A Discovery of Witches Season 1 Episode 4 Recap: In Which Matthew and Diana Visit Sept-Tours

May 23, 2021May 28, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

In episode 4, Matthew brings Diana to Sept-Tours, the ancestral French home where he was sired and where his vampire mother still lives. Matthew’s mother, Ysabeau, is a well known witch hunter, leading to a rocky start for her relationship with Diana. They leave Oxford in the hopes of avoiding further trouble with Peter Knox and the witches, but taking your girlfriend home to meet your mother isn’t exactly the most unpredictable move, so Peter and the Congregation discover where they are before long.

Recap

Matthew and Diana drive to Sept-Tours, rounding a section of road that overlooks the picturesque estate and village as they approach. Eventually, we’ll come to know this section of road very well, but for now, Matthew speeds through without giving Diana a chance to take in the view. As they drive through the village, she asks if the villagers know that the de Clermonts are vampires. He answers that they do- it’s safer for vampires to have a community, just like witches.

It’s also the only way the de Clermonts could have lived there through generations of humans without trouble arising.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Episode 6: Vows Recap

May 21, 2021June 4, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 3 Comments

Handmaid's Tale S4Ep6 Flashback June & Luke1

Episode 6, Vows, follows the adventures of June and Moira, beginning moments after Moira found June wandering in post-bombing Chicago with a head injury at the end of episode 5. Moira’s vow that she won’t leave June behind again conflicts with June’s vow that she won’t leave Gilead without Hannah. Through flashbacks, we’re reminded of how close the friendship is between the two women. We also learn more about what June and Luke expected from each other going into their marriage, versus June’s current worry that he’ll blame her for losing Hannah.

Though June’s insecurities and trauma are at the forefront in this episode, the exploration of her relationships with Luke and Moira are also a reminder that she had an entire life before Gilead. She, and thus the audience, have been more and more consumed with the people and events in Gilead as time has gone on, putting the rest of her life and loved ones on the backburner, as Luke has noted. On the way to Canada, she begins to confront the issues in her life that she’s set aside for five years.

Parallels with episode 2:3, Baggage, the episode when June almost escaped Gilead in a plane, run throughout this episode. But now, June is no longer baggage that Mayday is reluctantly getting out because Nick called in favors. She’s the most important person in the world to Moira, who’s right there, taking risks with her, and that makes all the difference for both of them.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Episode 5: Chicago Recap

May 16, 2021July 18, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

In episode 5, the halfway point for season 4, June and Janine acclimate to war-torn Chicago. Janine wants to stay with Steven’s group, which emphasizes survival over fighting, while June wants to find a more proactive group of fighters. In Gilead, Nick, Lawrence and Lydia scheme separately and together, both in the service of Gilead and themselves, leading them to double-cross each other.

While Nick, Joseph and Lydia are all effective agents as individuals, as spy teams they need some training in coordinating objectives. Or to agree on their mutual goals, contingent on certain blackmail arrangements if the goals aren’t achieved. Lydia and Joseph begin to work out their own process for remaking Gilead.

As Fred Waterford once said, “Better doesn’t mean better for everyone.” It’s not clear yet who Joseph and Lydia each want to make things better for, but the carpet bombing at the end of the episode makes it clear that by design, their machinations won’t make the former US better for everyone.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Episode 3: The Crossing Recap

May 6, 2021November 11, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 4 Comments

June is off to prison in episode 3, as Nick attempts to keep her alive by forcing her to give up the location of the rest of the handmaids, doing whatever it takes to make her talk. In Gilead, true love means torturing your paramour and killing your friends so that you’ll both live to see each other again someday. It’s a unique twist on Romeo and Juliet’s accidentally on purpose suicides and murders.

Gilead is such a harsh dystopia that sometimes I expect the bodies to turn into zombies, get up and keep going. Most of the living in Gilead are basically zombies anyway.

June acts as a reverse zombie maker. She wakes people up from their psychological numbness, but frequently they die not long afterwards. Sometimes they just symbolically die to Gilead and in reality they become Canadians. That can be fraught with difficulty as well, because June still haunts them.

Luke struggles with June’s choices this week and what they mean for him and Nichole. Joseph and Lydia struggle to regain their former positions in Gilead after June disrupted their lives. As always, June struggles to do the right thing in a world that only offers wrong choices.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Episode 2: Nightshade Recap

May 3, 2021May 20, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

Episode 2, Nightshade, uses the title as a pun, referring to both the poisonous plant that grows on Mrs Keyes’ farm and the country club version of Jezebels that June visits to make contact with Mayday. It could probably also be used to refer to Nick and his love for hanging back in the shadows, then stepping out into the light at the perfect dramatic moment.

This is an episode of transitions, where fateful choices are made with far reaching, unpredictable consequences. It’s becoming clear that the themes of this season are sacrifice, choice and consequences. Freedom is never really free and even within oppression, there are choices to be made that will eventually affect others. Finding the line where you can live with yourself and with the cost of those choices, whether living in freedom or oppression, is the hard part facing June and the rest.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 Episode 1: Pigs Recap

May 2, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

The Handmaid’s Tale season 4 begins where it left off at the end of season 3, with June gravely wounded after the successful takeoff of the flight holding dozens of Gilead’s children and several Marthas, including Rita. After spending several episodes organizing the flight, June and her squad of devoted handmaids further risked their lives, staying behind to distract the Guardians at the airport while the Marthas led the children onto the plane. The plane makes it to Canada as June’s fellow handmaids carry her toward safety.

In season 3, June learned that her own daughter, Hannah, may be out of her reach, but she can still be useful and save other Hannahs. She learned to honor her lost mother and the others she’s lost along the way not just by saving those she can, but also by avenging them when she gets a chance. Her leadership and her goals became more defined in season 3 and as a consequence, Gilead has lost many more children than just her own.

It’s also lost more Commanders. Ofglen took out several with her bomb in season 2. June killed Winslow and influenced Serena into taking Fred with her to Canada as the sweetener in her immunity deal. Lawrence planned to leave with the children, but went to jail instead. The losses caused by MayDay, Gilead’s war on the Western Front (Chicago), and the purges created by sparring between the two Sons of Jacob factions (True Believers, formerly led by Pryce and now maybe by Calhoun, and Career Opportunists, formerly led by Winslow and Waterford, now led by Putnam) have led to a power vacuum at the top in Gilead.

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Made for Love Season 1 Episode 3: I Want This Thing Out of My Head Recap

April 21, 2021 ~ Metacrone

In episode 3, we learn more about Hazel and Byron’s lives inside the Hub through an exclusive interview with Keegan James (Nyasha Hatendi) of Weeknight America, the only journalist ever allowed inside the Gogol complex. The story then returns to Twin Sands, picking up where episode 2 left off, with Byron (Billy Magnussen) and Hazel’s (Cristin Milioti) argument about their marriage. Eventually, Byron gives Hazel a few minutes “to herself” to think while he and Herb (Ray Romano) catch up. Herb treats Byron more like a potential investor than his son-in-law. Byron watches Hazel’s every move on Herb’s TV rather than allowing her privacy.

That sums up the relationships on this show- they appear to be about either materialism or obsession or both, with a dose of neglect thrown in to counterbalance the obsessions. The characters are unable to see below each others’ facades and remember that they are dealing with fellow human beings (or living creatures) who have feelings, needs and rights of their own. In their own way, each one sees the others as a means to an end, rather than a being worth connecting with simply for the sake of love, friendship or community.

Episode 3 confronts the facades and begins to deconstruct them.

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Made for Love Season 1 Episode 2: I Want a Divorce Recap

April 18, 2021 ~ Metacrone

In episode 2, Made for Love begins to explore Hazel’s relationship with her father while continuing to expose the frightening lack of boundaries in her marriage to Byron. Herb and Diane try to help Hazel get further away from Byron. Hazel has another run in with Lyle, whose motives remain unclear.

Recap

In the episode 2 cold open, Hazel (Cristin Milioti) is seated in her lounge chair by the pool for her morning reading session, a repeat of what we saw in episode 1. Except this time, Byron (Billy Magnussen) isn’t in the pool with Zelda and Hazel passes out after she takes a drink from her glass. As she loses consciousness, she knocks the glass over, the memory that flickered through her mind in episode 1 when she saw a shard of broken glass by her chair. The Mickey and Sylvia version of Lover Boy plays in the background.

Love is strange and a lot of people take it for a game.

Several people who are dressed in scrubs (including, I believe, Fiffany (Noma Dumezweni) in the black scrubs) swarm Hazel, strapping her to her lounge chair, blindfolding her, and prepping her for poolside surgery. Her biological information is displayed on a billboard sized monitor on the side of the house, while a machine implants the Made for Love chip into the side of her head. Byron sits on the chair next to hers with his back to her, watching the display on the monitor instead of his wife as her body and her privacy are violated. Zelda the dolphin keeps swimming.

I’m not sure if roofying your wife then performing experimental surgery on her BRAIN without her consent are grounds for divorce in California, but I can’t imagine they’re not. They inserted an experimental device into her BRAIN made from who knows what materials- the allergy and cancer causing potential alone are off the charts, before the app is even activated. The term “mind rape” applies in so many ways here.

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Made for Love Season 1 Episode 1: User One Recap

April 13, 2021April 16, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 1 Comment

Made for Love is a half hour dark comedy from HBO Max starring Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs), Billy Magnussen (Maniac) and Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond). Made for Love was created by Patrick Somerville (Maniac, The Leftovers), Alissa Nutting, Dean Bakopoulos and Christina Lee, based on Nutting’s novel of the same name. The series explores the life and crumbling marriage of a directionless millennial, Hazel Green (Milioti), and her controlling, tech billionaire husband, Byron Gogol (Magnussen).

Made for Love uses the same edgy, absurdist tone that Somerville utilized in Maniac to examine modern relationships- human to human, human to tech, human to dolphin, human to inanimate object, and so on. It’s a story about obsession, love, fear of loss and death, desperation, need, forgiveness and humanity. Sometimes there’s more humanity found in animals, tech and inanimate objects than there is in humans, but, as Kurt Vonnegut said in Slaughterhouse Five, so it goes. As is so often true, hope and optimism play a large role in success, for both good guys and villains. Even nihilists need to believe in something to succeed long-term. Whether someone is a good guy or a villain is wholly dependent on point of view. And finding the correct app.

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The Handmaid’s Tale Season 3 Episode 4: God Bless the Child Recap

April 11, 2021 ~ Metacrone ~ 2 Comments

Episode 4 brings the handmaids to a community baptism ceremony for all of the babies born recently, including Janine’s daughter, Angela. Nichole is notedly missing from the ceremony. Later, the handmaids are invited back to the Putnams for a reception, under the supervision of a still recovering Aunt Lydia. The baptism reminds June of her two children and her former life, while the party brings her back into contact with the Waterfords. In Toronto, Emily finally meets with her wife and son in person.

The episode continues this season’s exploration of identity, moving beyond the third episode’s focus on retaining one’s self, despite overwhelming pressure to submit to Gilead’s ideology. This week, the focus turns to Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological phenomenon that occurs when a hostage gives in to their captors’ world view out of exhaustion, despair and fear.

We saw the beginning of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in June in episode 3, as she accepted that she couldn’t fight Gilead on its own terms and stay the same person she’d always been. Lawrence convinced her that she needed to get her hands dirty in order to be effective, and in this episode she mourns the person she used to be while beginning to explore new possibilities. She’s pulled in a few different directions.

How far is the new version of June willing to go to achieve her goals? Lawrence avidly watches her transformation. He may be helping her, but he’s also still a cat playing with mice.

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