Did anyone catch the two hour premiere last night?
Man, this show just gets better and better. I’m officially hooked. The scenes with the Mormon homestead were riveting and brutally honest. Not much difference between them and the Indians.
Looking forward to seeing how this season turns out.
Just watched it on TIVO a few minutes ago. Liked it a lot. Looks like a strong season coming up.
Who the heck is the news reporter? She’s familiar but can’t place her.
Just posting for the LOL line from the most recent episode: ‘Sorry for your loss’
In that context, I nearly lost it. Aside from that, it was nice to have an episode where Bohannon didn’t get completely shit on for once and where the Swede was back to his psychopathic murdering ways.
We thought season 1 was so weak and pointless that we gave up on HOW. Then we needed something to watch and S2 came up on Netflix, so… wow, what a turnaround. We finished that and bought S3 on Vudu.
A couple of things I couldn’t quite shake, though…
Is anyone else getting a very Carnivale vibe from the bad man who is really good/bad man who is personified evil bit? The Swede seemed to become more and more a predecessor of Brother Justin and things kept resonating just that little bit with the “true evil” mysticism.
Is anyone else getting kind of a *Zelig *vibe from the changing settings? That the show isn’t as much about Bohannon as dropping him into one Western subculture after another? I could see S4 as being about Bohannon-as-Mormon-tribesman, helping them defend against the evil railroad empire of Durant. (Then S5 would have to be Bohannon-as-Plains-Indian-tribesman…)
They’ve let Anson Mount use more than the one expression and one slightly psycho attitude he had in S1. To the good. His reaction shot to finding out the Mormon girl’s child was his was priceless.
Oh… fa chrissakes, when are these period dramas going to stop throwing in the obligatory lesbian relationships? It’s shot past cliched to annoying.
I’ll spoiler this even though it’s a spoiler thread.
[spoiler]Wow, did the murder of Lily shock me. I know most shows now are pretty ruthless about killing off major and seemingly-permanent characters, but I kept waiting for her to reappear right up until they started shoveling dirt down on her. Just wow.
Sean’s murder/execution was almost as shocking but at least foreshadowed a little. The bit about him possibly killing women in Kansas City was shoehorned in too late to justify the killing, though. I don’t recall any warning that he might be “bad” before that episode. Mickey was the bad one (who now turns out to be gooder… another Carnivale vibe.[/spoiler]
I don’t think the story actually needs the Swede except as an excuse for this detour into the Mormon arc, which frankly I don’t really understand. I don’t see the social relevance or the relevance to the railroad except in the most tangential of ways but then I’m not exactly an expert on the history of the old West either, so maybe I’ll learn something - but I’m not optimistic.
This is one of those shows I watch for a few main characters like Bohannan. Actually, mainly Bohannan. He’s probably the closest thing to a modern day Clint Eastwood, spaghetti Western flawed hero I’ve seen in a while. There’s an elegant simplicity to that sort of story telling that still appeals to me and I guess to a lot of other people too. You can have internal conflict without all of the annoying requisite angst acted out over the course of an entire season that seems de rigueur these days.
I don’t know that I’d compare this to Carnivale though, having just watched that series. It seems to deliberately want to blur the lines, not to mention colors and seems to often do it just for the sake of doing it. Carnivale was anything but simple and while it did sort of work, I also wouldn’t consider it elegant.
Well, the Swede - and by the way, the infrequent reminders that he’s really Norwegian are hilarious to me - makes a good bridge between parts of the story, and is a hell of a bogeyman/bad guy as well.
The railroad is about to go through Mormon territory. That’s not an insignificant part of the history. Bringing in a strong connection to the Mormon colony and settlements is necessary. (That they have the courage to show the Mormons as having some pretty gray ethics instead of cardboard churchy folk is pretty ballsy… read up on the “Mountain Meadows Massacre,” for example.)
Eh. He’s pretty two-dimensional, if a lot less so than in the first season. He kind of picked up where Tim Olyphant left off in Deadwood - a steely-eyed grunter with no real focus or purpose. I think you can have depth without necessarily getting into late-20th angstiness.
Bullshit. Some work is required on the part of the viewer as well, at least that’s my opinion. If you want a story where the writers rub your nose in everything they want you to pick up on, fine, but I don’t.
This is why we’re plagued with all the whiny-ass angst drama we have to put up with now. Because if someone isn’t telling us ‘hey look, this character is suffering’, we’re too stupid to pick up on it. :smack:
I guess we’re stuck with the choice of Uncle Buffy slowly reading us the funny pages or characters making impenetrable scowls at each other for 45 minutes, then.
Damn. And I’ve seen so many good shows that were neither.
Don’t try to make it sound as if I’m presenting it as a false dichotomy since I think it’s pretty clear that’s not what I was doing. If things have worked out that way, it’s simply unfortunate. I didn’t say ALL shows are like that did I? It just seems that there is a surfeit of them.
And who knows, maybe my speculation as to the cause isn’t even accurate. Maybe it just actor vanity that is the reason and writers are pandering to that - giving them the opportunity to “express” themselves - gag. IDK and I don’t especially care. I just know that I’m getting awfully tired of it.
Well, you were kind of dismissive there, so I don’t know what kind of a response you expected.
I think Tim Olyphant devolved his character from interesting and nuanced down to a wooden parody of Clint Eastwood; in the third season of *Deadwood *his entire role seemed to be to stand in the background and look all steely-eyed and pissed-off. An occasional grunt and high-dudgeon exit varied the performance.
Anson Mount seemed to pick up at pretty much that point; he was wooden, impenetrable and just as much an Eastwood parody in the first season of HOW. That he has, or has been allowed to, broaden into a Gary Cooper is all to the good. I don’t think any aspect of HOW, first season or later developments, has gotten anywhere near angsty or pointlessly emotive. If anything, all of the characters seem to be reserved to the the point of woodenness. I don’t think a near total lack of expressed emotion (Elam’s almost childish outbursts being the only exception) represents fine, nuanced acting. (Nor does a more expressive style necessarily overwhelm whatever storytelling aspects you are admiring.)
I guess there’s a place to consider The Man With No Name the height of dramatic acting, but I’m not sure where that place is. Scandanavian territory in mid-winter, maybe. 
Why do you have to look at everything in black in white or create strawmen? Where did I say his performance was the height of television acting. Jesus. Cut me some slack here dude.
I was responding to your claim that he was two dimensional. He’s clearly not. Sure, there’s a lack of emotional expressiveness, but uhhh, that’s sort of the point of his character and I think there is a place for characters like that. The story can still fill in the elements of character development that the character itself can’t, at least not overtly and I think HOW does that reasonably well.
Is it the best show EVAAARRRR? No. I just like the character and story. There IS a middle ground you know.