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[llywela]

Rome 2.06 – The One with the Picnic of Assassination

Whoa. Talk about intense – and bloody! Such an episode, a real return to season one form.

The whole of one political faction got wiped out in pretty much one fell swoop. That makes me sad. I shall miss Cicero, Brutus and Cassius. Cicero especially. None of their on-screen deaths remotely resembled what actually happened to them in real life, mind, although Cicero's bugged me the most. But the dramatic license was employed to excellent effect.

Octavian and Mark Antony working together made me all uneasy. Probably because I know it won't last. Practically every character on this show is going to come to a very sticky end sooner or later – this episode certainly proved that, even if history hadn't already told us! That list of enemies drawn up and dispatched for assassination was an excellent demonstration of the brutal politics being played in those turbulent times. Forget electioneering, or any semblance of democracy – opponents were just slaughtered, and their wealth confiscated to pay for the war effort. Roman versus Roman in the worst possible way, civil war in all but name.

I'm a little confused, though. In the last episode we were told that Octavian had four legions, Antony had 11, and Brutus and Cassius between them had 20. But then in this episode, Octavian and Antony's combined forces had risen to 19 legions, while Brutus and Cassius's had dwindled to 14. And this was never explained. Hmm.

Anyway. Wholesale slaughter was the result, with Vorenus and Pullo at the centre of the domestic side of it, as the Aventine collegia crimelords tasked with seeing that the assassinations were carried out. Pullo's assassination of Cicero was the most painful part of the episode, I think – so hard to watch, on both sides. Cicero so dignified, and Pullo so respectful and yet so blasé about it. Just a job, for him, and violence is his trade. Amazing to think that those two had been leading characters in this show for a season and a half, and this was the first time they ever met. The social divide is for the most part strictly enforced, and I like that the show feels no compulsion to bring all its characters together.

I did have a moment of being thrown out of the story, though, when Cicero's slave came running to say that he'd heard from someone in Antony's camp. I mean, this was 2000 years before the invention of the telephone, so how exactly did he manage that? What he meant was that they'd received word from Antony's camp.

Only Pullo could be given an assassination job and decide to make a day of it for the entire family. Picnic, with a side of assassination. It says so much about the mores of the time that neither he nor Vorenus should bat an eyelid over that. And with Pullo starting to feel restless once more, uncertain of his place in the world as a civilian and making Eirene insecure along with him, at least until he announced her 'preglancy', Vorenus in contrast is happier now than we've seen him all season, with his family restored to him and beginning to settle into a routine of daily life once more.

The Vorenii will never again be as they once were. Too much has happened. But it warms the cockles of my heart to see Vorenus playing with little Lucius as if all the death and betrayal never happened, accepting the child completely as part of his family. He was absolutely right when he told Pullo that honour demanded the child's death, and it says a lot about Vorenus that he not only couldn't bring himself to do it, but is so genuinely fond of the child in spite of everything, when you consider how much his honour means to him.

Making things right with his daughters, the older Vorena especially, will be a much harder task, though. That girl has suffered a lot, and has enough of her father in her to bear that grudge a long way. She's a lot like Niobe in other respects, though. It's so typical of the repressed Vorenus that his harsh insistence on keeping her with him is his way of trying to protect her, unable to actually express his feelings to her face. He agrees with Lyde that she should be married, deserves the chance to be happy, but is convinced that after everything that's happened to her they could never find her a suitable husband, and thus he would rather provide for her himself than see her married unhappily. It's sweet, in a Vorenus kind of way, because he's so emotionally stunted.

And all that kind of makes Vorena the Elder the perfect target for whatever Memmio is plotting against her father. Only time will tell – we'll have to keep a sharp eye on developments.

Only four episodes left :(


Life on Mars 2.02 – The One with the Bent Super

The theme of this episode? Mentors and their protégées, fathers and sons: making one another proud, and being disappointed. It's always been kind of an epic theme, down the ages – Woolf said something about along those lines within the episode itself, how the son must kill the father in order to take his place, metaphorically speaking.

We'd already been introduced to Gene's mentor, Superintendent Harry Woolf, in the previous episode, and he was back for what was no doubt his final appearance in this. So, as the contrast, this episode also presented us with Sam's mentor, Glen Fletcher – arriving as a nervous temporary new recruit to the team just as Sam learns of his premature death back in the modern world. Thus, as Gene is desperate to please his mentor, only to be bitterly disappointed by him and yet still rise to the occasion as the better man Woolf once taught him to be, so Sam learns that his own was not always the man he respected so much, and finds himself in the reverse role of becoming a mentor to his own mentor, helping to shape the man who will later shape him. Kind of a brain-twister, that one. It works fabulously well.

Sam's surreal psychotic moments of connection with the modern world, his 'coma' moments, were notably absent from this episode, other than that one brief incident in which he learned of Fletcher's death via a billboard and newspaper headline and his later flashforward from young Fletcher to his older self. Symbolic of Sam having learned how to play the game, getting on with the life he finds himself living, even if he still doesn't understand how or why? Possibly. But then we have that phone call he made at the end of the episode, calling the Hyde number he traced the bizarre calls he keeps getting to in the last episode, and being told not to call there again. He isn't allowed to make contact that way – why should two-way communication be such a bad thing? The whole coma theory comes into question, and firm conclusions become harder than ever to draw. Fantastically enigmatic, this show.


Life on Mars 2.03 – The One with the Judgement Call

I had planned to watch week by week on the Beeb so I could digest each episode at a time, nice and slow, ignoring the BBC4 airing of a second episode every week. But then the announcer said that there wasn't to be a new episode next week, due to the football, so I caved and turned over to watch a second episode in a row.

Judgement was the theme of this episode, from start to finish. And the surreal was back, with Sam being visited by the test card girl for the first time this season – played by a new child actress, but every bit as creepy as she's ever been – and receiving messages via TV and radio once more. It sounds as though the experts are disagreeing over what's going on in Sam's head, regardless of whether he's in a coma or something more sinister is going on. One believes that there is no way he can recover without significant brain damage, while the other sees no reason why his cognitive and decision-making skills should suffer any ill-effect, whatever his current condition.

How's your judgement, Sam?

Well, based on the rollercoaster he rides in this episode, Sam's judgement is pretty much what it's always been. He's very good at his job, but tends toward overconfidence at times, especially with regard to the less highly trained officers he finds himself working with. He's as capable of making good or bad decisions as anyone else, and does both in this episode, in which his biggest problem is the self-doubt that surreal overheard conversation has awoken in him. He was right that the bombs were not IRA, but in his determination to impress his knowledge of the IRA's activity in this period upon everyone else, he failed to take other options into consideration – such as that the bomb threat could very easily be valid, just not IRA. And so it proved. Sam was right that the bomb wasn't IRA, but wrong in his belief that there was no bomb, and Ray got hurt as a result.

Whether the trauma of being blown up will continue to affect Ray in future episodes, or all will be back to normal in no time remains to be seen. But his injury brought Sam's continuing isolation from the rest of the team into sharp relief once more, and that after the lesson in teamwork Sam learnt in 2.01. He has more respect for his 1973 colleagues these days, but he still holds himself apart from them in many ways. And that was highlighted also by Annie's changing character dynamic. Sam brought her into the CID team, and thus she has become a part of that team, no longer the friend outside CID for him to turn to when he needs support.

She came through for him, though. Annie has been a really good friend to Sam over the course of the show, whether he deserved such loyalty or not. And, with his final judgement call being proved to be so completely spot on, his place within the team was restored to solid ground, after seeming so precarious earlier in the episode. Test passed – but that latest phone call suggests that there's a lot more still to come.