The feelings that the cast are portraying in these past two episodes: in effect, the sense of ‘post-nuked America’ , rings so emotionally illiterate that the show has lost itself in its planned rhetoric, forgetting that you convince at the solar plexus even more than in the neo-cortex. Especially with drama.

The actors need to be expressing something like: the hollowed-out sense of dread, as well as blistering fury, that everyone conscious felt freeze and boil in their gut on the morning of 9/11/2001 …and then amplify it times a hundred thousand lives (or times the “light of a thousand suns”).

It would be hard for a “series” writer to imagine this kind of stunned horror and targetless rage into a set of “actions”, but the actors should have been able to say: “Look, a nuke just went off, and we’re behaving like the Bomb was one-more quickly-digestible ‘bad experience’… we aren’t shown as the recovering mass-wounded, or, that, even if we are faking ‘normalcy’ perfectly, the madness would still seep through and reveal us all as a nation staggering around… in a state of half-sleepwalker, half-berserker. And venting Dantean bile against the homicidal fools who forgot that our history is fertilized by the bones of those who fatally crossed us.”

If the actors and writers can’t conjure any existential darkness about a goddamned nuclear attack, what would move them?

Ten?

Fifty?

profitsbeard on January 22, 2007 at 10:35 PM