Flashpoint 1x12
Feb. 17th, 2018 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enemyofperfect("Haunting the Barn" spoilers)
So my dad might have been visibly perturbed by my reaction, but THIS EPISODE MADE ME SO HAPPY. I just, everything that's been simmering so horribly just barely under the surface this whole season -- the repression, the fear-tinged scorn for any vulnerability that isn't carefully distilled into a new kind of less lethal weapon, Ed's distance from his wife and callousness towards his own son -- it's all laid bare, it's spread out like that file on the SRU floor and exposed as the toxin that it is, and Ed himself sheds layers of armor like dead skins until he can finally take his mentor's gun away from him, and wrap him in a hug as he sobs and sobs.
And it could all amount to nothing, except it doesn't: Greg declines, with bitterness in his mouth, to keep this secret in the family; and at home, Ed flinches and tries to lock up the cabinet where he keeps all those vivid memories he doesn't share with his wife -- and then stops himself, and lets her come and look, and oh my gosh, I'm so proud.
That little note from Ed's mentor, just I'm sorry, in an almost childish hand.
The explicit fact that Daniel's greatest regret was telling a boy, a child, that he needed to be brave.
And we got Kira being awesome, and Troy having her back, and Michelle insisting on being in the room when she was the one person Daniel least wanted to expose to what he was caught up in, and Greg factoring in the variables of Ed's vulnerability along with those of their colleague-subject, and even the fact that Daniel never lacked for empathy or the urge to connect -- or he wouldn't have spent so long sitting with that boy in the first place -- but only for the tools to exercise them without doing harm.
And of course, anything can harm. The symbolic weight of the advice he gave then is palpable, but we don't know how else things might have turned out. All of us spend our entire lives making mistakes.
But oh, I loved this episode.
So my dad might have been visibly perturbed by my reaction, but THIS EPISODE MADE ME SO HAPPY. I just, everything that's been simmering so horribly just barely under the surface this whole season -- the repression, the fear-tinged scorn for any vulnerability that isn't carefully distilled into a new kind of less lethal weapon, Ed's distance from his wife and callousness towards his own son -- it's all laid bare, it's spread out like that file on the SRU floor and exposed as the toxin that it is, and Ed himself sheds layers of armor like dead skins until he can finally take his mentor's gun away from him, and wrap him in a hug as he sobs and sobs.
And it could all amount to nothing, except it doesn't: Greg declines, with bitterness in his mouth, to keep this secret in the family; and at home, Ed flinches and tries to lock up the cabinet where he keeps all those vivid memories he doesn't share with his wife -- and then stops himself, and lets her come and look, and oh my gosh, I'm so proud.
That little note from Ed's mentor, just I'm sorry, in an almost childish hand.
The explicit fact that Daniel's greatest regret was telling a boy, a child, that he needed to be brave.
And we got Kira being awesome, and Troy having her back, and Michelle insisting on being in the room when she was the one person Daniel least wanted to expose to what he was caught up in, and Greg factoring in the variables of Ed's vulnerability along with those of their colleague-subject, and even the fact that Daniel never lacked for empathy or the urge to connect -- or he wouldn't have spent so long sitting with that boy in the first place -- but only for the tools to exercise them without doing harm.
And of course, anything can harm. The symbolic weight of the advice he gave then is palpable, but we don't know how else things might have turned out. All of us spend our entire lives making mistakes.
But oh, I loved this episode.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-18 06:31 am (UTC)I love Flashpoint and I love this and and and AAAAGH. I am so so happy to see Flashpoint content in 2018.
Flashpoint had its finger on the pulse of so many things.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-18 07:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-18 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-18 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-18 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-18 09:01 pm (UTC)...I'm having ill-defined but enormous feelings about how much America's police force could benefit from an emphasis on deescalation and resolving crises with minimal violence. It's not that I think Flashpoint says everything that needs saying about police work, or even that any single show could, but some of what it says is so painfully relevant and necessary.