The Son - General Discussion

[nodorothyparker]

Young Eli faces a life-or-death test of survival in 1849.  In 1915, the McCulloughs enact a dangerous plan to take the fight to their enemy.

[GHScorpiosRule]

I know this is very shallow and mean of me, but I don't see what the female Comanche in 1849 sees in Eli- with his big teeth with spaces in between and how his mouth is never completely closed when he's not speaking. The warrior who saw her sneak out of his Tipi is much more pleasing to the my eyes. But of course, in 1849, Zahn's Comanche is the BEST AND ??????HAWTEST??????

What? I said I was being shallow and mean!

[Medicine Crow]

Why does every show have a punk-ass teenager ... male or female??  It's just SO grating (& normal).  LOL.

[AuntiePam]

2 hours ago, Medicine Crow said:

Why does every show have a punk-ass teenager ... male or female??  It's just SO grating (& normal).  LOL.

You mean the piano-playing McCollough grandson?  He could have been worse. 

I wish the writing was more original.  The only thing here that we haven't seen in hundreds of other movies and TV shows is the Indians having conversations, joking, ribbing each other.  

[Joimiaroxeu]

"You don't look a day over 60." A joke for the audience? I think Brosnan looks great for his age but 80 is science fiction.

[nodorothyparker]

Brosnan is, I think, 63, so definitely an inside joke for the audience.

I assumed the punk-ass teenager was Charles, the McCullough kid so eager to be along for the ride for his first massacre.  But the other son probably works there too, asking all wide-eyed why the local Tejanos are giving your family such a wide berth.  Both of these families are supposed to be fairly famous and have been there for generations, so the kids should have at least some idea of what's what.  It seems the height of irresponsibility to have a long running feud that's resulted in a number of buried bodies as we learned last episode and not clue them in at some point why these people might someday be shooting at them.

I keep trying to figure out how with the book as good as it is in acknowledging the terrible cost of modern settlement of Texas, both in human and ecological terms, without going all hackneyed Kevin Costner Dances with Wolves about it that the writing feels like such a retread of a hundred other Westerns.  The show is really lacking in energy and dry humor as it moves from one set piece shootout to another. 

[Yokosmom]

Quote

  Here it's the opposite - the females were killed and the boys were taken.. but for what purpose? 

Comanche men had a high mortality rate due to their warlike nature and supposedly, Comanche women had a low fertility rate.  Eli was rather on the old side to be taken captive, but such things did happen.  The Comanche took captives from whites, Mexicans and other tribes. I believe in the book, that Eli had been observed for a number of days and was considered to be a possible addition to the tribe due to his hardiness and hunting skills.  

[nodorothyparker]

An enemy forces Young Eli to question his loyalties in 1849.  In 1915, the McCulloughs' past comes back to haunt them with deadly results.

[AuntiePam]

Another violent set piece, maybe to make up for the lack of compelling personal drama. 

Sally putting her injured son in a wheelbarrow and attempting to haul him to the house during the firefight -- well, I haven't seen that kind of stupidity on TV in awhile.  (Maybe early in The Walking Dead when Lorie took off in a car by herself and almost got eaten.) 

I didn't buy the dying Tonk suggesting to Eli that he carry the smallpox to the Comanche.  Yeah, they're enemies, but it's the white man who's trying to wipe you out.  Much different from warfare for horses, captives, food, etc. 

Also cringed at Sally telling her son how precious he is -- "You're the light of my life" is a signal of impending doom -- it's right up there with the Victorian cough,  and the retiring cop, going out on a call on his last day on the job. 

[nodorothyparker]

This was such a terrific book, and I keep trying to figure out how the hell the adaptation went so completely off the rails.

The Comanche going to make war on the Tonkawa and finding them all dead or dying of smallpox is mostly straight off the page, including the decision to send Eli in first as kind of a human guinea pig.  If nobody shoots at him, they do at least know that the disease doesn't seem to be as deadly to whites even if they don't know why.  Germ theory won't be around for another full decade or so and it will be even longer than that before it's widely accepted, so I'm not sure I buy Eli and the dying Thick Hair being able to deduce that it will be so easily spread by carrying the deads' possessions back to camp as plunder.  

The big shootout was completely ridiculous.  I realized I hadn't been paying that close attention because I was under the impression last week?  the week before? that the group killed trying to cross the river to dynamite the train were either on the payroll or were at least being bankrolled by the Garcia family.  So it made no sense to me that Eli would send Jeannie to them for help or that they would even come.  Now honestly I'm not sure if any of that is right or who they were and I don't care enough to go back and rewatch to sort it out.  None of this storyline is from the book

Spoiler

where an earlier shootout that injures one of the grandsons results in the McCulloughs and "volunteers" from town riding out slaughtering the entire Garcia family including women and children in their home except for one survivor which sets up a very different dynamic as the McCulloughs then basically steal the Garcia holding for the price of their back taxes,

so there's no help there either.

It's like the showrunners took some of the primary characters from the book, kept the part of the backstory that was interesting to them, and then abandoned the rest in favor of plugging in Western cliches as plot points.

[Razzberry]

The low female fertility rate is also mentioned in "Empire of The Summer Moon", a fascinating book about Comanches and in particular Quanah Parker, who is referenced in the show.

"But there was something else about Quanah, too. He was a half-breed, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman. People on the Texas frontier would soon learn this about him, partly because the fact was so exceptional. Comanche warriors had for centuries taken female captives — Indian, French, English, Spanish, Mexican, and American— and fathered children by them who were raised as Comanches. But there is no record of any prominent half-white Comanche war chief.

There are plenty of records of children being killed by Comanches, and of young girls being raped, but in general they fared far better than the adults. For one thing, they were young enough to be assimilated into a society that had abysmally low fertility rates (partly caused by the life on horseback, which induced miscarriages early in pregnancy) and needed captives to keep their numbers up. 2 They were also valuable for the ransom they might bring. In several other unusually violent Comanche raids, young female captives had been conspicuously spared and quickly accepted into the tribe. Girls had a decent chance, anyway. Certainly that was true compared to adult male captives, who were automatically killed or tortured to death."

Gwynne, S. C.. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (p. 121). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

[nodorothyparker]

That book is on my to read if I ever get around to it list, which at the rate I'm going probably will happen sometime around 2024.  I'd never really given much thought to fertility rates and pregnancy among the more nomadic peoples so that's really interesting to me.  It makes sense though, just as it makes a sort of sense for them to steal captives as it's so relatively easy for them to do to keep their numbers up.  In this novel, Eli is aware of a number of white and Mexican captives scattered throughout the various bands who have assimilated with various degrees of success.  If events had gone differently for him, he very well likely would have married into the tribe and done reasonably well for himself.

[walnutqueen]

I tried with this show - truly, I did.  But ir's a fuckin' shitbag, and I just can't anymore ...

[nodorothyparker]

It really is a steaming mess.  Which is a shame because the book is terrific and actually has a lot to say about how the West was settled and won, and it deserves its spot among the best of modern Westerns.

[Ina123]

At least we are getting to the part where they find the oil.

[Medicine Crow]

Yes, but, the plot thickens, not on his property!!!

[nodorothyparker]

I would love to believe this latest development of finding oil on the wrong side of the property line is finally going to lead to something interesting and not just more killing because hey, it's a Western and we've got some rope.  But the show has pretty much used up my faith and good will on that front.

I do continue to like the 1849/1850 story of Eli with the Comanche because there is some real complexity there in sorting out what the right thing to do actually was.  Eli getting the buffalo hunters killed removes a threat to the tribe's food source and they get to eat through the winter.  But by doing so, white woman Ingrid is taken captive into another tribe when she was on the verge of being free from a previous enslavement and the buffalo hunter dies a horrible agonizing death.  (Hi, J.D. Evermore who did such lovely work on Rectify.)   Those scenes and Prairie Flower talking about the massacre of her original tribe show how despite what we know on the larger scale in talking about colonialism and genocide, on the smaller individual level who was victimizing who was often a matter of perspective on the frontier.  The entire storyline and Toshaway's speech about why they kill white people was almost verbatim from the book and Zahn McLarnon was doing very nice work with it and understanding Eli's ambivalence about it.

And I just now realized that the captive Ingrid is very likely the same Ingrid we saw having happy fun times with grownup Eli a couple of episodes ago.  So that answers that question.

[AuntiePam]

If not for Zahn McLarnon, I wouldn't be watching.  None of these characters are grabbing me, and I'm really getting tired of the flirtation between Eli and Maria. 

I think a problem with movies that try to tell "big" stories -- multi-generational/historicals/sagas -- is that there aren't enough "little" scenes, scenes that add flavor or give insight into personality.  The Son is almost all "big scenes", scenes with meaning, exposition, back story.  That's all well and good, but it's like a meal with just a main course, no appetizers, no sides. 

Movies like The Godfather tell a big/family saga story, but that movie had enough little scenes to make us feel connected to the characters.  That's rare.  Some TV miniseries have done it -- Rich Man Poor Man, Centennial, Roots, Winds of War. 

[nodorothyparker]

Do you mean Pete and Maria?  While the show has been fairly faithful to the young Eli among the Comanches story, it's veered so wildly from the 1915 storyline that what was a pretty unconventional story between those two characters is yet another watered down mess that I have no idea what the point is or what they're trying to do.  Of course, that description could cover most of the 1915 story. 

Book spoiler:

Spoiler

Book Maria is the sole survivor of the McCulloughs massacring the entire Garcia entire family and basically stealing their land.  Years later after Sally has had enough of living in the middle of nowhere and left Pete for the city, he and Maria end up in a tortured hate turned to love sort of affair.  Eli wants her killed as a leftover loose end from the massacre, but is eventually talked down to paying her off to leave.  That results in Pete abandoning everything McCullough and chasing her into Mexico where we later learn they had a life and children together. 

[Ina123]

The 1915 drivel is so far from the book that it should not have been allowed to even list "based on the book".

(That said, yes, the young Eli with the Comanches is following the book).

[AuntiePam]

On 5/8/2017 at 7:39 AM, Ina123 said:

The 1915 drivel is so far from the book that it should not have been allowed to even list "based on the book".

Yes.  I don't remember much about the book, but I'd remember this soapy crap because I don't like soapy crap, and I really liked the book, so it couldn't have been this soapy. 

It made no sense for Jonas not to come back to the ranch.  If he survived the trip to Austin before his injuries were treated, he can certainly survive the trip home now that he's on the mend. 

It also made no sense for Maria to be cowed by Niles and those thugs.  Money and class always wins, then and now.  Niles wouldn't have dared to do anything to her.   A real Maria would have stuck her nose in the air and kept on walking.  And she would have married the old man and had affairs. 

[Medicine Crow]

Phineas ... I didn't see that coming!!

Edited May 14, 2017 by Medicine Crow

[nodorothyparker]

Like nearly everything else with this series, it was handled with so much more subtlety and shading on the page.  There was no big let's take my so sheltered she's only kissed one man married sister-in-law out to a gay and lesbian club 1915 coming out for which she'll be immediately and completely understanding and supportive, which seems a real stretch for the time period.  Because Pete and then Jeannie are the POV characters, we get mentions of little things that may not seem like much on their own but taken together paint a picture of a man who is more truly Eli's heir than Pete in being a total hardass in business matters who also happens to be deeply closeted.  None of the book characters ever come out and say it directly or otherwise acknowledge it. 

Letting the kid recuperate in Austin where he has better access to the all the modern amenities gives Sally the ready-made excuse to leave Pete and the ranch and stay gone.  I guess the showrunners decided just having had enough of bandit war shootouts in the living room and a completely ineffectual husband isn't a perfectly acceptable reason.   But I see they still chose to tack on the Pete-Maria romance anyway even if their version of events robs it of so much what made it so weirdly affecting in the source material.  Who doesn't go at it up against the wall in the main area of the home where most of your extended family lives and could come back at any time if you hadn't just dumped them all off in Austin?

[Joimiaroxeu]

Quote

which seems a real stretch for the time period.

In some if not most parts of Texas it seems like it'd be a real stretch right now.

Hate to admit I gasped when Eli went over the cliff. Should've seen that coming. Whatever, of course he'll survive so what was the point of leaving it as a literal  cliffhanger?

Edited May 15, 2017 by Joimiaroxeu

[nodorothyparker]

I hadn't thought about it being a literal cliffhanger but you're right.  That is funny.

It's all the more ridiculous when you consider that the Eli with the Comanche scenes are the prequel story and we're already looking at the much much older version of the character.  We know he survived it.

[Medicine Crow]

We never found out where Eli went when he packed up his rifle & other "stuff" & got in his car.  Anyone?

[nodorothyparker]

No idea.  Pierce Brosnan and his accent were barely in this episode.

[AuntiePam]

On 5/14/2017 at 0:18 PM, Medicine Crow said:

We never found out where Eli went when he packed up his rifle & other "stuff" & got in his car.  Anyone?

He took a lot of cash.  My guess is he's visiting the neighbor who owns the land where the oil was seeping up through the ground.  Eli will make him an offer he can't refuse.

[AuntiePam]

The Kindle version is on sale for $1.99 today (Friday) at Amazon. 

[Yakimaman]

Haven't read the book so have no idea where this is going or will end up but would someone please tell me that Pete gets killed.  It's the only reason I keep watching; just hoping to see what weak dick pos get shot in the head by someone.  

[nodorothyparker]

The show storyline is so far off the book that I'm not sure a book answer would even have any bearing at this point.  It's Monday and I'm still not sure what the hell Saturday's episode was supposed to be.   The only thing that was recognizable or made any sense was the McCulloughs plotting to snatch up the Garcias' oil soaked land for the cost of the back taxes.

[AuntiePam]

On 5/22/2017 at 3:24 PM, nodorothyparker said:

The show storyline is so far off the book that I'm not sure a book answer would even have any bearing at this point. 

You got that right.  I'm at 10% in the e-book and

Spoiler

the Garcia family is already gone (except for Maria, who is a young girl, not a widow).  Eli is Jeannie's great-grandfather, not her grandfather. 

The novel covered a huge amount of time but dammit, they didn't need to make the Readers Digest Condensed version.  With a mini-series, 10 hours+, they could have built characters, written some decent background, and trusted the audience to stick around. 

[Razzberry]

I saw that and got excited, then noticed the date of last Friday.  Turns out it's still on sale though!  Thanks for the head's up.

The Son, on Kindle

[Medicine Crow]

No episode last night in my area!!  Anyone else?

[nodorothyparker]

Nope.  AMC is apparently taking the holiday weekend off.  

[Ina123]

4 hours ago, Medicine Crow said:

No episode last night in my area!!  Anyone else?

The previews from last episode said it would be back in two weeks. And, yes, due to holiday weekend.

[Medicine Crow]

Just watched The Prophecy.  Anyone else watching this show?

[nodorothyparker]

I see the show apparently decided it wasn't nonsensical enough and threw a crazy ranty Mormon woman in for good measure.  I guess they didn't get the memo that adding evil Mormons into the mix was when Hell on Wheels went completely off the rails or maybe they figure it doesn't matter anymore.

[AuntiePam]

17 hours ago, Medicine Crow said:

Just watched The Prophecy.  Anyone else watching this show?

I'm hate-watching.  I don't watch a lot of TV dramas but the ones I do watch demand close attention -- Fargo, Better Call Saul, The Leftovers.  With The Son, I can fast-forward scenes and not miss a damn thing. 

[nodorothyparker]

I'm finding that I'm spending a lot of time on my phone while watching this because it keeps me from getting too aggravated that they took a book I really enjoyed and turned it into this.  Mostly it's a what else am I doing on a Saturday night thing and my own issues with not seeing things through to the end.

I can only assume they're gearing up for a finale that puts the show at the same place the book is almost in the beginning as far as the Garcias' fate.   It's a very strange choice to make unless they were feeling pretty confident they could talk AMC into giving them a second season.  The show hasn't gotten particularly good reviews, largely for the same reasons we've already discussed.

[North of Eden]

Not feeling all the hate this series seems to be receiving. I love it more than I thought I would. Must be all the book people that are disappointed...but never having read the book I’m immune.

I’m really enjoying the story, probably the 1850 stuff more so but it’s all good to me. The one thing that frustrates me is I’m rooting for young Eli and it’s a downer to know that he grows up to be such an a-hole but he took baby steps towards redemption in episode 9. Will it last…stay tuned…season 2 is a go!

Also it helps I find Elizabeth Frances as Prairie Flower radiant and captivating whenever she’s on screen.

The only real complaints I would level at the show was that they didn’t cast young Eli with  more of a heartthrob type actor…he is supposed to grow up to be Pierce Brosnan after all! And that  the young daughter is an annoying pill.

[AuntiePam]

I'm almost finished with the re-read, and still haven't figured out who Jeannie's father is.  Eli is her great-grandpa, Pete and Phineas are grand-uncles but there's a generation missing -- who was her dad? 

Does the paper copy have a family tree? 

[nodorothyparker]

Yes it does, which is incredibly helpful in keeping everybody straight.

Book Pete is Jeannie's grandfather, not father.  He had three sons: Glenn, who was the kid shot in the not big house shootout, Charles, the kid who went along with massacre to prove what a tough little shit he was, and Pete Jr.  Charles will go on to be Jeannie's father.

[AuntiePam]

On 6/5/2017 at 2:21 PM, North of Eden said:

Not feeling all the hate this series seems to be receiving. I love it more than I thought I would. Must be all the book people that are disappointed...but never having read the book I’m immune.

 

For me, the disappointment is that the show isn't catching any of the nuances of the book -- if 'nuance' is the right word.  The book went deeply into the mixed cultures of that region, the history, alienation, racial tension, guilt, politics, and later, with Jeannie, the misogyny of being a woman in a man's business world.  Instead we're getting a pretty standard soap opera.  The book did it better than most other novels set in that time and place, so I hoped the show would do the same.  Or at least try. 

[nodorothyparker]

There are things about it I have really enjoyed, like Eli's story among the Comanche which up until this last episode was pretty faithful to the book.  It does a nice job of showing that despite what we know on the large scale about the effects of colonialism and westward expansion, on the small scale things like what counts as civilized behavior or who were the good guys or bad guys were largely a matter of perspective to the individuals living it.  The 1915 story has been a mess as it's careened from one Western trope to another to make the family the kind of gun slinging badasses we root for in typical Westerns and lost all shading and nuance that made the book so strangely compelling.  There have been scenes where it felt like they kept the characters' names and situations in life and threw out everything else that made them recognizable.

I can't speak as to whether this would have worked better for me if I didn't like the book so much.  I'm generally not a book purist in that I realize some things don't translate well from one medium to another and they're entirely different ways of telling a story, but I do like to be able to still recognize the story that's being told.  

[Medicine Crow]

So, I'm thinking that Eli leaving the "Good Luck Pouch" that his Comanche father gave him in the burning house means that he thinks he's used up all his "Good Luck"???

[Joimiaroxeu]

Quote

  It's a very strange choice to make unless they were feeling pretty confident they could talk AMC into giving them a second season.

They must've known they were getting a second season by the time they taped the finale because if not, IMO that makes what they did with the Garcia family beyond horrific. Would they really have ended a series that way?

I don't get the character of Eli at all. Are we supposed to admire him because right now I see him as mostly greedy and evil. Ugh. And between Brosnan playing the world's most spry 80-year old and his ridiculous imitation of Batman with a Texas drawl (I actually think Christian Bale as the Dark Knight could've done a more convincing accent), it's hard for me to take the character serously.

Edited June 11, 2017 by Joimiaroxeu

[nodorothyparker]

The voice over teaser thing at the end said we are getting a second season so they must have known early and could plan accordingly.

So at the end of the first season, the primary story has only gotten as far as the Garcia massacre, which happens really really early in the book.  But other plotlines are much further in.  While I've had mixed feelings about some of the storytelling this season and some of it really didn't make for great episodic TV, I can at least sort of see now what they're trying to do and as horrific as the massacre and the false flag inciting of it was, it puts the 1915 versions of the characters more on track with their book counterparts.   We're never supposed to think the rising McCullough interests weren't built on the inevitable bloodshed and opportunism that came with settlement of the west.  Brosnan has had a hard time getting a handle on Eli as a larger than life figure who's done some very bad things along the way to becoming that larger than life figure at least in part because yeah, the attempt at the accent has been ridiculous.  In contrast, his fellow Briton Henry Garrett has absolutely nailed both the accent work and Pete as a deeply conflicted character who has nonetheless benefited from his father's legacy.  (Color me shocked to learn on IMBd that he played a Scottish army captain on Poldark so different that I wouldn't have recognized him as the same actor.  So kudos for that.)

The massacre was pretty faithful to the book in both how it was staged and that in that there really is no justifying it beyond a naked land grab and an excuse for the local boys to kill them some Tejanos.   Garcia's wife begging him beforehand to "call the police, call the army" and for him to matter of factly tell her that it wouldn't do anything, that that's not the country they live in was gutting.

Zahn McClarnon remains lovely.  That is all.

[nodorothyparker]

From a couple of weeks ago and confirming what we already know from the finale that we will be getting a second season.  The ratings apparently actually aren't bad.

http://www.tvguide.com/news/amc-renews-the-son-for-season-2/

Review of the season ender:

http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/the-son/265574/the-son-episode-10-review-scalps

[Medicine Crow]

Who was the boy/man puking after the massacre & why did Phineas shoot him?  What happened to Charles?  Sorry to be a bother.