Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. COVID-19 continues to
walk all over the planet, and the US is still the worst-case scenario…
proportionally speaking, because so far out of the overall 50 000 deceased
people, one-half belongs to Italy and Spain still, which is even worse. Ergo,
to distract myself from all this misery, I keep on watching DW; this time, I
took on the ‘Jesse James vs. Al Capone episode’, and boy, was it a hit!
Let us elaborate. On one hand, we got Al Capone, who, within
the DW-verse, is a direct successor of the nameless Mafia representative of DW S1.
On the other, we got Jesse James, who, within the same universe, is the
preliminary to Sancho Villa in S3. Pause. Trivia aside, this essentially meant
that DW made a ‘cowboys vs. gangsters’ episode, and-?
And the cowboys won. Why? Because they had better weapons;
in particular, the Bowie knife was a better weapon than the gangsters’ stiletto.
So-?
So nothing; the real beef here may be about how the fight
was stereographed, (or staged, or whatever the proper verb for that is). See,
the ‘Jesse James vs. Al Capone’ episode is unique in that two (out four)
members of team Cowboy were able to walk away. This feels kind of prejudiced
and staged, but, then again, a lot of DW was prejudiced, and all of it was
staged, hence why it was undone at the end.
‘Tiger King’ wasn’t staged, and it did its’ best not to be
prejudiced, but the truth is that it got lucky with timing – everyone got fed
up with the quarantine, and so when something really big and exciting dropped
in, everyone joined in on the discussion; the fact that it is a real-life
drama, (I’m sorry, but Joe Exotic is a drama queen on top of everything else
that he is), only added to the flavour, and Ms. Baskin may be getting the worst
of it – I’m fan of Big Cat Foundation, but she isn’t the BCF, not really. Back
to DW?
Here is the thing. In the last episode that we have
discussed – remember, ‘Persian Immortal vs. Celt Warrior’? – the two combatants
were equal, only not, as the Persian combatant had better weapons…
comparatively speaking. Here, in ‘Jesse James vs. Al Capone’, we got a
Winchester rifle compared to a pineapple bomb, which are not exactly comparable
to each other, both deadly weapons or not. Colt revolver against Tommy gun –
fair or not? It is hard to say, even though DW’s theatrics did a great job of
distracting the viewers from realizing this fact, especially in the short term.
Then again, DW did aim to entertain rather than to educate, and it quite
succeeded in the former. And ‘Tiger King’?
...And ‘Tiger King’ thought to inform rather than to educate,
and it too had succeeded in that area. People, certainly, are leaving the
series having learned more than how much they did before, and right now, they
have free time to do something with this knowledge, but-
-But it all comes down to the people in Washington D.C., who
clearly have their own ideas of what to do during the lockdown, etc., and so
the final result of the fallout from ‘Tiger King’ might be nothing – there will
be a lot of noise from the couch experts, detectives, etc., a lot of nasty
tweets and Instagram messages between all sorts of people, and – that’s it.
Especially once the quarantine ends and people will hurry to return their lives
back to normal, burying the past, however, recent, behind them – but first the
quarantine authentically needs to end…
…For now, though, this is it. See you all soon!
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