Reverie Season 1 Episode 4: Blue Is the Coldest Color Recap

~ Metacrone

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This week’s episode picks up right where last week’s last off, with Mara in her sister’s burning apartment. As it burns, the apartment, and Derealization Ghost Brynn, shatter and dissolve away from Mara, leaving her standing in the middle of the street with a car about to run her down. A man jumps in and pushes her to the side of the road, just in time.

Mara is left stunned, trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t, as she clutches the grass she’s lying on. The man who saved her introduces himself as Oliver Hill and says they need to talk. He also needs to eat, so they go to a diner.

At the diner, Oliver explains that he started Onira Tech with Alexis. He’s the brain part of the brain computer interface, or BCI, and Alexis is the computer. Oliver fidgets nervously with his Zippo lighter as he eats. Mara can tell that he should be on psych meds, but he says that he isn’t. Oliver says that despite what Paul told her, they don’t help with Reverie 2.0 derealizations, so he stopped taking them.

Oliver tells Mara that he’s been keeping an eye on her situation for a while, because before her, he was the person who had spent the most time in 2.0. Because of that, he knows that she’s in danger of losing her mind. He’s been stuck going in and out of derealizations for years, without being sure which is real. Sometimes he burns himself to figure out if he’s in reality or not.

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Reverie Season 1 Episode 3: No More Mr. Nice Guy Recap

~ Metacrone

 

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This week, our story begins with a bank heist, the fantasy of young father-to-be Nate Hallo. He’s lounging at home for his Reverie, but his wife is frantic to get him out of his typical male ego trip of a fantasy.

As she gets ready for work in the morning, Mara, who must be the calmest, nicest person on the planet, talks with the derealization ghost of her dead niece, Brynn. She let Brynn back into her brain at the end of last week’s episode, despite Paul’s instructions to avoid encouraging the visions. Brynn is accommodating, but stone-faced, until the conversation is interrupted by Mara’s ringing phone. Mara didn’t find out much about why and how Brynn is there before the phone rang and she disappeared.

Of course it’s Charlie on the phone, asking Mara to consult on Nate’s case. Nate’s wife, Annie, is suing Reverie because Nate has been using the product addictively for the last 4 months, to the point where it’s ruining their lives. Annie’s lawyer, Daniel Baez, explains that Nate’s lost his job and the couple are in so much debt that they’re about to lose their home due to the overwhelming amount of time Nate spends in Reverie.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Episode 11: Holly Recap

~ Metacrone ~ 1 Comment

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It’s a girl.

June doesn’t accomplish a physical escape in this episode, but she manages something almost as subversive- she gives birth to her baby girl alone, away from the toxic elements of the Gilead birth ceremony, and away from Serena Joy’s grabby hands. Then she curls up with HER baby, sleeping, sharing heartbeats and breath, and telling stories, without interruptions. That’s what a mother in America today can do with her newborn. But June wasn’t even supposed to be allowed to see or hold Holly before Serena did. Serena will view this as June having stolen those precious first moments, but she’s lucky June didn’t manage to make it to Canada with the baby.

This is a quiet episode, since June is alone in the closed up house where she saw Hannah last week. The silence is only broken by an argumentative visit from the Waterfords and June’s flashbacks to Hannah and Charlotte’s births, all of which serve as the counterpoints to what she could be experiencing as she gives birth. She doesn’t have emotional or medical support for the birth, but the baby is active and appears healthy. The only two people who matter are there, and get to have this time together before Gilead separates them, possibly forever. Holly will have a kernel of security deep inside her, from knowing somewhere inside that her mother wanted her.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Episode 10: The Last Ceremony

~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

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Episode 10, The Last Ceremony, plays out like an extra intense episode of a nighttime soap opera, with the characters letting their masks slip far enough to reveal their true feelings, whether it’s safe to do so or not, and various schemes, evil and otherwise, playing out. When those masks slip, the characters see themselves and each other for who they really are, and it’s not pretty. The end of June’s pregnancy and the change in circumstances that it will bring has everyone on edge, making them distracted enough to make serious mistakes that can’t be undone.

The episode begins with Emily preparing for the Ceremony, the handmaids’ reason for existing and monthly rape fertility routine. June’s voice narrates the ways that the handmaids’ typically cope with the regular, ritualized rapes, mainly through dissociation. They pretend they aren’t connected to their bodies, they pretend that the man is nothing more than a bee pollinating a flower, they take their minds somewhere else. There are undoubtedly handmaids who plan their revenge during these moments.

Emily looks as pinched and unhappy as she has since she came back from the colonies. She winces in pain a few times. Her current serial rapist Commander doesn’t look so good as he works his way through the act. He’s becomes uncoordinated and stumbles away once he finishes. Moments later, he collapses on the floor. His wife goes to him, then yells at Emily to run for help. Emily, still on the bed in the position her captors left her in, says, with only a hint of snark in her voice, “The chances are better if I lay on my back.”

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Episode 9: Smart Power Recap

~ Metacrone ~ 1 Comment

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Travel isn’t what it used to be, now that most of the US has become Gilead. If there’s one thing we learn in Smart Power, it’s that the people on both sides of the US-Canadian border miss the easy tourism relationship they used to share. Fred tries to blithely assume that the relationship will return to normal very soon, but the gay diplomat he’s speaking to disabuses him of that notion very quickly. The situation only devolves from there, as the Waterfords and Gilead manage to p*ss off the nicest country in the world so much that they’re thrown out of Canada, with angry protesters at the airport following them right up to their plane.

I really wish the Canadians had thrown them in the Canadian gulag. They might have had to build one just for Fred and Serena Joy, but it would have been worth it. Why hasn’t the UN been able to bring them up on charges as war criminals yet? Why aren’t the refugees in Little America speaking out? Surely Gilead deserves to be sanctioned by the international community for human rights violations, if nothing else. They don’t seem to have much trade with the rest of the world, or good relations with powerful countries to protect them from punishment.

I guess there’s no international “Believe the women” movement happening in this universe, at least until the end of the episode. We can only hope that Moira and Erin have found their true calling, and find a way to keep the attention on Gilead’s abusive practices.

If episode 8 was about longing, episode 9 is about disappointment and facing reality. No one gets what they want, expectations aren’t met, circumstances are reduced, consequences must be accepted. It’s an episode full of lost princesses, as if the movie Enchanted met Alice in Wonderland then got high with Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Our feisty princesses spend the hour making plans and considering options, but they don’t even know which universe they’re living in half the time. Is it the universe where unwomen are brought back from the dead and bring their babies back from the dead? Or the universe where wives who have saved their husbands from unfounded charges of treason are whipped for not obeying their husbands? The universe where a plucky Jezebel can jump in a car, make a run for the border, and somehow make it to freedom? Or the one where refusing to murder a friend will get your tongue cut out? Or another appendage maimed or amputated? Every decision is high risk, now that Gilead and the Waterford home have become unstable and unpredictable, and more often than not, the result will be disappointing, if not disastrous.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Episode 8: Women’s Work Recap

~ Metacrone

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“We do our work in the evenings. She writes, I read. In another life, maybe we could have been colleagues. In this one, we’re heretics.

“I was already on the naughty list. An adulteress. A fallen woman, as Aunt Lydia used to say. But this is new territory for Serena, I think. How does she feel about falling? She seems pretty f**king happy.”

In the background, the Commodores’ Easy plays, with the lyrics, “easy like Sunday morning.” There are cups of tea and baked goods scattered around Fred’s cosy study. If not for their outfits, this could be a working brunch between two professional women before the war.

Episode 8 of season 2, Women’s Work, begins with Serena and June doing the work they were paid to do before Gilead stripped them of their rights and identities. We’ve never seen either woman look so focussed, relaxed and happy.

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The Crossing Season 1 Episode 11: These Are the Names/ Series Finale Recap

~ Metacrone

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Well, that all went much better than I thought it would. For once, we were given a reasonable amount of closure on a “cancelled without warning” scifi show. There was a clear set up for season 2, if it had happened, but everyone either got to a good stopping point on camera, or it’s not hard to imagine one for them. That’s really all you can ask for from showrunners working for a network like ABC.

These Are the Names is Part 2 of the series finale. It’s framed by Jude’s testimony in front of a task force investigating events at Camp Tamanowas, which are explained by extended flashbacks to two weeks prior to Jude’s testimony. Lindauer was pretending to prepare to transfer the refugees to detention facilities, but actually preparing for a mass murder. Before Jude testifies, he oversleeps and has a nightmare that Apex have taken over. In the dream, they come to his house to enslave and brand Oliver the way Rachel and Naomi were enslaved and branded in the future.

By the time Jude testifies, the camp has been burned to the ground, the detainees have disappeared, and the only evidence that the task force has been able to find to explain what happened consists of contradictory depositions from a few guards and Paul’s video that claims the refugees were part of a suicide cult. The investigator starts by asking Jude if he knows where the detainees are, to which he answers, “No.”

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The Crossing Season 1 Episode 10: The Androcles Option Recap

~ Metacrone

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In the first half of the two part series finale of The Crossing, the stakes are building toward a breaking point for the refugees and the people who want to be rid of them. Jude, Nestor, Marshall and Diana race to rescue the time travelers before Eve and her minions can carry out her plan to murder the refugees, while the Homeland Security agents unknowingly prepare to slaughter the refugees in the camp. Eve goes so far off the deep end that even Lindauer can no longer deny how out of control she is, while Sophie makes some desperate choices that will have a huge impact on the future.

Another person of color/camp director has met their end. We’re told at the beginning of this episode that Agent Bryce Foster, who was shot at the end of the last episode, has died off camera. No tears or moment of silence for him either, just like Emma, just an excuse to further crack down on the refugees. The whole structure of his death was nearly identical to Emma’s, other than the shot being fired at the camp instead of in a house.

We also lose Paul during this episode. Instead of it happening off camera, and being nothing but an excuse for more oppression and violence, as with Emma and Bryce’s deaths, the death of the white guy is shown in its entirety, on camera, framed as a Hitchcockian horror show, and it triggers Lindauer to eventually find his conscience.

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How Star Wars Invites Trolls Who Are Toxic to Diversity

~ Metacrone

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Last week, Kelly Marie Tran, the Asian-American actor who played Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, shut down her Instagram account after being bombarded with racist and misogynist insults for months. Daisy Ridley (Rey) was harassed into leaving Instagram in 2016. John Boyega (Finn) has received similar negative attention for his Star Wars appearances.

There were many things wrong with The Last Jedi, but Kelly Marie Tran, Daisy Ridley and John Boyega were among the bright spots in a badly conceived story. Rian Johnson wrote and directed a film with a diverse cast that put the women and some of the people of color in prominent positions. Then he tore them down.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2 Episode 7: After Recap

~ Metacrone

This episode deals with the aftermath. The aftermath of Ofglen2 Lillie Fuller’s suicide bomb, the aftermath of Commander Pryce’s death and the power vacuum it leaves, the aftermath of Gilead’s tyrannical policies and the resulting reduction in fertile women, the aftermath of Gilead’s purges, the aftermath of Luke and June’s marriage. Sometimes there is a resolution or at least a sense of closure, sometimes there is not. The deaths from the suicide bombing will likely haunt Gilead for a long time to come.

“After” begins with the funeral of the handmaids who died as a result of the bombing. It’s a beautiful spectacle, as the handmaid ceremonies tend to be. The handmaids wear red and black, with red veils completely covering their faces and tucked into their collars, keeping them anonymous and vaguely horrifying. They walk in formation to the cemetery, and surround the caskets, which are laid out in a circular formation. Seriously, if I didn’t know better I would have thought I’d accidentally clicked on a horror movie that includes a cult of creepy young women.

Aunt Lydia says the prayers over the fallen, while the handmaids repeat the phrase “We remember them” after each line. Eventually, the women remove their veils.

Aunt Lydia: I wish I could give you a world without violence. Without pain. That’s all I ever wanted. And in their names, dear lord, we remember them. Of ryan, Ofleo, Ofhal, Ofzev…

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