Uncategorized
by Shannon Gibney and Lori Askeland
Hulu’s reboot of The Handmaid’s Tale opens with a car chase: the protagonist (Elisabeth Moss), who will later be called “Offred,” is racing with her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake) in their faded, old model Volvo through a frozen landscape, sirens of their invisible pursuers wailing.
The decision to introduce us to Offred as a member of an interracial family revealed an obvious break from the overwhelmingly white world of the novel and 1990 movie. Many reviewers construed that fact — and the powerful presence of Samira Wiley in the role of Offred’s badass lesbian friend, Moira — as undeniable evidence that the series would be more intersectional in its approach to feminist themes than the novel had been. (“There’s intersectionality, too, with Moira, a lesbian, played by a black actress, Ms. Wiley,” was the breezy quip of the New York Times’ Katrina Onstad.) But sadly, bodies of color alone do not a liberatory racial narrative make. Indeed, a deeper look at the series shows the uncomplicated, and therefore, problematic effects of this “colorblind” casting.
Back in the world of the series’ opening sequence, the car crashes off to the side of the icy road as the pursuers gain on them, and Luke, “not-yet-Offred’s” black husband, tells his wife and child to run into the woods across the street. The camera focuses on mother and child, frantically, desperately running through the bleak landscape… until we hear the stark sound of a gunshot in the distance. The anguished look on “not-yet-Offred’s” face tells us everything we need to know: That her beloved has been killed by the insurgents, that he has in fact sacrificed himself in order for his family to live (cue sardonic groan of all viewers of color at this point, maybe three minutes into the first episode). Indeed, the frequency with which characters of color are killed off early in movies and films so that the deserving white people they love so much can live, has become something of a running joke. The trope has become so familiar to black and viewers of color that one friend called it a “blackrifice” on her social media feed.
Of course, Luke reappears in the numerous flashbacks peppered throughout the series, giving characters texture and depth via their lives pre-Gilead, and I know that legions of viewers of color are thrilled that actor O-T Fagbenle will still get work this year, even though his character is ostensibly dead. But the point remains that, narratively speaking, his role in the series as its lone sacrificial and very-much-dead black man, is suspect.
As a friend pointed out on an online discussion, the Handmaid’s Tale series is a missed opportunity to examine how evangelical movements, which are almost always patriarchal, often rely on racism to achieve their goals. I was thinking, in that first episode: Oohh: how are they going to make 2017 Luke’s experience of the patriarchy as a black man different from the experience of the novel’s white 1985 Luke? My assumption was: obviously, he will not be treated the same. When he goes out onto the street, would Moira really be likely to be “safer” with a tall, muscular black man, or would they together seem like a threat? Is his ability and right to “protect” Offred — paternalistic as it might be — going to be respected in the world as white Luke’s paternalistic rights were (except for the fact that he was divorced?). But, alas, as director Bruce Miller has noted with misplaced pride, “Once you have decided it’s going to be a diverse world, it doesn’t change the story.” When black characters are just substituted in, the post-racial optics are what allow the television show to erase any interrogation of white supremacy as a logical part of any post-apocalyptic scenario in a US context — which is what Atwood was shooting for.
Then there is the issue of Offred’s “sassy” and “take no shit/take no prisoners,” best friend Moira, who is now a black lesbian, rather than a white lesbian, in this iteration of Atwood’s world. While I was happy to see the series attempting to accurately represent contemporary America, racially and otherwise, I was let down when I realized they were attempting to do so via yet another tried and true stereotype Hollywood and white folks love to perpetuate about black folks: The “wild,” “Ride Or Die,” black lesbian friend who is “far more woke” than her perpetually meeker white female counterpart, the “sister who is just not here for this,” who through her nonconforming black female lesbian body, shows her “white sister” how to “resist.”
Problematic.
Which brings us to the decision to include people of color into the television series world of Gilead at all. The whiteness of the novel’s world was a deliberate erasure: not the result of a blindness on the part of the novelist that Miller’s post-racial directing is correcting, but a vital part of Atwood’s efforts to fully imagine what a theocratic revolution in the US would look like, given our history. Atwood dedicated the book to Perry Miller who taught her the history of Puritan theocracy in New England, and has repeatedly said in interviews that every incident had historical precedent.
Thus, the “Children of Ham” discussion* in chapter 14 of the novel can be understood as a revival of the American Colonization Society dream: the idea, warmly supported by white abolitionist luminaries from Thomas Jefferson to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Abraham Lincoln, that the best way to “deal with” black people (when you hate slavery only a little more than you hate slaves, to paraphrase Toni Morrison), is to ship them back to any random place on the continent of Africa (Liberia eventually founded for the purpose) or perhaps to a Caribbean island. In the novel, the 1985’s Offred hears a TV News report that the “Children of Ham,” the term from biblical precedent that was regularly used to justify slavery in the US, were being shipped out to “Homelands” in the West, that a “pure” white-supremacist world could be created in Gilead, with the exception of a few “Marthas” who are “allowed” to be servants (described as brown). Atwood’s understanding of what a likely evangelical coup would look like in the US is, logically, genocidal — the Cherokee Removal also comes to mind — and focused on “racial purity.”
In an interview with TVLine, Miller suggests, in fact, that Atwood at least initially resisted the post-racial direction he was taking, saying it was:
“a huge discussion with Margaret Atwood, and in some ways it is ‘TV vs. book’ thing.” After all, on the printed page, ‘It’s easy to say ‘they sent off all the people of color,’ but seeing it all the time on a TV show is harder. ‘Also, honestly,’ he adds, ‘what’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show? Why would we be covering [the story of handmaid Offred, played by Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss], rather than telling the story of the people of color who got sent off to Nebraska?’”
Which is, of course, a fair question of Atwood’s 1985 narrative, but not one that is simply resolved by acting as if racism is readily solved by “diversity” in the cast. (And, if we’re really dreaming, could perhaps more easily be resolved by simply making a series out of Octavia Butler’s Parable novels…!)
A television show about racists can critically examine the nature and power dynamics of the race-based hierarchy portrayed on screen, thus unhinging it for the viewer. And a television show about “nice, open-minded people” or “evil, small-minded racists” can also be racist if it relies on unexamined stereotypes to tell its story. That Miller doesn’t recognize this key difference is telling.
In a recent Think Progress piece, Miller says: “When you think about a world where the fertility rate has fallen precipitously [as it has in Gilead], fertility would trump everything. And we’ve seen that: When fertility becomes an issue, racism starts to fall because people adopt kids from Ethiopia and Asian countries and from everywhere.”
With all due respect, I wonder if Miller has heard of colonialism? That is, the process by which a country or society with more power ostensibly rapes, pillages, and reaps the natural resources (one of which is children) of a less powerful society or country, in order to gain more power and resources? Talk to transracial adoptees, and you will learn very quickly that our adoption into majority white cultures in the Global North does not necessarily or even often mean they are instantly welcoming or open to the presence of non-white bodies in their midst. The real issue is how these black, brown, and indigenous bodies are used in the service of building up these majority white societies — a key subtlety Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale never quite seems to get to.
Indeed, Miller’s uncomplicated analysis of transracial adoption and its ubiquity signalling a new kind of racial tolerance reveals troubling fissures in his understanding of power and difference. And these fissures are unfortunately echoed in the series itself.
And yet. Despite the fact that this entire article is devoted to the series’ problems with race and representation, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale still packs an indelible punch. In today’s Trumped up world, in which white male Republicans hold the majority in both state and federal government (many of them evangelicals), and the global attack on women’s rights is steadily gaining steam, the idea that a society like Gilead could gain prominence is not so far-fetched. After all, as Glosswitch explains in The New Statesman, it is already happening:
“Today there are parts of the world in which renting the womb of a poor woman is indeed ten times cheaper than in the US. The choice of wealthy white couples to implant embryos in the bodies of brown women is seen, not as colonialist exploitation, but as a neutral consumer choice. I can’t help wondering why, if the fate of the fictional Offred is so horrifying to western feminists today, the fate of real-life women in surrogacy hostels is causing so little outrage.
“I suppose the main argument of these feminists would be that real-life women choose to be surrogates, whereas Offred does not. But is the distinction so clear? If Offred refuses to work as a handmaid, she may be sent to the Colonies, where life expectancy is short. Yet even this is a choice of sorts. As she herself notes, ‘nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.’ In the real world, grinding poverty drives women of colour to gestate the babies of the wealthy. As one Indian surrogate tells interviewer Seemi Pasha, ‘Why would I be a surrogate for someone else if I don’t need the money? Why would I make myself go through this pain?’”
The timeliness of this story, given our current political reality, cannot be understated. Although critics such as Francine Prose argue that the series is simply, “…a seven-hour-long orgy of violence against women — promoted and marketed as high-minded, politically astute popular entertainment,” I believe otherwise. The show works best, and to be clear, it often does work, when it reveals the raw, visceral violence hiding at the core of most otherwise “civilized” cultures, where women are concerned. And I, for one, appreciate that the producers have not sugar-coated this truth, or made it in any way easier for viewers to digest. I also appreciate that they have opted to show how women ourselves are some of the most vicious perpetrators of violence on other women, and how this in turn keeps the whole system of patriarchy working.
That a television series, just four episodes in, should provoke such impassioned responses, and outpouring of critique and analysis, shows that it is doing some very important work. This work could be even more powerful, however, with a more complex racial lens.
Lori Askeland loves beautiful writing that engages political ideas head on, especially speculative fiction and life writing of all sorts — memoir, personal essays, journals. She’s currently a teacher of American literature and composition at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Follow on twitter: @AskelandLori
by Shannon Gibney and Lori Askeland
Hulu’s reboot of The Handmaid’s Tale opens with a car chase: the protagonist (Elisabeth Moss), who will later be called “Offred,” is racing with her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake) in their faded, old model Volvo through a frozen landscape, sirens of their invisible pursuers wailing.
The decision to introduce us to Offred as a member of an interracial family revealed an obvious break from the overwhelmingly white world of the novel and 1990 movie. Many reviewers construed that fact — and the powerful presence of Samira Wiley in the role of Offred’s badass lesbian friend, Moira — as undeniable evidence that the series would be more intersectional in its approach to feminist themes than the novel had been. (“There’s intersectionality, too, with Moira, a lesbian, played by a black actress, Ms. Wiley,” was the breezy quip of the New York Times’ Katrina Onstad.) But sadly, bodies of color alone do not a liberatory racial narrative make. Indeed, a deeper look at the series shows the uncomplicated, and therefore, problematic effects of this “colorblind” casting.
Back in the world of the series’ opening sequence, the car crashes off to the side of the icy road as the pursuers gain on them, and Luke, “not-yet-Offred’s” black husband, tells his wife and child to run into the woods across the street. The camera focuses on mother and child, frantically, desperately running through the bleak landscape… until we hear the stark sound of a gunshot in the distance. The anguished look on “not-yet-Offred’s” face tells us everything we need to know: That her beloved has been killed by the insurgents, that he has in fact sacrificed himself in order for his family to live (cue sardonic groan of all viewers of color at this point, maybe three minutes into the first episode). Indeed, the frequency with which characters of color are killed off early in movies and films so that the deserving white people they love so much can live, has become something of a running joke. The trope has become so familiar to black and viewers of color that one friend called it a “blackrifice” on her social media feed.
Of course, Luke reappears in the numerous flashbacks peppered throughout the series, giving characters texture and depth via their lives pre-Gilead, and I know that legions of viewers of color are thrilled that actor O-T Fagbenle will still get work this year, even though his character is ostensibly dead. But the point remains that, narratively speaking, his role in the series as its lone sacrificial and very-much-dead black man, is suspect.
As a friend pointed out on an online discussion, the Handmaid’s Tale series is a missed opportunity to examine how evangelical movements, which are almost always patriarchal, often rely on racism to achieve their goals. I was thinking, in that first episode: Oohh: how are they going to make 2017 Luke’s experience of the patriarchy as a black man different from the experience of the novel’s white 1985 Luke? My assumption was: obviously, he will not be treated the same. When he goes out onto the street, would Moira really be likely to be “safer” with a tall, muscular black man, or would they together seem like a threat? Is his ability and right to “protect” Offred — paternalistic as it might be — going to be respected in the world as white Luke’s paternalistic rights were (except for the fact that he was divorced?). But, alas, as director Bruce Miller has noted with misplaced pride, “Once you have decided it’s going to be a diverse world, it doesn’t change the story.” When black characters are just substituted in, the post-racial optics are what allow the television show to erase any interrogation of white supremacy as a logical part of any post-apocalyptic scenario in a US context — which is what Atwood was shooting for.
Then there is the issue of Offred’s “sassy” and “take no shit/take no prisoners,” best friend Moira, who is now a black lesbian, rather than a white lesbian, in this iteration of Atwood’s world. While I was happy to see the series attempting to accurately represent contemporary America, racially and otherwise, I was let down when I realized they were attempting to do so via yet another tried and true stereotype Hollywood and white folks love to perpetuate about black folks: The “wild,” “Ride Or Die,” black lesbian friend who is “far more woke” than her perpetually meeker white female counterpart, the “sister who is just not here for this,” who through her nonconforming black female lesbian body, shows her “white sister” how to “resist.”
Problematic.
Which brings us to the decision to include people of color into the television series world of Gilead at all. The whiteness of the novel’s world was a deliberate erasure: not the result of a blindness on the part of the novelist that Miller’s post-racial directing is correcting, but a vital part of Atwood’s efforts to fully imagine what a theocratic revolution in the US would look like, given our history. Atwood dedicated the book to Perry Miller who taught her the history of Puritan theocracy in New England, and has repeatedly said in interviews that every incident had historical precedent.
Thus, the “Children of Ham” discussion* in chapter 14 of the novel can be understood as a revival of the American Colonization Society dream: the idea, warmly supported by white abolitionist luminaries from Thomas Jefferson to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Abraham Lincoln, that the best way to “deal with” black people (when you hate slavery only a little more than you hate slaves, to paraphrase Toni Morrison), is to ship them back to any random place on the continent of Africa (Liberia eventually founded for the purpose) or perhaps to a Caribbean island. In the novel, the 1985’s Offred hears a TV News report that the “Children of Ham,” the term from biblical precedent that was regularly used to justify slavery in the US, were being shipped out to “Homelands” in the West, that a “pure” white-supremacist world could be created in Gilead, with the exception of a few “Marthas” who are “allowed” to be servants (described as brown). Atwood’s understanding of what a likely evangelical coup would look like in the US is, logically, genocidal — the Cherokee Removal also comes to mind — and focused on “racial purity.”
In an interview with TVLine, Miller suggests, in fact, that Atwood at least initially resisted the post-racial direction he was taking, saying it was:
“a huge discussion with Margaret Atwood, and in some ways it is ‘TV vs. book’ thing.” After all, on the printed page, ‘It’s easy to say ‘they sent off all the people of color,’ but seeing it all the time on a TV show is harder. ‘Also, honestly,’ he adds, ‘what’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show? Why would we be covering [the story of handmaid Offred, played by Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss], rather than telling the story of the people of color who got sent off to Nebraska?’”
Which is, of course, a fair question of Atwood’s 1985 narrative, but not one that is simply resolved by acting as if racism is readily solved by “diversity” in the cast. (And, if we’re really dreaming, could perhaps more easily be resolved by simply making a series out of Octavia Butler’s Parable novels…!)
A television show about racists can critically examine the nature and power dynamics of the race-based hierarchy portrayed on screen, thus unhinging it for the viewer. And a television show about “nice, open-minded people” or “evil, small-minded racists” can also be racist if it relies on unexamined stereotypes to tell its story. That Miller doesn’t recognize this key difference is telling.
In a recent Think Progress piece, Miller says: “When you think about a world where the fertility rate has fallen precipitously [as it has in Gilead], fertility would trump everything. And we’ve seen that: When fertility becomes an issue, racism starts to fall because people adopt kids from Ethiopia and Asian countries and from everywhere.”
With all due respect, I wonder if Miller has heard of colonialism? That is, the process by which a country or society with more power ostensibly rapes, pillages, and reaps the natural resources (one of which is children) of a less powerful society or country, in order to gain more power and resources? Talk to transracial adoptees, and you will learn very quickly that our adoption into majority white cultures in the Global North does not necessarily or even often mean they are instantly welcoming or open to the presence of non-white bodies in their midst. The real issue is how these black, brown, and indigenous bodies are used in the service of building up these majority white societies — a key subtlety Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale never quite seems to get to.
Indeed, Miller’s uncomplicated analysis of transracial adoption and its ubiquity signalling a new kind of racial tolerance reveals troubling fissures in his understanding of power and difference. And these fissures are unfortunately echoed in the series itself.
And yet. Despite the fact that this entire article is devoted to the series’ problems with race and representation, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale still packs an indelible punch. In today’s Trumped up world, in which white male Republicans hold the majority in both state and federal government (many of them evangelicals), and the global attack on women’s rights is steadily gaining steam, the idea that a society like Gilead could gain prominence is not so far-fetched. After all, as Glosswitch explains in The New Statesman, it is already happening:
“Today there are parts of the world in which renting the womb of a poor woman is indeed ten times cheaper than in the US. The choice of wealthy white couples to implant embryos in the bodies of brown women is seen, not as colonialist exploitation, but as a neutral consumer choice. I can’t help wondering why, if the fate of the fictional Offred is so horrifying to western feminists today, the fate of real-life women in surrogacy hostels is causing so little outrage.
“I suppose the main argument of these feminists would be that real-life women choose to be surrogates, whereas Offred does not. But is the distinction so clear? If Offred refuses to work as a handmaid, she may be sent to the Colonies, where life expectancy is short. Yet even this is a choice of sorts. As she herself notes, ‘nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.’ In the real world, grinding poverty drives women of colour to gestate the babies of the wealthy. As one Indian surrogate tells interviewer Seemi Pasha, ‘Why would I be a surrogate for someone else if I don’t need the money? Why would I make myself go through this pain?’”
The timeliness of this story, given our current political reality, cannot be understated. Although critics such as Francine Prose argue that the series is simply, “…a seven-hour-long orgy of violence against women — promoted and marketed as high-minded, politically astute popular entertainment,” I believe otherwise. The show works best, and to be clear, it often does work, when it reveals the raw, visceral violence hiding at the core of most otherwise “civilized” cultures, where women are concerned. And I, for one, appreciate that the producers have not sugar-coated this truth, or made it in any way easier for viewers to digest. I also appreciate that they have opted to show how women ourselves are some of the most vicious perpetrators of violence on other women, and how this in turn keeps the whole system of patriarchy working.
That a television series, just four episodes in, should provoke such impassioned responses, and outpouring of critique and analysis, shows that it is doing some very important work. This work could be even more powerful, however, with a more complex racial lens.
Lori Askeland loves beautiful writing that engages political ideas head on, especially speculative fiction and life writing of all sorts — memoir, personal essays, journals. She’s currently a teacher of American literature and composition at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Follow on twitter: @AskelandLori
There was so much packed into Riverdale‘s first season that the pacing always felt off. In a TV series about a murder mystery with the characters from Archie Comics, it’s to be expected that the show would move at a breakneck pace as that story unfolded over only 13 episodes.
One big casualty from the super fast pacing was that a lot of characters got pushed to the sidelines if their stories weren’t integral to the main murder mystery, resulting in deleted scenes galore. But I’ve made my feelings known about how Riverdale should have gotten more episodes than just 13 for its first season. I’m not going to rehash everything I’ve already said again. But the deleted scene that The CW and Warner Bros. TV just released from the season one finale confused me. A lot. I have so many questions.
First, check out the deleted scene for yourself below:
It’s a funny little scene showing Betty (Lili Reinhart) helping her pregnant older sister Polly (Tiera Skovbye) settle back in to life at Riverdale High after the drama of Jason Blossom’s (Trevor Stines) murder investigation died down. In a moment scored to Josie (Ashleigh Murray) and the Pussycats’ “Fear Nothing,” Betty and Veronica (Camila Mendes) walk Polly through the school halls, all three wearing Riverdale Vixen uniforms.
Of course, other students are obviously shocked to see the pregnant Polly not only back in school like nothing had happened but also in a cheerleader’s uniform (I honestly didn’t know they made maternity cheerleader uniforms until now). I love how the trio don’t even bat an eyelash at the camera phones flashing in their faces. Their confidence and no-f-cks-given attitude is just the best. I’m all for the basically-widowed Polly returning to some semblance of normalcy after losing the father of her (cough, incest-bred, cough) unborn baby.
And then Reggie Mantle (Ross Butler) crashes the female empowerment party, ruining the moment with a classic Reggie leer and gross comment about “mommy issues” and how good Polly looks pregnant. Gross, yes, but this little moment wouldn’t normally be a big deal …
But The CW already announced two weeks ago that Riverdale was recasting the role of Reggie for season two.
Butler, who stars as a series regular on Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why (also renewed for a second season), had scheduling issues with the two series and chose to give his time to the buzzy Netflix drama over The CW’s series. That resulted in Riverdale effectively not using the iconic character of Reggie for most of the first season. That definitely hurt the series, as Reggie is a huge part of the Archie Comics world as Archie’s (KJ Apa) rival, and the producers decided to recast the role for season two so they could use the character more without having to work around Butler’s 13 Reasons Why production schedule.
It’s a sad loss for Riverdale as Butler made a great Reggie, but I’d rather have more Reggie played by a different actor than no Reggie at all. You just can’t tell a good, complete Archie Comics story without Reggie!
Based on this deleted scene, however, that decision to recast came after the finale was filmed. I find it nuts that the producers not only wrote a scene with the old Reggie, but they had Butler fly back to Vancouver to film it. It was edited out before the hour made it air. But then the network released the scene online anyways! I don’t have to tell you how weird it is that they brought Butler back to film this scene, only to cut the scene and recast his role and then release this scene regardless. I mean, why release the scene at all?!
Of all the twists and turns presented in the season finale (#prayforFred), this is the one I just can’t get over. Am I overreacting or do you think it’s weird too? Tweet me at @SydneyBucksbaum and let’s chat all things Riverdale … including the mysterious case of the reappearing Reggie.
Images/video: The CW, Warner Bros. TV
I’m really not at all interested in reviewing or analyzing Sense8 again, but I would like to get mah nerds into a discussion about the ENORMOUS plot holes, and the weird turns this in-spite-of-it-all-compelling show has taken. So let’s just launch in, shall we? In no particular, but very SPOILERY, order:
- Wait, WHAT was the FBI after Nomi for, ostensibly? Because as far as I remember, it was just the SFPD looking for her because she ran away from a lobotomy, but all of a sudden the whole alphabet soup are after her for… WHAT EXACTLY?
- So, I guess we’re not worrying about local cultural authenticity AT ALL anymore, right?
- So, Will was on heroin basically 24/7 for 365, but the moment he struck a deal with Whispers he was able to kick, just like that, with only the occasional wistful glance at his still fully supplied works?
- So they all bought tickets to London with WHAT money? Isn’t Lito broke? Doesn’t Nomi no longer exist, much less have no bank accounts? Etc. And where. the. fuck. did Capheus even get a passport?
- They really haven’t improved their relationship with narrative logic, the Wachowskis, have they?
- Did you notice that Capheus is the only one whose passportness I wondered about? That’s because he’s the only working class/poor sensate in the whole show. Wolfgang doesn’t count because: 1.) he’s a lifelong member of organized crime, and 2.) he’s very clearly considered criminal royalty in season two, and 3.) woulda needed a passport anyhow to traffic young women out of former Warsaw Pact countries, which is what Berlin-based baddies DO. Will doesn’t count because some 45% of U.S. cops may have college degrees, (and you KNOW Will woulda been one of those,) which means Will woulda needed a passport to go to Puerto Vallarta for spring break. So, I guess the real question is: why is there only one working class/poor sensate in the show?
- Is it because the working class sensate’s superpower is DRIVING?
- How useless would I be to my cluster if I were a sensate? I mean, hacking out 1000 words an hour (when under the gun,) doing a fairly decent downward facing dog, and knowing how to put together a fundraiser aren’t really the skillsets that are going to bring down BPO or save my clusterschmucks. Do you think the clustermom gets to choose the cluster members?
- Wait, they all went to London with this complicated, and very successful, plan to get into probably the most secure compound in the world, given the fact that they couldn’t even FIND it for a year, and they took Whispers AND Jonas, but they didn’t get Wolfgang back? I mean, Wolfgang and Whispers were in the same facility. They might not have known that for sure, but it’s a near-certainty, since Whispers is in hiding too, so… WTF? (Yes, yes, I know it’s so there’s still something high stakes at the beginning of season 3, but… BAD WRITING WTF?)
- Wait, how DID they find the London facility?
- So is Kala just not even worried about her husband anymore? Even though she was planning a rendezvous with Wolfgang in her husband’s Parisian appartement?
- Is Tuppence Middleton pregnant? They put her in middle(ton)-hiding clothes in a buncha scenes. NOBODY IS FOOLED BY THAT, YOU KNOW.
- Like, did NONE of the 100 or so diners in Berlin see Lila fighting with and shooting a gun at Wolfgang? Are the Berlin police incapable of noticing that several of the guns have Lila’s prints on them and that those are the guns responsible for a lot of the bodies in the restaurant? In Sense8′s weirdly misogynistic world, does a woman with an accent taking off her blouse and crying somehow override CSI, investigation, eyewitness testimony, and, like, common sense? Because Lila sticking around and crying into her copious cleavage after the restaurant fight was basically her handing herself over to the police, unless die Berliner Bullen are really the Keystone Kops.
- Is Sun answering “I would” to the question of whether or not Lila was stupid enough to attack Wolfgang in a public restaurant — and the implicit question as to whether Wolfgang should be stupid enough to attack her first — really a good enough reason to do it, for either of them?
- So, we’ve decided to scrap the whole ambitious global narrative greatness that Sense8 was trembling on the brink of — and busily withdrawing from — last season and just plunge the show directly into a pool of chilled tropey Velveeta, yes? Because… I think I’m actually kinda okay with that…?
- And WHY didn’t Wolfgang just kill Lila at the end of that fight?
- How amazing is it that all eight of them are super into raves?
- Is there anything more anglo-centric than naming Sun’s love interest “Mun” (pron. “moon”)?
- Who the fuck is the hotness that plays hot Detective Mun, and where can I get more?
- Like, did NONE of the 1,000 or so gala attendees in Seoul, or the handful of cops sent there to arrest him, see Joong-Ki pull a gun and SHOOT A COP IN THE GUT? Or, you know, turn around and, together with his security detail, start shooting into the crowd? Is the implied corruption able to silence 1,000 gala attendees who are, it is to be assumed, among Seoul’s elite?
Are the Seoul police incapable of noticing that all of the guns have Joong-Ki’s and his goons’ prints on them, and that those are the guns responsible for all the bodies at the gala? In Sense8′s weirdly misogynistic world, does the Korean media just turn against women because patriarchy, overriding evidence, CSI, eyewitness testimony, and like, common fucking sense? Are the Seoul police trained by the same people as the Berlin police? - How kickass is Sun, tho’?
- And how, on Earth, does Sun’s prison warden not notice that these groups of men who have no business in his/her prison keep showing up there and getting their asses kicked/necks snapped by Sun? Is this not even the SLIGHTEST BIT suspicious? Did the jerry-rigged noose hanging in the broom closet with the DNA from the hands of the dead men lying all around it rope-burned all over the end of the noose, not somehow tip them off that something was amiss?
- In what world was THAT Nomi keeping her promise to not make her sister’s wedding all about Nomi? I mean that wedding party toast… I mean, I love me some Nomi, but she really DOES make everything about herself, to the point that when, in the proposal scene, Neets talked about the voice in her head telling her not to let this one go, my immediate response was “WHY THE FUCK NOT?” Isn’t Amanita half of what makes Nomi so awesome, and ignorance of the limitations of hacking the other half?
- Why do I love this sloppily written show?
- Come to think of it, why does EVERY SINGLE SENSATE in our main cluster either make everything about themselves or have the FUCKING WORLD making everything about themselves? Except Will. Kala has people falling in love with her and bringing shit to her, and life is so handed to her on a platter that her conflict is literally “I don’t love the gifts life is giving me enough.” Sun is the center of the universe in the sense that everyone goes out of their way to dump on her. It’s like, random people off the street walk half a block just to spit on her shoes. Everyone in Lito’s life is focused on Lito; Capheus does, like, one impressive thing, and suddenly his entire slum is writing graffiti about him, the local crime lord is going legit behind his example, his greatest enemy saves his life, and he’s asked to RUN FOR FUCKING PRESIDENT; Riley has all of London wanting her to do their drugs and all of Iceland driving her places; and fucking Wolfgang kills his uncle and suddenly everybody wants him to be king of Berlin? WTF?
- Why is poor Will the only one left out of the everybody-in-my-city-is-obsessed-with-me-fest?
- Wait, I’m not willing to let Lila go yet. What is the deal with her supposed to be? I mean, I GET that she’s Magneto (or maybe Mystique) to Wolfgang’s somewhat murdery Wolverine, but how does selling him and his cluster out to Whispers (Sense8′s William Stryker, I guess) benefit her sensate-first world domination plan?
- Why was Wolfgang and Kala’s sex scene so unsexy? Sense8 usually does sex so… well, “well” isn’t the word I’m really looking for. How about “stickily?” Why was there so much awkward ankle positioning and fake “o” face? Capheus and Zakia seemed to do okay in the same sequence (although not great, I have to say; why is the sex in season two not as good?)
- When someone is kidnapped and they put duct tape over their mouths, how is it that none of them ever has asthma or, like, allergies, so their nose closes up and they die? (This has nothing to do with Sense8, btw, it’s just the sort of question that belongs in its world.)
- How much do we love Amanita’s three dads?
- How much do we love Lito’s threesome?
- Was that actually Johnny Depp in the Lito Hollywood Party scene?
- How did that slimy motorcycle-riding sensate (was his name Puck?) know that Sun needed help? I mean, he could visit Riley before that, but he couldn’t see Sun through Riley, and Riley wasn’t specifically calling for help, so how did he know a.) THAT she needed help, and b.) where to go to pick her up? Is this just part of Sense8′s extensive hand-waving?
- Is everyone else over Sun’s slime-ass little brother’s storyline? I’d like for him to be arrested already, please.
- Can we get some of this on the show?
- Was that the point of Riley’s DJ set? To try to make eye contact with sensates in the crowd? ‘Cause it seems like kind of a dumb plan, plus they never spelled out that that was what they were doing.
- How awesome were the Kenyan sensates when they showed up in Capheus’ living room. Why haven’t a bunch of Brazilian LGBT sensates shown up in Lito’s living room, given the Pride Parade? Or Korean sensates shown up to help Sun after the gala? Or German sensates, you know, given the amount of time Wolfgang spends in clubs and bath houses?
- And did this make it into an actual scene, because I clearly need to watch season 2 again?
SOCORRO O BRIAN BEIJANDO O MIGUEL SHDHEYIJHSSUSOKW TO PASSANDO MAL pic.twitter.com/Yh7C8WzwhU
— Sense8 da Depressão (@sense8dadepre) May 29, 2016
- Anything else?
