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Post by Metella on Oct 28, 2004 7:18:19 GMT -5
Yeah, I was waiting for Goren to scrape the grey off that gold the first time he picked up those weights.
Welcome to the board - post often!
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Post by Sirenna on Oct 28, 2004 12:33:30 GMT -5
I must say, this episode, although good, didn't really strike me. But your comments have made me rethink this and I'm going to rewind my tape and give it another shot!
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Post by NikkiGreen on Oct 28, 2004 13:13:52 GMT -5
Sirenna, I've seen this episode twice. It hasn't struck me yet, either. Must be my head cold, sort of zoned out during the first airing.
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Post by Sirenna on Oct 29, 2004 13:11:07 GMT -5
I watched this one again and still no on my end but it's definately growing on me. Larry seemed less like Lucifer and more like Lucifer's errant, ok very errant, kid brother. He's still a neophyte, when it comes to creating trouble, compared to his older brother. But he's well able to pull the wool over the eyes of everyone who cares about him and fool them all, including Goren and Eames. He almost fooled them twice. If he's Eosphorous, then his light is a torch he uses to illuminate whatever it is his mark needs to see in him the most, leaving the rest of the picture conveniently dark. The girl saw someone who made her feel important and beautiful. The parole officer saw a criminal who he could "scare straight" into a law-abiding citizen. Larry gave him the contraband trophy and, as an added kicked in the guy's rear, had the hokey sentiment written on the plaque! The athiest saw a way to dim the power of religion. She tried to shaft the reverend and unwittinly used the devil to do it but, of course, underestimated and got shafted herself in the process. In Goren and Eames' scenes, where he had his finest moments, they saw a way to close their case. Relentless needs a new definition after these two. Larry got them to not only close the case but right an injustice (his framing), which, being them, they love to do. He used them to perfect an iron defence for himself. The actor played him cleverly; petulant and a bit whiny. He had a child's desire to extricate himself out of trouble with absolutely no regard for why it got him there in the first place. There was a cloak of twisted innocence covering Larry's real character which shows why people might have been taken in with him in the first place. You know, victims of crime who say "he didn't look like a criminal. He seemed so nice." The direction was interesting too especially the lighting and set design contrasting light and shadow. Larry's scenes were dark even when lit by the fire in the furnace while G/E's were bright even when they were in an underground parking garage. It would be easy to say that dark=evil Larry and light=good detectives. It's often done this way in literature and everyday life. But nothing's ever that black and white in LO:Ci, is it? Everything light seemed to be a red herring. The mud on the car wheel that Eames found in the garage for instance. While all the answers were hidden, as others have said, in plain sight, in Larry's little shoebox.
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Post by Observer2 on Dec 6, 2004 19:54:31 GMT -5
I meant to post about this episode at the time, and eventually did on the other board; but I seem to have forgotten to post it over here.
On the other board, as here, several people complained about April being a stereotype of an insecure, lonely, overweight woman. One person over there said they wished someone would write about an overweight person with a “strong, opinionated, secure, intelligent” personality.
Opinionated and intelligent, I’ll buy. I’ve known a lot of heavy women with those qualities. Strong? Yeah, I’ve know a few. Secure? Not so many. Especially when you go from moderately overweight to as heavy as April was. Which is part of why men do specifically target overweight women, at times, when they’re looking for someone they can manipulate.
Because, barring medical conditions, women who are strong, intelligent and secure rarely weigh that much. It’s no fun. It makes everything in life harder. And after a few years of it, some things aren’t just harder, they’re painful. Like walking. Or standing still. Our feet, knees, hips and backs just weren’t designed for that kind of weight, and when you exceed the design specs for long, the stress starts to cause damage.
And yeah, I’m familiar with NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) and the whole Fat Pride movement. I just think there’s a difference between fighting oppressive, inaccurate stereotypes and being in denial.
I like this episode a lot, but I’ve been reluctant to try to post about it because of having to address this issue. It’s one that I’m familiar with, having been significantly overweight in a couple of different periods in my life. I’m coming out of one of those periods now... I’ve lost a significant amount of weight in the past year, and still have a ways to go. So suffice to say that I know whereof I speak.
So no, I don’t want heavy women to be portrayed as always insecure or unattractive. You only have to check out the models in some of the plus-size catalogs to know that’s not the case. And I certainly don’t like to see them portrayed as stupid. I do expect to see them sometimes portrayed as emotionally dysfunctional, but I also like to see balancing characters. Characters like the friend of the victim in The Pilgrim – heavier than the dominant culture deems ideal, and still seeming like a solid, functional person. I’d like to see more incidental heavy characters – not morbidly obese, as the character in Eosphoros was, but heavy people, especially heavy women, who happen to be witnesses, co-workers, family members, etc., and are portrayed as just normal, functional people. But I don’t think shows should try to avoid plots in which manipulative men target heavy women who are lonely and/or insecure. It’s something that happens in real life. Watch a month of Court TV shows based on real cases, and you’ll likely see it at least once or twice.
I think people concerned with how heavy women are portrayed on television can learn from looking at what ethnic minorities have had to deal with. African-Americans, for instance, used to be very rare on television – and in crime dramas the vast majority of African-American characters were criminals. But the solution was not to stop showing African-American criminals. The key was to begin to balance that, both by also showing Euro-American criminals, and by having more African-American characters in positive and incidental roles.
To my mind, the problem isn’t that we sometimes see shows in which heavy women are targeted for victimization. The problem is that we see so few heavy women on television in general. Moderately heavy women are normal in our culture, but rare on television – and when they appear, it’s most often because of some problem related in some way to their weight. I don’t think it’s a healthy goal to try to normalize the image of the kind of innately unhealthy weight April was carrying in Eosphoros. We should not try to bend our minds around the idea that that is a happy, healthy way to live. But I do think it’s reasonable to ask television to treat the more moderate degree of heaviness that is normal in our culture as something that can occur in a person who is intelligent and basically functional and healthy – and in some cases sexually secure, attractive and involved.
I was pleased, by the way, several weeks after Eosphoros aired, to see a moderately overweight woman as a positive incidental character in the episode Inert Dwarf. She was the supervisor of the nurses, a successful, apparently competent woman, who just happened to be overweight, to a degree that is not unusual for someone in a basically sedentary supervisory position.
In any case, in Eosphoros, I thought the weight issue was an appropriate part of the plot. And the acting was good enough to make me work. Another thing some people complained about in this episode was the fact that they kept switching suspects. Now, I don’t understand that as a complaint about a detective show.
Yes, it was challenging to follow; but to me, that was an integral part of the plot – following the evidence... it points this way... no, wait, that doesn’t quite add up... but look over here, this might... but no...
About halfway through, at the commercial break after the second interview with April, I grinned at my sister and said, delightedly, “I don’t know who did it!”
I was tracking right along with the detectives – suspecting April, then Mitch, then April, then not sure. I did have one disadvantage Goren didn’t have... I was factoring in what he believed, since he usually twigs early on. When he shifted from April to her father I was trying to go with him – April did show convincing signs of PTSD – but I really wasn’t sure about her. Still, if Goren thought she was legit, then maybe what I was picking up was less than consistent acting. But no, it was *good* acting – and Goren was thrown off by the fact that there really was some PTSD and distress (not to mention some visible bruising), triggering his tendency to sympathize with the victim.
I love a show that can keep me working the puzzle, instead of knowing ahead of time what the picture’s going to look like. The pieces were all there, they just had to be put together the right way. And as others have mentioned, the guest cast did a great job.
The bit between Carver and Deakins was startling, though the acting was such that at the time I didn’t question it at all. And I liked seeing Deakins step around so he was almost between Carver and the detectives, and definitely drawing Carver’s attention – defending his detectives symbolically as well as verbally. Some people have commented about that scene, someone thought it was out of character, just done to give Carver and Deakins a little more play in the episode. But I went back and checked, and to me it was explained by the context of the high-profile people who felt harassed – one who might not be shy about complaining to contacts in high places, and one who doesn’t mind complaining loudly about the establishment in general. That made it make sense to me. Carver’s first words were about them uniting the Christians and the atheists, so I expect Carver had just come from being chewed out by his very political top boss, the DA.
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Post by maherjunkie on Jan 22, 2006 12:07:51 GMT -5
I liked this episode. It really made me question Goren's take on spirituality, standing up for the Atheists so strongly at the end, and defending the religous character in the "View from Up Here".
I like how they didn't portray the Atheists as evil or strange.
Incidentially, Mara Hobel played a positive heavy character in "Roseanne".
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Post by rosemary on Jan 22, 2006 16:36:23 GMT -5
„Eosphoros“ was an episode even I, a Central Europe girl, knew to be ripped off the headlines. To me the real life characters, the atheists as well as the others, seemed to be dickheads. In the CI episode they were drawn less stereotypical, but I recognized the expression „post birth abortion“ which was also used by the real life character, I think. As for Goren‘s spirituality…I think he might be somewhat religious, and I also think that he sees his RC past as a generally positive experience. He was 100% believable, when he told the „The view from up here“ character that she wasn‘t stupid simply because of her faith in God. I, however, think that she was a little more than just naive, but that this doesn‘t have to be faith-related. Appearently, he doesn‘t think religious people are stupid or incompetent („The Faithful“, „Magnificat“). But it‘s also pretty sure to me, that he‘s convinced that, if a person choses to be an atheist, he/or she has the right to be one and does not deserve to be treated as a bad person solely on that ground.
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Post by Techguy on Mar 12, 2010 19:14:47 GMT -5
Bump for EOTW reference
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