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selenakFor All Mankind: In which the scriptwriting duo Weddle & Thompson, who first made their name on the later seasons of DS9 and were subsequently recruited by Ron Moore for BSG now script For all Mankind: War Against Your Population Is Fucked Up, the episode.
Pllus I still think this is kind of, sort of inspired by the DS9 two parter Past Tense, now entering the "the bloody clusterfuck that happens to inspire the change of public mood later" stage. Note that while we hear Miles' voice now and then on public speaker, he never shows up on screen in this episode. Instead, we're completely in the pov of the youngsters for the Mars storyline(s); Lily and Alex on the Marsian side, and Avery (now with extra survivor trauma and need for vengeance for her dead seargeant) and Haskell (I was wrong about him dying last week, that was the seargeant who had been kind to Avery) on the M6 marines side. Which doesn't mean other characters don't also share the spotlight - notably Camilla Boyd, definitely The Sisko in this episode, continuing her quiet heroism - but we see her only when she shows up to rescue the group Alex and Lily were initially with and not before. The pov being limited to the youngsters mean we only know as much as they know and reminds me of another later DS9 episode, the one with young Jake Sisko supposed to write an article about Dr. Bashir only to find himself in a war zone . It works in both cases to convey the horror, confusion and desperation. As this show isn't nihilistic, it also means positive things amidst the clusterfuck: Alex, despite incredibly scared, manages to save two wounded people with his minimum medical training from last week (for now) and volunteers to retrieve the direly needed medical stuff from Helios (read: Dev). Lily might be shaken by Palmer telling her Miles ratted out his comrades back in the 2003 day, but she still keeps it together and does her best to document all that's going on. And Avery might feel guilty and enraged because of her dead Sergeant, but in the final scene, when she, Haskell and Alex all run into each other, she prioritizes saving a life over any shoot first, ask questions later or vengeance impulse.
(Introducing Avery and Haskell earlier in the season was a clever if obvious to the media experienced way to ensure we do have pov characters among the invading Marines and thus don't see them as evil opressors to the Marsians' heroic freedom fighters but acting on the information they have, believing themselves basically the heroes ending a hostage situation engineered by terrorists.)
Continuing with the "you can be your better self, not your worst self, even in a complete clusterfuck of a situation" theme: Stanislaus, he who in fact committed the season opening murder mystery for corruption reasons and who tried his best to keep it from Boyd, proves a) their friendship was real to him and b) he's not beyond redemptiion by using the moment all the other MVP's backs are turned to let Boyd & Co. go. Boyd's actress proves she's as great an addition to the ensemble as is her character by not saying anything out loud but let her face and a long exchange of looks with Stanislaus speak.
Mind you, those are the bright lights in a very dark episode (not surprising, given it's the penultimate one on this show, which is always when anything that can go wrong does go wrong). From the moment Alex and Lily spot the incoming ships with the Marines, the ominous tone is set. No more rubber bullets; the very outmatched (in terms of weaponry) Mars people are initially shot on sight, and everyone is so triggery that the inevitable friendly fire incident happens as well.
Because all of this is happening on Mars, Sojourner and the Away team on Titan don't hear anything from them, including new flight data to return from the Titan surface. Which is bad, but it does provide Kelly with another time window when the first samples they take still are inconclusive, so she and the other two Away team astronouts continue to explore and take new samples, which leads ton accident and inevitably another discovery of something which glows (Titan sulphur or phosphor?). Kelly and Walt have never worked together this well, which makes me believe he'll find out what she did next week. (At a guess, because Mars still won't be back into contact to deliver a flight path, they'll have to calculate one themselves, Walt will be full of doubt because he thinks he fucked up the last time, and Kelly will have to confess.) The fact all three Away mission members are so joyful to be on Titan (until Elena has her accident at least) makes for a stark contrast to what's going on on Mars, but on Titan, too, the clock is ticking.
Next week: Season finale, right?
The Testaments 1.09: Marat/Sade .
This was really the title of the episode, I kid you not. Being a theatre and a French Revolution nerd sometimes really pays off.
About the only thing I had kind of guessed or considered a possibility was that Daisy would get the "frames Dr. Grove with a rape accusation he can't refute the way he could have if his actual victims had accused him" plot instead of Lydia making one of the younger Aunts do it as in the book; in the show, it's also exclusively Daisy's idea, though Lydia signals she knows what Daisy did. It says something about the effect living in Gilead had on Daisy, who threw up the first time she witnessed a "savaging" early in the show. If Daisy, who has been raised in Canada, can decide she needs to do something (which as far as she knows will have bloody results, though not the ones she expects) to deal with serial sexual molester and rapist Dr. Grove - what, asks the episode, will Becka do, who unlike the book version really had no idea regarding her father and now finds out in a situation where she is already miserable about the impending unwanted marriage (any marriage to a man being unwanted), and feels like she's losing her beloved Agnes even as a friend, and to Daisy of all the people? What will Becka do, who like all the women in Gilead has been given just one outlet for all that pent up rage, the organized maulings of "evildoers"? What will she do if she finds out the truth - that her father assaulted her best friend, the woman she loves?
Cosplay Charlotte Corday, is what she does. Seriously, the production went to some effort to reconstruct David's famous painting of the dead Marat in his bathtup. And until the still alive Dr. Grove in his bathtub came into sight, I had no idea (not least because I didn't know the title of the episode); I was very much afraid Becka would kill herself, and thought, but have the production team considered that by making her explicitly gay and in love with Agnes, they would make her a tragic lesbian (tm) if they let her end by suicide NOW? Instead, though: Charlotte Corday. The young actress was amazing, too, in the earlier scene where the Grove family has their dinner and Dr. Grove denies there is any truth to Daisy's accusation by specifically saying he never touched DAYSY. And you can see it all on Becka's face.
(Speaking of Daisy: her actress also did great stuff in this episode, especially in her scenes with Grove, the Aunts and Garth. )
I had assumed there would be a plea for help to Commander MacKenzie who would then reveal he's not about to help anyone but himself, and that kind of did happen, but not in the way I had assumed. Instead, Agnes when a literally bloody Becka shows up in the middle of the night and tells her she's just killed her father for Agnes makes the mistake of asking her parents - welll, "parents" - for help. Who promptly have Garth call the Eyes. (Or does he? Notably the book "The Handmaid's Tale" ended with June entering a van where she doesn't know whether it's the Eyes or the Resistance Nick called, and they might go for a parallel here, though if they don't want to completley depart from the book plot, it pretty much have to be the Aunts instead of the Eyes Garth called.) Agnes has been going through stages of disillusion with elements of the system she was taught to believe in through the season, and both Grove's actions towards her and Hulda and the Aunts not doing something about them (that she could see) were parts of it, but as opposed to the book, show!Agnes might justly resent Paula but does love her adopted father. This might be the point where this tie, too, snaps or at least loses some of its power.
Otoh: Even without knowing Daisy faked the assault, Agnes also suspects something is wrong with Daisy now, and not what Becka assumed - that Daisy was spying for Aunt Lydia. Because for a true convert to Gilead, Daisy's actions - not caring that she's ruining her marriage prospects by openly accusing Dr. Grove, initially keeping the fact she got her period secret - do not fit. I suspect Agnes will figure it out in the finale, and will have to make a decision about it...
Pllus I still think this is kind of, sort of inspired by the DS9 two parter Past Tense, now entering the "the bloody clusterfuck that happens to inspire the change of public mood later" stage. Note that while we hear Miles' voice now and then on public speaker, he never shows up on screen in this episode. Instead, we're completely in the pov of the youngsters for the Mars storyline(s); Lily and Alex on the Marsian side, and Avery (now with extra survivor trauma and need for vengeance for her dead seargeant) and Haskell (I was wrong about him dying last week, that was the seargeant who had been kind to Avery) on the M6 marines side. Which doesn't mean other characters don't also share the spotlight - notably Camilla Boyd, definitely The Sisko in this episode, continuing her quiet heroism - but we see her only when she shows up to rescue the group Alex and Lily were initially with and not before. The pov being limited to the youngsters mean we only know as much as they know and reminds me of another later DS9 episode, the one with young Jake Sisko supposed to write an article about Dr. Bashir only to find himself in a war zone . It works in both cases to convey the horror, confusion and desperation. As this show isn't nihilistic, it also means positive things amidst the clusterfuck: Alex, despite incredibly scared, manages to save two wounded people with his minimum medical training from last week (for now) and volunteers to retrieve the direly needed medical stuff from Helios (read: Dev). Lily might be shaken by Palmer telling her Miles ratted out his comrades back in the 2003 day, but she still keeps it together and does her best to document all that's going on. And Avery might feel guilty and enraged because of her dead Sergeant, but in the final scene, when she, Haskell and Alex all run into each other, she prioritizes saving a life over any shoot first, ask questions later or vengeance impulse.
(Introducing Avery and Haskell earlier in the season was a clever if obvious to the media experienced way to ensure we do have pov characters among the invading Marines and thus don't see them as evil opressors to the Marsians' heroic freedom fighters but acting on the information they have, believing themselves basically the heroes ending a hostage situation engineered by terrorists.)
Continuing with the "you can be your better self, not your worst self, even in a complete clusterfuck of a situation" theme: Stanislaus, he who in fact committed the season opening murder mystery for corruption reasons and who tried his best to keep it from Boyd, proves a) their friendship was real to him and b) he's not beyond redemptiion by using the moment all the other MVP's backs are turned to let Boyd & Co. go. Boyd's actress proves she's as great an addition to the ensemble as is her character by not saying anything out loud but let her face and a long exchange of looks with Stanislaus speak.
Mind you, those are the bright lights in a very dark episode (not surprising, given it's the penultimate one on this show, which is always when anything that can go wrong does go wrong). From the moment Alex and Lily spot the incoming ships with the Marines, the ominous tone is set. No more rubber bullets; the very outmatched (in terms of weaponry) Mars people are initially shot on sight, and everyone is so triggery that the inevitable friendly fire incident happens as well.
Because all of this is happening on Mars, Sojourner and the Away team on Titan don't hear anything from them, including new flight data to return from the Titan surface. Which is bad, but it does provide Kelly with another time window when the first samples they take still are inconclusive, so she and the other two Away team astronouts continue to explore and take new samples, which leads ton accident and inevitably another discovery of something which glows (Titan sulphur or phosphor?). Kelly and Walt have never worked together this well, which makes me believe he'll find out what she did next week. (At a guess, because Mars still won't be back into contact to deliver a flight path, they'll have to calculate one themselves, Walt will be full of doubt because he thinks he fucked up the last time, and Kelly will have to confess.) The fact all three Away mission members are so joyful to be on Titan (until Elena has her accident at least) makes for a stark contrast to what's going on on Mars, but on Titan, too, the clock is ticking.
Next week: Season finale, right?
The Testaments 1.09: Marat/Sade .
This was really the title of the episode, I kid you not. Being a theatre and a French Revolution nerd sometimes really pays off.
About the only thing I had kind of guessed or considered a possibility was that Daisy would get the "frames Dr. Grove with a rape accusation he can't refute the way he could have if his actual victims had accused him" plot instead of Lydia making one of the younger Aunts do it as in the book; in the show, it's also exclusively Daisy's idea, though Lydia signals she knows what Daisy did. It says something about the effect living in Gilead had on Daisy, who threw up the first time she witnessed a "savaging" early in the show. If Daisy, who has been raised in Canada, can decide she needs to do something (which as far as she knows will have bloody results, though not the ones she expects) to deal with serial sexual molester and rapist Dr. Grove - what, asks the episode, will Becka do, who unlike the book version really had no idea regarding her father and now finds out in a situation where she is already miserable about the impending unwanted marriage (any marriage to a man being unwanted), and feels like she's losing her beloved Agnes even as a friend, and to Daisy of all the people? What will Becka do, who like all the women in Gilead has been given just one outlet for all that pent up rage, the organized maulings of "evildoers"? What will she do if she finds out the truth - that her father assaulted her best friend, the woman she loves?
Cosplay Charlotte Corday, is what she does. Seriously, the production went to some effort to reconstruct David's famous painting of the dead Marat in his bathtup. And until the still alive Dr. Grove in his bathtub came into sight, I had no idea (not least because I didn't know the title of the episode); I was very much afraid Becka would kill herself, and thought, but have the production team considered that by making her explicitly gay and in love with Agnes, they would make her a tragic lesbian (tm) if they let her end by suicide NOW? Instead, though: Charlotte Corday. The young actress was amazing, too, in the earlier scene where the Grove family has their dinner and Dr. Grove denies there is any truth to Daisy's accusation by specifically saying he never touched DAYSY. And you can see it all on Becka's face.
(Speaking of Daisy: her actress also did great stuff in this episode, especially in her scenes with Grove, the Aunts and Garth. )
I had assumed there would be a plea for help to Commander MacKenzie who would then reveal he's not about to help anyone but himself, and that kind of did happen, but not in the way I had assumed. Instead, Agnes when a literally bloody Becka shows up in the middle of the night and tells her she's just killed her father for Agnes makes the mistake of asking her parents - welll, "parents" - for help. Who promptly have Garth call the Eyes. (Or does he? Notably the book "The Handmaid's Tale" ended with June entering a van where she doesn't know whether it's the Eyes or the Resistance Nick called, and they might go for a parallel here, though if they don't want to completley depart from the book plot, it pretty much have to be the Aunts instead of the Eyes Garth called.) Agnes has been going through stages of disillusion with elements of the system she was taught to believe in through the season, and both Grove's actions towards her and Hulda and the Aunts not doing something about them (that she could see) were parts of it, but as opposed to the book, show!Agnes might justly resent Paula but does love her adopted father. This might be the point where this tie, too, snaps or at least loses some of its power.
Otoh: Even without knowing Daisy faked the assault, Agnes also suspects something is wrong with Daisy now, and not what Becka assumed - that Daisy was spying for Aunt Lydia. Because for a true convert to Gilead, Daisy's actions - not caring that she's ruining her marriage prospects by openly accusing Dr. Grove, initially keeping the fact she got her period secret - do not fit. I suspect Agnes will figure it out in the finale, and will have to make a decision about it...
