154. Tonight’s rent
Road House is all over the map when it comes to crusty weird old guy solidarity. It is undoubtedly true that a Frank Tilghman/Pete Strodenmire/Red Webster/Emmett alliance tandem-murders Brad Wesley to end his reign of terror and free Jasper forever. But this requires the sacrifice of their comrade in grizzledness Wade Garrett, as well as a great deal of groundwork laid by young Dalton, who murdered five people and incapacitated a sixth with a stuffed polar bear so that the old timers could infiltrate the Wesley compound. Moreover, it is precisely the lack of solidarity shown by Brad Wesley, himself a weird old man, that necessitated this revolution of the geriatrics in the first place. And where does this leave Big T and the red-hatted gentlemen who are among the Four Car Salesmen of Jasper, Missouri? Excluded, alienated, and atomized, that’s where.
Dalton, perforce, addresses a similar breach as his deeply weird bad date with Dr. Elizabeth Clay winds to a close. “Pretty soon I’m gonna have to start charging that bum rent!” growls the counterman at the diner, presumably the owner judging from his literal rent-seeking behavior, regarding the exhausted and/or drunk gentleman Dalton kept from collapsing onto the floor a few seconds earlier. Stepping in to do so once again, Dalton reaches into the pocket of his ostentatiously loose-fitting white trousers and throws some money onto the counter in the owner’s direction. “Tonight’s rent,” he deadpans, leaving the old bastard to scowl and the other old bastard to sleep in peace.
Here we see the fraying seam between Dalton’s priggish elitism and his salt-of-the-earth affectations more clearly than ever before. He rights for the rights of everydrunk, provided he’s not being paid to keep such men out of his place of work. (Recall if you will the power drinkers and the trustees of modern chemistry.) He’s a liberator armed with the money he earns in the course of oppression. He’ll take care of tonight but tomorrow you’re on your own. Maybe Doc is right. Maybe he isn’t a nice guy after all.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Eleven: “Lamster”
Chuck Rhoades has issued his own mission statement. “I myself will be doing my usual boogie,” he tells the gaggle of favor-trading power brokers he’s assembled to help him take down Jock Jeffcoat. “Inducing mistakes through temptation, misdirection, obfuscation and conflation-slash-corruption of the ideals that built this great nation.” A brief pause for breath follows, before he adds, “For a good and noble purpose, of course.”
The assembled bigwigs all nod in the affirmative and concur. Why wouldn’t they? For one thing, they’re all in on Chuck’s shady attempt to expose Jeffcoat’s even shadier collusion with a voting machine manufacturer to rig elections. That “good and noble purpose” is ostensibly one they share.
But you don’t need to be part of criminal conspiracy to recognize the underlying sentiment. Chuck’s merry men all agree that this self-admitted liar is telling them the truth, in the familiar manner of people who’ve decided to humor someone who’s full of it because disagreeing would be more trouble than it’s worth.
Fortunately, we here are under no such obligation.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
153. “You ain’t no nice guy!”
Caught completely off guard by an opponent he didn’t see coming (not yet anyway, rimshot), Dalton straight-up gives up on his date with the Doc. I’m serious, man, he just takes his balls and goes home. He drops his smile, fidgets, looks out the window, takes a final drag of his cigarette, and acts like he’s just had the completely unrelated idea that it’s time to take her home. “I keep talking, you’re gonna go off thinking I’m a nice guy.” He’s putting his pack of Marlboros into his jacket pocket, he’s smiling and raising his eyebrows and doing little head nods, haha, he’s back in business baby!
Done with looking away from this man, Elizabeth reclaims his gaze, seizes control of it. Her voice a bedroom-fireplace crackle, her smile spreading like an inkblot, she looks him dead in the eyes and says “I know you’re not a nice guy.”
Pain don’t hurt, or so we’ve been told. From this we can conclude, can we not, that Dalton is a sub, or at the very least (and given what we see of his later behavior this proves out) a switch. It follows that the moment Dr. Elizabeth Clay smiles at him while calling him a piece of shit is the moment Dalton falls in love with Dr. Elizabeth Clay.
It will all go very smoothly from there, I’m quite sure.
Take it away, Larry Underwood and friend.
“Sure,” she said, cringing back and starting to cry. “Why not? Big star. Fuck
and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You ain’t no nice guy.” Several tears
ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest.
Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down the slope of her right breast and
perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one
black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ, I’m going
crazy, he thought wonderingly.“I have to go,” he said. His white cloth jacket was on the foot of the bed. He
picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.“You ain’t no nice guy!” she cried at him as he went into the living room. “I
only went with you because I thought you were a nice guy!”The sight of the living room made him feel like groaning. On the couch where
he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen copies of “Baby, Can
You Dig Your Man?” Three more were on the turntable of the dusty portable
stereo. On the far wall was a huge poster of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. Being
gobbled means never having to say you’re sorry, ha-ha. Jesus, I am going crazy.She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her half-slip. He
could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.“Listen, give me a call,” she said. “I ain’t mad.”
He should have said, “Sure,” and that would have been the end of it. Instead
he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, “Your kippers are burning.”She screamed at him and started across the room, only to trip over a throw-
pillow on the floor and go sprawling. One of her arms knocked over a half-empty
bottle of milk and rocked the empty bottle of Scotch standing next to it. Holy
God, Larry thought, were we mixing those?He got out quickly and pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six
steps to the front door, he heard her in the upstairs hall, yelling down: “You
ain’t no nice guy! You ain’t no—”He slammed the door behind him and misty, humid warmth washed over him,
carrying the aroma of spring trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after
the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy
cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and
took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness.
Return with us now to those wonderful days of normalcy as weAbove and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what
was coming next.“I hope you rot!” she screamed down at him. The Compleat Bronx Fishwife. “I
hope you fall in front of some fuckin subway train! You ain’t no singer! You’re
shitty in bed! You louse! Pound this up your ass! Take this to ya mother, you
louse! “The milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Larry
ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass
fragments. The Scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly
at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run,
holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy Bronx
intonation: “KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BAAASTARD!” Then he was around the corner
and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity
that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.“Couldn’t you have handled that better?” he said, totally unaware he was
speaking out loud. “Oh man, you coulda done better than that. That was a bad
scene. Crap on that, man.” He realized he was speaking aloud, and another burst
of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his
stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit in the Department
of Masochism clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying, There’s something in
you that’s like biting on tinfoil.He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frathouse
gangbang.You ain’t no nice guy.
I am. I am.
But when the people at the big party had protested his decision to cut them
off, he had threatened to call the police, and he had meant it. Hadn’t he? Yes.
Yes, he had. Most of them were strangers, true, he could care if they crapped on
a landmine, but four or five of the protestors had gone back to the old days.And Wayne Stukey, that bastard, standing in the doorway with his arms folded
like a hanging judge on the big day.Sal Doria going out, saying: If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions.
He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab. Oh
sure. The outraged friend bit. If Sal was such a big friend, what was he doing
there sucking off him in the first place? I was stupid and nobody likes to see a
stupid guy wise up. That’s the real story.You ain’t no nice guy.
“I am a nice guy,” he said sulkily. “And whose business is it, anyway?”
A cab was coming and Larry flagged it. It seemed to hesitate a moment before
pulling up to the curb, and Larry remembered the blood on his forehead. He
opened the back door and climbed in before the guy could change his mind.“Manhattan. The Chemical Bank Building on Park,” he said.
The cab pulled out into traffic. “You got a cut on your forehead, guy,” the
cabbie said.“A girl threw a spatula at me,” Larry said absently.
The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on,
leaving Larry to settle back and try to imagine how he was going to explain his
night out to his mother.
152. It’s a dirty job
Let the negging commence. With his typical poetic elision and equally typical lack of awareness as to how he might come across to a normal person, Dalton has given the Doc his best guess as to why he’s been so successful as a bouncer and cooler: “The ones who go looking for trouble are not much of a problem as someone who’s ready for them. I suspect it’s always been that way.” But here comes trouble he’s not ready for at all: the kind of withering, barely-worth-the-effort condescension and contempt he’s shown to lesser men throughout the film, aimed right back at him.
As soon as he’s done epigrammatically gassing himself up and righting a listing derelict sitting nearby—acting on a signal from Elizabeth, who nods in the man’s direction to tip him off—he turns back and exchanges a smile with his date. How can she resist the charms of a knight errant?
“Somebody has to do it,” she says, smiling broadly, broadly enough that he doesn’t notice that she’s saying his job is quite stupid.
“Somebody’s gotta pay somebody to do it,” he replies in another typical rhetorical ploy, the poet/workin’ man two-step. Here’s my eloquent summary of my raison d’être, here’s me rollin’ up my sleeves, scratchin’ my balls, and takin’ out the trash.
Taking her eyes off of him, looking down at the table or into her own lap, smiling almost ruefully, she says “Might as well be you.” She says it like Larry Underwood’s mother sighing about the trouble her son the famous musician has gotten himself into out there in The Stand. All the things you could have done with your life, James Dalton, and this is what you choose. Not a question, a statement. This is what you are. Okay. If that’s the way it has to be.
Her smile becomes a ghost and then vanishes altogether. Dalton’s follows as if it has no choice in the matter at all. Not in this matter.
Dalton has no comeback here. Larry would hem and haw and mewl a bit before finally giving in; Dalton, a trained fighter, knows when he’s been beaten. The disapproval, the disappointment, is worse than the trouble itself. It is the trouble. Trouble he was not ready for at all.
151. You simply hate to see it
The Doc is no fan of barfights. Good heavens no! Not even the ones that take place in parking lots outside the bar and thus run less risk of concussions on tables and whatnot. I mean, look at her! Here she is, sauntering up to the Double Deuce in her finest gingham clubwear, absolutely shocked and appalled and a little bit disgusted and a tiny tad outraged to see that a bar so well known for its barfights that she cracks jokes about it to patients who’ve incurred injuries there is hosting a barfight. Treating the wounded is one thing, but watching the wounding is quite another, apparently! Anyway in about a minute she’ll make googly eyes at the winning combatant and tell him he’s what she’s looking for, so she gets over it. You could probably chalk up the disconnect to Rowdy Herrington directing Kelly Lynch like a showdog rather than a human actor, you can probably hear him say “You’re disgusted, you see it and you can’t believe it, you’re wincing it’s so painful even to look at” and her thinking well it’s a living and giving him that ooooh face with all she’s got. But that is the coward’s way. Here at Pain Don’t Hurt we attribute agency to accident and thus we can interpret this as Dr. Elizabeth Clay blanching at the sight of the source of her income stream. Given that she was once married to Brad Wesley it’s not a half-bad interpretation, when you get right down to it. Dr. Elizabeth Clay is a student in the art of ignoring the obvious until it’s too late to look away.
150. Ready for trouble
“The ones who go looking for trouble are not much of a problem as someone who’s ready for them,” Dalton tells Dr. Elizabeth Clay, immediately before reaching over to effortlessly keep an exhausted old drunk from passing out and falling right off his chair at the counter. Here we see the flipside to Dalton’s obliviousness to his true nature as discussed in the previous entry. The reason Dalton fails to consider the ways in which he has gone looking for trouble throughout his life is because, as a matter of day-to-day life, he is more actively aware of and invested in preventing trouble from finding others. Making ready for trouble rather than looking for it is what occupies his mind. I’d call this self-flattery or even narcissism if it weren’t for the fact that, well, he kept that old man from falling off his chair, didn’t he?
149. Which Side Are You On
I could write an essay a day about Road House for a full calendar year and never come close to summarizing Dalton as neatly as this: He tells the woman he will come to love “The ones who go looking for trouble are not much of a problem as someone who’s ready for them” as if it’s never occurred to him that a man who beats up other men for a living might be the former instead of the latter.
148. The ones who go looking for trouble
Dalton is always better than his opponents, pretty much. He’s never been put down, not really. This much we learn from leading questions by Dr. Elizabeth Clay during her date with Dalton at Bonnie’s Grill. One can assume we’re joining the questioning already in progress given the uncomfortably long period of silence prior to the first one, during which she takes a sip of her coffee and he takes a drag of his cigarette. That’s not the awkward pause of two people just beginning a conversation and waiting for someone to voluntarily select the starting line. That’s the awkward pause that has onlookers going “yikes.”
But these are the facts as Dalton and the Doc have established them. Dalton is superior. Dalton is undefeated. Only one question remains, and the Doc, and displaying the diagnostic acumen that’s made her the finest student of Hippocrates in the Jasper, Missouri metropolitan area, asks it: “How do you explain that?”
“The ones who go looking for trouble are not much of a problem as someone who’s ready for them,” he replies. [Sic.] “I suspect it’s always been that way.”
While Dalton garbles his response the intent is clear enough. Troublemakers are no match for people who’ve spent some time, or in his case their entire professional lives, preparing for them. Never underestimating your opponent, expecting the unexpected, you know the drill.
But this isn’t just an explanation, it’s a demonstration.
Consider Elizabeth’s questions pertaining to Dalton’s win-loss record. She’s already been disabused of the notion that his vast array of injuries indicates he loses his fights during his visit to the ER, but how, exactly? With his zen-clear response that nobody ever wins a fight. He doesn’t just “nuh-uh!!” her, he recalibrates her view of combat.
Now look at what he does here. “Are you always better than they are?” “Pretty much.” “Never been put down?” “No, not really.” Look how expertly he dodges, rather than parries, her thrusts. He’s not going to assert outright that he’s always the better man; yeah, pretty much, sure, I guess. He’s not going to state unequivocally that he’s never been put down; no, not really, I mean at the very least he gets up at the the end while the other guys don’t, pretty much, it’s complicated but yeah, no.
Despite the third degree delivered in a raspy and intimate bedroom voice, and despite the tense and awkward atmosphere (watch this space), Dalton does not wilt before her merciless gaze. He’s going to yield just enough ground each time to deny her the me vs. you framework she’s reaching for. He’s going to involve her in making her own determinations on each question in such a way that does not require her to ever explicitly contradict him. She can cling to the “pretty much” and the “not really” if she’s determined to do so…which, due to the presence of the “pretty much” and the “not really” in the first place, she’s less likely to do.
The ones who go looking for trouble are not much of a problem as someone who’s ready for them.
If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.
147. Look Back in Anger
In addition to “embedding a knife in a boot” and “murdering Wade Garrett” and “being Mister Clean Jeans,” Ketchum has a leg up (wink!) on his fellow goons in one other respect: He is outraged that Dalton has the temerity to whip his ass. “Son of a bitch!” he shouts at the cooler as Captain Turner pulls him away, one boot on, one boot somewhere above the streets of Jasper. It’s the same verbiage employed by Carrie Ann when she brains some drunken dipstick with a beer bottle in the middle of that full-scale riot within the bar earlier in the film. She’s just a working woman trying to make a living and not get groped or punched or forced to bear witness to other people enduring the same. Ketchum is a paid killer who just attempted to murder a man by kicking him in the skull with a knife-shoe. That man intercepted the killing Rockette maneuver and simply followed the Three Simple Rules in response. But does this keep Ketchum from acting like he’s the wronged party once things don’t go the way he wants them to? Heavens no. Not one for simply going quietly and licking his wounds is Ketchum. One last “how dare you sir,” in modern vernacular of course, is required before he drifts away, allowing Dalton to go on a date with Dr. Elizabeth Clay that will change the lives of all three of them. (Death changes your life.) In Ketchum’s climactic whinge you hear the sound of privilege. Like his boss Brad Wesley, who expresses surprise that anyone would resist him more than once as the film continues, Ketchum does not believe those he oppresses have the right to fight back. But it’s more than that: He does not believe that those he oppresses should even be able to formulate the knowledge, desire, and will the very notion of “fighting back” requires. They should be as blissfully unaware of their power in this situation as an animal that has briefly slipped loose of its bonds and, should it realize its chance for freedom is upon it, could reduce its human handler to red wreckage. But they don’t realize. Neither, according to the only form of morality the Wesleys and Ketchums acknowledge, should the hoi polloi of Jasper.
J.R.R. Tolkien once said “I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides within the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed dominion of the author” and I think about that a lot.
“Billions” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Ten: “New Year’s Day”
“All is quiet on New Year’s Day.” Fat chance, Bono.
U2’s wintry hit “New Year’s Day” may kick off the “Billions” episode it shares a title with, but Bono’s opening line certainly doesn’t describe it. Directed with verve and humor by Adam Bernstein and written by the series creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien — always a sign that the game is well and truly afoot — “New Year’s Day” has the feel of a turning point for the season. Nothing shocking or momentous takes place, but the air is electric.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.
136. (There’s A) Fire in the Night
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“So, you lookin’ for somebody?”
“You.”
You’ve just read the conversation Dalton has with Elizabeth when he spots her and her dress outside the Double Deuce. She’s leaning back against a post, a pose she’ll have occasion to revisit later in the course of their relationship. He’s just finished whipping someone’s ass, which, same. They have an easy and unmistakably sexual intimacy here that the film spends the following scene, depicting their coffee date at a local greasy spoon, blows to smithereens. Yet it’s really only upon repeated viewings that the Doc’s repeated and rather open and vicious skepticism regarding Dalton’s career and character alike becomes apparent. Rather it reads like a tiger and tigress sizing each other up, deciding whether when and where to fuck, knowing they have within them the power to annihilate each other but choosing to do something else to each other instead, something hot to the touch and sweet to the skin. I credit Kelly Lynch and Patrick Swayze with much of that, since there’s hardly a person either character meets at any point in the movie you can’t imagine jumping right into the sack with them with the slightest provocation, and that’s no less true here. But mostly I credit the band Alabama and their song “(There’s A) Fire in the Night.”
Despite spending the better part of my adult life among music critics and music nerds and being both myself, I’ve never heard Alabama so much as mentioned outside country circles. Whatever it is that’s allowed my cohort to deify Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, make a crossover star out of Kacey Musgraves, turn Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” into an NYC karaoke staple, place the country affectations of Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks front and center in their respective late-period critical celebrations, and allow Lil Nas X & Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Old Town Road” to happen has never touched the biggest band in the history of the genre.
Listening to this song it is very, very difficult to understand why. Occupying the overlap position in the Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” / Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” / The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” Venn diagram you didn’t know existed, its minimal, dry guitars and water-on-the-snare-drums ’80s beat tell help singer Randy Owen tell his tale of one great night with one helluva woman. It’s not breaking any kind of ground (except perhaps the tight and expansive-sounding vocal harmonies during the chorus) and that’s the point. It’s guiding you, expertly, through familiar territory—bedrooms you’ve slept in and the people you’ve slept next to in them and your memories of both. Who wouldn’t want to warm their hands by that fire again?
The quick cut that follows Elizabeth’s explanatory “Me” leads us directly to a night sky, blank of stars moon and cloud. The camera descends onto a red orb emblazoned with a roaring fire. It descends further still, revealing the light-up signage of a diner. It’s an echo of the opening shot, which tells you right there that what follows is, in some as yet undefined way, momentous.
But it’s that rhythmic, percussive, low guitar line that sells the mood. When you hear that, and you see the night sky, and you take in the comfortingly ersatz glow of the lights, and you identify the kind of establishment we’re visiting, your mind quite naturally imagines a couple in the moments between when they realize they’re going home together and when they get up to do so. That tension and reserve is all in Jeff Cook’s insistent, somehow twitchy guitar. You pick up on instantly, you contextualize it effortlessly, you know what it’s about before Randy Owen’s singing comes in and proves you right.
Things don’t go great on the date itself, as we’ll see, though again not as bad as they appear at first glance, as we’ll also see. So for me, the music is the message here, and the message speaks true. Not for nothing is our first glimpse of this scene a fire in the night. One is being kindled whether the kindling and the tinder know it yet or not.
145. Niece
“Oh, that there? That there’s my niece. Helluva gal. Doctor, you know. Put her through medical school. I ever mention that? If I were a bettin’ man, and I ain’t sayin’ I ain’t, I’d put my money on ‘Yes, Red, you’ve mentioned that.’ What can I say? Ain’t every uncle knows people are out there livin’ and breathin’ on account of what your money helped teach your brother’s daughter to do. You do that, you shout it to the world. Not for them you understand, but for you! It’s healthy to give yourself three cheers now and then. Nobody else gonna do it for you. Ah well. Them’s the breaks. Now you strike me as the strong silent type. Not much for talkin’ yourself up. Man o’ your reputation doesn’t need to do his own advertising. Tried my hand in the ad game myself one time. I know, I know, it sure don’t look that way when you look around this ol’ place, but that’s just because I doubt ol’ Emmett gets the Pennysaver delivered out his way. If’n he did you’d take a look at it on that porch o’ his one mornin’ and say ‘Now that Red Webster, he’s one old geezer can make his copy *sing.*’ Yep, do it all m’self: writin’, layout, photography, the works. Price the damn sales too, naturally, and not with one o’ them fancy calculators they’re makin’ over in Tokyo or that Silicone Valley, or even down in Texas with them instruments. World’s smallest violin, that’s the only instrument a Texan’s ever played for me. Hell, I deserved it. Long story. Water under the bridge. Used the same camera to take that pic of Elizabeth as I do for all the ads, too. Now don’t get me wrong, I like the shop, I really do. Otherwise I’d just sell to Brad Wesley in toto and get the hell outta Doge. In a Dodge. Fancy that. Funny thing about Wesley is I took that picture of her the day she heard back from the county clerk that they’d finalized h—well. Not my place to say really. You ever get the chance to talk to her about that picture, why she looked so damn beautiful and serious and strong, best just sit back and let her do the talkin’. That was a day alright. Camera’s seen me through a lot, y’know. Lotta memories I mighta forgot otherwise. Nothin’ fancy, that camera. Coulda upgraded over the years I suppose, back before Wesley got his hooks in the place. I just never saw the upside to payin’ more money for a fancier version of what already worked perfectly fine. Don’t know why people ever do it any different. Thing about technology—it’s a glitterin’ lure. But once in a blue moon you can really hit folks where they live if you show ’em somethin’ they’re already fond o’ seein’. Worked at a furrier once. First job. In-house. Boss was this old-pro copywriter. Teddy, his name was. Greek. Don’t that beat all. This Teddy, he says to me ‘Red, the word you need first in your vernacular is
“new.” You give ’em the itch for new and it ain’t a matter of if they’re gonna scratch it but when. The new thing’s calamine lotion, plain and simple. But you really wanna glue the people and the product together, there’s another word you’d better learn: Nostalgia.’ Delicate thing. Potent. Pain from an old wound. That’s what it means in Greek, Teddy tells me anyway. Twinge in your heart. Leaves plain ol’ memory in the dust. That camera, it’s my time machine. Forwards, backwards, don’t matter. Anytime I got the ache to go someplace I wish I never left but can’t get back to, place makes me feel like a child, place that feels like home, I head to the darkroom. If there’s any place in God’s creation I know I’m loved…well, you’re lookin’ at it right there. Behind my niece, I mean. That’ll be $17.48 with tax, Mr. Weiner.”
“The Rain” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “Survival of the Fittest”
I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.
Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.
“Surival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.
I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.
“The Rain” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “Survival of the Fittest”
I’ll give The Rain‘s second season this: I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flummoxed by a season finale in my life. Thematically, that’s on point.
Overseen by co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt, Season 2 shifted the series from being a survival story about searching for family into a story of surviving the search for a cure. In that respect it mimics the rapidly mutating macguffin of a virus that wiped out the world, or at least the section of the world with Denmark in it, in minutes—but which over the course of the intervening years has started transforming plants into deathtraps and people into supervillains with magic virus powers.
“Survival of the Fittest” is, in its way, the most perplexing mutation yet. Not because it’s outright bad, like the first half of this strange season, but because despite containing and even doubling down on so much that made this season bad, it’s…actually good? I dunno, man, I just work here. If I sound confused, it’s because I am.
I reviewed the season finale of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.
144. The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.
Here’s Ketchum, the clear second to Jimmy in the hierarchy of Brad Wesley’s goons and his successor upon his death in much the same way that the unspecified entity Gothmog assumed control of the assault on Minas Tirith following the death of the Witch-king of Angmar, getting dragged out of the Double Deuce on his ass into the dirt parking lot outside. Bumpty bumpty bump, right down the front steps, squealing and mewling over his injured ankle all the way. In a matter of seconds, Dalton thwarted his assassination attempt, caught his leg in midair, ruthlessly twisted it, yelled “You’re too stupid to have a good time!” right in his face, toppled him to the ground, and dragged his ass, literally, into the dirt, also literally. Such is the indignity of this forced exit that, get this, his extended free leg is actually what opens the right-hand door (facing the building) while Dalton shoulders open the left. He is forced to facilitate his own humiliating defeat.
Now in addition to being the most anonymous of Wesley’s core goons, Ketchum is also the least sympathetic. My guess is that the two phenomena are interrelated. Can’t feel sympathy for a guy you can’t remember!
But recall that in the world of the story, Ketchum is a thought leader, a ring general , a man to whom the Tinkers and Bleeders and sister-sons of the world are supposed to look for guidance. Both Tinker and O’Connor—Tinker! and O’Connor!—fare better in their fight against Dalton than Ketchum does in his. Dalton beats Ketchum like a mule. To keep up the ring-general jargon, bahgawd ref, stop the damn match.
Later in the film, Ketchum murders Wade Garrett.
“They’re not my brothers,” Jon snapped. “They hate me because I’m better than they are.”
“No. They hate you because you act like you’re better than they are. They look at you and see a castle-bred bastard who thinks he’s a lordling.” The armorer leaned close. “You’re no lordling. Remember that. You’re a Snow, not a Stark. You’re a bastard and a bully.”
“A bully?” Jon almost choked on the word. The accusation was so unjust it took his breath away. “They were the ones who came after me. Four of them.”
“Four that you’ve humiliated in the yard. Four who are probably afraid of you. I’ve watched you fight. It’s not training with you. Put a good edge on your sword, and they’d be dead meat; you know it, I know it, they know it. You leave them nothing. You shame them. Does that make you proud?”
Jon hesitated. He did feel proud when he won. Why shouldn’t he? But the armorer was taking that away too, making it sound as if he were doing something wrong. “They’re all older than me,” he said defensively.
“Older and bigger and stronger, that’s the truth. I’ll wager your master-at-arms taught you how to fight bigger men at Winterfell, though. Who was he, some old knight?”
“Ser Rodrik Cassel,” Jon said warily. There was a trap here. He felt it closing around him.
Donal Noye leaned forward, into Jon’s face. “Now think on this, boy. None of these others have ever had a master-at-arms until Ser Alliser. Their fathers were farmers and wagonmen and poachers, smiths and miners and oars on a trading galley. What they know of fighting they learned between decks, in the alleys of Oldtown and Lannisport, in wayside brothels and taverns on the kingsroad. They may have clacked a few sticks together before they came here, but I promise you, not one in twenty was ever rich enough to own a real sword.” His look was grim. “So how do you like the taste of your victories now, Lord Snow?”
“Don’t call me that!” Jon said sharply, but the force had gone out of his anger. Suddenly he felt ashamed and guilty.“I never…I didn’t think…”
“Best you start thinking,” Noye warned him. “That, or sleep with a dagger by your bed. Now go.”
—George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“The Rain” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Keep It Together”
Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.
I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Rain Season 2 for Decider.
“The Rain” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Save Yourself”
So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.
The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.
Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.
(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)
I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:
He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!
“The Rain” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “Keep It Together”
Titled “Keep It Together,” Episode 5 of this wobbly season appears to have taken its own titular advice. This is everything I want out of a Rain episode: tender, tense, romantic, emotional, rapidly escalating, and utilizing its sci-fi horror in its smartest and most horrifying way since the season began.
I reviewed the strong fifth episode of The Rain Season Two for Decider.
“The Rain” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “Save Yourself”
So there was this show, Game of Thrones; maybe you’ve heard about it? Early in the run of this little-known cult favorite it became apparent that despite taking place in a vaguely medieval, vaguely northern European setting, few characters were wearing—hang on, I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I’m about to talk about something this dorky—the appropriate headgear.
The armored knights rarely wore full helmets and visors. The folks who lived in wintry areas almost never wore plain-old hats. In both cases, were we being strictly realistic about the science of combat and climate, this would increase the mortality rates of the characters by a preposterous amount. In neither case did I care.
Why not? Because it’s silly to care about that kind of thing. For the most part, anyway. You’re dealing with fantastic fiction here, the umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, superheroes, fairy tales, basically anything where stuff happens that can’t happen in real life. You have to suspend disbelief, and you have to determine where your boundary for that suspended disbelief lies. Human emotion, human behavior, that kind of stuff you want to keep realistic, or at least related as directly as possible to our own, so that the story can communicate. Hats? You’re watching a show with ice zombies. You can let the hats go.
(If you’re doing straight-up historical fiction, maybe that’s another story, but you still need to able to tell the goddamn actors apart. There’s a reason all the mask and helmet and cowl-wearing superheroes wear such colorful and distinctive costumes, and it’s not because they’re all fashion plates.)
I say that to say this: In “Save Yourself,” the fourth episode of The Rain‘s shaky second season, the lead security goon for the Apollon corporation—not Kira, a semi-main character at this point, but some other guy who looks a bit like Euron Greyjoy from that other show I mentioned and who’s popped up in a supporting role before—breaks into the compound where our heroes have been hiding out with heavily armed team, and he’s the only one not wearing protective headgear. Considering the fact that they’re attempting to capture Rasmus Andersen, who’s a human virus bomb, this would increase his chances of dying considerably. What I thought about it this time was this:
He’s not wearing the headgear? Ridiculous!
Why the change? Because while all fantastic fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and while “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a solid rule of thumb to follow when reading or watching it, you need to be kept in a mentally non-sweaty mood. The weaker the work, the less you’re getting by way of compensatory value in terms of ideas, images, writing, acting, all the things that make shows or movies or whatever of any genre worthwhile, the more likely you are to start noticing people’s hats. In that light,The Rain Season 2 might as well be a ad for a haberdashery.