arc

I'm genuinely into how political the show is.

There was also the moment after their heart-to-heart where Gene said he'd bill Barry for it as a private class. And Loach's awful handwriting. Sam is a really awful abusive monster. He may not have killed anyone yet, but I think he's as fundamentally sociopathic as Fuches or Barry. Fun little structural thing: the first spoken words of the episode (after Barry's rage-induced inability to hear anything subsided) were "I'm sorry, what?" and then of course the last word of the episode was "What?!", which was also the episode title.

There’s no way Barry didn’t at least try to kill Janice, and believes he succeeded. (And personally, I’d just go with the simple answer that she’s really dead.) Otherwise, the “Starting… now!” thing he said as he crept back to bed with Sally makes less sense.

From 2x02, her name is Diana Knox and she looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/gUEZ54R

I thought there was a photo of them? Her name is definitely Denise. I may be displaying my own internal biases here.

Everyone in this class is wildly delusional! The actors have ambitions well beyond their talent levels. Barry thinks he can just drop his old life. Gene uses the class as a fill-in for the Hollywood glory he thinks he should have. Meanwhile, Noho Hank has surprisingly small ambitions. He was a good lieutenant to Goran because he apparently never wanted to be the sole guy in charge. He wants to be 50-50 partners with Cristobal but somehow this season he doesn’t want to eliminate the Bolivians. Yeah, in a lot of ways he’s delusional himself about what a life of crime means. I guess the cop (forgot his name) investigating Janice’s death used to be delusional about the state of his marriage. BTW, it kills me that his wife isn’t even Latina herself (probably) but insisted on opening a quinceañera store in a non Latinx neighbourhood.

I think she has some talent. More so than the rest of the class, certainly. Succeeding in Hollywood takes a mix of luck and talent and work. She’s certainly better than the sort of roles she’s booked so far. Now, is she also low key a pretty bad person? Yeah, probably. She’s petty and very shallow. But bad people can be talented.

Gene's face when his son called him out on the cabin -- he clearly isn't processing his own trauma in any kind of healthy way himself. If Esther is as smart as she seems, Hank completely gave himself up with everything he was saying in Cristobal's office. I do wonder why her hand showed no visible scarring from the knife trick though. I mean, that knife cut across bone. If it actually did... there was no blood, after all. But why are the Chechens all living at the stash house anyways? Where did they live before that? Surely not at Goran's house, because (1) it was too small for all those dudes and (2) if I remember right, Goran tried to provide a relatively normal situation at the house for his family.

Well, the way I took what he said was more about "you still benefited from slavery whether or not you personally supported it or not".

The nudity on this show feels exploitative. =/ Mai Ling is hella reckless. She’s cheating on her gangster boss husband with his second in command, she’s secretly defying his wishes for peace with the Hop Wei… BTW, according to Wikipedia, the most lucrative crime for tongs in SF was prostitution, but I can see how that would make these tongs too unsympathetic for TV. Also, I vaguely understand the bloodiest years of the tong wars didn’t actually kill that many people. The body count on this show will probably get up to 20x what history did. In what little I got from descriptions of Bruce Lee’s original notes, “Big Bill” was supposed to both be a friend and antagonist to Ah Sahm. So far this Bill is just the latter. Maybe they’ve split out the friend role to the rookie cop. I do like that Bill was a Union soldier and has the high road on slavery on the rookie, even while simultaneously having the low road on anti-Chinese bigotry. Going back to the pilot for a second, a lot of the dialogue was corny, but delivery was often solid. Father Jun imperiously demanding a bow, and Ah Toy flirting with Ah Sahm at the bar were both a lot of fun. The Armani-ish suits of the Hop Wei and the Taiwanese rap at the end make me wish this show was full on postmodern pastiche, Samurai Champloo style. It’s infuriating and kind of too real that the cops are furious about the murders of the two Irish murderers without ever even considering that they were themselves murderers too.

Since the move to Primetimer, I can't log in via Twitter. (Chrome, Windows 10, and also Dolphin, iOS.)

Mannnnnnnnnnnn, Andrew Koji's Cantonese* is really bad. I imagine it must be very hard to hear the tones when not brought up in it; I'm pretty bad at Cantonese myself and it is technically my first language. And I can't pronounce Mandarin words to save my life, so I know coming to a different language's tones is super hard. And I am sympathetic. But it took me several rewinds to even guess what he was going for, and that's with the English subtitles. * the non-Cantonese speakers learned their Cantonese lines phonetically, per this fascinating article about the choice to have the Chinese characters speak modern unaccented English when among themselves. The action was pretty good. I liked that the madam was a skilled martial artist herself, as was Li Yong, the high level guy in Mai Ling's tong. The nudity, eh. And the tension between being a period piece with Something Important To Say about immigration and being a Cinemax brawls and boobs show is... weird.

Well, he seems to care about Janice’s disappearance — her murder, as he personally knows — only because it’s interfering with his life.

For my money, Barry is at least as deranged as any of the Chechen gangsters or the struggling actors. Probably more, because he is both the remorseless killer and the actor who dreams of making it big in Hollywood. His particular coping mechanisms this season have made him seem a bit more sane than the rest of the actors, but it’s all in service of his own delusions. I don’t want Esther to die, but I do hope the season doesn’t end up with a three way gang treaty, sort of just a linear one-upping of how the Bolivian-Chechen gang war ended up in s1.

Ahahahahahaha. In "Barry", Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays a British struggling actor in LA, and in s02e01 she has a conversation with Barry where she says she'd never play an Australian.