“You’re either the butcher or the cattle.”
The Walking Dead has always been about survival, in one way or another. Most of its thematic explorations have been around the idea of who you become in a post apocalyptic world, what you do to survive, what your mindset is regarding your life in relation to others. In our culture, cannibalism is seen as the lowest form of human life, as savage, but it also becomes a lingering question when you must do anything possible to survive.
“Ain’t nobody ever gonna be free.”
In this environment of violence and corruption and death, power and allegiances may shift, but one thing remains constant: the environment, one that is restricting and cruel, unrelenting and indifferent to the plights of its inhabitants. All empires eventually crumble, and what’s left is the need for survival; what’s left is the question of whether you can make peace with the inevitability of your mortality.
If everyone is an unreliable narrator of his or her own life, then are there really reliable accounts of anything when you bring human nature in, when you factor in different perspectives and psychological issues and even memory? Even a recording–even the cameras used to film this show–may not display the full picture, and that’s an idea that is ever so pervasive throughout this pilot.
“Whatever you decide, I’m truly sorry for what happened to you, and I wish you luck.”
In the type of environment Carrie and Quinn and Saul and the rest live in, the concept of choice becomes muddled, and your own agency oftentimes becomes secondary to what’s happening around you. Moving forward, Aayan must decide whether or not to tell his story in exchange for a ticket out of Pakistan, but either way, he’s still doing something that’s the result of him simply being thrown into a situation unwillingly. He wanted no part of this, he’s afraid, and ironically, the fact that he’s an aspiring doctor is used to trick him, to get him into a room with Carrie, to get him to hear an offer that would allow him to live out those aspirations elsewhere.
KIM JONG-UN COLD OPEN: Bobby Moynihan’s physical comedy makes this sketch much funnier than it should be, but at the end of it all–thankfully, only three minutes–it’s still pretty awful. There are no jokes here, and this seems like something the writers came up with in about 15 seconds. GRADE: D+
MONOLOGUE: Oh hi, Kristen Wiig. I never expected you to show up. Never. Anyway, the monologue is just perfectly average, with some pretty bland singing, a cameo by Harvey Fierstein, and a few middling jokes. GRADE: C+
“Coach shows up and gives 100%. Every game, every practice. It’s more than just a game to us. Football is our life.”
Friday Night Lights has constantly tackled the ideas of what it means to be in Dillon and what it means to leave it, what it means to come home and what it means to move on. “It’s like a drug,” Tyra says as she kicks back with Julie on the hood of a car, listening to the sounds of Panthers fans celebrating the dissolution of the East Dillon Lions football program. “When you get outside of it, you see it for what it really is. But when you’re in it, it seems like there’s no other possible reality.”
The Lions are marching toward state, and this once 2-8 team is now moving right on through the competition. In an interesting stylistic choice, the playoffs are reduced to one episode, partly due to time constraints, but also due to the fact that it simply works. It doesn’t feel rushed at all, and the journey the show takes us on from that early scene in Coach’s yard to that final scene outside of the stadium is thrilling to experience.
“We all get our strength from you.”
“The Waiting Room” tests that strength, placing Zeek under the knife and the rest of the family in a waiting room. Waiting can oftentimes be an extremely difficult thing to do because you’re left with your own thoughts, left to think about, in Adam’s case, possible worst case scenarios. Hospitals save lives, but the ambience in a waiting room is anything but pleasant because each person, to some extent, is fearing the worst.
American Horror Story has dealt with all of the themes currently being dealt with in Freak Show. However, for all the explorations of the repressed in society and for all the emphasis on the “freaks” of the past three seasons, this is the season that looks to tackle the issue head on, placing all of its characters within the confines of an actual “freak show” and expounding on the “us vs. them” mentality that’s ever so pervasive in these types of situations.
“A man cannot live by two names.”
A dilemma many superheroes must deal with is the question of how to balance a personal and a professional life, how to, in this show’s case, balance Oliver Queen and The Arrow. Throughout the season three premiere, we see that dilemma being applied not only to Oliver, but also to those who’ve come into contact with him, to those who’ve structured much of their lives around him in one form or another.
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