Justify your best episode
My favorite episode (today, anyway) was K-Town, for a lot of different reasons. I was puzzled at first by the behavior of the denizens of the town. Eventually I came to see it as a kind of lunatic asylum, where those who were relentlessly contrary and contentious in their former lives were sent to argue and throw rocks at once another. There was no rationale for their behavior, because they didn’t need one. And that was sort of Mantrid’s M.O. He wanted to destroy the universe, and he had no sane reason for wanting to do so. Yet he redeemed himself in a way, because when he reversed Kai’s control rods, he must have known Kai might kill him. It was his way to escape, and that’s a perfectly rational thing to do under extreme duress.
It was also the episode with that touching scene between Stan and Xev, when he tells her that she’s “really okay”. He recognizes her disdain for him, but at the same time he realizes he feels affection for her, and she obviously must feel some for him too, since she’s massaging his back, and hugs him and gives him the little peck on the cheek. It’s the beginnings of what Stan said later about them being family.
It also showed growth in Xev’s personality. She was actually able to be affectionate with Stanley without associating it with either sexual desire or repugnance. A lot of people diss Season 3, but I thought the characters of Xev and Stan gained a heck of a lot of development in that season.
I also liked the scene where Kai falls down in the hole with them, but not for the usual reasons. For the first time I saw him as two characters in one. He denies that he can feel pain, and yet on his face, he’s clearly registering pain. It’s almost as if he feels it, but doesn’t *know* he’s feeling it. There’s an external, dead Kai who feels nothing, and there’s an internal, buried Kai who does, almost as if the two personas are unaware of each other. It gives the character more complexity than you would normally associate with a corpse (sort of reminds me now of those conversations between the mortician and the corpses he’s preparing for burial in “Six Feet Under”). But it’s a portrayal that could also explain a lot of living people.
Visually, I found the Planet Fire fascinating and beautiful (but then, I’m a desert girl at heart). When they push Kai off the building, he falls to the ground, then stands up and rolls down the sand dune — it’s basically silent (except for the whistling sound he makes as he falls, and the thump at the end). That scene, and the scene near the end when Xev and Stan are sitting, waiting for Kai to come back to them and they spot a balloon going by, made me feel the overwhelming silence and summer heat of the planet. The way those scenes were done evoked a memory of summer in me, I suppose. And I think a lot of it was because the scenes were so quiet, so low-key, even though there was much drama at the heart of it: will Kai be repaired, will he come back and rescue us from this hell?
Anyhow, that’s my take on it, and I’m sticking to it.
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