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Viginti posted:I'm pretty torn on this season as a whole. While there were some moments that worked really, really well it also wasn't really a season in any coherent way. I don't need a single central villain or story for a season, but a direction would be nice. We bounced from plot to plot in such a strange fashion that it was hard to get attached to any one story and then none of them amounted to anything anyway. A few small plot points here and there aside I don't know what was accomplished with these thirteen hours. I don't even know that you can say that this was the 'Paige finds out' season because she had so little screen-time. The characters' relationships to each other (Philip with Elizabeth, Philip with Martha, Elizabeth and Philip with Paige) have radically changed. The characters themselves have changed, a lot. All of this was done well, which is why the season had these really grueling, emotional scenes that everyone loved. The 'golden age' of television is not about serialization, or dissolving the border of the episode. Game of Thrones and The Americans are still trying to tell a story every episode, by having all the scenes relate to each other, build up on each other's emotional and intellectual beats, and whatnot. The plot stuff in this show isn't really that different than all the 'what's happening with the company now' stuff that happens in Mad Men that isn't actually all that important.
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Apr 23, 2015 15:49
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Viginti posted:Have they though? Certainly the season had a lot of very strong individual scenes like the trip to the dentist, and superb sub-plots like PedoPhil, but I don't know that the arcing was really very clear or prevalent in terms of the season wide structure. Phil is disillusioned, but that was how we were introduced to him, this is simply another step down an established path. Philip was disillusioned since the first episode, but more in the 'I don't actually care about this job' sense. Now he's falling apart in an interesting and depressing way. quote:Martha and Paige were confronted by things this season but we don't really get to see either of their final reactions to them, there is no emotional status quo for either. We definitely saw Paige's final reaction: rejection. quote:Stan is off being Stan with Bobby Draper and Elizabeth is inscrutable and oscillatory, too hard to pin down to any linear arc. None of this is a bad thing, in fact in a moment to moment and series wide sense the show does, as you say, excel at these emotional moments, but on that middle level of season structure this third effort falls down a little with its looseness for me. Stan is an underplayed character. His story was he tried to save Nina and didn't do it. Which makes sense, it would have been utterly ridiculous if he'd actually succeeded. It is true, though, that many characters didn't really seem to do much this season, like whatshisname, the head of the Russians. quote:Take Gabriel as a real mis-en-abyme for this, what was his arc? Hell, what was his character? I have faith that he will have good material in the future, because he's Frank Langella, but so far he's nor really an entity outside of the strong performance. Look at the Nina stoylines in season two and three, does her work this year feel anywhere near as resolved or contained? The missions that they spent all year setting-up, do you feel like they had the same relevance or resolution as the stuff last year tended too, given the singular mission it surrounded. He's just their handler, he doesn't need an arc. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 13:40
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spronk posted:I also think they focused way, way, way too much on really boring stuff like Paige and visiting Grandma and Nina's adventures in Siberia and not enough on the Mujahideen, Nicaragua, and Iran/Iraq. What show have you been watching this whole time? Because this one has always been about the internal struggles of a bunch of people involved in spywork. That's why they focus on 'boring stuff' like characters. It has never been about the nuances of the various conflicts that the United States and the Soviet Union were involved in during the eighties, which is why the season(s) largely don't depend on any of that. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 12:19 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 12:15
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