Dev F
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Oh, I realized another thing that rang false about Veidt's squid confession: In sharing Veidt's tape and explaining how he learned about it, didn't Keene just confess to stealing and illegally disseminating highly classified government secrets obtained during the course of his legislative career? Isn't that basically the equivalent of a sitting senator becoming Edward Snowden, but instead of entrusting his secrets to a controversial journalist specializing in the surveillance state who promised him confidentiality, he just blabbed them to a cop he barely knows without any assurances that the guy won't immediately turn him in?
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24 minutes ago, SeanC said:
The videotape drove home that Jeremy Irons' portrayal of Veidt is the one aspect of this show that, so far, doesn't quite work for me. This really doesn't remind me at all of the character on the page. Veidt was extremely reserved, Irons is borderline manic.
I dunno, I always read Veidt as sort of a clean-cut bon vivant, apt to give saucy interviews to lifestyle magazines and show off his acrobatic talents on TV. So Irons's basic persona seems about right to me.
But I'm not sure I buy the premise of his videotape more specifically -- that after murdering probably dozens of people, including a fellow superhero, to create a perfect pyramid of secrecy around the true origins of the squid attack, he would create a video record of the whole thing to send to Robert Redford. If he'd planned so ingeniously to usher in the Redford administration, you'd think he could've figured out a way to get Redford behind his new political program without having to tell him the secret that could bring it all crashing down! He's not a Republic serial villain, after all.
It would've been more interesting, I think, if the evidence of Veidt's crimes had been something less on-the-nose. For instance, it could've been the deposition hinted at in the show's supplemental materials: Laurie Blake spilling everything she knows about Veidt's plans to Redford in exchange for clemency. But maybe there'll be more to it -- say, it's another fabrication, a fake video created by the devotees of Rorschach's journal to put across his message without all of Rorschach's baggage?
3 minutes ago, scrb said:His mask and alter ego is based on the sexual humiliation he endured in the fun house of mirrors before the 11/2 event -- why was he immune in the fun house?
Apparently the psychic shock wasn't 100 percent fatal even at close range; we see other survivors at the carnival, and Spielberg's movie about 11/2 apparently had a Girl in the Red Dress wandering around under the arms of the squid in Lower Manhattan.
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My latest pie-in-the-sky theory: I was theorizing earlier that Adrian isn't in a literal prison but some sort of quantum netherworld created by his own mind after he tried to disassemble himself in his intrinsic field device in the hopes of becoming a god like Dr. Manhattan. What if Adrian's attempts at "escape" represents his efforts to finally ascend to godhood? Further, what if Lady Trieu has somehow found out that his ascension is imminent, and her plan is actually an elaborate attempt to destroy him before he can become omnipotent?
It's a pretty out-there theory, I know, but it's pretty neatly in line with the show's exploration of appropriation and overreaching nanny-state authoritarianism -- and with Lady Trieu's role in the series so far as sort of a disrupter of superhero origin myths.
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2 hours ago, Cardie said:
I agree that Veidt might be checking the fetuses’ gender, although that chamber seemed capable of making any transformation necessary.
It looked like one of the fetuses he threw back didn't have fully formed arms, while the ones he put into the incubator did. So I think he was doing a general check to make sure the two he chose were free of imperfections -- as if he were at the grocery store and making sure the pieces of fruit he bought didn't have any bruises on them.
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Is anyone else super confused by how the reparations system's genetic ancestry database is supposed to work?
In this episode, Angela gets a call notifying her that there's new information about her family tree in the system. She breaks into the heritage center and discovers that submitting Will's DNA has added him to her family tree as her paternal grandfather. Okay, so far so good.
But then the system asks Angela, "Would you like to meet your great-grandparents?" Angela hesitates, as if this is genuinely a difficult question, and then accesses the information about Will's parents. She reacts to it as if she's never seen it before.
My question is: Why hasn't she seen it before? Shouldn't her own DNA have been enough to match her to her great-grandparents even before she put Will into the system? She would share exactly one-eighth of her DNA with each of them, which (unless one of her great-grandparents had an identical twin!) would absolutely differentiate them from other, more distant relatives.
The only explanation I can think of is that maybe when they exhumed her great-grandparents' bodies to put their DNA into the reparations system, they were too damaged by fire or decomposition to produce complete DNA profiles. With some of the genetic data missing, perhaps it took an especially close relative like Will to produce a verifiable match. Though if that was the intended explanation, you'd think they would've mentioning it in passing in the episode itself.
Does anyone else have a theory as to what might be going on here, aside from "The writers didn't really think it through"?
Edited to add: Or, wait, am I thinking about this wrong? You get exactly one-half of your DNA from each parent, but in each generation that half divides randomly. So compounded over the generations, maybe it's not that straightforward to differentiate a great-grandmother from a great-great-aunt or something? But possessing the genetics of two people who are otherwise not related to each other still pretty much guarantees that they are both in your direct family line, doesn't it? Now I'm just confusing myself further . . .
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Folks over on Reddit have pointed out that the childless farm couple in the opening scene are pretty obviously meant to echo Superman's adoptive parents; the husband is even named Jon, like Jonathan Kent, and their surname is Clark. And then, of course, there's the mysterious something from space that crash-lands on their property . . .
What's interesting to me, though, is the way in which Lady Trieu imposes herself on that familiar origin story. We don't know what the thing from space is yet, but the Superman parallels suggest that it could play a central role in the greatest superhero story ever told. Which means that for all her talk of giving the Clarks a legacy, she actually steals the promise of that legacy from them. She doesn't like that story, so she writes her own.
And yet she does so by replacing the possibility of an alien foster son or somesuch with the Clarks' real son. In that sense she's almost the mirror image of Adrian Veidt: while he transformed the ugly reality of nuclear brinkmanship into an over-the-top comic book apocalypse, she turned a comic book origin story into the story of a farm couple having a normal baby boy.
Of course, there's a lot we still don't know -- about what Trieu intends to do with the extraterrestrial artifact, about how normal the Clarks' new son actually is, etc. -- so it's too soon to tell how much of Trieu's antiheroic methodology is genuine and how much is a convenient pose. But it's an intriguing starting point for the character.
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30 minutes ago, AimingforYoko said:
I've read the comic, I've seen the movie, but I've been away from both for a while. Here's a question for the hardcores: Did we know Veidt was such a big reggae fan?
I think it's based on an interview with Adrian in the supplemental material for the original comic, in which he talks about how he's getting into Jamaican dub music. I wonder if it's meant to reflect Veidt's changed relationship with technology that his current tastes seem to run more to straight reggae than its electronic-music subgenre.
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31 minutes ago, mac123x said:
I really hope they're not doing the tired "clone with genetic memories" trope because it's so hacky science fiction. Clones don't have genetic memories because genes don't work that way.
The implication of the pills and the IV is that it's not genetic but medicinal, right? It looks like Lady Trieu found a way to download a person's memories and encode them within a drug preparation, which would then transfer said memories to whomever ingested the drug.
It's complete sci-fi horseshit, but unlike the "clone with genetic memories" cliche, it doesn't attribute any magical properties to real-life genetics.
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28 minutes ago, tennisgurl said:
I wonder if he is stuck on another planet or dimension? Like wherever the squids are coming from? Thats why no one on Earth knows where he is, and he is building some kind of space suit? His rather bitter play about Dr. Manhattans birth does sure seem like he is his jailer, but maybe thats just how Ozzy roles in his retirement.
Someone on Reddit theorized that Adrian is stuck in some sort of quantum netherworld generated by his own mind after disassembling himself in his intrinsic field device in the hopes of becoming another Dr. Manhattan. If that's the case, you could interpret his play as a manifestation of his attempts to will himself into godhood. Or perhaps Dr. Manhattan detected Veidt's attempts to become a god and is working to suppress them, in which case he is Adrian's jailer, just not in any physical sense, and the play is a manifestation of the wannabe god's struggle against the actual god.
Barring some extravagant explanation like this, I can't think of a plausible reason why Manhattan would care enough to keep Adrian prisoner, or why Adrian would feel motivated to make a deal with him instead of just daring him to do his worst. If this story is taking place in the physical realm, I think it makes more sense that Lady Trieu is Adrian's jailer. As the new owner of Veidt's company, it makes sense that she would want him to keep applying his massive intellect to their product line (perhaps why the gameskeeper thanks him for the tomatoes). And if Trieu somehow found out that Adrian fabricated the squid attack and confronted him with it, I could see him agreeing to an oppressive "arrangement" to keep it under her hat. (Whereas Manhattan has already killed a man to keep Veidt's secret, so I can't imagine he'd now try to leverage that secret against him.)
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I was bummed to see a pretty major inconsistency in the Peteypedia materials this week. In the New Frontiersman article lamenting the upcoming Supreme Court confirmation, the paper's ultraconservative editor laments that President Redford is naming "activist attorney" John Grisham to replace recently deceased conservative justice John MacLaughlin. But at the beginning of the episode itself, we see one of the FBI agents staking out the bank reading a newpaper with the headline "GRISHAM TO RETIRE FROM THE SUPREME COURT." I'm at a loss to explain away a discontinuity as significant as the show and the supplements not agreeing on whether Grisham is joining or leaving SCOTUS! (And neither one is obviously incorrect, since Grisham is currently sixty-four, which is pretty old to be appointed to the court, especially by a president who's about to leave office and probably concerned about his legacy, but young to be retiring.)
It's also notable the the previous Peteypedia articles have suggested that the Washington Post is now the Washington Post-Intelligencer, while the paper the agent is reading is called the DC Post-Times. It's frustrating, because I was really enjoying the supplemental materials, but now I have to wonder how authoritative it's meant to be, or whether the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing with all this stuff.
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3 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:
Also it mentions that Judd served under a Robert Mueller. I wonder if that is meant to be connected to the guy who was thought to be Hooded Justice, Rolf Mueller.
The name of the alleged Hooded Justice is Rolf Müller, without the first e. Judd's commanding officer is a reference to the real-life Robert S. Mueller, the former special counsel and FBI director, who was a decorated Vietnam War veteran.
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4 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:
It may help enrich things if you are familiar with the backstory on a deeper level, but so far I don't think there has been anything that one can't follow along on its own terms.
That's basically my feeling, though I might articulate it in a less flattering way. That is, instead of thinking the Mysterious Castle Man storyline works equally well whether you're familiar with the source material or not, I think it works equally badly. As someone who's very familiar with the original graphic novel, I find that storyline to be the least interesting part of a show I've otherwise found quite fascinating.
To me, basically, it feels like Lindelof is writing that part of the story in Lost mystery-box mode: Here's something that makes no sense now, but eventually it will be something neat! I much prefer when he writes in Leftovers mode, where even things that are mysterious have clear resonances with what's going on with the characters and the themes of the episode. Is Castle Man's willingness to sacrifice Mr. Phillips to put on his play meant to reflect how the other characters are shielding their true intentions behind masks and meat shields? Like . . . maybe? But it's impossible to really tell when the writers have yet to give us any clue as to what Castle Man's larger goals actually are.
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On 10/27/2019 at 9:13 PM, mac123x said:
When the camera unartfully zoomed in on the painting, I yelled "Metaphor!" at the TV. Then I wondered what exactly it was metaphoring. Symbolism for symbolism sake, another Lindelhof special.
I think this is one of the reasons I'm enjoying the series way, way more than some other folks -- because when faced with a seemingly incomprehensible symbol like this, my instinct is not just to assume it's meaningless but to work out what it does mean.
The original painting Comanche Feats of Martial Horsemanship depicts the technique by which a Comanche warrior would drop to one side of his horse while closing on an enemy, staying out of sight and out of reach until he was in range and then springing up and attacking. That's Angela's fear about Judd, right? That he might have been hiding his true intentions behind his badge, preparing to spring up and betray them all when the time was right, like the Kavalry did on White Night?
And, of course, the episode title reverses the construction -- "Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship" -- suggesting some element of appropriation, another martial force taking the Comanche technique for their own. And isn't that basically what Angela does? Fearing that Judd may have hidden his true intentions to get close to her, she hides her own intentions to get close to him -- literally dropping to the floor, hiding behind a shield of grief and helplessness, then springing up and penetrating Judd's most closely guarded spaces.
And that idea of people becoming what they battle against is one of the central focuses of the series -- Nixon's authoritarian daddy state giving way to Redford's authoritarian nanny state, African Americans wielding the power of law enforcement against the white supremacists who previously wielded it against them, and so on and so forth.
After all, the shields people are hiding behind are not just shields of passivity and postponement. The horsemanship metaphor, after all, is about a galloping meat shield, action hiding behind another action that has destructive force of its own -- like the Snyderized version of Hooded Justice crashing through a window and unleashing murder everywhere, then talking about how that's all just a mask to hide his rage.
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5 minutes ago, mac123x said:
Frankly the whole flashback timelines are confusing, because Louis Gosset had that "Protect This Boy" note that was written in 1921, but the front of the note was the Nazi pamphlet from WWII. I would attribute that to something clever coming up in the future, but this is Damon Lindelhof we're talking about. He and clever writing have never shared a meal.
It was a World War I pamphlet, so there's nothing weird about the chronology as presented.
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2 hours ago, DearEvette said:
The episode starts with the very real historical destruction of Black Wall Street. A massacre of a prosperous and wealthy black business enclave that, by today's calculations, the concentrated wealth would be in the billions. And the episode did not exaggerate, white folks actually got planes to drop bombs on a black business district. Had it been allowed to thrive, it could have been a model for black generational wealth that was unprecedented. As it is, the results of the destruction are incalculable,
My take is that Robert Redford was a complete pendulum swing from the Nixon and got a reparations bills passed based on that destruction. To bring the story to the present day and make it immediate for the current audience, this all ties in with the new villain that a masked superhero simply can't defeat with a kapow!. The nuclear threat has been replaced by another ephemeral threat - white supremacy. This is a real miasma, like the unease of the cold war, that kinda hangs over everything and is difficult to defeat.
Exactly. And in that sense I absolutely see Sister Night as someone who may resort to horrifying actions but is nonetheless trying to make the world a better place, just like Rorschach (and Ozy!). She's protecting a social order that from her perspective is oriented toward equal justice and prosperity for the first time in a century. She's fighting the sort of people who murdered her forebears in the streets to overthrow that order the last time -- and the actual people who nearly killed her in an attempt to overthrow it again. "If we don't have walls, it all comes tumblin' down."
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On 10/21/2019 at 12:06 PM, Deanie87 said:
Also, is there some significance to the title of this episode other than the song at the end?
I think it's also a more figurative statement about the tense sociopolitical situation: as things heat up, there's a rot that can no longer be forestalled.
18 minutes ago, sadie said:Why was Judd the only police person that didn't try to hide his identity? Did I miss it?
I don't recall an on-screen explanation, but I assumed that it was because he was the one ultimately responsible for the conduct of the police department, and if he were anonymous it would mean no one could possibly be held accountable to the public. Considering all the other regulations that seem designed to ensure that the police are monitored and regulated, it doesn't seem like folks in this society would stand for completely unaccountable leadership.
(Indeed, it would be pretty well in keeping with the broader themes of the Watchmen universe for the public to have invested all accountability in one larger-than-life figure of authority and allow the rest of the cops to go around anonymously, assuming the one known and trusted authority has got things under control.)
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45 minutes ago, lynxfx said:
People keep blaming the wardrobe assistant as if she missed her cue. It wasn't her, it was the director in the booth who had the wrong camera live. It was supposed to be a tight shot on Woody and Kenan who was saying his last lines. They were changing outfits for those that weren't on camera ahead of the graphic bumper.
It was probably a mixture of both. Aidy clearly knew that she was on camera, so there must've been a tally light or something on the active camera that the wardrobe lady didn't see. But there was also clearly something wonky going on with the shot choices in that flashback, since they never showed Cecily or Woody before they started delivering their lines, instead keeping tight on Kenan even though he was just listening to them talk -- and then cutting to the wide shot just as he was about to deliver the punchline.
My guess is that the director had to change the camera sequence on the fly because of some other quick-change issues that took place off-screen -- say, Cecily and/or Woody weren't camera-ready in time for their close-ups, so the director made the call to stay on Kenan instead? -- and the wardrobe lady didn't manage to keep up with the sudden, counterintuitive changes.
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1 hour ago, Ilovepie said:
I read an interview with the Duffers and they mentioned portals. I think it's more likely they went into the upside down and used a portal to get to Russia, taking Hop with them.......
I've seen a lot of people interpret the Duffers' interview comments that way, but when they talked about the new season "allowing portals into areas outside of Hawkins," I assumed they were speaking figuratively, not literally. I figure the "portals" are just the fact that Hopper is probably in Russia and the Byerses are moving who knows where, which gives the writers the opportunity to expand the world of the show. I don't think they're saying that the characters will literally be jumping through magic portals to other places on Earth.
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2 hours ago, tennisgurl said:
The Evil Commie bit was so over the top ridiculous that it seemed like some kind of 1950s Red Scare propaganda film, I mean we never even know what the fuck they are even DOING opening that hole to the Netherworld, just that they're evil and thats how they roll. We can guess why they are doing what they're doing (like the Americans, presumably trying to weaponize the Upside Down and its creatures to get a leg up in the Cold War) and the US is also obviously up to its own sketchy stuff with 11 and the Upside Down, but they were pretty weak antagonists.
Yeah, as I mentioned elsewhere, they don't even try to give the Russians the typical Stranger Things twist on a familiar idea. Whenever they're on screen, it's like all the deeper thematic and character work dries up so we can have a dumb '80s moment about evil Commies.
And it's not like they couldn't have tried harder to integrate them into the more nuanced story they were telling elsewhere. One of the main things this season was about was the insidious evil of conformity and the value of setting your own path. What if in the very first scene, the Soviets were presented not just as snarling villains who wanted to do an evil thing but as anxious warriors who were terrified that the Americans were developing this fearsome gate technology that they didn't have? Thus, they would set the whole story in motion through their desperate need to conform, to do what the Americans do.
And what if Grigori were the most fearsome Russian not because he's a big, muscly thug who stomps toward you with his gun drawn, but because he's a shrewd infiltrator and master of disguise who can disappear into a crowd and ambush you unawares -- less Arnold Schwarzenegger, more Matthew Rhys from The Americans. In other words, what if conformity, fitting in and blending in, were his superpower? Just little connecting threads like that would've done a lot to make the Russian storyline feel like part of the greater whole.
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8 minutes ago, CeeBeeGee said:
Murray's speech would've been fine had this been the first time. But frankly, I was grossed out by Murray's speech to Nancy and Jonathan last season. It is not appropriate for an adult to be urging teenagers to have sex.
I get that -- and I think it's another way the repetition this season actually retroactively makes the previous matchmaking scene much worse. If the point is that Murray identifies with Nancy, and he's telling her what he wishes someone had told him when he was younger, it's a lot less prurient than if he's just like, "Oh, here are two people in front of me. I should try to talk them into fucking each other, even though they're like sixteen." Though, I admit, even my more flattering original reading requires the fairly large leap of logic that a hard-drinking forty-year-old newspaperman would identify so strongly with a buttoned-down high school girl.
Honestly, if I had a magic wand I could wave and change one small thing about Stranger Things, I'd be sorely tempted to use it to make Murray into a female character. I like Brett Gelman and think he's fun in the role, but his whole shtick would make a lot more sense if the character were, like, Kristen Schaal as nutty Maria Bauman, who sees in Nancy her own past battles against the old boys' club and encourages her to go get yours, girl.
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14 minutes ago, AngelKitty said:
But were you called a telemarketer at that time or a telephone salesperson?
Webster's dates the term telemarketer to 1980, and I can find almost 8,000 occurrences of the term in 1985 newspapers on Newspapers.com.
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8 hours ago, bunnyblue said:
- Will & Mike lose those awful bowl-cuts; just please no mullets. Not every boy in the 1980s sported terrible haircuts.
I absolutely think that Will is in line for an image update in season 4. I think the "Will the Wise" scene teases this possibility -- that there's a part of him that wants to be more ostentatious and cheeky, but so far he's only been able to acknowledge it through him and his friends' fantasy adventures. But I think now that he's rejected that fantasy defense mechanism, destroying Castle Byers and giving away his D&D books, he might be able to start expressing that side of himself in a more integrated way. I could imagine him showing up next season as like a funky art kid, or something like that.
Quote- El & Will have actual conversations (not about Mike please) and bond over their shared traumas & experiences with the Upside Down/the monsters. They become actual friends.
I also definitely expect this to happen. As I mentioned in the thread for episode 8, I suspect that one of the reasons why they stripped El of her powers and moved the Byerses out of Hawkins was to set up a storyline where Will and El are trying to put their traumatic pasts behind them and become "normal" kids. Which would set them in opposition to Mike, who always wanted to be involved in wild, supernatural adventures, because they made him feel special and needed -- needed by Will and El in particular, so it would be an interesting challenge for him to see them finding a way to be cool and well-adjusted together, without him.
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2 hours ago, Dobian said:
You can already see how next season is going to shape up. They had Eleven lose her powers obviously so she can't "see" Hopper, but at some point early next season she is going to get those powers back.
I wonder if El's power loss is also meant to set up a more personal story, with her and Will finally taking the opportunity to be "normal" and escape the trauma of their pasts. I could see them reversing the direction of the Will/Mike/El triangle, with Will and El returning to Hawkins as cool, simpatico siblings who finish each other's sentences and giggle over the fun, normal teen adventures they've had together, and Mike, the kid who always wanted to be involved in supernatural shenanigans because they made him feel special and needed, worrying that he's losing the two most important people in his life to each other.
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2 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:
I think the theory the kids had that the mindflayer survived in the world after the gate was closed was just a theory. I think in reality the mind flayer was able to come back because the Russians opened the gate. But since the kids didn't know that they just took a guess.
No, the kids were right. When El closed the gate at the end of season 2, the parts of the Mind Flayer that were joined to other creatures in our world (the demodogs, the vines) all died, but the part that had already been exorcised from Will and was flying across Hawkins just fell dormant. It ended up on the basement floor of Brimborn Steel Works, where it lay inert until the Russians cracked open their gate. At that point, its connection to the Mind Flayer was restored and it came back online.
That's the scene we see in the first episode of season 3: the power goes out as the Russians turn on the portal drill, the shadow particles on the floor of the mill swirl back to life, and they possess all the rats.
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S01.E05: Little Fear of Lightning
in Watchmen [V]
True, but whether Keene's conspiring with the Kavalry is a he-said/he-said situation at this point. Whereas if Glass can offer a detailed description of one of the government's most closely guarded secrets, that's pretty strong corroboration of the fact that Keene shared it with him.