Meta like whoa (Ballyk, NX)
Aug. 27th, 2006 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieRemember how I said I wanted to do a paper on how a similar premise is treated by two different TV programs?
Er, yes. I got another disc of Ballykissangel episodes from Netflix today.
(Caveat: It's been years since I've seen most NX episodes, and I know I've got some specifics wrong. Take as many grains of salt as necessary for sanity.)
Because my first critical love is comparative literature (really, all my best papers concern at least two authors), I've been watching some taped episodes of Northern Exposure along with these. While the first season of Ballyk seemed remarkably similar to NX, although with crucial differences, it's really diverged in this season. Despite the village's quirky inhabitants, the show is firmly grounded in realism. Something like Fleischman's Robert Palmer dream sequence in "Spring Break" would never fly here; nor would an episode like "The Quest," with its wacky, possibly-it-was-all-a-metaphor-for-death storyline, or Chris's half-sibling-who-happens-to-be-black Bernard, or breaking the fourth wall in "Russian Flu," or Shelly's morning sickness taking place as singing and her meeting up with/having visions of her daughter throughout her life in "Hello I Love You," or Maggie having Holling's dreams because of the northern lights, or any of the other fantastical things you could name. While events in Ballyk are decidedly strange, nothing goes on that's outside the realm of possibility in our mundane world.
And Ballyk, for all its fluffy, cozy Irish exterior, is a much darker program than NX. It takes five seasons for Doctor Joel to lose one patient. (Well, discounting the grouse in season three.) Father Peter loses one in the very first episode--although of course by "losing" here I mean "not getting there in time to do the Last Rites," which thematically is, I think, roughly comparable. When Maggie's mother burns her house down, it's not a tragedy--there are no real world concerns like insurance, but rather it's another step in the evolving relationship between Maggie and her mother, and is high comedy to boot.
In Ballyk, by the fourth episode, Peter is struggling with whether a guest character has done the right thing by euthanizing his wife when she begged to be released from her constant pain, despite his dogmatic belief that "all life is sacred." Season two, we have Niamh's miscarriage (which incidentally lead to the first scene where it actually looked like Niamh and Ambrose were in love, for pity's sake, but I digress...still, the few minutes where he comforts her upon hearing of the miscarriage was an excellently-played and directed scene, with really fine music), spousal abuse between guest characters (again incidentally, Ambrose really got to shine in that episode...more further down), and Brendan Kearney losing his job, at least for a while, because of limited enrollment/finances at the school. Actually, in the last episode of the first season, we get hints that Assumpta isn't doing too well financially--it seems like Brian's bar could very easily put her out of business if it were allowed to stay open for much longer than the weekend it was. One of the things I like about the series is that while, yes, it is an idealized version of rural Ireland to a certain extent, not everybody has a magically well-paying job. Everyone but Brian, the rich man in town, lives relatively sparely, at least from what we've seen of the interiors of Peter's, Niamh's and Ambrose's, and Assumpta's dwellings. "Live in My Heart and Pay No Rent" deals with this fairly directly with its counting-sheep-by-satellite subplot. In "Fallen Angel," Kathleen's nephew mentions the lack of jobs in the area.
This leads me to another point of departure between the Ballyk and NX: the relative distance of the outside world to each of the communities. There is a real difference here, perhaps the most dramatic of all the differences between these two programs. Cicely is not accessible by road from any major city. You have to fly in on a prop plane to get to it from the outside world. The town is about as isolated as you can be outside of Antarctica. There are a few outlying Indian villages here and there, and apparently the booming metropolis of Cantwell (population 222 in the real world, perhaps slightly higher in the NX world) is reachable via car when the roads are in decent condition, but that's it. The 843 citizens of Cicely are very much stuck with each other, and only each other.
Meanwhile, Ballykissangel appears to be maybe an hour from the county seat of Wicklow, and about two hours, maybe a little more, from Dublin. Cilldargan, the biggest town in the parish, is just up the road. There is regular bus service from each of these places. The town may be smaller than Cicely (given that there are fifty-eight kids at the national school, and probably ten or twenty more at the private school in Cilldargan, I'm hazarding a guess at a population of not quite three hundred), but it has a much greater connection with the rest of the country, which in all likelihood both influences and was influenced by the choice to ground the series rather firmly in the real world.1 It's harder to have the really strange stuff when the real world is so close without making the "magic" in some way ironic or otherwise not played straight, which NX never did. They always plowed full on into the weirder stuff, taking it completely seriously, which I think is why it worked as well as it did.
And yet interestingly enough, there's a weird thing where it seems that conflict in Ballyk comes more from inside the community than it does in NX. By that, I mean that in Ballyk, the drama comes from either something like Brian setting up his bar and his festival, causing Assumpta and Siobhan to hate in him different ways (for taking away desperately-needed profits and for mistreating a sheep in the course of the celebration, respectively), or via the characters trying to either catch, hide, or talk about an advertising deal with the man behind the pirate radio station. Alternately, something from outside the community starts the ball of conflict rolling, but the rest of the episode focuses nearly exclusively on how the regulars react to it. For example, a girl from Cilldargan dropping her baby off in front of Peter's door as a foundling leads to his idea of giving the local teens a sex talk, causing conflict between him and Father Mac. It's all very inwardly-focused.
NX is similarly inwardly-focused much of the time, but at the same time the conflict is often driven by something outside of the community. For example, there's a running theme of a sort of natural mind-control at work in Cicely. There's the spring thaw making everyone crazy (and libidinous) in "Spring Break," and the aforementioned northern lights causing weird dreams for everyone. Not to mention "Ill Wind," where the Coho winds influence Maggie and Joel to the point where she breaks his nose--twice--and then they end up having sex, even though they still really dislike each other at that point. Or at any rate, they claim it was the winds, and it certainly seems like it was, since there was no obvious internal trigger for their behaviour in this episode. (Although one of the many brilliant things about the show is that almost always, when something "magical" or "supernatural" like that happens, the "magic" is all in the way the writers chose to focus on supernatural explanations for coincidences--admittedly very strange coincidences--but, looked at objectively, there are also "real world" explanations for many of the events.) Also, many of the stories take place outside of Cicely, such as "It Happened in Juneau" or "Grosse Point 44201" (or whatever the zipcode was), or the multiple ones in the country around Cicely. At the moment, I'm having trouble thinking of any Ballyk episodes where large parts take place a significant distance away from the village, but of course I haven't seen much. This is not in any way to say that NX either does not have episodes where the drama originates within the characters or the community, doesn't have something from the outside world show up and then deal with everyone's reaction to it, or that the episodes where they don't are in any way inferior (trust me, I really like "Juneau" and "Grosse Pointe"). And undoubtedly a large reason behind this is that NX had three or four times the amount of episodes as Ballyk, so even by the law of averages, they had to have more types of stories.
Also important is the main character's relationship to the community. Joel comes as a fish out of water, under protest and only to repay his medical school debt, and resolutely remains so for the majority of the show. Depending on how you view "The Quest," he eventually goes back home to New York City. (Or he dies. God only knows what really happened in that episode.) He does make friends with many of the other characters, and has a relationship of sorts with Maggie (more on that later), but there are also frequent episodes detailing his resistance to fitting in in Cicely. Meanwhile, Peter requested to be transferred away from home, although not necessarily to Ballyk. From the very beginning, he makes an effort to fit in, and only six episodes in, when it seems he's to be transferred again, the rest of the community petitions to keep him as their curate. He's a successful transplant. It's interesting that it's actually Peter who gets to go home at some point during the series (his mother is dying), while Joel never does go back to visit NYC. This almost certainly ties into the above differences in how each community is connected to the outside world.
Moving on from community angle, I come to my last point of comparison: the Peter/Assumpta relationship versus that of Maggie and Joel. They start out from a very similar position: fish-out-of-water man comes to a tiny town because of his job, and has massive UST with the local young, beautiful, feisty lady, but their UST is hampered because they have serious ideological conflicts, not to mention outside factors which keep them apart (obvious reasons for Father Peter and Assumpta, and a boyfriend and girlfriend for Maggie and Joel, respectively).
And yet the relationships play out so differently. I have to admit, I root harder for Peter and Assumpta. Their main obstacle is an outside roadblock--the Church, Peter's relationship to it, and Assumpta's dislike of it. Okay, actually, those are all technically obstacles that come from within themselves--Assumpta obviously comes to love Peter despite the Church, and once he realizes he's fallen in love, he's happy enough to leave the priesthood. But for the first three seasons, they both are in the position of, "Well, if we could, that would be nice, but it's inconceivable, so let'sreel out the tension ignore, deny, suppress!" which is more of an outside restriction. (I know, that makes no sense. But go with it.) In the meantime, they build up a respectful friendship, and obviously care deeply about each other, and, perhaps most importantly of all, are shown to be decent human beings in all areas of life, although of course they have their individual flaws. When they finally do decide on a course of action, it really seems like they're going to be happy together, and they're going to be better people because they're together. (And then Assumpta goes down to fix that thrice-damned fuse box. ARGH.)
Meanwhile, Maggie and Joel...well. The biggest impediment to their marriage of true minds is, well, their minds. More specifically, their individual neuroses and their really quite handicapped ways of dealing with other people. As I understand it, the reason Rob Morrow wanted out of his contract early was that by about season four, Fleischman was learning many of the same lessons about interpersonal interaction that he'd already learned. Maggie was little better. While their vaguely hateful personalities do in fact drive much of the comedy of NX, they aren't always likeable. And it's definitely not always easy to see them ever being happy together. As Joel says in, "Old Tree," the episode where Maggie tries to constantly be nice to him, causing him grievous bodily injury (it's NX, these kinds of causal relationships happen), their relationship is one of basic hostility. Even when they're attracted to each other, they express it in hostile ways: their first kiss sends most of the stuff on the counters in the Brick's kitchen to the floor, and their foreplay consists of basically trying to kill each other.
However, all through the series, there are indications that they belong together. In the "Cicely," "Zarya," and "Dinner at 7:30," episodes where the actors play different-but-related characters (they're kind of like AU episodes of sci-fi shows, except that the main draw is that they put the current situation of the show into a different place or time period, and the actors play similar characters to their regular role), their alter-egos end up together. In "Grosse Point," Maggie's grandmother tells Joel and allegorical story of how she separated from her husband for a while and took up with another man, but missed her husband, and they got back together and stayed that way. Coincidentally, this is after the sex in "Ill Wind," while Maggie is having a relationship with "Bubble Boy" Mike Monroe. It ends not long after. *cough, cough* Perhaps most revealingly, in "First Snow," Maggie buys a chair that nobody else considers comfortable, but near the end of the episode, Joel sits in it and claims it's absolutely wonderful. The expression on her face, watching her fit the pieces together--what her house was missing was him--is just incredible.
In the next season, they start dating, and their relationship moderates considerably. It looks like they might actually be able to put aside their differences and become better people because of their association with each other. But at the same time, the writers and directors of several episodes make choices that seem to counterindicate this track. In "Mite Makes Right," where they officially start "going out" (note that this is nearly a full season after they had sex in "Ill Wind"), they agree on a "clean slate" while standing across Maggie's kitchen island. Visually, they are strikingly separated. Later in the episode, when Maggie calls Joel out to a snowy field and kisses him, they're both bundled up in Alaskan parkas--more distance, despite the kiss. And good LORD, "Full Upright Position" is one giant metaphor about their relationship. They're stuck on the Russian airline from hell, trying to go from Anchorage to St. Petersburg. The plane is delayed for several hours, stuck on the tarmac. They have a huge fight, and then, near the end, after probably the most tension-filled day in his life, Joel proposes, saying basically that it's either marriage or they never see each other again. Just after she accepts, its announced that the plane's finally going to take off--and they get off the plane. GIANT HONKING METAPHOR. And then later in that episode I think they decide to call off the engagement, but live together for a while. (This lasts half an episode.) Not to mention, six years, and they never say they love one another.
So I dunno, sometimes I think there's not a chance in hell of them ever making it as a couple. They're attracted to each other, and in their own ways, they each care about the other, but they can't live together, and they can't have a functional relationship. But I also see growth for both characters, and at times they do seem to be capable of treating each other with respect and are genuinely happy together.And NOBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD will have either of them, so they're each other's last, best hope. There are, in fact, some very sweet moments sprinkled throughout the seasons. So, yeah. I really like ambiguity, and NX is one of the best in the business at it. but it does make 'shipping very hard!
I also want to do a comparison of storytelling techniques between the two shows, which will basically have the thesis of "Chris as Greek Chorus in NX is FRACKING BRILLIANT; why has no one else rediscovered this technique?!" but I'm too tired to do it right now, and this is long enough as it is.
1 I think this relative connection to the rest of the country is very indicative of key differences in the American and European experience. In "The Power and the Gory," Assumpta says, "I live in the middle of nowhere." I'm over here going, "Buh? You're two hours from the capital of the nation. You have public transportation, for god's sake! You don't by any stretch of the imagination live in the middle of nowhere!" Heck, even going to school in Gambier (pop. 500, plus 1600 college students for eight months of the year), I recognized that while I could make jokes about living in a cornfield and having Amish for neighbors, I was far from as "middle of nowhere" as you can get in this country. But in the UK or in Ireland, it would be considered really far out. The population density was one of the hardest things to adjust to during my year in England, and Exeter is far from the largest city in even the southwest. Don't get me wrong; it was very, very nice to be able to get just about anywhere on public transportation, but at the same time, it was weird and disconcerting to be constantly surrounded by people. No matter how far away from civilization I wandered, there was always someone beyond the next hedge--usually talking on their cell phone. Bill Bryson has an interesting section at the beginning of Notes from a Small Island about the major difference in the perception of distance between Americans and Brits. Where most of us think, "Six hour drive there and back, whatever, that's a day trip," he found that many people in the UK considered that too far to go without stopping overnight.
*
A couple random comments on episodes one through four of Ballyk's second season:
- Father Mac just reaches the edge of caricature villainy in many of these episodes, but he always steps back just before he gets there with surprise approval for one of Peter's progressive ideas or by bursting out with something terribly funny. ("But DON'T play 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore'! ...I hate that song.")
- You could get really sloshed if you participated in a drinking game based on significant glances between Peter and Assumpta. On average, I think they have one every .14 seconds. More in certain episodes. Oof.
- So, Assumpta was in Juno and the Paycock, and Playboy of the Western World. I remember them...sort of. I keep thinking that if I just read it enough, I'll really get PotWW, you know?
- Speaking of that episode: eeeee, near-kiss. In front of the bishop. PETER AND ASSUMPTA ARE SO ADORKABLE.
- I thought Ambrose really came into his own in "River Dance," when he had to handle Maura's husband abusing her. In Season One, he seemed a bit superfluous; now he seems to be getting more to do, which is nice, since I like him as a character. (He has a good heart, and he's a bit dorky, which is fun.)
*
Hmmm. Well, I meant to read another hundred or so pages of A.S. Byatt's Possession tonight, but my meta ramblings ate up my evening. Whoops. More on that book when I finish it...
Er, yes. I got another disc of Ballykissangel episodes from Netflix today.
(Caveat: It's been years since I've seen most NX episodes, and I know I've got some specifics wrong. Take as many grains of salt as necessary for sanity.)
Because my first critical love is comparative literature (really, all my best papers concern at least two authors), I've been watching some taped episodes of Northern Exposure along with these. While the first season of Ballyk seemed remarkably similar to NX, although with crucial differences, it's really diverged in this season. Despite the village's quirky inhabitants, the show is firmly grounded in realism. Something like Fleischman's Robert Palmer dream sequence in "Spring Break" would never fly here; nor would an episode like "The Quest," with its wacky, possibly-it-was-all-a-metaphor-for-death storyline, or Chris's half-sibling-who-happens-to-be-black Bernard, or breaking the fourth wall in "Russian Flu," or Shelly's morning sickness taking place as singing and her meeting up with/having visions of her daughter throughout her life in "Hello I Love You," or Maggie having Holling's dreams because of the northern lights, or any of the other fantastical things you could name. While events in Ballyk are decidedly strange, nothing goes on that's outside the realm of possibility in our mundane world.
And Ballyk, for all its fluffy, cozy Irish exterior, is a much darker program than NX. It takes five seasons for Doctor Joel to lose one patient. (Well, discounting the grouse in season three.) Father Peter loses one in the very first episode--although of course by "losing" here I mean "not getting there in time to do the Last Rites," which thematically is, I think, roughly comparable. When Maggie's mother burns her house down, it's not a tragedy--there are no real world concerns like insurance, but rather it's another step in the evolving relationship between Maggie and her mother, and is high comedy to boot.
In Ballyk, by the fourth episode, Peter is struggling with whether a guest character has done the right thing by euthanizing his wife when she begged to be released from her constant pain, despite his dogmatic belief that "all life is sacred." Season two, we have Niamh's miscarriage (which incidentally lead to the first scene where it actually looked like Niamh and Ambrose were in love, for pity's sake, but I digress...still, the few minutes where he comforts her upon hearing of the miscarriage was an excellently-played and directed scene, with really fine music), spousal abuse between guest characters (again incidentally, Ambrose really got to shine in that episode...more further down), and Brendan Kearney losing his job, at least for a while, because of limited enrollment/finances at the school. Actually, in the last episode of the first season, we get hints that Assumpta isn't doing too well financially--it seems like Brian's bar could very easily put her out of business if it were allowed to stay open for much longer than the weekend it was. One of the things I like about the series is that while, yes, it is an idealized version of rural Ireland to a certain extent, not everybody has a magically well-paying job. Everyone but Brian, the rich man in town, lives relatively sparely, at least from what we've seen of the interiors of Peter's, Niamh's and Ambrose's, and Assumpta's dwellings. "Live in My Heart and Pay No Rent" deals with this fairly directly with its counting-sheep-by-satellite subplot. In "Fallen Angel," Kathleen's nephew mentions the lack of jobs in the area.
This leads me to another point of departure between the Ballyk and NX: the relative distance of the outside world to each of the communities. There is a real difference here, perhaps the most dramatic of all the differences between these two programs. Cicely is not accessible by road from any major city. You have to fly in on a prop plane to get to it from the outside world. The town is about as isolated as you can be outside of Antarctica. There are a few outlying Indian villages here and there, and apparently the booming metropolis of Cantwell (population 222 in the real world, perhaps slightly higher in the NX world) is reachable via car when the roads are in decent condition, but that's it. The 843 citizens of Cicely are very much stuck with each other, and only each other.
Meanwhile, Ballykissangel appears to be maybe an hour from the county seat of Wicklow, and about two hours, maybe a little more, from Dublin. Cilldargan, the biggest town in the parish, is just up the road. There is regular bus service from each of these places. The town may be smaller than Cicely (given that there are fifty-eight kids at the national school, and probably ten or twenty more at the private school in Cilldargan, I'm hazarding a guess at a population of not quite three hundred), but it has a much greater connection with the rest of the country, which in all likelihood both influences and was influenced by the choice to ground the series rather firmly in the real world.1 It's harder to have the really strange stuff when the real world is so close without making the "magic" in some way ironic or otherwise not played straight, which NX never did. They always plowed full on into the weirder stuff, taking it completely seriously, which I think is why it worked as well as it did.
And yet interestingly enough, there's a weird thing where it seems that conflict in Ballyk comes more from inside the community than it does in NX. By that, I mean that in Ballyk, the drama comes from either something like Brian setting up his bar and his festival, causing Assumpta and Siobhan to hate in him different ways (for taking away desperately-needed profits and for mistreating a sheep in the course of the celebration, respectively), or via the characters trying to either catch, hide, or talk about an advertising deal with the man behind the pirate radio station. Alternately, something from outside the community starts the ball of conflict rolling, but the rest of the episode focuses nearly exclusively on how the regulars react to it. For example, a girl from Cilldargan dropping her baby off in front of Peter's door as a foundling leads to his idea of giving the local teens a sex talk, causing conflict between him and Father Mac. It's all very inwardly-focused.
NX is similarly inwardly-focused much of the time, but at the same time the conflict is often driven by something outside of the community. For example, there's a running theme of a sort of natural mind-control at work in Cicely. There's the spring thaw making everyone crazy (and libidinous) in "Spring Break," and the aforementioned northern lights causing weird dreams for everyone. Not to mention "Ill Wind," where the Coho winds influence Maggie and Joel to the point where she breaks his nose--twice--and then they end up having sex, even though they still really dislike each other at that point. Or at any rate, they claim it was the winds, and it certainly seems like it was, since there was no obvious internal trigger for their behaviour in this episode. (Although one of the many brilliant things about the show is that almost always, when something "magical" or "supernatural" like that happens, the "magic" is all in the way the writers chose to focus on supernatural explanations for coincidences--admittedly very strange coincidences--but, looked at objectively, there are also "real world" explanations for many of the events.) Also, many of the stories take place outside of Cicely, such as "It Happened in Juneau" or "Grosse Point 44201" (or whatever the zipcode was), or the multiple ones in the country around Cicely. At the moment, I'm having trouble thinking of any Ballyk episodes where large parts take place a significant distance away from the village, but of course I haven't seen much. This is not in any way to say that NX either does not have episodes where the drama originates within the characters or the community, doesn't have something from the outside world show up and then deal with everyone's reaction to it, or that the episodes where they don't are in any way inferior (trust me, I really like "Juneau" and "Grosse Pointe"). And undoubtedly a large reason behind this is that NX had three or four times the amount of episodes as Ballyk, so even by the law of averages, they had to have more types of stories.
Also important is the main character's relationship to the community. Joel comes as a fish out of water, under protest and only to repay his medical school debt, and resolutely remains so for the majority of the show. Depending on how you view "The Quest," he eventually goes back home to New York City. (Or he dies. God only knows what really happened in that episode.) He does make friends with many of the other characters, and has a relationship of sorts with Maggie (more on that later), but there are also frequent episodes detailing his resistance to fitting in in Cicely. Meanwhile, Peter requested to be transferred away from home, although not necessarily to Ballyk. From the very beginning, he makes an effort to fit in, and only six episodes in, when it seems he's to be transferred again, the rest of the community petitions to keep him as their curate. He's a successful transplant. It's interesting that it's actually Peter who gets to go home at some point during the series (his mother is dying), while Joel never does go back to visit NYC. This almost certainly ties into the above differences in how each community is connected to the outside world.
Moving on from community angle, I come to my last point of comparison: the Peter/Assumpta relationship versus that of Maggie and Joel. They start out from a very similar position: fish-out-of-water man comes to a tiny town because of his job, and has massive UST with the local young, beautiful, feisty lady, but their UST is hampered because they have serious ideological conflicts, not to mention outside factors which keep them apart (obvious reasons for Father Peter and Assumpta, and a boyfriend and girlfriend for Maggie and Joel, respectively).
And yet the relationships play out so differently. I have to admit, I root harder for Peter and Assumpta. Their main obstacle is an outside roadblock--the Church, Peter's relationship to it, and Assumpta's dislike of it. Okay, actually, those are all technically obstacles that come from within themselves--Assumpta obviously comes to love Peter despite the Church, and once he realizes he's fallen in love, he's happy enough to leave the priesthood. But for the first three seasons, they both are in the position of, "Well, if we could, that would be nice, but it's inconceivable, so let's
Meanwhile, Maggie and Joel...well. The biggest impediment to their marriage of true minds is, well, their minds. More specifically, their individual neuroses and their really quite handicapped ways of dealing with other people. As I understand it, the reason Rob Morrow wanted out of his contract early was that by about season four, Fleischman was learning many of the same lessons about interpersonal interaction that he'd already learned. Maggie was little better. While their vaguely hateful personalities do in fact drive much of the comedy of NX, they aren't always likeable. And it's definitely not always easy to see them ever being happy together. As Joel says in, "Old Tree," the episode where Maggie tries to constantly be nice to him, causing him grievous bodily injury (it's NX, these kinds of causal relationships happen), their relationship is one of basic hostility. Even when they're attracted to each other, they express it in hostile ways: their first kiss sends most of the stuff on the counters in the Brick's kitchen to the floor, and their foreplay consists of basically trying to kill each other.
However, all through the series, there are indications that they belong together. In the "Cicely," "Zarya," and "Dinner at 7:30," episodes where the actors play different-but-related characters (they're kind of like AU episodes of sci-fi shows, except that the main draw is that they put the current situation of the show into a different place or time period, and the actors play similar characters to their regular role), their alter-egos end up together. In "Grosse Point," Maggie's grandmother tells Joel and allegorical story of how she separated from her husband for a while and took up with another man, but missed her husband, and they got back together and stayed that way. Coincidentally, this is after the sex in "Ill Wind," while Maggie is having a relationship with "Bubble Boy" Mike Monroe. It ends not long after. *cough, cough* Perhaps most revealingly, in "First Snow," Maggie buys a chair that nobody else considers comfortable, but near the end of the episode, Joel sits in it and claims it's absolutely wonderful. The expression on her face, watching her fit the pieces together--what her house was missing was him--is just incredible.
In the next season, they start dating, and their relationship moderates considerably. It looks like they might actually be able to put aside their differences and become better people because of their association with each other. But at the same time, the writers and directors of several episodes make choices that seem to counterindicate this track. In "Mite Makes Right," where they officially start "going out" (note that this is nearly a full season after they had sex in "Ill Wind"), they agree on a "clean slate" while standing across Maggie's kitchen island. Visually, they are strikingly separated. Later in the episode, when Maggie calls Joel out to a snowy field and kisses him, they're both bundled up in Alaskan parkas--more distance, despite the kiss. And good LORD, "Full Upright Position" is one giant metaphor about their relationship. They're stuck on the Russian airline from hell, trying to go from Anchorage to St. Petersburg. The plane is delayed for several hours, stuck on the tarmac. They have a huge fight, and then, near the end, after probably the most tension-filled day in his life, Joel proposes, saying basically that it's either marriage or they never see each other again. Just after she accepts, its announced that the plane's finally going to take off--and they get off the plane. GIANT HONKING METAPHOR. And then later in that episode I think they decide to call off the engagement, but live together for a while. (This lasts half an episode.) Not to mention, six years, and they never say they love one another.
So I dunno, sometimes I think there's not a chance in hell of them ever making it as a couple. They're attracted to each other, and in their own ways, they each care about the other, but they can't live together, and they can't have a functional relationship. But I also see growth for both characters, and at times they do seem to be capable of treating each other with respect and are genuinely happy together.
I also want to do a comparison of storytelling techniques between the two shows, which will basically have the thesis of "Chris as Greek Chorus in NX is FRACKING BRILLIANT; why has no one else rediscovered this technique?!" but I'm too tired to do it right now, and this is long enough as it is.
1 I think this relative connection to the rest of the country is very indicative of key differences in the American and European experience. In "The Power and the Gory," Assumpta says, "I live in the middle of nowhere." I'm over here going, "Buh? You're two hours from the capital of the nation. You have public transportation, for god's sake! You don't by any stretch of the imagination live in the middle of nowhere!" Heck, even going to school in Gambier (pop. 500, plus 1600 college students for eight months of the year), I recognized that while I could make jokes about living in a cornfield and having Amish for neighbors, I was far from as "middle of nowhere" as you can get in this country. But in the UK or in Ireland, it would be considered really far out. The population density was one of the hardest things to adjust to during my year in England, and Exeter is far from the largest city in even the southwest. Don't get me wrong; it was very, very nice to be able to get just about anywhere on public transportation, but at the same time, it was weird and disconcerting to be constantly surrounded by people. No matter how far away from civilization I wandered, there was always someone beyond the next hedge--usually talking on their cell phone. Bill Bryson has an interesting section at the beginning of Notes from a Small Island about the major difference in the perception of distance between Americans and Brits. Where most of us think, "Six hour drive there and back, whatever, that's a day trip," he found that many people in the UK considered that too far to go without stopping overnight.
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A couple random comments on episodes one through four of Ballyk's second season:
- Father Mac just reaches the edge of caricature villainy in many of these episodes, but he always steps back just before he gets there with surprise approval for one of Peter's progressive ideas or by bursting out with something terribly funny. ("But DON'T play 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore'! ...I hate that song.")
- You could get really sloshed if you participated in a drinking game based on significant glances between Peter and Assumpta. On average, I think they have one every .14 seconds. More in certain episodes. Oof.
- So, Assumpta was in Juno and the Paycock, and Playboy of the Western World. I remember them...sort of. I keep thinking that if I just read it enough, I'll really get PotWW, you know?
- Speaking of that episode: eeeee, near-kiss. In front of the bishop. PETER AND ASSUMPTA ARE SO ADORKABLE.
- I thought Ambrose really came into his own in "River Dance," when he had to handle Maura's husband abusing her. In Season One, he seemed a bit superfluous; now he seems to be getting more to do, which is nice, since I like him as a character. (He has a good heart, and he's a bit dorky, which is fun.)
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Hmmm. Well, I meant to read another hundred or so pages of A.S. Byatt's Possession tonight, but my meta ramblings ate up my evening. Whoops. More on that book when I finish it...
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Date: 2006-08-30 08:01 pm (UTC)I can't decide if reading this really makes me want to watch these shows through sometimes (I've never seen any NX, and only random bits of BallyK) or run away from the shippy pain...but this whole piece was fascinating to read nevertheless!
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