Pumpkin Ranks More Episodes of Television

16. The West Wing - The Crackpots and These Women (S01E05)

Nominated by: scarletspeed7

What I (Think I) I Know - Sorkin's valorization of Great Men and their institutional power is not for me. Plus I really struggle with the big speeches over swelling music.

For the second time, a Sorkin show takes last place. It doesn't help that my last and only exposure to The West Wing is the incredible "Two Cathedrals". It also doesn't help that even when it's incredible, I don't really like it. There are a bunch of threads in this episode: the crackpots, these women, Toby's fight, Josh's dilemma, and the president's chili dinner. Some of it pays off satisfactorily, there's a general lack of focus, and it all ends with a herculean effort to tie everything together.

The crackpots

It's one of Leo's "big block of cheese" days, which is a policy he borrowed from Andrew Jackson about spending a day opening the White House to groups with fringe interests who normally have a tough time getting heard. Toby refers to it as "Throw open our office doors to people who want to discuss things we can care less about" day, Josh more succinctly refers to it as "total crackpot" day, and everyone calls it a waste of time. Trouble is, they are basically right, as the cheese day appointments are all played for comedy, as members of staff deal with people asking for more attention paid to UFOs or a roadway for wolves. The episode is predominantly about showing the camaraderie of the main cast, but often to the exclusion of everyone else. There's also a scene where the president, leaning back with hands behind his head, bluffs a room of economists, ends the meeting when he learns that his daughter is in town, and announces that he's going to make chili even as the economists file out of the room. I like these characters until they have to interact with people. Anyways, the punch-line of this plot thread has CJ getting convinced by the people proposing a 900 million dollar wolves-only roadway. She spends the entire chili party talking about wolves, and will likely make some sort of proposal for wildlife protection to the interior. It establishes CJ's character, but unfortunately only slightly gestures towards the value of outside voices.

Josh

This thread is the highlight for me, though it gets a bit melodramatic for the more broadly comedic tone of the rest of the episode. Josh receives a card from the NSC that tells him where to go in the event of a nuclear attack. He soon discovers that none of his co-workers received it, and he is the only one important enough to be saved. He struggles with this information, and we later learn that he has survivor's guilt from when, as a child, he abandoned his older sister to die in a burning building. In my favourite part of the episode, he ends up talking to CJ about the card, who is completely correct when she says how very sweet Josh is being. Josh sits alone in a room listening to Ave Maria (which played when his sister died), and explains that he doesn't want to be friends with her without being honest. CJ gives rational responses to Josh's worries at every turn, even when he's describing in excruciating detail the airborne toxic event he concocted in his head. Cold War paranoia seems like a silly concern at first, and especially odd for a show that's so fundamentally optimistic, but the episode builds it up well. It understands that the anxiety is not from the worst case scenario, but the straddling of possibilities where people must prepare for doomsday and not-doomsday simultaneously. Josh's concern is in the present, which is the feeling of abandoning his friends. As he explains when he returns the card, "I want to be a comfort to my friends in tragedy. And I want to be able to celebrate with them in triumph. And for all the times in between, I just want to be able to look them in the eye." In the face of uncertainty, Josh focuses on what he can actually believe in. I like it as a contrast to the infallible confidence that the show is more often prone to.

Toby

Toby sticks to his principles, despite the president's hostility and lack of support from his co-workers. He argues with the president throughout the episode, even as he feels like "kid in the class with his hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call on." Toby's paranoia comes to a head when, while supposedly burying the hatchet, Mandy tells him she's glad David Rosen turned down his job first, which has got to be deliberate sabotage, right? It's a back-handed compliment even if Toby knew about it. Anyways, I immediately like Toby, because he's the only one to question the president's decisions, while the president only stonewalls him with some variation of "because I said so, and I'm the president". This thread culminates with a heartfelt conversation where the president reveals that he needs Toby, and he only gets mad because he knows he disappoints Toby sometimes. It's a much-needed moment of vulnerability for the president.

Chili party

The president has a chili dinner to celebrate his daughter being home. He announces it to lukewarm response and doubts about his cooking ability. He reminds them he's the president, makes the announcement a second time, and is greeted with enthusiastic response. The gag doesn't work. Powerful people aren't funny, except maybe as the object of ridicule. It's also the same language used to put down Toby in a non-jokey way. He recycles the joke at the party where it gets laughs because, again, he's the president. What a hack.

These women

In a ridiculously hokey scene, the president, Leo, and Josh stand in the middle of the party, talking privately about how impressed they are by these women. The camera goes around the room focusing on CJ, Mandy and Mrs. Landingham as the men exalt their virtues in mostly gendered descriptions. It comes from absolutely nowhere. The episode was not about women or even these women. If anything, Toby persevered through the most, but of course, integrity is expected from a man and does not need to be singled out in this fashion. It's especially disappointing, because so far, the show has done a good job of having well-written female characters who are not defined by their gender. In this scene, they're othered and subsumed by the male perspective, which gets the final word. It doesn't help that right after this we get another reference to the unseen first lady who only exists as a few negative female stereotypes. The wife's out of town, so the president can eat whatever he wants, hence the chili party.

The music swells

The president makes a speech that mentions everything that happened, which really ends up showing how little through-line there was in this episode.

Will I Watch More - Not right now, but it's first on the list for when I run out of shows I like.

15. Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger - A Privateer Appears (Episode 15)

Nominated by: Mega Mana

What I (Think I) I Know - Pirate Power Ranger with rad cutlasses and collars. The last one I vaguely remember seeing is Turbo, I think? Never got to Dino Thunder, Ninja Storm, Jungle Beat, are any of those right.

The old criticism is that a merchandise-focused show like this is just one long commercial, and there is hardly a better image for this than the sight of a pile of super sentai figures, regarded as the greatest treasure in the universe, stored in a pirate treasure chest. It's weirdly metafictional; the plot of this toy commercial show is centred on the accumulation of toys. In this episode, as I imagine in most episodes, the crew learns that there are more toys out there to get, and of course there is. Consumerism is a never-ending cycle.

First, some background on Japanese hero shows, partially gleaned from eshop darling Attack of the Friday Monsters (which you should play). In the 1950s, the kaiju was a manifestation of encroaching modernity, symbolizing the effects of pollution and radiation. In the '60s and '70s, heroes were created as a means of challenging the kaiju. Man becomes partly mechanised, a cog in the machine, or a limb of the giant robot. Factories created to meet the demands of capitalism. Both monster and heroes are expressions of alienation. The products of human labour takes on a life of its own, and dominates the labourer. The monster from the vantage point where technological growth lead to the atomic bomb. The hero from the vantage point where it's the means of postwar reconstruction. The anxieties of capitalism are integral to the genre.

In KSG, the monsters are the Zangyack empire, which look like life-sized, sentient action figures with ornate armour and plastic-moulded faces that don't move when they talk. They are mass produced goods threatening to take over the universe, driven by the constant demand of profit and expansion rather than need. However, they barely factor into this episode. The Gokaigers are searching for treasure and have no truck with the Zangyack until provoked. The Zangyack, meanwhile, spot the ship of Basco ta Jolokia - privateer, capitalist, and the villain of the episode. Privateers are pirates that are allowed to operate, but only against targets marked by Zangyack who control most of the universe. Chief of Staff Damarasu contacts Basco and sends him after the Gokaigers.

During a brief skirmish between Basco and the Gokaigers, Damarasu sends a couple giant monsters to the slaughter as a means of showing Basco the Gokaiger's force. They call the Gokai-Galleon, which transforms into the giant robot Gokai-Ou. There's a rather silly moment where the Gokaigers pull out a tiny figures of themselves and plug it into the console in order to activate their Grand Power. The heroes were always designed to be commodifiable, but here they come commodified. I've been calling them toys because that's what they look like, but in-universe, they're Ranger Keys. Consumerism insists that you need things to be complete, and to unlock your potential, which in this show is the ability to get more Ranger Keys.

Ranger Keys are also a corporate incursion on play as a creative act. Play occurs in the margins between an action figure in a child's hand, and the full-sized being it mimics on the TV screen. Now an action figure in a child's hand is analogous to an action figure in the hero's hand. Similarly , the inclination to mix toys of different origin is similarly taken up by the show as it brings together super sentais from all eras as part of its anniversary celebration. It becomes harder to be off-brand, and take ownership of the toys away from its connection to the show.

Back at base, Captain Marvelous reveals that he and Basco used to be crewmates before Basco betrayed the Akaki Pirates and their captain, AkaRed. Basco sold them out to the Zangyack in exchange for all the Ranger Keys they've gathered. In this flashback, we hear his philosophy: to obtain something, you must give something up. He gives up his friends, and obtains treasure. Basco understands that commodities have exchange value which overwhelms their use value, and people are commodities.

Basco and Captain Marvelous agree to meet alone and settle the score. At the meeting place, Basco ambushes Captain Marvelous. He turns 5 Ranger Keys of different incarnations of the show into trumpet buttons, blows the horn which turns them into warriors to do his bidding. Thankfully, Marvelous's crew shows up, with their excuse being that they were just out looking for Ranger Keys. After a lengthy fight, they manage to defeat the ersatz warriors, but Basco reveals that he had more Ranger Keys. The Gokaigers are overwhelmed, Basco captures them, leaves 5 Ranger Keys, and reiterates that to obtain something, you must give something up. Labour is abstracted in a profit system. The crew exchanged for Ranger Keys which can be turned into ersatz warriors in imitation of a crew, and all are made equivalent.

Also, their jolly roger looks like a spatula.

Will I Watch More - Nah, too much vamping. I'll watch episode 16 to see how they get out, though.

14. Dexter - The Getaway (S04E12)

Nominated by: SwayM

What I (Think I) Know - I've seen some of the first season, but I don't remember a lot about it. It's about a "good" serial killer who kills other serial killers. Then he becomes a lumberjack.

A lot of the hallmarks of film noir are present here: the male anti-hero, rationalising voice-over, the ambivalence towards family and particularly maternity. Film noir starts at the end and works backwards to track how it went wrong. This process of story-telling allows the protagonist to distance themselves from what happened and shift the blame to fate, circumstance, etc. This is present in "The Getaway". Dexter spends a lot of the episode shoring up his identity though voice-over to himself or in dialogue with the ghostly apparition of his father. He is obsessed with inevitability, and is convinced that he is stuck in a cycle of violence largely beyond his control.

First off, the title sequence is great. Close-up shots of everyday activities as Dexter gets up to go to work that are nonetheless violent and bloody, like making breakfast or shaving. The ever-present threat of violence is barely repressed below the public persona, and it's a basic life necessity as natural as eating. Dexter's body is shown in parts, and obscured until the very end to show how a fractured sense of self is pulled together and rigorously maintained. The way the body is compartmentalised is also indicative of Dexter's sanitized worldview and echoed by the ritualistic, well-organised way he kills, which are compulsive repetitions of repressed trauma as attempts to police the boundaries of identity. Trauma is where we fail to combine memory with narrative. His victims are wrapped up, catalogued by blood sample, divided up into garbage bags and tossed into the ocean. We see the messy corpses and crime scene photos of the Trinity Killer's victims, but Dexter's kill is never dwelled on or even shown explicitly.

The episode starts with Arthur Mitchell, the Trinity Killer, finding out who Dexter is and tracking him down at work. The camera spins slowly at an oblique angle to show Dexter's mental state as Trinity threatens him to stay out of his way. The show has a nice visual style where it often takes up Dexter's subjectivity with a lot of claustrophobic or distorted angles. Dexter does not heed the warning and chases after Arthur. Meanwhile, Deb discovers that Dexter and the Ice Truck Killer are brothers, and Laura Moser is their mother. The rest of the police station spends the entire episode standing around a whiteboard. Alright, they discover that a child goes missing every time before the trinity of kills which gives them a new pattern, and that eventually leads them to Arthur. It speeds things along but it's not done in a visually or narratively interesting way. Everything that doesn't involve Dexter is kind of just there.

Dexter follows Arthur's car. His ghost dad backseat drives, asking him if he has a plan. These scenes are bathed in light, as if communing with divinity. Dexter externalizes his deterministic instinct, as ghost dad insists that family is a distraction, and that the "dark passenger" is not ruining his life, but is his life. The "dark passenger" is Dexter's euphemism for his compulsive killing, and one that wouldn't hold up to much scrutiny if he had to use it on anyone but the voice in his head, since it still means he's driving the vehicle. Furthermore, right before the "dark passenger" conversation, we see who that is even if Dexter doesn't realize it, as he's driving a car with ghost dad in the passenger seat. Rita calls, ghost dad tells him not to pick up, he does so anyway, and hits the mirror of a parked car. He comes up behind Arthur in a parking lot and tranquilizes him. There's a sense of glee in Dexter's voice as he realizes Arthur intends to leave town with all his family's savings, which means he can kill him and have everyone think he just fled. Killing serial killers is just how he sates his dark passenger, and there's no actual heroic intent. It doesn't matter that Arthur's family will be destitute, Dexter only cares about having a clean murder. Before Dexter can take Arthur's body, the owner of the car he hits shows up with 2 cops. Dexter loses it, smashes the guy's phone and gets arrested, which is where he gets lectured by ghost dad.

Rita bails him out, and refutes Dexter's belief in patterns. Dexter thinks Rita is disappointed because picking him up from jail reminds her of her ex-husband. Rita explains how this situation is different, and believes that he is not a slave to his demons. Similarly, later in the episode Deb tells Dexter what she learned about Dexter's relation to the Ice Truck Killer. Dexter instantly connects that it's his fault that Ice Truck targeted Deb, before having her cut him off and insist that he's been good for her. The people around Dexter believe in autonomy and change in contrast to Dexter's fatalism.

Dexter, and the police department both eventually end up at Arthur's place and finds him gone. Dexter tracks him down alone, readies him for the kill, and they talk. Arthur goes into a bit of that old "we're not so different you and I" bit, but it works here since not only is it true, Dexter once tried to learn from him as a model for how to make the "dark passenger" work with having a family. Convinced by Rita and Deb, Dexter thinks that the difference between them is that he wants to change while Arthur does not. Arthur says that he prayed to be different, which Dexter characterizes as not trying but waiting to be stopped. Arthur offers that it worked, and now he's being stopped. Arthur abdicates his agency just as Dexter does, giving him a glimpse into where his path will take him. A resolute Dexter vows to rid himself of the "dark passenger", which is perhaps a doomed enterprise since he still doesn't realize it's a part of him. We cut away from Arthur on the table, to him bagged up and ready to be disposed, because Dexter still can't face the trauma.

Then they fridge Rita.

Dexter goes home and finds Rita dead in the bathtub as part of the Trinity Killer's pattern. He sees his son crying in a pool of her blood which brings to mind his own experience. Both he and his son are reborn in blood, and there lives will always be bathed in blood. It reinvigorates his belief in fate, and his inability to change. This either offers new story possibilities or it's a reversion of the status quo, depending on what happens next. In isolation, I find it rather disappointing.

Will I Watch More -  Probably not. Cinematography, Michael C. Hall and John Lithgow are great, everything else not so much. Plus I hear later seasons are terrible.

13. Burn Notice - Pilot (S01E01)

Nominated by: Murphiroth

What I (Think I) Know - Decently fun spy show with MacGyver s***, "when you're a spy" voice-overs, and an uncharismatic lead.

The three repeat shows from last time cover a wide range of re-evaluated opinion. The West Wing plummets, showing the thin line between a good episode and a bad episode of that show. Mystery future entry shows improvement, though a lot of that is due to my low opinion of it going in. Burn Notice is fairly formulaic, and everything I said last time still applies. The action scenes are well done, some of the visual flourishes look bad, Jeffrey Donovan's voice-overs sound like they're being read off a card. Being formulaic is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make it harder to find something new to say this time around.

The episode starts with Michael Westen on assignment learning that there's a burn notice on him as he's calling for a money wire transfer while meeting with a warlord in. They start beating him up for being CIA, but through improvisation and spy ingenuity, he narrowly escapes his captors, and passes out on a plane. The show is about a hyper-competent spy who's been cut off from the resources he needs to operate, trying to figure out who burned him.

The shows frequent use of voice-over recalls our last entry, Dexter, but used for the opposite effect. While Dexter show's vulnerability, Michael's voice-overs show his unflappability. They are occasionally accompanied by a freeze-frame during a tense situation, and are bits of spy knowledge delivered matter-of-factly. This shows how calm he remains at all times, and his ability to make snap tactical decisions in dire situations. He's also incredibly detached, as he riffs on terrible-smelling preserved fish during a car chase through the market. Even as he's passing out on the plane, he dresses it up as another spy tip, talking about how it's better to collapse in business class.

Michael wakes up in a hotel in with his ex-girlfriend Fi, who was his emergency contact. Fi is an ex-IRA operative who in this episode, lends tactical support, but they will obviously get back together at some point. We also learn that his mother, whom he doesn't get along with, lives in. It's not all that dramatic though; his mother just calls too much, and is a hypochondriac. One of the elements of the pilot is that Michael's not great with relationships. His spy career allows him to constantly run from them, but his current situation forces him to stay in one place for a while and take root. The pilot establishes Michael's relationships and new living situation, along with a standard Burn Notice case, all while dodging surveillance by the FBI.

Michael gets in touch with Lucy, a former colleague who sets him up with a job working with Sam Axe, another former colleague who spends his time drinking and sponging off rich divorcees. A caretaker named Javier is accused of stealing art from his employer Mr. Pyne, and needs help clearing his name. Michael is initially put-off by how little Javier can pay, but he takes the job anyway. By the end of the episode he will discover that he enjoys standing up for the little guy, and along the way, teaches Javier's son how to fight off his bullies.

I said last time that Jeffery Donovan is terrible, and can't pull of a character that's required to adopt a lot of different personas, but it's somewhat effective because it makes the situation even more precarious than it already is. Without funding, Michael often relies on bluffing and improvising, and less on long-term planning. The unconvincing disguises fits right in with all the duct-taped gadgets, as tools that aren't meant to last. When it doesn't work, I'm thinking that Jeffrey Donovan is a bad actor, when it does work, I'm thinking that his character is a bad actor. Evidence to the latter: the part where he's speaking with a male art dealer to track down where the missing paintings went, who ended up thinking that Michael was hitting on him. His British art buyer character was camper than he realized. Evidence to the former: his general awkwardness even when he's not supposed to be in disguise, and how bored he sounds in the voice-overs. So it's really a bit of both.

As he suspected, Michael finds evidence that it was an inside job. Javier's boss intended to frame him and collect on the insurance. He makes a bug by combing a cheap phone with a crappy mic that picks up everything with the battery and circuits of a better phone, and learns that Javier's boss intends to kidnap Javier's son in a desperate bid for leverage. Michael steals a car and rams it into the bodyguard Pyne sent, allowing him to take Javier's son to safety. He then returns to the house, and sets a trap with mirrors and a gun sound effect in preparation for when he returns. For whatever reason, Pyne himself shows up for the second kidnapping, which makes no sense but it's convenient. In the confusion, Pyne shoots his bodyguard in the gut. Michael convinces Pyne to clear Javier's name and give financial support to his family, or Pyne goes to jail for shooting his bodyguard, and plotting a kidnapping.

Will I Watch More - I didn't talk about it much this time, but the MacGyvering and the spy tricks are all quite fun. It's not bad, but I'm not particularly enthused to watch more. It needed something as ridiculous as Louis.