POI 2x07 and 2x08
Mar. 31st, 2014 04:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitA change in my work schedule means that I'll have to be at work at 6 am every day now. Except for the one day a week when I'll work 2-10 pm. Yeah, this is gonna be awesome.
So, have a very early POI discussion post for "Critical" and "Til Death." As always, anyone's welcome to join in, but please, no spoilers for developments after the episodes we're talking about.
Episode summaries under the cut, discussion in comments. (Note: my comments and probably most of the discussion will be on DW; I'm having connectivity problems and DW loads a lot better for me right now.)
2x07, "Critical"
This week's number is a surgeon, Maddy Enright, who will be performing heart surgery on the CEO of an energy company. Right before the surgery she gets a phone call telling her that her wife, who is in a local park hosting a charity art festival, will be shot unless she kills her patient by giving him a blood thinner and then "accidentally" nicking an artery.
Reese incapacitates one sniper, but learns from their leader, ex-MI6 agent Alistair Wesley, that there are more. Meanwhile, Finch is at the hospital keeping an eye on Maddie and researching the situation with the help of Leon Tao, whom they've let temporarily take refuge in the library because he got himself in trouble again.
Reese, with Fusco's help, manages to get Maddy's wife Amy safely away from the park, and Maddy calls off the operation even before she knows Amy is safe, but the actions of the surgical nurse, who was working for Wesley, mean that Maddy has to restart her patient's heart with Finch's help.
Meanwhile, Carter encounters ex-CIA agent Mark Snow, who reveals that "she," i.e. Kara is controlling him and is going to cause trouble. The episode ends with Carter confronting Reese about this, and Reese telling her she has to decide how much she really wants to know.
2x08, "Til Death"
This time they get the numbers of a married couple, Daniel and Sabrina Drake, who are joint CEOs of East Village Publishing. At first it seems like the threat comes from a militia leader about whom they published an exposé, but it soon becomes clear that in fact Daniel and Sabrina have each hired a hitman to kill each other,
With the help of Fusco (who was on a date), Reese and Carter foil the first murder attempts, then kidnap the couple and put them in a room together to try and force them to reveal whom they've hired. It turns out that their estrangement comes from lack of communication after Sabrina had a miscarriage, and soon they're talking again and cooperating to try to stop the hit men.
Reese takes them back to their apartment to serve as bait, and stops the killers with Fusco and Carter's help after a big shoot-out. The couple are arrested but won't testify against each other and will probably get off lightly.
Fusco's stakeout/date with Rhonda goes well and looks likely to turn into a romance. Meanwhile, Carter agrees to a date with a colleague, Beecher, who helped her on the case.
Throughout the episode there are flashbacks to Finch's early relationship with Grace, including his attempt to tell her the truth about himself, which he abandons after she implies that she doesn't need to know.
So, have a very early POI discussion post for "Critical" and "Til Death." As always, anyone's welcome to join in, but please, no spoilers for developments after the episodes we're talking about.
Episode summaries under the cut, discussion in comments. (Note: my comments and probably most of the discussion will be on DW; I'm having connectivity problems and DW loads a lot better for me right now.)
2x07, "Critical"
This week's number is a surgeon, Maddy Enright, who will be performing heart surgery on the CEO of an energy company. Right before the surgery she gets a phone call telling her that her wife, who is in a local park hosting a charity art festival, will be shot unless she kills her patient by giving him a blood thinner and then "accidentally" nicking an artery.
Reese incapacitates one sniper, but learns from their leader, ex-MI6 agent Alistair Wesley, that there are more. Meanwhile, Finch is at the hospital keeping an eye on Maddie and researching the situation with the help of Leon Tao, whom they've let temporarily take refuge in the library because he got himself in trouble again.
Reese, with Fusco's help, manages to get Maddy's wife Amy safely away from the park, and Maddy calls off the operation even before she knows Amy is safe, but the actions of the surgical nurse, who was working for Wesley, mean that Maddy has to restart her patient's heart with Finch's help.
Meanwhile, Carter encounters ex-CIA agent Mark Snow, who reveals that "she," i.e. Kara is controlling him and is going to cause trouble. The episode ends with Carter confronting Reese about this, and Reese telling her she has to decide how much she really wants to know.
2x08, "Til Death"
This time they get the numbers of a married couple, Daniel and Sabrina Drake, who are joint CEOs of East Village Publishing. At first it seems like the threat comes from a militia leader about whom they published an exposé, but it soon becomes clear that in fact Daniel and Sabrina have each hired a hitman to kill each other,
With the help of Fusco (who was on a date), Reese and Carter foil the first murder attempts, then kidnap the couple and put them in a room together to try and force them to reveal whom they've hired. It turns out that their estrangement comes from lack of communication after Sabrina had a miscarriage, and soon they're talking again and cooperating to try to stop the hit men.
Reese takes them back to their apartment to serve as bait, and stops the killers with Fusco and Carter's help after a big shoot-out. The couple are arrested but won't testify against each other and will probably get off lightly.
Fusco's stakeout/date with Rhonda goes well and looks likely to turn into a romance. Meanwhile, Carter agrees to a date with a colleague, Beecher, who helped her on the case.
Throughout the episode there are flashbacks to Finch's early relationship with Grace, including his attempt to tell her the truth about himself, which he abandons after she implies that she doesn't need to know.
Re: 2x08, "Til Death"
Date: 2014-04-02 04:37 pm (UTC)I think the writer thought the Grace/Harold stuff was cute and lovely, because based on the central couple, this writer doesn't see realtionships the way I do, but what really struck me was how much of the Grace/Harold interaction was sort of... just meaningless? Italy's beautiful and art is nice and it's fun to have people buy you ice-cream - none of that is what makes a relationship profound or meaningful. If I'm going to buy in to Grace/Harold, I want something more solid that ties them together. Like risking their lives for each other, or giving up something for each other. It's weird that in a show that generally excels at strong, interesting, varied female characters, Grace is none of those things.
It makes me feel, in many ways, like Haorld is fascinated by the fact that he can be with Grace as much as he is with Grace. When he's with Grace, he can play the role of the lovely, fairly cliche boyfriend. He can flirt (because she's not going to just discount him for not being Brad Pitt), he can do date talk, he can indulge his need to protect and give things. And he can be watching himself *winning* at this social art and smiling internally, amazed that he can actually have 'normal' life if he ever wanted. And OK, maybe he doesn't want her precisely, but he's not not having this because he *couldn't*, that's the point... /ramble
So yeah, mostly I'm going to forget this episode happened...
Re: 2x08, "Til Death"
Date: 2014-04-02 06:45 pm (UTC)It's weird that in a show that generally excels at strong, interesting, varied female characters, Grace is none of those things.
And this episode was written by a woman, too. My sense is that the show can give us great women character so long as they're not one of the guys' romantic interests. But it can't manage to give us love interests that are more than just love interests. We're seen rather more of Jessica than of Grace, but what do we actually know about her personality? Nothing. She was there to love Reese and then be victimized and then be killed.
If I'm going to buy in to Grace/Harold, I want something more solid that ties them together. Like risking their lives for each other, or giving up something for each other.
Even more than that, I want to see what they see in each other. Then if after that there's life-risking or self-sacrifice, awesome, but I want a basis in some sense of compatibility. With Harold and Grace, I kept thinking "What do they talk about?" and I couldn't think of anything. Partly that's because we know Harold is a lying liar who lies for reasons we don't yet know about, but it's also Grace's underdeveloped personality and the lack of a sense that they have anything real in common. I just can't see Grace, as written, holding a sensible conversation about anything (she supposedly loves Dickens, but that's definitely something we're told; if the best she can say about Italy is that it's beautiful, I don't get the sense that she reads much), and Harold has a real streak of intellectual snobbery. And what does she see in him? Again, what do they talk about? I think you're probably right that Harold deliberately enacts a "perfect boyfriend" persona, and I can see how Grace or anyone might find that pleasant, but I'd think there would have to be a hollowness to it: Harold is withholding almost every aspect of his real self, and what we know of his real self doesn't seem like someone who would be genuinely compatible with Grace.
Haorld is fascinated by the fact that he can be with Grace
*nods* Thinking about it from his point of view, the relationship makes most sense to me as his experiment in normality. He meets this sweet-natured woman, not very bright, not with a high self-esteem ("I'm just an illustrator"), who's self-effacing and kind in a very undemanding way (see: low self-esteem), and she accepts him and is flattered by his attention, impressed by his intelligence, etc. Of course he's going to be flattered by that--he's lonely and insecure, feels alienated by most people, and wants to feel that he could be normal and have the things other people have. I'm sure he thinks he's making her happy--possibly he is making her happy--but it's all facade and surface, no depth. His heart isn't in it, though I'm willing to believe that he convinced himself, sometimes, that he loved her (and also had a lot of nagging doubts).
Re: 2x08, "Til Death"
Date: 2014-04-03 02:41 pm (UTC)And then he thinks, well maybe this is what love is like, this nice simple fondness. This is what normal people get to feel, this low key, low stress sense of 'actually, I could stand to share a house with this person' and a vague confidence that they'd help with cooking and be quite fun vacation companions.
But on the other hand, he's heard that love is harsh and crazy and painful, and he's seen evidence of that, and what he's felt for Nathan and what he's learnt to feel for Reese? That isn't nice or simple or gentle. It's wracking and complicated and involves a lot of feeling dreadful and then spikes of feeling just *amazing*, just better than he thought anyone could feel without pharmaceuticals.
And he doesn't like it, or get why human beings have to be so messy and contradictory. And he still longs a little for Grace, with whom he could be perfectly in control of himself.
Re: 2x08, "Til Death"
Date: 2014-04-03 04:28 pm (UTC)Tying this in to what you've said, he could feel that the nice calm affection and sense of stability/control he feels with Grace are the rewards of heterosexuality: real grown-up normal heterosexual love doesn't hurt, it isn't extreme, it's calm and decorous. Obviously this is preferable to the abnormal love he felt for Nathan and is scared of feeling for Reese, with its humiliating, overwhelming emotions and its dreadful feeling of vulnerability.