Well, it’s been a busy couple weeks for all of us at Adversion. Our recaps may have fallen behind, but rest assured, we are committed to parsing every single second of our favorite shows for sexism, hidden meanings, and opportunities to make fun of Scarlett.
In the first half of Emma Donoghue’s meticulously psychological Room, the character of Ma is just that—she’s a mother. She’s a near-saintly, self-sacrificing angel who unfailingly thinks of everything and always knows how to make everything better. She’s also not a person in her own right, but that’s the entire point, as the story is told from her five-year-old son’s perspective. To him, she is just “Ma,” because he’s never known her to be anything else. Continue reading →
After the events of this past weekend, it seems a little strange, and frivolous even, to recap a soap opera about CIA agents chasing down terrorists in Europe. I thought for awhile about what to write here—but in the end, this seems like the wrong venue to say anything other than that our thoughts are with the people of Paris and Beirut.
Because the episode wasn’t particularly violent or scary, I am comfortable posting about it today, with the side note that this recap will attempt (as we always try to attempt) to highlight any ways in which this episode might encourage assumptions that we should instead be questioning. And with that, on to the recap.
In this episode, everyone learns a nice little lesson about not hiring people without doing a background check.
Alicia and Lucca’s newest client takes a polygraph.
I like to think that this is the face of, “Sure, Carrie. Take my sister’s medical supplies to treat the smoldering hitman. I’ll just be waiting right here when you get back.”
“Why are you watching me? Do you enjoy watching me suffer?… I am all the parts of you that you disown. I take on all of the punishment you abdicate. That’s why you’re here.”
Rachel Cusk’s modern interpretation of Euripides’s classic tragedy is a lot of things—consistently compelling, politically engaged, extremely loud—but subtle it is not. While I am nothing if not a fan of tendentiously feminist literature, sociopolitical themes are much more effective when they are a little more subliminal. In Medea, characters break the fourth wall to explicitly implicate the audience in Medea’s taboo desire to murder her children not once, but twice, and the lack of delicacy dilutes the play’s worthy message. Continue reading →
At the end of the last recap, I joked that the answer to Alicia’s question was such a cliffhanger, because the answer was so obvious. And sure enough, when this episode opens, without much discussion or drama, Alicia and Lucca are partners.
The episode opens with a clip of a charming, self-deprecating young woman talking about her glioblastoma multiform to her webcam followers. She dined on “applesauce du jour with broken-up pentabarbitol mixed in. My last supper.” She starts to cry and says she can’t live with the pain.
Adversion 