New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Knots Blogger" data-source="post: 73406" data-attributes="member: 392">CONTINUEDWe actually open Vulnerable in the s***ty trailer park that Nurse Wilson lives in.  She is still reticent and scared to speak with Karen about anything, and at the start of the ep, she is ordering Ben and Karen to get out of here, to leave her alone.  Then they call Mack to come and give them some muscle, but by the time he shows up with a cop, the trailer has been abandoned.  Her groceries are still sitting in their bags, but they can tell someone packed a suitcase real fast and hit the road.  How are they going to find Nurse Wilson now?<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BRQ28aVgTEY/WTBo6o_1MRI/AAAAAAAACqY/pgZZotdmiOsz9A6DjSugCZHyIpv0tFrBwCLcB/s1600/nurse%2Bwilson.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BRQ28aVgTEY/WTBo6o_1MRI/AAAAAAAACqY/pgZZotdmiOsz9A6DjSugCZHyIpv0tFrBwCLcB/s400/nurse%2Bwilson.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> Surprisingly, Nurse Wilson winds up coming to them.  There’s a really terrific scene right before we go to commercial in which Val is over at the MacKenzie house (or should I be referring to is as the Fairgate MacKenzie house?) and she’s just getting up to leave and as she opens the front door, there stands Nurse Wilson, her hand up in the air, clearly about to knock on the door.  The music swells, we wonder if Val will recognize this lady from her horrifying delivery back in November, and then we cut to commercial.  When we come back, we get confirmation that Val doesn’t recognize this lady, as she’s just like, “Oh hey, how you doing?” and then she leaves the house.  Nurse Wilson stays and finally spills the beans to Mack and Karen, confirming that Dr. Ackerman is a really evil man who stole Val’s babies and sent them away someplace.  We also find out that Dr. Ackerman has some sort of dirt on Nurse Wilson, that he got her to participate in this baby theft because he threatened to expose whatever this secret is.  One thing I really appreciate is that we don’t actually find out what Nurse Wilson’s big secret is; she’s about to tell Karen and Mack and seems embarrassed and then Karen sorta says how it doesn’t matter, what matters is finding the babies.  I like the mystery of this as well as the fact that the writers are saying yeah, it doesn’t matter.  Whatever Nurse Wilson did, it’s something she regrets and Dr. Ackerman is using it to manipulate her.  It makes me wonder precisely what the big secret is, and I just like that little aura of mystery.In fact, I really like Nurse Wilson.  Again, I had kinda forgotten about this character, yet she’s another beautiful example of KL’s ability to turn every single character interesting.  For all intents and purposes, Nurse Wilson could be treated as just a plot function, here to help the characters find the babies.  Instead, she comes alive and seems real, and I feel like there’s this whole other person with this whole other life here, and we are just briefly getting a glimpse into her life at this precise moment in time.  I also like the fact that this character is never presented as bad and that we get a real sense of her life in this scene.  She talks about how hard it was to put herself through nursing school, yet she managed to do it.  Honestly, I just marvel at this stuff, because there’s really no reason that we need to know this stuff; a lazier writing staff could just have Nurse Wilson show up to provide exposition and then ship her right back out of there, but the KL writers take the time to give us a little information on her back story and her character history, and it makes everything all the more richer because of it.<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0ZzzHTB-eFw/WTBqXGbSysI/AAAAAAAACqg/Y2oeoIRO4IwKJ7Qa-FSC-oEYm8J2hY7mwCLcB/s1600/more%2Bwilson.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0ZzzHTB-eFw/WTBqXGbSysI/AAAAAAAACqg/Y2oeoIRO4IwKJ7Qa-FSC-oEYm8J2hY7mwCLcB/s400/more%2Bwilson.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> Joshua is on a real roll of evil this ep, by the way, and he’s certainly not helping Val to feel any less vulnerable or any less depressed about the state of her life.  By this point, I’m officially ready to declare Joshua as evil.  I can’t put my finger on the precise moment when it happened, as everything has been done so well and so subtly that it was almost hard to notice him changing from good to evil, but I feel now he has arrived at evil.  He’s not just egotistical, he doesn’t just have a big head, he isn’t just kinda socially weird; he’s very calculating in the way he manages to degrade Val and hurt her.  For instance, in this ep when Karen fails to show up as Val expected her to, Joshua goes on about how all of Val’s friends abandon her, and he lists Karen and Gary and Ben and all these people, and he says how the only real friends Val has are her family, Lilimae and himself.  This scene takes place right in front of both Cathy and Lilimae, by the way, and while Cathy speaks up and tells him not to speak to Val in that way (much the way that Val appears to be the only one sticking up for Cathy when Joshua degrades her), Lilimae remains conspicuously silent.  I still love Lilimae and always have and always will, but I’m having a hard time liking her as much at this juncture because of the way she stays silent about Joshua and lets him be a tyrant.<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R_sizn842Tc/WTBpoUaZR3I/AAAAAAAACqc/zF8IPvesDS8X-z3rN021nPpdI-gGdq0eQCLcB/s1600/vulnerable.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R_sizn842Tc/WTBpoUaZR3I/AAAAAAAACqc/zF8IPvesDS8X-z3rN021nPpdI-gGdq0eQCLcB/s400/vulnerable.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> There’s a fabulous scene later in the ep involving Joshua and Ben, and I do mean fabulous.  This scene was so great it made both My Beloved Grammy as well as myself clap and cheer.  See, Ben comes over to visit Val and gets word of all the nasty stuff Joshua’s been saying to her and filling her head with.  He gets damn mad and marches upstairs and right into Joshua and Cathy’s bedroom (the room where they don’t ever have sex because, you know, Cathy mentioned how she’s not ready to start popping out babies immediately and so now Joshua refuses to touch her, in the grand spirit of all religious fanatics worldwide) to have it out with Joshua.  He asks Cathy to leave them alone for a minute and then he totally confronts Joshua and I love it.  Again, I wish I had transcribed this speech down word for word so that I could share it with you right now, but I was too stunned and enraptured by watching this amazingness unfold before me, so I just stared and drooled and wrote nothing in my notes.  The basic gist of it is that Ben calls him on his bull***t and he says, “I’ve seen the way you work,” and how Joshua manipulates people to get what he wants, all that good stuff.  Then Joshua says something mean to Ben (I think it’s something about running out on his responsibilities, how he knocked Val up and then left her all alone) and Ben punches him.  We’ve all been waiting to see Joshua get punched for a good long while now, and I found it very satisfying even if it does look a smidge too stagey, but why nitpick when you are being given such a wonderful gift as this scene?Before I move on to other business, I want to make sure and note real fast that while I’m starting to hate the character of Joshua, in no way does this reflect on Baldwin’s performance, which is frankly quite stunning considering this is one of his first acting gigs ever.  Also, I hate the character in a good way, if that makes sense.  It’s not the way I hated Kenny and Ginger for being so useless (and, if we’ll flashback to their departure at the end of season four, I believe I declared that I had graduated to not hating them anymore, which was a big deal for me) and it’s not the way I hate, say, um, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends" target="_blank">Friends</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Guy" target="_blank">Family Guy</a> or those awful seven and a half hour superhero movies that just keep coming out every two seconds; this is the kind of hatred where the audience is supposed to hate the character.  Joshua is evil and nasty and treats people I love very badly, and that’s why I hate him, but this is fully intentional on the part of the writers and Baldwin is playing the part just precisely right.<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SkQOPUZuaCE/WTBsH7QcsnI/AAAAAAAACqo/z-SGntyADCIWqLQKc60Y1a-zfmsdWyLnwCLcB/s1600/ack.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SkQOPUZuaCE/WTBsH7QcsnI/AAAAAAAACqo/z-SGntyADCIWqLQKc60Y1a-zfmsdWyLnwCLcB/s400/ack.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> The big quest to find Dr. Ackerman is the central thrust of this ep, and it’s unbelievably compelling and delivers us directly into one of the most exciting and memorable episode endings of the entire series run, at least in my opinion.  There have been so many truly wonderful episode endings (with probably the first GREAT ep ending being Laura getting her cigarette lit in <a href="http://www.knotsblogging.com/2015/10/knots-landing-episode-004-of-344-lie.html" target="_blank">The Lie</a>), but this is definitely top ten material right here.  In fact, I actually thought we were gonna get this episode a few eps back, when Joshua and Cathy were getting married and Karen tracked Dr. Ackerman down to Vegas.  Nope, I was wrong, it was this episode I was thinking of.  Basically, after speaking with Nurse Wilson at some length, Karen is doing some brainstorming and she realizes that, whether he’s supposed to be on the run or not, Dr. Ackerman can’t not go to the upcoming bridge tournament.  She sorta narrates out loud to Mack and says how people who are addicted to gambling really can’t stop, no matter what’s going on in their lives, so she thinks even though he probably knows logically that he should lay low and keep a low profile, he won’t be able to resist going to play bridge.  This is confirmed when we see Dr. Ackerman packing up a bag and getting ready to, I guess, blow town, when his friend calls and leaves a message on his machine saying how he’d better be at the tournament and that they should play together, or whatever.  We see Dr. Ackerman stare sorta thoughtfully at the phone, the wheels spinning in his head, and we realize Karen is right; Dr. Ackerman can’t resist the lure of a bridge tournament any more than I can resist the lure of a naked Korean spa packed to the gills with hot young men.  <a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--2ey2Rq-6u0/WTBrhk0_sYI/AAAAAAAACqk/DHiLm_wR9HAX7lF3pjMk8NxhN_WtrcKAgCLcB/s1600/naked%2Bspa.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--2ey2Rq-6u0/WTBrhk0_sYI/AAAAAAAACqk/DHiLm_wR9HAX7lF3pjMk8NxhN_WtrcKAgCLcB/s640/naked%2Bspa.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a> Karen, Mack, and Nurse Wilson all successfully manage to track Dr. Ackerman down at, oh, someplace.  It’s not really really far away like Vegas this time, but it’s kinda sorta far away.  I’m sure they tell us directly at some point where the characters are heading, but suffice it to say that I have forgotten the details and let’s just say it’s kinda sorta far away from where they live, but not too far, like maybe an hour away.  Anyway, who cares about that, anyway?  Let’s talk about this incredible sequence that leads to this incredible ending.  Basically the trio burst in on Dr. Ackerman when he’s right in the middle of some big important hand and when he looks up and sees them glaring at him, he gets pretty scared.    He immediately makes some sort of weird, inadequate bet (I don’t know my bridge, so I’m not really sure what he does that’s inappropriate) and then the people around him are all like, “Hey, you can’t do that,” and then he loses his cool big time and is like, “Those people are distracting me!”  Then he makes a run for it and manages to make it out to the parking lot.  Mack tells Karen to get in the car and cut him off so he can’t drive away, and they crash real good when Karen backs her car right into him.  Then, as Karen and Mack loom in front of him and Mack yells, “It’ s over, Ackerman!”, we go into super slow motion (that sorta choppy type of slow motion) as Dr. Ackerman pulls a gun out of his glove box and blows himself away.  Obviously this isn’t <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwalk_Empire" target="_blank">Boardwalk Empire</a>, so we don’t actually see him pull the trigger and blow his own brains out, but the message is clear and we end on a nice shot of Mack and Karen looking rather horrified right after he pulls the trigger.  I actually got real morbid during this sequence and started to wonder what it would really look like and feel like to watch someone shoot themselves in the head, what a hard image that would be to shake off after you’ve seen it. TO BE CONTINUED</blockquote>

Verification: Who played Sue Ellen in Dallas?