Suburgatory 1-11: Out in the 'Burbs

Okay, let's get the weird incest thing out of the way first.  The first and only thing most people want to talk about with Suburgatory is the relationship between the central father/daughter couple which, because of a mixture of Dawson's Casting and the generally even, banter-filled relationship between the two, has been seen as perhaps more romantic than filial.  In truth, there's not a lot of basis for this, and I think Jane Levy and Jeremy Sisto actually do a good precocious-teenager/understanding-dad[1] relationship, and it's only made awkward by the too-small age gap and a few weird scenes (e.g. the two of them dancing in the Sweet Sixteen episode).  The father/daughter relationship in Veronica Mars was pretty similar, and nobody made much in the way of jokes, mainly because Enrico Colatani looks like he could actually have a teenage daughter.  But it's a fun oppositional reading to take, and once you hear the theory it's hard to stop noticing possibly-incestuous shit in the show.

At this point, though, it's hard not to feel that the writers aren't having some fun here.  This episode opens with a fairly gratuitous Jane Levy shower scene, which leads to the water being cut off, and both father and daughter going to answer the door in their towels.  Later, closeted guidance counsellor Mr. Wolf mentions bidding on a Perfect Strangers box set online, with the comment "You know, I don't think those two were really cousins."  The obvious context of the joke is his own unacknowledged homosexuality, but I can't help but think of it as a subtle nod to the improbability of Levy really being Sisto's daughter.

All of this ties in with the generally unreal feeling of Suburgatory.  The setting looks like a colourful theme park, the women look like Barbie dolls, and the characters all seem to be cliches exaggerated so much that it becomes vaguely surreal.  It would be easy to take this as a failing of the show, and from a conventional viewpoint it is, with the satire often being broad and unoriginal.  On paper it's a standard, not-particularly-great family sitcom, but there's a kind of ungraspable strangeness lurking below the surface.

Perhaps the strangeness has something to do with the swerve that seems to occur more and more in Suburgatory, where the show will intentionally invoke a standard sitcom plot and then veer off into something different altogether, or have everyone seem confused as to what page they're on.  In this episode Tessa seems to believe she's in one of those overly-earnest coming out episodes (as does Mr. Wolf at the end), when the boy in question is interested in the school jocks not for their good looks but because he's an undercover officer investigating for steroids.

The entire premise is ludicrous, of course, and involves that sitcom thing where people talk just vague enough to misunderstand each other.  But it's still a distinctly unusual plot, particularly in how nobody addresses or notices the absurdity of the (married) steroid-hunting undercover agent.  It also invokes two after school special topics -- gay acceptance and drugs -- and shrugs them off without much attention.  Only Tessa, determined to be the cool accepting city girl, gets drawn into the coming-out narrative, and the show more or less mocks her for it.  As it turns out, Chatswin may be superficial, but it's not bigoted -- if only perhaps because bigotry would involve taking an interest in other people.

There's also the manic stalkerishness of Lisa, the obligatory best friend character who has actually turned into one of my favourites.  She's weird in a real life way, that slightly off-putting air (instead of a mass of quirks, which is how TV usually does weird) that you see in the girl who sits alone at the lunch table.  She's also one of the few regulars who looks like she could actually be in high school, which helps.  In this episode she becomes fixated on the newcomer and promptly tries to appeal to the newcomer in many of her strange ways, from dressing up as a male jock to telling him that she's never been to his home city of Chicago but she's seen the musical.  What's notable here is the lack of reaction from Tessa, the undercover guy, or really anyone.  Lisa is never rejected and never learns her lesson -- she's just an odd element out in the plot's orbit.

I don't want to overstate the case here.  There are a lot of times when Suburgatory is comfortable staying in standard sitcom plots without changing it up much at all.  The show is still charming, but it's nothing revolutionary, and only moderately well-executed.  The plotline between George and Dallas episode isn't exactly a stock plot, building as it does off of a serialized storyline from previous episodes, but it does rely on a lot of misinterpreted double-entendres that wouldn't be out of place on Three's Company.

The basic recurring joke is that George thinks Dallas is making overt sexual advances at him through thinly-veiled double entendres, but the ditzy Dallas actually means just what she literally says.  Cheryl Hines is given a pretty thankless job here as one of the above-mentioned Barbie dolls, but one who's supposed to be at least somewhat endearing.  At the same time, there's an issue with the possibility of a Dallas/George relationship, which is that it's the equivalent of a real person dating a cartoon.  If Dallas is really dumb enough that she doesn't see the possible double meaning in asking George to squeeze her melons, while George is more or less a normal person, then it seems like any relationship between them would be so unequal that he would be taking advantage of her.

Certainly the suburban housewife culture deserves satire (especially as it's being glamourized in all of those Real Housewives series) but Dallas is a very problematic way to go about it.  Her overt sexuality and naivete are a joke, as over-the-top as everything else in the series, but even if it's done for the purposes of humour there's still the overt text of a hot chick seducing a guy, and that surface level doesn't go away simply because it's played for laughs.  As Community has discovered, an ironic mud wrestling match is still a mud wrestling match.

There's also a kind of tomboy misogyny in the way Suburgatory separates the sympathetic, intelligent girls in Tessa and Lisa from people like Dallas and Dalia.  Of course, the men of suburbia are mocked as well, but even superficial characters like Alan Tudyk's Noah[2] have at least a certain amount of cunning, whereas Dallas and Dalia are completely braindead.  The performances add more depth and nuance to these characters than the writing does, but it's still rather problematic.

"Out in the 'Burbs" is written by series newcomer Elliot Hegarty, who I know absolutely nothing about, and directed by Bob Kushell, who previously directed what was probably the series' best episode in "The Barbecue".  Comedy writing credits are always fairly arbitrary, but this does feel like a different kind of writing than most Suburgatory episodes, being less satirical and more broadly comedic.  All of the characters are mocked (even Tessa in her desire to live up to her own self-image), but for once it doesn't feel like they're meant to stand in for broad swathes of people.  It's a shift to a more character-driven, idiosyncratic kind of comedy, which I think frankly works better for this show.

As for Kushell, he mainly sticks to the show's day-glo aesthetic and conventional directing technique, but there are some decidedly odd shots in here.  For instance, one scene begins with George's head seemingly having been replaced by a melon (due to strange camera perspective) with Dallas whispering "squeeze it".  The Lynchian tableau doesn't last long, and is quickly assimilated back into a fairly standard scene, but that oddness is still there, creeping in at the corners.

(The giant "MELONS" sign really adds to the absurdity here.)

A lot of shows spend their first seasons trying to figure out what they'll eventually become, and Suburgatory falls into this category.  There are a lot of different shows it could become: a gentle family hang-out show, a sharp social satire, a character-based single-camera serial comedy of the kind that's so popular now, or something decidedly stranger.  All of these could be good shows in their own right, although some of them -- particularly the satire -- would require stronger execution than Emily Kapnek and crew have previously showed.  But right now I'm enjoying the show in its inchoate form, with all its goals and half-realized desires pushing against each other.  And maybe its this struggle between several different visions and possibilities that leads to that intoxicating, unplaceable weirdness.

Next week: "If you were really good, you'd get the mouse to stay off both paths.  You know, like dada.  Everything is pointless."

[1]Sisto might actually be my favourite TV dad in recent memory.  The guy is just so slick.

[2]Tudyk is predictably great in this role, but it's probably a bad sign that I had to look up his character's name on Wikipedia.

Star Trek 1-18: Arena

In order to get Star Trek on the air, Gene Roddenberry says that he had to sell it as a Western, a "Wagon Train to the stars", and that certainly does show up in some episodes ("Mudd's Women", "The Conscience of the King")[1].  However, I would venture to say that it's really more of a horror series than anything else -- the horror hiding inside a sci-fi shell, which in itself hid inside a Western shell.  The world of the original Star Trek is one filled with supernatural beings, many of whom can bear the image of your best friend, and many of whom are completely beyond human comprehension.  These beings, almost to a man, are out to kill you.

The setting is in space, but the show rarely tells genuinely science fictional stories, proceeding from a "what-if" question about our future.  Star Trek takes place on the outskirts of civilized space, so we don't get much of a picture of what this future society looks like.  Instead, we have the cold darkness of space, a space you apparently can't go two feet in without running into some Lovecraftian god beyond your comprehension.  Two of the three episodes directly before "Arena" ("Shore Leave" and "The Squire of Gothos") dealt with beings who were or at least seemed all-powerful, although those two took a more humorous tack.

"Arena" is an action episode though, and not a humour episode, or one of the more overt horror or science-fictional episodes.  From the start we're immersed into fighting, a shootout on a ruined Federation outpost, which leads to a warp-speed chase, until the Enterprise and its mysterious enemy run into the home of a race of god-like beings, who chide them for being more violently and promptly force Kirk and the enemy captain to fight mano y mano.  The end of the episode makes a plea for mercy and understanding, but structurally this a story told entirely through violence, and very aestheticized violence at that.

We start in on the fighting almost immediately, beaming down to an alien planet that is being, to use the scientific terminology, having the shit bombed out of it.  Full-scale war is at this point unknown to the peaceful, near-utopian world of Star Trek -- but the Enterprise exists on the fringes of that utopia, the unexplored frontier that fuels the Western genre Roddenberry claimed to channel.  So we have full-scale warfare -- but it's a rather odd depiction of that warfare.  Six Enterprise members beam down into some kind of central pavilion, where they are then continuously bombed from afar.  The previously unseen and unnamed security officers die, of course (these are the infamous "redshirts", although their shirt colour is actually much more varied than I had been lead to beleive).  The regulars then run around the open area dodging remarkably inaccurate bombs.  Kirk even evades some by his patented Shatnerian acrobatics, and then takes them out with a powerful grenade that looks like a blue eggshell.

From a realist perspective, this scene is ridiculous.  The idea that the main characters (and only them) can survive industrial warfare by tucking and rolling is silly, and turns a mass battle into something that can be solved by individual heroism.  But Star Trek isn't trying to be realistic SF (and no, that's not a contradiction).  Instead it's more of a mythic, fantastical storyline, where Kirk is a larger-than-life hero that's both in charge of the ship and does all of the exciting adventuring.  It's also interesting to note the futuristic weaponry, which looks cute but causes a massive explosion.  Like most of the technology in Star Trek, it's not really important to the plot, and exists without much comment from our characters.  Obviously weapons technology has developed considerably in 200 years, but it's still a shock when we see the massive explosion the grenade generates.  But it's just a shock, and it passes.

It's worth also noting the landscape in the screenshot above.  Star Trek is a world of bright primary colours -- the three uniforms we see Starfleet officers in are red, blue and yellow -- and landscapes that have an almost radioactive glow.  This can be seen in the bright yellowish-brown backdrop, with a clear blue sky, where the initial battle takes place.  We also get a version of that same background later in the episode, on the "arena" planet, although this one has enough mountainous scrub brush that it looks almost Leone-esque.
























Obviously the technical limitations of the era were a large part of this look.  But I think it also reinforces the almost mythic qualities of the story.  Even in space, there's very little darkness in Star Trek.  It's not a coincidence that both of this episode's battles take place in sets that look plopped right out of a Western.

The chase scene that follows is a more genuine attempt to adapt the rhythm of another genre to science fiction, and it doesn't quite work -- we're stuck in the stationary Enterprise no matter how fast everyone says they're going.  When Kirk takes the ship up to Warp 8, we get a rough idea that it's dangerous from the rest of the crew's reaction, but the lack of worldbuilding stops this from being much more than technobabble -- the show never tells us exactly what's significant about Warp 8.  The scene is like something out of a radio play, where we hear the action being tersely described instead of seeing it, and that's not good for a series that relies on visual novelty as much as Star Trek does.

The aliens this week are actually a great example of that visual spectacle.  As much as science fiction claims to be a literature of ideas, it makes more profit as a vehicle for outlandish thrills, from the trashy covers of pulp magazines to the massive success of Star Wars.  The Gorn is an attempt at such an appeal, and a departure from the usual human-with-weird-ears-and-forehead approach to aliens.  Instead it's the guy-in-a-suit approach reminiscent of kaiju movies.

This is the carnival-esque novelty appeal (something similar to Gunning's "cinema of attractions") that you find often in early TV.  In other words, "our show might not have the best writing, but it's the only one with a giant lizard man".  "Arena" even acknowledges this by having the other characters watch this fight on the big screen from the bridge of the Starship, shot exactly as we see it -- even in the show's world this fight is a spectacle.  The Metron, the all-powerful beings du jour, represent the other side of Star Trek, the wannabe-cerebral side side prone to morality plays.  They even look angelic (and extremely effeminate), evoking all sorts of age-old theological questions about why God allows war.  (It's apparently to punish us for being violent, at least according to Star Trek.)

This side of the story doesn't really bear too much scrutiny.  The Metron are an alien species that views humans as barbaric and violent, a fairly familiar sci-fi trope, but their solution to intruders is to make them fight to the death and wipe out the loser, which doesn't exactly seem like something a peaceful society would do.  Also, while Kirk eventually chooses mercy, he does so only after blasting the Gorn with a cannon that could have killed it.  It's easy to be peaceful when you have the other guy on the end of your phaser.

This is really quite typical of the Golden Age sci-fi that Star Trek takes its cues from, which often tried to convey rather staid allegorical Lessons (by the time Trek aired there was already a backlash against this in the New Wave movement of SF).  There's an uncomfortable enjambment of didactic, Asimovian science fiction and the raw dumb joy of the pulps here.  And on a further level, there are all the other genres thrown in the stew of Star Trek, at least a few of which I've tried to get to above -- horror, epic, Western.  This is probably why Star Trek was such a cult phenomenon -- the mass audience didn't know how to respond to a show so far outside of the genre templates (even fans of more pure SF shows like The Twilight Zone), but for those who enjoyed the weird alchemy, it was the best thing on television.

While it's easy to pick at the flaws in "Arena" from a distance of forty-plus years, it doesn't change how striking an episode it is.  We don't get a chance to breathe -- like I said about Bob Newhart last week[2], the whole episode is of one cloth, without a B-plot in sight.  Contemporary shows have a comfortable rhythm that usually requires us not to spend too much time in one place or on one subject, making it all the more striking when there is an extended scene (e. g. the long confrontation scene in Mad Men's "The Gypsy and the Hobo").  We can see the alternative in this episode, which is essentially a 50-minute action sequence.  It's unrelenting, it sometimes drags, and it's sometimes uncomfortable, but you nevertheless can't take your eyes from it.

This is what created a cult following that's still talked about (usually jokingly) today.  Star Trek is a show that's easy to mock but impossible to forget.  In this episode Kirk defeats the more physically powerful Gorn by using his chemistry knowledge to construct a cannon.  Science triumphs over brute force -- and strangely enough, the square-jawed conventional leading man Captain Kirk becomes a symbol for the triumphant nerd, the weak but smart triumphing over the big brute.  History was being made, where no man had gone before but many would go after.

Next week: "I love you.  I love being heterosexual with you.  But if for some reason you're not feeling it, just let me know, so I can find another woman to be heterosexual with.  Because I have needs."

[1]This would make Firefly a lot less of an original fusion than it's often described as, although Whedon uses the "space Western" concept a lot more literally.

[2]I'm tempted to say that this unity of plot is characteristic of older TV shows, but I really haven't watched enough to speak definitively.

The Bob Newhart Show 1-17: The Man with the Golden Wrist

Misanthropy is a fine line.  Everybody likes the witty cynic, the one who hates the world in pithy one-liners (as evidence, consider House, which is on like its eighth season or something).  But there's a difference between hating people and acting hatefully towards people.  Or maybe that difference is just panache -- it's the difference between the lovable rogue and the teenager with the gothy T-shirt sneering at you.  Maybe only handsome, clever people are allowe the luxury of being antisocial.  But I think there's a question of technique as well.

This is a line that The Bob Newhart Show has to walk without really letting on that it's doing it.  Newhart is an atypical sitcom protagonist, at least by the standards of his era -- he's quiet, introverted, reasonable, and a good deal older than the rest of the cast (with the exception of Bill Daily, who still looks younger).  Even his acting technique is dramatically different, much more naturalistic than the cartoony, almost hammy approach the others take[1].  He's a man at odds with the world around him, and he acts like one actually would -- surly, good-natured but only to a point, and getting pretty tired of dealing with all these people.  This isn't the cartoonish misanthropy you see in your Houses and Dr. Coxes.  It's more of a real world-weariness.

This dynamic can be used very well to act against the sitcom's social norms, as in the previous episode I looked at.  But at times it can also come to make Bob seem simply mean-spirited.  Sometimes it becomes difficult not to identify with the brightly-coloured world he lives in, cartoony or not, and wonder why he can't just sit back and enjoy it.  "The Man with the Golden Arm" is one of those episodes where he just seems like a grump rejecting the kindness of everyone around him.  Unsympathetic protagonists can certainly work (which is why It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of my favourite shows) but Bob's unlikeability makes the episode hard to sit through -- the format isn't suited for it, and while I hate talking about intentionality, it's hard to imagine that the writers were consciously making their star unbearable.

The plot of the episode revolves around Bob's birthday, and in particular the watch Emily gets him as a present.  Bob likes the gift, but is aghast when he discovers how much it costs.  It's the type of mundane, eveyday plot the series uses to counterbalance its extreme personalities.  It would be easy to go all-out with the watch -- make it absurdly expensive and equipped with futuristic doo-dads -- but it remains a mundane problem.  Later in "The Man with the Golden Arm" we find out that the watch is $1300, which was certainly a lot of money, allegedly a third or so of Emily's salary as a substitute teacher, but not so much as to seem completely unrealistic.  (When was the last time you saw someone's salary stated in exact numbers on TV?  And someone who wasn't ludicrously rich?)

It's perhaps the mundanity of the event that makes Bob's sourness stick out to me.  In the first place, modern gift etiquette frowns on even knowing, much less trying to learn, how expensive a gift you received is[2].  On top of that, it's established early on that the watch isn't returnable -- it's custom-engraved -- so no matter how much Bob makes Emily regret it, the couple isn't going to get their money back.  When Bob keeps going on about how he doesn't need a fancy watch, it seems less like the typical sitcom lead affronted by the irrational world around him and more an asshole chewing someone out for the gift they got him.  Maybe this is simply a gap in cultural mores, but the show's writers are usually deftly able to strike a balance between kindness and sarcasm, so the failure here seems odd.

This prickliness extends to his interactions with the rest of the cast.  Bob is established early in the episode as one of those guys who doesn't want you to acknowledge his birthday, much less make a big deal out of it.  As a "it's-just-Tuesday" type myself, I can relate.  Still, there's a kind of inverted narcissism in the way he goes about it, informing everyone that they know it's his birthday but they shouldn't do anything.  The other characters point this out, so to some degrees it's intentional, but it does make Bob a more obviously flawed protagonist than he's been in the past.  Later in the episode, at a surprise party, he comes off as an utter grouch, attacking everyone around him for the effort they've put into being kind to him, or at least trying to be.

(The one thing I like (perhaps even love) about this scene is how Howard keeps explaining on gag gifts to his date, usually working Bob's profession in for no reason.  "You see, psychologists are not supposed to be afraid of the dark, and a nightlight, that's very funny.")

That this episode works at all is a credit to the talent of the actors involved.  The party guests do their best lame-uncle acts, and it succeeds at conjuring up one of those nightmarish social gatherings that you're obligated to attend but don't enjoy in any way, suffering through the lame jokes of people like Jerry.  This is, of course, old-school talent that's very broad and straightforward, and that can seem hackish next to the seemingly more sophisticated comedy on television today.  (Once again, this may  just be a difference in era, or the fact that dynamite punchlines in the 70s seem tired now.)  But there is an art to that, and that art can be seen in how the cast alchemizes a misjudged script into a fairly acceptable episode.

Even here, however, "The Man with the Golden Wrist" descends a bit too far into cruelty.  Characters like Jerry are meant to be buffoons, but they're buffoons we find funny and want to spend time around.  If we start viewing his jokes and gaffes as unfunny and tiresome -- as Bob does in this
 episode -- then The Bob Newhart Show ceases to be enjoyable.  Sitcoms can be uncomfortabe (contemporary "cringe comedy" being the best example), but at the very least they have to be entertaining.  Peter Bonerz (tee hee hee) does a great job portraying a guy Bob wouldn't want to be around, but in doing so he creates a character that we as viewers don't really want to be around.

So, in the end, Emily agrees to exchange the watch (although the issue of the inscription is seemingly dropped), martial harmony is restored to the Hartley household, and there's a brief allusion to sex and a lot of hooting from the studio audience -- the classic sitcom ending.  The threat to the family unit, even a family unit of two as in Bob Newhart, is resolved, and this reconnection is represented through physical contact both on-screen and off-screen (or so it is implied).  But all of this feels a bit hollow, because the conflict, instead of being a genuine threat to the family unit, is just kind of pointless.

(Throughout this scene I'm distracted by the raw shininess of Emily's shirt.  Man, 70s fashion was the best.)

Part of what made this hard for me as a viewer is that this storyline takes up the entirety of the episode.  Contemporary comedies will frequently seperate the cast into two or three storylines that have nothing to do with each other, just so that everyone gets their time to shine.  This can lead to episodes seeming crowded and rushed, but this episode makes clear why it became standard -- twenty-four straight minutes of the same story starts to feel oppressive, especially when it's a story that is pretty thin to begin with.  I certainly wouldn't mind if a couple of Bob and Emily's arguments had been cut in favour of Howard and his date doing something wacky.

This leads me once again to the feeling that my objections may stem from generation gap moreso than from actual merit.  But I've enjoyed most of the other episodes of the show I've watched, albeit not in the same way as I would enjoy Community and It's Always Sunny.  Besides which, I don't think (or perhaps I just hope) the unavoidable fact that I have a 2012 perspective on a 1973 show means that my perspective is flawed.  In fact, I would go so far as to argue that it isn't any less legitimate than the 1973 perspective.  In the end, there's no such thing as objective taste that you can set aside from the critical biases of the culture we grow up in, and that's what makes criticism a worthwhile endeavour.  In other words, my distaste for the episode may say more about me than it does about the episode itself, but even so I think it's worth saying.

Next Week: "You will not be destroyed.  It would not be... civilized."

[1]This isn't meant as a slight against the rest of the cast -- sometimes you need hammy.

[2]The Office did a similar joke, where Michael got an iPod for the office's $15-maxium Secret Santa, so it's not a completely foreign idea for contemporary times.  It's worth noting, however, that on The Office the inappropriate value of the gift was immediately apparent, whereas Bob actively investigates the watch's true cost, and that in The Office it was a much smaller element of the plot.

Lost 1-17: ...In Translation

This was totally not planned, but somehow the gods of random.org have assigned me to cover specifically the Korean episodes of Lost as I go through it in my attempts to cover the gaping holes in my TV-viewing experience.  I'm a little worried about avoiding redundancy here, which shows you just how poor I'd be at covering anything week-to-week.  But I think it's also interesting because "...In Translation" acts as a counterpart to "House of the Rising Sun" in more intereting ways than being a direct sequel.  The two episodes are interlocking pieces of a small puzzle within the larger puzzle of the series.

Usually the flashback plotlines in Lost involve discovering new information about a character's backstory, information which (ideally) helps the viewer make sense of the choices the character makes in that episode.  This formula is more than a little contrived, but it basically reflects the inherent difficulties and contrivances of ensemble television -- characters have to fade in and out of importance, with a secondary character getting a "showcase episode" where they're really important and then being back in the background next week [1].  But "...In Translation" breaks the mold just a bit.  Essentially we don't learn anything new about Sun and Jin.  We see Jin's criminal activities in new detail, but everything we really needed to know was implied in "House of the Rising Sun".  Instead the flashbacks show a shift in perspective, looking at the events of the couple's past through Jin's perspective.

There's a bold element to this in that it demands memory from the audience, something television shows are famously loathe to do.  To fully appreciate this episode you need to remember the details of a B-plot from 11 episodes ago (four months during the original airing[2]), being able to recognize where the two perspectives interlock and where they differ.  But what's really interesting is how different a change of perspective makes the story become.  This isn't a Rashomon episode where the basic facts of what happened are in dispute -- Sun and Jin's flashbacks mesh completely.  Instead, it's what we take away from the stories that changes.

In "House of the Rising Sun", Jin is an initially romantic husband who becomes distant and cold.  Sun's desire to leave him seems reasonable -- this is essentially a story of a disillusioned woman in danger.  In "...In Translation", Sun is an ignorant wife whose innocence has to be maintained, and is ungrateful for this.  She's basically the Lois Lane character.  From both characters' perspectives they're the victims and their spouse is, if not a villain, at least a burden.  This is actually a quite clever use of a flashback structure that is usually sadly conventional.

Jin's story is a quintessentially noir-ish one, concerning his attempt to maintain his morals (e.g. not killing the safety inspector) in the face of a corrupt world, and inevitably becoming half-corrupt himself in the process.  Lost returns again and again to the world of crime fiction, a genre it weaves into its tapestry of science fiction, survival narrative, and human drama.  The backstories of characters like Kate, Sawyer, and to a lesser extent Shannon and Boone all seem to be lifted out of pulp crime novels.  This is why the "outside world" that exists only in flashbacks usually seems less real than the world of the island.  The direction of "...In Translation" cements this tone, with most scenes taking place in almost unreasonable amounts of shadow.

(This government bureaucrat doesn't keep his house very well lit.  Maybe he's conserving energy?)

Jin's flashback then traces his evolution (or devolution) from the doe-eyed suitor we see at the start of "House of the Rising Sun" to the violent, stand-offish man we see on the island.  The flashback is more interesting than his plot on the island this week, which rests on the same problematic aspects that I've previously mentioned about the Koreans as characters.  Jin's patriarchy remains essentially racialized, with all of the white characters trying to protect Sun and her right to speech (essentially identified here with her right to speak English).  At the same time there's a tolerance plot where Jin is unfairly suspected for sabotaging Michael's raft.  The result is a kind of contradiction: Lost condemns prejudice while engaging in it itself.

All of this speaks to the vulnerability of the liberal humanist ideology that Lost bases itself upon.  In its most positive aspects, liberal humanism is anti-discriminatory, viewing all human beings as deserving equal rights.  However, issues arise when oppressions intersect, and at this point liberalism can become an ideological justification for the very discrimination it situates itself against.  This is how well-meaning left-of-centre types end up signing on to imperial adventures in the Middle East to protect the rights of women in burqas.

Of course, I'm not genuinely comparing an episode of Lost to the Iraq war, but the same ideological constructs are at play.  Early on in the episode we see Sun in a bikini, and Jin frantically tries to cover her up, invoking a conflict between Sun, more Westernized and liberated (being able to speak English), and Jin, patriarchal, prudish, and unapologetically foreign.  (Funny, isn't it, how Americans seem to view womens' most important right as the ability to dress scantily.)  This is a conflict within liberal humanism, between respect for other cultures and respect for women, although at the same time it's engaging in the racist depiction of foreign cultures as backwards and less liberated[3].  The way in which Jin is both the perpetrator of and victim of prejudice could show a key example of intersectionality, but in the end the show is unsure of itself and falls back on the same narrative of the foreign brute and the beautiful foreign woman who just wants to be an American -- and who saves the day by speaking English.

What's really required is a more complex model that recognizes intersecting identities and oppressions.  It needs to consider the web of social forces instead of simply condemning individuals.  Lost makes motions towards this, but hesitates, and the Koreans are in a half-world between stereotypes and decent characters.  This kind of uncertainty goes to the roots of Lost: Jin's speech is sometimes subtitled, sometimes not; the characters are placed in a social context through their flashbacks but also ripped from that context by the premise of the show.  Ultimately this splintered, unsure approach fails.  The opening scene is telling: when we see Jin covering up Sun, the camera cuts away numerous times to the various white American characters watching on the beach and looking uncomfortable.  Even on TV, the viewer can only take on the role of a white spectator gazing on at these strange half-people and wishing they would go away.

The other plots in this episode fall more within Lost's ideological wheelhouse.  There's not much of the bizarre mythos and ongoing plots that Lost became famous for, and instead we have the characters facing dilemmas straight out of an ethics textbook.  The primary one is Michael's attempt to build a raft, and the inevitable question of who gets a seat on the raft.  Of course, this is a Gilligan plot[4] in the most literal sense -- as viewers we know (or are at least pretty sure) that Michael's raft is not going to find a nice boat of ordinary people who will rescue everyone and take them back to the States.  The series even acknowledges this.  At the end of the episode we learn that it was in fact Walt who set fire to the raft, and this is not even known, much less addressed, by any of the castaways except Locke.  His rationale is that he finds the island fun and wants to stay there.  This is our rationale as viewers as well: we like the island, we want the Lostaways to stay on the island for our amusement, and we're okay with the show going to extremes to keep it there.  What could be an annoying cop-out is turned into a kind of self-aware contract with the viewer.

The question of who should ride the raft, discarded by the catastrophe, does pose ethical questions that are never fully explored.  It's the old ethical dilemma of who to save, one that hasn't lost its power through repetition.  This is probably not new to philosophy students, but even presenting thought-provoking questions, ones that don't have a right answer that can be arrived at by the end of the episode, in the margins of a hit TV show is a bit of a revolution.  This is true especially considering the serialization-adverse network television scene that Lost hit like a tidal wave in 2004.

So who do you save in a situation like this?  The weakest and neediest?  The most deserving?  Women and children first?  In Lost it mainly goes to the ones who have done the most to contributing to the raft: Michael, Walt, and Sawyer (who provided the materials), with one seat hanging in the air and the subject of debate.  The liberal capitalist order has restored itself on the islands -- the raft becomes the property of Michael because he has put in the work to build it, with Sawyer a sub-contractor.  This may sound fair, but it seems less so when you consider people like Claire who couldn't have contributed much if they wanted to.  This debate isn't really played out in the episode, but it's batted into the laps of the audience, and Lost trusts that its audience is smart enough to consider the possibilities themselves.  The ratings rewarded them for that trust -- the TV audience is smarter than network execs usually aim for, or at least like to feel smarter.

The other plotline in this episode is a fairly trivial one about the budding relationship between Sayid and Shannon.  This one doesn't quite work in the context of the characters -- the super-serious Sayid worrying about a crush in what is still a survival situation, and the general lack of chemistry between the two -- but it's perhaps a better display of liberal non-discrimination than the Korean plotline that dominates the episode.  The show is matter-of-fact about the interracial couple, not speechifying on it but having it still present through Boone's definite but not overpowering animus.

"...In Translation" is then an episode that shows Lost's ruling political ideology more than most.  Like a lot of American TV, it takes a noisy stance against explicit discrimination, but this is less ideal than it appears beneath the surface.  But Lost presents all of this more explicitly than most, even going so far as to name characters after key liberal thinkers like Rousseau and Locke, and embodies the desert-island man-in-nature thought experiment that these thinkers were so fond of.  This is what I think makes it worth studying, besides its considerable merits as a television show: it's a banner of the ruling ideology of our age, with all that ideology's benefits, flaws, and contradictions clear to see.

Next week: Bob Newhart gets all mad and shit.

[1]Primetime Adventures, a quite witty (and fun) roleplaying game based around TV storytelling tropes, actually has a mechanic for "screentime this episode" that codifies this unwritten rule.  The Koreans don't have a lot of 3s.

[2]Of course, it's less time if you're watching it through after the fact, even on my slow schedule.  This may be why so many people like watching serial dramas on DVD better than following them week-to-week.  But I'm always trying to consider how these shows would have appeared in their original presentation first and foremost, as that's still the primary method of television consumption.

[3]Korean culture may or may not be more patriarchal than American culture -- I'm not really qualified to make a distinction either way.  Most likely it is in some ways and isn't in others.  I'm more interested in the implications of this portrayal than its accuracy.

[4]A term I may have just invented, in which characters try to challenge the premise of the show and obviously fail, because if they succeed there wouldn't be a show.  Think Gilligan trying to get off the island, or the Losties doing the same.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 7-13: "The High School Reunion Part 2: The Gang's Revenge"

No screencaps this week due to technical difficulties.  Your tables shall remain sadly unbroken.  Triple ho.

It's Always Sunny has done a lot of shocking things over the years, but perhaps the most shocking part of this episode is that it opens with a "Previously On" segment.  I mean, there's a standard opening: we see the time and place (almost always Paddy's Pub) flash up on a black screen while hearing the audio of an inane, bizarre conversation, then cutting into that conversation, which continues until one of the cast members barges in with the plot of the week.  I mean, it's the formula for a reason.  Come on, people!

All joking aside, the unprecedented "previously on" segment reflect a remarkable turn to continuity in a normally episodic show.  These are episodes aimed squarely at people who have been following the series since episode one, and know who all of the recurring characters (some of whom have only been alluded to before now) are, know why Dee is wearing a weird metal contraption, and the ongoing downward spirals of the waitress and Rickety Cricket.  None of this is covered in the "previously on", of course: it's almost a futile gesture in an episode as geared as this one is to long-term fans.

There are some who might criticize an episode like this for being lazy, relying on the show's established history to recycle past gags with the joke being nothing more than "Hey, remember this?"  And there's some merit to that.  But to some extent this is the nature of episodic television.  Even shows without ongoing storylines build a world and a shared past for the characters and the viewers, and that past is always an unstated presence.  It would in fact be stranger for a show to never refer to past episodes, as though the characters were constantly being mind-wiped, although this was the standard on TV for many years.

The call-back is then cheap in some ways, but in other ways neccessary.  It's Always Sunny falls into the category of comedies that rely on a cult audience, from their courting of politically volatile subject matter to the clearly personal nature of the audience.  This is a show that started without any kind of introduction to the characters or the setting, as though it had been going on for years and we just got the chance to see it.  I've discussed this kind of bond with the audience before, and call-backs are a big part of establishing that "I'm one of the people who get it" dynamic.  But if they're done well the new audience isn't completely left out in the cold.  When Charlie describes himself as an expert in bird law, that's funny in itself, not just because it refers to a previous episode.

"The Gang's Revenge" even offers a call-back in microcosm.  At one point the gang references Schmitty (himself a character from an older episode), who should be at the reunion, but eventually decides that he'll most likely "swoop in at the end and pick up the drunkest chick here".  Later he does exactly that -- far enough away that we've almost forgotten the original comment, and placed in a context we didn't quite expect (e.g. said drunkest chick being the waitress). And of course, the entire episode "calls back" to the one before it.  The entire thing is structured as a Russian nesting doll of callbacks.

The episode employs continuity in other ways too.  For example, we've been getting hints all season that Dennis has turned into a full-blown sexual predator, a natural extension of his existing personality, through the discovery of weird crawlspaces in the bar and tapes of underage girls and so on and so forth[1].  In this episode we see him produce a "kit" from the back of the van in a fit of rage, made up of what are, for all intents and purposes, rape supplies.  The kit, and his frantic explanations for it, are darkly funny, but even more so if you've been watching this side of his   character be slowly exposed over the course of the season.

This isn't really a character arc  -- the characters of It's Always Sunny are too permanently wretched to really have such things.  Instead of growing or gaining a kind of redemption, they only have new facets of their awful personalities revealed.  Still, it's worth noting how even a mostly episodic show has started to incorporate season-long storylines -- Dennis's emergence as a predator and Mac's fatness this season, and Dee's pregnancy in season six.  In times where serialization is so popular, diluted versions of it pop up everywhere.
Which isn't to say that this episode is only watchable if you're a religious viewer of the show.  If this was the first episode you tuned into, you'd probably feel dropped in the middle of something you didn't quite understand, but as I mentioned above that's the same feeling you get if you start with season 1, episode 1.  It's Always Sunny grounds its inner mythology in the universal, the pop cultural, and the relevant.  This episode may not be a ripped-from-the-headlines story like the ones more popular in the early seasons, but it still takes as its basis a well-known phenomenon both on TV and in real life: the high school reunion, which is basically a recreation of high school starring adults who have supposedly matured since then.

Obviously not everyone has been to a reunion, but everyone is familiar with high school and its resultant drama and emotions -- which is probably why American TV keeps returning to it, to the point of obsession.  The gang shares this obsession, particularly Dennis, who has over the course of the show built up quite a mythology surrounding his prowress and popularity in high school.  Other characters' teenage lives have also been established over the course of the season, such as Dee's "aluminum monster" persona.  Of course, Dennis's delusions of being a "golden god" are shattered when in this episode the popular kids (still acting as the dickish popular kids from high school but also inhabiting the "harried normal person" role that pops up all the time on It's Always Sunny) reveal what seems only reasonable in retrospect: nobody really liked Dennis to begin with, and he was always an outsider like the rest of the gang.

These are outsiders of a different type than the glorified losers you usually see on TV, though.  As arrogant as the popular kids in this episode may be, it's hard to blame them for rejecting the gang.  Who would want to spend their high school years hanging out with a filthy paint-huffing guy, a narc who kept trying to imitate kung fu movies, and a sociopathic prick?  Dee may have been unpopular because of her back brace, but she had an awful personality to go with it.  As much as it celebrates the margins and fringes of society, It's Always Sunny suggests that its characters may be on the fringe for a valid reason.  When the gang decides that their bar is the home they belong in, it's less of a warm-hearted moment than it would be in a show like Community -- it's just another failure to deal with the world of well-adjusted people.

This all culminates in a climactic dance number (no, really) which continues to play with the narrative of the outsider.  It's more subtle than the recent episode of Community, but it's an equally savage take on the kind of mythology that underlies tripe like Glee: there are outsiders (clean-cut, attractive and morally flawless outsiders) but they can win acceptance from those cruel bullies by putting on a big performance.  This narrative is presented in an extended fantasy sequence, rare for the show, and then undercut by the reality.

Interestingly enough, the show lets the viewer determine that the fantasy is just that before the big reveal.  At first it looks like It's Always Sunny may actually be playing this trope straight, but by the time Mac throws off his shirt to reveal a six-pack we know this is firmly a fantasy... and yet the sequence continues for a little bit.  By allowing the viewer to make the connections themselves, it makes said connections all the stronger.

In its form "The Gang's Revenge" triumphs the insider, the superfan who can get all these references and is stoked to see characters that have only been referenced before appear in the flesh.  But its content is a different matter, inverting the outsider narrative and focusing on how sometimes the rejected turn into loathsome people, or were rejected precisely because of this loathsomeness.  It's a contrast between form and function that I don't think It's Always Sunny has fully worked out.  But in a way this contradiction -- along with its nonstop humour -- is what makes it such a viscerally entertaining, violently unstable show.  A show in its seven season should feel like a staid institution by now, but It's Always Sunny still manages to feel perennially on the verge of collapse.

Next week: More about those damn Koreans

[1]This is a lot funnier than it sounds.  Or at least I thought so -- someone who's actually suffered sexual abuse may have a different reaction.  The politics of "offensive humour" are probably worth discussing in relation to It's Always Sunny, which travels in a kind of "political incorrectness" I usually find really aggravating, but for some reason works in this series.  Maybe it's just because the characters are portrayed as terrible people instead of honest men telling it like it is.  Or maybe it's just my priveledge kicking into high gear.  But it deserves a deeper discussion than I'm giving it here.

The Amazing Race 19-11: We Are Charlie Chaplin

By the time any given TV show reaches its nineteenth season, it's either gone beyond stale or become an institution -- usually both at once, and one could say that the two are simply different ways to describe the same state.  Indeed, it's slightly startling to be typing "19-11" in to the episode box.  To be fair, the count is a bit deceptive -- The Amazing Race has only been on TV for about a decade now ("only"), airing two shorter seasons each year.  A low-rated critical darling for the first few years of its run, it's become a stable presence that nobody bothers to cancel, one of the sedate elder statesmen of the reality TV world along with Survivor.

But is it still worth watching?  It's hard to think of a show whose quality persisted this late into its run -- the decline of The Simpsons is probably the most famous example.  It may be better (or at least more flattering) to view these competition reality shows less in the vein of fictional TV and more in that of competitions like sports.  After all, nobody wonders when they're going to get around to wrapping up that whole NFL thing.  But it's hard to deny that there's a sense of malaise setting in.  It's not so much that the recent seasons are that much worse than the initial ones -- you'll find people who say this, but it's mainly nostalgia -- but just that the formula has lost its power to surprise.  It's a comfortable show to watch, for me a bit of a family tradition, but the other side of comfort is complacency.

This episode is the penultimate one of the season, in which the final four is whittled down to the final three who will compete for the million bucks before taxes in the finale.  Geographically, it takes the teams from Belgium to Panama, as part of the continual quest for new destinations.  But it's most notable for the surprise elimination of perennial leg-winners and snowboarding stereotypes Andy and Tommy.  It's one of the few moments of genuine surprise this season has produced.

It also involves the perennial draw of competition reality shows: the joy of watching someone else fail.  I wish there was a more convenient word for that.  This is really what competition shows promise us: sure, every week someone will win, but more important than that someone will fail and be eliminated because of some monumental error that we're all sure we would never make.  With the exception of the finale, every episode is situated around the question of who will lose.  (Except for those non-elimination legs that everyone hates).  And this is very rarely presented as simply being the least good of a good group: it's always some kind of character or skill failing.

In a way this is a simple exhibition of cruelty, allowing the viewer to triumph in another's suffering in the way they are rarely invited to in fictional television.  Of course, this may just be my own individual reaction -- perhaps there are viewers out there who bite their nails hoping that everything works out for the best.  But in order to maintain the justice of the competition, the editing has to suggest that everything a team suffers is what they deserve -- effectively giving us permission to laugh.  And it's worth noting how comedic this show, and reality TV in general, is.  The Amazing Race occasionally highlights its contestants' stumblings with jokey music, but even when it doesn't it's easy to laugh at the pratfalls and slip-ups of the team.

Of course, as the omniscient viewers we're able to see the right path beforehand, and as such it seems obvious to us.  The best example is a tricky-to-find clue (printed on a dancing girl's skirt) at the end of this leg.  We receive narration of where it is, and the camera repeatedly flashes to it, but the teams are stumped.  What's obvious to us is not obvious to the contestants, making them seem dumber and weaker than ourselves.  Once again, a good deal of the pleasure lies in mockery -- seeing Andy and Tommy nosing around the docks of Panama in search of a nonexistant clue and laughing and saying "What the hell are they doing?"

On the other hand, "cruelty" is probably overstating things a bit.  After all, we're only watching people lose a game show, not be tortured.  In its genial family-friendly way, The Amazing Race doesn't even involve much humiliation, aside from the occasional eating challenge.  Still, it's important to keep in mind the pleasures these shows offer and to consider what it means that they're offering them.

The fist challenge for this episode involves the contestants dressing up as characters from the comic Tintin and trying to identify who it is they're dressed as.  I liked this challenge for a couple reasons.  It makes the racers actually engage in a limited way with the culture they're in, instead of just going somewhere and going through some motions.  And it also involves funny costumes.

Do you see what I mean about the comedic elements?

Of course, none of the racers have any idea who the Tintin characters are, and so rely on a combination of friendly locals and the Internet to learn the answer.  The co-operation of local passerbies is a big part of just about every episode of The Amazing Race.  Competitive reality shows have been attacked, with some fairness, for being advocates of dog-eat-dog neoliberalism.  But it's also worth noting how co-operation is an essential part of theses hows, especially The Amazing Race and Survivor.  There's a kind of reassuring note to the show, that the streets of every city on Earth are teeming with people who will help you if you get lost or just need assistance in some silly game show[1].

Amusingly, in this episode the cabbies of several of the teams end up working together and sharing direction, much to the chagrin of the racers trying to make it a competition.  Once again, co-operation occurs despite the focus on competition -- and the fate of the whole thing is, as usual, left in the hands of anonymous taxi drivers.

Having completed their comic book-character identification task, the teams can now take a plane to Panama, in order to walk a tightrope between two buildings.  If that sentence sounded like a string of non-sequiters to you, you're not alone.  The Amazing Race and many other reality shows take on a carnivalesque atmosphere, using their loose plot (a race around the world) to string together a series of disparate visual pleasures -- like, say, people dressing up in funny costumes or walking on tightropes.  In this way they're heirs to the legacy of variety shows, providing a little something for everyone, much more so than variety's official heir, late-night tak shows.  While the race provides a diegetic impetus for these performances, it usually doesn't provide a justification for them.  For instance, all four teams get on the same flight to Panama, so there's no

This accounts for the popularity of challenges which are visually striking but not all that, well, challenging or skill-testing.  Heights challenges, which usually occur several times per season, are the key example of this.  The only challenge is whether or not the teams will work up the nerve to jump or rappel or cross or whatever itis, which they pretty much always do -- although a shocking amount of people go on this show while being afraid of heights.  This episode's rendition is at least a little visually scary, although the tension is tempered by the fact that obviously none of these people are going to fall to their deaths in the middle of the episode.

The final challenge on this leg is a more quotidian one, a Detour that requires teams to choose between, to quote erstwhile host and certified choo-choo chrarlie Phil Keoghan, "two of Panama's oldest professions".  Fortunately, no prostitution is involved.  The actual tasks are constructing a sandal out of leather and transporting fish to the right stands in an open-air fish market.  Usually on The Amazing Race you end up with challenges that exoticize the country of the week, but here they just seem content to ignore it.  All I really learned about Panama from this episode was that it had tall buildings, shoes, and fish -- very distinctive traits.

In a way this is an extension of the humiliation factor -- affluent first-worlders forced to do manual labour in a developing country -- although this element isn't focused on in the editing.  But it's also the most competitive section of the leg, pitting the teams against each other in a contest that involves unusual and unexpected skills.  And somehow this shoe-making race is edited to actually create tension and excitement.  The Amazing Race never lingers on a single scene for more than a minute, always switching between teams and between tasks, so there's never really the potential for boredom.  The techniques used here are the conventional shooting methods of action movies (there's a reason Jerry Bruckheimer is a producer), which on their own are quite effective in making a dramatic narrative out of literally anything.

But after a while this narrative and this style grows thin, and nineteen seasons certainly qualifies as "a while".  Unlike most shows, a competitive reality show grows weaker the more you watch of it. The first season of Survivor or The Amazing Race or Top Chef seems amazing, dramatic, and almost iconic -- all of the characters are new to you, the tension seems genuine, and the format is fresh.  This is true even if you start with a comparatively weak season.  But as the format of the show repeats again and again, diminishing returns set in.  The new faces are edited into the same old archetypes, making them seem like nothing more than imitations, and you've already seen the drama a hundred times before.  That doesn't mean that watching more than one season of one of these shows is redundant, or that their current incarnation is neccesarily bad.  I still enjoy the show, albeit to a lesser extent than I did when I first started watching it.  But diminishing returns is endemic to the genre.

There are three pleasures that The Amazing Race promises its audience, then: schadenfreude, visual splendour akin to Andre Bazin's "cinema of attraction", and novelty.  The first two spring eternal.  The third is something that each episode of the show endlessly grasps for, constantly juggling between strange activities and stranger people, but something that is always fleeting.  If staleness is not inevitable, then I'd love to see a reality show that proves that -- and that show might just be a hit.

Next Week: A cornucopia of callbacks on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

[1]The cameras may induce a lot of this charity, but that's certainly not in the text of the show.

The Shield 7-05: Game Face

Despite all the (deserved) focus and praise that gets heaped on the Strike Team and their antics, my favourite character on The Shield is probably Dutch.  He's a character who's obviously flawed -- arrogant but with a fragile ego that needs boosting through intellectual accomplishment and puerile chest-beating -- but also one who's basically a good guy.  It's the same balance the series tries to strike with Vic Mackey, but one that seems to fit together into a more real character, although that may just be because Dutch never falls near as far as Vic does.  Dutch is a "good cop", but in the sense of The Wire, in that he's motivated more by the intellectual rush of outsmarting criminals than material reward.  He's the kind of overcompensating beta male that's difficult to like, but at least manages to avoid the corruption of Vic and the complacency of Billings.

But in another way Dutch is just an alternate universe version of Vic.  It's worth noting that in their police work the two deal with very different criminals: Vic and the strike team deal with gangs, whereas Dutch's plotlines tend to involve serial killers and crimes of passion.  And while the strike team becomes more and more of a criminal gang, Dutch comes to resemble the killers he profiles.  This is an old trope, but it's well-executed here.  There's the scene a few seasons ago where he kills a cat, but more generally he begins to resemble a serial killer in his obsession, his preening and his ability to dehumanize the people around him (his relationship with Corrine a season or two ago being the best example of this).  And yet this is what makes him a good cop.  It's like Dexter, but less ridiculous.

"Game Face" deals with this dynamic a lot, along with the usual strike team maneuvering and flailing.  I want to focus on the serial killers for now.  First there's Kleavon, the killer Dutch and Claudette dealt with two seasons ago, who returns in this episode to confront Claudette with a legal challenge[1].  The second is Lloyd, a teenager Dutch suspects but can't prove is a future serial killer who's just committed his first murder.  Together these two plotlines present not just a before-and-after picture, with Kleavon as the potential future of Lloyd, but also presents a direct challenge to the characters of Dutch and Claudette.

Unlike most of the cast, Claudette doesn't have much in the ways of obvious moral or character flaws -- sure, she can be self-righteous and stubborn sometimes, but that mainly stems from her intense moral compass, one that just about everyone else on the show lacks.  She's the only one who views morality as more than a justifying pretext.  So instead of a moral flaw she's been given a physical one: she's been struggling with a hidden case of lupus.  Her disease has mainly been in the background, exactly how she or Dutch would see it: a looming problem, but one under the surface.  Kleavon, acting as his own attorney, returns to try and dredge this problem up to the light.

There's an interesting parallel with Claudette's actions at the end of season three, in which she revealed a public defender was on drugs, forcing all of her cases to be retried and earning the enmity of the top brass.  Obviously it's not the exact same situation, but Kleavon is making the same case: if the mechanisms of justice are flawed in any way, then they are illegitimate.  Whether or not he has a legal leg to stand on, it momentarily places Claudette in the same position as Vic -- the representative of flawed justice, who raises the question of whether it's better than no justice at all.

(There's an argument that could be made that the stresses of the chief's position have corrupted or at least worn down Claudette -- after all, her reign hasn't exactly been the radical change we'd been led to believe it would be.  I'm not sure whether this is a flaw in the character or a flaw in the show though.)

On the other side of things we have Dutch dealing with the potential future serial killer in Lloyd.  He's butting up against the natural limit of police work -- the police are there ostensibly to maintain order, but they do that by catching and punishing people after they commit crimes.  This may be justice, but the deed is already done.  The serial killer actually presents the clearest case of how arrest can be preventative, as they'll clearly kill again otherwise.  It's more questionable whether locking up a crime-of-passion case actually does much good, aside from deterrence.  Of course, there's no alternative, unless one wants to talk of Minority Report-style future crime.

So Dutch decides to go beyond the bounds of his job to deal with Lloyd.  The role he envisions is not criminal like Vic's extracurricular activities, but more of a social worker, trying to save Lloyd (and his future victims).  And yet it involves using the powers of his job for other means, as the strike team does repeatedly, and involves the same "I can't prove it but I know he did it" logic we see routinely on this show.  Problematically, this intuition almost always turns out to be correct, as if evidence is just a burden to confirm a cop's gut feeling.  Everyone Dutch talks to about the case expresses doubt about it.  On the other hand, Kyle Gallner plays Lloyd as a smarmy sociopath so well that it seems believable -- although to an extent he's just drawing out the sociopathy present in all teenagers.

Michael Chiklis wrote this episode, stepping into a star-auteur role a la Louis C.K., Bryan Cranston, and (to a lesser extent) Michael Imperioli.  Despite this, it's not really a showcase episode for Vic, at least not any more than the rest of the show is.  The strike team is mostly involved in an episodic plot involving rescuing the daughter of a Mexican drug kingpin who's about to flip.  There's nothing really wrong with this plot, but it feels like filler.  This is a bit of a reversal -- usually it's Dutch and the other "straight" detectives who get the one-off B-plot, while Vic and the strike team are involved in a serialized storyline.  Of course, all of the running plotlines advance in small increments, both in Vic's "professional" life (his conflicts with Shane and Pezuela) and in his personal one (the rebellion of his daughter Cassidy and Danni's attempt to get him to sign away paternity rights for their child).

In a way, it's remarkable how the show juggles all of these balls without it ever being confusing.  This is probably best seen in the scenes on the floor of the Barn, which switch rapidly between plotlines, managing to hit up nearly everything in five minutes or less, both recapping and advancing plots.  Even the visual aspects of these scenes reflect this through the chaotic jumble of figures in the background.  If you watch closely (which I usually don't) you can even make out tiny stories and actions going on silently behind our main characters.

(Catherine Dent isn't looking so great in this screenshot, but mainly I'm just trying to figure out what the old guy in the background is doing.)

And the sheer multiplicity of these storylines is not just a case of overstuffing -- it's a very conscious effect.  Vic has to juggle all of these dilemmas in the same way that the show (and the audience) does, and as the plots pile up his life spins out of control, with a thousand forces tugging him in different directions.  Even his family, the golden ideal that he says all of his actions are for, is beginning to come apart at the seams.  When Danni wants Vic to sign away his paternity, he reacts badly because she's threatening to take away the only thing he can use to justify his actions.

In large part this is because he chooses to do things for them (or at least things he says are for them) instead of actually being with them.  The Cassidy plotline in this episode is a great example.  Vic discovers that his daughter was at a rowdy, drug-and-sex-fueled teenage party, and instead of talking to her about it decides to deal with it the Vic Mackey way -- i. e. abusing his authority to punish some guy.  The problem arises when the teenage boy he interrogates reveals that Cassidy herself was the organizer of the party.  Vic has by this point lost the ability to deal with problems outside of the cop/criminal paradigm, and as a result he's beginning to lose his family.

This could only happen in the final season of the show -- there's really nowhere to go from here, no way that things could spiral out of control any worse.  That's more obvious by the time we get to the midway point of the season, but even here in the earlier episodes, we have a sense that everyone is on the edge, that the usual tactics aren't working, and that doom is on the horizon.  And, like Dutch with Lloyd, we can't prove it but we know bodies are about to drop.

Next Week: I do my best Phil Keoghan impression.

[1]I've probably mentioned this before, but I really like how The Shield brings back characters from the past just when you'd started to forget about them.  This really ties into the series's main idea of recurrence, how the effects of your actions never really stop, and how there's no such thing as safely in the past.  (For instance, despite being dead for several seasons Ben Gilroy still manages to make trouble for Vic every once in a while).  Deena, a carjacker from an earlier season, shows up in a more damaged and scarred form in this episode as well.