Homecoming Review pt 2

[moon_custafer]

I have today off, so Andrew and I binge-watched episodes 5-10 last night. Slight spoilers, but probably not enough to ruin the plot:

Sales clerk in department store, to Heidi: “What’s your beauty regimen?”
Heidi: “Regimen?”
(Clerk gets terrifying gleeful look of “ooh! someone I can do a demo on!”)
Next shot: Heidi in car, with overdone makeup, sees herself in the rear view mirror, grimaces and begins cleaning it off.

Andrew: “Her beauty regiment is ‘being Julia Roberts!’”

Walter’s mom (Marianne Jean-Baptiste ) needs her own spinoff detective series.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems possible to read both Heidi and Carrasco as non-NT, though that may just be a side-effect of the series’ overall tone— the camera fixes intensely on details of the environment, ambiguous facial expressions, etc. Carrasco gives a really good speech about how yes, he’s just a cog in the wheel, but he’s a cog that turns other cogs, as he’s sprawled on the ground after having tripped over a rack of bicycles. Whigham’s described the role in interviews as “doing microsurgery,” and that he tried very hard to resist tipping over into cartooniness.

Some other reviewers have mentioned that there are no obvious changes in fashion or technology between the 2018 and the 2022 scenes, but anticipating future fashions/tech usually ends up looking corny, and would have distracted from the main storyline.

Yay Checkov’s Pelican!

Hong Chau gets a good scene in the last episode after seeming like a background character, and word is she’ll be back in S2, which is a separate story set in the same universe, like they’ve been doing with <i>Fargo</i>. I don’t buy the theories that she secretly *is* the owner of the Geist corporation, but she does seem to be, or have become, closer to them than her apparent (and now former) bosses.

I also don’t buy the theories that Carrasco looking at the leaf, or the shot of his office chair spinning after he gets up from his desk, mean he quits his job with the DoD. For one thing if he were quitting he’d have begun conscientiously typing up his letter of resignation. He’s just completed his investigation, made his report and elevated the complaint, and now he’s gone home for the day or the weekend. Maybe he’ll even have a celebratory beer. But I think he’ll be back the next day or on Monday morning, dealing with the next complaint on his docket.

Comments

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Carrasco gives a really good speech about how yes, he’s just a cog in the wheel, but he’s a cog that turns other cogs, as he’s sprawled on the ground after having tripped over a rack of bicycles.

WHY DOES THAT MAKE ME WANT TO SEE A SERIES

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SEE SO I’LL HAVE SOMEBODY TO DISCUSS IT WITH

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SEE SO I’LL HAVE SOMEBODY TO DISCUSS IT WITH

I shall see if spatch can detach it from its Amazon roots so that I may.

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I only got to finally see it because Andrew found it on iTunes. I guess Amazon eventually releases the shows it commissions for its streaming service there after a year or so.

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Slight spoilers, but probably not enough to ruin the plot

Huh, so the hook of this show is like the biochemical equivalent of the fringe Nazi science in The Glass Pearls. That's successfully skin-crawling.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is wonderful. She is also wonderful in Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018), which I loved in January and have not yet managed to write about. She is in the category of actors I would watch read a phone book.

I knew Shea Whigham was already, but the bicycle rack speech is good.

[edit] I truly enjoy the way the multiple perspectives and timelines build this show. The way that Carrasco looks to Heidi like the government hunting her down and she looks to him like the linchpin of a cover-up (and Colin just looks like a terrible, terrible person, whenever he is) and both of these things are not untrue, but. I fully expect a confluence any second now, though.

[edit edit] OH MY GOD AS I SAID THAT WE GOT A DOLLY ZOOM REALIZATION. I RESPECT THIS SHOW'S MID-CENTURY AESTHETICS SO MUCH.

P.S. The aspect ratio suddenly filling out from the tunnel vision of Heidi's previous present state is beautiful. I wondered if the show would do that, rejoining the continuity, and it turns out it was written for pattern-recognizing people after all. This is structured so well.

[moon_custafer]

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is wonderful.

Her character should get her own series. Or she should play Lt. Columbo in a reboot.

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Or she should play Lt. Columbo in a reboot.

She's underestimated enough, but she's not vague enough for Columbo. I'd just watch her solve crimes.

[moon_custafer]

She's underestimated enough, but she's not vague enough for Columbo.

Good point. I admit the Columbo I recall best is one where the murderer frames himself for his wife’s “mysterious disappearance” while she’s away of her own volition on a trip, trying to get himself arrested for murder in order to set up a double-jeopardy defense for when he does kill her; so that probably wasn’t a typical storyline.

I'd just watch her solve crimes.
I’m just sorry she and Carrasco didn’t team up; they’d be adorable together. Alternatively, a show where she’s the main detective, but he could have a recurring guest spot for when she needs someone to look up stuff in government databases. Though it might go against his conscience to do that, and then there’d be a running gag about her having a stack of pre-filled Freedom of Information Act request forms ready for use.

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I’m just sorry she and Carrasco didn’t team up; they’d be adorable together.

Agreed. Their one real scene was a standout.

Though it might go against his conscience to do that, and then there’d be a running gag about her having a stack of pre-filled Freedom of Information Act request forms ready for use.

I would be delighted by the recurring role of Thomas Carrasco, Bureaucracy Wrangler.

(Having returned to the small print in this post, by the way, I agree with you that I didn't read the final scene as Carrasco walking off the job: I took it as his end-of-the-day routine which we've never seen before. He seems to be the sort of person who conscientiously leaves his work at work, his business cards, his notes, and so forth, except he almost tidies the leaf with the rest of the job done and then he tucks it inside his jacket and takes it home with him and that seemed significant to me. A memento. Maybe more literally a reminder.)

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And then, apparently, he teleports out of there.

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And then, apparently, he teleports out of there.

That spinning chair is kind of the show's aesthetic, though: movements cropped just out of shot, apparently meaningless action continuing long after you'd think the camera would follow it. It starts to look like it means something, but you give yourself apophenia trying to figure out what.

(Except that he drives to Tampa from D.C. and it is such an obvious pain in the ass—because most of Carrasco's interactions with the world beyond his desk are a pain in the ass, if not an outright fall down stairs—I would be oddly willing to believe that he can teleport; why not that hidden talent among so many others? He probably wouldn't notice it was unusual until it was pointed out to him, and then he wouldn't actually change a thing.)

[moon_custafer]

apparently meaningless action continuing long after you'd think the camera would follow it.

There’s an interview somewhere where the series producers talk about how difficult it was to get that pelican to stay on Heidi’s desk for the duration of the credits (and there’s only one pelican in show biz, and she’s *expensive*.)

and your earlier comment: He seems to be the sort of person who conscientiously leaves his work at work, gave me pause for thought — Carrasco might be a totally different person away from the job. All we see of not-totally-work-Carrasco is when he’s fixed Heidi’s mom’s stereo.

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There’s an interview somewhere where the series producers talk about how difficult it was to get that pelican to stay on Heidi’s desk for the duration of the credits

That's incredibly charming. (I had wondered at the time if the pelican was real or CGI, and truly hoped so, and I was so glad to see from IMDb that that was the case.)

All we see of not-totally-work-Carrasco is when he’s fixed Heidi’s mom’s stereo.

The fact that he could fix the stereo is one of the reasons telepathy wouldn't surprise me, because until that point he didn't look at all like a particularly handy person, but he knew exactly what to do with it and it worked.

[moon_custafer]

I think they said that in the podcast the pelican had been some other, rarer bird, hence the dialogue about not being able to shoo it away because of environmental regulations— but that’s also why they had to change it to a different species for tv.

I think part of my fascination with Carrasco is that he’s a subtly *odd* sort of human, once you start watching him carefully. I found another interview in which Whigham hinted he’d thought up a backstory for the character but that none of it ever comes up in the show, and he then didn’t reveal any of it. Heidi’s odd too, when you get right down to it, but I’m not sure it’s as visible to the other players in the story— though Colin is perceptive enough to manipulate her for a while— or maybe they’re normal enough people for the show’s universe.

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but that’s also why they had to change it to a different species for tv.

Good to know. I just assumed it was some kind of incredibly endangered pelican.

(I had no idea pelicans made that noise. It's a hell of a noise.)

I think part of my fascination with Carrasco is that he’s a subtly *odd* sort of human, once you start watching him carefully.

He is, but his oddnesses add up to a real person, which it is not immediately obvious that he is. You mentioned earlier that Whigham referred to the process as microsurgery and it's a great description, because Carrasco is the kind of character who if he were just a little broader would be both more familiar and less real. The thing about the bike-rack-sidewalk speech is not just that he delivers it with admirable composure for a man who just wiped out like Harold Lloyd or even the self-awareness of "I know what people think," it's that sitting there on the ground, nursing his knee, looking frustrated and silly, he says with perfect seriousness the most important thing that Gloria has heard so far from anyone connected with the Homecoming atrocity: "I don't think your son did anything wrong . . . I think something was done to him." Everyone scolds him, everyone stonewalls him, nothing actually deters him, and it doesn't make him monotonous, paradoxically it makes him unpredictable. When Colin is taunting him, for example, Colin is doing a smarmy management-bro version of whatever that classic villain monologue is called (the one which ventriloquizes all the hero's fears, I'm sure it's on TV Tropes) and Carrasco just keeps looking at him with that quizzical creased expression of his, like he's trying to make sense of the behavior while waiting out the tirade. I have no idea what he would have done if Heidi hadn't pushed Colin into the fountain. Probably just gotten back in his car and started writing up everything he could confirm from the conversation, but he also picked up a sign stand and very literally broke into the old Homecoming offices when his boss yelled at him ("Thomas, your job consists of a very simple set of finite tasks"). I love that Colin tries to invoke "man to man" misogyny to get to back off and it just doesn't work, any more than calling him a clerk gets him upset. He's at a slight angle from a lot of expected human behavior, but it was a believable one.

(Have you seen Costa-Gavras' Z (1969)? I ask for reasons that, if you have not, will be obvious from the link. I was wrong about the film noir difference, but that's what personal growth is for.)

I found another interview in which Whigham hinted he’d thought up a backstory for the character but that none of it ever comes up in the show, and he then didn’t reveal any of it.

That's excellent. And feels correct.

or maybe they’re normal enough people for the show’s universe.

No, if you look at Walter and Gloria and even Heidi's mother, I think other people in this universe are a lot closer to what we would consider non-corporate-evil-shadowy-government-functionary normal. Heidi is closer to that norm than Carrasco, I think, but they have a lot of linking elements—close-to-the-vest people with resting neutral expressions who keep their desks very neat. I was fascinated to notice in the last episode that Heidi writes left-handed and vertically. I assume that means so does Julia Roberts, but it also made sense for the character.

[moon_custafer]

(Have you seen Costa-Gavras' Z (1969)?
I have not. Adding it to the list of things I should.

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Adding it to the list of things I should.

As mentioned in comments, it suffers from the characterization of one of the assassins, but otherwise I have been thinking about rewatching it. (I finally did see Jean-Louis Trintignant in another film and it was Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970), in which he was great, but which I do not feel like rewatching any time soon.)

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Some Season 2 photos have finally been posted: https://news.otakukart.com/260407/homecoming-season-2-productions-release-date-and-spoilers/

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Some Season 2 photos have finally been posted

Whoa. I was not expecting the carryover of Stephan James. That should be interesting.