wait.
if Nandor knew that the only way to reverse the transformation was to kill the vampire that sired Guillermo...
he was going to travel the world...with his best friend...go back to his home...turn Guillermo at the banks of the Tigris
in s3 finale, after Guillermo had cornered Nandor, proving he can have violent intent towards him, Nandor says, "yes, yes. this is what I've been waiting for. you've passed the test"
but he wasn't talking about being a vampire...
he was talking about what he would have to do after...
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So I've only watched 2.1, 2.2., and 2.3 once each so far, but I can already tell the music choices are going to wreck me this season. I figure lots of people will have things to say about the use of Kate Bush in 2.3, so I want to focus on the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony #7 in 2.2, "Red Flags."
First, this movement has been a banger since it existed: at its first performance, the audience demanded that the second movement be repeated after the symphony concluded. It's a funeral march, and per the notes accompanying the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie of Bremen's gorgeous recording, it was likely heard as responding to collective grief:
The premiere performance of Beethoven's Seventh was at a benefit concert in Vienna in December 1813 for wounded soldiers and their families. It came only two months after the Battle of Nations near Leipzig. The German name is "Völkerschlacht" (Slaughter of the Peoples), one of the most catastrophic wartime events in human history. It also marked the liberation from Napoleon's forces. The sad, beautiful quality of this piece makes it very different from the other three movements of Beethoven's Seventh. Endlessly mournful – but also uplifting, it is still played at funerals today.
For those of us who were in music school at a certain point in history, it is also the soundtrack for characters experiencing suicidal ideation, courtesy of the 1994 film Immortal Beloved.
Its use underpinning the conversation between Ed and Izzy is self-explanatory: Ed's way of expressing self-loathing is to goad the people around him to hurt him. He feels a kind of ambivalence toward his own life that we saw last in OFMD's pilot, where Stede cannot firmly answer Oluwande's question, "Do you want to live?!"
But we hear the first notes of Beethoven before that scene ever begins.
That the music begins here, rather than when Ed enters the hold to press Izzy into killing him, highlights as much as anything we've seen so far how traumatized Lucius is: not just by being pushed overboard, but by all the trafficking and abuse he experienced before encountering his former crewmates, which he barely starts to detail in this episode. "If I start, I don't know what's going to come out." The stories Lucius shares may have an over-the-top quality, but they're scored like tragedy.
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