The belated The English post
Dec. 10th, 2022 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessOkay, thanks to the AD for ‘Vultures on the Line’ I know that Martha Myers was Billy’s wife and presumably Jed’s mother, and what Jed found in the dark, poor kid. I have now corrected Katie’s name in the previous entry. The AD informed me of more details than I’d taken in that showed how things were linked – that the two men brought Jensen (formerly ‘Mansplainer’)’s wagon and body to John, that it was human fingers that Eli saw, that Cordelia found Jensen’s body, not a total stranger’s, and that, though he was wearing a cross, Kills on Water was no priest. And given that Katie’s children were buried in a cemetery, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that that was where they’d dig a grave for Jensen, but the contrast with Red Elk’s tradition of burial platforms was clearer to me.
1.4 The Wounded Wolf
Yes, let’s call an episode after Eli where his symbolic animal stand-in gets more screen time than him.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that most of the episode was a flashback on the first viewing, okay? I was too lazy to get up and make out the text. But it made more sense that Thomas was NOT Cordelia’s fiancé 10 years ago than now. And if we couldn’t get Cordelia and Eli’s stories/story in 1890 and had to go back to when Telford stopped being a gentleman, the viewers’ reward was Rafe Spall’s David Melmont – what a psychopath. It certainly was a star turn, and weird and funny and horrifying both in America and then around Cordelia in London. I’m glad that most of the worst of the violence wasn’t shown – the pounding of the guns was quite enough, while, as the Dvorak tinkled, we knew what had been done to Cordelia.
Eli opted to or was forced to opt for a policy of non-interference as, well, the Chalk River massacre happened.
What a voice McClintock had, it sounded like it was soaked in ‘soldiers joy’.
We got an explanation for the DD that was branded on either Billy Myers or Timothy Flynn’s bodies.
Class and privilege didn’t count for much in a place where, because the Native Americans were classed with inconvenient animals, men like Melmont’s ‘horror’ had free rein. It was grossly disturbing, although there were little pockets of hope – he had only winged the symbolic wolf (or had he even?), Cordelia had shown flashes of who she was (Telford’s claim to be her protector was laughable with added bitterness), Melmont has frostbitten feet (although the use of that cane‘s tapping was creepifying) and by raping her I presume he made her a mother with no idea of what he was unleashing.
But by the end of the ep, I wanted to give a little eye roll at how so many of these characters we’d seen were linked. I know there weren’t that many people around in 1890, but I thought America was a big country…
In the rewatch with AD, I realised that Ellroy and McClintock were two different people, and I caught Kills on Water saying that the Cheyenne who’d been massacred were his family. It also explained that the man at Cordelia’s London home was a piano tuner.
I have watched the next episode, but I’ll wait until I’ve rewatched it with AD before posting about it, because I get so much wrong.
[Edited for typos 17/2/25.]
1.4 The Wounded Wolf
Yes, let’s call an episode after Eli where his symbolic animal stand-in gets more screen time than him.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that most of the episode was a flashback on the first viewing, okay? I was too lazy to get up and make out the text. But it made more sense that Thomas was NOT Cordelia’s fiancé 10 years ago than now. And if we couldn’t get Cordelia and Eli’s stories/story in 1890 and had to go back to when Telford stopped being a gentleman, the viewers’ reward was Rafe Spall’s David Melmont – what a psychopath. It certainly was a star turn, and weird and funny and horrifying both in America and then around Cordelia in London. I’m glad that most of the worst of the violence wasn’t shown – the pounding of the guns was quite enough, while, as the Dvorak tinkled, we knew what had been done to Cordelia.
Eli opted to or was forced to opt for a policy of non-interference as, well, the Chalk River massacre happened.
What a voice McClintock had, it sounded like it was soaked in ‘soldiers joy’.
We got an explanation for the DD that was branded on either Billy Myers or Timothy Flynn’s bodies.
Class and privilege didn’t count for much in a place where, because the Native Americans were classed with inconvenient animals, men like Melmont’s ‘horror’ had free rein. It was grossly disturbing, although there were little pockets of hope – he had only winged the symbolic wolf (or had he even?), Cordelia had shown flashes of who she was (Telford’s claim to be her protector was laughable with added bitterness), Melmont has frostbitten feet (although the use of that cane‘s tapping was creepifying) and by raping her I presume he made her a mother with no idea of what he was unleashing.
But by the end of the ep, I wanted to give a little eye roll at how so many of these characters we’d seen were linked. I know there weren’t that many people around in 1890, but I thought America was a big country…
In the rewatch with AD, I realised that Ellroy and McClintock were two different people, and I caught Kills on Water saying that the Cheyenne who’d been massacred were his family. It also explained that the man at Cordelia’s London home was a piano tuner.
I have watched the next episode, but I’ll wait until I’ve rewatched it with AD before posting about it, because I get so much wrong.
[Edited for typos 17/2/25.]
