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Having just watched this for the first time, I'd kill for a Director's Cut that completely excises all of the lovely cop drama and toxic masculinity and magic bullet gunfights. It's frustrating because there's a lot of cool stuff buried in the first four seasons. The intro to the fifth season is so good I've just been telling people to just watch that season and then find an episode guide if they want more. Life's too short to watch a thousand replays of rejected Wire storylines and "Reese, he's not the victim, he's the perpetrator!!!!!"
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Jan 2, 2017 20:59
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 08:25 |
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More fragile than toxic really, Reese wasn't running around boning everyone. But S1/2 he was basically Jack Reacher. poo poo got way better when Root but especially Shaw came around so Reese's character could breathe a little. As far as number of the week goes, I wasn't opposed to the concept, but 99% of the time, it was just a two minute scene of Finch talking to the Machine. It would have been really cool if they didn't know about Samaritan from the beginning and had to figure out there was another AI hunting them. Also, it sucked that they only thought to show other Machine cells in the last season. I would have much preferred that and conflicts with Vigilance over the boring rear end HR and Elias/Dominic arcs.
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Jan 3, 2017 05:03
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oohhboy posted:??!? There was a literal episode detailing what would happen if someone lesser than Reese was employed conclusively dealing with the question. Not really a question of his skills, just his awful attitude and personality for a while. For other cells, just knowing they existed, even offscreen, would have been interesting. I'm not sure the Machine could have seen an emerging AI like Samaritan. She didn't know Vigilance was controlled by Greer and couldn't really predict their movements. Greer was also able to ditch Machine surveillance on the reg.
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Jan 3, 2017 15:39
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Spergatory posted:Toxic masculinity is the thing that ruined Reese's life. He straight up says that he hosed up his own life because he couldn't open his big stupid mouth and actually say feelings stuff to the woman he desperately loved and would've died for. Yeah, the show gets there, but only after a couple dozen hours
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Jan 3, 2017 15:43
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I don't disagree, and on paper where you only sketch out the dramatic parts for a character arc, everything looks cool. But for a huge chunk of the series, the dude is the hero and accomplishes all of his goals by suppressing his emotions and being glib about shooting and torturing people. You can retcon all of the explanations you want about why his character is the way he is, but they just end up as parentheticals to the demonstrated behaviors of overbearing masculinity for at least two seasons.
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Jan 3, 2017 17:53
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Talking about the main character's motivations and presentation thereof in a show isn't a derail
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Jan 3, 2017 18:15
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I would like to restate that my use of the term "toxic masculinity" was too strong and I would like to substitute "fragile masculinity", where every bit of emotional progress Reese makes seemingly has to be met with a demonstration of his shooting skills. I think that Nolan and some of the writers had good ideas for Reese and a few of them surfaced in the first couple seasons, but were buried in whatever forces that dictated 25 minutes of ultra-serious gunfights per episode. That tone and the quantity of actions undermined Reese's character development. A huge part of his development was him coming to grips with how his violence deeply affected him and others and that his emotional detachment was unhealthy, that he had to actually care about people both "good" and "bad" to achieve meaning in his life and redeem his past. The flashbacks and Finch conversations and some of the bigger beats (letting Elias go) reflected this, but for every minute of those, there were ten minutes of him kneecapping, torturing, or massacring henchmen in between smarmy quips. One of the primary features of a fragilely masculine character is a blasé attitude about direly wounding and killing and this incongruity wasn't resolved until the middle of the series, when he went from wasting a whole room to incapacitating and only killing in truly dire situations. Later in the series, you even get outsiders poking fun at his love of kneecapping and his put-on hyper-masculine Batman gravel and it definitely should have showed up earlier than late S3/S4. A lot of this is also resolved when Shaw arrives, because it freed Reese from having to do all of the lifting on the script. It can be argued that her character's bad traits are just as bad as Reese's. Within the show universe, this is a stronger argument; in the context of action shows as a whole, there's less of a stereotype for Shaw to reinforce, which mitigates (not entirely!) its impact. I felt frustrated enough to post about it because episodes like the UN one existed where you had both seriousness and levity happily coexisting because there were more characters. I genuinely laughed at Fusco's one-liners and everything just clicked better. The "lovely cop drama" to which I was referring is not an attack on cop drama at large, but how it fits into the show's ideas. Weirdly, this actually gets worse as the show progresses. It starts with using HR as a statement on how the police could tacitly allow organized crime to occur in the interest of preserving order over the individual lives destroyed by such crime. (It adds the nuance later, Fusco and the crooked cops start off as generic greedy amoral bad guys) It also attempted to use Fusco as an example of how someone so clearly designated as evil can eventually become good, undercut by flashbacks that show Fusco as far more reluctant and accidentally bad than his introduction would suggest. The HR storyline morphs such that they abandon their goals of allowing criminal organizations to exist to preserve order and into a very flat, very generic situation where HR is actively facilitating and committing crime to enrich themselves. I never got why Elias was given such a heroic treatment by the show. Every good thing he does is motivated by blatant self-interest and lust for power, and his existence is used to justify the sort of revenge killings that have become unpalatable for the Machinists by the end of the show (strangling Simmons, blowing up the Voice). Despite this, he's kept around, ironically turning the Machinists into the original incarnation of HR, but without any sort of thematic resolution. The Brotherhood plotline was hot garbage start to finish and brought absolutely nothing to the table. They were unabashedly evil and had only the most superficial connection to any of the main themes, storylines, or character developments.
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Jan 4, 2017 08:47
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That would make a lot more sense if God mode were always running, but it's weird to have superhero fantasy gun battles in a high concept show. I like that interpretation for sure
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Jan 4, 2017 10:13
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 08:25 |
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Kegslayer posted:HR and Elias are basically the idea that even when you're trying to build a perfect world, corruption and crime will always exist because humans are lovely. Luckily, Samaritan finds a solution to this age old problem Yeah, if you take out The Correction, HR and Elias and The Brotherhood are bog-standard organized crime stories that steal time from better stories and characters. You don't even get any of the nuance of a political figure very carefully and very indirectly influencing crime, Quinn almost gleefully gets elbows deep in murder and drugs.
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Jan 4, 2017 12:45
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