Episode Report Card Sobell: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Niedermeyer -- dead!
By Sobell | Season 2 | Episode 17 | Aired on 02.18.2007
Fortunately, now we switch back to the awesome Pope. He hunkers down to look at the gun and calmly says, "I could shoot you right now and not even think twice." Michael replies, "But you won't. You spent too much time around prisons to throw your life away like that." Pope snaps, "What the hell are you trying to pull?" It's simple: Michael wants Pope to go clean out Governor Dad's humidor. Pope is resolutely against it until Michael Blue Steels him with, "Maybe there's something I can offer to make you change your mind."
And now, back to the heady redolence of delta breezes and verbena, the faintest notes of Faulker and Williams dancing in the air... the T-Bag subplot. The door to Tara-lette swings open and T-Bag gapes, too undone to utter even, "Derelict! Dilapidated! Disintegrating! Deteriorating!" Susan and the kids reluctantly come in. T-Bag wanders ahead of them, his eyes taking in the boarded-over windows and graffiti but actually seeing something else. T-Bag walks over to a dusty console bookcase, pushes it away from the wall, digs a foxed dictionary out of the wall. The pages are swollen from water damage. We get a nicely-composed shot of him resting the book on his prosthesis and flipping through it with his good hand; I am choosing to interpret that as a visual shorthand for how the present damages the past. We see that the page has arrows and words scrawled on it. T-Bag hears a laugh and whirls around; Susan and the kids, all of whom have been silent, flinch. Susan finally asks what T-Bag intends to do with them all. T-Bag turns back to the book, then slips into a full-fledged flashback.
I take back what I said about Faulkner and Williams. This here is Erskine Caldwell territory. We see T-Bag's banal and evil father, his father's equally banal and venal friends, and a carefully-screened shot of T-Bag's mentally-challenged, silent mother. Young Theodore is sitting on the floor when his old man shouts that it's time to play a game -- "Ten synonyms! [turns to his friends] Pick a word." One of them says, "DEE-stroy." Young Theodore turns around and stands up, reciting, "Ten synonyms for 'destroy.' 'Annul,' 'mutilate,' 'liquidate,' 'abrogate,' 'quell,' 'ravage,' 'expunge,' 'demolish,' 'extirpate,' 'extinguish.'" The men on the couch look like they're still stuck back on "abrogate." As T-Bag flashes back to the present, we hear his father saying, "'Stupid,' my hell. My boy's going to be president." So Team Escarpara was also an exploratory committee, is that what we're saying here? T-Bag hugs the dictionary, then continues his survey of the family manse. We then flash to the next scene in Young Theodore's life. We learn that Father T-Bag would, to paraphrase the great Florence King, rape a rattlesnake under a rock pile; apparently he has yet to meet -- or father -- a relative he does not molest. We flash back to the present again, where Susan asks gently, "Theodore? Theodore, do you hear me? What are you going to do with us?" In the flashback, Father T-Bag closes the door; in the present, T-Bag turns away from the now-closed door and says, "We're going to put down some roots." I have ten synonyms for T-Bag's plotline: contrived, pretentious, extraneous, ridiculous, spurious, fabricated, labored, melodramatic, histrionic, unnecessary.