the_other_sandy: Black and white TV (TV)
the_other_sandy ([personal profile] the_other_sandy) wrote2014-04-25 10:16 pm
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H50 Ep: Pe'epe'e Kanaka

Only two episodes left this season, huh? I suspect they may be the last two I ever watch.

I'm kind of in a quandary here. I've never been shy about saying when I didn't like something about an episode, but there's a potential here for me to get really unpleasantly ranty, more so than anyone would find enjoyable to read. I also don't know if it's possible for me to properly articulate why this episode made me so angry. I think it just may be that the sheer number of things in this episode that pushed my buttons achieved critical mass and I'm overreacting. Let me start with the basics and see how far I get.



Nope, I didn't get far. You can't see it, but I've been writing and deleting and rewriting this entry for over an hour. I think I'm just going to have to let this one go.



So, umm...

Yay for TPTB sending Danny to PT instead of granting him a magical recovery during the off-week. Boo for the way the "banter" scenes between Steve and Danny have become so mean-spirited.

And you know, I mostly do like Grover, but they really need to stop having him participate in the action scenes. Chi McBride is just not up to it.

Sorry, everyone. There were many issues in this episode that deserved thoughtful and considerate deconstruction. There are many things to be said about the plot, the way Steve talked to Dawn, and the agenda TPTB had for this episode that they pushed so hard they didn't care the episode ran short enough to need two epilogues, including a monologue about fish. But they're not going to be said by me. I need to go read some fic. From another fandom.
superbadgirl: (alpaca steve)

[personal profile] superbadgirl 2014-04-26 05:30 am (UTC)(link)
I didn't get angry, but probably because I didn't really pay too close attention. It all did seem pretty much like one long set-up for next episode, which I don't know if I'm dreading or looking forward to. Leaning toward the former at the moment, because, well, and I know this makes me a "bad fan", but Steve-hurt kind of bores me for some reason.

Perhaps because instead of broadening the other core three's backgrounds, TPTB seem to just employ the "make everything that's not Steve-related surface and add more players" method of showrunning and I don't get it.

Not that I'm bitter.
Edited 2014-04-26 05:32 (UTC)

[identity profile] mangacat201.livejournal.com 2014-04-26 07:08 am (UTC)(link)
Wow, that's a first, but seeing as I'm a non-American person I think I'm a little more detached, but I'm still involved enough to see the problems with this episode.

I do feel like they tampered the scenes between Danny and Steve with a precarious balance, but I agree about the mean-spiritedness. While it's lovely to hear them express their feelings, we used to not need that kind of display to assure people that they were never ever taking serious jabs at each other. Now the 'I love you's felt more like they needed to assure each other of that more than anyone else. it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, but there's a Terminator style endoskeleton hiding under the feathers, if you excuse the dramatic metaphor.

The inclusion of the recovering veterans made me tear up from the genuiness of the exchange, but it felt too much like a plot device engineered towards eliciting a specific reaction to not be tainted by what came ahead.

As for the Patriot Act defending attack ad that made up the rest of the ep .... *sigh* it's just another of those examples of TPTB being too heavy-handed in their approach to any kind of sensitive topic, but I understand how this particular one might cut exceptionally deep. I thought the actress portraying Dawn did an exceptional job with the material she'd been given. (I found her more menacing in her shackled impotence than any of those CIA hicks that Steve faced trying to dissuade him from 'the conspiracy'). That said, I did believe her portrayal, but not her character, mainly because the 'explanatory backstory' was shoehorned in with such a lack of deference and the 'off-screen-argument' that I could have pulled my hair.
I wish they had layered her with more than just 'petulant, angry teenager lashing out at her lot in life with murderous extremism' but I liked that her attitude made Steve lose his cool and made him unwittingly expose a bit of hypocrisy coming from the American side of this conflict (someone should sit him down and make him watch the first ten minutes of The Newsroom sometime) and while I acknowledge that that's way too deep to be intentional from the side of the production team, I think it's still a foothold for those who are aware and choose to care about that. Is that going to serve as an educational tool for the masses can't be bothered to look for those subtleties? Certainly not, but then, that's not what the format aims for after all. Still, it's interesting how they comment on themselves with this ep. Either there's that one writer who's actually smarter than everyone else in the club and smuggled that by so far under the radar, or some really poor shmuck who has no grasp of how flawed noble intentions can be.

I'm not sure which one I'd be more likely to believe is true... anyway, that's my first instinct response to watching it, I hope I maybe could articulate some of what's been bothering you about it, though I'll understand either way whether you want to debate or not. Now I'm going back to searching for that x-men first class fic I've been craving because I've been on Marvel's superheroes like white on rice those past few weeks. Take care!

[identity profile] bookwurm.livejournal.com 2014-04-26 07:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Wow. I watched the first third to a half of this episode wondering what about it made you so angry. It wasn't great, but it wasn't any worse than an average episode this season. Then it turned into a jingoistic, anti-Islamic train wreck with a side of borderline-exploitation of wounded veterans.

I'll finish out the season, but I think it's becoming increasingly obvious that I am not the demographic wanted by TPTB for this show.

[identity profile] federica pieretti (from livejournal.com) 2014-04-30 10:22 pm (UTC)(link)
This episode made me angry too. Difficult to explain in my language, impossible in english.
For simplify: propaganda. However I saw very worst in NCIS and other shows.
About Steve and Danny I think that writers can't put them toghether (it will be the end of the show) and so they try to put some kind of tension between them.
Sorry for my english