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And we’re back to mediocre. At this point, I think I’m more watching these so I have something to put on my livejournal on a regular basis. But, damnit, I've got all the DVDs sitting here, it feels stupid to quit this early on!
Problems: This is the kind of episode, the sort of quiet character piece, that you can get away with once in a while, a few seasons into the show, when you’ve established your characters well enough that you can get away with just showing them going about their normal routine for an hour instead of dealing with the crisis of the week. Five episodes in, when I’m still struggling to work out which white guy in a suit is which… no, it doesn’t work for me. It all feels kind of smarmy, and at this point I don’t like the characters enough to really tolerate an episode that seems largely devoted to each of them reassuring each other how awesome they all are. I haven’t seen enough of either Josh or Toby to care about their feelings of insecurity, and the episode doesn’t have any other real content.
And the bit at the end about “These women” – I don’t know, it felt… not exactly patronising, but at the very least a bad case of ‘tell, don’t show’ to have the main characters muse on how important the female characters are to their work while at the same time the show itself so far has been so totally dominated by white men. Mandy seems to be the only woman so far who’s had a chance to be anything other than a bystander in male character’s stories, and she’s neither driving the narrative nor at all likeable, and I understand she vanishes fairly soon…
Minor notes:
- It felt a little dishonest to me to raise the issue of smallpox outbreaks without mentioning that the US is one of only two countries that still maintains samples of the virus – and was, at the time of this episode, acting against WHO recommendations that the samples be destroyed.
- Can we kill the “Hero reels off a list of figures, impresses everyone with his in-depth knowledge, later admits he was just making them up” joke? Granted, it was possibly a little fresher in ’99 – but at this point, I assume that’s where a scene’s going whenever someone in a movie reels of specific details.
- Funny, I was just thinking during the pan-over of Washington DC how weird it looks to see it intact, then we go into a scene discussing nuclear evacuation procedure. Yeah, I play too much Fallout…
Problems: This is the kind of episode, the sort of quiet character piece, that you can get away with once in a while, a few seasons into the show, when you’ve established your characters well enough that you can get away with just showing them going about their normal routine for an hour instead of dealing with the crisis of the week. Five episodes in, when I’m still struggling to work out which white guy in a suit is which… no, it doesn’t work for me. It all feels kind of smarmy, and at this point I don’t like the characters enough to really tolerate an episode that seems largely devoted to each of them reassuring each other how awesome they all are. I haven’t seen enough of either Josh or Toby to care about their feelings of insecurity, and the episode doesn’t have any other real content.
And the bit at the end about “These women” – I don’t know, it felt… not exactly patronising, but at the very least a bad case of ‘tell, don’t show’ to have the main characters muse on how important the female characters are to their work while at the same time the show itself so far has been so totally dominated by white men. Mandy seems to be the only woman so far who’s had a chance to be anything other than a bystander in male character’s stories, and she’s neither driving the narrative nor at all likeable, and I understand she vanishes fairly soon…
Minor notes:
- It felt a little dishonest to me to raise the issue of smallpox outbreaks without mentioning that the US is one of only two countries that still maintains samples of the virus – and was, at the time of this episode, acting against WHO recommendations that the samples be destroyed.
- Can we kill the “Hero reels off a list of figures, impresses everyone with his in-depth knowledge, later admits he was just making them up” joke? Granted, it was possibly a little fresher in ’99 – but at this point, I assume that’s where a scene’s going whenever someone in a movie reels of specific details.
- Funny, I was just thinking during the pan-over of Washington DC how weird it looks to see it intact, then we go into a scene discussing nuclear evacuation procedure. Yeah, I play too much Fallout…