Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT What The Water Gave Me
By Jacob Clifton | Season 2 | Episode 25 | Aired on 03.19.2012
Hanna: "She was my friend!"
You said it, girl. What a senseless awful thing. What a perfectly tragic, monstrous turn of events, that A is Mona. And Mona is dead.
Or is she? It's midnight now, her wristwatch beeping out somebody's death knell, as the cops finally find Mona -- still alive! -- down in the ravine.
PSYCHO
There's a neat transition from Mona looking crazy down there to Mona looking crazy in a padded cell, doped-up and angry and amazing. She looks like Needy at the end of Jennifer's Body, only not as validating.
Therapy Anne, absolutely fucking verbatim: "She was living in a perpetual state of hyperreality. The adrenaline rush that accompanied her feelings of empowerment and her high level of intelligence fueled Mona's ability to be seemingly all-knowing and omnipresent."
You don't say! Well, that's not a thing.
But if you don't get the A-Team part of it -- which again, Mona painstakingly explained to Spencer in simple English -- and you know that Marlene says it really was almost completely Mona doing that shit, I guess it will suffice. I actually pretty much love it: Like, this is the Matrix and Mona is Neo. We know she can think fast, we know she's capable of absolutely lying to your face so well she believes it herself, we know she's a gifted psychological profiler that can read people's shit like the Mentalist, and we know she's a technowizard, so the all-knowing thing doesn't bother me so much. And I think they threw in the adrenaline part to explain how she was constantly hurling grown men over her head and punching through mountains all the time.
I dunno, as hilarious as the whole thing is, I think they covered their tracks pretty well. Especially for a show that doesn't ever feel the need to make any logical sense -- being, as it is, less a "logical" "story" or "TV show" and more of a subjective sequence of juxtaposed dreamlike images, like a Malick movie or a Hooper painting, like the poetry of Amy Lowell or the fiction of Gertrude Stein -- I think it shows serious effort, and I am impressed by it. It could have given a lot less, to be satisfying at this late hour, than it gave. It's been one of the hottest shows on any network for awhile now, so I guess they can do whatever they want, because they are definitely speaking to something.
God knows I loved it for a long time before I felt even slightly like I understood it. I still don't understand understand it, I just feel like it gives you the keys to negotiate it, if you look for them. The language is maybe more flowery than how I feel, because I don't know the words to accurately describe what I'm saying, but these words aren't really meant as praise: I'm saying what I think the deal is, the plainest way I can think of.