Thursday, 12 July 2018

Reverie, 'Pas De Deux' - July 12


‘Reverie’ is back this week. Yay!

Well, it is ‘yay’ because otherwise, there is not too much left to talk about. Well, we can talk about the ants in the Marvel franchise, more specifically – in the Ant-Man and Wasp movies, (there are two now), how they can fly. The twist is in the ants themselves.

…As far as insects go, ants’ closest relatives are bees, wasps, and the like. In many of those insects, there are three adult morphs: the worker, which is technically female, but is actually sexless, the male, more usually known as the drone, and the queen – the fertile female. The ants have all of these morphs, but only the drones and queens retain their wings…for the mating flight. After that, the males die, and the fertile female queens go underground and start new ant colonies – sir David Attenborough showed all of this in one or another of his specials. (The termites are something else, not very closely related to the ants, and so we will discuss them another time). What interests us now, if we have no life, is does the Ant-Man fly an ant drone into battle, or an ant queen?

…And now that we have acknowledged that, we have no social life, back to ‘Reverie’? In this week’s episode, ‘Pas De Deux’, we encounter an ex-ballerina, who has lost everything in a bicycle accident, (including her unborn baby)…and then regained it all in the reverie, with the usual twist: she is dying in the real life, and has to be brought back, or else.

In a secondary twist, Alexis seems to have changed her attitude towards other people a lot, and now does not take their attempts at impromptu suicide by the reverie lying down: if Mara doesn’t get them out of there nicely, she will pull them out of it manually, by physically unplugging their machine parts. That course of action is fraught with its’ own risks, but since it was allocated only a single scene, we cannot really talk about it very much – not right now.

The other plotlines include Mara’s ex-fiancé, (and it’s a man, not a woman – there aren’t too many same-sex plotlines going in ‘Reverie’ yet, but this is just their first season, this may change in the future), who is also the doctor, (psychiatrist) of the ex-ballerina, so there’s some tension as well. In addition, Mara is continuing to confront her inner demons, but, presumably, the main point of PDD is that the ex-ballerina has accepted her fate and will continue teaching her sister’s children’s ballet school, while the latter is quietly dying from multiple sclerosis. Have I mentioned that PDD was especially dark even for a ‘Reverie’ episode? No? Then did I mention that PDD was based on the AoS plotline where Mack refused to leave the framework because he had his daughter in there, (she died a long time in real life before the AoS S1 events began)? Also no? Well, now I have, and I will say it again: ‘Reverie’ has taken that plot line and dealt with it much better than AoS had done, so there.

Anything else? Before ‘Reverie’ had taken their week off last week, their numbers have actually gone up slightly, so that’s good news…provided that their week off didn’t bit them in the proverbial foot this time – so far it is too early to tell about the numbers. ‘C&D’ are… still doing worse than ‘Reverie’ does, even though they are really trying to do something about it…but that is a talk for another time…

However, for now, this is it. See you all soon instead!

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