prozzies and other respectable women

Ashes to Ashes 1.03

Ashes to Ashes continues, hitting many of the same notes as Sam’s stint in Gene Hunt’s world.  Since the pilot, Alex has reliably featured moments of headdesking stupidity in the presence of her mother and her mother’s law firm partner (in 2008, the godfather of her daughter).  Abandoning her ‘you are all figments’ stance, she alternates between amazed gawping and craven attempts to elicit approval.  Rather than backing away slowly from the crazy woman, they offer brief but meaningful insights into their perspectives that inadvertently guide Alex through her hallucinatory new world.  Again like Sam, the gang surprisingly takes her lapses of cranial continence in stride while being horrified by her minor futuristic faux pas…but I suppose without this contractual genre blindness (or just plot-induced stupidity?), the show would be called Special Woman Is Instantly Institutionalised and Spends Thirteen Episodes Heavily Sedated.

Still, it bugs me.  Almost as much as Alex’s club-appropriate workwear, set in a time when a female professional, let alone a detective, would have been strapped into restrictive chin-to-knees pseudo-Victorian armor, heavily featuring those awful high-necked blouses with sewn-in bows and boxy pleated wool skirts.  A few years later, she’d be clad in a solid-color power suit with shoulder pads up to her ears.  Professional specifically did not equal sexy, outside of fetishes similar to those surrounding schoolgirl uniforms (and bearing as much relation to the reality).  A white-collar female was an impenetrable tank.

Despite this incongruity, the show is starting to play with a more complex morality.  Along the lines of the impenetrable tank…after subtly hitting on Gene and being shot down, Alex lets herself be picked up by a red suspender wearing Thatcherite, who she drunkenly boffs to the energetic beats of Bucks Fizz.  Her coworkers start out teasing her when she drags herself into work the following day, hungover and exhausted, but she reacts the way a modern woman working in a chauvinist environment should: yes, I’m dead tired because I was up all night shagging a total stranger, and it was bloody fantastic.  No shame, no cringing, just one of the boys.

Unfortunately…1981 wasn’t quite modern enough for that, or at least for these blokes.  No matter what Aaron Spelling and his Starsky & Hutch taught us in the late 70s, a confident, pretty woman interested in getting laid wasn’t a great girl but someone who should be far more discrete.  The men are uncomfortable, Gene is furious and offering the hard truth that she won’t be respected if she’s known to have sex—part advice for someone working beneath him who needs the respect of his crew, part fury that a woman who’d made herself ‘his’ in some vague but definite way by hitting on him had flipped over to someone who wouldn’t look after her.

This is set in an episode focusing on prostitutes, specifically whether one can be raped, as she claims.  Gene & Co display the sentiments that continue to linger in many minds today—prostitutes, as people who sell their bodies for sex, cease to be properly human.  A woman who doesn’t strenuously resist having sex with men, let alone chasing them for her own pleasure, becomes something closer to a prostitute.  These aren’t rational preconceptions, by any means, but divisions usually instilled before a child hits puberty and are rarely challenged.

Ray, however, possibly the thickest member of Gene’s squad, does rise to the challenge.  He befriends a traumatised young woman and, while he’s obviously disturbed by her revelation that she’s a ‘lady of the night,’ it leads him to the second moral quandary of the episode—framing the man who raped and assaulted her for cocaine possession.  Ray is now unable to accept that a man could go unpunished for violating just a prostitute, and betrays the law he is sworn to uphold in a satisfying but disturbing way.

Even more jolting, this takes place during the denouement, and Alex and the police watching the rapist being arrested on an obviously bogus drug possession charge applaud and congratulate Ray.  None of them acknowledges Ray’s legal violation or suggests there was a better, legal way to go after him—ideally by following the bugger and establishing relationships with the local prostitutes to catch him repeating his crime, rather than bunging him up on a charge that will likely fall apart in court.

This department feels that, together, they can answer to a higher morality than the law when the law fails them.  What terrifying disaster awaits this crew of celibate ersatz Dark Knights if they continue to follow this ‘higher’ calling?

fire up the quattro!

Ashes to Ashes:1.01
2008

The spin-off from the acclaimed (if sometimes excruciating) Life on Mars is self-consciously extreme, with both the drama and dark humor ratcheted up to the appropriate 80s excess.  This year’s timetraveller-slash-madman is DI Alex Drake, a police psychiatrist and single mother who has been investigating the suicide of Sam Tyler.  Familiar with Sam’s fantasy world and characters that suddenly surround her after being shot in the face by druglord-cum-vagrant Arthur Layton, she believes she’s having an elaborate hallucination in the seconds before she dies, but still fights to wake up from it and return to her demanding, impulsive daughter.

Ray Carling, who BBC informs us is now “The Bear,” tells her with regret that her acquaintance Sam Tyler died with the 70s a year earlier, crashing his car into a river after leaving Gene behind on a police chase.  His body was never found, allowing speculation on his Schrödingeresque state to rampage on.  He tells Alex that they key to surviving is to stay with Gene, not only expressing his own philosophy of life but possibly offering a key to why the two officers have been drawn back into the past.

The pilot was a conscious retread of the Life on Mars pilot.  Set-up of current life in the present, spotlighting the few personal connections?  Check.  Introductory Make Ass Of Self scene?  Check.  Enigmatic flashbacks in old-film filter?  Check.  Parent issues centring around that year?  Check.  There’s even similar avatars of hostile knowledge in the form of different childhood icons (which, lacking a UK childhood, had no more significance to me than ‘sort of like Sesame Street’ and ‘some freaky Euro-clown’).  The subject is partly aware of this reality—or only thinks she is—and seeks out the missing signifiers from Sam’s reports.  Unfortunately, phones, radios, and tvs give her nothing; her only communications come in dreams and visions.

Most of the direct communication from the hostile avatars in fact goes over her head, couched in subtle visuals only the viewers see—such as the clown’s head on a shelf in Layton’s junk store, or its reflection looming over her shoulder in a shiny interview table.  While Life on Mars followed Sam’s point of view, DI Drake of more an active object of the mystery than an identification figure.  The audience has more pieces of the puzzle.

Alex thus far seems to be a less sympathetic character than Sam, but a more confident timetraveler-slash-madman, hopefully less likely to likely to commit the forehead-smackingly boneheaded moves that Tyler’s run included at least once per episode.  Instead of acting generally unhinged in a manner that would leave most professionals escorted by security carrying a box of personal belongings, Alex calmly treats the others as both people and figments in turn and with equal sangfroid expects to be treated with respect while stuck wearing uncomfortably revealing clothes.  She also gains a few points by getting drunk with the team and groping Gene on her very first night in the past, thus ensuring they’ll overlook a greater proportion of weird behaviour than if she’d remained in the remote and dismissive pose Sam initially chose.

This spinoff so far seems to retain the parent show’s flaws, particularly in the imbalanced drama/comedy tone.  Particularly, scenes and setups still misfire as often as they catch.  The “A-Team”’s emergence in the gunfight via speedboat with machine guns, while a good visual gag, destroys the delicate dream vs time-travel question.  That could only be a modern person’s fantasy moment.  When scenes catch, though, they really really catch.  When Ray tells of Sam’s death, he is a man more comfortable with his place in life than the resentful demoted DI of the earlier decade.  Gene’s frustration while on the phone to his superior shows a big man who’s time has passed, and knows it.  And entire shows could take place in their new hangout, a wine bar where a long-suffering Magical Italian possibly takes Nelson’s place as the wise bartender.

There is one unbearable bit, though.  I don’t know how I’ll get through a season of an entire cast in those terrible pleated trousers and white jeans.  For the love of Oxford Street, let no lazy designers take those on as this fall’s new look!

that, and NYC blew up…

Heroes interrupted: Volume One in retrospect
1.02 Don’t Look Back

I really wanted to give Peter a break.  He was a nice enough leading character the first time I watched these, after all.  But…he told Nathan he’d been standing on that roof all night.  And when we first see Isaac and Simone in his studio, she tells him they’ve had a hard night.  Ah man…Peter really did stare vacantly at the painting of himself while the medically untrained girlfriend tried to revive her dying boyfriend, before dashing off muttering something about his destiny—leaving her to nurse both her dying boyfriend and dying father ALONE.

That trust fund baby is such an ass.

Angela Petrelli: maybe Freud was right

One of the more reliable combination spoiler/speculationsI’ve found (coming from showrunner interviews that Peter has used his mother’s power on screen) is that Angela Petrelli’s ability is related to Hiro Nakamuru’s.  She can see the future and past, and even be there to some extent (leaving her physical body in the present moment), but can’t affect it while she’s there.  She can only alter and manipulate the present in an attempt to change or cause what she sees.

In this sense, she could be the sort of monster she accuses Matt Parkman of becoming in the second season, using his powers to manipulate others in order the cause of his personal greater good.  Peter, who needs others’ attention and approval at all times to have any sense of self, would be more vulnerable to and damaged by the constant nudging than Teflon Nathan.

This is all supposition, of course, but there’s an oddness to the way she convinces hospital-bound Peter that he is delusional by telling him of his father’s “suicide”:

“He committed suicide.”
“What?!”
Same flat tone: “He committed suicide.”  Come on, be manipulated already…

If this is the way they go with her character, it could be quite interesting.  On the other hand, I’m still holding out for something completely undignified, something Hulk-like.  She’s always so pulled together and dignified that I’d love a scene where, after, say, battling Sylar to a standstill in some physically powerful way, she huffs in annoyance and starts the process of rebuilding her perfect WASP updo.

Simone who?

What did I remember of Simone?  Father owned the building where much of the show’s action took place.  Had a gallery full of Isaac’s prophetic paintings, most of which were sold to Linderman.  Started off dating Isaac, briefly dated Peter, shot and killed by Isaac.  Seemed to know everyone (in her services as plot enabler), none of whom noticed her death/disappearance.

She’s more interesting now, the token ‘normal’ who wasn’t obsessed with abilities.  Her interests and her worries are mundane: her father is dying slowly, and she’d like some damn support.  Instead, her boyfriend and the hospice nurse demand she prioritise their self-inflicted dramas.  Like most female characters on tv, she lacks a life—complete with friends—outside the male leads, and is thus narratively stuck hanging around these drips hoping they’ll reciprocate and, unsurprisingly, is only loaded with more demands.  And, not to mention, left out of the adventures, while she buries her father, alone.

Unfortunately, the arc requires her to be the resistor in the circuit of plot, as often the obstruction as the enabler.  She’s a successful (if born to privilege) businesswoman who expects support and respect from those who want to be close to her…in this group, she’s the freak.

Mr Bennet’s daughter

Ah, the days when Mr Bennet lacked context, backstory, even a first name…one of the first season’s great hooks was his interaction with his adopted daughter, Claire.  Was he a monster, a cynical experimenter, or even—least likely of all—a loving father?

Claire inhabits a well worn character slot, the teenage girl who is potentially powerful, but vulnerable not only to the revelation of her abilities but to the usual pains, parents, and sea changes of adolescence.  Her father attempts to manipulate what facets of her identity she explores and develops—while her latter-day “cool” Mom encourages her indiscriminately—from both altruistic and selfish impulses.  Her power threatens the fragile identities of both.

Not only is Claire a teenager, and thus not only free but expected to explore alternate personas—from cheerleader to hellraiser to krelboyne—she is also adopted.  Her strange ability is something that is unexpectedly part of her but upsets her “real” identity and life, as her own DNA has the potential to do.  Her present image as a smart, popular girl with an average and loving family is more a surface than she realises, but at this stage she only worries that her ability to heal from any injury hints at something horrible, or wonderful, in her past and biology.

Bennet thwarts her efforts to explore that past and her ability in order, he says, to protect her from leaving the relative safety of childhood and facing the adult world.  And, incidentally, from a life of torturous experimentation at the hands of his employers.  Mostly, though, he’s protecting himself, his sane, bland family life, and his unexpectedly cherished identity as a dad.

Parkman: now with more fail

Matt Parkman is blessed with suck.  After failing the detective’s exam, again, the bored traffic cop begins to hear voices in his head that originate as other people’s thoughts, and immediately uses the ability to find the terrified little girl that the dozen or so detectives think has been kidnapped or killed.  He’s a hero, and goes on to become first a detective with a spotless conviction record, then commissioner, governor, and eventually the guy in one of Isaac’s Oval Office paintings.  He knows what everyone within earshot (so to speak) is going to do and how they can be persuaded to go his way, so there’s no stopping him!

Except, actually, there’s no non-psychic way he could have known where the little girl was hiding or the name “Syler,” so he instead turns from bored traffic cop to oversharing nervous schmoe to serial murderer suspect being roughly handcuffed and searched.

Part Xander, part object lesson, Parkman is the ordinary person who demonstrates to all potential heroes why they could do worse than liming their extraordinary potential in mediocrity like layers of playground mulch.  Those who witness—or in particular, are show up by—a hero’s unexplainable heroics will more often ignore Occam’s razor than favour of a convoluted conspiracy theory that leaves the dangerous person safely institutionalised, whether by Homeland Security or the men in white coats.

Even worse for poor Matt, his arc is defined by one of the first thoughts he hears, from a female superior: This guy is worthless.  In a slight change from the original pilot, Matt’s internal filter sifts away others’ calm, complimentary, or even relieved-at-seeing-a-cop thoughts, but turns up the volume for the dismissals and insults that feed his deep insecurity.

His power is paralleled by his severe dyslexia, which he refuses to reveal even when he is legally entitled to assistance or alternatives.  Parkman may not prove to be the pointiest pin in the cushion in later episodes, but he’s never shown to truly lack intelligence; nevertheless, he considers his problems with processing written information to be a secret stupidity that needs to stay hidden.  His dyslexia is only a component of his deep insecurity, and his telepathy becomes another.