Good timing, what do I tell you? I said last week that Christopher Eccleston’s position in the credits meant more screentime must be coming his way, and now episode 3 is totally Matt-centered. Eccleston is great in his spotlight story.
Since October 14th (the day of the disappearances three years ago,) Matt has been the shepherd of a dwindling flock. An Episcopal priest, his church is struggling. While the disappearances have a lot of people searching for something to believe in, many have turned to the new cults that have sprung up, and a lot of folks in town have it in for Matt over his habit of publicizing the sins of the departed with his “they weren’t all angels” crusade. When Matt finds the church in financial peril, he’s prepared to go to desperate measures to keep it.
I promise, I’m going to try not to keep hearkening back to Lost in these reviews, but they’re not making it easy. Given the heavy emphasis on Matt in this episode (I think he’s in just about every scene, and quite a few members of the cast don’t even make appearances,) I suspect that the first two ensemble episodes are meant to ease us into the concept and the characters before moving into the classic Lost structure of centric episodes (Once Upon a Time, whose showrunners also came directly from Lost, used this as well.) There might not be flashbacks, save for one relatively-short scene, but this episode is all about diving into who Matt is, what he’s about, how he’s suffered, and who he’s connected to. Unfortunately, we’re treated to another hallmark of Lost, with an able-bodied actor playing a paralyzed character. The heavy religious undertones of Matt’s story and the sci-fi-lite premise has me worried that we might be heading toward a “miraculous” recovery that will “necessitate” the inauthentic casting, and I’m not excited about the prospect.
But now, let’s get to Matt/Eccleston. Like I said, we get a lot of information about him here – right from the opening scene, the revelation that he’s a priest made me raise my eyebrows. Some of it answers questions from the tidbits we get of him in earlier episodes, some of it is new, some of it explains a lot, and some of it is pretty wild. There’s also a completely balls-out trippy dream sequence that’s all kinds of out-there; I don’t know if the scene quite accomplishes what it sets out to do, but it certainly catches my attention.
The first two episodes basically give us two scenes with Eccleston, but here, he’s front and center the whole time. And yeah, he’s super good. There’s quite a bit going on with Mat, and not all of it necessarily feels internally consistent, but Eccleston sells the hell out of everything he’s given. You feel Matt’s gentleness mixed with his moments of ruthlessness, his calm mixed with his desperation, his attempt to project wisdom while being riddled with doubt. And as far as the accent is concerned, I can’t tell you whether it’s getting better or I’m getting more acclimated to it, but by the end of the episode, it only felt a little bit off to me.
There are a few scenes I want to shout out as being especially good. Matt has an extended conversation with Nora, and Eccleston and Carrie Coon play really well off of each other, easily laying out the nature of the characters’ relationship in a fairly subtle way. There’s also a really good scene between Matt and Laurie, and Eccleston is just as strong playing off of Amy Brenneman, albeit in a completely different way. Finally, I won’t spoil any details, but Eccleston is just excellent in one particular scene that involves Matt taking an enormous swing in what’s almost a literal hail-mary gambit.
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