Yes, I left episode 2 thinking, for sure, the same thing you spoilered. Especially with the send-up line:
You are not a mother.
Nice to see some old friends for HBO’s Rome!
Yeah, did Brutus die from the gunshot, or was that him that Nessa was thanking?
I couldn’t tell. My understanding is that the writers kill off characters more randomly than Game of Thrones.
Anyone else call, in their minds the slightly disheveled intelilgence guy “Columbo”?
This is a frustrating show… obviously very well made in some ways, and then it has insanely stupid moments (she claims her mother works at a rock factory, and for some reason she has to contact her in person, and she has to go there, and he follows her in, and only at the very last moment does he become suspicious??? and this guy is a trained and competent security professional?) and also weirdly confusing moments…
So Atika got a new toothbrush and pretended it was her son’s. And it has her DNA on it. They’re not going to confuse her DNA from his DNA, that’s not how it works at all (is it?). So that keeps alive the fairly obvious suspicion that the boy is really Nessa’s. Also, what information would the widow of a hit man have that was SO potentially damaging? “Oh, hi, honey, I’m off on a new mission tomorrow, by the way, my employer is THE MOSSAD, get it, THE MOSSAD. Obviously I can’t tell you what I’m doing for THE MOSSAD”, etc.
Just lots of unnecessarily complicated scenes in which people don’t really act like real people. Irritating.
MaxTheVool, I had the same reactions to those plot elements. I’m sticking with the show as it’s gotten so many raves, but I can’t go along with the “brilliantly written” assessments; the problems you mention belie such a view.
I couldn’t make any sense at all out of this latest episode. Can somebody clue me in?
It helped me a lot to re-watch the first episode but I admit I’m not clear on several plot points. I don’t know who that woman was that led the security guard into the trap. I don’t get the whole deal with the kid- whoever is or is not the father/mother of that boy is way to mellow about the kidnapping. Which does point it to being Nessa’s- she’s the only one you see ever losing it.
When the boy was kidnapped, one of the kidnappers was caught, and hospitalized. He then committed suicide. That lady was his wife. He was induced to kidnap himself via a phone call which presumably said “if you kill yourself, we’ll give your wife a bunch of money, if you don’t, we’ll kill her”. Then the kidnappers (fairly clearly implied to be the same group of people who kidnapped Nessa and Atika 9 years ago, including facial-scar-man) continued to blackmail the wife with threats to her mother, forcing her to lure the security guy into the trap.
I’m pretty sure I’m clear on all that.
I think Atika is pretty clearly very upset also, but she’s been raising the boy for 9 years, so she would be, even if he isn’t her biological son.
Thanks- that helps because the only thing I could come up with was that she was the suicide guys wife and it made no sense that way.
Yes, I forgot Atika is having sleepless nights either over the boy or the questions the kidnapping raised.
I love to see Stephen Rea again- seems like I haven’t seen him in anything for a long time. Also great seeing all these Rome people popping up- is it too much to ask that Marc Anthony will be Nessa’s new bodyguard? Because that would be super hot…
So the theory is that while Nessa and Atika were kidnapped (apparently for over a year), Nessa either voluntarily or involuntarily had sex with the scarred guy. That resulted in a pregnancy, explaining the boy’s existence. But why would Nessa hide that the boy is hers? Perhaps, because people might think that this makes her sympathetic to the Palestinian people. Also, the boy would be entitled to a share of the Stein Group.
But why are they keeping secret that she was kidnapped? And how were they able to keep the secret? Also, why did her brother cede control of the company to her?
I was assuming it was the fairly obvious idea that a child of rape brings great shame on both child and mother, and since Nessa was a wealthy public figure it would be much harder to invent a fictional-but-now-dead-in-an-honorable-fashion-boyfriend for her than for Atika. Or something along those lines.
Both excellent questions.
So I’m guessing that all the killing was instigated when Nessa told the guy on the phone that the “secret” was no longer safe. Then she told Atika that she fucked up and the fun began.
I’m still bothered by the latest episode shown here (the fourth, “The Ribbon Cutter”). Specifically, I am having trouble caring about a main character who could behave in so spectacularly moronic a fashion.
If the character Nessa is supposed to be developmentally disabled–the only explanation that would work in the face of her decision to go into Gaza to Ask Questions About Missing Money–then why would her brother have let her go off on her own to the Middle East? If she is supposed to have normal intelligence but just be An Idealist, then…no. No person of normal intelligence, no matter how idealistic, would think that she could accomplish something by going into an area rife with kidnapping-of-Westerners and “confronting” some mysterious person or persons and thus convincing them to hand her back her 1.5 million pounds sterling (or whatever it was). It’s ludicrous.
Sometimes characters behave in a way that makes it impossible to care two cents what happens to them, or to believe that the story is worth giving any more time. Is there anything coming in future episodes that would make this character’s choice believable or sympathetic?
On the plus side, this episode revealed what happened in the past, so we’re not guessing as to motives and wondering “who the fuck is that?”.
That’s true, Chefguy.
But I still can’t find a way to process her decision as anything other than criminally stupid. Yet this doesn’t appear to be a story about how an unusually stupid person deals with life. So I have to go with “the writer couldn’t make the plot work unless the protagonist did this genuinely implausible thing.”
Not a good sign for the rest of the series.
For once I agree entirely with Sherrerd.
In addition, I find the idea that Fatah cares so much about their reputation that anyone would find it surprising that a kidnapped woman might get raped to be a bit silly (although it’s possible that that entire scene was a setup, for some reason, but that seems unlikely, since the cleric did apparently banish the rapist/son). And also I find it pretty unlikely that an extremely rich and prominent kidnap victim would meet with nothing but “oh, we don’t negotiate with terrorists” from all sides. Is there any factual or historical basis for that?
(Was the rapist the same actor who played the scarred-face guy? Presumably it should be, but I didn’t recognize him at all.)
Another episode, another collection of powerfully written and acted scenes in which you aren’t quite sure what’s actually going on, and a bunch of people acting unbelievably stupid. In this case:
(1) Hey, let’s have our super-secret eavesdropping room behind an unlocked wooden door in the basement of a college. Also, we’ll have our super-secret wiretap thing under a manhole and otherwise in plain sight.
(2) Is someone rigging the college entrance exams? All we have is one sample. There’s no way we could possibly know the truth! So let’s mope about it rather than, you know, taking a half hour to make a little excel spreadsheet from the big pile of exams we just saw a few scenes ago?
(3) That was the most ridiculous rescue mission I’ve ever seen. Fortunately it didn’t matter because the kidnappers had already decided to let them go. but how on earth was your plan going to succeed when they had 10 minutes of warning as your extremely non-stealthy helicopter gave them plenty of warning to kill the captives, or at least get in to a nice threatening-y hostage-y situation. (I suppose it’s possible that the Israelis somehow had info that the guards weren’t serious, or whatever…)
I kept dozing off during the last episode. It’s good there are only two eps left in the series, or I wouldn’t continue watching. Could they be any more obscure?
Another classic moment for this series was the creepy rapist at the beginning. There are, I suppose, times when it “makes sense” to not only be a rapist, but be extra-taunty about it. Those times are:
-when you’re planning to kill your victim afterwards
-or she can never possibly identify you
-or you have all the power and she has none, due to your places in the hierarchy of society (or at least you assume that is true)
None of those apply to 21st century England when the victim is a BARONESS. And you are AWARE of that.
Clearly the show wanted to illustrate Nessa’s self-destructive and self-loathing tendencies. Which is reasonable, and could be done in a powerful and interesting way without going the extra level into both super-creepy and also super-implausible.
Also, I think the last episode made explicit what they’ve only previously implied; that Nessa sleeps in a panic room every night. That’s another sign of the damage she suffered as a result of her kidnapping/rape.