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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: Hunger Games

    Adult Shauna tries to fill the gaping hole inside. Teen Misty gives an interesting monologue.Season 2, Episode 3: ‘Digestif’This week’s episode of “Yellowjackets” is a tale of two monologues.First, we have adult Shauna, pointing a gun at a carjacker to get her minivan back. “Have you ever peeled the skin off a human corpse?” she asks. “It’s not as easy as you might think. It’s really stuck on us, skin.”As she speaks, her eyes blaze with hunger. Maybe not quite a hunger for flesh, but the memory of that hunger is being funneled into her desire for something thrilling in her current life. She wants to kill, even if she doesn’t want to eat. “My hand wasn’t shaking because I was afraid,” she explains, countering the man’s earlier assumptions. “It was shaking because of how badly I wanted to do this.”Melanie Lynskey is phenomenal in the scene, her face a mixture of excitement and arousal. You can just about see the saliva forming around her lips as she contemplates (or resists) pulling the trigger. It’s not about the minivan or her daughter’s childhood toy inside. She has a blood lust. The threat is the closest she can come to getting what will satisfy her.And then there’s young Misty, in the woods, performing at Shauna’s depressing, post-cannibalism baby shower. Having tasted (and digested) the forbidden flesh, she, too, is looking for another way to fill her emptiness. Encouraged by her new friend Crystal, Misty decides to give Shauna the gift of theater, doing her best Sally Field in “Steel Magnolias” for her skeptical teammates.It’s a weird choice. “Did she really choose a scene about a dead daughter?” Tai wonders out loud. Misty squeals: “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I can jog all the way to Texas and back but my daughter can’t,” invoking the sorrow of a woman who lost her child. Despite the initial skepticism, by the time Misty finishes, the other girls erupt in applause. Misty smiles. She is also being satiated in a way. Finally, she is getting more of that attention she so desires.Cleverly titled “Digestif,” this episode is shockingly less about the guilt of consuming Jackie’s corpse than one might think. Other than Taissa, who ate while technically asleep, the rest of the survivors have grimly come to terms with their actions. Natalie elects to bring what’s left of Jackie to the plane so she can be buried with the crash victims when the ground thaws. In her weariness, Natalie actually envies Jackie — “Way to make everyone jealous of you one last time,” she says — who will not have to endure the rest of the winter.There’s a bit of awkward discomfort regarding their cannibalism among the others, but also satisfaction. Misty and Crystal gab about how it wasn’t all that bad, and Crystal — that oddball — confesses it wasn’t the first time she had eaten a person. “I actually absorbed my identical twin in the womb,” she says. These two are giddy as if they had just shoplifted from the mall. The transgression is exciting rather than disturbing.The one person who remains hungry is Coach Scott, a.k.a. Ben, who didn’t partake and has now entered a fugue state, where he relives memories, or perhaps near-memories, of his time with an ex-boyfriend. At first, these scenes seem like straight flashbacks. Ben is resistant to committing to a relationship with Paul (​​François Arnaud) for fear of being outed. “You always say those girls are vicious little monsters,” Paul says, challenging Ben’s desire to stay with the team. Little did either of them know just how vicious the girls could be.But the more these sequences progress, the more they begin to seem like an alternate timeline, with Ben envisioning what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten on that plane. The moments between Ben and Paul are a little static. They feel like they come from another show, in which the dialogue and the actions are blunter. I started to wonder if that was an intentional choice by the showrunners. Before Ben descends into these fantasy memories, we see and hear the fuzz and sound of vintage TV static. He’s playing back these scenes as if rewinding a VCR. They have the schmaltz of a prime-time soap or a cheesy movie.Even just three hours into the new season, we can start to divide the Yellowjackets into who is aware of their own reality and who is not. Taissa — in the past and in the present — is not. In the ’90s, she follows the lead of the “man with no eyes” into the wilderness at night, not in possession of her own body. The current day Taissa is feeling that same force taking hold. With her wife in the hospital after the car accident Taissa caused, the shadow self is growing stronger, appearing in a bathroom mirror, contorting Taissa’s face.Something similar is happening to grown-up Lottie, who runs an entire enterprise on being in touch with one’s emotions but finds herself getting lost in her own head. Her latest hallucination comes courtesy of the bees she keeps on her commune. She has a vision of these creatures as dead, their hive filled with bloody honey. Lottie clearly identifies with the queen bee, and now she is besieged by an image of the hive’s demise, one that may foretell her own. She hears a voice say what sounds like “Il veut de sang,” French for “He wants blood,” before snapping out of the hallucination.On the other side of the spectrum are Shauna and Misty. Shauna is in full control of her faculties when she takes it upon herself to reclaim her family’s car, and Misty is still on the hunt for Natalie, now ensconced with Lottie. Now, however, Misty has an accomplice. Meet the brilliantly named Walter Tattersall, played by Elijah Wood, another message web sleuth who offers to help Misty in her investigation.Their interrogation of the doltish Randy (Jeff Holman) leads to some amusing “Cyrano”-like high jinks — even though Misty detests “Cyrano” — and Walter seems pleasant enough. Still, it’s hard to say whether he can be trusted. He comes clean, explaining that he didn’t bring his mother to the nursing home in order get Misty’s attention. Instead, he just recruited a random old lady. Misty is befuddled.“Maybe I’m just a bored Moriarty looking for his Sherlock,” he says.Wood has such an easy, cheery demeanor that you almost think he meant to say Watson, Sherlock’s partner. But no, he invokes Moriarty, Sherlock’s greatest foe. What is his game plan here? Or is “Moriarty” actually the perfect reference for the kind of person who performs a monologue about a dead daughter at a baby shower?More to chew on:Jeff is so wonderfully characterized as a huge dork. He thinks strawberry lube is for “bisexuals and Goths.” His idea of a spontaneous trip is to go to Colonial Williamsburg and churn butter. Oh Jeff, you silly, naïve loser.Once again, this show is expertly deploying Tori Amos. This time it’s “Bells for Her,” a song about the dissolution of a female friendship. “Can’t stop what’s coming,” Amos sings. “Can’t stop what’s on its way.”The symbol the Yellowjackets find in the woods is getting quite a workout. In the ’90s, Taissa is drawn to it in her sleep, finding it carved into a tree. In the present, she draws it on her wife. Past Lottie embroiders it on a baby blanket for Shauna, which may or may not have triggered a mass bird death around their cabin. Are we getting closer to finding out who or what it is?Travis determines that Ben is acting “weird.” At risk of sounding like a teenager: Duh, dude. More

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    Dmitry Krymov, Exiled Russian Director, Starts Over in New York

    Dmitry Krymov, one of Russia’s most eminent directors, is among the dozens of artists who have left their homeland since Russia invaded Ukraine.If Dmitry Krymov, the celebrated Russian director and playwright, were directing a play about his life, the third act would begin, he mused, in a cramped, art-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It is winter, nearly a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, turning his brief visit to the United States into an open-ended exile after he spoke out against the war. And his living room has suddenly burst into flames.So much brownish-black smoke is filling the apartment that he can’t see his arms, and he’s gasping for air. The computer containing drafts of his plays is burning. He is struggling to stamp out the flames with a blanket. Then darkness. His lungs are so badly damaged by the fire, which was apparently caused by a wire that short-circuited, that his doctors keep him in an induced coma for nine days.But this third act, Krymov stressed later, is not meant to be the final one.Surviving a fire, he added wryly, had been a baptism of sorts for his new life in the United States. “A fire brings you closer to a country, when you burn,” Krymov, 68, said recently as he recovered at a friend’s apartment and reflected on his self-imposed displacement, which he sees as a banishment of sorts, but also as a rebirth. “My life as a play needs to end with something, and I hope that we’re not at the end,” he added.Krymov, who scaled the heights of Russian theater during a storied career, left Moscow last year, the day after the invasion of Ukraine, for what he thought would be a six-week trip to the United States to direct a production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. He packed only one small suitcase.Before getting on one of the last Aeroflot flights to New York, he became one of the first prominent Russian cultural luminaries to sign a public letter criticizing the war. “We don’t want a new war, we don’t want people to die,” the letter said.The reaction was harsh. In the months that followed, he said, the authorities closed seven of his nine plays, which were playing at some of Moscow’s most vaunted theaters, and his name was erased from the posters and the programs of the two that continued. The cancellations were crushing, he said, but he had no regrets about signing the letter.“Sometimes,” he said, “you are facing something that is so obvious there is no other way.”During President Vladimir V. Putin’s first two decades in power, Russians in many walks of life — including the arts — were sometimes forced into compromises as the space for free speech narrowed. But with the war, that space has slammed shut almost entirely. As Putin has introduced some of the most draconian measures against freedom of expression since the end of the Cold War, Krymov has become part of a growing exodus of Russian artists, writers and intellectuals who have left the country, dealing a heavy blow to Russian culture.Krymov and the actor Annie Hägg rehearsed “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a mash-up of works by Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill.Marina LevitskayaChulpan Khamatova, one of Russia’s most prominent stage and screen actresses, left the country; so did Alla Pugacheva, one of its defining 20th-century pop stars. Young, ascendant filmmakers fled. Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, denounced the war, left the Bolshoi and joined the Dutch National Ballet. The list goes on.For Krymov, the 14 months since he left Moscow have had all the audacious drama, tragedy and dark comedy of one of his plays.In Russia, Krymov was revered by critics and audiences alike for his brazenly original and visually driven re-imaginings of classics from Pushkin, Chekhov and Shakespeare, among others. Now his antiwar stance has pushed him into a period of reinvention: as a little-known director in the United States, a country whose language he speaks only haltingly. He has gone from rehearsing plays at the famed Moscow Art Theater, where Stanislavski once presided, to rehearsing at a vacant barbershop in Midtown Manhattan that his new Krymov Lab NYC rents for $10 an hour from a friend.Last fall, his group was given a residency at La MaMa, the venerable East Village theater. He and a company of New York actors held workshops there of his adaptation of Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words),” and his own work “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a play mashing up works by Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill. He hopes to stage them at La MaMa next fall.“I want to work and have my work shown in the United States, to make them angry back home that I am gone,” he said. He brandished a handwritten manuscript of a play he is working on, its words blurred after being drenched by a fire hose.“Manuscripts don’t burn,” he said with a hint of mischief, quoting the devil Woland from “The Master and Margarita” by the Soviet-era writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The quote, with its suggestion that true art cannot be destroyed, has taken on new meaning for him.Liz Diamond, chair of directing at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, has known Krymov for nearly two decades and teaches his work in her courses.“He has lost everything,” she said. “He was at the absolute heights of Russian theater.”She credited him with pioneering a visceral and strikingly visual form of theater, known as “theater of the artist,” where classic texts are mined for contemporary themes and fused with deeply personal meditations.Anya Zicer and Jackson Scott in Krymov’s “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words).” Steven PisanoHe often uses a single line, scene or gesture as a jumping off point in works like “The Square Root of Three Sisters,” an encounter with Chekhov that he staged in 2016 with students at Yale. In his play, an actress reinterprets a line about a fork left outside by repeatedly stabbing herself with a fork.Diamond recalled she was “thunderstruck” years ago upon seeing Krymov’s wordless take on “Don Quixote,” with the whimsically phonetic title “Sir Vantes. Donkey Hot.”“Dima creates a poetry of space that I’ve never seen anyone else achieve,” Diamond said.Born in 1954 in Moscow, Krymov was the only child of two titans of Russian theater: His father, Anatoly Efros, who was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, was one of the leading Soviet theater directors of his generation, while his mother, Natalya Krymova, was an influential critic.Krymov said his father was Jewish, and that his parents, who were concerned about antisemitism, gave him his mother’s more Russian-sounding surname. Before he could walk, he said, he crawled around the backstages of leading Moscow theaters.“I never felt I was living in my father’s shadow,” he said. “My parents didn’t pressure me.”After graduating from the Moscow Art Theater School in 1976, he initially started out as a set designer, which has deeply informed his approach. He eventually became a successful painter, and returned to the theater in 2002 almost by accident, he said, and only reluctantly. He had mentioned to an actor friend an idea for a plot twist in “Hamlet” in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father doesn’t want his death avenged. At his friend’s urging, he directed the play, which bombed with critics but proved a hit with theatergoers.Soon he began teaching at the Russian Institute of Theater Arts, the oldest theatrical school in Russia, and he went on to direct and design dozens of productions.He and his wife, Inna, a frequent collaborator, who often finishes his sentences and lives with him in New York, have one son, age 40, who lives in Miami.This year Krymov’s work has taken on a sharper satirical edge as it grapples with the fate of Russian culture, which is under pressure, for very different reasons, at home and abroad.In the first scene of his new adaptation of “Eugene Onegin,” a group of elderly Russians are telling the story of Pushkin’s poem, as if to children. Then, suddenly, an actor planted in the audience violently throws a tomato at them, accusing them of ignoring the brutality of Putin’s war.“How can you talk about the beauty of Russian culture?” the actor screams. “It’s disgusting!”Krymov has many friends in Ukraine, and he said that he had broken down in tears several times during rehearsals of “The Cherry Orchard” in Philadelphia, thinking of them sheltering underground while bombs rained down.Still armed with his dark and fatalistic Russian sense of humor, he appears resigned to his new life. Alluding to Dostoevsky’s satirical novel “Demons,” he said he wouldn’t return home until “the latest demons had left Russia.”“It’s very safe to be a demon now in Russia,” he said. “Even if you are not a demon, you are going to put the tail and the horns on just in case they are looking for one.” More

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    Seth Meyers Defends New York City From Marjorie Taylor Greene

    “I don’t go to her hometown and say nasty things about it, although I don’t know where she’s from,” Meyers said. “I’m assuming the videotape from ‘The Ring’?”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Start Spreading the NewsIn a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene referred to New York City as “disgusting,” “filthy,” “repulsive” and “a terrible place.”“How dare you say that in the city that is home to Fox News headquarters!” Seth Meyers joked on Thursday.“Only Republicans would go to liberal cities and [expletive] on them — it doesn’t work the other way around. I don’t go to her hometown and say nasty things about it, although I don’t know where she’s from. I’m assuming the videotape from ‘The Ring’?”— SETH MEYERS“After attending a rally in Manhattan in support of former President Trump on Tuesday, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized New York during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson and said, ‘I think it’s a very terrible place.’ But the joke’s on you, Marjorie, because once you think that, you’re officially a New Yorker.” — SETH MEYERS“After visiting New York to protest Trump’s arrest, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called the city ‘a terrible place that is disgusting, filthy and repulsive.’ But don’t worry, things got a lot better here after she left.” — JIMMY FALLON“The only people who are allowed to [expletive] on New York — the only people — are New Yorkers, because we love it and we love how mad it makes us. It’s not an easy city to live in — you fight and claw and you finally get the job of your dreams, and you move into a New York City apartment, and you give a little fist pump and you say, ‘Yes!’ and then your neighbor pounds on the wall and screams, ‘Keep the [expletive] noise down!’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Old C.T. Edition)“I am sure this billionaire Republican didn’t want to influence nobody. He just — no, no, he — no! He just wanted to go on vacation with Clarence Thomas, you know, because we all know that Clarence Thomas is clearly a bag of fun. Just be straight up! Who wouldn’t want to pull up on Miami Beach with old C.T.?” — ROY WOOD JR., on Justice Clarence Thomas’s reported failure to disclose that he’d accepted luxury trips from a billionaire conservative donor“Here’s my question: If you’re going to buy a Supreme Court justice, why would you spend all that money on luxury yachts and planes for Clarence Thomas? You could have bought Brett Kavanaugh for a bottle of Jager and a Southwest boarding pass.” — ROY WOOD JR.The Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon invited a few talented dogs to show off their sports-related talents on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutPhoto Illustration: The New York Times; Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images for Tibet House USThe indie rock singers Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus talk about their collaborative side project, boygenius, on this week’s Popcast! More

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    Review: In ‘The Wife of Willesden,’ a Literary Marriage Falters

    Zadie Smith brings her first play, an adaptation of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath tale, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.This April, in New York, when the rains have come and the winds have calmed and the cherry trees and hyacinths have hustled into bloom, theatergoers might find themselves making a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for the New York premiere of “The Wife of Willesden,” the novelist Zadie Smith’s adaptation of a lusty wedge of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” And despite the punch and panache of the play’s language, they might find themselves going nowhere.As literary marriages go, one between Smith (“White Teeth,” “On Beauty,” “Swing Time”) and Chaucer, is in theory, of true minds. Though separated by some 600 years, both are keen stylists, eager comedians and dyed-in-the-worsted-wool humanists with a consuming interest in the varieties of emotion and experience. But marriage is hard and somehow Smith’s rendering — presented by BAM in association with A.R.T. — never quickens into life. “The Wife of Willesden,” Smith’s first play, is bookish bed death.Smith, aided by the director Indhu Rubasingham, has updated the action to the present and the setting a few miles north, from a South London tavern to a pub on the Kilburn High Road. (Rubasingham is the artistic director of Kilburn’s Kiln Theater, where the play debuted in 2021.) In Robert Jones’s design, the pub expands across the whole stage floor with lamps and lanterns flickering high above. Chaucer’s text, even unfinished, extends to 29 pilgrims and a host. Here the cast runs to just 10, though audience members seated onstage at wooden tables, swell those numbers.A prologue delivered by a character identified as Author (Jessica Murrain, charming in Smith drag), explains the circumstances. These pilgrims aren’t religious. (Unless drinking is your religion?) Instead, they are locals, out for a beer and a laugh and committed to a “lock-in,” a way to keep the party going long after closing time.In Smith’s rendering, Chaucer’s tapestry has shrunk to just one thread, though arguably its most vivid. If you have read “The Canterbury Tales,” from the cheerful bawdry of the Miller’s tale to the formalities of the Knight’s tale, the Wife of Bath will have leaped off the page in her scarlet stockings. Earthy, contradictory, impulsive and self-aware, she seems effortlessly and shockingly modern.The Wife, or Alison as Chaucer calls her, advocates for female pleasure and female autonomy and has some tart words regarding the prowess of her elderly husbands. What does it mean to offer her a modern vernacular and wardrobe? Extrapolating from “The Wife of Willesden,” not that much.Alison has been renamed Alvita. She is played with archness and authority and hip-swinging sass, shot through with vulnerability, by Clare Perkins, who has traded in those red stockings for a cold-shoulder dress and some very high heels. In Chaucer she is introduced as, “a worthy woman all her life.” Here: “She’s been that bitch since 1983.”Story within the story: Troy Glasgow and Ellen Thomas in the tale Alvita tells about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want.Stephanie BergerAs in Chaucer’s poem, she prefaces her tale with what is essentially her life story, enlisting the pub’s patrons as her many husbands and various friends and acquaintances. (The ensemble is nimble throughout.) Smith’s language is jewel-bright, particular and lively, and Perkins’s performance is brassy and expressive. But every time the Wife addressed the Brooklyn audience — sometimes rhetorically, sometimes seeking an actual reply — there was no response to her call.How to explain these connectivity issues? Smith’s vocabulary, which mixes North London vernacular and Jamaican patois, may be one problem. And the accents, however mild, might rattle unfamiliar ears. Then there’s the form, which attempts to expand the monologue into something more communal and multivocal. Rubasingham’s direction is busy. Maybe it’s too busy (there are disco songs and a haloed Black Jesus). And yet these efforts fail to lift this literary exercise to drama.But the principal problem is the way that Smith has collapsed the now and the then. In the general prologue, the Author warns that audience members might feel surprise or offense at Alvita’s thirsty frankness:“It’s worth remembering — though I’m sure you know —When wives spoke thus six hundred years agoYou were all shocked then. The shock never endsWhen women say things usually said by men”Yet there’s no shock here. Alvita has been married more than most, sure, but her advocacy for equality, for freedom, for great sex is hardly radical now. Maybe it wasn’t even so extreme back then; the Wife became a favorite of balladeers. Her speech still has moments of ambivalence, as when she says that she found great happiness with a man who abused her. (Yes, he repented, but still.) And in the tale Alvita tells, about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want, there remains no genuine justice for the victim. But Smith leaves this tension mostly unexplored and unresolved.The play ends with Alvita and her husbands singing along to Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” which is both apposite and wrong. The Wife of Bath is an everywoman, but she’s also a singular literary creation, a character who transcends her moment. She doesn’t really need the updates — or the knockoff Jimmy Choos — to speak to ours.The Wife of WillesdenThrough April 16 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    Review: Laughing, and Crying, in the Face of ‘Grief’

    In his solo show about the death of his teenage children, Colin Campbell recounts his calamitous relationship with the darkest of emotions.Death is often described as a loss, but for Colin Campbell and his wife, it was a theft. On June 12, 2019, the couple’s children, Ruby and Hart, were killed by an inebriated driver in a horrific crash. Ruby was 17 and loved anime; Hart was 14 and worshiped hip-hop. A photograph of them even younger — bright-eyed and golden-haired — rests on a table like a shrine, one of the few props in Campbell’s brusque tragicomedy, “Grief: A One Man ShitShow.”In “Grief,” directed by Michael Schlitt, Campbell recounts his relationship with the emotion. Before the bleak canvas of a back wall, Campbell, a writer and director of theater and film, begins his solo show with a warning of the semi-macabre journey to come: “Tonight, you are going to get taken to some uncomfortable places.” Seconds later, the lights dim and Campbell begins detailing that fatal night.Campbell knows that memories aren’t kept only in the brain; they are also conjured by the tongue. So the remainder of “Grief” unfolds like a talking book of essays (Campbell recently wrote “Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose”), weaving together the many ways friends and family fumble grief-talk with stories about Ruby and Hart. Campbell’s blunt delivery of the former often conflicts with his deeply felt recollections of the latter, but what is lost in his uneven performance is more than made up for by his vulnerability.Campbell insists that “Grief” is not an act of sadomasochistic indulgence, nor is the act of dramatizing pain anything new. Sophocles and Aeschylus did it first. Campbell calls back to the Ancient Greek practice of gathering for the sole purpose of communal catharsis through theater, reminding us that “Oedipus” and “Agamemnon” would play out over a full day in 20,000-seat venues. “Grief” simply asks for 75 minutes in a black box.Campbell is not concerned with niceties or palatable jokes. His script acknowledges its brazenness, but only after taking combative jabs at religion, grief books, group counseling and other restorative practices friends dare suggest. He dedicates entire passages to the messy parts of the healing process: how to explain to friends the differences between not wanting to live and being suicidal; how to empathize with other bereaved parents who still have living children; at what point during mourning is morning sex acceptable.I could never answer Campbell’s questions. I’ve never had a child, let alone lost two. But I have said eternal goodbyes. “Grief” opened on what would have been my grandmother Adina’s birthday, April 2. She turned 84 on that day in 2010, and died the next. I imagine that Campbell — adamant that no grief compares with that of losing all your children — might roll his eyes at that anecdote, but including her is the same act of remembrance he spent his unforgettable performance showing me how to do.GriefThrough April 16 at Theater Row, Manhattan; griefaonemanshitshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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    ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 3, Episode 8 Recap: Consequences Abound

    Jean-Luc breaks Data in case of emergency. Vadic makes a move.Season 3, Episode 8: ‘Surrender’Much of this season of “Picard” revolves around familial relationships, particularly parenting. There’s how we choose to do it (Beverly). The consequences of avoiding it entirely (Jean-Luc). The weight of keeping our children safe (Geordi). How we grieve (Riker and Troi.)It takes being captured on a brutal enemy’s ship for Riker and Troi to finally have an impactful conversation about their marriage and the loss of Thad, their child. Riker wanted to bathe in his grief as his lone remaining connection to Thad. Troi wanted to protect Riker from that pain using her Betazoid abilities, which has the unintended effect of pushing a wedge between them. Riker wanted to cocoon himself, which was unacceptable to Troi.In their prison cell, they are honest with each other, as married couples should be. It turns out their grief is a prison unto itself. They disagree on how to grieve, but it shows the strength of the foundation of their relationship that they can finally talk like this. (Another indication: We learn that a changeling came to Riker and Troi’s home pretending to be Riker, which Troi snuffed out right away.)“You can’t skip to the end of healing,” Troi says.And then she embraces him, as a loving spouse would, rather than as the ship’s counselor we’ve come to know for decades. Troi also informs Riker that she doesn’t like their move to the intergalactic suburbs. Fair enough. Been there.This was just about the only scene that worked for me the entire episode in a season that has otherwise been great. When Worf shows up to rescue Riker and Troi, he gives a campy, borderline romantic speech about how he is now sensitive to Troi, which Riker notes is “inappropriate.” He’s right! It was weird!When things seem bleakest for the Titan, Jack has a deus ex machina at the ready: He is a living Professor X with Cerebro capabilities. He can control others’ movements, read their minds and see through them — although we don’t know why. It’s a handy tool when your ship has been overtaken. (Parenting looms over small moments of the season, too, as when Jack quips to Vadic that Beverly taught him “better manners than that.”)But it’s hard to separate this from the fact that none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for another disastrous planned hatched by Jean-Luc in last week’s episode, which caused the crew to lose control of the Titan to begin with. Captured on the bridge, Shaw lectures Seven about the consequences of our actions. Jean-Luc placed the ship and its crew — once again — in great danger with a foolhardy plan to bait Vadic in last week’s episode. Now we see the consequences: T’Veen (Stephanie Czajkowski) is executed, a crew member that 100 percent died in a needless way.Speaking of Shaw: The writing of his character this season has been all over the place. It undermines his character, despite a strong performance from Todd Stashwick. When Vadic moves to execute one of his crew members, Seven tries to intervene and sacrifice herself. Shaw, the captain, holds her back, telling her there’s nothing she can do. This seemed out of character compared with the Shaw we saw earlier in the season — the rule-following captain who prioritizes the safety of his crew.Shaw strikes me as the type of person who would have offered to sacrifice himself, rather than interrupting Seven’s attempt to do so. Just moments before, Shaw upbraids Seven for not blowing up the turbolift with him inside to keep Vadic from taking over the ship. When T’Veen is executed, Shaw barely reacts. Given his emotiveness throughout the season, that stuck out like a sore thumb.Even so, this episode seemingly brings an end to Vadic, who is sucked out into space, and the Shrike, which is blown up by the newly emboldened Titan crew. As Vadic, Amanda Plummer played an excellent villain, but she deserved a better death — assuming it is a death — than to be so easily outsmarted by Jack. (Not to mention: What was Jack’s plan exactly? What if Vadic hadn’t moved the rest of the crew to another room?)Vadic also leaves with a secret: What’s the deal with Jack? Why is he Professor X? What’s up with the red door?I don’t have a great theory. But Troi says that there’s a “darkness” around Jack and a voice inside him that is “ancient and weak.” “Ancient” is an interesting hint. The Pah-wraiths perhaps? They would have had good reason to link up with changelings after what happened in “Deep Space Nine.”Odds and EndsI lied. One other part of the episode worked for me: seeing the original cast back together in one room for the first time all season. While the episode seemed rushed, this was the moment we’d all been waiting for as we head into the final episodes of the season.Data co-opts Lore’s brotherly resentment and uses it against his evil twin. Historically, Data has often had difficulty reading the room. But in this case, he diagnoses Lore’s jealousy and uses it to mold a whole new version of himself. It’s arguably the most human Data has ever been. Data seems to revel in Lore’s misery when he says, “We are me.” It’s possible that our favorite android has developed the ability to experience schadenfreude. (Also, some fun fan service when Data offers up his memories to Lore, such a Tasha Yar sighting.)Some of the behavior of this new contraction-using Data seemed silly to me, particularly when he “greets” the Titan and calls himself a “friendly positronic pissed-off security system.” If New Data is a combination of Data, Lore, B-4 and Lal, where would that language even come from? It seemed forced, just to get a laugh from the audience. But Data also seems to have a new purpose now: Instead of trying to find out what it means to be human, he’ll now contend with how to handle aging. (Data’s old friends should probably be more suspicious about Data than they seem. Lore has repeatedly shown up in their lives, and he seemed within seconds of taking over the android body entirely. How do they know that Data isn’t actually Lore taking advantage of their need to have their old friend back?)A commenter last week asked a question for which I don’t have an answer: A big part of the plot seems to concern what the changelings will do with the corpse of Jean-Luc, given that he is slated to speak at Frontier Day. But why would Jean-Luc still speak at a big Starfleet celebration when he is a fugitive?The Titan blows up the Shrike. I’m sure there’s no strategic advantage to examining a superior changeling ship’s technology when many of them have taken over Starfleet, but we digress.Vadic orders members of her crew to go find Jack. She has control over a good portion of the Titan. No one thinks to look for a doctor in sickbay? According to Beverly, Vadic didn’t have control of bridge consoles, so how did she have control of the ship? Why wouldn’t she spend her time trying to take command of the most essential section of the Titan? More

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    in Theater

    The Enduring Appeal of ‘Wagatha,’ Now on Stage and Screen

    A dramatization of the trial between the wives of two soccer stars is returning to the West End in London, joining TV shows, podcasts and documentaries about the high-profile spat.With its stage transformed into a green soccer pitch, “Vardy v. Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial” at Wyndham’s Theater in London last November promised its nearly sold-out audience a game, and the two women onstage were both trying to score a goal.But as two pundits ooh’ed and aah’ed from the sidelines, the actresses sparring were not playing soccer stars but the women married to them, caught at the center of an Instagram feud turned high-profile libel case that captured the British public’s attention last May and peeled back the curtain hiding the machinations of British celebrity and the glitzy world of English soccer.“I see it as a comedy of manners,” said Liv Hennessy, the writer of the play, which returns to the West End on Thursday at the Ambassadors Theater. “It’s a theatrical way for us to look at the way people behave in our current society.”The play is just one recent retelling of the real-life case that became known as the “Wagatha Christie” trial, in which Rebekah Vardy, the wife of the Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, sued Coleen Rooney, the wife of the former Manchester United star Wayne Rooney, for defamation. The catalyst: Rooney’s accusation, on Twitter, that Vardy had leaked her personal information to the British press.The wives and girlfriends of soccer players — commonly known in Britain by the acronym WAGs — have long been followed by tabloids, but Rooney’s post caused an online furor. Its escalation into the legal realm led to breathless coverage, drawing in powerhouse lawyers and unearthing revelations about both women’s personal lives.The legal side of the long-running saga came to an end last July, with the High Court ruling against Vardy, saying that the reputational damage from the scandal was not libel and ordering Vardy to pay almost all of Rooney’s legal costs, which amounted to about £1.7 million, or $1.9 million.But the case’s power as a story has lived on, with production companies, documentary makers, podcasters and journalists finding the unfolding trial and its cast of characters just too irresistible not to dissect, all helped by the availability of the weeklong case’s court transcripts.“It’s the old adage of: You can’t write this,” said Thomas Popay, the creative director of Chalkboard TV, which produced a two-part dramatization, “Vardy v. Rooney: A Courtroom Drama,” that aired on Channel 4 in Britain last December. “We literally didn’t. We took the transcripts and recreated them.”Alongside the West End play and Channel 4 show, offerings for followers of the feud include a BBC podcast called “It’s … Wagatha Christie” and the Discovery+ documentary “Vardy vs Rooney: The Wagatha Trial.” Rooney has signed a Disney+ deal for a three-part documentary looking at the events leading up to the trial, and the saga is reportedly being considered for a retelling as part of the series “A Very British Scandal.”Rebekah Vardy, left, lost her defamation case against Coleen Rooney, right, in London’s High Court last year. Rooney described how she concocted a sting operation to reveal the betrayer.Daniel Leal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“All of us can relate to the idea of being betrayed — especially betrayed by someone who we trusted,” Popay said. “And on Vardy’s side — we can all relate to not being believed.”In her 2019 social media post, Rooney described how she concocted a sting operation to reveal the betrayer by posting false stories that were visible to a single account — Vardy’s — to test if they would turn up in The Sun, a London tabloid.The popularity of the post led to Rooney being nicknamed “Wagatha Christie” — a portmanteau of WAG and Agatha Christie, the mystery writer — for her detective work. Vardy quickly denied she was the leaker and sued Rooney for defaming her.“We are absolutely interested in people’s misfortunes and what goes on in celebrity lives,” said Adrian Bingham, a professor of modern British history at the University of Sheffield who has studied media and gender issues. The women’s involvement with the soccer world gave their dispute resonance with a wider audience, he added, while the legal case gave the non-tabloid media a legitimate reason to cover it. Producers of the adaptations say they have asked their own lawyers to look over scripts, lest they find themselves accused of defamation.The court transcript itself had moments and revelations that many say were ripe for re-enactment: a phone with key evidence in the form of WhatsApp messages, apparently lost to the bottom of the North Sea; lawyers in wigs formally reading out text messages from the women, some containing profanities; Vardy’s tears on the witness stand after cross-examination by David Sherborne, Rooney’s lawyer.“It was positively Shakespearean in terms of how it went down,” said Popay. “We decided the best thing to do and the most accurate thing to do was to completely recreate the trial by using the court transcripts verbatim.” His company’s show, which was commissioned in May during the trial and aired in December, drew 1.5 million viewers.In the Channel 4 show “Vardy v. Rooney: A Courtroom Drama,” Vardy is played by Natalia Tena, seen here arriving at court.Channel 4Hennessy, the writer of the West End play, also relied heavily on the court transcripts, but took liberties by leaning into the soccer world, structuring the play like a game itself. Reading the transcripts, she said she was struck by the humanity of the two women, who have both been criticized (Vardy has said that people made abusive threats toward her and her unborn baby following that fateful post, while the trial laid bare tensions in Rooney’s marriage and her experience growing up with fame).“It does ask how complicit we are in creating public figures, and tearing them down when they don’t meet our standards,” Hennessy said.Even at a rehearsal in late March, before the play’s official return, it was clear the trial continued to intrigue and perplex even the cast members. During a pivotal scene in which Rooney is grilled by Vardy’s lawyer on precisely why she made the fateful decision to share the feud with the world, the actors broke character to pose their own burning questions: Was that decision one of a calculating woman, or a woman at a breaking point? Why had she not privately confronted Vardy? And what did it feel like to live, as they imagined Rooney did, in a world where one’s image could become a public commodity?Though celebrity gossip can be easy to dismiss as frivolous, the two opponents in the trial were both women from working-class backgrounds who laid out one aspirational pathway for others like them, said Rebecca Twomey, an entertainment correspondent who has covered both women closely.“We like to put people on pedestals — and bring them down,” she said, adding that many people enjoyed a modern-day pantomime. “You might think they’re airhead WAGs, but these are two sharp, intelligent women.”Still, the enduring appeal of the high drama of “Wagatha Christie” is also simple, Professor Bingham said.“The reason people are telling it is not because it’s insightful,” he added. “It’s because it’s a great story — with great lines.” More

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    in Television

    Stephen Colbert on Trump: ‘Business Fraud Is His Brand’

    Colbert recapped Donald Trump’s post-arraignment return to Mar-a-Lago, “where he held an angry rally for all his cult members.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.The Return of Florida ManFormer President Donald Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday after being arrested and arraigned on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.“And you know what? I’m not sure if that’s fair,” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday. “Business fraud is his brand.”“And after his arraignment, he hauled his ass to LaGuardia, got on his private jet, flew to Mar-a-Lago, where he held an angry rally for all his cult members.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Then it was time for the former president to take the stage and inspire a nation with a six-minute list of unresolved grievances. Well, come on, what do you expect? You’re listening to a 76-year-old man in Florida.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So he was arrested and released, and we never got a mug shot. But that did not stop the ex-president’s campaign from making one up and selling it on a T-shirt that says, ‘Not guilty.’ OK, but if he’s not guilty, why did you put him in a mug shot? Just sell a poster that says, ‘Wanted! for following too many laws.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (‘Back So Soon?’ Edition)“Meanwhile, after his arraignment, Trump flew back home to Florida and held a rally in Mar-a-Lago. It’s always nice to have a traditional post-arrest reception.” — JIMMY FALLON“The whole staff looked at him like, ‘Back so soon?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Former President Trump spoke last night at Mar-a-Lago following his arraignment and said, ‘I never thought anything like this could happen in America.’ Honestly, neither did I. I mean, you got away with so many crimes for so long. Trump getting arrested was like ‘Avatar 2’ — I just figured it was never going to happen. Then it finally did, and I was like, ‘You know what? Worth the wait.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJordan Klepper visited a Trump indictment rally in New York for Wednesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightMolly Shannon will appear on Thursday’s “Tonight Show” ahead of hosting this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live.”Also, Check This OutDante ZaballaA dozen musicians, scholars and critics weighed in on the best music of the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams. More