“You’re the only family I have.”
The thing about Carrie Mathison is that for all her intelligence, for all her abilities to manipulate and extract the truth and expose who she wants to expose, she oftentimes gets in over her head emotionally. We saw it with Brody, and we’re now definitely seeing it with Aayan as well; she’s excellent when it comes to drawing him in, but at the same time, she may not realize that she’s drawing herself in, too.
EBOLA CZAR COLD OPEN: The sketch opens pretty weakly, but it gets better as it progresses. Taran Killam’s Ron Klain doesn’t truly bring the laughs until he starts talking about Latinos being immune to ebola and until he begins urging southern voters to stay away from polling booths. Thompson later gets in a good line with “All of New York is contaminated!” GRADE: B
MONOLOGUE: What the hell? (Ha). This is just weird, and not in a funny way. I think everyone was stoned when this was pitched. GRADE: D+
“Sometimes, it’s better not to know.”
The POI team, for the most part, spends this episode on the outskirts of the action, never directly interacting with the case of the week subject–Jason Ritter’s Simon Lee–until the end of the episode; rather, they resort to tactics such as crashing a random car in order to get him to turn a certain way, and this all serves to highlight the necessity of keeping a cover, of avoiding Samaritan’s watchful eye. However, this is also an episode that clearly delineates the mindsets of our main characters, forcing them to confront the idea of Samaritan, of the past, the present, and the future.
“Marriage means different things to different people.”
“2” does a great job of shading in more of the nuances surrounding each of the characters and the environments they inhabit, and there is a common theme–aside from differing perceptions–that seems to tie everything together nicely: water. The first scene of the pilot was of Noah swimming, and from the opening credits on, I get the idea of two people floating in the middle of a large expanse of water, moving forward and backward and side to side, desperately searching for something around them.
“What I need is your help, not your goddamn foot on the brake.”
We’ve seen time and time again that Carrie Mathison throws herself into her work, that she’ll oftentimes do anything it takes to come out on top and to complete her mission. She’s faced the consequences of her stubbornness before, but she’s also been able to get results, and this season places her in a position in which the main opposition she would face–Washington–is an ocean away. This is all, simply put, her element, and the question being asked is: How far will she go? Whether that question still interests the audience is left up to us.
“Dumber than I knew.”
Tony Soprano. Vic Mackey. Walter White. We’ve had our fair share of main characters with empires, characters brought down and crushed under the weights of their own powers, but what those characters don’t seem to have in common with Nucky Thompson is an opportunity to recover some semblance of morality. Yes, Nucky’s lost everything and the future belongs to people like Lansky and Luciano, but there’s a small ounce of redemption to be found here, a true confrontation of the past and all the terrible things he did.
“I don’t want to die down here.”
“Sara” is an exploration of grief, of the various ways our characters cope with the loss of someone they cared deeply about. It’s also a turning point in the series, a transition period for characters like Laurel and Felicity and Oliver in response to Sara’s death. Death often reminds us of our own mortality, and here, that certainly is the case; death also reminds them of their seeming lack of identity, of the fact that they’ve spent all this time in a high-tech basement, that they’ve done good in the world, but that they’ve done so while they’ve been closed off emotionally from life in general.
“There’s just one rule: we all die in the end.”
The unrelenting cycle of violence and crime seems to be a common topic among television shows these days, with The Bridge exploring that idea in terms of the U.S.-Mexico border and with Boardwalk Empire doing so in a historical, gangster world context. Person of Interest is tackling the issue in present-day New York, in a steadily evolving world that gets more restrictive as time progresses.
“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.
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