Gilead society the whole “ball” situation was, while present! Agnes, despite her disgust at what the dentist did to her last episode, is still full of hope. The “ball” /Gileadian Prom, the one night where the girls are provided with something like a teenage experience only to be bartered off to decades older men thereafter, is a great (as in, world building wise) example of how the wrongness of Gilead pervades every single aspect of it, and yet the show doesn’t do easy caricatures that would allow the audience to dismiss all the men as something from outer space or unlike guys you’d encounter in rl. The young commander Agnes briefly dances with strikes up an actual conversation with her, not in the romantic sense but in two young people interacting and joking about a story. (BTW, go figure the Commanders are allowed to watch movies in the baracks and women are not.) Doesn’t mean he won’t go out next morning to spread oppression as he’s been taught to.
We finally get a bit more of Aunt Lydia in this episode, though still not her narration, which is becoming awkward because the scenes I mean are scenes where neither Agnes nor Daisy are present, i.e. they have to come from Lydia. In one case, she chews out Commander Judd because several of the older Commanders have been plying the girls with alcohol, and as Lydia points out, these girls were raised to obey men, they have no way to say no when ordered to drink, in another, she clashes with Vidala post show. There is also an earlier scene in which Judd heavily hints to Aunt Vidala he wants her to take over. Now in the book, Judd is Aunt Lydia’s age, and they have history from back when she was originally imprisoned directly after the Gilead takeover and went from Lydia the pre Gilead judge to Aunt Lydia - while here he’s a younger man - I’d say mid 30s ? And thus can’t have the same backstory. Still, he is her main antagonist in the book, and presumably they’re setting the scene in this ep for them to be antagonists as well. (Given that I osmosed Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale the TV Show has a very different origin story from the one in the book(s). I feel a bit reassured because (carefully hidden) antagonism is certain necessary for the Lydia-related plot to proceed in anything like the direction it takes in the book. Speaking of that, both the scene with Judd and Lydia’s later dressing down of her provide Vidala with additional reasons to act as she does in the book as well.
For All Mankind 5.06:
Aaaaand the Mars Revolution has started. The episode also answered my questions from last week with the Aleida and Dev scene, i.e. he knew, she did not (but can’t say so out loud to anyone else because that would make her look terribly incompetent as a CEO). As the subsequent Dev and Alex scene also brings up, Dev not seeing the problem in making 98 n% of the workforce superfluos because presumably, his Mars Utopia was never meant for them anyway is very him. Mind you, it’s also of course echoing real life current problems and is less clear cut than at first sight. Working in space is incredibly dangerous. In both timelihnes. And for all that Mars is now harboring lots of people, it still is such a hostile environment that no one survives it without a working space suit, all the time, if they’re outside a settlement. Does it make sense, under these conditions, to replace human work with machines that are not in danger of dying if anything goes wrong as easily? It sure does. But the people currently working on Mars were for the most part coming on a promise of not short but long term employment and the chance to live decades or even their entire lives there. It will be interesting to see how this plays out on a show that’s neither cynical nor rosy-eyed about its alternative timeline.
The episode also atches us up with Irina and what happened to her in the fallout of last season’s finale. Sibiria, prison, abuse and interrogaton, and then Irina successfully executing a masterful bluff. (The last one was my interpretation of what we saw in the opening sequence, i.e. her tapping to morse with a fellow prisoner. I’m assuming this is how she found out all the intel about the prison commander’s background and family, making him believe that she still has outside connections able to get her these informations and thus could blackmail him into releasing her. That she ended up working for Kuragin - i.e. goes from KGB to Russian Oligarchs as employers - figures. The short, terse conversation with Aleida was fantastic, culminating in Irina asking about Margo. To mindmess with Aleida? Because she really cares? Both are possible and not mutually exclusive. Irina is a great villain, and I’m glad she’s back. (Doubly so, I hear, because yesterday I found outi belatedly we have a spin-off coming in May ittled “Star City”, which will go back to the Sixties and show us how the Russians managed to beat the Americans to the Moon and presumably ensueing events from the Sowyet, with both Sergeii and Irina among the characters. (I suspect p part of the creative team treasured the chance to go back to the 1960s and the early days of space/moon exploration, too.)
Oleg the Governor whose actual in show name I can never remember sent his wife off Mars just in time, and my current speculation is that the reason why we got all the scenes emphasising their closeness is that he won’t survive what comes next after the cliffhanger ending, and she will be instrumental in the Kuragin/Sowjet part of whatever the M6 will do to get control on Mars back.
My new fave Boyd is still on the case, with the reveal about the ijmpending plans for automatisation providing her with a key missing bit re: motivation, but she also has to discover that her pal Stanislaus is not only involved in the murder but the one who actually did the did, as the late Korean worker flipped out when discovering what was coming and tried blackmail. As if this is not crushing enough, Celia Boyd has also to fin dout (what the audience already knows) that her boss is involved as well. And she finds out in the middle of a riot pitching the Peacekeepers (never a reassuring name in any genre show) against the demonstrators in a riot that quickly turns bloody. (Btw, it is of course inevitable to associate current events when watching armed to the teeth security forces go violent against demonstrators, and For All Mankind isn’t the only show right now with these echoes (see also: Daredevil: Born Again, about which I’ll do a seasonal review once it’s done). Given her initial mission is now fulflled in the worst way yet very fitting for a noir detective - i.e. she discovered the killer who is a friend, and the motivation involvng the incredible corruption of the system she’s a part of -, I’m curious about her next steps. She clearly thinks the crashdown on the demonstrators was unjust, but the tide has just turned, the rebels are winning, and I think her changing sides at this point would be too easy. Maybe she’ll try to mediate between rebels and (surviving) adminstration?
The Testaments 1.05:
The show continues to flesh out supporting characters with more than was in the book; the interplay between Shulamite and Hulda as well as between Becca and Daisy (and earlier Shulamite, Daisy and Becca) is all unique to the show while fitting with what was in the book. Shulamite shows a bit more than her usual Mean Girl attitude here, genuinely concerned for Becca earlier, and upset beyond getting upstaged when her tea helped Hulda but not herself to menstruate near the end. Becca due to the alcohol blurts out her feelings for Agnes to Daisy, and her deep horror at the idea of marriage, something Daisy responds sympathetically to while not blowing her cover. But mainly we’re spending this episode in Agnes’ pov, as her narrative voice provides her perspective from thje fiuture, when she knows just how cynical on the part of Gilead society the whole “ball” situation was, while present! Agnes, despite her disgust at what the dentist did to her last episode, is still full of hope. The “ball” /Gileadian Prom, the one night where the girls are provided with something like a teenage experience only to be bartered off to decades older men thereafter, is a great (as in, world building wise) example of how the wrongness of Gilead pervades every single aspect of it, and yet the show doesn’t do easy caricatures that would allow the audience to dismiss all the men as something from outer space or unlike guys you’d encounter in rl. The young commander Agnes briefly dances with strikes up an actual conversation with her, not in the romantic sense but in two young people interacting and joking about a story. (BTW, go figure the Commanders are allowed to watch movies in the baracks and women are not.) Doesn’t mean he won’t go out next morning to spread oppression as he’s been taught to.
We finally get a bit more of Aunt Lydia in this episode, though still not her narration, which is becoming awkward because the scenes I mean are scenes where neither Agnes nor Daisy are present, i.e. they have to come from Lydia. In one case, she chews out Commander Judd because several of the older Commanders have been plying the girls with alcohol, and as Lydia points out, these girls were raised to obey men, they have no way to say no when ordered to drink, in another, she clashes with Vidala post show. There is also an earlier scene in which Judd heavily hints to Aunt Vidala he wants her to take over. Now in the book, Judd is Aunt Lydia’s age, and they have history from back when she was originally imprisoned directly after the Gilead takeover and went from Lydia the pre Gilead judge to Aunt Lydia - while here he’s a younger man - I’d say mid 30s ? And thus can’t have the same backstory. Still, he is her main antagonist in the book, and presumably they’re setting the scene in this ep for them to be antagonists as well. (Given that I osmosed Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale the TV Show has a very different origin story from the one in the book(s). I feel a bit reassured because (carefully hidden) antagonism is certain necessary for the Lydia-related plot to proceed in anything like the direction it takes in the book. Speaking of that, both the scene with Judd and Lydia’s later dressing down of her provide Vidala with additional reasons to act as she does in the book as well.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 03:10 pm (UTC)