Not as Big as God

Dear Kathryn,

In the past few weeks, we’ve complained some about the heavy handed ways the show is unpacking its religious symbols. Between my own scrambling to remember the various scenes from Revelation and Quinn’s hilarious, drunken, bemused confusion at a student plagiarizing C.S. Lewis (“Who!?” his eyes bluffed), I began to wonder something: have we actually been somewhat unfair in thinking a general populace should be able to recognize these symbols? If the show wants to play with religious imagery, do we live in a culture that can actually recognize that imagery anymore? I’m not quite sure we do.

Here it is…

The Walking Dead, Season 2, Episode 3, “Save the Last One”

“You gotta make it ok somehow…no matter what happens.”

–Maggie

Hello friends,

As you can see from my title, the first thing I was inspired to do after watching this episode was to listen to Leonard Cohen’s “Here it is” as I began to write. It just seems appropriate. I was especially impressed by how this episode brought together everything we’ve seen thus far–not only in this season, but also the last. I thought the last season started great and then sort of dovetailed into (what I took to be) irrelevancy. But with this episode and with the touching and yet deeply disturbing focus on the problem of evil, I feel like the two seasons have an amazing continuity, with past actions easily fitting into an organic (or better, with this episode in mind: living) whole. The theme that unites everything in the show thus far seems to be the question of the relationship between life and evil, especially how the existence of something like radical evil affects the sorts of reasons we might give for choosing life.

One Down, Five to Go…

Hi friends,

Well I guess we were dead on last week when we said the zombies were serving simply as a back-drop! Until the final, terrifying moments, they all but disappeared from the story. And indeed, its “story” – or, story structure – that intrigued me most this week. How do you tell a story, and how is The Walking Dead going to tell its?

Believe me

Dear Natalie,

I’m really liking this season of Dexter! Somehow the pace of the episodes seems a bit slower, but in a good way. I feel like we get more time to watch Dex and other characters develop instead of just racing through multiple interwoven plots. That is not to say that there isn’t plenty of action. Last night’s episode was pretty packed. We start with a baptismal scene. As Brother Sam later tells Dexter, the ritual really isn’t about the dunking in water or even about the belief in a brand new start. It is about surrender. Surrender to something greater than yourself. This becomes a theme of the episode – what do our characters believe in? What are they willing to surrender themselves to?

Everybody Lives

The Moth Chase welcomes a new friend to our conversations, Michael, to respond to Travis’ previous post on Dr. Who – click here see Travis’ original post.

Hi, Travis,

I’m sorry it’s taken me a while to reply, but you’ve given me a lot to think about. Like you, having grown up in the United States my childhood was deprived of Doctor Who. I first encountered him while in graduate school in New York City, when PBS affiliate WNED was broadcasting some of the 1960s episodes. I think my first Doctor was the fourth (played by Tom Baker), and I’m pretty sure that he and his companion were being threatened by Daleks. It’s a safe guess, anyway. That was about twenty years before the series reboot, which, unlike you, I watched from the beginning. Perhaps it was more accessible from the start here in Canada, being broadcast (at least initially) on CBC. In any case, being a sci-fi geek longing for good sci-fi on TV (to my everlasting shame, I entirely missed the reboot of Battlestar Galactica), and knowing a bit about the Doctor from my first encounter and from a few other bits of information I’d picked up over the years,

Strange Fruit

“That was tactical, this is criminal.”

— Eli Roosevelt

Episode 6: With an X
Episode 7: Fruit for the Crows

Hey Travis,

What an in-your-face couplet of episodes. We see the plot “thickening,” so to speak. I was particularly impressed by the sorts of moral ambiguity that was brought out of Roosevelt’s character. You could really see that he struggled with being used by Linc. I think it will be interesting to see how the Roosevelt-Linc relationship pans out when/if Juice commits suicide. (The sounds at the end of the last episode made it seem as if his suicide attempt was unsuccessful).

The Walking Dead – Season 2 Premier

The Moth Chase is covering Season 2 of The Walking Dead in a new group format. Instead of two writers, five of us – Kathryn, Natalie, Travis and Martin, and a new guest blogger, Shelly – will be blogging our way through the series together. Each week one of us will start with a somewhat longer post and then as many of the others as want to will jump in with shorter responses. We hope to keep the conversation going throughout the week, so check back often for new responses or subscribe to the blog to get notifications. And of course feel free to jump in with your own comments and reactions.

Well The Walking Dead is back with a bang – quite literally by the end of the premier. My husband didn’t watch season 1 and was a bit skeptical about getting dragged into another supernatural thriller with me. I kept objecting that this show wasn’t really about zombies; they are mostly a back-drop, I argued. A pretty freaking terrifying, active, in your face backdrop, I should have added, since last night was terrifyingly zombie-full. My husband was not impressed with my nonchalance when I was burying my head into my pillow a mere five minutes in.

Nothing is in order anymore

Dear Natalie,

This was one of those weeks on Dexter where I felt like I could have been surfing the internet while I watched. I like these episodes – a little slow, mostly about the characters small developments, relationships, etc. – but they don’t really grab me. My favorite part was probably watching Deb try to figure out what it meant to wield her new power. We’ve heard rumors that LaGuerta was a good cop before she took a desk job and got embroiled in politics, but we never got to see that transition. I think it could be fun to watch Deb figure out if being Lieutenant really is just about putting a blazer on over her old clothes. Her show down with Mike Anderson made it clear that Deb’s straight-talking, take-no-prisoners style will survive the transition and might just be what saves her.

Can I get a witness?

Dear Natalie,

Dexter’s journey to understand religious faith continues with a new potential guide in the earnest face of Mos Def as Brother Sam. Throughout all six seasons Dexter has been asking the question “can humans change?” And then even more importantly for him, “can monsters change?” Last season he began to think that perhaps love – genuine understanding, vulnerability and transparency with Lumen – could change him, or was itself proof that he was more than the monster he had been raised to think he was. With Trinity, he wondered if family bonds could temper monstrous impulses. In both cases he came back to his rather fatalistic conclusion – once a monster, always a monster. Though in both cases, he also accepted that he was capable of more than he had ever imagined and that he could in fact accept love and family in his own terms as part of his life.

Time can be rewritten: reflecting on Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who

Michael,

I’m pretty new to Doctor Who; I jumped on board with the well-publicized “soft reboot” of the 11th Doctor and the fifth season (sorry, “series”). Like many an American viewer, I initially found the campy style and entry-level effects a bit off-putting (my wife never made it back), but I was struck right away by three things. First was frenetic, explosive energy of the story and Matt Smith’s acting, which was matched by the irresistible chemistry of Smith and Karen Gillan, and the out-of-the-gate mythos that “The 11th Hour” gave Amy Pond. But more than anything, I was struck by the awareness that here was an entirely different kind of hero: unabashedly intellectual, deeply eccentric (not, God help us, “quirky,” but really and genuinely…alien), and most of all, totally unrelatable. I mean that, not in the sense that Matt Smith’s Doctor isn’t sympathetic, because Smith is a profoundly good actor whose emotional register can turn on a dime; but rather, that “Who” is premised on the idea that the Doctor is not like us – which of course is the reason the Doctor always has a companion (or two), to provide that place of both identification and disorientation that allows us to be swept off our feet by the adventures of the man from Gallifrey.