Go back to previous topic
Forum namePass The Popcorn
Topic subjectNevermind, couldn't help but watch the last 40 of S2's finale as well
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=6&topic_id=745460&mesg_id=746295
746295, Nevermind, couldn't help but watch the last 40 of S2's finale as well
Posted by Nodima, Sat Oct-08-22 05:55 AM
There are plenty of good references I could make to the rest of the season if we weren't a few weeks removed from this, but it is what it is so I'm specifically working off this episode and my memory of what led to it.


HARPER GOT FUCKING PLAYED. One of the most painful moments of this episode is early in these 40 minutes, when Eric tells his buddy that Harper is the key to their enterprise. Eric is all side eye and Harper just doesn't see it. She also doesn't see that she's often in quiet rooms with decision making men years into the game while leveraging a single client and emotional/sexual abuse on the strength of her word...forgetting that she twisted, for profit, those situations into abuses and the client she's bragging about always presents himself as an absolute mercenary.


Which is the thing that caught me so off guard about this season. Because Herrold is so charming as Harper it's easy to forget that she's often just as if not more toxic and consuming as Yas openly is, but she has no fallout shelter other than being the main character. Speaking of: yes, the actress and character of Yas could probably toy with me very similarly, but she contrasts so well with Harper because she's so outwardly terrible at playing the game Harper is trying to play, she's simply outfitted with too many social and political parachutes to fail the way Harper can.


Ken Leung plays Eric so brilliantly that he convinces the audience she really is this finance prodigy, when the CHARACTER is more brilliantly realizing he can massage her ego while hinting at all his homies and the real players that she's not the Sue Bird of UK finance if they don't say she is.


So I don't think how this wraps up necessarily excuses the moments when season 2 seems to be satisfying tropes (from a few different types of shows, to its credit, rather than a single recipe) but in the bigger picture it does a pretty nasty job of reminding you this is despicable business the show is about. On rewatch, my favorite moment might be when Jay Duplass (I'm not saying his character's name because this casting in particular is PERFECT) lets Gus know he's got a seat at the table because: A) I've rarely felt so sad to see someone smile so genuinely B) it's obviously a transition from manipulating Harper to Gus and C) every scene afterward is abusers being confronted by victims and their attempts to understand their dynamics. With the big, bold faced D being: kind of like Six Feet Under's relationship with death, it's more about the accounts than the emotions. Everyone is under the same delusion, they're all trying to slip the mickey in the drink.


But of course we'll still root for Harper because she didn't belong in this story to begin with, and just like her we couldn't have realized it until it was too late. Eric's "uh oh, time's up" is maybe sadder than when he says "I'm doing this for you" moments later on rewatch because he has to play at being the biased dungeon master one last time, and probably truly likes Harper. She'll see him as Judas, but nobody sees her as the finance Messiah. It might seem abrupt but to me that's the power in it. Harper spends this entire season convincing us, and herself, that she's the Peggy to Eric's Don Draper, when she's only just what she is - a young girl in a disadvantaged position, allowing a couple strokes of luck to make her a pawn in a handful of other peoples' games.


I'm so mad they haven't confirmed season 3 yet.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz