Favorite Characters: George Lass (Dead Like Me)

It’s time for another Bryan Fuller creation, which means it’s time for another wonderful mess.  George was Fuller’s first protagonist, but she would be special even without that distinction.  From the opening scene of Dead Like Me, she captures my attention with her deadpan pourquoi narrative, and like so many characters in that show, she keeps me invested in the later episodes when the series loses its way a little.

George is our eyes into Dead Like Me, the voice of this macabre tale that’s an arresting mix of black comedy and surprisingly honest emotion.  Our first look at her is of a scowly, disconnected teen who’s not sure where she fits into this whole growing-up business.  She chafes against her mother’s particularly involved parenting, but at the same time, she’s hesitant about venturing into the adult world of nine-to-five grinds.  She doesn’t know what she wants or what her life is heading towards, but all those decisions are made for her pretty decisively when she’s killed by a stray pieces of falling space junk (a toilet seat.)

Her life is over, but her afterlife is just beginning – seemingly at random, she’s been selected to become a grim reaper who takes souls from the soon-to-be-no-longer-living.  The sullen girl who shirks responsibility and doesn’t like to make decisions now literally holds life and death in her hands, and it’s no surprise that she’s terrible at it at first.  Some of it is the steep learning curve, of course, the difficulty of identifying her mark from the scant information she’s given or the trick of finding an excuse to get close enough to reap the soul, but much of it is her own stubbornness and refusal to fall in line.  Early in the first season, she tries to buck the system at every turn, because she simply can’t face the towering duty of the horribly unpleasant job she’s been tasked with for who-knows-how-long.

She does this for a lot of reasons.  She’s a surly brat who doesn’t like being told what to do.  She’s an overwhelmed kid who’s unused to having any genuine weight on her shoulders.  She’s a scared girl who thinks taking someone’s soul is the same as killing them, and she can’t bear it.  She’s a young dead woman who regrets that she didn’t do anything with her life when she had it.  These and other motivations swirl through her actions, and even as I gape at her selfishness, her lies, and her attempts to cheat death, I appreciate the complicated baggage that informs them.

And just as importantly, George grows.  She never loses her attitude or her distaste for authority, but she matures tremendously over the course of the series.  She realizes she needs to take her calling seriously, learning to reap like a pro and respecting the final moments of the living.  She matures as a woman as well, which is an even more impressive feat, since she’s not actually alive.  However, her day job – grim-reaping is strictly gratis – provides ample opportunity to stretch her wings.  I like watching her struggles at Happy Time, first to avoid her work and later to do it well, and it’s striking to compare season 1 George with season 2 George.  Even her work wardrobe is so much more professional and put-together; I love it.

In short, I love George.  I love her ballsiness, her immaturity, her snark, and her anger.  Whether she’s floundering or succeeding, tough or vulnerable, she’s hugely entertaining and rootable.  I wouldn’t have thought a dead girl could have a coming-of-age story, but, as is so often the case with George, she proves everyone, herself included, dead wrong.

Relationship Spotlight: Rube Sofer & George Lass (Dead Like Me)

 

If there’s one thing a newly-undead girl needs, it’s someone to guide her through the unique challenges of being a reaper and the hassles and headaches of her afterlife.  Though George would argue that it doesn’t always feel like it, Rube is just the ticket.  There’s a lot of shouting, a lot of aggravation, but when it comes down to it, she and Rube care deeply for each other.  Under his supervision, she grows as both a reaper and an undead person, and she gradually finds her way into the regard of the somewhat-closed-off man.

 

When George first becomes a reaper, she’s an absolute mess, no question about it.  She’s furious at a world that let her die when she was only 18, and the last thing she wants is someone calmly explaining her new role in society.  She doesn’t want the nine-to-five grind her afterlife turns out to be, she doesn’t want to take souls from the living, and she definitely doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of Rube’s homespun, usually food-metaphor-based advice.  And so, she acts up and out.  She tries to cheat the system, sometimes to save herself the work or responsibility, sometimes in the mistaken hope of “saving” someone, and to her, Rube is the quiet-voiced warden forcing her to toe the line.

 

This is, of course, because Rube has already been where George is now.  He’s learned what happens when an expired soul sits in a heart, when someone dies with their souls still in their body, or when you bend the rules of fate to make someone miss their “appointment.”  He knows how important their work is, and he does whatever he can, not just to get George to do what she’s supposed to, but to help her understand why she has to do it.  Sometimes, he gives her big, confrontational “shape up, little girl” moments, which is what the obstinate, self-centered George often needs.  She gives him lip, and he gets in her face, letting her know exactly how her irresponsibility or meddling affects people’s lives, and more importantly, their deaths. 

 

But that isn’t Rube’s only tactic.  He also realizes that, for all of George’s attitude and defiance, she’s still a confused dead girl trying to make sense of an impossible situation, and there are times when she can’t deal with hard truths delivered bluntly.  In these moments, he’s surprisingly gentle, fatherly, with her.  They often come after he’s warned her of the thin ice she’s on and she’s ignored him, causing the catastrophe he was trying to prevent.  They’re the moments when she most expects the full force of his ire, but he instead offers her quiet support and concern.  I think of when, against his explicit instructions, she tries to make contact with her mother and gets burned for it, or his considerate advice to think of everything she likes about being on Earth and decide if it’s worth sticking around for.

 

I’d imagine Rube prefers these caring scenes with George over the ones where he has to yell at her – it’d be much nicer for both of them if she would just learn to believe him when he tells her she can’t avoid her duties.  However, I think he knows that the strong-willed George has high enough defenses that she’s only receptive to such conversations when she’s taken a hit.  So, he instead gives her what she needs when she needs it: he’s tough on her to try and protect her from making serious mistakes, and when she falls anyway, he’s there to pick up the pieces and let her know she can come back from it.

Favorite Characters: Mason (Dead Like Me)

 

The best description of my favorite character from Dead Like Me would be “all of them (except Clancy,)” but I can’t do justice to them all in one post, can I?  So today, we’re only focusing on Mason, easily the best undead druggie to ever grace the small screen.

 

Oh, Mason, Mason, Mason.  He’s George’s buddy, a screw-up for Roxy to keep in line, Daisy’s would-be suiter, and an eternal thorn in Rube’s side.  He died in the ‘60s trying to chase a permanent high, and while his decades as a grim reaper have matured him a little, he hasn’t made much headway.  Mason’s reaps are often haphazard and last-minute, and they’re frequently accompanied by a little petty larceny among the effects of the dear departed.  Roxy and George use day jobs to pay for their afterlifestyle, but not Mason.  He’d rather break into parking meters, smuggle drugs, and have little old dead ladies teach him their signatures so he can collect their social security.

 

In other words, Mason is an incalculable narrative presence.  He’s always stirring things up and getting into trouble, which opens up plenty of entertaining plot possibilities.  It offers clashes with Rube and Roxy, it’s part of what makes Daisy just string him along, and it means he tends to play the devil on George’s shoulder.  This last point is especially fun since, particularly in season one, he’s a sort-of mentor for George, and his lessons on the ways of the reaper aren’t what you’d call entirely reliable.

 

And of course, many of these antics are hilarious.  The best is, naturally, the episode in which Mason gets accidentally high from the drugs he’s muling.  His paranoia and rambling non-sequiturs are priceless, and his wild, almost-tearful admission “I’ve got illegals in my bottom!” might be the funniest line uttered on the show.  But, great as it is, it’s in excellent company.  There’s also pepper-spraying his eggs and holding a yard sale in someone else’s yard, along with countless others.

 

While comic relief obviously = a good thing, it’s not all there is to Mason.  Sometimes his cavalier attitude and reckless behavior have serious consequences, and more importantly, we get just enough hints of Mason’s serious side to see that he has deeper qualities.  He has an awesome subplot where he reaps one of his aging rock idols; eventually revealing his true nature to the front man, he confesses that immortality “isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”  Another great story comes when he’s forced to really think about the possibility of moving on and tells the people in his life what he thinks about them.  For once, his advice to George (while disjointed) is dead-on, and his genuine affection for her is utterly sweet.

 

And every now and then, he actually makes good.  I love the episode where he reaps a gay couple and, after a lot of insistence that he’s not supposed to, gives in and relays a message from the first man killed to his still-living partner.  Even though it’s against reaper protocol, it’s compassionate and emotionally sound.  And then there’s giving a final moment of happiness to a soon-to-be-dead little boy.  These scenes are always fantastic – Mason brings such warmth to them and shows you who he can be beneath the substance abuse, the stupid decisions, and, the years stuck on earth taking souls.  In moments like these, I root for him to find his way more often.  Not all the time, though!  Foolhardy Mason is comedy gold.

How Hannibal Fits Fuller

At first, Hannibal seems out of place among Bryan Fuller’s other shows – Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and the pilot for Mockingbird Lane.  It’s darker, more gruesome, and less fantastical.  With the other four shows, it’s immediately clear that they’re from the same showrunner, and Hannibal appears the odd man out.  However, Fuller’s latest work shares a number of threads with his previous efforts.  Here are the Fuller-esque elements in Hannibal.

Extreme Foodiness

 

Dead Like Me had Der Waffle Haus, Pushing Daisies had The Pie Hole, and Hannibal has the good doctor’s kitchen.  Rather than dwelling on greasy-spoon breakfast food or mouthwatering dessert, Hannibal is all about ostentatious gourmet fare.  True, it’s all made of people, but it looks amazing, and Hannibal is the most verbose TV foodie since Rube.

Sumptuous Visuals

 

Because it’s not as brightly-colored as Fuller’s other shows, Hannibal’s visual feast is subtler than that of its fellows.  Still, the attention to color, detail, and eye-catching mise-en-scène is undeniably there.  Look at the saturated sunlight when Will imagines himself fly-fishing and the twisted beauty of the macabre murder tableaus.  Speaking of which…

 

Inventive Deaths

 

While I’ve yet to see anyone on Hannibal die from a water-cooler bottle or a scratch ‘n’ sniff bomb, the killers in the D.C. area are a creative bunch.  There’s the human mushroom garden, the corpse totem pole, and the color palette of dead bodies used for a mural.  Hannibal himself gets in on the fun regularly.  My personal favorite is the man turned into a human tree, with his torso opened to show that his organs have been swapped out for precisely-arranged flowers.

 

Psychological Themes

 

Jaye saw Dr. Ron, Chuck baked antidepressants into pies, and Reggie visited child psychiatrists after George’s death.  Hannibal, meanwhile, is full of psychology.  In addition to Hannibal (therapist and psychopath – a twofer!) we have Drs. Bloom, Chilton, and Du Maurier, along with a plethora of psychopaths and people with other disorders.  Plus, Will works with the FBI’s behavioral science unit.  Hallucinations, hypnosis, and psychoanalysis, oh my!

Exceptional Dialogue

 

Like the visuals, this parallel is less obvious.  Hannibal doesn’t use the whimsical wordplay of Pushing Daisies, but the dialogue is remarkable in quieter ways.  Will and Abigail’s extended metaphors on hunting and fishing are excellent, and I don’t think I’ve heard a more plaintive description of cancer than Bella’s story about a stray cell that got lost and is simply doing what it does best.  More recently, Margot’s explanation of having “the proclivity for the wrong parts” artfully says everything you need to know about her sexuality and her family’s opinion about it.