Just like Hader, I don't wanna waste any time:
Shane Taylor is BARRY's second-best villain - Barry Berkman being the
first, but enough about him for now. Shane's entrance is definitely creepy
but I didn't think that feeling
would linger and fill the whole room. I thought something wacky, ala
ronny/lily, would happen before he punched Barry out - especially following Gene and Jim's grueling interrogation scene we needed a palette cleanse. No, Hader isn't letting up: once Motorcross Psycho turns and moves toward Sally...my breath stopped. Before this, Shane was kind of a hapless dope. Sure, he shot
Fuches and left him for dead, but Fuches is a piece of shit and he survived. Then there's the "Hand-off!" scene in 710N where he
not only misses every shot he takes at Barry but cartoonishly causes a
crash trying to hand a giant gun to a guy on a motorcycle - I wasn't
worried about him.
I should have worried because him strangling Sally is intense enough for its shock factors: this show has never been scary before, Sally enduring more fucking abuse, and the ticking-clock of "Oh shit, is she about to fucking die??" but something else about it really fucked with me. After he subdues her struggling, Shane kind of...deflates. He has this completely blank look on his face as he proceeds to finish the job. He's taking someone's life and he looks bored doing it. This kind of dispassion reminded me of BTK casually talking about his murders in court. And why is he doing this? Nothing important; Barry shot down Taylor Garrett's idea for a hot-tub.
And Hader still doesn't let us off the hook when Sally stabs him and silently gets the upper-hand in the soundbooth with the metal bat. There's no satisfying comeuppance when he dies; we don't see it, we don't hear it, but we do experience the totality of it traumatizing Sally. Even the image of the knife in his neck, his eyeball filled with blood, and him rambling nonsense because he doesn't fully understand what's happened - all while calling Sally a "fuckin' bitch" over and over - is ghoulish instead of the typical dark comedy we're used to.
Then there's Hank's escape from Elena which is nerve-shredding even beyond the audio nightmare of the panther mauling; there's the guard vomiting and it splatting under the door, the other guard laughing maniacally like he can't stop even if he wanted to - it sounds less like he's amused and more like he's fucking snapped. I had chills. Then the shot of Hank with the gun in the hallway (confused and traumatized, just like Sally), shallow-focus on a mysterious 'shape' dancing in the distance while the power buzzes on and off...again, this show has never been scary before this episode but if Hader has any idea[s] for a horror movie, he needs to make one. The climax of this scene is incredible writing because Elena isn't painted as some one-note villain for Hank. What she's doing is insanely fucked up but she isn't being cruel, Hader & Berg are too smart to write some jilted lover trope: it's more human than that. This isn't torture, it's a last-ditch desperate attempt to make her husband love her again. It's clearly painful for her to watch him endure it and she dies without any catharsis or understanding whatsoever. The look on Hank's face as his hug with Cristobal dissolves to the next scene means he's not fucking okay. It's heartbreaking, sickening, and tragic for all three of them. Absolutely no one is safe anymore.
Of course the next scene is Barry having a nervous breakdown in front of Albert, trembling and hyperventilating so much that he physically can't speak, he just
I've said it before and here it comes again: ronny/lily was a reinvention that broke the show and these are the cracks peeling away - it can be a cartoon or it can be an episode of Black Summer sans zombies, we'll never know what kind of show this is. We'll just have to take it on an episode-by-episode basis and this one is intense, nauseating, soul-killing and hideous from beginning to end. A+
No comments:
Post a Comment