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ksuew · 3 years

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The Rookie 4x01 Life and Death Recap ****Spoiler city****

I promised a friend a recap, since she can’t watch until tomorrow, so I figured I might as well post it for anyone who wants to see it? I never can figure out a read more break on mobile so fair warning, DON’T LOOK IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS 😁

This is just a rough draft thing, so it’s probably full of typos.

@hamburgerheroes @piratesbooty63fan

Phew… crazy first episode. Unfortunately I was fielding calls and texts about a work issue the whole time so my viewing was very disjointed. So I’m rewatching as I type this recap for you.

The episode is preceded with a recap, of course. Then the opening scene is Chen, Bradford, Nolan, and Harper in tactical gear approaching a warehouse.

While waiting for the go order from Grey, grey has flashbacks of a few hours earlier. They realize Lopez and West are both missing, they find out La Fiera has escaped and assume she took them, then they get security footage of the kidnapping and are watching it at the station, still in their wedding attire. As we suspected. The footage shows Lopez being put in a vehicle and West struggling, then shot in the back, then stuffed into the trunk. Everyone is in shock, Lucy is crying.

Lots of fans are really upset about Jackson, and I get it. But the show runner and writers had no choice. Here’s excerpts from an interview with Alexi

At this point, we’re back to Grey a different officer wants to wait, but Grey says it’s been 3 hours and they need to move fast and orders them in.

They breach the warehouse, find an empty get away car and Angela’s wedding dress on the floor. Lucy moves to pick it up, Nolan stops her, there is a trip wire to explosives under the SUV. They leave the warehouse and realize they had a plane waiting there from the tracks it left.

Next we see La Fiera, Angela, and her female goon in the airplane. Angela assumes they’re going to Guatemala so she can torture and kill her slowly, but La Fiera tells her (as we suspected) that she’ll be kept alive until Angela safely delivers her (La Fiera’s) baby (of course)

Next Grey and Wesley are meeting with a DEA bigwig who essentially says, we ain’t helping. Next they arrive in the compound in Guatemala and talk about how impenetrable it is, etc. She meets the doctor who will be attending her. Angela tries to tell the doctor not to touch her and La Fiera says if she resists she will be sedated for the rest of the pregnancy.

Back at the station Lucy is talking with Nolan, beating herself up about not seeing the trip wire. She’s really just upset about Jackson, she says she can’t believe he’s gone and she and Nolan hold hand for a moment.

Tim and Harper join them and discuss if Lopez is still alive and why. Lucy comes up with the theory that La Fiera wants Angela’s baby as the ultimate revenge. Grey tells them the DEA won’t help. They talk about how Jackson scratched his killer and they’re running DNA. Grey tells them all to go home and get some rest while they work on a plan. ***Chenford alert***

Lucy says she can’t go home and see Jackson’s empty room. Tim says, “you don’t have to, you can stay with me”

Dying!

She says she doesn’t want to impose and this is where he says she shouldn’t be alone right now. She says thanks, he says yeah, then she wonders how Wesley is holding up.

Cut to Wesley meeting with some bad guy and offering to turn dirty lawyer in exchange for finding out where Angela is. I do not like this development and what it can/will do to them in the future.

Cut to a short, weird interaction with Lopez and the female bodyguard then, back to Chenford.

We see Tim in his jammies, setting up his couch to sleep on. The house looks different than I remember it and surely it has at least 2 bedrooms, so why the couch 🤷🏻‍♀️. Anyway. He looks adorable in his jammies. He says, “I’ll take the couch”. Lucy walks out of presumably his bedroom and says she thought he was setting up the couch for her. He says he’s not going to have a guest sleep on the couch and she says she’s not going to kick him out of his bed. He says okay, gets up. Looks a bit awkward, a bit nervous. Asks her if she needs anything. She says “the last 24 hours back”, he says he doesn’t have that power. She says, “a hug” and he says, “yeah. Come here” in a soft voice that nearly made me combust! He hugs her. As they go to part things get all UST, he croaks out “night”, can’t quite meet her eyes. Meanwhile she’s definitely got the “realization” light bulb starting to go off slowly. Still a bit confused. He goes to his room and flops into bed. Obviously affected by what just happened. she is the same out on the couch. Fidgety with nervous energy. He looks toward the door like he’s about to go back out there to her, say something more (do something more?) she looks toward his door from the couch, obviously contemplating same. Back to him purposefully looking away from the door, back to her making her decision. She’s pushing the covers off about to go to his door, when his door suddenly opens. He’s on the phone saying “yeah, okay, we’ll be right there”. She tries to pretend she wasn’t already up and moving toward the door. He says Wesley knows where Angela is and they head into the station.

Oh man, it was sooo gooood!!!

Next it’s the Wesley telling them that he knows where they’re holding Angela. They all say they want to help, but Grey says how’re we gonna do that . They bring up “Max” the covert government guy from the counterfeit money case. Grey says fine, reach out. He tasks Tim, Harper, and John to start tactical plan and says Lucy will stay with him to run the murder case. Then he takes a moment to congratulate Nolan on officially becoming a P2. They get the DNA back, the killer is a 17 year old kid.

Government guy shows up at Nolan’s they coerce him into helping. They go to Guatemala separately from Wesley who is supposed to get a meeting with La Fiera without getting killed. Nyla and Tim look hot playing with military surveillance toys while John steals the plans to La Fiera’s compound from the architect.

Lucy and Grey go after the killer. Grey has a really great scene after cornering the killer and he and Lucy take him in.

Back at the compound Wesley gets to see Angela. John tells Nyla and Tim that he has the plans and there’s a weakness, but the drone shows that the weakness has been fixed so they have to go to plan B. Nyla does not like plan B!

Cut to a very sad scene of Lucy finally going home and looking at Jackson’s room as he left it. Tim calls, says they’re going to plan B. Lucy, as well, does not like plan B. She says to give her a minute to get set up. Tim then radios government guy Max, who also does not like plan B. They decide on a different extraction point and he reminds them if they aren’t there at the agreed upon time they will be left behind.

They alert Wesley with fireworks. Turns out plan B is him injecting Angela with pitocin to start contractions so that they’ll have to transport her out of the compound to the hospital. Nyla will have a drug to counterreact the pitocin at the hospital.

Unfortunately, they separate Angela and Wesley. He’s put in a different car to take him away and kill him so Nolan goes after Wesley while Tim and Nyla get set up at the hospital. Lucy is tapped into a satellite giving them info on the vehicles, etc. Tim says, thanks, we got it from here”. Lucy says, “Tim”, the tension clear in her voice. “Please be careful”. With more significance than just one officer to another. He’s in business mode and replies, “I always am”.

Bradford and Harper ambush LaFiera et al. Angela gets into the hospital with Tim and Nyla and gives Angela the reversal shot. As they make their escape to the helicopter LaFiera follows and fires on them, grazing Angela’s leg, she turns and shoots La Fiera, killing her. They make it to the chopper, tell Max they need to get Wesley and Nolan, he says no, they all point their guns at him and he decides to make the stop.

Wesley and Nolan fight their two bad guys (Nolan simply must save the day in each episode). They make it to the chopper, everyone is safe and they get the hell out of dodge.

Then, the time jump. It’s 3 months later and Angela and Wesley are arriving home from the hospital with their son to a surprise welcome home party with Grey, Nolan, Harper, and Chen. They’ve stocked their freezer and bought them a second freezer and stocked that too. Tim is happy and relaxed. Lucy is a bit overly cheerful, it’s obviously a bit forced. She and Nyla present Angela with a basket full of teas and herbs and cookies tailored to uterine health and breast milk production (as she would). Nyla admits that it was all Lucy when she walks away. That it was good for Lucy to concentrate on something positive. This makes Angela turn a bit sad and reflective. The show ends with Angela holding her baby and standing at Jackson’s grave updating him on her life and how she misses him and hopes by the time her leave is over that she’ll be able to face the station without him in it. She then reveals (again, as we suspected) that her baby’s name is Jackson😢

#the Rookie #the Rookie abc #the Rookie spoilers #the rookie 4x01 #Lucy Chen #tim bradford #john nolan #Jackson west #sergeant grey #Wesley Evers #chenford #chenford spoilers

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chronicbatfictioner · 3 years

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"Overall, it wasn't so bad..." Tim commented.

"Except for the fact that Bane roared like a constipated bear and literally lunged at Damian and Jason threw him out the window..." Barbara quipped, her face serious but her lips were still twitching. "I... am highly amused. Twice."

"You were laughing until you bent over double that if you weren't in a wheelchair, you've probably knelt on the floor laughing." Dinah deadpanned. "It was hilarious."

"Yes, it was. The fact that Jason could actually lift Bane and throw him out... Did you guys see Bruce's face, though! Oh my god! He... he looked at Jason as if he'd seen the lord savior Jésus Todd or something!" Tim crowed. "Like, the dude Bane got thrown out a bay window twice. I get the awe, I was a little star-struck myself. But I can't believe dude actually wanted to try the third time until Alfred pointed a damn shotgun to his forehead! I can't even!"

"This thus solidifies my thoughts that the Waynes may be trying to figure out a way to get rid of this... brute without... I dunno..." Barbara pondered.

"Gotten themselves broken in half?" Tim suggested. "He sure insinuated that he would do such a thing to Damian."

"Oh, gee, Tim. Which part of his speech insinuated that? 'You lying bastard!', or 'I'll break you in halves!'?"

"I'm partial to the 'bastard' remark, really. I mean, pot, kettle?" Tim replied, giggling.

"Technically," Helena Bertinelli - The Huntress - sighed as she chimed in; "and ironically, at that; the 'bastard' would be Bane since he claimed to be Thomas Wayne's son and is younger than Bruce. Which means he was 'conceived' while Dr Thomas was already married to Mrs Wayne..."

"Right? Bruce and Talia were two consenting adults, albeit under 20 years old; and were wed in a local ritual witnessed by locals, according to Jason. You should see Bane's face when Jason presented copies of the marriage's registry." Tim continued.

"Oh, we saw, all right. Harper's drones worked quite well." Dinah replied, snickering, referring to Harper Row, one of their tech 'consultants'. "Even at that height, it still delivered crystal clear pictures. I vote we use them again."

"No vote needed, the drones are on stand-by at the Wayne Manor permanently at this point. I'm more interested in his reaction when Damian offered them a DNA test." Barbara told her.

"I'm more interested in Bruce Wayne's reaction, really. He didn't seem too surprised, as if he was expecting this to happen or something." Helena pointed out.

"Maybe he did," Barbara replied absently. "Dude has been swingin' more than the roarin' 50s, there has got to be some juniors out there that even he��didn't know of."

"Ugh, while I'm not a fan of Bruce Wayne's womanizing ways, I personally don't think he's that reckless. He's not a drinker or a junkie, as far as I know. He has virtually no vice other than extreme sports." Helena argued.

"I agree," Selina, who has been quietly watching from the corner, chimed in. "This is a guy who got visibly antsy when some sexy girls in bikinis come up to him - I thought he was gay. But if he'd been... wedded to Talia Al Ghul all these times, that would make sense. He knew exactly where he stood, and what would come up if he screwed it up."

"Has Jason or Dick said anything of the Doc and Mama Wayne's reaction?" Helena asked.

"They seemed truly confused, a little apprehensive, but didn't seem to be opposed to the idea that Damian is Bruce's child. Dr Wayne said that a DNA test wouldn't be necessary, but Jason insisted it." Tim replied, and added a little absently a few heartbeats later. "But why would he, a physician with more specialties than a truck stop, would not question the biology of anyone claiming to be his biological descendant?"

Barbara glared at Tim, "excellent question, Tim. If my dad has someone coming out of the boonies saying he's related to me, the first thing dad would do is draw blood."

"They... don't care?" Dinah suggested. "Maybe the Wayne men were less... chaste than they appear?"

Barbara glared at her this time. "Of all the women Bruce Wayne has dated, I've only recorded a handful who would end up in a second date. Less than a handful who were actually mentioned beyond social media photos; and you know how I feel with social media photos: generic, unverifiable, and showoff-only. Dates with Bruce Wayne generally would start with the pick-up, dinner, and then some form of jewelry. I..." she looked at Selina and Helena, "you've both dated him at one point or the other."

Selina shrugged, "I went for a gala dinner, and was honestly there to scope the homeowner's safe, really. I wasn't interested in a follow-up date." she replied. "Helena?"

"Social arrangement. My people called his people and boom, we were on a red carpet." she elaborated. Helena was a part of a mafia family, until she decided that the mafia way would not be the best way to make Gotham a happy place for all, and donned the costume of the Huntress to hunt down wrongdoers. Barbara had decided to let her join to prevent her from going over the line and murder anyone out of overzealous-ness; but also in order to get a line-in into the mafia families.

"No second dates, either, huh?"

"No, I'll have to check, though. I think his people called me again, but I wasn't interested in a vapid playboy, even if he has more money than Jesus."

"Vicky Vale," Selina reminded. "She has had a... somewhat lengthy relationship with Bruce some years ago."

"Sooo... the next answer in our mystery could probably be answered by interviewing an investigative journalist." Tim commented.

"Oh, no..." Barbara grinned mischievously. "Not this investigative journalist. I know just the journalist to talk to when it comes to gossip among themselves."

Dinah snorted a laugh. "I thought you didn't like her."

"I liked Vale less," Barbara griped. "Plus, Vale is already getting news on Bruce's probable child; why shouldn't I send Lois Lane the allegations of the Bane Conspiracy?"

"Conspiracy with who?" Dinah asked curiously.

"Oh, the Waynes, of course, to get rid of the Court of Owls," Barbara smirked. "Why should we be the only ones racking our respective and collective brains when we can have someone else on the ground doing the grunt work?"

"Babs, you can be... pretty evil sometimes," Selina remarked. "I know there's got to be a reason why I like you."

"I'm also awesome with technology and can launder your ill-gotten money and make it legal and undetected." Barbara pointed out.

"Oh no, that's why I liked you." Helena quipped smirking. "Seriously, how many mob family can say their ill-gotten money is accountable by law?"

"As long as it is within the facets of the law, and so on and so forth... Anyway! Tim, you're quiet for more than two seconds. I'm always nervous when you're quiet."

"Just thinking..." Tim said, looking a little lost in his own brain. He often does that when he has at least a dozen scenarios running through his mind. Through the time of Barbara knowing him, Tim would probably be the only person whose claims of 'just thinking' wouldn't immediately be picked on by anybody.

"Care to share with the class, kitten?" Selina prompted.

"It's not fully mapped yet... but I was thinking. What if the Waynes aren't... didn't cooperate with Bane in order to destroy the Court of Owls, and they're literally being hostages in their own home? What if Bruce Wayne has predicted something like this could happen, and has gotten himself all prepared all the way to ten years ago when he wedded Talia Al Ghul? I mean, who would have had enough firepower to defeat Bane other than the Al Ghuls? Look at Jason," Tim pointed out. "He threw Bane out the window as if he was a fly. While Jason is as solid as a rock but isn't a metahuman - Bane is. He was assigned by Talia herself - out of Gotham - to protect and guide Damian-- why? What's so special about Jason Todd? Why did Talia choose him? Why didn't Bruce Wayne - at least - act shocked when Damian said he was his son? Surprised, sure. But not shocked or in denial.

"Who's gonna win if Bane turned out to be Dr Wayne's son? Who's gonna lose? What will they lose? Who is Bane accountable to? If none, who planted the idea of him being Dr Wayne's son? Because from what I've read about him, he was born and raised in a prison with his mother - no mention of a father. His mother was an insurgent of Hasaragua, fighting against US-condoned democracy. And while there was a record of Dr Wayne being there, there was no exact date and length of stay, because he was there privately and not as a part of Médecin sans Frontieres or something like that.

"What about Mrs Wayne? She wasn't a poor or uneducated woman, since she was a Kane. Society-wise, do you think she would have tolerated her husband's indiscretion, both then and now? Yet she kept quiet for nearly two months. She has a Ph.D. in psychiatry, and would she be the ones to keep quiet about DNA testing and all that? Personally, I don't think so. If my mother - a little 'lesser' society lady compared to Martha Kane-Wayne - ever got a word of a child that 'probably' got fathered by my dad, she would have demanded a divorce right away without bothering with a paternity test, sure. But my dad, who was also a society man, would have at least attempted to convince her that it was a mistake and/or it was a lie. What best method to decide a child's paternity than DNA test?

"The criminal front in general - especially the costumed criminals - has been pretty quiet since Bane eliminated the Court of Owls. Why? That's rather stupid since we know that the Court's Talons were the ones who made moves to 'discourage' the costumed freaks. Annnd... that's where I couldn't map out things further." Tim rambled.

"Keep talking, even half sentences are better than none, Timmy." Barbara prompted. Tim might have had a brain that worked a mile a minute, but he was still very young and would often get flustered with himself. Barbara, on the other hand, has an eidetic memory, and things Tim said tend to stick to her brain and would fill the gaps in any puzzles she might be thinking about. Even half sentences.

"Right, I do the fact spreads, you do the jigsaw-puzzling." Tim nodded. "The murders of Talia and Ra's Al Ghul. Jason said they were deliberately murdered in a way that they would never be able to be resurrected through the Lazarus Pit. The perpetrators would be the League of Shadows, a rogue splinter of the League of Assassins. Lead by Lady Shiva. Why? Why were they murdered? Why now and not - say - next year or last year? Who benefited by their death? Aaand... I'm done, for now, I think..."

"I... can feel a headache brewing," Dinah admitted. "You and your conspiracy theories." she rubbed Tim's head fondly. Tim gave her a half-smile, still trying to articulate the thoughts in his head.

"That's why we need him, he takes the most random input and makes a theory out of it, and some of them would actually make sense. I'll start a search string based on some of your questions. If you have more, don't hesitate to tell me, Tim." Barbara realized belatedly that her tone sounded dismissive, and turned to Tim. "Want me to call up for Chinese and powwow a little more?" she added.

Tim shook his head, still glaring blankly. "Thanks, I gotta go... I've some... things to look into. Thanks, Babs," he replied, ending it with a genuine smile as he got up.

"Want to come home with me, Kitten?" Selina asked, worry for Tim apparent on her normally-blank face.

"No, thanks, Ma. I gotta go back to the mansion, just in case, right?" Tim pointed out.

"Then Dinah should go with you," Selina decided.

"She's coming there later, right, aunt Dinah?" Tim asked. Dinah nodded.

"I'll get home with food, so don't worry about that, kiddo." she said. Tim waved them all and then walked out.

Once he was out of the door, Selina sighed. "Ah, young love..."

"Right? Remind me to check in on him before going to the House. I don't want to walk in on something and have him traumatized." Dinah agreed.

Barbara glared at them quizzically, and then at Helena, who shrugged. "Grayson said it first, I think. Our kitten is growing up. I just hope that Jason guy is worth his firsts..."

The memory of Tim gawking at Jason when he thought Barbara wasn't watching flashed in her mind.

Oh.

And then of Jason blatantly checking Tim out just before Oracle made her appearance, and at times when her Oracle projection was turned off.

"Oh boy," she sighed.

"That's about it in a nutshell. Good thing I've told him of the birds and the birds..." Selina grinned slyly.

"Millennial parenting at best, Ms Selina Kyle." Dinah grinned. "Come on, let's go patrol and induce the fear of goddesses to Gotham's low-lives before inducing maternal fear to our little kitten."

"...or to the big tabby. We'll see," Selina added, waving as she and Dinah walked out of the room.

Suddenly Barbara felt a little sorry for Jason. Just a tiny, teensy, weensy bit of sorry.

#Batless!AU #jaytim #Jason Todd #Tim Drake #Barbara Gordon #Selina Kyle #Helena Bertinelli #Dinah Drake #Oracle

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noodlecupcakeswritings · 4 years

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Undercover - Chapter 11 (A LokixRaven AU)

Loki won the battle of New York and now rules over Earth after eliminating Thor and Hawkeye. The remaining Avengers have gone into hiding, waiting for a chance to take back their planet. Raven (OC) is their key to doing so.

This fic is pretty much porn and with this AU Raven and Loki have no previous history.

Please leave comments, kudos and reblogs if you like it. It really helps me out as a writer, lemme know if you wanna be on the taglist as well :)

Warnings: Language, Romance, Fluff, Feels, Discussion of self harm/scars, Discussion of abuse, Implied murder.

Ravens dress reference

Chapter 11

Raven’s P.O.V

Loki had done nothing but shower me in gifts and affection since I’d ‘accepted’ his apology. It was almost sickening how sweet he was being. Of course I would never actually forgive him for what he had done to me, but I would take full advantage of him making it up to me. It was one of my nights tonight and perhaps I’d do something nice for him. Perhaps it was time to stop acting like an ice queen, after all I still had a job to do. Speaking of job to do, Collins and I were in the library trying to get through to Fury. Collins had managed to sneak a phone in here when he’d arrived. “Agent Harper, report,” came Fury’s voice through on the loudspeaker. What did I actually have to report? What information did I have? What progress had I made? I couldn’t say nothing but honestly there wasn’t much to report. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t taking this seriously or that I wasn’t trying hard enough.

“Well, he seems to be trusting me so far,” I explained. “How so?” “There was an…incident. He wanted to make it up to me so now I’m spending two nights a week with him instead of one.” “Incident?” He sounded concerned. “Forgive me sir but it’s not something I really want to go into great detail with you.” “Right. So long as you’re okay, Harper.” “I’m fine, thank you, sir.” “So long as your making progress that’s the main thing.” “Of course. I’ve memorized the layout of the palace and drawn maps. However, theres a network of secret passageways that I need to explore further.” “Just be careful-“ “I know the risks director.”

If I got caught, this mission would be over and so would my life. Loki wouldn’t hesitate to kill a spy. But I needed to explore those passageways, it might lead to a secret entrance. It could be the way in that the remaining Avengers needed. It would make more sense for Collins to explore the tunnels, he wasent under as much scrutiny as I was. If I went missing for hours, Loki would know about it and look for me. Collins, not so much. Besides, Collins’ role required him to be in the library and Loki happened to have a secret doorway in the library. The door to the library opened and Collins quickly ended the call before shoving the phone in a desk drawer.

I grabbed a book, pretending to study the back cover as Loki stepped further into the room. My heart rate had picked up, panic slowly starting to creep in. That had been a little too close. And even now we could still be caught. Glancing up from my book, I forced a soft smile at Loki. It was odd to see him outside of the hours we were scheduled to spend together. “There you are, I've been looking all over for you,” Loki spoke, a hint of relief in his voice. “I wanted some new reading material,” I explained. Loki glanced at the book in my hands, studying the title before a soft smirk grew across his face. “You didn’t strike me as the type to enjoy romance novels,” he remarked.

For the first time since picking up the book, my brain finally registered just what I had actually picked up. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Definitely not my taste. “It’s a classic,” I explained. “So I've been told.” Stepping closer, he took the book from my hands only to discard it on the desk behind me. I felt a little cornered by him, my fight or flight mode was going to start kicking in if he wasn’t careful. Leaning down, Loki pressed soft kisses to my neck. My body relaxed under his touch but my mind was still on high alert. Thankfully Collins had busied himself a little deeper into the masses of books to avoid the slight public display of affection. “Would you join me for dinner tonight?” Loki asked.

Dinner? This struck me as odd. The other slaves dined alone, as did Loki. Almost as if it were an unofficial rule of sorts. I suppose there would be no harm in it, perhaps it would allow us to ‘get closer’. “Sure,” I answered. “Shall we say seven pm? Outside in the palace gardens?” “Sounds good to me.” It didn’t, it meant I had to spend more time with him tonight. I had to sit across from him and listen to him drone on about god knows what. The thought almost made me roll my eyes, but I refrained from showing my distaste. Loki leaned down, kissing me softly and running his fingers through my hair. He exited the library mentioning that he would start making preparations. The second I heard the door close behind I relaxed physically, almost as if I had been holding my breath. I could make it through an extra two hours with him. I had too.

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The dress I settled on was black and simple. Long sleeved with a floral pattern and backless. The dress started at the length of my neck and ended below my knees. A bra wouldn’t be necessary with this dress. My hair was loosely curled, and I went for a more neutral makeup look. It felt odd not picking out some kind of purse, that was a must have accessory for any woman. But I didn’t exactly have a phone, cash or makeup to carry around with me, so it wasn’t a necessity. Glancing at myself in the mirror, I adjusted my dress and put a lock of hair in place before leaving my room. It felt odd not having him come and collect me or meet me, yet it was giving me more freedom. Meaning he must be trusting me more. His mistake.

I reached the gardens finding candles arranged like a pathway, leading me further into the greenery. After turning a corner it became obvious that the candles led to the beautiful, vintage styled gazebo. The gazebo had been decorated with more candles and all sorts of flowers. Roses were intertwined together in the walls of the gazebo. It was quite the sight and gesture. Perhaps if things had been different between us, I would have gotten a bit flustered over the sight. It was beautiful, it was like something out of a fairy tale. I climbed the three steps to find a table fully decorated with more candles and flowers. Loki really had been paying attention when I’d shown him my sketch book, all the flowers I’d sketched had been brought into the gazebo. All different types and all different colours. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had paid this much attention to me or had done something so thoughtful. Perhaps I could…no, no I couldn’t forgive him for him.

Loki was dressed in another black three-piece suit, one that fitted him perfectly. The only speck of colour from him was the emerald green of his eyes which were currently taking in every inch of my outfit. He looked almost dazed or perhaps entranced. “You look beautiful,” Loki complimented. He didn’t stop there though as he took my hand in his and pressed his lips to the back of it. Someone was really turning up the gentleman charm tonight. I wanted to give into it, I wanted to revel in his attention and affection, but it would be wrong. We took our places at the table, the first course already laid out. Cheese souffle with a little salad. Whilst I didn’t mind the fancy food there were times, I missed takeout food, like burgers or pizza. Conversation felt awkward, perhaps it was due to the intimacy of this situation. Normally it was just sex, nothing else.

I couldn’t help but notice how Loki kept glancing at my bare hands. I suppose it would be odd seeing me without gloves for a change, but with the long sleeves of the dress, gloves wouldn’t be necessary. When he’d seen them, he hadn't asked about them like most people would have. Even after that he still hadn't asked. I could tell he wanted too, curiosity was natural to people and scars tend to have a story behind them. My scars did indeed have a story behind them, a long, tragic story. One I didn’t like to revisit often. Yet if I showed my vulnerable side maybe it would help speed along the mission. Or, he’d be disgusted with me and kick me out. It was a gamble. But tonight I was feeling a little lucky. “You can ask about them if you want,” I spoke. Loki raised a brow at me, acting dumb, acting like I hadn't caught him staring. It wasn’t a good look for him.

“My arms. I know you saw them down in that room. And you haven’t stopped staring at my hands tonight because I’m not wearing gloves,” I explained. “Is it something you would be comfortable sharing?” “I wouldn’t have mentioned them if it wasn’t.” “Raven, I understand its likely a sensitive subject, otherwise you wouldn’t have worked so hard to cover them all the time. I also understand that our relationship isn't…normal. I would understand if I wasn’t someone you felt comfortable to confide in.” Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow. I hadn't expected him to treat this so delicately, so respectfully. This night really was taking an unexpected turn. Finishing off my souffle I considered that maybe Loki had made an honest mistake that day, maybe he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Maybe I should start being nicer to him, maybe I should accept his apology finally. Not just for the mission but for myself. My old therapist had once told me it would do me no good to hold grudges. “The ones on my arms were mostly self-inflicted. It was my form of a coping mechanism when I needed to feel something or when the pain just got too much. I know you’ve probably seen the other ones across my thighs.” I started. Loki hung on every single word, listening intently and without an ounce of judgement. I paused as our plates were taken from us and replaced with the main course. Beef brisket with new potatoes and vegetables. Loki didn’t make a start on his meal, instead all his attention was still on me. Now came the hard part, inhaling deeply I internally prepared myself. “The ones across my back…my father made those. He used to beat me as a kid, he’d beat my mother too. One night I guess maybe he’d drank more than usual, had a worse day at work than usual but he beat my mother to death,” I continued.

Reaching across the table Loki took my hand in his, his touch tender and comforting. His thumb rubbed across my knuckles as if offering comfort, as if he wanted to soothe my pain. I welcomed the comfort; a lump having formed in my throat making it difficult to continue. But he had to know, he had to know why I was like this. “You have to understand what I did was in self-defence. If I hadn't…” I trailed off, my voice cracking as I fought off tears. Something snapped in Loki, I saw it in his eyes as he rose from the table. He came around to me, taking my hands in his. “I promise you that nobody will ever harm you ever again. So long as you are in my care nobody will lay a finger on you,” Loki vowed. In that moment, I believed him. In that moment, I was able to forgive him.

Taglist: @sweetfictionalworld, @therealityhelix, @darkprincessloki92, @skulliebythesea, @fizzyxcustard, @myownviperroom, @jana-banana-fana,

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travllingbunny · 5 years

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The 100 rewatch: 4x04 A Lie Guarded

This episode has some interesting moments, mostly those where characters have morality debates and try to be a moral compass and make the other question the approach they’ve chosen: Kane to Octavia – for getting too prone to violence and murder; Monty (and kind of Jasper) to Clarke – for maybe going too far in trying to act according to the Big Picture and Head over Heart principle and becoming more like the Ark leadership that they all used to hate; in order to save people; Raven and Nyko to Luna – for again almost opting to stay away and not help save people.

It also kills of one of my favorite minor characters, has a minor fake-out death of a secondary character, and a big fake-out death of a main character, and escalates hostilities between two groups of people again.

It’s one of the weaker episodes of the season, because it has a few things that really don’t make sense, including two instances of character behavior that is clearly plot-driven, and one instance of extreme Plot Armor.

According to a tweet from one of the staff (thanks, The 100 wiki), the title comes from the quote “An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded." It doesn’t say who it comes from, though Google says it’s by Alexander Pope. This clearly refers to the lie that Clarke told previously when she told people in Arkadia that everyone will be saved, and didn’t tell them that only 100 people would probably be (unless they manage to find the Nightblood solution to save everyone), and the fact that her attempts to explain things only made people more upset.

But it’s also a spoilery pun (this never even occurred to me until I saw someone on YouTube point it out) - “ALIE guarded”, because the group that’s on the mission to find Becca’s lab (Abby, Raven, Jackson, Luna, Nyko, Miller, one redshirt guy, and for some reason Murphy and Emori) runs into ALIE’s drones that start shooting at them and kill two people.

Luna is the character that I have changed my opinion the most on rewatch. I used to really like her, because her rejection of violence and rebellion against the Grounder warlike way of life, so I was really shocked when she had what seemed to be a sudden complete 180 turn similar to the one that often happens with characters on The Walking Dead – from being against killing to “DIE DIE Kill everyone!” But now I see that this turn was foreshadowed from the start, and that she had already shown the tendency to be judgmental of humans in general in a way that’s nihilistic and misanthropic. Here, for instance, she says: “What if the fight is all we are? We torture, kill, betray. We pretend we're more than that just to make ourselves feel better, but it's a lie.” Jasper wrote something similar in his letter, but he didn’t decide to kill everyone. She also asks Raven if she thinks she/they deserve to survive. This is something different from the way Kane or Abby talked about “deserving to survive” – they said that as an incentive for people to be better, while Luna is saying people maybe should not be saved. It’s not the first time she decided to stay away and not get involved to save people, which is her right, but also doesn’t make her such a great person. I know she has been very traumatized and lost everyone she loved. But if your reasoning is: I won’t make an effort to save people, because they’re not good enough to deserve saving, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Nyko tries to talk to her and convince her to give blood so they could try to synthesize Nightblood, saying “those are good people”, and she asks him what they would do if she refuses to do it to save them. Nyko points out she would be doing it to “save us all”. But then the drones attack, and he gets killed saving her, making himself a shield for the bullets – no doubt that was not just to save another person, but because she is the key to saving everyone. Luna still doesn’t want to donate blood, so Raven – who herself has been prone occasionally to self-righteousness of that kind – tells her that no one will forcibly take the blood from her, but begs her to give it on her own will to help: “It’s not your blood that defines you, it’s your heart” – and she finally gets through to her. For now.

Raven still doesn’t trust Murphy and thinks he’s an opportunistic jerk, but she changes her mind a little after Murphy saves her from the drones.

There’s some setup for the plotline with Emori in the upcoming episodes – as we find out she is afraid of something and not too happy to go to Becca’s lab. We also find out that “Frikdreina” is what Grounders call those with genetic mutations/deformities.

In Arkadia, things start in a light-hearted way, Jasper’s prank on Jaha – he managed to get him asleep, probably with some of the stuff he and Monty liked, and put him a raft in the middle of the lake, where Jaha woke up to Jasper laughing and telling “Chancellor, you’ve been floated”. This is a way for the Delinquents to channel their resentment of their former Chancellor, who executed so many people and sent them to probably die as expendable people, in a harmless joke.

There’s also a friendly scene between Clarke and Monty, where Clarke is concerned about Bellamy not being back, and Monty telling her not to worry. But things deteriorate when Jasper and Monty, setting up a silly prank on Clarke, end up finding the List. Jasper is angry and compares Clarke to the former Ark leadership, calling her “Jaha-lite”. When he tries to tell everyone through the radio, Clarke has him electrocuted and arrested. Monty is more understanding, even though Jasper told him that he (Monty) was not on the list, and he’s also not happy that Harper is not – he realizes why she had to leave him off, but he thinks she is indeed becoming like the hated former Ark leadership – lying to people, keeping secrets, arresting her friends. Clarke admits that Jaha used to be everyone she hated, but that she’s now starting to understand him to a point. It’s a very morally complicated situation, because they are right, but at the same time, that list had to be made, someone had to make it, and Raven gave Clarke that responsibility – and now Clarke is getting the blame for it. And she – or anyone who made that list – was going to get blamed no matter what: they were going to leave people out of it; if they left out their friends, that is cold hearted and their friends would resent them, if they put their friends on it, it would make them look biased and get everyone else to resent them. Clarke’s choices are completely understandable, but also unhealthy for her - she is taking on all on herself and losing her morality and emotional health to ensure people’s survival, but she has to stop before going too far.

Monty ends up reading the list to everyone and causing a lot of anger in the crowd. People start questioning her about everything, from why she left this or that person out (Harper, for instance, because of a genetic disorder her father died of, Monty because they already had other engineers), from supposedly “putting herself on the list”, and one guy is like “Bellamy Blake? Really?” He obviously is someone from the Ark who has no idea what Bellamy meant to the Delinquents, or how instrumental he was in defeating the Mountain Men and saving the people form Mount Weather, but I guess he is not related to one of the Delinquents so he doesn’t care. He probably thinks that Clarke being important is acceptable because she’s the former Chancellor/Council member’s daughter, but Bellamy was just a janitor, right? But then Jaha intercepts and shows one of his main talents – doing talking to the crowd. He explains that Clarke and Bellamy are important because good leadership is necessary, and promises everyone that they would get rid of the list and instead hold a lottery to determine who survives. Jaha has both proved himself useful and saved the moment, and somehow made himself the decision-maker again. When Clarke later tells him that lottery is risky as they may end up without doctors etc., he points out that this was necessary to motivate people (note that he never says they would honor his promise), because people, understandably, hate hearing that they’re expendable and that they have no value. “That’s not what I said” – “That’s what they heard”.(No matter how different Jaha and Bellamy are, they both share the ability to talk to the crows and gauge their emotional reactions, something Kane is terrible at, and that Clarke is not that good at. Abby has never even tried.)

In Polis, Kane has a serious conversation with Octavia, warning her that she’s become a bit too murdery. He calls her out on killing the looter to make him a scapegoat, and says she didn’t have to kill him or the Trishanakru Ambassador Rafel, or Pike. Octavia says Pike got what he deserved, and Kane points out the difference between revenge and justice. Hmm, I have to say that killing Rafel, while being immoral, could be argued to be necessary? He was going to fight and probably kill Roan, who was still recuperating, and that would have had really bad consequences. But there’s no doubt that Octavia is enjoying a chance to murder people a bit too much, and that using violence to solve all problems is her thing. But she is not comfortable listening to Kane morally judging her – something that also caused her behavior towards him in 6x01, when she was preemptively verbally attacking him because she was expecting his judgment.

But it turns out that Roan also isn’t a guarantee of peace and alliance, either. Echo has captured Bellamy and another guy called Stevens, off-screen (presumably with her people, the same way she confronted Octavia later, since I don’t see a way how she, with her sword, could capture Bellamy and another guy with guns), Roan forces Kane to tell him the truth about what the Sky people have been doing, and decides to break the alliance and go to war against them and Trikru, and take over Arkadia as a shelter, although Kane insists it’s just plan B. Roan thinks they lied to him and suspects that the Nightblood solution is a cover for trying to make another Commander behind his back, since he doesn’t really trust Octavia about the Flame being destroyed. At least he smartly got that right, though he is actually wrong about the rest of it.

The first victims of Roan’s decision are Trikru warriors in Polis, even though they didn’t even know anything about what was going on between Sky people and Roan. Octavia, looking for Indra finds many of them killed. There’s a moment where she thinks she sees Indra’s dead body, but it’s someone else. (Not the only time season 4 does this – we had a similar fake-out in 4x11 with Monty and Harper.) She goes to Arkadia to warn her people. Roan sends Echo to stop her and capture her, but Octavia won’t come and defends herself. Echo is trying to take her alive and she genuinely seems a bit upset/sad when she ends up stabbing Octavia, and Octavia falls down a very high cliff. I guess she’s interested in Bellamy enough already, and fears that constantly killing his loved ones is not going to help that potential relationship happen. Both Echo and Roan are a bit uncomfortable when they have to tell Bellamy the news. There’s a scene where Bellamy cries and breaks down, thinking his sister is dead, set to sad and emotional music. But guess what, end of episode twist - Octavia is alive.

Sorry, but the Azgeda war paint looks really silly. Is it supposed to look scary? It looks like a cross between a clown and a panda.

There are several things in this episode that really don’t make sense:

Clarke not putting Monty on the list – I feel like this happened just to show how Clarke is willing to not put her friends on the list (the conflict between her and Monty could have been just about Harper, but Harper and Clarke are not as close as Monty and Clarke, and Jasper wants to die anyway), but I’m supposed to believe that Clarke doesn’t think Monty is one of the 97 people in Arkadia most useful and important for survival? (I say 97, because Clarke would have put Bellamy and Octavia on the list no matter what – the latter because Bellamy would never forgive her if Octavia was not on the list.) Monty is probably one of the 5 most important people – he’s a genius, not just an engineer but someone who grows plants and can ensure food; Clarke was aware of his talents even in early season 1, and he will ,of course, prove to be arguably the most important person for everyone’s survival.

Jasper and Monty accusing Clarke of putting herself on the list – they really didn’t notice that “Clarke Griffin” was written in a different handwriting from the rest of the names? Come on!

Riley is now starting to get shoved into scenes in a way that doesn’t make too much sense, like being given important tasks. This guy had been a slave and mistreated until very recently, why isn’t he resting and getting therapy or something?

And of course, Octavia’s extreme Plot Armor – surviving the stab wound, I could believe, but after falling from that cliff, she is not only alive, but hasn’t broken her spine, or even leg, and is able to mount on the horse and ride to Arkadia?

Body count:

Stevens, Arker killed by Echo, who kills him with Bellamy right next to him and watching

A guard from the Ark, killed by a drone

Nyko, one of my favorite minor characters – I guess the show can’t let someone so nice and reasonable live

A number of Trikru warriors, killed by Azgeda, because we haven’t had any mass murders so far in the season, and we have to fill the quota of 2-3 mass deaths per season.

Two Azgeda warriors who were with Echo, and tried to capture Octavia, killed by Octavia

Rating: 6.5/10

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xtruss · 2 years

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“Dressing for the Carnival” (1877). Its brightly colored, singing beauty is such that tragedy takes hold only on examination.Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Critic at Large: Race, War, and Winslow Homer

The artist’s experiences in the Civil War and after helped him transcend stereotypes in portraying Black experience.

— By Claudia Roth Pierpont | April 11, 2022 | The New Yorker

A soldier in blue sits high on the branch of a pine tree. The barrel of his rifle, jutting hard across the canopy of green, is mounted with a lens that he holds close to his eye as he takes aim. We can’t see his face. Neither can the man he is about to kill, down below, hundreds of yards away, whether in the midst of battle or furtively leaving camp to fill canteens—many soldiers got shot this way—or simply lifting his head above fortifications to take a breath. The telescopic rifle, widely introduced in this country during the Civil War, allowed for attack with unprecedented stealth, a technological leap akin in our time to the military drone. In the spring of 1862, Winslow Homer observed the sharpshooting soldiers trained to use these weapons while encamped with the Union Army at the Virginia front. Homer, at twenty-six, was a professional artist-reporter, his drawings often reproduced in the illustrated press. He aspired, however, to be a painter. “Sharpshooter,” by reliable account his first oil painting, completed in 1863, was preceded in the public eye by his engraving of the same hawkeyed soldier in Harper’s Weekly, part of the excitement over the élite new unit’s efficacy and skill. It would be easy to assume that he shared the excitement—his soldier has a mesmerizing energy and focus—were it not for a randomly surviving letter he wrote decades later, recalling that the use of these rifles had struck him “as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army.” He added a quick drawing of an unsuspecting victim framed in a rifle’s crosshairs.

“Sharpshooter” was painted back in the safety of Homer’s studio, in New York City. He’d moved from his native Boston in 1859, using the job at Harper’s as security while enrolling in life-drawing classes (one didn’t draw naked bodies in art class in Boston) and taking a few lessons in painting technique from a transplanted Frenchman. Mostly, though, his idea of painting grew out of his magazine illustrations, and while some of this work was brashly political—in 1860, he depicted Frederick Douglass, in mid-oration, being expelled from a stage by anti-abolitionists—the majority were cheery anecdotes of contemporary life. The first work he exhibited, also in 1860, was a watercolor titled “Skating in Central Park,” which suggests the lightly amiable direction he was taking before the war gave him a subject and a purpose.

He visited the soldiers’ camps around Washington in the fall of 1861 but was not overly affected. He would have travelled to Europe after that, to learn more about painting, if he’d had the money. The transformation came with his Virginia trip the following year. For two or more months he was “without food 3 days at a time & all in camp either died or were carried away with typhoid fever,” his mother wrote to his younger brother. “He came home so changed that his best friends did not know him.” The paper trail for Homer’s trips to the front ends here. A new biography, “Winslow Homer: American Passage,” by William R. Cross (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), confidently adds to the general disagreement about where and when (or even whether) he went back. The chaotic Battle of the Wilderness? The devastation at Spotsylvania Court House? The long and catastrophic—for both sides—siege of Petersburg? His presence at these historic killing fields has been deduced primarily from the paintings and drawings he now began to turn out with quiet intensity, creating our richest artistic record of the Civil War.

Coinciding with the biography, the Metropolitan Museum’s grand yet thematically intent new Homer show, titled “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents,” begins with a group of these paintings, and it’s stirring to see the young, relatively unschooled artist rise to eloquence in service of his broken country. The co-curator Sylvia Yount, setting out the show’s pointedly contemporary theme, writes, “A persistent fascination with struggle permeates Homer’s art, revealing lifelong concerns with race and the environment.” Homer can support these not so new claims easily, although the work is never rhetorical or preachy. A viewer coming to the exhibition from other American classics of the era in the Met’s galleries, like the famous mountain scenes by Bierstadt or Church, may initially feel puzzled by the emotional reserve, the understatement, even the smaller scale of these works. As a war painter, Homer was uncomfortable with battle scenes—he painted only one, a willfully unintelligible mayhem of men and trees—and at odds with the heroic posing of a European past. Several of his paintings simply give us weary, homesick men in camp, in the mud and the weather, enduring.

He even seemed to shy away from painting corpses, although their rarity in his work may have been partly strategic. Alexander Gardner’s photographs of fields strewn with the dead of Antietam, which drew huge crowds when exhibited in New York, in 1862, offered the lesson that the new art form, in its cold reality, could shock as paintings never could. Death, for Homer, is a single former Union soldier standing with his back to us, swinging a scythe against a field of wheat as tall and endless as the troops that fell at Antietam and the other battlefields. He executed the scene, titled “The Veteran in a New Field,” like a plainspoken realist—the high sunlight, the veteran’s rumpled shirt, the shadowed stalks of wheat—who couldn’t hide, try as he might, the dark and troubled heart of a poet. At some point, he changed his mind about what he wanted to portray. Painting out parts of a cradle scythe, the instrument used to harvest wheat at the time, he left his veteran wielding the anachronistically stark curve of a scythe that evoked images of the Grim Reaper. All flesh is grass. Yet Homer was never casual about his titles, and the veteran is also planting the earth anew. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares. Neither the painter nor we need choose a single meaning.

Two paintings are set where Homer could never have gone, behind enemy lines. (The imaginative prerogatives of painting over photography are also many.) “Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg,” of 1864, shows a Confederate soldier who can endure no longer. Leaping wildly atop fortifications meant as shelter, he stands exposed against the open sky, shouting tauntingly in the direction of massed Yankee forces. A couple of distant puffs of gun smoke suggest the ending to this act of suicidal insanity—or insane bravery, perhaps, for there is something heroic in this awful figure, so very different from the sharpshooter, whose unremitting eye was reported to drive troops to nervous collapse.

The problematic figure here is not the quixotic Rebel, though, toward whom Homer extends a strained compassion, but a Black banjo player huddled behind the fortifications, strumming away, his face a minstrel caricature of big pink lips and rolling eyes. (Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, in the show’s catalogue, notes that Homer would likely have used the same burnt cork and lampblack that minstrel players used to blacken their faces.) This figure presses the question: How far did Homer’s compassion extend in these years?

In the spontaneous act of drawing, his eye was perfectly honest, sketching Black men in the Union Army—a mule-team driver, men riding a baggage train—with individuality and dignity. Even in the more public sphere of magazine illustration, Black men—from Douglass to a figure seated on what looks to be a powder keg, illustrating “Dixie”—are few but untouched by minstrelsy. Questions have been raised about a lithograph called “Our Jolly Cook”: Is the frantically dancing Black man performing for his own racially clichéd pleasure or to meet the demands of an audience of grim-faced white soldiers? Homer brought Black soldiers to the fore in two substantive paintings, “The Bright Side” and “Army Boots,” which, while they don’t trade in physical stereotypes, show the men at rest, all but one lying down—or, as Shaw and others see it, purveying “tropes of Black indolence.” It seems fair to say that the painter who would end up “breaking artistic stereotypes about the Negro,” in the words of Alain Locke, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and a scholar of African American art, was still finding his way. His early depictions of Black men were variable. Whether owing to some personal acquaintance, however, or to the absence of fear, or to simple empathy, he never wavered in the dignity he accorded Black women.

It is doubtful whether Homer was ever near the Confederate prison known as Andersonville, in southwestern Georgia. But, within months of the war’s end, the artist, like everyone in the North who could read a newspaper, knew about the brutal conditions that ultimately resulted in the death there of thirteen thousand captured Union soldiers. The camp’s commander was put on very public trial, and was hanged. Homer made no attempt to show the prison itself. Yet his response was as large in intellectual scope and feeling as it is visually restrained and indirect. “Near Andersonville,” completed in 1866, shows a young Black woman, modestly but neatly dressed and wearing a white apron, standing in the doorway of a rough-hewn dwelling, looking to the side, deep in thought. Only at the edge of the painting do we see the soldiers she has seen already, captive Yankees being led off by Rebel forces, the triumphant Confederate flag flying overhead.

Without bloodshed, or brutality, Homer conveys the stakes of Union losses—the stakes of the war—in the face of one enslaved woman. She is depicted with neither the pitifulness nor the titillating nudity that made the female slave an attractive subject to many artists. (And to audiences. Hiram Powers’s“The Greek Slave,” a prettily chained white marble nude, was one of the most popular works of the nineteenth century. Even Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s sympathetic bust of a Black woman, titled “Why Born Enslaved!,” completed in 1873 and the centerpiece of another current Met show, is bound with ropes that frame one bared breast.) This woman is all consciousness. We are drawn in by the workings of her mind, her difficult but masked emotions—she couldn’t risk letting any reaction show—as, the Mona Lisa of the Civil War, she weighs her future and the future of her country.

“I think that it would probably kill me to have such a thing appear,” Homer wrote to an inquiring biographer, in 1908, two years before he died, at the age of seventy-four. “And as the most interesting part of my life is of no concern to the public I must decline to give you any particulars in regard to it.” Biographers are a fairly undiscourageable group, and the first biography of the artist was duly published in 1911. There was not a lot to work with, aside from the work itself. Homer’s two brothers volunteered some stories, but there was, otherwise, scant personal material. He was closely attached to his parents and to his older brother. He never married and had no known romantic relationships; the record offers little even about close friendships. There are no diaries, and hardly any letters of substance. (Homer’s moral condemnation of telescopic rifles is one of the few examples we have of serious thought put into words.) No protégés, no public life. Clement Greenberg, dismissing a later Homer biography, in 1944, blamed the fact that the book was “hard reading” on Homer, since he had “practically no life aside from his art” and “no inner life worth mentioning.” This was, of course, just what Homer would have wanted. Yet intrepid biographers have pressed on, drawn by the siren song of all he did instead of living.

Cross’s scrupulous new book is devoted to Homer as both man and artist and is largely a pleasure to read, despite the inevitable difficulties of the subject: call him repressed; call him, as Cross does, “a misfit by nature” or even a “human periscope,” who liked to observe others without being seen. Cross tries to circumvent these difficulties by placing the life in a wider context, particularly in Homer’s early years, when abolitionism was ablaze in Boston and in Cambridge, where the boy grew up, exposed to mounting outcries about the evils of slavery. Homer’s family was middle class but struggled to remain so, financially and socially. His father, Charles, a proud man, seems to have failed in every business venture he tried; his mother, Henrietta, a gifted watercolor artist, had a wealthy brother who helped them (however humiliatingly) get through. Devoutly Christian, the pair initially attended two different churches: hers was strongly pro-abolitionist, his strongly against, a position fundamentally aligned with the economic interests of Massachusetts. But with Winslow’s birth, in 1836, Henrietta joined her husband’s church, a move that seemed to go beyond awakened wifely duty. Winslow was named for their preacher, who invoked Scripture to claim that abolitionists would “fill the land with violence and blood.”

How the young man managed such personal and political discord is unknown. Cross, whose scruples sometimes lead to a Homer-like reticence, refuses even to ask questions. (Is this how Homer learned to keep his thoughts to himself? Or why in his adult life he stayed away from church?) By the time he was seventeen, he’d left high school and set to work in a Boston lithography shop. He may already have had hopes of painting, but hopes became certain plans six years later, when he arrived in New York. Here again, Cross seeks to provide a wider context, and while the material remains thin, one is grateful for every scrap that shows Homer living as a painter among painters, joining clubs and sharing thoughts in a downtown vie de bohème filled with excitement about selling paintings and (more often) worries about not selling them.

Settling in Greenwich Village for some twenty years, he rubbed shoulders with such close neighbors—often with studios in the same building—as Church and Bierstadt and, most important, the lesser known Eastman Johnson, who preceded Homer in treating African American subjects with sympathy. It is extraordinary to think of the human periscope having dinner with Johnson and John Frederick Kensett at the Waverly Inn, or regularly attending exhibitions. “What I remember best is the smell of paint,” he recalled of these years, which extended through the eighteen-seventies. “I used to love it in a picture gallery.”

Speculation about why he turned toward solitude—that is, inevitably, about his love life—has run the gamut. Was he homosexual and in hiding? The fact that there is “no evidence” (as Cross notes) of a relationship with a specific man means little, in the absence of evidence of any kind. In his work, the rendering of the male body lacks the overt eroticism of Eakins or Sargent (or, for that matter, of Michelangelo), but some critics (particularly Thomas Hess) have perceived it there, and, in any case, almost nothing about Homer is overt. A photograph of him and a friend, Albert Kelsey, both rather dandified and evidently close, is hardly evidence, but a nude drawing of Kelsey, however comic in added details, goes some way toward justifying speculation. Yet Homer’s conflicts show signs of being even more complex.

Physically, he was slight and wiry, elegant in dress and bearing but prematurely balding, and with a large mustache he seemed to hide behind. Although he earned critical acclaim as early as the mid-sixties, sales remained slow; it was only in 1875 that he was able to quit illustration work, and far longer before he began to achieve financial stability. He was well aware during all these years that he could not support a wife and family. Romantic failure was another possible reason for secrecy, and the pretty women who fill his postwar canvases have prompted various scholars to guess at which one may have broken his heart. The best candidate is a beautiful young artist, Helena de Kay, whose marriage seems to have disturbed him. Homer’s cold and mournful portrait of her, dressed in black, was precisely dated “June 3rd 1874,” her wedding day, and intended as a less than joyous gift. Still, the majority of women in these paintings are anonymous figures, purely social, as illustrative of a determinedly sunlit America as his other postwar subjects: the energetic boys of “Snap the Whip,” the one-room schoolhouse of “The Country School,” the broad green pastures of “Milking Time” and of a country at peace.

These are still among Homer’s most beloved works. The genial populism of such subjects, however, was regarded with notable loathing by Henry James, then a working critic. In 1875, he complained about the artist’s “freckled, straight-haired Yankee urchins, his flat-breasted maidens, suggestive of a dish of rural doughnuts and pie, his calico sun-bonnets, his flannel shirts”—all the proud provincialism (with a bit of sexual repugnance thrown in) that James would flee for Europe, and which he felt Homer was wasting his enormous talent on. Homer himself had spent seven or eight months in Paris, in 1867. But, aside from an affinity for Millet’s glowing scenes of noble peasants in the fields, French art left little mark, and seems rather to have shown him how essentially American he was. He displayed no interest in going back. He was restless, though, and may have been dissatisfied. He had begun to paint in watercolor for the first time since his youth; he made increasing use of photographs; he travelled from one picturesque locale to another, as though in search of a purpose like that he had felt during the war. No one has suggested a better reason for his heading back South just as the situation there was once again becoming dire.

“Near Andersonville,” completed in 1866, refers to a notorious Confederate prison in southwestern Georgia. As Union prisoners of war are led off in the background, the contemplative face of this lone enslaved woman conveys the stakes of the war.Art work courtesy the Newark Museum of Art, N.J.; Photograph by Richard Goodbody

In 1877, with the new politics of President Rutherford B. Hayes, remaining Federal troops in the South were relieved of the task of enforcing racial justice. Reconstruction was at an end, and the widespread result, through a combination of disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and violence, was a return to a system hardly different from slavery. Homer was in Virginia that spring, and was likely also there the previous year, despite being reproved and even threatened by local whites for showing undue interest in Black life. The work he did affirms that they had cause for concern. “A Visit from the Old Mistress,” of 1876, offers a confrontation between the white woman who has entered stiffly into former slave quarters and three Black women who regard her steadily, without greeting; the air is thick with distrust, the gap between them fraught with unresolved history. Painted the same year, “The Cotton Pickers” displays two formerly enslaved young women, akin to Millet’s peasants, looming like goddesses against a clouded sky yet wholly trapped—as they must know—in a field of cotton overspilling and blindingly infinite. Like the wheat of “Veteran in a New Field,” the cotton suggests more than itself, but shares only the sorrow of that Northern crop and none of its hope.

The celebratory preparations of “Dressing for the Carnival,” of 1877, have such a brightly colored, singing beauty that tragedy takes hold only on examination. A group of figures, all African American, are gathered in a sunny yard. Two women are stitching a young man into a brilliant Harlequin costume, while a scattered group of barefoot children, some holding tiny American flags, look on. The man’s fantastic costume has been linked with Jonkonnu, a Jamaican holiday with African roots that had long since spread to parts of the South. Granting slaves a brief moment of relative freedom, it was held around Christmas for decades. But, with the bold promises of Reconstruction, elements of Jonkonnu were joined to the national festivities that seemed at last to belong to everyone: Homer’s original title was “Sketch—4th of July in Virginia.”

The dominating figure, once again, is a woman: this time, a tall, rawboned, intensely determined older woman with a pipe in her mouth—tobacco was the main crop in Virginia—who, taking a stitch, draws a thread through the air with the powerful gesture of a Fate. This woman has been through everything and can carry any load. Yet, as Homer and much of his audience knew, she is as trapped as the dreamy young women in the cotton fields, unable to make a life for herself or for these shoeless, happily excited children with their heartbreaking flags.

Cross’s portrayal of Homer, as contemporary as the Met’s, emphasizes his “empathy with Blacks and Native Americans.” The latter part of the statement is not untrue, although Homer’s contact with Native Americans was limited: a Montaukett chief on Long Island whom he met (and painted) in 1874—Cross relates that Homer’s wealthy uncle swindled the tribe out of land—and Indigenous guides hired to lead a fishing trip he took with his older brother in Quebec, people whose work in making canoes he documented and admired. These paintings have never been well known, and Cross’s contribution here is particularly fresh. Homer’s depictions of African Americans, on the other hand, were regarded as exceptional as early as 1880, although this aspect of his work faded from view along with the accepted rights and humanity of his subjects.

Paintings disappeared, too. “Near Andersonville,” originally owned by a New Jersey woman who’d gone South to teach in freedmen’s schools, was forgotten for nearly a century, and emerged from the woman’s family attic only in the early nineteen-sixties. Recognized as a (signed) Homer, but with nothing else about it known, it was given the title “Captured Liberators” by an astute dealer in Civil War artifacts. By this time, however, the country’s leading Homer scholar did not believe that Homer would have given a painting even such a mildly political title, and soon renamed it “At the Cabin Door.” It was a pair of scholars with eyes and minds sharpened by the civil-rights movement, Peter H. Wood and Marc Simpson, who recovered the painting’s story and true title and, along with the art historian Karen C. C. Dalton, set out to reëstablish the importance of Homer’s African American subjects, and to explain the artist’s relevance to our times. And so today Cross comfortably compares “The Cotton Pickers” to portraits by Kehinde Wiley and the Met’s show includes, as part of a “contemporary coda,” several terrific Kerry James Marshall sketches riffing on one of Homer’s late sea paintings: a relaxed and high-living modern Black family out sailing, boom box and all. No victims here.

“The Veteran in a New Field” (1865). Homer initially painted a cradle scythe—the implement actually used by soldiers who returned to their fields after the war—but then painted parts of it out and left his veteran wielding the anachronistically stark curve of a scythe that evoked images of the Grim Reaper.Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Women and tempests. The dangers of the sea and the beauty of the sturdy fisherwomen on the northern coast of England, near Tynemouth, in the village of Cullercoats, where Homer, still restless, travelled in 1881, following in the path of many other painters, and remained for close to a year and a half. Tempests and angry seas and women, over and over. And then, in 1884, back in the States, he combined them anew in “The Life Line,” depicting a woman being saved from shipwreck by a man, the pair suspended by a pulley just above a crashing sea. This throbbing tumult of a painting was a great success on exhibition, its suggestiveness—the Times noted that the woman was “a buxom lassie”—largely subordinated to its heroics. There has been much discussion of just where Homer saw this new mode of rescue, which he painted with exacting care. Cross notes, too, the work’s “dramatic truth.” But the frenzied scene also looks very much like a sexual fantasy run amok, a Victorian ravishment, with the man’s face hidden by the woman’s billowing red scarf, and her water-soaked clothes outlining every curve and crevice, as she swoons, unconscious, in his arms. Only his inability to see her so exposed, and her unawareness of her exposure, insured the painting’s (and the viewer’s) hold on propriety.

Expanding on the subject two years later, this most reserved and subtle painter achieved a sort of aggrandized light pornography in “Undertow,” in which two sculpturally chiselled men drag two provocatively drenched and entwined women from the angry surf. (Legend has it that Homer posed his young models on the roof of his New York studio building, periodically dousing them with water.) Highly praised at the time for its “virility” and described as “an altogether manly work,” this painting, following on “The Life Line,” seems rather to betray the artist in crisis on these very matters.

Could this crisis account for the fact that Homer’s work came virtually to a halt in the next few years? He never went further than a drawing for a wildly sensual work called “Ship Deck with Two Women Lashed to the Mast,” which would have required great pailfuls to be brought up to the roof. When he resumed painting, the sensuality was becalmed, as in the two women raptly dancing together, before a moonlit sea, in the elegiac work “A Summer Night,” of 1890. But soon even such figures came to seem superfluous. People on the shore or on surrounding rocks appeared less frequently, were painted out, were unnecessary. The sea alone became his most insistent subject, the place where his desires were drowned.

Homer was able to replicate the inspiring coastal geography of Northern England at his family’s newly fashioned homestead in Maine, on a rocky promontory called Prouts Neck, where he spent much of the rest of his life. But not all of it, despite his preferred image as a hermit. (His door knocker was a Medusa head, and he put out a sign that read “snakes! snakes! mice!” to keep people away.) Although he never returned to Europe, there were trips to New York, even after he gave up his studio there, and many trips to Boston—especially, music lover that he was, to hear concerts. Prouts Neck was on its way to becoming a summer resort; Homer’s studio, with a balcony overlooking the sea, was in hailing distance of an elegant hotel, whose kitchen would deliver his lunch.

Nevertheless, winters were isolating and bitter. After Homer’s mother died, in April, 1884, he assumed the care of his obstreperous father, and that December, whether to flee the cold or the sorrow, the two men vacationed together in Nassau, in the Bahamas; Homer, alone, went on to Cuba for a few more weeks. There were later winter trips to Florida and to Bermuda. But the Bahamas, he wrote, was special: “the best place I have ever found.” Although he returned only once, after his father’s death, in 1898, the work he did as a result of these two trips—one major oil painting and an outpouring of watercolors—seems ever more important, and it forms the resplendent yet strangely vexed core of the Met’s show.

“The Gulf Stream,” begun in 1899, is the linchpin of the Met’s show.Art work courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Turquoise waters, bright sun, brown skin—rendered in a watercolor technique newly free and vibrant, using the white of the paper to set off colors already saturated with light, so that the images appear to glow from within. The Met’s selection of these fragile and rarely shown works suggests not only summery breezes but also the human warmth and interest so increasingly absent from the ocean scenes back home. Yet, to judge by the catalogue that forms the permanent record of this show, the beauty of these works is a significant problem. Although slavery ended in the Bahamas in the eighteen-thirties, in Homer’s era it was a British colony with a racially brutal economic system, akin to sharecropping in America. Tourism, a means of income for the British governor, was just gearing up, and Homer, who published some of these scenes as illustrations in a “touristic article,” in 1887, is in the dock.

“He seemed entirely comfortable with colonialist stereotypes of Caribbean islands as exotic idylls,” the historian Daniel Immerwahr writes. True, he admits, Homer depicts hurricanes hitting the islands, and the works have “variation and nuance,” but the weather he shows is too often bright, the people too consistently healthy. We see Black men wresting a living from the beautiful waters, but not “the harsh economics of colonialism” that impels them. Nor do we see any “indictment” of “U.S. colonialism,” which did not in fact exist in the places Homer knew: the Bahamas remained British until independence, Bermuda is still a British territory, and the U.S. takeover of Cuba followed his visit by some thirteen years. Beyond the Atlantic, the artist is censured for failing to depict the murderous violence of the U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines—about which Immerwahr has written elsewhere with effectiveness—and a reader might easily fail to realize that Homer was never in the Philippines. No matter. An illustration of the violence appeared on the cover of Life. The artist could have—should have—painted such a scene. Instead, he spent the years when the war was taking place (1899-1902) making works so enticing they amounted to “an invitation to empire.”

A debt is owed to the co-curator Stephanie L. Herdrich for conceiving this show. So it is even more perplexing, in terms of the triumph of presupposition, when she writes, of the Bahamas watercolors, “He focused on the quotidian lives of the island’s Black inhabitants and uncritically acknowledged the rigid stratification of Bahamian society.” Uncritically? The statement would be perfectly accurate were it not for this inexplicable word, which contradicts the content of several of the works on the museum’s walls, and even some of Herdrich’s descriptions of them. “A Garden in Nassau,” for example, of 1885, in which a small Black child stands on a dusty road, looking up toward a tall, closed gate in a whitewashed wall, forcefully excluded from the lush growth of palms and flowers on the other side. (We know that Homer originally painted and then erased two figures climbing the wall to pick a coconut, increasing the poignance of the lone child.) Or “Native Hut at Nassau,” of the same year, with a group of Black children staring from the doorway of a poor hut in a hardscrabble yard; Cross, whose perception of the artist’s intent is more generous, sees him as “eager to understand the lives they lived within these houses.” Or “A Wall, Nassau,” of 1898, showing the same sort of whitewashed wall with cultivated plantings behind it, and jagged shards of glass along the top to keep the unwanted out. Needless to say—or is it?—these images are not exotic idylls and are far from uncritical of the racial status quo.

Then, there are the sharks. Even the healthiest islanders, in “Shark Fishing,” of 1885, take mortal risks in a rowboat hardly larger than their prey. The results for some can be seen in the same year’s “Sharks (The Derelict),” in which another small if sturdier boat, now swamped by sharks, is eerily empty and going over on its side. Homer placed this image at the climax of his first show of Caribbean works, in 1885; it was found so unnerving that it didn’t sell for twenty years. The culmination of this output, “The Gulf Stream,” long contemplated and begun only in 1899—the single oil based on his time in the Bahamas—also failed to sell for several years. Homer said that he knew it was not made to hang in anybody’s home.

The linchpin of the Met’s show, “The Gulf Stream” intensifies the artist’s racial focus even as it universalizes its sailor’s plight. A single Black man, the drama’s protagonist, is shown bare-chested and casually majestic—“modelled with a musculature and physical power,” Alain Locke wrote in 1936, that “broke the cotton-patch and back-porch tradition” and “began the artistic emancipation of the Negro subject.” But his innate power is to no avail. He lies across the deck of a devastated boat, as gape-mouthed sharks close in; the water nearby is flecked with blood. A few stalks of sugarcane coil across the deck, either a plain fact of his cargo or a sign of centuries of slave trade. “I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description,” Homer replied with typical asperity to questions about its meaning. He also mentioned, though, the influence of Turner’s painting “Slave Ship” (originally titled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On”), which Ruskin had once owned but said he found too painful to keep.

With the unsold painting returned to his studio, Homer made changes. The boat—and presumably the man adrift in it—became American; we can make out “Key West” lettered on the stern. He added a broken section to the hull, and a grand but ghostly ship, gray and nearly transparent, on the horizon. Some speculate that this ship was meant to supply the hope that people wanted to see, but that is not how Homer worked—and rarely how artists work, especially in old age. It hurts more to know that Cordelia was almost saved, and that the ship, pace Auden, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

It is no surprise that Homer painted no self-portraits. There are, however, some imaginative hints in two of his most magisterial late works. “Fox Hunt,” of 1893, is the biggest painting he ever made: six feet across, it is given over to a single alert yet weary fox, pursued by a flock of terrifying crows—a deathly winged mass—across an expanse of glaring snow. It is winter in Maine; the sea is visible in the mid-distance, cutting off the fox’s path. The struggling animal, legs sinking perilously in the snow, looks off toward the impassable waters. Homer signed the painting in a curious way, giving the letters a rounded weight, so that his name, too, sinks like an object or a creature in the snow, to the very bar of the capital “H.” In his late fifties, he still possessed something of the fox’s elegance, as well as the ironic wit for the comparison, and as much wonder at this empty white world as despair.

The hunched figure in “Driftwood,” painted when the artist was seventy-three, in 1909, also looks out to sea, in foul weather. He is unusual simply in that he exists, a man on Homer’s by now long unpeopled shore. He is tying a rope around a fallen, washed-up tree trunk—“driftwood,” too, seems ironic—that is far too massive for him to move; he might better use it to anchor himself against the elements. He does not appear young. There is a real chance of his being blown off his feet, inundated, badly hurt. Homer was excited about this painting, which he took up after suffering a mild stroke. It was the last work he completed before his death, the following year. “I have little time for anything,” he warned his younger brother, excusing himself from Thanksgiving dinner. “I am painting.”

“Driftwood” has the quality of a devotional image. The figure, as inconspicuous against the waves as the fox is arresting against the snow, is difficult even to see, at first. Before him, the sea is painted with an acute discernment (deep gray against the nearby rocks, wild sprays of textured white, glassy opal and limpid gray beyond) that was learned by looking hard, for years, with a depth of commitment most people reserve for each other. He braved it, holding fast, to show others so much they didn’t see—beauty, injustice, sheer mystery—his gaze ever outward and his face turned away. ♦

Published in the Print Edition of the April 18, 2022, issue, with the headline “The Colorist.”

#The New Yorker #The Colorist #Race War and Winslow Homer #Claudia Roth Pierpont

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lil-harper · 1 year

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(OOC: THE BABY FINALY HAS AN ACCOUNT)

Momma said that I should be on here so they helped me make this.. ask me questions I guess..?

( @serial-designation-j @khan-loves-doors HEHEHE)

#murder drones #murder drones oc #little baby harper <33 #ask away!

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idoart · 1 year

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Some bitch at a grocery store on earth was looking at me and Harper funny. What has she never seen a mother with their kid before?

#(theyre just ignoring the fact their a demon and harper is a worker drone #murder drones #baby worker drone #demons #bitch needs some respect

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triocat · 1 year

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Serial designation H/ Harper!

Here’s my Murder Drone Oc, H! Also known as Harper!

He was with N, V, and J on their trip to Cropper 9. When the worker drones made the bunker H offered to become an spy so he could find a way to let them in and find the easiest way hunt them all. They agreed to the plan and made a homemade disguise to trick the workers and gave him a new name of “Harper”

Which somehow worked.

But as “Harper” spends more time with the worker drones, the more he didn’t want to leave. He liked the calm and peaceful atmosphere of the colony and grew to like the workers. He would actually forget that he was a murder drone and even joined the school and the WDF.

N, V, and J just assumed that he died, so it was a surprise for everyone when he was spotted amongst the crowd of workers and even protecting them. When they called him out for being a murder drone, he was like “What are you talking about, I am a worker- Oohhh… Sh*t. I just remembered.”

After that reveal, he sorta just stayed the same but he gets more involved with anything that revolves around mysterious events. He also helps Uzi and N when it comes to the layout of the colony and how to reach them just in case they need to check specific areas.

#my art #murder drones #murder drones oc #trios ocs

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sly2o · 6 years

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What's in a(n episode) name? (Season 4)

It’s fun to play the guessing game of what all these episode titles for season 5 we’re seeing mean. I thought it might be worth looking back at season 4′s episode names to help form a base for our guessing for season 5.

Each episode has lots of reasons for a possible name so I bolded what was the stand out item to me that most obviously pointed to the episode name.

Also - I have knowledge gaps! Especially literary ones. I’ll update if some of you have edits/suggestions on things I missed.

“Echoes”

A nod to the character echo

An echo is “a close parallel or repetition of an idea, feeling, style, or event.” In this episode we see echoes of numerous past villains and fights, but also the beginning of the conflicts that will frame this season.

“Heavy Lies the Crown”

From The 100 wikia: The episode title is a common misquote of the line “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”, from Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 2. It was picked because it sounds better.

Likely applies to multiple characters. Particularly:

Bellamy Blake. His tie-breaking decision on whether to destroy the hydrogenerator.

Roan. New in his position as king in Polis, dealing with an uncertain group of ambassadors including one who plans to challenge him to a duel.

Clarke. Learning how to motivate people to get to work repairing the ship, burdened by the knowledge it won’t save everyone.

“The Four Horsemen”

A reference to “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” a concept from the Christian Bible.

I ended up on a really interesting dig through lots of stuff on this topic. But the piece that stood out to me was this: The Four Horsemen are released when four of seven “seals” are broken. This is interesting in how the show departed from this to make it 12 seals - aligning it with the 12 stations on the Ark and the 12 grounder clans.

From The 100 wikia: The cult also used the hashtag “#fourhorsemen”, from which this episode derives its title.

It's unclear if this was the set designers/prop makers making a nod to the episode name or instruction from the writers. (Perhaps someone else knows more about which is most likely?)

The Four Horseman are typically portrayed as Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. All of these are portrayed in this episode.

Pestilence - Luna and her sick kru showing up at Arkadia

War - Ilian and company’s war on technology. The seeds of war between Arkadia and Azegeda are also sewn in this episode due to the decision to not tell Azegeda about Alpha Station only being able to support 100 people.

Famine - Only 100 people can survive with severe rationing, prompting the demand that Clarke make The List.

Death - the skeletons found in the fake Second Dawn Bunker. The Floukru members who died. The person Octavia murdered. Lots of people.

“A Lie Guarded”

From The 100 Wikia:

The title has two meanings:

It’s from the quote, “An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.”[7]This might be a reference to Clarke hiding the truth about Alpha Station only being able to support 100 people out of the 500 Sky People.

It is also a visual pun: “A Lie Guarded” → “ALIE Guarded”, referencing the drones guarding A.L.I.E.’s Island.[8]

As the Wikia says - is very likely a reference to the cap on how many people can live in Arkadia. Particularly it seems like a reference to when Monty berates Clarke saying “you’re the one going too far and using the same old justification, it’s all for my people”.

May also reference

the excuses Clarke is seen giving to the crowd of people for why certain people were and were not picked for the list

Jasper roasting Clarke for lying to everyone.

“The Tinder Box”

This quote about Arkadians the Azegeda: “This is a tinder box. One shot, and we’ll be at war.” - Monty.

Arkadia going down in flames.

“We Will Rise”

note: apparently was supposed to be called “Fight or Flight”. But we’re going to stick with the final name they chose.

Self-referencing to their own quote “from the ashes we will rise”. In the last episode what seemed like their only hope for survival went up in flames.

The focus of this episode is the need to bring hydrazene to Becca’s lab so that they can get to space to create nightblood syrum. In this case “rise” is to rise up through the atmosphere into outer space.

“Gimme Shelter”

A reference to the Rolling Stones song of the same name. The lyrics of Gimmie Shelter are about the Vietnam war and the the horrors that came with that war.

This is the first episode where black rain comes down, causing a stampede towards the current source of shelter. We see the horrors of what happens when shelter isn’t found.

“God Complex”

Reminder: a God Complex references someone who believe they are above the rules of society and should be given special consideration.

Many people. Particularly:

Abby for experimenting on humans.

Clarke for ignoring the group and injecting herself with the experimental nightblood serum.

Abby again for ignoring the group and breaking the machine they would have used to test Clarke.

Emori, for being discovered for having lied to the group about the identity of the grounder that was killed.

The connection between Second Dawn Bunker and the Grounder culture being revealed through a Grounder Prayer. (Niylah saying “From the ashes, we will rise” at the funeral for the people who died in the black rain). This is another visual pun: the Second Dawn Bunker is revealed to be an underground complex under a place of worship.

“DNR”

“DNR” stands for “Do Not Resuscitate”, which is used in the medical field to indicate that a patient does not want CPR or any advanced cardiac life support if their heart stops.

This episode features multiple characters in one form or another saying they don’t intend to live past praimfire. They include Jasper, Raven, and Harper and a few others.

“Die All, Die Merrily”

A second reference to Shakespeare. This time it's King Henry the Fourth Part 1. The full line is: “Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.”

A reference to the conclave that dominates this episode where multiple reoccurring guest stars and one main cast member die.

Numerous pieces of the play appear in a variety of forms in this episode.

Scenes from the climatic battle of this play are also similar to the fight in the show.

Apparently a reference to Octavia being Henry IV? but I don’t know enough about the play to pick that out.

“The Other Side”

This episodes name refers to the saying “See you on the other side” which is said by numerous characters throughout the series, but especially Jasper - including before he was supposed to die in the pilot.

This quote is said by Jasper to Monty before he dies.

Another visual pun: different factions are trying to get to the other side of the second dawn bunker doorway.

“The Chosen”

Skaikru must choose who will stay in the second dawn bunker.

Possibly a reference to Judaism and the “chosen people”. However I do not know enough about this religion to speak to any quotes or finer points on this.

“Praimfaya”

The villain of the season arrives.

Some quick thoughts on the name versus episode content

1. I know we are drawn to point to an episode name and say “it’s about that individual” in the case of Season 4 when I look at all the things I bolded... they seem to really speak about the delinquent's relationship with the villain for the season.

The names are about how the strife incurred on the delinquents by the villain (”DNR”, “The Other Side”, “Gimmie Shelter”), how our heroes are planning to defeat the villain ( “A Lie Guarded”, ”God Complex”, “We Will Rise”), how their plans failed (“Heavy Lies the Crown”, “The Four Horseman”, “The Tinder Box”) and then at the very end the name of the villain (”Praimfire”).

I might be shoehorning some of those in.

2. The writers like their visual puns (”God Complex”, “A Lie Guarded”, “The Other Side”)

3. Interesting that they did two Shakespeare quotes from plays that bookend each other.

Anyways that’s it. Let me know if I missed anything.

#the 100 #the 100 meta

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