The Book of Rannells: Girls: Season 2, Episode 1 – “It’s About Time” (2013)

If I follow air dates on IMDb, season 2 of Girls should technically come later, after The New Normal – while the The New Normal premiered in the fall of 2012, Girls’s second season didn’t start airing until 2013.  That’s the easiest way to order my Andrew Rannells reviews, but in this instance, I’ll make an exception because I know Rannells filmed these before The New Normal.  If you look at his episodes on Girls around this time – the start of season 2 followed by the last half of season 3 – the New-Normal-shaped gap in the middle is pretty noticeable.  So, off we go with more Girls!

(Note:  in these reviews, I try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but as I go through all six seasons of Girls, it’s not going to be feasible to talk about the episodes while simultaneously talking around the various relationship shake-ups.  So, take this as your official warning.  Who’s dating who will be considered fair game in these reviews, so while I won’t necessarily lead with “OMG, X & Y broke up!!!”, parts of those plots will be evident in my write-ups.)

Season 2 opens with establishing the new status quo.  Hannah has a new squeeze that she’s deliberately keeping at arm’s length to avoid another Adam situation, but she’s not exactly keeping Adam at arm’s length – he’s laid up in his apartment with a broken leg, and Hannah has been looking after him.  After Marnie moved out of Hannah’s apartment last season, Elijah moved in, and he and Hannah thoroughly enjoy the honeymoon phase of their new roomies/besties relationship as they prepare to throw their first party together.  If you’ve been paying attention, you know that parties on Girls are prime places for drama, and all kinds of relationship craziness goes down.

A solid season opener, in my opinion.  The Hannah/Adam stuff is messed up, as it always is, and I feel for Hannah trying to assert some distance even as she feels stuck.  Unfortunately, it does minimize time with Sandy, the new guy Hannah’s seeing, played by none other than Donald Glover!  Before I started watching Girls, I’d heard that Glover had been a guest star and was excited when I saw him, but this episode definitely under-uses him.

For other developments, I’m officially all about Shoshanna, and her being hilarious and endearingly odd is the main reason I’m coming around to Ray, who entered the friend group as a buddy of Charlie, Marnie’s ex, but who now maintains his connection to the circle largely through the little thing he and Shoshanna have going on.  I love the scene of Shoshanna angrily searching through a stack of purses for her own while Ray awkwardly tries to talk about his feelings.

But for real, Elijah is just awesome here.  I like everything about his weirdly-compatible friendship with Hannah.  Whether they’re spooning in bed (“I’m sorry I have a boner – it’s not for you”) or discussing potential themes for future parties (Elijah’s argument in favor of a French salon night:  “I was watching Midnight in Paris, and I thought, I could do that,”) they’re just a blast together, and I find that I almost always enjoy Hannah best when she has Elijah to bounce off of.

We also get a little more of Elijah outside of Hannah, which is good – it helps keep him from simply being her gay BFF.  He’s anxious to bring George, his older rich boyfriend, to the party to meet his friends, but when George gets drunk and embarrasses Elijah, it results in a bit of a meltdown for Elijah.  I really love when, later on, he admits to Marnie that he’s not sure if he could leave George because George pays for everything, that he didn’t mean for it to happen but now he doesn’t know what to do.  I feel like the idea of a “kept woman/man” is often framed as someone who seeks out a rich partner for the perks, or maybe someone with no ambitions of their own just latching themselves onto a wealthy meal ticket.  Not that I think Elijah is particularly ambitious, but he didn’t set out to get himself a sugar daddy, and I like seeing how unsure he feels about it.  This leads into other uncertainty/ill-advised actions on his behalf, the latter of which are inevitably going to come back to bite him.

Countdown to Thirteen: White Wedding (2009, PG-13)

This South African rom-com is pretty fun.  I’ve seen/read enough of Trevor Noah’s stuff to recognize some of the particular South African cultural aspects of it, but really, it’s wedding mishaps meets disastrous road trip, all in an engaging package.

It’s the week of Elvis and Ayanda’s wedding, and Elvis is on the other side of the country.  He and his best friend/best man Tumi think they have plenty of time to make the 1000-mile cross-country drive, but as you can imagine, one thing leads to another and they keep meeting various roadblocks, both literal and metaphorical; things get even more complicated when they pick up a jilted would-be bride on the road.  Meanwhile, Elvis’s fiancée Ayanda is left to handle all the preparations in Cape Town on her own, dealing with a demanding wedding planner and a mother who refuses to accept that her daughter wants a “white wedding” (i.e. a fancy ceremony in the city) instead of an everyone’s-invited blowout in the township.

It’s pretty much everything you’d expect from a wedding comedy:  arguments over the guest list, the wedding dress in peril, an ex conveniently hanging around, last-minute crises, and just enough misunderstanding to make the future bride and groom doubt one another’s commitment.  That said, it also involves a live goat as a wedding present, so it still keeps you on your toes.

Similarly, the characters are familiar archetypes but are still entertaining.  Ayanda is very put-together, holding up masterfully under the ludicrous stress she’s forced to endure, and there are definitely times you wonder why she’s with Elvis, who seems like a decent enough guy but not an obvious choice for her.  (At the same time, though, I appreciate that Tony, the ex of hers that’s sniffing around, is neither a blatant bad guy or presented as the clear “right” guy for her.)  Elvis’s friend Tumi is enjoyable, the typical funny best friend with bad judgment who keeps getting the more straitlaced protagonist in trouble.

Jodie Whittaker plays Rose, a young woman who came to visit a friend in South Africa after her engagement fell apart.  A surprise subsequent falling-out with that friend leaves her with her own cross-country trip to Cape Town, where she needs to be in a few days in order to make her flight back home.  Along the way, she crosses paths with Elvis and Tumi, and after first sneaking into their car at a gas station, she cajoles them into giving her a lift.

Before I go any further, I don’t care how depressed, desperate, and/or naïve Rose is – who on earth tries to hide in a stranger’s car?  It’s just blindingly dumb, and the only reason I don’t hold it too much against Rose as a character is because it simply does not seem like a thing any rational human being would do, so that makes it a writing problem.  For the life of me, I don’t know why they didn’t have her corner the guys at the gas station and beg them to take her with them. 

Other than that, however, I mostly like Rose.  Her present circumstances have made her rather self-absorbed regarding her problems, and she’s certainly painted as an inexperienced tourist who doesn’t really know what’s what, but it’s largely done in a humorous manner and seems to fit her character for the most part.  I especially enjoy her bonding with the aforementioned wedding-present goat Elvis and Tumi acquire halfway through the road trip.

Accent Watch

Northern.

Recommend?

In General – I think so, for anyone who likes romantic comedies.  This is a fairly fun one.

Jodie Whittaker – Again, I think so.  Rose isn’t the most complicated character out there, but she’s entertaining to watch, and it’s a good-sized role.

Warnings

Sexual content, language (including South African racial slurs,) drinking/smoking, some violence, and thematic elements.

Relationship Spotlight: Luke & Sarah Jane Smith (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

I think plenty of people are suckers for a good “it’s the family you choose” narrative, and in this case, the chosen family is very literal.  Sarah Jane Smith and her adopted made-by-aliens son provide a lot of heart for The Sarah Jane Adventures, especially in its first season as both muddle along together, figuring out how to be a family (a few Sarah Jane-Luke spoilers.)

Sarah Jane’s appearance on new Who in “School Reunion,” prior to The Sarah Jane Adventures starting up, shows us one important aspect of her post-companion life that carries over into her own series:  she’s maintained her spirits of adventure, curiosity, and justice, investigating and combatting minor alien threats on Earth after parting with the Doctor.  However, it shows us a more unhappy aspect as well – since her time with the Doctor, she’s been largely isolated, fighting the fight with only Mr. Smith and K9 for company.  The first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures, in large part, is about her journey to letting non-mechanized/computerized people into her life again, learning not to resist the friendship offered by her new young acquaintances and allowing them a window into her adventures.  Naturally, Luke is instrumental to this plot.

While Sarah Jane has intentionally isolated herself because she doesn’t know how to relate to people after her incredible experiences with the Doctor, Luke awakens to the world fully formed and completely alone.  A human boy grown by the Bane in order to study humans for the purposes of perfecting their invasion, Luke is a science experiment, never intended to live in his own right.  When a freak situation in the lab brings him into consciousness, however, he comes into life with no experiences but ready to absorb everything like a brainy sponge.  Language, mathematics, and facts come easily enough for him, but social interactions are an ongoing struggle.  That said, if he doesn’t understand at first how humans interact, it in no way lessens his desire to do so.  When their initial adventure is over and the Bane have been defeated, Sarah Jane is the warier of the two about the prospect of her adopting him.

But as I said, Luke and Sarah Jane’s early relationship is about learning together how to be a family, and the two quickly begin puzzling out what works for them.  There are growing pains on both sides – Sarah Jane not wanting Luke to call her “Mum,” Luke distressing over the ways he’s different from other children, trial and error over the best means of giving Luke a normal human life – but it’s also clear that the affection is there pretty much from the start.  Even as both make mistakes and are unsure what to do, both of them want to make the effort to get there and they find their way together, accepting that it’s okay for each to admit these uncertainties to the other.  In this way, their relationship grows by leaps and bounds.

On this sci-fi show featuring a kid who was grown by aliens, it’s actually a really nice story about adoption.  Because, despite how Luke came into the world, and even though we only see a few seasons of them becoming and being a family, they love each other absolutely, and there’s no doubt that they’re family through and through.  These two are one another’s biggest fans and would do anything for each other.  While you can never really forget that Luke isn’t exactly a standard-issue human, you could easily forget that Sarah Jane has only been his mom for a few years.