Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 3 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT See Me Bare My Teeth For You
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 19 | Aired on 03.25.2012
It was only on rewatch that I noticed how carefully Mike is treating her. He's saying the same things, in the same particular way, that Diane might use to warn her off. The way it's being performed, he comes off scary as shit, but because he's being so subtle about it I wonder if he won't turn out to be a good deal more okay than he's coming off here. It's the norm for this show -- Canning's not so bad, the more we get to know him; Eli is even more of a trainwreck now than when we hated him -- but the way the episode ends had me thinking he was a more iconic person, like Wendy Scott-Carr or Colin Sweeney (or Jackie Florrick): Somebody whose existence depends on their meaning to Alicia's shifting personal philosophy.
Now, though, I wonder. Because he's appealing to the real-world ratfuck ethos -- Alicia's blind spot, still -- in the same way Diane would, like bumpers on a bowling lane, to shut this down before it goes insane, and because he's signalling that he's not the enemy here. Maybe he's both. Maybe, as in real life, he's both. They certainly pulled the actor for both. I am very interested in this Mike Kresteva, actually, come to think of it. No idea where it's headed -- but the fact that he explicitly referenced the Lifeguard situation...
I know I bring it up a lot and I honestly don't know if that's just because it was such a hugely affecting storyline for me personally or whether we're meant to apply it to every situation, but it definitely would apply here anyway, even if he hadn't said it, because we're talking about back-scratching and ass-covering in the halls of power. That whole thing -- the perversion, the way it kicked Diane in the nuts and kept kicking -- still makes me feel sick to think about, because it was so true and so evil, in that institutionalized blame-spreading way where if everybody's part of the problem then nobody's part of the problem and then, swiftly, there is no problem, because conspiracies protect their own and conspiracies never look like conspiracies. Nobody ever says to himself, "I am a conspirator," in the same way that a random person in HR at Blackwater or McDonald's franchise owner thinks, "I am a murderer." It's not so much the injustice that bothers me as the fact that everybody walks away a little bit dirtier than they were before, but not dirty enough that you'd notice. Nobody wins or loses, just ... entropy. A little more ugly in a beautiful world.
DEAR GILDA
After a day like that, you need a glass of wine. Especially when you're being forced to write a book report on your life and why it fell apart and who you have become since then.
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