Damages Season 2
Dec. 8th, 2010 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficNot as well-done as the first season. It's not bad, by any means, it's just a letdown coming on the heels of such a well-thought-out television story. I'm always of the opinion that when something is good, you should see it for yourself rather than see someone gush about it, but when it's bad, you wanna hear about it. So let's run this down.
Okay, the Ellen working for the FBI plot, that worked for me. I think it got the lion's share of attention in the writing room, rightfully so, and it came off well until the very end, where they didn't nail the landing. Why? Well, the season starts off similarly to the first season, in media res, then flashing back to show us how everyone got to where they were. In this case, with Ellen talking with and then shooting someone. The first episode shows us that Ellen can't kill even Arthur Frohbisher, the man responsible for her fiance's death, so the dramatic question the series is asking becomes... what could it be that drives Ellen to kill someone? Given that Patty tried to kill Ellen in the first season and Patty = Ellen, this is a pretty good question.
Then they up the ante. It's Patty that Ellen's shooting, and they even show us her staggering away, bleeding. Not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story, Ellen is going to shoot Patty. Anything else would be ridiculous, right? Right. So the finale rolls around and not only does Ellen just shoot a transmitter the FBI was using to listen in, BUUUUUUUT Patty had been stabbed before her meeting by a roving sub-plot and THAT'S why she was bleeding. Bullshit, Damages. Bull. Shit. There's a difference between tricking the audience and scamming the audience, and it's having a character go through a meeting after she's been stabbed just so it can look like she was shot.
Another letdown is the villain. Frohbisher was like a revelation. Unambiguously evil, yet he's so entitled that he thinks he's the victim. You can really believe there are people like that out there. So when it came time to top him, TPTB decide to go with a Big Bad who is an out and out megalomaniac. He's introduced punching out someone who made fun of him at a comedy roast, for Christ's sake. I get what they're going for, someone who is actually competent and ruthless as opposed to Frohbisher, but Walter Kendrick just ends up being boring and you don't really care if Patty brings him down. So what? He's just another corporate fat cat. It doesn't help that he has his own overly creepy henchman on the payroll (in the Damages universe, does every Fortune 500 CEO have a personal hitman?), but unlike the genuinely creepy Beard Guy, this guy looks like Darrell Hammond, so you always get the feeling you're not so much watching Damages as an SNL sketch spoofing Damages.
Thirdly, a lot of the season revolves around Daniel Purcell, a whistle-blower who is being framed for murdering his wife (OR IS HE? In another hacky narrative contrivance, it turns out he did, but she was only mostly dead, so Darrell Hammond killed her all the way... possible with a Bill Clinton impression). He's also Patty Hewes' baby daddy and played by star actor William Hurt... who makes the very odd choice to play every scene as if he's just taken a Valium or five. I'm not a connoisseur of acting or anything... you can probably tell by me being a Megan Fox fan... but when a character is framed as being the lost love of PATTY HEWES, and someone who is married to an intelligent woman and also having an affair with Nega Patty Hewes, you expect him to be charismatic, or passionate, or brilliant. But Purcell is so dull, so grim, so humorless, I legitimately thought he would either turn out to have a social disorder of some sort or be a Scans_Daily mod.
Another thing is they bring in Timothy Olyphant as Ellen's new love interest, a hitman (the reveal for this, showing Olyphant unlocking a cabinet full of guns, goes with a wailing guitar solo. I don't think that was part of the soundtrack, I think the universe realized this was so awesome it just had to shred). And they did not give him a lot to work with. I mean, c'mon, a guy who is being forced by the villain into pretending he's in love but then falls in love for real? Not even Raylan Givens can pull that off.
It's good that they tried to do something different from the first season, but in juggling so many storylines (seriously, take a shot every time a character reveals that they have a hidden agenda. Take two if it's revealed by an ominous phone call) they end up promising a narrative payoff that they just can't deliver. It's like the first season, only with six Leila subplots instead of one.
P.S. About the gender politics... I have thoughts about what would happen if you switched the genders of the cast. Obviously, it'd be unusual to have a cast with that many female characters, but let's think about it. Tom Shayes is a schlub, Patty's husband is a cheater, her son is a brat, Purcell is a wife-beater, the villains are villains, Timothy Olyphant is a femme fatale... to find a real "good guy," you'd have to go with either a minor character like Mario van Peebles (who is killed) or... David, Ellen's martyred fiance whose death motivates her while providing her with dramatic anguish. Even in the first season, he was in the refrigerator... we knew he was going to die and that compelled the plot.
This isn't a criticism, just something that interested me.
Okay, the Ellen working for the FBI plot, that worked for me. I think it got the lion's share of attention in the writing room, rightfully so, and it came off well until the very end, where they didn't nail the landing. Why? Well, the season starts off similarly to the first season, in media res, then flashing back to show us how everyone got to where they were. In this case, with Ellen talking with and then shooting someone. The first episode shows us that Ellen can't kill even Arthur Frohbisher, the man responsible for her fiance's death, so the dramatic question the series is asking becomes... what could it be that drives Ellen to kill someone? Given that Patty tried to kill Ellen in the first season and Patty = Ellen, this is a pretty good question.
Then they up the ante. It's Patty that Ellen's shooting, and they even show us her staggering away, bleeding. Not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story, Ellen is going to shoot Patty. Anything else would be ridiculous, right? Right. So the finale rolls around and not only does Ellen just shoot a transmitter the FBI was using to listen in, BUUUUUUUT Patty had been stabbed before her meeting by a roving sub-plot and THAT'S why she was bleeding. Bullshit, Damages. Bull. Shit. There's a difference between tricking the audience and scamming the audience, and it's having a character go through a meeting after she's been stabbed just so it can look like she was shot.
Another letdown is the villain. Frohbisher was like a revelation. Unambiguously evil, yet he's so entitled that he thinks he's the victim. You can really believe there are people like that out there. So when it came time to top him, TPTB decide to go with a Big Bad who is an out and out megalomaniac. He's introduced punching out someone who made fun of him at a comedy roast, for Christ's sake. I get what they're going for, someone who is actually competent and ruthless as opposed to Frohbisher, but Walter Kendrick just ends up being boring and you don't really care if Patty brings him down. So what? He's just another corporate fat cat. It doesn't help that he has his own overly creepy henchman on the payroll (in the Damages universe, does every Fortune 500 CEO have a personal hitman?), but unlike the genuinely creepy Beard Guy, this guy looks like Darrell Hammond, so you always get the feeling you're not so much watching Damages as an SNL sketch spoofing Damages.
Thirdly, a lot of the season revolves around Daniel Purcell, a whistle-blower who is being framed for murdering his wife (OR IS HE? In another hacky narrative contrivance, it turns out he did, but she was only mostly dead, so Darrell Hammond killed her all the way... possible with a Bill Clinton impression). He's also Patty Hewes' baby daddy and played by star actor William Hurt... who makes the very odd choice to play every scene as if he's just taken a Valium or five. I'm not a connoisseur of acting or anything... you can probably tell by me being a Megan Fox fan... but when a character is framed as being the lost love of PATTY HEWES, and someone who is married to an intelligent woman and also having an affair with Nega Patty Hewes, you expect him to be charismatic, or passionate, or brilliant. But Purcell is so dull, so grim, so humorless, I legitimately thought he would either turn out to have a social disorder of some sort or be a Scans_Daily mod.
Another thing is they bring in Timothy Olyphant as Ellen's new love interest, a hitman (the reveal for this, showing Olyphant unlocking a cabinet full of guns, goes with a wailing guitar solo. I don't think that was part of the soundtrack, I think the universe realized this was so awesome it just had to shred). And they did not give him a lot to work with. I mean, c'mon, a guy who is being forced by the villain into pretending he's in love but then falls in love for real? Not even Raylan Givens can pull that off.
It's good that they tried to do something different from the first season, but in juggling so many storylines (seriously, take a shot every time a character reveals that they have a hidden agenda. Take two if it's revealed by an ominous phone call) they end up promising a narrative payoff that they just can't deliver. It's like the first season, only with six Leila subplots instead of one.
P.S. About the gender politics... I have thoughts about what would happen if you switched the genders of the cast. Obviously, it'd be unusual to have a cast with that many female characters, but let's think about it. Tom Shayes is a schlub, Patty's husband is a cheater, her son is a brat, Purcell is a wife-beater, the villains are villains, Timothy Olyphant is a femme fatale... to find a real "good guy," you'd have to go with either a minor character like Mario van Peebles (who is killed) or... David, Ellen's martyred fiance whose death motivates her while providing her with dramatic anguish. Even in the first season, he was in the refrigerator... we knew he was going to die and that compelled the plot.
This isn't a criticism, just something that interested me.
