Wonderfalls: Episodes 4-8
Jun. 28th, 2008 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJaye still rocks. Eric, still full of awesome. Jaye/Eric, still sweet. Hopefully it will continue now that they’re more or less going out, which so often precipitates a downward spiral in television shows.
It’s sweet, though misguided, that he thinks Jaye is really a lovely person. I think there’s a very suppressed part of her that wants to be a lovely person, but trying to have a relationship with the part of a person that they attempt to silence with a jackhammer surely is unwise.
Especially given that Eric’s already had his heart irreparably cracked.
I like that backstories keep coming back to bite. In the first few episodes I was worried, because so many backstories (particularly Eric’s) sounded like farces, that the character backgrounds were just throwaway gags and the characters were really just caricatures. But they’ve gained depth.
The other thing about Eric, which I wasn’t expecting: he’s as close as the show gets to a moral center.
I don’t mean that Wonderfalls doesn’t have a moral center—the show has some guiding moral precepts (be kind, be compassionate, judge people by what they do and not who they are)—but it doesn’t have a character who embodies it, like Star Trek had Captain Kirk or Veronica Mars has Wallace and Keith. All of the characters go off the deep end sometimes. But Eric seems to have a better grasp on basic decency than Mahandra or Jaye or Jaye’s family.
This does not, however, excuse him for his Mr. Hallmark Card moments in episode 8. Not even giving that bratty lovesick kid (who’s a HOOT) a talking to or making out with Jaye will make Mr. Hallmark Card go away.
Speaking of episode 8: The dad marrying the Russian bride is creepily Freudian, but the kid had enough issues already that this probably won’t make things WORSE.
Other things:
Jaye’s brother and his discussion with the psychiatrist made me giggle, as did his obsession with the cow creamer. If the show had continued, Jaye and her talking animals would have led him into a spiritual crisis. (Eventual resolution: Hinduism?—given that it was a cow that was talking.)
I’m not quite sure about episode seven. Vague ideas about Truth hang around the episode like smoke, but they never settle into any definite theme. The writers appear to be in a bind: the episodes tend to go for themes that are heartfelt yet hip, but there doesn’t seem to be that middle ground here.
Absolute truth isn’t very hip, but it’s heartfelt. “Truth is in the eye of the beholder,” or truth is all about appearance, or even something satirical about the relationship between the media and truth, is much more modern, but it’s also really unbearably cynical given the context.
Which really defines the tightrope the whole show is walking.
***
On a sort of random tangent: I don’t know if Wonderfalls will ever get to this story, but during Victorian times there was a fellow named Blondin who walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Once he stopped in the middle to cook an egg.
The British newspapers refused to publish the story until they sent their own correspondent to verify, because only a few weeks earlier they’d giddily published a story about someone who walked across the falls on stilts. Alas! it was an American hoax.
It’s sweet, though misguided, that he thinks Jaye is really a lovely person. I think there’s a very suppressed part of her that wants to be a lovely person, but trying to have a relationship with the part of a person that they attempt to silence with a jackhammer surely is unwise.
Especially given that Eric’s already had his heart irreparably cracked.
I like that backstories keep coming back to bite. In the first few episodes I was worried, because so many backstories (particularly Eric’s) sounded like farces, that the character backgrounds were just throwaway gags and the characters were really just caricatures. But they’ve gained depth.
The other thing about Eric, which I wasn’t expecting: he’s as close as the show gets to a moral center.
I don’t mean that Wonderfalls doesn’t have a moral center—the show has some guiding moral precepts (be kind, be compassionate, judge people by what they do and not who they are)—but it doesn’t have a character who embodies it, like Star Trek had Captain Kirk or Veronica Mars has Wallace and Keith. All of the characters go off the deep end sometimes. But Eric seems to have a better grasp on basic decency than Mahandra or Jaye or Jaye’s family.
This does not, however, excuse him for his Mr. Hallmark Card moments in episode 8. Not even giving that bratty lovesick kid (who’s a HOOT) a talking to or making out with Jaye will make Mr. Hallmark Card go away.
Speaking of episode 8: The dad marrying the Russian bride is creepily Freudian, but the kid had enough issues already that this probably won’t make things WORSE.
Other things:
Jaye’s brother and his discussion with the psychiatrist made me giggle, as did his obsession with the cow creamer. If the show had continued, Jaye and her talking animals would have led him into a spiritual crisis. (Eventual resolution: Hinduism?—given that it was a cow that was talking.)
I’m not quite sure about episode seven. Vague ideas about Truth hang around the episode like smoke, but they never settle into any definite theme. The writers appear to be in a bind: the episodes tend to go for themes that are heartfelt yet hip, but there doesn’t seem to be that middle ground here.
Absolute truth isn’t very hip, but it’s heartfelt. “Truth is in the eye of the beholder,” or truth is all about appearance, or even something satirical about the relationship between the media and truth, is much more modern, but it’s also really unbearably cynical given the context.
Which really defines the tightrope the whole show is walking.
***
On a sort of random tangent: I don’t know if Wonderfalls will ever get to this story, but during Victorian times there was a fellow named Blondin who walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Once he stopped in the middle to cook an egg.
The British newspapers refused to publish the story until they sent their own correspondent to verify, because only a few weeks earlier they’d giddily published a story about someone who walked across the falls on stilts. Alas! it was an American hoax.
