My weekly routine of heading to the SDMB as soon as I finally get to see an episode and opening the threads has been disturbingly lacking the past few weeks.
A few thoughts:
General:
Reg is really growing on me. I’m not sure why, but she is. Her mom…isn’t. The babysitter she had last week deserves her ass kicked.
Daisy and Mas… I think they’re potentially a good couple, if things continue as they look to be.
Reaps:
Is it me, or are there a growing number of deaths that the Reapers actually CAUSE lately?
George is indirectly responsible for the massive shooting at the medical company she took too long to assign a temp to.
Daisy’s Priest this week was killed because he was careless because of what Daisy told him earlier.
Roxy shot Mas’s reap this week.
This is an interesting trend.
Roxy deserves a kick in the pants for making Mas’s job harder than it needed to be. Fine, get shirty at Mas, but it’s his reap that’s gonna suffer for it. If she was going to help George get in, she should have helped Mas.
Mas’s apologies for this reap were surprising. He’s had reaps that were close calls before, without the grovelling, and this time the problems weren’t all his own fault (Roxy & the guard) - although he could have disengaged from the bunch of goths that dragged him in a little earlier. I’m wondering if the chick who got him in freaking out when it turned out he really WAS a Reaper had anything to do with it.
Last week, Mas reaping his hero was…kind of neat. I liked the bit with the needle.
I was, but now I’m not. TMN on Demand has finally gotten around to adding the most recent.
So…further thoughts:
Looks like we’re gonna find out some more about Rube’s history before the season’s over. I still say he was a con-man.
The Trip situation was predictable.
The ‘Dragon Slayer’ was interesting. I wonder if he’ll be a regular character. Gotta be sucky for a kid to get stuck with the job.
Roxy and Mas’s reaps were fairly predictable, too, but there was a lot more amusement waiting for them than waiting for the Trip situation to unfold. (Although I have to admit, that was an amusing death.) I actually LIKED Roxy this time around - I usually don’t so much.
Yes, it’s worth following. It’s funny as hell, but I wouldn’t really call it a comedy. It’s often poignant, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a drama. And I most certainly wouldn’t use that horrid word “dramedy” that is sometimes used for stuff that walks the line between humor and pathos.
The main character is George, who was the consummate slacker teenager–apathy, isolation, and angst personified. And then she dies and becomes a Grim Reaper. The show is about her going through the who am I/who do I want to be/what am I going to do with my life stuff most people her age have to sort out, except that she’s undead and also has to learn to cope with being a Reaper. It’s also about the Reapers she works with, and how they deal with various unresolved issues from their lives and deaths and afterlives.
I’m very happy over two plot elements from the most recent episode (9/12, I believe):
1) Dragonslayer kid is back!
2) George has made contact with her grandmother! You may question how valuable this contact was, but I think it’s an important step to George communicating with her family, or making a decision as to whether she should do so.
The situation on the plane brings up this question: After a Reaper takes a soul and the person dies, is the Reaper still visible to the living? If not, how is his/her disappearance explained to people who saw them before the person died?
Right after George was reaped, Rube explained to her that he could choose to be interactive with the living. I think that when a soul is reaped and the reaper takes him/her to their reward, they are no longer visable to anyone except other reapers and the deseased.
As to the most recent episode, I, too, was glad that George made semi-contact with her grandmother. I don’t think that Rube is related in anyway, that he was looking in the phone books for Rosie or decendants.
It seems that the writers are breaking away from some of the rules established in the first season, ie…that the reapers don’t cause accidents or death, that the gravelings do, but we have seen death as a direct cause of interference by Daisy (with the priest), Roxy (the groupie with the gun) and George (the temp placed at Luna-techa).
I do dearly love this show. Now, if only Carnivale and Deadwood would start back up, I could become the couch potato I always dreamed of becoming.
But she didn’t try to do that. She was calling her own home; her gran just happened to be the one who picked up.
You’re misremembering. The gravelings cause accidents; they have little or nothing to do with murders and suicides. And when Rube says that Reapers don’t kill people, just remove their souls before death, he’s clearing up a point of confusion that would have turned a lot of people off when George took the little girl’s soul at the end of the ep: the act of reaping is not ending the life, only preparing it for its fated end.
You have a strange definition of “direct” that does not match our Earth definition. George didn’t directly cause the temp’s death by sending him to Luna-tech any more than Joy caused her death by sending her out to work - she didn’t know that doing so would kill him, which makes it an indirect action at worst. Same with Daisy; the priest might not have been at the font without the epiphany she gave him, but she in no wise caused his accident.
Trip was the name of the guy George was sort of trying to hook up with when she found out she had to reap his father - but thought she had to reap HIM first, which was very awkward for her, and served to make the already awkward situation of reaping his dad even worse. I saw how that whole bit would unfold - That he’d turn out to be the Reap’s son, that George would think he was the Reap, that George and he would get cozy, making that kinda weird - the moment Trip introduced himself, and I’m sure some people caught it as soon as he spoke up.
One thing I didn’t get (and I’ve no idea where this episode fits into the series) was George trying to reap some rock star and having to use subterfuge to get into his unplugged concert, the VIP room, etc. That suggests to me that if you’re wealthy enough and can afford bodyguards to keep every unfamiliar person away (or if you’re just a shut-in with no human contact at all), the reapers can’t get you and you’ll never die.
Oh, you still die - but your soul is trapped in a dead, decaying body, experiencing all the unpleasantness of being undead (autopsy), not able to speak or cry out…
Until a reaper frees your soul.
The reaper touching a person doesn’t kill them, it releases their soul from their body. Most reapers do it first, so the person doesn’t experience the pain/trauma of physically dying.
How about you pay some minimal amount of attention to the episodes before you post? The guy introduces himself as Trip, George calls him Trip, and they even have a brief conversation about it. I can’t see how you could watch that ep and miss it.
aegypt - DLM isn’t really much like Grim Fandango. I also suggest you try getting hold of the pilot; it’s really important for understanding how the show works, and will save you many "Huh?"s and "Why doesn’t…?"s.
