Jaw-droppingly intimate and sensitive. Be prepared to be wrecked - the whole theater was shaking with sobs at points.
Beautifully and specifically queer. I've never on screen seen gay sex that felt this much like gay sex. The texture of it. There's a brief, funny, inter-micro-generation terminology convo that if you are LGBTQ of a certain age, you've had. There are two coming out conversations with lines that I swear are plagiarized from my life. There's a delightful subversion, in an early scene, of cruising, that achieves a cocktail of funny and sweet and sad that returns throughout the film (most notably in a moment where a 48-year-old Adam climbs into bed with his parents wearing a 12-year-old's pajamas). The exploration of how things can be so much better than 1987 but still not fine, and the ways the not-okayness of 1987 is still with us, especially in the psyches of folks that were there… so relatable and such a rare and subtle theme.
There is a final twist that, while devastating, does some real damage to Adam's character and, in my opinion, the emotional impact of the movie. Investing incredibly deeply in a fantasy of a relationship with a neighbor that didn’t happen is creepy where imagining you can talk to your dead parents again is sweet and sad. We know early on that the interactions with Adam’s parents aren’t a part of conventional reality and that doesn’t diminish any of their emotional impact, but the romantic relationship being unreal cheapens it.
This last emotional gutting felt unnecessary and unearned to me: it makes me hesitant to recommend the movie, despite how much it affected me, despite the impeccable execution. A friend who saw the movie with me and didn’t personally relate to as many of the queer culture touchpoints felt emotionally manipulated, and I get that. But aside from the last few minutes, my experience of the movie was near-perfect.
[8.5/10] “What did it cost you?” “Everything.”
It’s silly to try to connect Veep with Avengers: Infinity War, but it’s also hard to disaggregate them in my mind. Selina Meyer is not Thanos. Her goal is one of direct personal ambition than Thanos’s faux-altruistic goal. But the costs, at least in a spiritual sense, are the same.
Selina has her wish. After so much striving, so much conniving, so many lines crossed, she becomes President -- not just for a few months, but for a full term. And all she has to do to get there is: make a deal with the Chinese to let them undo the diplomatic liberation that made her politically relevant again, throw her nearest advisor into a position to have another heart attack, make a ignorant and repugnant man her Vice President at the expense of her other nearest advisor who resigns in disgust, relegate her one time protege to working for him without letting her advance from where she started, ensuring that another of the younger members of her team is out of politics, outlawing gay marriage to get votes but firmly and finally estrange her from her daughter, and throw the one person who genuinely, truly loved her under the bus.
In short, Selina sold her soul. That is impressive, if only because I didn’t think Selina had a soul left to sell. This show has constantly been about Team Meyer being utterly and completely mercenary, having no scruples to get in the way of climbing the political ladder, and being happy to sharply elbow one another whenever necessary or possible. Selina in particular has been happy to throw anything and everyone to the wolves when it suits her.
And yet, there’s something about the change that erupts in her when a (maybe?) dying Ben tells her that she knows what to do, that feels like she enters a new realm of darkness. With one blistering dress down, she eviscerates Tom James’s chief of staff and orchestrates her unexpected rival’s untimely demise with a MeToo moment. She sells out to whatever interests are necessary to get her the nomination, no matter the effects on her allies and erstwhile friend. She’s even willing to make a pact with the most repugnant man, who brandishes the most repugnant ideas, if it gets her what she wants.
There’s well-placed irony in the fact that, after all of the insults, all of his ridiculous ideas, all of his dump truck of deplorables speeches and gestures, Jonah ends up in the VP slot. With all the horse-trading and compartmentalizing going on here, it’s the ultimate gesture of futility. Selina knows full well, and vents, at how useless a drawer the Vice Presidency is to be shoved into and forgotten about. Having that be the culmination of Jonah’s obsequious journey feels appropriate.
That said, the genuine stock and trade of politics has never been Veep’s specialty, and so some of the brokered convention mishegoss to get to Selina’s ascendance and Jonah’s relegation becomes tiring after a while. The delegate-whipping and backroom dealing is a good opportunity for Veep to work in some final blasts from its arsenal of insults, and give the usual rondelay from its foul-mouthed politicians one last airing. But beyond the satire of Jonah’s “terrorist math” prediction coming true, the episode doesn't really kick into gear until Selina goes over to the darkest of the dark side once and for all.
But what does it get her? Well, the presidency, for one thing. And hey, that’s not nothing! But when we see Selina sitting in the Oval Office (once again buttressed by Sue!), being the President who won’t let the veep’s staff in rather than living on the other side of that arrangement, she doesn't seem happy. She’s still reflexively asking for Gary. Her staff is now made up of strangers. And in the end, she’s utterly alone, something that, as conveyed through Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s outstanding performance in the series finale, seems to be getting to her.
All of this striving and backstabbing and cutthroat Washington D.C. politicking still doesn't seem to have made her happy, still hasn’t fulfilled her in the way it was supposed to. The opening of the season asked repeatedly why Selina wanted to be President, and the closest she could come to an answer is “because this country owes it to me.” When that’s the only reason you want something -- because you like the idea of having it, not the thing itself -- then attaining will, as the finale suggests, only leave you alone and empty.
It’s a surprisingly powerful statement from a show that had seemed to adopt a Seinfeld-esque, “no learning, no hugging” policy. The true chutzpah comes in the show’s final segment, which jumps twenty-four years in the future, and you see that these years and years of naked political ambition left Selina’s hangers-on without much either.
Ben is dead. Kent looks like a shaggy wildman who raises livestock. Amy married Bill Ericson and chose never to have kids (an interesting echo given where things started for her this season). Dan is out of politics, never grew up, and is now selling real estate. Jonah was impeached, but is still married to his half-sister, apparently. And poor Gary is still devoted to the object of his courtly affection, despite all she’s done to him, laying the special lipstick on her coffin in a moment that has more emotional resonance than any comedy this foul should be able to muster.
Meanwhile, Richard, the only person in Selina’s coterie with any ethics or morality whatsoever, is the current President, having been reelected in a landslide. All of the shameless political backstabbers ended up discarded, depressed, or somewhere far short of their goals, and the one of their number who was too decent to be real, who shared none of their ambition, is the one who ended up succeeding better than any of them. In some ways, Veep’s finale is a fairytale. In others, it’s the final chapter of a tragedy.
(The one exception to all of this is Mike who, in a hilarious running gag that reaches its apex here, manages to consistently fail upward in the media world, with his boneheaded schtick being seen as endearing and a part of his charm. There’s a lesson, and an implicit critique, in that too.)
What did all of that selling out and betrayal and darkening of the soul net Selina? A one-term presidency that seems to have left her overshadowed by her successors, discarded by history, and bumped from the evening news by the death of Tom Hanks. Selina thought that all of this scratching and clawing would not only bring her happiness and fulfilment, but also a legacy. Veep declares, with her yonic Presidential Library full of disdainful rivals and allies and shoddy stumbles, that she ended up with none of the above.
Veep is a deeply cynical show, about government, about politicians, and about people. And yet, in the end, it delivered one of the most remarkably optimistic, and even moralistic messages imaginable: that the calculated climbers lose, even when they win, and that the good will ultimately prevail. The series was always one measure of caricature beyond the real world and one measure of hitting too close to home. But in its final hour, it buries its protagonist, and with her earthly remains, buries everything she aspired to and represented in the process.
[7.1/10] Good but unspectacular. My favorite storyline was probably Dan having to manage Jonah’s campaign. The notion of Jonah trying to make himself likable and presentable for the public has so much comic mileage to it, and throwing Dan into the mix plays on the Jim-Dwight vibe the two have. Whether it’s Jonah getting angry at people in a focus group or his hilariously awful campaign ad, it’s an interesting albatross to saddle Dan with. And the idea of Jonah gaining traction by turning on the Meyer administration has a lot of juice in it too. (It’s also nice to get Bill Erickson back and have poor Candi learn “the position has been filled once more.”)
I wasn’t over the moon about Selina having to choose which bank to bail out and vacillating about it. There’s something amusing enough about her being swayed by personal expediency on the one side, but political expediency on the other (and hey, there’s the whole “for the good of the country” thing too, which never really seems to factor in). It’s fine, but the show doesn’t wring much comedy out of it.
On the other hand, I admire this show’s commitment to making Selina an awful person without a hint of redemption and only the barest sense of humanity. It occurred to me that HBO hasn’t had a show this devoted to exposing the terribleness of its protagonist since The Sopranos.
Amy investigating the titular “c**tgate” was amusing, particularly when everyone she “interviewed” had said it. The fact that Selina is getting Nixonian levels of paranoid is an interesting direction to take things. Mike inadvertently finding out about Tom James’s corruption with Sydney Purcell is intriguing. Oh, and Catherine’s reveal that she’s in a relationship with Marjorie is kind of a neat sign of Selina’s obliviousness, and the button with them being “giddy” is a nice note to end on.
Overall, a perfectly solid meat and potatoes episode.
[7.2/10] Solid stuff – the reveal that “The Eagle” was suffering from dementia seemed pretty well-telegraphed so it didn’t have the intended impact, but it’s still a fun idea that Selina & Co. are so convinced by a guy’s reputation and doubletalk that they buy his nonsense as folksy wisdom. Ben putting him in what I can only assume is Ainsley Hayes’s old office in the basement is a nice note to end on.
I also enjoyed the running thread of Chinese hackers being foregrounded with Selina being bad at technology and then blaming a public tweet that was meant to be private on them. It’s the sort of absurd solution to problems, likely to just cause more problems, that this show does well. And by the same token, poor Mike! The unintended consequence of the tweet-based sanctions being that he and Wendy can’t adopt their Chinese baby is dark humor, but fits well into the Kafkaesque political environment of the show.
Gary bonding with Charlie Baird and getting on with people at the gala is a nice moment for him that makes me wonder if they’re going anywhere with the quiet hints they’ve dropped of him developing a little more. Ben translating Kent’s number crunches into English was a nice recurring bit, and Richard’s obliviousness leading to the O’Brien campaign admitting there are missing ballots is a fun comic setpiece as well. I think Richard has slowly but surely become my favorite character on the show. His sunshine-y and often inadvertent competence at his job is just so great.
Overall, a solid, enjoyable episode.
[9.2/10] One of the things about Veep that occasionally throws me for a loop but which I also really admire about the show is how dense it is. (Hold your horses, George Lucas.) In keeping with the frenzied nature of the Beltway shuffle, there’s always fifteen things going on in a given episode and it makes it hard to keep up with every storyline and thread that makes its way through.
But sometimes it all comes together in something that’s not quite a harmony, but at least a beautiful and very funny cacophony. That is this episode to a tee, and it gets particular force by centering everything around a countdown to Selina’s big announcement speech, which creates a spine for all those crazy happenings.
I also really appreciated the theme of this one. There’s a really interesting and submerged commentary on how women are treated in politics and in life writ large. There are a number of parallels drawn between Selina and Alicia Bryce, the leader of a “walk for universal childcare” group who’s roped into the photo op. Both of them aim to do good, but both find themselves being steamrolled by the apparatus around them to have their concerns ignored and papered over in favor of doing business as usual, often by a collection of old white guys.
And what’s really interesting is that Selina does it to Alicia herself. That even as Selina is having her own push for Universal Childcare squashed by the jerk Senator, she’s brushing off Alicia and not really listening to her. It’s a canny move to bring the two of them together and have Selina using Alicia’s daughter as a focal point for leaning on the Senator and getting a sliver of what she wanted in there, even if she just as soon demurs from making any sort of commitment on it.
I don’t know, man. This may be the most cynical show I’ve watched, and I’m putting it next to the likes of The Wire and Moral Orel on those terms. It posits such self-interest and venal behavior from pretty much everyone who matters, but with a dismissive smile from everyone. As chilling as it is funny in some ways.
I also appreciated the irony of Selina getting so worn down and frustrated by not being able to advance universal healthcare as a cause and her being steamrolled on it, only for the thing that snaps her back to life being her own daughter telling her about how hard it was to grow up as her daughter. Selina continually treats Catherine terribly, and I appreciate how the show never shies away from or excuses that, but it again creates some really interesting parallels.
On top of that, there’s just some funny stuff happening outside of the main deal. Mike’s interactions with Alicia and Jonah are great. Jonah is in particularly rare form when he’s awkwardly trying to ingratiate himself to the black community as a reporter. And Mike begging with “goober peas,” while getting rebuffed by “Jonad” only to win at the end of the day is a fun and funny little story.
The SNL stuff is slight but great as well. There is, again, some fun winking humor in former castmember Julia Louis-Dreyfus complaining about the show and the whole cast lamenting “comedians” as the bane of their existence. The show also perfectly captures the stilted, not-ready-for-prime-time vibe of politicians appearing in political sketches on the show.
Overall, it’s one of the deepest, most interesting, most intricate, and funniest episodes Veep has ever done.
[9.3/10] Call it recency bias. Call it coincidence. Call it what you will. But I saw a production of Fiddler on the Roof recently, and it’s hard not to have the themes and melodies of that show floating in the back of my mind while watching T’Pol’s portions of “Home”. Both stories focus on the clash between longstanding traditions and generational changes, on the conflict between collectivist/communal values and growing individualism, on a choice between one parental-approved suitor and one a daughter has found on her own, and on parents trying to do what’s best for their daughters while also honoring the traditions and ideals that have sustained their people.
That’s all a long-winded way of saying that both are very complex, very compelling, and very very good. Much of “Home” is about the aftermath of the Xindi war, the effect it had on the people and institutions the Enterprise left behind. But T’Pol’s story in the episode is different. It’s about the effect that T’Pol’s three-year absence, her growth and development, her choices out in the frontier of space, have had on the life that she left behind.
Enterprise dramatizes that through T’Pol’s shore leave, where she decides to return home to Vulcan to visit her mother, and invites Trip with her. What follows is a nicely small stakes kitchen sink drama, which follows in the proud tradition of Spock’s strained attempt to reconcile his life in Starfleet with his family’s expectations. In the process, T’Pol has to handle her mother’s tsk tsk-ing at a human beau, the reappearance of her once and future fiancée, and most notably, the effect that her choices have had on her mother’s life.
But “Home” also explores the effect that all those adventures had on Archer. After a testy exchange with usual side-thorn Ambassador Soval over the events of “Impulse”, Archer lashes out his point-eared foe and his commanding officer for their questioning. There’s an All Quiet on the Western Front-esque “you weren’t there, so you can’t know what it was like” anger bubbling within him, on top of survivor’s guilt, and worry that the throes of war have curdled his idealism, and a dash of PTSD to sweeten the deal.
I know I’m rough on Archer-focused stories, but this one was quite good. Some of the dialogue is on the nose about what the captain is going through, but it’s a good topic to explore. It’s nice to see the show giving us something of an epilogue to the Xindi business, to the effect of turning the Enterprise from an exploratory vessel to a warship. Archer has to contend with having lived through that, having lost people along the way, having to face the insecurity that all this exploring started this dust-up and put Earth in danger. That’s meaningful territory to explore.
Enterprise the good sense to ground that stories in one individual experience, but also to broaden it to explore the larger societal reaction to the Xindi attack. That takes the form of a general Xenophobia against aliens on Earth, with Phlox as the focal point. There’s genuine fear and danger in the sense where one rowdy lout implicitly threatens the good doctor for drinking with Reed and Mayweather in a bar filled with humans.
The fist fight that follows is a little silly (if righteous), but the show does well to end it with Phlox deploying a (Kif Kroker-esque) defense mechanism that both scares off his attackers and cements him as something other. There are layers of irony to this moment, made tragic by the fact that this one asshole is harassing someone who did as much to help save Earth as almost anyone.
I know I complained about Enterprise not being equipped to handle a post-9/11 allegory, but I actually really like the show diving into this reflection of the contemporary social climate, and how it affects one of the show’s best characters. I hope this season doesn't leave things with Phlox’s laudable but also discomfiting accommodationist stance that Earth’s been through a trauma and will understandably need time to get over it. (Something that seems particularly concerning a decade and a half later when Islamophobia is still very much a problem.) But this is one area where the show addresses the real, unpleasant consequences of its major developments in a realistic, personal way.
I know I’ve also complained constantly about Bakula’s performances, buy by god, he’s actually pretty good here! His break down with Captain Hernandez is good stuff, that deftly conveys the struggle of being a hero in the public eye while also worrying that as much of the bad stuff is your fault as the good stuff is to your credit.
I’ll admit to blanching a bit at the fact that Enterprise dramatizes the recovery from that with a romance, and Hernandez seems basically to exist only to kiss Archer and make him feel better. But it’s nice to see Archer romantically involved with someone who’s his peer, who’s age-appropriate, and who isn’t afraid to call him on his crap when need be. I doubt it’s something the show will pursue forever, but it’s Archer’s best romance so far which, while not an especially high bar, is still something nice to see the show manage.
The show’s overall best romance, on the other hand, has been T’Pol and Trip. That’s why there’s juice to the fact that T’Pol decides to reluctantly end her relationship with Trip and marry Koss, her Vulcan fiancée, in order to use his family’s influence to restore her mother’s position at the Vulcan Science Academy. There are so many fraught layers to that decision, from T’Pol’s plain feelings for Trip, to her friction with her mother over departing from Vulcan norms, to anger at the High Command for punishing T’Pol’s mom on flimsy charges when T’Pol herself was out of the Vulcan government’s reach, to the overarching sense of duty to the place where you were raised and the people who dwell within it.
My hope and expectation is that the decision is neither firm nor irreversible. The show adds layers to that conflict by showing T’Les (T’Pol’s mom) initially bristling at her daughter bringing a human home, but then seeing Trip’s capability, intuiting the depth of their feelings for one another, and eventually seeing the way in which those feelings mirror T’Les’s feelings for her dearly departed husband. There is, in the nuanced interplay of Vulcan traditionalism, human individualism, and T’Pol’s position with a foot in both worlds, a depth to these figures, their dilemma, and the story being told.
It’s a story that, like Fiddler on the Roof, is ensconced in notions of societal change, and the effects, both political and personal, it has when communities collide and old enmities reemerge. But as Soval’s unexpectedly heartening handshake to Archer signifies, even when change is hard, or painful, or rocky to reckon with, it can still end up being for the better, or at least bring satisfaction in ways you might never have expected.
