Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Love Lockdown
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 02.05.2010
y Prosna although I didn't recognize him. Francis gives Willie hell for taking so long with their burritos, and tells him to scat. One of the other ones asks Willie if he's lost, and Willie calls him a "funny guy," which makes them all oooh. I really like Willie. I like his complete disinterest in adult bullshit so, so much. It makes him such a stronger player in this half of the show, especially for such a small kid, than I was expecting. Joe could learn from him. And of course, I really love it because every woman or girl or daughter he will ever love will have the same fearless/insubordinate quality, which is why I will love them too.There's gossip about how badly Taurons are treated and how the "badgers" are always such dicks to them, which really gets across the interesting thing about the Ha'la'tha which is that strong feeling that they have every right to work against the law because it wasn't ever written for them, which is how shadow economies and mafias are created, and which in turn becomes an interesting thing about Joe, who tries to operate within the law and can't, both for those institutional reasons and because of the extraordinary circumstances of his lifetime.
Willie, trying to get a word in, notes that he recently went to jail, and they giggle about how cute he is for thinking that was hard time. Sam finally shows up and pulls him away from their good-natured ribbing, which he is eating up, to yell at him for skipping school... Without showing up for attendance first. Sam is so interesting. He mentally paces -- "Once you start in a direction, it's best to just keep going" -- before cracking open a beer for Willie and deciding that he'll call the school and tell them it's a Tauron day of devotion to Mars. "Your school's got too few Taurons to figure out that it's skor, right?" They clink their beers and I imagine that Sam thinks he's doing something good.
When bloody Daniel gets home, Serge cues up his 53 Google alerts and Daniel puts some frozen peas on his shiner. Of course, all of the clips are about how Graystone Industries is plummeting and how the C-Bucs are begging to get traded to a different team, etc., so Daniel erases all of them, because he loves Pyramid so much and owning his own team was a private dream. Serge asks him if he needs like first aid or something, but Daniel just heads down to nurse his wounds, where his daughter is resting.
Evelyn, Joe's assistant I think for the last three years, ushers him into the courthouse, where a pissed-off judge has summoned him on threat of bench warrant for reasons unknown. Evelyn assures him that all his paperwork -- and bribes -- are up to par, and is sympathetic. But not so sympathetic that she doesn't bristle at his request to get him some coffee while he waits in the hallway to get reamed by this judge, but he makes a smooshy face and she finally acquiesces. (House this week dealt with this particular weirdness by having the person point out that she gets the assistant coffee sometimes too, which would have made this scene less weird, but this is what we're working with.) So as she's walking away he's like, "I love those shoes!" And she grins to herself, because women don't mind being dominated as long as you act all passive about it and then compliment their shoes (Angeli Thing One: Check.) but also: Won't Bill's mother of record be named Evelyn? Hmm.
There's a farcical sort of scene here where Clarice is pushing one agenda while Lacy looks like she's about to barf and dicks around with Clarice in such an odd way that in a normal situation somebody would say something, but here it's just sort of provocative and like the opposite of a conversation normal people would have: Clarice's unbroken banter is all about how they're sitting in the same room -- gorgeous room, gorgeously shot with them off-center in front of a long window like a wonderful painting -- in which she used to act as Zoë's confessor, and how close they were, and all of that, and meanwhile Lacy keeps making her get up and fetch her sugar, and milk, and lemon, and a spoon, and finally when that's over with she bounces for her astronomy tutorial -- "Trouble with my stars," she says wonderfully -- and Clarice makes the most hilarious WTF face in the history of the Colonies, it's just great. But still: Nobody acts like that, it's interesting and tonally very power-gamesy and well-played, but nobody actually would do that.
(Angeli Thing Two: Check. And I'm not even being a dick about it, because I do finally like him and his stories, but these scripts generally do have features that stick out that nobody else's has, and he does tend to go weird places that other writers don't ever really carry through on. On some shows -- Weeds being my go-to example -- every one of the writers is like that, so you have twelve unconnected half-hour movies that often don't add up to anything. So the fact that it's taken seven years or however many to figure these out -- and they all have them, Jane has them and Michael Taylor has them, Verheiden has them, RDM and Weddle/Thompson have a huge old barrel of them -- is more of a testament to how much leeway terrific writers can earn, v. the usual explanation that the showrunner doesn't care enough to connect the dots/nobody's minding the store. Although I will say you get this effect more on shows with a really great writer's room, so many it's a sign of quality, but it's hell on the viewer. Buffy Season Seven, which I adored, was a lot like being told a story by ten people simultaneously, for example, with everybody leaving out parts and bringing up their favorite toys again and again, and for another example, the New Testament: Wouldn't even exist without this same effect.)
Oh, good! Graystone time. I live for these scenes and they always deliver. So Amanda comes down into the lab, all bloodied up from her latest mobbing, and they fuss over each other's wounds with their usual mixture of prickly hate and exceedingly wonderful love for each other. He describes his incident as having run into "someone else who lost a child on that train," and she clenches her jaw when he says it in the most captivating way. She glues him back together, and while he's hissing and squirming she unthinkingly goes, "Stop squirming, you're worse than Zoë!" Which is... Appalling.
Not least because it's opened the door to part two of this conversation, wherein Zoë and thus Amanda's breach of sanity are now on the table, but also because Amanda has been hiding a very gross secret, which is that she kind of can't stop worshipping the idea that Zoë was a complete alien bad egg changeling cuckoo child and thus not Amanda's fault, so if Zoë was this crazy terrorist monster that everybody is saying she was, then as the mother Amanda's not culpable. That's the actually appalling part, because of course Amanda can't process any of those thoughts or she will die, so she has to do a trick, which is to mourn her daughter in the shadow of this thing that she's invented to make it easier. Like, when your best friend is moving away and you pretend to hate him, you can't actually think or say, "I'm only pretending to start this fight so I won't miss you," right? You just go ahead and sock him.
So there is silence and there are bad feelings, and Zoë is in the corner, hulking and watching, and finally their eyes agree to talk about what Amanda did. They don't know how deep they can go with it yet, but they know it has to be acknowledged. So they are very sad with each other, and Daniel admits that he's pissed she pulled that in public, and she angrily -- rehearsedly -- says that she was in shock and didn't know what she was even saying, and then goes on to tell an even more elaborate story about how obviously Zoë was sleeping with Ben Stark who they never even knew, and eventually works herself up into a lather, while Zoë