Captain's Log
TV? All us boorish Americans are grilling and getting drunk and setting off fireworks this week
There’s very little new this week as our own TV schedule flies, but soon, that will change! And so will the scheduling on this article. We’re moving to Thursday after today’s post.
Well, it’s long past “currently airing,” but my wife talked me into starting Rome, and the first episode was pretty good. I might need to watch it more sober to have a firmer idea of what I think about it, but it was entertaining enough to at least give it a chance when I’ve got the time to.
And I used the slow week in TV to catch up on Rick and Morty. “The Last Temptation of Jerry” turns the story of Easter into something involving a superpowered alien rabbit… that Jerry hits with his car. It gets weirder from there, though I mostly had fun, and got a good laugh out of Rick’s fascination with the front-butt aliens.
“Cryo Mort a Rickver” might be the biggest stretch of a title we’ve heard so far, but it starts with Rick and Morty detecting a ship whose passengers are in cryogenic statis, attempting to rob it, and then fucking that up and waking everybody up. This leads to some bizarre and funny role reversals between the two, as well as a plot that reminded me a lot of Digman!‘s “The Mile High Club.” Until it went straight into It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
This also doesn’t really count as catching up, since it’s been around a while and I wasn’t intending to watch the whole show, but I don’t know where else to put it. With my Andor fixation of late, I decided to watch the Star Wars Rebels episode “Secret Cargo,” which occurs kind of concurrently with Andor‘s “Welcome to the Rebellion”– as it’s the story of the Ghost picking up Mon Mothma after her extraction and delivering her to Gold Squadron to make the rebel-rallying speech. What I learned is, I’m a fan of Andor.
That’s probably unfair, as Rebels is explicitly a children’s show, and I did find the climax of Mothma delivering her speech and the ships appearing one by one jumping from hyperspace in order to join the rebellion pretty effective. But, man, after Andor, it really stands out how much a show like this relies on surface-level and expository dialogue. (Again, though, it’s a children’s show, so maybe that’s to be expected.)
Murderbot gives us “All Systems Red,” where the PresAux team makes contact with the GrayCris team and Murderbot hatches a plan to get them all away safely… while keeping certain elements of the plan (such as “killing the entire GrayCris team”) secret from the humans. As the plan starts going askew, Gurathin and Pin-Lee have to hack a control module or something manually, which adds to the tension. There’s also a fair bit of humor in the episode, as Murderbot is not exactly skilled at bullshitting humans (and usually relies on dialogue from Sanctuary Moon when it tries to). All in all, pretty enjoyable, and felt like a real fireworks-factory episode after much of the season seemed more deliberately paced. One more episode, I believe.
In this week’s Rick and Morty, “The Curious Case of Bethjamin Button” has a titular plot where Beth and Space Beth use an age-regression machine to become kids again, and it turns out ten-year-old Beth was kind of a terror. Meanwhile, Rick takes the rest of the family to “Earth World,” a theme park he always liked ironically for its terrible attempts to replicate Earth culture and its Action Park levels of disregard for safety. But they get there and it’s been corporatized and sanitized; Rick eventually finds the original founder and sets him free to enact his Westworld / “Itchy & Scratchy Land” vision. Danny DeVito plays the founder, probably the highlight of this episode.
Now that I’m caught up on Rick and Morty, I don’t really have anything to fall behind on, unless I decide to pick up one of these new shows. (Anyone see Dept. Q yet? Or Smoke?)
Same old on our Mr. Show kick of late, and also, there’s been a lot of rewatching of Andor around here. It really is that good. (And since I used Murderbot three weeks ago, I decided to use Andor again for the header image.)
Still nothing of late. Summer is the slow season. And apparently the Fox animated shows are all holding over one or two episodes for July, so none of them have “ended” yet, either. (And they might come back in the fall anyway, although if the rumors are true, The Great North might not be coming back at all.)
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Digman! return on Wednesday. And this article series is moving to Thursday, so I’ll try to cover those to the best of my ability.
What did you watch?
About the writer
Captain Nath
Born on the bayou, thriving in the mountains. Writer, gambler, comedian, singer-songwriter, bon vivant, globetrotter, and all-around Renaissance Man with perfect opinions about TV and music. Pronounced with a long A and with the H.
It's a gaming ship.
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Department of
Conversation
Well, Digman!‘s premiere was pushed back two weeks, so just ignore anything up there about its impending premiere.
Let’s talk The Practice, with the caveat that I am one episode from ending the abbreviated first season (remember when spring replacements got six episodes to prove themselves?). I’m the middle of one of those fascinating things David E. Kelley does more than anyone else I have encountered: examining the intersection between the legal system and religion. Here, a man has gotten revenge on the man who killed his daughter but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The man is Jewish and his rabbi actually gave him permission to seek revenge. Now the man is on trial, the rabbi (who didn’t really think the man would kill someone) is an accessory, and the Boston DA is bringing a lawyer who also has rabbinic ordination (which isn’t that uncommon – I know three such people just off the top of my head). Bobby Donnell, and the audience, is forced to grapple with the notion that the legal system isn’t necessarily compatible with religious notions of law and justice, albeit using a religion that most of the audience (and Kelley himself) are not part of. We also have a great moment where Ellenor refuses to be part of this case because she too is Jewish and pissed at a rabbi who makes it seem like Jews believe in revenge. Strictly in terms of writing Jews, Kelley seems to understand that Jews are not a monolith on any subject and also generally writes Jewish characters as people as much as he writes anyone else as a person. It all resonates well for me. Later, Kelley will move to his own faith and Bobby will be his angry mouthpiece about all the monstrous things in the Catholic Church. Maybe this is Kelley rehearsing with a different religion before really getting into it.
Meanwhile, it is just a pleasure watching such a well acted show, both main cast and myriad top tier guests. Going from this to Sherlock and Daughter, where Blu Hunt as the daughter is so so bland, is jarring. How can anyone making a TV settle for such tepid acting, especially if you hired David Thewlis to be Sherlock? There might be what to say for the old days of network TV, when there was a budget for hiring top notch actors for everyone role.
Fuck yeah, Rome! I assume I would also love this if I came across it for the first time now, but I watched it at a fundamental enough place in my artistic/critical development that it feels like part of me at this point. It can be messy, but there’s a ton about it that I love and that really speaks to me, and it helped me define some things I look for in both drama and historical fiction. Also, great cast.
Murderbot, “All Systems Red”
Agreed that this was a tense, funny fireworks factory episode. Probably my favorite of the season so far, especially with the intersecting, changing plans that not all the characters realize are intersecting and changing. And I could see the ending making a huge difference in any future Murderbot-Gurathin interactions: saving Mensah’s live is probably all you need to have Gurathin on your side, even if he’ll be a little jealous that he couldn’t have dramatically sacrificed himself for her too.
Murderbot frantically trying to come up with even the most banal of small talk, delivered in a dramatic fashion–“Where … are you from?”–was great and a little too relatable to me. Great severed head use as well.
Andor, “Make It Stop,” “Who Else Knows?”, and “Jedha, Kyber, Erso”
Stunning conclusion to an incredible show. As usual, I know I already talked about a lot of this on Discord, so I’ll rephrase some of the biggest points here but won’t try to be comprehensive. (If anyone ever wants to do episode-by-episode roundtable pieces on this, though, I’m totally on board.)
* The highlight of these last three episodes is absolutely Kleya, who had some great scenes in the past but really comes into her own here, demonstrating both her absolute competence and toughness and giving way to more vulnerability than we’ve seen before as she deals with having to not only lose Luthen but also be the one to literally pull the plug, completing his suicide. (One of the best scenes in the series, and its existence is one of the reasons I’m so glad Andor is Andor. Another, more kid- or family-oriented show, or even one that’s emptily optimistic rather than committed to the practical work of keeping hope alive, would have let Kleya somehow get Luthen out of the Imperial hospital so he could recover with the Rebellion. Not so here.) A lot of unbelievably great work from Elizabeth Dulau here.
* And speaking of the above, that Luthen-Dedra scene was likewise great. I love the moment when she puts the Starpath unit down and all the awkward, does-she-know small talk stops, and Luthen gets to own twice, right when he’s supposedly getting owned himself, both with killing himself before he can talk and with “And I’ve known you all along. Hardly seems fair.”
* And of course Dedra confronting him one-on-one, wanting the drama of finally capturing her white whale, wanting to be an individual “hero” rather than the force of the Empire, bites her hard: she becomes the face of a failed mission, one that’s gone so badly that it ends with her in an Imperial prison cell (and Partagaz dead, although that’s also for missing Lonni working for the Rebellion). Denise Gough is so incredible in Dedra’s prison scenes, with all her resourcefulness and strength gone and her desperation and despair amping up by the second until she simply breaks down. That scene between her and Krennic deserves to become iconic, too.
* I love how Luthen haunts “Jedha, Kyber, Erso” (with distant shades of The Bad and the Beautiful): his ruthless pragmatism and willingness to give his all (and everyone else’s, when necessary) to the Rebellion hurt and alienated a lot of the people in his life, even the people he obviously cared about, but they also still cared about and respected him in turn: as Cassian more or less points out, everyone in the Rebellion who actually knew Luthen is prepared to believe any secrets Luthen wanted to pass on, and they all know how much they owed to him (and to Kleya).
* Cassian watering his plants is going to stay with me for a long time, and so is Kleya’s face when she sees that he’s the one who came to retrieve her. Beautiful stuff.
Dedra sort of exemplifies something I saw somewhere on the internet: the Empire, for all its power, rarely manages to be as competent as it is fascist. She really blew it with capturing Luthen so she could lord it over him. But that sort of follows a pattern of the Empire and of many (though hardly all) authoritarian regimes. But it’s also entirely in character for Dedra, and wow that scene just rocked even if she should have just lobbed a dozen sleeping gas grenades in the door.
Fascism tends to be incompetent and eat itself, in part because historically it’s been built on infighting and that punishments for failure are severe. (Both of these are true in the Empire.) Dedra’s hubris brings her down, but she’s also not wrong about how much failure there is among the ISB to simply share information with one another, because everyone is more interested in jockeying for their own position than in working together– which is historically speaking pretty accurate as well.
God, don’t tempt me, as if I don’t talk about this show enough already.
It certainly wasn’t a sentence specifically crafted to tempt you. No, sir. /whistles innocently.
Dulau is fuckin’ unbelievable and these last three episodes elevated her to maybe my favorite performance on the show.
(Considering how few credits she had before Andor— I think she graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2020— makes it all the more remarkable. She’s got such presence and intensity, we’ve got to get her some star-making roles. Gilroy said they wrote more for Kleya in season 2 because she was just so consistently good in the dailies in season 1– the editors said “there’s no bad footage of her.”)
The Kleya – Vel scene in the finale is one of my secret favorites, especially for a show that runs so often on the tension and thrill inherent in spycraft. “‘I have friends everywhere.’ You’re here with friends.” We saw Kleya and Vel butt heads quite a bit and never really get along, but Vel is probably the longest-serving member of Luthen’s network and one of the people who most appreciates what Kleya and Luthen did and gave for the rebellion, and it’s just lovely and even a little misty that she takes her in and reassures her after all this. And then, the next morning, Kleya can look outside and smile a little as the rebellion goes to work, seeing the fruits of the work she and Luthen did finally coming together. (Or, uh, “fruiting” would be less of a mixed metaphor, I guess.)