S05.E06: Better to Marry Than Burn

[nodorothyparker]

I'm finally getting around to seeing this.  Nice to see Roger finally get a win after episodes of Now on Hapless Modern Son-in-Law.  I get that the tenants of the Ridge are used to a system where Jamie as the Head Big Deal Landowner manages bigger picture issues and has all the answers for them, but I was seriously rooting for Roger in that early scene with them to just be like "Look, you clearly think you know better than me and consider me an inept nepotism hire.  So what is your solution then?"

Wylie was suitably distasteful.  I have only very vague memories of the Wylie, Forbes, Bonnet entanglement from the book too, although I know there was one at some point in there.  It's a little jarring that the last time we saw Forbes the former hobbit he was angling to marry Brianna for Riverrun and now he's so in cahoots with Bonnet, who's apparently spreading the news far and wide that he's Jemmy's actual father.

The show has me in the weird position of really liking Maria Doyle Kennedy's Jocasta more than I did in the books while also being more uncomfortable with her as the slave owning mistress than I was there.  In the books you're not really seeing it and it becomes so much easier to chalk these portrayals up to the series having begun in the '90s when we weren't really grappling so much with plantation epic narratives yet.  Some of it honestly feels like a holdover from the '80s plantation miniseries that was always focused on the pretty clothes and big houses and the slaves were mostly backdrops with a token line or two.  I don't know how much of that is colored by my book knowledge of the Jocasta-Ulysses book relationship or that he's basically free there, but I'm sure that's figuring into some of this for me too.  The actors really sold Jocasta and Murtagh's parting scene and why she would choose the safety of a complete cipher like show Duncan Innes, although there are issues there too.  Murtagh already knows from Jamie and Claire that full blown revolution is coming.  Yet he's going to ask her to wait for him?  Wait for what?  And all of that still ignores that Murtagh is apparently so passionate about revolutionary ideals that he can't cool his jets and wait, that he spent 12 years as as indenture, yet is in love with a woman who holds people in bondage.  I said at the end of last season when that plot thread popped up that I could see it as a fling, but as a full emotional relationship?  Murtagh should have at least as much objection as Jamie put up if not more, because he did his time here in the colonies surrounded by it.  I get that people compartmentalize or ignore all sorts of things when it suits them, but it feels wildly out of character for a man who can't even try to temper himself when he knows that he'll be on the winning side if he just waits for it.

 

[SassAndSnacks]

36 minutes ago, nodorothyparker said:

The show has me in the weird position of really liking Maria Doyle Kennedy's Jocasta more than I did in the books while also being more uncomfortable with her as the slave owning mistress than I was there. 

I feel the exact same way. I really didn’t like her in the books, and I think she came across much more manipulative and conniving there. In the show, I find her to be almost sympathetic at times, which makes me feel...uncomfortable.

[CatWarmer]

Apologizes for popping in out of nowhere - I’ve been binge watching since signing up with STARZ and read the books years ago. So I haven’t been commenting on anything.  I’m kind of glad I’ve forgotten much of the books so I don’t get as frustrated as some of you!  Yes, this Brianna seems like a totally different character than in my memories.  All that MIT education gone to naught.

But had to ask..am I the only one who thinks Reverend Wakefield must have been reading Little House on the Prairie to Wee Roger?  Locust swarm, American West, smoke pots, book published in 1935....although it didn’t work out so well for the Ingalls. Perhaps Roger can open a one room schoolhouse!