We're All In This Together

To say it's been a momentous week would be something of an understatement. Things are still spinning at a rate that is hard for me to quite grasp yet. So far the only thing I've been able to cobble any sanity-saving humor out of is the idea that the Trump people were caught utterly flat-footed by the negative backlash of a sitting president intervening to fire the person potentially at the forefront of investigations into him and his campaign team. That can only mean that someone within the Trump White House before the announcement was giddy with puffed-up confidence, absolute fucking sure that because a) Democrats hated Comey because of the October Surprise letter that helped to sink the Clinton campaign and b) firing him would definitely at the very least slow down some of the momentum of the Trump-Russia investigations, removing James Comey as the head of the FBI was a slam-dunk can't-lose proposition, the unqualified public win that has eluded Trump since the inauguration.

And then... uh... man. What do you even do with something like this? I keep hearing "constitutional crisis" as the rule of law is threatened by the oblivious actions of the very stupid person at the head of the executive branch of government. I would like the luxury of just freaking out, but I'm pacing myself as I know--I KNOW--he's just going to say more dumb shit about this and make it worse. So I did the only responsible thing I could think of to do in a time of potential national crisis not seen since Nixon or perhaps the Civil War: I finished the second season of the Wachowski's Sense8 on Netflix.

I have to say, I have to admire something that started off seemingly terrible, then stuck to its central terrible-ness with wildly misplaced confidence long enough to develop into something that is actually good.

Looking back now I'm not 100% sure if the first season of the show was uneven and unsure of itself (in other words, actually terrible) or if I just wasn't fully attuned to the frequency it was working on. There was an overarching plot, sure, but it has eight(!) central characters to service and a kooky high-concept sci-fi plot loaded up with practically vaudevillian levels of melodrama, complete with a villain who only doesn't twirl his mustache because he has a full beard. Underneath it all (and this took a while for me to tease out) was a base earnestness that I think some GenX people struggle with, having been raised in a bubble of safely insulated ironic detachment.

Also if I'm honest, I had to come to terms with just how unapologetically queer the whole show is, which shouldn't be surprising given that two thirds of the creative team are a pair of transgender sisters. Yes, the show handles sex and sexuality in a way that ranges from tawdry all the way to gratuitous (the orgies--yes, plural--are infamous), but I did realize after a while that what was unsettling was that I was seeing something (gay sexuality) being treated in a way that neither demurred nor apologized by making a cut or panning the camera away, which is almost unprecedented in the visual vocabulary of American TV. The camera is there for the doin'-it, sure, but it also lingers for the intimacy and does so without the underlying nudge of noble social progress or eat-your-vegetables sanctimony. One of the first shots of the first episode in season 1 is a close-up of a strap-on wetly hitting the floor just after being used by a trans woman and her girlfriend. There's your tone for that portion of the experience right there. It challenged expectations I didn't know I had, which I eventually found richly fascinating and more and more watchable. Not in a lurid way, but in a... um... well, not in an entirely lurid way.

The more I think about it, it's a show about people with an inborn level of super-heightened sensitivity above and beyond the vast majority of normals, for which they are forced to live in secret lest they be hunted by forces wishing to do them harm in the name of the normative majority. The allegory is hardly subtle.

The whole production occasionally groans (sometimes literally, see above re: orgies) under the weight of its ungainly cast size, but these are the Wachowskis, the same people who brought you The Matrix and its less mentionable sequels. They know to move a camera to draw out the tension in a scene. Over and over again, they take something that really should not work: action or merely active sequences highlighting the central premise of 8 strangers born at the same minute, connected by a psychic bond across the planet that allows them to tap in to each others' thoughts, feelings and physical and emotional abilities. They turn what should be a fucking jumble and into sharp, dynamic, masterful feats of editing, camera work, direction and acting that (almost) never fail to coalesce into sparkly little firework displays that light up the sometimes forgotten ostensible A-plot of these social freaks against the evil forces who want to lock them in mental facilities and lobotomize them. Honestly, these are the best action sequences on television right now. In these collaborative scenes, the ensemble becomes not only justified but the absolute strength of the show. Sure, sometimes it struggles to find a use for some of the characters with less tradeable skills (a bus driver, a chemist...) but the Korean martial-arts bad-ass sure gets a lot of feature time, snapping appendages for us in defense of her connected brain-siblings.

As I said, the 8 central characters are spread out all over the world. The show makes absolutely brilliant use of location shooting, maybe at an unprecedented level for television. I don't know what their travel budget is, but they squeeze every single dollar, peso, rupee and euro out of it and splash it all across the screen. I don't know if they actually get to all the story locales of Nairobi, Berlin, Mumbai, London, Chicago, Mexico City, Iceland or Seoul, but they manage to make a story about people living inside their heads feel massively expansive.

I'm probably being overly generous now about the first season because season 2 was committed to fleshing out the struggle of the show's central mythology that season one was deliberately (but at best of arguable necessity) vague about as plot bits were de-emphasized in favor of character establishment. It all pays off with a second season absolutely devoted to lobbing propulsive exposition at you.

The biggest letdown (and I'll say this vaguely as to avoid spoilers) is a thrown-together ending that a) should have been a momentous physical reunion of all the main group but is inexplicably rushed through with b) a plan that doesn't seem possible to have pulled off and was deliberately not explained before or after. I'll say something for this that I've never really said of a Netflix show I've binged: it could have done with one more episode.

But it's the oldest of showbiz axioms: always leave them wanting more. Or, if you're president, I guess: always leave them wanting.