1x04 A History of Violence

[7.2/10] So it looks like this week’s genre pastiche is Indiana Jones and the adventure novels and spelunking hero serials those movies were imitating. It’s not the best mode of the show so far, if only because it feels like this one prompts the characters to make dumb decisions or otherwise require contrivances.

How is it that our heroes just happen to be at the museum with the secret vault on the exact night when the moon’s in the right position to illuminate the entrance? Why do they have Montrose try to leap across a chasm onto a flimsy, disappearing beam rather than just telling him to go back? Why do they just stop stock still and make no efforts to grab the pages they came for and run when the corpse in front of them starts to hiss and come to life? How can they hold their breath long enough to swim out of there, get to the elevator, and give Leti enough time to retrieve the errant pages and swim back?

The answer is because the plot requires all these things. I try not to be a nitpicker, and I’m a firm believer in willing suspension of disbelief. But when you stack all these implausibilities on top of one another, they start to weigh on the viewer.

What’s more, the whole setup just isn’t that interesting. I do vaguely appreciate that we have some clear MacGuffins and objectives here. Tic, Leti, and Montrose are trying to retrieve Titus’s pages. But the journey through the caves and efforts to avoid the various booby traps isn’t especially novel or well done. Slicing pendulums, flooding caverns, etc. are all old hat, and the editing and cinematography doesn’t do much to make them feel new or exciting.

That said, once again, I like the themes of the episode. The subtext (and occasionally explicit text) of colonialism here, and the fiction of “explorers” like Titus and Indiana Jones types fancying themselves archeologists and tamers of savages when, in fact, they’re just pillaging other cultures’ heritage, is potent. As weird as her inclusion is, the indigenous woman rescued from Titus’s curse is compelling as she tells the story of she and her people being taken advantage of in the name of unraveling the “language of Adam”, by someone who was treated with generosity and responded with deceit. (It also ties into Lovecraftian tropes of trying to decode ancient symbols from unknown languages).

There also continues to be some interesting parent-child relationships. The key one here is Montrose and Tic, with the father trying to keep his son from getting involved in all of this, the two bonding a bit during the adventure, and Montrose even complimenting his son on the good, brave man he’s grown into...right before Montrose slits the poor indigenous woman’s throat. I’m not sure where they’re going with Montrose’s relationship to his son just yet, especially with the suggestions that Montrose might have more to his sexuality than his son realized, but Michael K. Williams is always good.

Surprisingly, I actually liked the subplots in this one a fair amount. I especially like Rudy’s story here, how she feels ground down by life and like she’s losing despite doing everything right. After working so hard to earn a job at a local department store, another woman of color is hired, one who is more conventionally attractive. She feels like she’s losing the rat race, failing to get the slim slice of the pie that African Americans were permitted to fight for at the time. Her artistic expression at the bar gets no appreciation, and she has to watch her sister, Leti, who never followed the rules, come into money and her own kind of success despite it all. That makes her uniquely susceptible to the charms and manipulations of the valet from the Braithewhite house, and there’s definitely something interesting about that development.

I’m still not crazy about the continued presence of Christina Braithwaite, but I guess we need a Big Bad of sorts now that her dad has been turned to stone. I do like the bit of world-building we get here, with the reveal that there are multiple “lodges” within the Order of Ancient Dawn and that the police chief in the North Side of Chicago is in a rival one. I also appreciate that even Christina has to fight for respect within her organization, given her gender. Seeing her actually face (profane) resistance on that account and not just have it paid lip service helps give it more force, and I’m beginning to appreciate the throughline that she’s better at casting spells than anyone else in her family or organization, but gets no recognition or rank because she’s a woman.

Otherwise, this was a more conventional episode of television, with the Indiana Jones adventure being the A-story and Ruby and Christina’s tales being B- and C-stories. The main pastiche was weaker than the others we’ve seen so far, and I’m still not sold on the overarching plot/mystery box. But each of the three stories had at least some merit to them.