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ts_bluejungle2009-11-25 08:27 pm
mab_browne) wrote in ts_bluejungle2009-11-25 08:27 pm
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Episode Discussion - Warriors
This is a crosspost of something I did for TS talk on LJ. I don't see why I couldn't pop something in here too, to fill out a DW comm. :-)
At the Gmail TS chats, the regulars had the bright idea to resume episode summaries and discussion. This has happened before in this comm, with fans dutifully beginning at the beginning of the series, and then running out of enthusiasm or time before getting much past the end of season two. (Check out the calendar archives for this comm around 2006-2007 for previous discussions.) For that reason Snycock and I had the idea for people who want to take turns at writing ep discussions to just pick an episode. This means of course that the fan-favourite eps are going to go first, but is that such a bad thing?
It also means that I'm going to start with 'Warriors', Jen is following up with an ep next week, and then we have to figure out with what system to carry on if other people (who certainly don't have to be chat regulars) are interested in picking up an episode. It goes without saying, surely, that eps will be spoiled in these recaps/discussions.
Comparative old-timers may remember this post on Warriors in my Live Journal from 2007. Yes, I'll be repeating some of it .
Other links
Warriors transcript from Becky's Sentinel Site
Zelempa's not very serious and rather slashy episode recap
Starfox's Warriors Screencaps
I was thinking about the title - Warriors. It covers a fair amount of metaphorical ground over the course of the episode. There's the literal - Incacha and his people are here to fight Yeager and Spalding, and we have the obligatory action climax to the show. There are eco-warrior overtones in the set-up of the episode. Cyclops is illegally drilling for oil and Janet and Blair have spent time together 'chained to redwoods'. And Jim Ellison is of course 'a sentinel in the fight for justice.... in the war against crime', as intoned by Garrett Maggart at the beginning of the episode.
The opening scene in a suspiciously conifered Peruvian forest sets up Incacha and his people, and their nemesis, Cyclops before we move to Jim interrupting a burglary in a mall and accidentally shooting a security guard. Jim has charmingly formal manners when he's flustered. We cut to the loft and Blair meditating to what he calls Australian aborgine music which is supposed to put his 'rhythms in harmony'. Given my eyerolling despair the time that the show mentioned New Zealand's indigenous culture, I will reserve my judgement on the authenticity of this matter. We get brusque Jim, concerned Blair (and a use of Blair's first name) and Jim's anger and concern over a mistake he was led to by his senses, followed by a symbolic and blue-filtered scene of Jim shooting the jaguar.
There's not much to say about the bathroom/toaster scene, as I'm way too distracted by shirtless Jim. However, I am convinced that Jim declares 'once you buy us a new toaster', and I'm trying to figure out if this is my slash-brain running away with me, or Burgi offering additional fanservice. Also, how cute is it that Blair goes out regularly get a paper? Does the USA not have door to door delivery? Or is it just an excuse for a gentle weekend meander on Blair's part?
It's never quite made explicit in this episode that rejecting the senses equals rejecting Blair, but it's fairly clear that it certainly crosses Blair's mind more than once, beginning with the scene in the police station where Jim points out that maybe he doesn't want the senses back. Blair looks fairly worried, and it is made explicit later in the episode that Blair doesn't need to hang around Jim for the dissertation any longer.
Withe discovery of Torren's body we get canon confirmation that Blair has some pyschology knowledge, and that Simon has some understanding that anthropology has its uses. Given Blair's remark in Black and White about being in therapy since being a small child, we're left speculating whether Blair took those papers out of introspective interest or just a broader interest in the workings of humankind in general.
Blair comments 'I'm having a hard time understanding why a Chopec Indian, one of the last primitive people left, is going to up and travel 5,000 miles from a rain forest in Peru and land here in Cascade. ' I'm having a hard time understanding how they did it. Lois Balzer has written a story positing that the Chopec had assistance from some eco-group and I'm entirely in agreement with that concept. Geographically speaking, Peruvian forests tend to be in the inland east of the country, and the coast is westward. The Chopec have to get to a port, get on a ship that's docking in Cascade, and once in Cascade, get off the ship and find their lair of the 'forest in the sky'. They're depicted as pretty Ninja-like in this episode, but you need more than secret Ninja skills to accomplish all those things, especially dressed in kilts and facepaint.
Mitch Yeager immediately screams 'baddie!' to me on the entirely unfair basis of his surface resemblance to Brackett. Luckily, my ridiculous intuition is of course vindicated by later events. Spalding comes across as the weakling he is from the start, and I rather like poor doomed Janet, despite the startling shortness of her skirt. I hope she has a modesty panel on her desk.
Blair is charmingly dorky here - he doesn't get 'a gun or a badge or anything cool like that'. Perhaps it's another example of Blair's hero-worship of 'manly men'. Cops, sentinels, professional athletes. It's interesting how Blair gravitates to these archetypes despite his presumably counter-culture influenced upbringing.
The infamous 'dog that would jump a table-leg' comment pops out of Jim's mouth. Slashy yearning? Competitive male jealousy that everywhere Blair goes he seems to get the women paying attention to him? Annoyance that Blair is acting in a potentially unprofessional manner when on police business? Whatever your preference, Jim is clearly unimpressed. Perhaps his concern about the Chopec connection is weighing on him? Speaking of the Chopec connection, next we see Incacha being overwhelmed by the big city as he tracks down the Cyclop's headquarters and displaying impressive physical prowess. Last time I saw jumps like those, I was watching The Six Million Dollar Man. Or Jim Ellison jumping off a highway overpass onto a booby-trapped bus.
Jim and Blair detect on a map obtained from an Army buddy of Jim's, and Blair tries to convince Jim to reconsider the senses decision. Jim displays his tendency to black and white, either/or thinking when he retorts 'If they [the senses] lead me to one fatal error, none of it has been worth it, you follow?' How did the guy cope with being a soldier, where the possibility of fatal errors are a fact of life? Ditto policing in general. I find myself indulging more back-story speculation.
More of the Chopec. The noble, dignified indigeous leader/shaman is a comparatively common trope in tv and movies, and Pato Hoffman does well with a role where he never gets the chance to speak a word of English. Having said that, what makes me fall in love with this character is that shy, friendly smile as he looks up at Jim from where he's admiring the car. Burgi and Hoffman do really well with what's essentially an expository scene. They both of them very believably express the frustration of two men who are friends and also completely at cross-purposes.
The cute little introductory scene throws several things at us. Blair knows a little bit of Quechua (which may not necessarily be Incacha's own native tongue. Quechua is the language of the mountains and the cities. If the Chopec are a truly primitive and comparatively isolated tribe, they will have their own language, and may have used Quechua as a sort of lingua franca. ) Incacha wants to know if Blair will be Jim's spiritual guide, and Jim seems quite at ease with this as an idea, so presumably Incacha fulfilled something like that function for him in the jungle. We never do find out what Incacha finds so funny. Does Blair inadvertently make a very rude hand gesture? What else has Jim been telling Incacha that we're never privy to?
Following on with the 'how did the Chopec get to Cascade' theories, someone has been seriously misleading the Chopec, or else just don't care about the realities of the Chopec's plans. How on earth would they get Spalding back to Peru? Peru is a continent's length away by boat, ( and the Chopec apparently stowed away to get to Cascade; I believe that Incacha is covering for someone here) never mind unloading him and taking him back to the jungle. Conspiracy theories abound in my brain right about now. Given that Yeager somehow gets hold of a Chopec arrow to murder Janet, I'm left wondering if he hasn't set this up for some Machiavellian reasons of his own. Or else that all that dirty oil money has suborned someone in that eco-group that I imagined earlier. It doesn't do to dwell too much on the plot mechanics of this ep, delicious though it is in the Jim and Blair interaction.
And the interaction is delicious. There are so many significant glances and little character touches in the actors' portrayals of Jim and Blair, and reading the transcripts just can't give the flavour.
Poor Janet makes the fateful phonecall that Yeager overhears. Blair mentions an anti-nuke rally as part of their past. And then we have the Big Conversation in the truck. Blair makes it pretty explicit that no senses equals no anthropologist, something that Jim doesn't seem to have given thought to. This scene is a picture of two men wanting to be reassured as to their place in the other's life and being so busy asking for that reassurance that they don't notice that the other is asking for exactly the same thing. (See the comments attached to my original 2007 post for the source of this deep thought. Thanks, Jane.) Like I thought back then, if this is how they communicate with each other, no wonder TSbyBS happened. Then our guys have more angst on the discovery of Janet's body.
How does the wounded Incacha get to Jim and Blair's apartment? Incacha dies, having passed on the way of the Shaman to Blair, something that the series then forgot about... We have the justly fan-favourite scene with Jim scarily angry and out of control. He knows that crime scene photography and such is required and is still violently opposed, and Blair is up in his face trying to calm or at least distract him. One wonders what the forensic and coroner's staff think about this, and there is at least one decent story out there written from the pov of one of the people gathered there.
Faced with necessity (and a very pushy Blair), Jim makes the attempt to regain his senses, and instead of killing his jaguar, permits it to enter him. Quite what this symbolism says about the famous 'merge' of spirit animals in Sentoo I leave to the preference of the individual fan. So far as my sentimental heart is concerned, the gift that is accepted here with the senses is the guide.
Blair and Jim go to the rescue of the Chopec. I would love to see the headlines in the local news the day after this little escapade. Don't ask me how the Chopec learned to rappel. However, I do like seeing Richard Burgi running in slo-mo. He's athletic and I'm shallow. Blair displays his usual facility with makeshift weaponry. Yeager is ironically bested with a crossbow bolt in his tyre. The bad guys are vanquished and the Chopec vanish, Ninja like, never to be seen again. (Um. Yeah. Sure.) However before they go, they declare Jim officially the sentinel of the great city, which leaves Blair to consider that this must make him the shaman of the great city. Jim seems lukewarm about that concept, and the show never mentions the episode again. Fandom, however, was fascinated.
All opinions are purely my own, your mileage may vary, differing views welcome etc. Comments? Further thought? Talk amongst yourselves. :-)
At the Gmail TS chats, the regulars had the bright idea to resume episode summaries and discussion. This has happened before in this comm, with fans dutifully beginning at the beginning of the series, and then running out of enthusiasm or time before getting much past the end of season two. (Check out the calendar archives for this comm around 2006-2007 for previous discussions.) For that reason Snycock and I had the idea for people who want to take turns at writing ep discussions to just pick an episode. This means of course that the fan-favourite eps are going to go first, but is that such a bad thing?
It also means that I'm going to start with 'Warriors', Jen is following up with an ep next week, and then we have to figure out with what system to carry on if other people (who certainly don't have to be chat regulars) are interested in picking up an episode. It goes without saying, surely, that eps will be spoiled in these recaps/discussions.
Comparative old-timers may remember this post on Warriors in my Live Journal from 2007. Yes, I'll be repeating some of it .
Other links
Warriors transcript from Becky's Sentinel Site
Zelempa's not very serious and rather slashy episode recap
Starfox's Warriors Screencaps
I was thinking about the title - Warriors. It covers a fair amount of metaphorical ground over the course of the episode. There's the literal - Incacha and his people are here to fight Yeager and Spalding, and we have the obligatory action climax to the show. There are eco-warrior overtones in the set-up of the episode. Cyclops is illegally drilling for oil and Janet and Blair have spent time together 'chained to redwoods'. And Jim Ellison is of course 'a sentinel in the fight for justice.... in the war against crime', as intoned by Garrett Maggart at the beginning of the episode.
The opening scene in a suspiciously conifered Peruvian forest sets up Incacha and his people, and their nemesis, Cyclops before we move to Jim interrupting a burglary in a mall and accidentally shooting a security guard. Jim has charmingly formal manners when he's flustered. We cut to the loft and Blair meditating to what he calls Australian aborgine music which is supposed to put his 'rhythms in harmony'. Given my eyerolling despair the time that the show mentioned New Zealand's indigenous culture, I will reserve my judgement on the authenticity of this matter. We get brusque Jim, concerned Blair (and a use of Blair's first name) and Jim's anger and concern over a mistake he was led to by his senses, followed by a symbolic and blue-filtered scene of Jim shooting the jaguar.
There's not much to say about the bathroom/toaster scene, as I'm way too distracted by shirtless Jim. However, I am convinced that Jim declares 'once you buy us a new toaster', and I'm trying to figure out if this is my slash-brain running away with me, or Burgi offering additional fanservice. Also, how cute is it that Blair goes out regularly get a paper? Does the USA not have door to door delivery? Or is it just an excuse for a gentle weekend meander on Blair's part?
It's never quite made explicit in this episode that rejecting the senses equals rejecting Blair, but it's fairly clear that it certainly crosses Blair's mind more than once, beginning with the scene in the police station where Jim points out that maybe he doesn't want the senses back. Blair looks fairly worried, and it is made explicit later in the episode that Blair doesn't need to hang around Jim for the dissertation any longer.
Withe discovery of Torren's body we get canon confirmation that Blair has some pyschology knowledge, and that Simon has some understanding that anthropology has its uses. Given Blair's remark in Black and White about being in therapy since being a small child, we're left speculating whether Blair took those papers out of introspective interest or just a broader interest in the workings of humankind in general.
Blair comments 'I'm having a hard time understanding why a Chopec Indian, one of the last primitive people left, is going to up and travel 5,000 miles from a rain forest in Peru and land here in Cascade. ' I'm having a hard time understanding how they did it. Lois Balzer has written a story positing that the Chopec had assistance from some eco-group and I'm entirely in agreement with that concept. Geographically speaking, Peruvian forests tend to be in the inland east of the country, and the coast is westward. The Chopec have to get to a port, get on a ship that's docking in Cascade, and once in Cascade, get off the ship and find their lair of the 'forest in the sky'. They're depicted as pretty Ninja-like in this episode, but you need more than secret Ninja skills to accomplish all those things, especially dressed in kilts and facepaint.
Mitch Yeager immediately screams 'baddie!' to me on the entirely unfair basis of his surface resemblance to Brackett. Luckily, my ridiculous intuition is of course vindicated by later events. Spalding comes across as the weakling he is from the start, and I rather like poor doomed Janet, despite the startling shortness of her skirt. I hope she has a modesty panel on her desk.
Blair is charmingly dorky here - he doesn't get 'a gun or a badge or anything cool like that'. Perhaps it's another example of Blair's hero-worship of 'manly men'. Cops, sentinels, professional athletes. It's interesting how Blair gravitates to these archetypes despite his presumably counter-culture influenced upbringing.
The infamous 'dog that would jump a table-leg' comment pops out of Jim's mouth. Slashy yearning? Competitive male jealousy that everywhere Blair goes he seems to get the women paying attention to him? Annoyance that Blair is acting in a potentially unprofessional manner when on police business? Whatever your preference, Jim is clearly unimpressed. Perhaps his concern about the Chopec connection is weighing on him? Speaking of the Chopec connection, next we see Incacha being overwhelmed by the big city as he tracks down the Cyclop's headquarters and displaying impressive physical prowess. Last time I saw jumps like those, I was watching The Six Million Dollar Man. Or Jim Ellison jumping off a highway overpass onto a booby-trapped bus.
Jim and Blair detect on a map obtained from an Army buddy of Jim's, and Blair tries to convince Jim to reconsider the senses decision. Jim displays his tendency to black and white, either/or thinking when he retorts 'If they [the senses] lead me to one fatal error, none of it has been worth it, you follow?' How did the guy cope with being a soldier, where the possibility of fatal errors are a fact of life? Ditto policing in general. I find myself indulging more back-story speculation.
More of the Chopec. The noble, dignified indigeous leader/shaman is a comparatively common trope in tv and movies, and Pato Hoffman does well with a role where he never gets the chance to speak a word of English. Having said that, what makes me fall in love with this character is that shy, friendly smile as he looks up at Jim from where he's admiring the car. Burgi and Hoffman do really well with what's essentially an expository scene. They both of them very believably express the frustration of two men who are friends and also completely at cross-purposes.
The cute little introductory scene throws several things at us. Blair knows a little bit of Quechua (which may not necessarily be Incacha's own native tongue. Quechua is the language of the mountains and the cities. If the Chopec are a truly primitive and comparatively isolated tribe, they will have their own language, and may have used Quechua as a sort of lingua franca. ) Incacha wants to know if Blair will be Jim's spiritual guide, and Jim seems quite at ease with this as an idea, so presumably Incacha fulfilled something like that function for him in the jungle. We never do find out what Incacha finds so funny. Does Blair inadvertently make a very rude hand gesture? What else has Jim been telling Incacha that we're never privy to?
Following on with the 'how did the Chopec get to Cascade' theories, someone has been seriously misleading the Chopec, or else just don't care about the realities of the Chopec's plans. How on earth would they get Spalding back to Peru? Peru is a continent's length away by boat, ( and the Chopec apparently stowed away to get to Cascade; I believe that Incacha is covering for someone here) never mind unloading him and taking him back to the jungle. Conspiracy theories abound in my brain right about now. Given that Yeager somehow gets hold of a Chopec arrow to murder Janet, I'm left wondering if he hasn't set this up for some Machiavellian reasons of his own. Or else that all that dirty oil money has suborned someone in that eco-group that I imagined earlier. It doesn't do to dwell too much on the plot mechanics of this ep, delicious though it is in the Jim and Blair interaction.
And the interaction is delicious. There are so many significant glances and little character touches in the actors' portrayals of Jim and Blair, and reading the transcripts just can't give the flavour.
Poor Janet makes the fateful phonecall that Yeager overhears. Blair mentions an anti-nuke rally as part of their past. And then we have the Big Conversation in the truck. Blair makes it pretty explicit that no senses equals no anthropologist, something that Jim doesn't seem to have given thought to. This scene is a picture of two men wanting to be reassured as to their place in the other's life and being so busy asking for that reassurance that they don't notice that the other is asking for exactly the same thing. (See the comments attached to my original 2007 post for the source of this deep thought. Thanks, Jane.) Like I thought back then, if this is how they communicate with each other, no wonder TSbyBS happened. Then our guys have more angst on the discovery of Janet's body.
How does the wounded Incacha get to Jim and Blair's apartment? Incacha dies, having passed on the way of the Shaman to Blair, something that the series then forgot about... We have the justly fan-favourite scene with Jim scarily angry and out of control. He knows that crime scene photography and such is required and is still violently opposed, and Blair is up in his face trying to calm or at least distract him. One wonders what the forensic and coroner's staff think about this, and there is at least one decent story out there written from the pov of one of the people gathered there.
Faced with necessity (and a very pushy Blair), Jim makes the attempt to regain his senses, and instead of killing his jaguar, permits it to enter him. Quite what this symbolism says about the famous 'merge' of spirit animals in Sentoo I leave to the preference of the individual fan. So far as my sentimental heart is concerned, the gift that is accepted here with the senses is the guide.
Blair and Jim go to the rescue of the Chopec. I would love to see the headlines in the local news the day after this little escapade. Don't ask me how the Chopec learned to rappel. However, I do like seeing Richard Burgi running in slo-mo. He's athletic and I'm shallow. Blair displays his usual facility with makeshift weaponry. Yeager is ironically bested with a crossbow bolt in his tyre. The bad guys are vanquished and the Chopec vanish, Ninja like, never to be seen again. (Um. Yeah. Sure.) However before they go, they declare Jim officially the sentinel of the great city, which leaves Blair to consider that this must make him the shaman of the great city. Jim seems lukewarm about that concept, and the show never mentions the episode again. Fandom, however, was fascinated.
All opinions are purely my own, your mileage may vary, differing views welcome etc. Comments? Further thought? Talk amongst yourselves. :-)