Plus, Al is sacrificing people to maintain the order of the town even in the last episode.
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| Originally Posted by Francis Wolcott View Post You know, I ain’t even going to argue here. I’ll just sit back and wait for the inevitable oops post. |
Oops.
Just finished the first season finale. I think seeing Al’s scenes with Rev. Smith and the corrupt magistrate back to back explained the character a lot more to me.
“I’m as nimble as a forest creature.” Wonderfully human ending.
Often I’ve held, and tried to explain, that of all the things I’ve ever watched, Deadwood is probably the most human/joyous/alive and that scene is near the top of the reasons why.
I’ve been toying with re-watching Deadwood. Now I have to. Although this will lead to me talking like Joanie and/or drunk Jane for at least a week.
I think it’s because I keep seeing commercials for Jonah Hex and John Malkovich looks JUST like Brad Dourif. I’ve done many a double take.
The Jewel/Al conversations might be my favorite. She’s the only character to consistently call him on his shit and in a funny fashion.
Feeling a need…
I dreamed last night I was clamoring up a fuckin’ creek bank, which is often required of a drunk. It was dark, and I couldn’t tell where I was till I cleared the bank and come face to face with Charlie Utter’s ugly mug. Now Charlie’s, as usual, on the lookout for Bill, that’s as usual too, losing at poker inside the joint we’re outside of. ‘Where are we, Charlie?’ This could be any fucking place the last number of years. And he said: ‘Jane, don’t you know this is the No 10 saloon here in the camp where Bill’s gonna fuckin’ get killed soon?’ ‘Jesus Christ – how do you know, Charlie?” I asked him. He said: ‘Don’t you know,’ he says, ‘some point we know these fucking things? Don’t you know the world says its fuckin’ name to us?’ ‘What the fuck? What the fuck do I have to dream about this for?’ I say to Charlie, ‘Wasn’t I miserable enough?’ ‘Jane,’ fuckin’ Charlie says to me, ‘Don’t you know this is the night you couldn’t look out for that little girl when you was at Cochran’s, and Swearengen come in and scared you and you went down to the creek to weep? That’s where the fuck you’re coming from. And don’t you know,’ he says, ‘this is the night you spirit that child from Cochrans, and to where our stock was outside of camp, and we watched out on that little girl and sung to her, and you, with the presence of mind to continue the fucking round when I was too fucking stupid? And you said you would ‘row, row, row’ and I said ‘row, row, row your boat’ and we had this … now,’ Charlie says to me, ‘don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you? Any evenings in your life you made mistakes, remember where even evenings you was as most ashamed as you ever thought you could ever be are able to wind up, and don’t fuckin’ only remember the middle of the fuckin’ dream!’ If I wonder why I dreamed that dream, yesterday you sent Mose to find me, and I was nearly dead-drowned drunk, and Mose made me get up, and you and me walked them kids to school, and before I went to sleep … you kissed me.
That’s some fuckin shit, boys. The world says it’s fuckin name to us.
Just started watching this over the weekend (first 3 DVDs after restarting Netflix). The show is pretty great but I’m kind of hating having to wait 3 days to see the next couple episodes. Netflix waiting for the next discs to arrive from Netflix is just too frustrating sometimes.
Finished season 2.
I fucking love this show.
More later.
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| Originally Posted by Crash-Man View Post Finished season 2. I fucking love this show. More later. |
Yeah, huh? They’re goddamn geniuses.
Ok, my thoughts as I remember them:
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The “I am not the fine man you take me for” speech was simultaneously one of the funniest and one of the saddest things I’ve seen on this show so far. And the *crunch* still makes me cringe.
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I love the way they’re slowly revealing Al’s childhood abuse over the course of several monologues. The best so far was the last one I saw, where his young buxom companion related to his experience.
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The dialogue seemed to take a heavy turn toward Shakespearean form a few episodes into the second season, and then it toned down a bit near the end of the season. It was fantastic during that period.
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I couldn’t help but tap my toes along with the music at the end of the second season finale.
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The Bone Shaker (bicycle) scene had me grinning from ear to ear. Wolcott, I agree with you…the show’s dreary setting really makes for deeply joyous expressions of humanity. The smiles the “childish thing” cracked across the faces of even the most cynical of the characters was a high point for me.
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Which leads to…Bullock’s kid. Damn…the funeral episode was rough. I really missed Rev. Brown during that episode.
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As much as I love Al’s three henchmen, I get the feeling that Dan’s character changed a lot between the first and second seasons. He’s every bit as deadly as before, but he didn’t seem to fawn over Al as much initially.
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I love Blazanov and Nigger General. Ellsworth and Doc Cochrane are great characters too. I feel bad about Ellsworth’s heartbreak, and I hope he gets involved in the camp politics soon. But he probably has too much integrity for that.
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Why did Hofstedter do that?
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I like the relationship Al has with Merrick, and I wonder why Al has a soft spot for the guy. I’m guessing it’s because Merrick, despite not being cut from the same granite as Al, Bullock and their ilk, sticks to his guns and moves as easily among them as he does among the less rowdy sort.
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Hearst is a cunt.
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Brian Cox!
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Why was this show cancelled? There was room for so much more story! It feels a lot like a reverse The Wire. Instead of the wrong types working against each other and slowly destroying a city, we see these rough types working together slowly building a city up from nothing.
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Merriweather, yeah. Loathe as I am to say it, Dillahunt gave the character some pitiful, almost confused facial expressions that made it look like he hated his actions (condition?) but couldn’t control theme. I almost felt sorry for the guy. Almost.
There’s more, but I think I’ll finish up the last 6 episodes first.
Quote:
| Originally Posted by All of us - Why was this show cancelled? There was room for so much more story! It feels a lot like a reverse The Wire. Instead of the wrong types working against each other and slowly destroying a city, we see these rough types working together slowly building a city up from nothing. |
Because that’s what the show was about: Individuals finding a way to overcome their own pasts and needs to form something larger than themselves.
From the very excellent Onion AV Club…
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| This ties in to my largest point I’ve been making about Deadwood throughout this series but is also illustrative of my second point: The people of Deadwood began the series as a large group of islands, separated by their own petty interests and concerns, and as the series continued, they merged together through circumstance and common cause to form one body, one continent of Deadwood that could stand up to whatever was thrown at it. Al begins the series as a scheming, backroom manipulator who aims only for his own gain. He ends the series as all of those things, yes, but he’s also realized that his own gain is inextricably tied to the future of the camp he calls home. As the series has progressed, he has been very slowly and rationally changed from an egotist to something approaching an altruist (granted, an altruist who slits throats). And every character on the show has undergone some sort of metamorphosis like this (Al’s is just the most obvious and dramatic). Ellsworth goes from a man who’s simply proud to be working an operational gold claim to the one person most willing to rage against the tyranny befalling his town. Alma goes from a weak society wife to a titan of the camp. Charlie goes from the put-upon sidekick of a frontier hero to a genuine force as camp deputy. Even Bullock has proceeded from frontier lawman to someone learning to put his temper under control to fit into the larger societal template. In this series, everyone is embarking on a voyage they themselves often do not understand, a voyage where the needs of the larger body will slowly mold them into the components the larger body needs. The only people unwilling to embark on these voyages – your Cys and Wolcotts and Hearsts – may get what they want, but they are ultimately marginalized within the camp as a whole, to the point where they often seem to be raging, even as their positions are relatively strong. |
If I’m not mistaken, very soon after Hearst left the camp the town was actually mostly destroyed by fire. So we know that the following season probably would have built up to that as the finale. But that’s not what the show was about…that destruction. The season after that, had there been one, would have likely been about restructuring the town and the relationships of the principles. Again, not really what Milch had wanted to do. Granted, both seasons would have likely been awesome. I still grieve we weren’t granted them. But what we were given, these three seasons of excellence and heart, is enough for me to keep close for a long long time.
Read this: http://www.avclub.com/articles/a-con...mething,32655/
- Racist Steve’s drunken rants are genuinely fucking hilarious.
I don’t know what cracks me up more: his overwrought attempts at abuse (he honestly looked like he was going to burst out laughing at himself in one scene), or the other Fields’s effortless non-reactions. It’d be hilarious if these two were revealed to actually share the same lineage.
Oh yeah…GOLD.
Quote:
| Originally Posted by Crash-Man View Post - As much as I love Al’s three henchmen, I get the feeling that Dan’s character changed a lot between the first and second seasons. He’s every bit as deadly as before, but he didn’t seem to fawn over Al as much initially. |
I think a big part of that comes from the introduction of Adams into the Gem dynamic. Prior to that, sure there was Johnny and to a slight extent EB, but Dan was clearly and comfortably occupying the no. 2 spot. But with Adams he could sense that this guy is a more natural heir to Al’s legacy. Al and Adams will cut a throat if it comes to it, but they’re also capable of more subtlety and a wider range of maneuvering around potential problems, whereas Dan knows that he’s not much more than a “strong right arm” at the end of the day. That’s why he’s so immediately threatened by him and they have all the conflict at the beginning of S2.
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| - I like the relationship Al has with Merrick, and I wonder why Al has a soft spot for the guy. I’m guessing it’s because Merrick, despite not being cut from the same granite as Al, Bullock and their ilk, sticks to his guns and moves as easily among them as he does among the less rowdy sort. |
I think it began from a very pragmatic place, that the Pioneer is the only paper in town, and having it as a friendly presence is far preferable to the alternative. But I think he also sees Merrick (correctly) as something of an overgrown child, and there’s a part of him that wants to take in lost “boys” and teach them to navigate the big, bad world that brutalized him as a lad. You can see it with Merrick, but also to a degree with Dan (although the vibe there is more fraternal than paternal, with Al clearly being the elder), and especially with Johnny and Adams. The way he half yells, half lectures at the two reminds me very much of how my father interacts with my brother and I. Particularly the way he makes them repeat the “lesson” of the tirade back to make sure it’s sunk in.
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| - Hearst is a cunt. |
But magnificently played. It’s a shame Gerald McRaney didn’t get more recognition for his work, but I think at least part of that is the bad luck to have Daniel Day-Lewis playing a more flamboyant version of the character in a higher profile production at about the same time.
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| - Brian Cox! |
The theater storyline ends up feeling kind of wasted at the end of the series, but every scene with him is just awesome. I think my favorite bit is his delivery of “Fuck you, sir!” to Shaunessy when they have their random little spat in the thoroughfare. It’s angry, but there’s a slightly bemused undercurrent to the whole thing I find hilarious.
Reminds me of one of my favorite lines, from the mobbed government official: “You cannot fuck the future, sir! The future fucks you!”
I found out after that it was in Saturday Night Fever first, but it cracked me up the first time I heard it.
What strikes me about Hearst is how reasonable and down-to-earth an individual he appears to be at first before revealing his megalomania.
Quote:
| Originally Posted by Crash-Man View Post - Racist Steve’s drunken rants are genuinely fucking hilarious. I don’t know what cracks me up more: his overwrought attempts at abuse (he honestly looked like he was going to burst out laughing at himself in one scene), or the other Fields’s effortless non-reactions. It’d be hilarious if these two were revealed to actually share the same lineage. Oh yeah…GOLD. |
I love Steve’s rants. They are so overwrought, and his voice modulation is fantastic.
Steve is practically Falstaff. In fact, I think if he wasn’t so racist, he’d been downright lovable. There’s something fascinating about that amount of wit, vocabulary, and artful sentence construction employed by such a stupid asshole. He’s like a professional wrestler.
The cuts to the Al, Hearst, Bullock and the other major players during the amateur night presentation created quite a scary sense of tension and foreboding. I was wondering if something violent was going to happen there and then.
It sucks that the other two seasons ended so joyously, while this one left the town somewhere between defeat and compromise.
All in all, I’m really glad I gave this series a chance. Excellent stuff, easily up there with my other completed faves like The Wire and The Shield. I’ll say more later.
It’s a very special show. I plowed through it during the spring. I’ll rewatch on Blu when that hits. I was struck by how human it was, how every single character, no matter how initially despicable, got their turn in the spotlight with some level of narrative empathy (even Hearst to a lesser degree). I was struck by how sympathetic I felt, by how the women were strongly addressed (I’ve loved precious few fiction characters as much as Deadwood’s Calamity Jane).
“Ecce homo” was what the show was about.
The dialogue made the show. It had consistently effective narrative drama, but the language is what I remember most.
To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want to see Deadwood in high definition.