Okay, I’ve been enjoying this season, but this episode kicked everything way up a notch. A superb bottle episode that gets a number of secrets out in the open, offers up the show’s usual audacious sensibilities, and lets this excellent cast do what they do best of all (episode premise spoilers.)
Mo, Dawn, Blair, and Keith, along with Yassir, are scooped up by the feds and taken to a black site. It appears that the reason for their detention is to get to the bottom behind the assassination attempts against Blair, but naturally, this group uses the occasion to talk shit about each other and air some dirty laundry.
For much of this season so far, we’ve seen Mo and Dawn, Keith and Tiff, and Blair. Their plots can sometimes overlap and converge, but those are the basic groupings we’ve been seeing. And honestly, it’s all been great. I’m having a great time, relishing the moments when our main characters cross paths but heartily enjoying them in largely-separate plots. But this episode reminds me how fantastic they all are together. The mind games, the accusations, the insults, and the chaos – my god, the chaos! So fantastic. These characters could play off of one another and keep me entertained endlessly. They push each other’s buttons and pick at each other’s flaws so well, and yet there’s also this undercurrent of how all these ruthless, self-serving people with flashes of vulnerability kind of deserve each other. There’s no one else who quite gets them like the other people in this room, and as effed up as they all are, it’s almost like they have more space to be so with one another.
Plenty of stellar comedy. I love Keith’s rambling warning about the rats in the black site – I died laughing at, “[I] pissed off the live ones because I pissed on their fallen comrades.” Yassir’s tidy summation of why this particular group would be low-hanging fruit to a bunch of racist, homophobic feds is both funny and on point, and there are some savage Bill Cosby jokes (when the show made them, I’m sure they couldn’t have guessed what would happen the same week the episode aired.) And how much do I adore Don Cheadle’s line reading of, “I will admit, that motherfucker’s highly murderable”?
It’s a fantastic episode for Andrew Rannells. After Blair’s spiral last week, he’s trying to be more proactive in figuring out who might be trying to kill him, and that has him reexamining old relationships. With his ongoing paranoia, he’s suspicious of everyone, which the others obviously don’t take too kindly to, and the whole situation quickly devolves into everyone going for the jugular against others in the group, not to mention outing other people’s secrets while somewhat ham-fistedly trying to keep their own. Blair has going down a very dark road since the show began, but when it comes to this sort of game, he doesn’t have Mo’s expertise or Dawn’s savvy, and when the swords are drawn, he frequently finds himself with his back to the wall.
And yet. Something that’s really fascinating to me about Blair is that he’s a complex mix of 1) totally in over his head and flailing, 2) presenting a transparent façade of being cool/collected that crumbles at the slightest prodding from Mo, and 3) genuinely steely, with a serious “you don’t know what I’m capable of” vibe. There are times in this episode where he’s just scrambling to stay afloat, but there are others where he holds his own and hits back in a major way. I never quite know how he’s going to respond at any given moment.
I’ve talked plenty of times about Rannells’s skillful navigation between comedy and drama, but he’s just so good. He can switch on a dime, so that you’re still laughing from Blair’s last reaction shot or one-liner when he suddenly does something that makes you go, “Oh, shit – it’s getting real.” With impeccable screen partners like Don Cheadle and Regina Hall, he really gets to flex his acting muscles as he plays off of the amazing energy they give back to him.
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Okay, so I’m not talking about Tony Leung Chiu-wai today, if only because I realize that I’m being a little unfair to everything in the Shang-Chi trailers that’s not related to Wenwu/the Mandarin. But both trailers do honestly have me excited for the movie as a whole. The fight choreographers, collectively, have experience on Into the Badlands and Jackie Chan movies, and the action scenes look positively delicious. That fight between Shang-Chi and Death Dealer? That awesome double-kick on the bus? Michelle Yeoh doing her thing? Yes! The look of the film is gorgeous too – the colors are just eye-catching, and again, everything about the design of the Ten Rings looks amazing. I want to apologize to Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Michelle Yeoh, Destin Daniel Cretton, and everyone involved with the production who’s not Tony Leung Chiu-wai. It might seem like I’m only in this for the Leung of it all, but I’d have been genuinely excited for the movie with or without him. (It just so happens that with him, my excitement is approaching critical mass. No disrespect, but I’ve been a Leung fan longer than I’ve been an MCU fan, and the fan heart wants what it wants!)
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