Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT In This Dojo
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 15 | Aired on 01.30.2003
D'Argo and Macton enter the refectory from opposite ends. Awkward! D'Argo keeps the long table between them and gets dramatic: "I'll say this just once: stay away from me, stay away from my friends, and stop spreading your lies." Macton offers that he's not the one lying, and D'Argo accuses him of being full of dren. (And full of sexy!) "You've always hated me -- you'd have hated any non-Sebacean who married your sister." (Also known as "being a Sebacean." Not that you should knuckle under to racism at any point, but stop being so wide-eyed surprised by it. It's really unattractive.) Macton suggests the total lie that he might have accepted their marriage eventually, if D'Argo hadn't started beating her. Macton nods at D'Argo as he takes a long, deep breath in through the mouth and out through the nose. Out with anger, in with love! "I'm violent...when I choose to be. And right now, I choose not to kill you. But that could change." But I won't have a compelling or flattering reason, because this episode has some frelled-up beliefs about what honor really means. Macton invades D'Argo's personal space a little bit. "Really? Well, if I chose to kill you, you'd never see me coming." He spills that he's there -- the whole purpose of him being there all of a sudden -- to tell him the truth: that Lo'Laan kept the truth from him. Not even Macton knows that D'Argo blackmailed her into it. This episode is retarded. "Even a stupid Luxan should be able to see the truth," Macton says, so of course D'Argo loses all composure and attacks.
I love that movie The Cell, because it is beautiful to look at, and because Vincent D'Onofrio was well sexy back in the day. But I also love it because it is hilarious and stupid. Any time you write about this kind of stuff, you run the risk of universalizing your own particular creepy surprise parties: a statement about one man's mind becomes a really unflattering window on the way you see the world. And I really do think that this episode has fallen into that trap. It's not the usual, with this show, where it's just that you don't want to know these things about men. The show excels in the secret So-Called Life of men, and women, and soldiers, and scientists. The problem with this episode is specific to this episode, and it's not that I don't want to know these things about men, it's that I don't want to know these things about the show, this week. It's got its shirt tucked into its boxer-briefs and it's doing a Charlie Gordon dance.