|
|
|
Bravissima Sheena, tradotto benissimo, hai fatto un ottimo e faticoso lavoro! Di errori praticamente non ne ho trovati, solo qualche correzione "di bozza" e di battitura, oppure ho suggerito tra parentesi dei vocaboli che mi sembravano piú appropriati. 
Le mie correzioni sono in grassetto.
Quando torna Dream vediamo cosa decide di tagliare. Ad esempio, il paragrafo sull'uniforme di Booth andrebbe, se tenuto, aggiornato dato che ho letto che hanno fatto un errore e hanno cucito le decorazioni al contrario!! 
Well, I think I should start with the ending. An ending not exactly up to such an amazing season, devastated by the strike at the most awkward moment. This third season had five main storylines going on: B&B, obviously, Angela’s husband, Max’s trail, Gormogon, and Zack, back from Iraq. The strike, shortening the season, turned many plans upside down, and FOX didn’t help at all, conceding just two episodes after the strike, meaning only fourteen episodes in all (while most of the other shows had sixteen). So what should Hanson & Co. have done in this situation? Postpone everything to season four? You can’t always postpone in a tv show. Whether we like it or not, this is a business too, and the commercial needs of the television network and producers often prevail over the writer’s wish. I’m glad they chose to bring the storyline about Max’s trial to an end: besides the fact that we had a chance to see a really nice episode, Max’s presence had been essential during this year and I think it was right to carry out his juridical story. And besides, neither Ryan O’Neal nor Loren Dean are regulars, and it’s always good to use the characters as long as they’re available. And the same goes for Pam’s character and Booth’s injuring. In television every opportunity has to be taken, but unfortunately, due to unforeseen events, many of
them are missed, and using them again in the future is not always as easy as it might seem. Could the resolution of Gormogon’s case have been rescheduled? Maybe, maybe not. Prolonging it for another season would have meant complicating it, binding the show to a subplot that the producers too maybe wanted to end, in order to start something new. And the same goes for Zack too: the strike proved that his character was the weak point, the one without a story on his own, and who apparently wasn’t stimulating enough the writers’ creativity. Briefly, the only storyline that could have been easily postponed was the one about Angela’s husband, essentially because there hadn’t been any casting for the character yet, so there weren’t any restrictions. What I’m trying to say with this premise is that this season finale was a missed opportunity. But not wasted. An opportunity is wasted when you have the resources, under favourable conditions, but you don’t use them, or you use them in a wrong way. But when you have the resources, but not the favourable conditions, the opportunity is just missed. And in this case in my opinion it’s no use crying over spilt milk, or over what could have been. What we should ask ourselves now is: was this missed opportunity fruitful anyway? Did it give possibilities for the future? I tried to answer this questions.
1-Zack
“I thanked God for saving all of us. It was all of us. Every single one. You take one of us away, and you and Hodgins are in that hole forever.”
Booth – “Aliens in a Spaceship” 2x09
These are the first words that I remembered while “Pain in the heart” was ending. I was watching the small Jeffersonian’s family gathered around the favourite things belonging to one of them, a member they were losing, and I remembered that beautiful speech that Booth made. Him, Brennan, Angela, Jack, Zack, Cam. Colleagues slowly turned into close-knit team, family, life fellows. And like in real life, suddenly, unexpected, cruelly, the confusion of the loss fell upon them. God didn’t save all of them this time. On the contrary, he played a trick on them: Zack Addy didn’t die as a hero, as one of the many innocent victims they’ve always had to deal with. The Evil they’ve been fighting had suddenly undermined one of them. Him, the unsuspected, the purest. The one it should never have happened to. Sad, unfair, painful. And so true. There’s a lot of controversy about the choice that Hart Hanson and Stephen Nathan made, turning Zack into Gormogon’s apprentice. I understand that for many fans an innocent death would have been easier, more acceptable, more conventional. There would have been tears, emotion, and then everything would have gone on, with clear conscience, as clear as Zack’s leaving. But Hanson and Nathan chose the dangerous way, the nastier one. To cause a sensation? To gain a flood of angry people, who for the most part will still be watching Bones, because one of the unwritten rules of television says that the audience is essentially masochist? Maybe. But, deliberately or not, this choice sure had a huge narrative meaning in my opinion. Hanson and Nathan induced me to ask myself this important question. Fighting Evil, facing corruption every single day, can we still hope to remain untouched by it? And I don’t mean just as possible victims… This is the basic idea from which this famous quote comes from:
“Se guardi troppo a lungo nell’abisso, l’abisso guarda in te” (questa non l'ho trovata nella versione originale, ma forse la conosci tu)
Just this year, during episode 3x06, Booth called the Jeffersonian „the house of reason” and it’s unbelievable how good the metaphor works in this case. The Evil infiltrated the house of reason, the one that has always been a refuge (shelter?) for the victims looking for justice and for those who do their best to assure it. And it did it slowly, together with Gormogon’s silver skeleton. Which was always there, throughout the whole season, even when we forgot it. While celebrating Halloween, or exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve, while joking or talking about private things. The sliest symbol of the evil, penetrating the safest place, undermining the most secluded cells, and showing itself only when it’s too late to stop it. And just when the Evil arrives at the Jeffersonian, Zack comes back. It’s another coincidence, I believe, that the first episode of season three represents a sort of symmetrical alter-ego to “Pain in the Heart”. In that episode, the team faces Zack’s absence. An absence which is just an anteroom of the future. And this is why I didn’t see the truth as totally senseless.
“Zack can learn anything.”
Brennan - “Judas on a Pole” 2x11
Zack was convinced about this, at least. But it didn’t go this way, and I have to wonder how his mind reacted… What do I mean? Some time ago Hanson said that Zack is the “alien” of the team. He observes the human behaviour to learn, as if he were detached from it, as if he watched the others from a different planet. And we have to admit that this is true, if we think about Zack’s journey as a human being, his dialogues, his attitude. Even his departure to Iraq came from this.
“Zack needed to leave the nest, the same way you did when you wanted to leave the lab and see the world for the first time.”
Booth – “Widow’s Son in the Windshield” 3x01
Booth is right. Zack observed his mentor, his model, Brennan, go out into the world, and measure herself with it. And he wants to do it too, the same way he learned to dress and act in a certain way to be able to testify in court and to be part of Cam’s parameters. Even Booth is a model for Zack, the emblem of the alpha-male, the one who “knows more about duty and honor than anyone else he knows”. So why not leaving the Jeffersonian following in his footsteps? But apparently something goes wrong. Zack is sent back home before time. And he himself uses the term “failure”, while talking with Cam. He failed to assimilate the approach to the military life and the army psychiatrist told him that he should question why the Jeffersonian is the only place that he can fit in. For a guy who can learn anything, what does this mean? Did his logic find explanations for this? Thinking of the episodes in the third season, we realize that Zack doesn’t have any “agenda”. First he was a student, pursuing the aim to get his doctorate, then he reached (achieved?) it, he got the job at the Jeffersonian, and so he needed a new aim, the outside world. Just like his icon did. But, unlike Brennan, his jump didn’t get him far, and he returned into a reality where he’s not much more than just a mascot. A reality where he seems to exist only inside the Jeffersonian. In season one, Zack declared to Miss Pickering from National Security that even in the face of an irrefutable reasoning that could corrupt him, he would have talked about it with his friends first. But now…Cam is making a career for herself, with a department to run; Jack and Angela are together; Brennan spends most of her time out of the lab, with Booth or with her father… and Zack? “Pain in the Heart” made me wonder: what is Zack’s life like, besides the competitions for the King of the Lab title and the Christmas holidays with his family in Michigan? What’s Zachary Uriah Addy’s interior dimension after his return from Iraq? Nobody knows. Not us, not his friends, who love him, but are too busy living their own lives and relationships. Should I really be so surprised that Gormogon, or the Master, was able to approach Zack, the alien in the blue lab-coat, and charm him with his irrefutable reasoning of a new experience, a new purpose that was finally going to bring him in the outside world? I think it makes sense. Also the fact that Zack could kill someone or accept that his Master tried to hurt his friends. We don’t know how his logic was manipulated. And this is the only thing that I’m sorry about, the hurried rate of the season finale: I would have liked to see some flashbacks, know how Gormogon approached Zack… But I’m not trying to justify Zack’s deed. I’m just saying that his changing makes sense: an extreme genius goes often along with a quite fragile psychic nature and it’s not unreal that people like Zack can turn to the dark side. But anyway, with his choice, Hanson made Zack more interesting, at least to my point of view. And he and Nathan did a good job linking this last minute idea to everything that came before. Especially, of course, to the Gormogon-centric episodes (like 3x06, when everyone thinks that Gormogon works at the Jeffersonian, or 3x08, where the apprentice who kills the lobbyist is very similar to Eric Millegan), but also to many other small details(for instance, Booth’s speech about all of us looking for that spark, hoping to find somebody to love: when Zack is shown, Booth is talking about those who look in the wrong place). Coincidences, little clues, but if we watch closely, the signs of Zack’s loneliness and changing are there, just in front of us. Maybe they were meant to explain the story of his return from Iraq, but in the end they worked anyway. And episode 3x08 revealed us another important clue: that Gormogon wasn’t a person, but a concept, an inheritance, a title that passed from the Master to the Apprentice. That’s why in “Pain in the Heart” the identity of the Master is not important. It didn’t matter who he was, what mattered was the idea that he transmitted. What matters is the fact that with this idea he entered the house of reason and corrupted one of the good guys, and none of the others realized it. I don’t know if Hanson will be able to exploit the narrative structure that he created with this season finale. I hope so. It sure offers a lot of possibilities now, psychologically speaking: the team lost one of its members, and still has to face the feeling of guilt for realizing it when it was too late, with a new consciousness that there are no untouchable oasis or bonds. The corruption of Evil can arrive everywhere. But there’s another message too, a message that always supports the positive spirit of the show. And this message says that, besides the fact that Evil can insinuate itself in our own family, Love never dies. It lives on. Someone didn’t appreciate the others still showing love towards Zack after his arrest, but would they still be the characters we know if they suddenly hated someone they had loved till the day before? Doing justice doesn’t mean denying the love that we felt and that we feel. As well as we fans will never forget what Zack was before Gormogon, so his friends look for comfort in those objects well-loved by him, gifts that they gave him and that he always kept. They still love the boy they used to know, and the days spent together. Evil wasn’t strong enough to defeat this feeling. And I don’t think this is a disappointing message at all.
2-Booth & Brennan
“Brennan: Are you going to betray me?
Booth: No.”
(The Intern in the Incinerator 3x06)
I’ve never forgotten these words. I’ve been thinking about them for months…
But let’s start from the beginning. And I’d like to start by saying that the whole Booth’s fake death for national security seemed quite nice to me. It worked much better than a fake death related to Gormogon would have (how could Booth’s death influence Gormogon’s moves?) and, with just one episode more, it could have been developed properly, creating a lot of nice scenes, with suspense, and comedy as well. But this way it was all reduced to a simple parody. I don’t want to waist time listing every fault in the entire story, even though, among all the criticism, I don’t understand why some people are complaining because Parker wasn’t at the funeral. If Booth wrote a list of people to inform, obviously Rebecca was one of them too. And, if she were a sensible mother, why would she bring her six-year-old son to his father’s fake funeral? To be able to send him to a shrink until he goes to college? Actually, with a little more time, every detail could have been explained, even the family’s absence. For instance I know that sometimes they have two different ceremonies, a public one, and also a private one, just for the family ( and in this case, it would have made sense, since Booth’s family vault is probably in Pittsburg and not in D.C.). And also the lack of explanations to the squints: considering that the graveyard is obviously not at the back of the Jeffersonian, a quite long lapse of time must have passed between the end of the fake funeral, the arrest of the guy, and the move from the graveyard to the lab. The problem is that there wasn’t enough time to show us everything and it all seemed like a crazy flash which doesn’t do justice at all to the devastating ending of the previous episode. But, like I said in the premise, are there any results? Yes, there are… Booth’s fake death caused a quite fascinating unreal result: Brennan out of control. Most of the comments I read talked about Brennan reacting like she always does, hiding the grief behind rationality, but…I don’t agree with that. Actually I don’t think I ever saw her as irrational as she was in this episode. Listen to what she says, look at the things she does. She refuses to go to the funeral because she has to identify the bones of someone who could have a family. Bones that are five hundred years old. Does this seem rational to you? The Brennan who faces grief rationally is the one who examines her mother’s skull, the one who argues saying that apparently she’s just a person who doesn’t get to be in a family, after seeing her father and her brother leave her behind again. The Brennan we see in this episode is not rational. She tries to find absurd excuses. Think about her considering the funeral a waist of time. We know she doesn’t believe in God, but she’s always respected its function, maybe recognizing an important anthropological element in it, and we’ve seen her taking part in different funerals before (she even paid the one for the victims in 1x13, getting angry with Booth because he was late for the ceremony). It’s Booth’s funeral that she refuses. Just his. And this is not rational. When Angela asks her to go with her, she barely looks at Booth’s picture, her eyes are bright, and her chin is shaking slightly. Then, at the funeral, she can’t stand still and her arms are folded (she’s never had folded arms at a funeral, until now). She seethes with anger, refusal, emotion. It’s the last place she wants to be. This is not rationality, this is instinct. Instinct of escape, of negation (denial?), of despair, whatever, but it sure is not rationality.
Jack: “You have a lot of faith in Booth.”
Brennan: ”(…) Over time I’ve seen what Booth can do. It’s not faith.”
Jack: “No offence, (…) but what you have is faith, baby!”
(Aliens in a Spaceship 2x09)
There’s no rationality for it when you lose someone you believed so much in. Against such an emptiness rationality simply doesn’t have any power.
A few words about Booth in uniform: I had been waiting to see him like this since Bones started, and I wasn’t disappointed. Of course not. David looks always good, whatever he wears. Somebody wondered if that was his actual uniform from the Rangers… Knowing where to look, it shouldn’t be difficult to find out: it seemed to have quite peculiar features, like the black jacket and the blue trousers. If it really is Booth’s, anyway, and not just a fictitious one used for the fake funeral, also the decorations have to be his, and they seemed to be quite a few…
Back to Brennan. Even when Booth reappears, she’s all instinct and no rationality. Her brain is in a primary mode. And in the first place she just registers two basic facts: that’s her partner, Booth, and he’s in trouble. So she defends him and helps him, knocking down the guy who he’s fighting with. There’s no need to clarify what this means, right? Still remaining in a primary mode, Brennan’s brain registers the third fact: Booth is alive, so he has to killed (?? you mean, he was not killed?) . Rewatch the scene in slow-motion: her expression is full of pure rage, which has nothing to do with rationality. This is pure passion at full tilt, that kind of flame that burns just for someone you love so much. Still in slow-motion you’ll notice what kind of leap she takes to hit Booth. Too bad the make-up artists didn’t give him a huge bruise on his jaw, because she really put all her strength in that punch, and Booth couldn’t even defend himself, because he wasn’t expecting that blow at all. Priceless. I loved it. And I also loved the scene right after that, at the lab, when Sweets underlines the passion in Brennan’s deed (action?) : she and Booth are sparkling and the others look at them as if they’re looking at two lovers having an argument. Brennan looks like she’s about to bite Booth (and I hope she does it soon, like B’Elanna Torres bit Tom Paris – if you used to watch Star Trek Voyager you’ll know what it means for a klingon to bite someone’s face!). And it takes a short step to go from here to the bathtub scene. I have to say I was kind of sad that so many fans underrated or considered this scene superficial, which instead, like someone said, was probably one of the most important in the whole episode, or at least one of the most important between Booth and Brennan. I just love it. I watched it so many times, I almost know it by heart. And not because David’s naked (I’ve seen him more naked than that – both front and back). Rather because I like the tune that Hanson and Nathan chose for this scene. I needed it, to be honest. After the emotions from “The Verdict in the Story” and the dreadful ending from “Wannabe in the Weeds”, I realized that I really wanted to see Booth and Brennan so crackling and “hot”. Don’t get me wrong: I love their tender conversations, their loving looks, but it was time to show us some passion and fire. They had been mostly bickering all the time until now, about sex, religion, work. There had never been a real personal and passionate confrontation. Watching them I thought about what Booth told Wyatt in 2x17, his description of Brennan’s territory, the Jeffersonian, as a place where there’s nothing to put on fire. Basically like Brennan herself, whose inner fire was always stopped by her reason. But not this time. This time Brennan is on fire. Her reason supplies are temporarily worn-out and she bursts into Booth’s bathroom, without considering that she might surprise him in a much more private situation (much more than a bath in the tub). And Booth… I didn’t understand most of the criticism about this too. Booth is the one who wears wild socks and crazy ties, the one who wears a “COCKY” belt buckle, collects evidence with a pen with a woman on it who’s naked if you turn it upside down, and gives plastic pigs, smurfs and Christmas trees as gifts. Why should we be surprised if he has a hat that dispenses beer and a rubber duck in his bathtub? Someone criticized the comic book and the cigar too. But Booth already mentioned that he reads comic books during season one (and the fact that he’s reading Green Lantern is a reference to the motion picture in which David recently dubbed Hal Jordan/Green Lantern) and the cigar…well, it’s one of the clearest and most classical sexual references of all time (we all remember Clinton and Lewinski, don’t we?). I’m not surprised that David too smokes a cigar from time to time: it’s one of the favourites of men with a certain level of narcissism. And at last, a question: why shouldn’t someone who has been shot be drinking or smoking? If they took out the bullet and released him from hospital (meaning he’s fine), why would that be a problem? I don’t know… About the character, someone said Booth doesn’t show enough love towards Brennan, and all he’s worried about is how to make Sweets responsible for what happened. In my opinion, I think love wasn’t the right attitude to have, with Brennan so out of control. She would have denied it, probably accusing Booth of being condescending. And we have to understand his attitude, anyway. He acted in good faith. As soon as he knew about the farce, he wrote a list of people to have them informed, to preserve their feelings from the fake bad news. And Brennan was on that list, because he cares about her, and he would never wrong her on purpose, especially pretending to be death without telling her. He would never do that to his Bones… But now his Bones is there, accusing him of betraying her, manipulating her, ignoring her feelings, not trusting her… how can she say those things to him? The one who took a bullet for her? Knowing that Booth would do anything for Brennan, these accuses must seem to him like an offence… And, hey, he thought she wasn’t crying at the funeral because she knew the truth, but now he realizes the she actually thought he was dead and…nothing. Ok, Booth knows Brennan’s tendency to hide her feelings, but, since they’ve known each other, he saw her open up to tears many times, and at this moment his mind is not clear enough to understand that if there were no tears it was because Brennan was feeling even worse. This Bones so different and “burning” shocks him, exactly because of what I said before about the Jeffersonian that can’t be put on fire. She’s never been so feminine and spontaneous with him before (or with any other man, I think, not even during the arguments with Sully) and he has no idea how to relate to her, he’s not used to it. And maybe he doesn’t understand the reason of this changing, which I think goes past the you-had-to-tell-me-personally problem. As usual the conversation develops around a pretext. Considering the last scene from 3x06, I think Brennan feels “betrayed” because of the feelings that Booth’s momentary death and his return brought her to (like Sweets says too). They were doing fine together, right? Friends, partners, always careful not to cross that line, in a way that allowed rationality to run everything. Then Booth “died” and “rose again”, turning on inside her a series of violent emotions which are destabilizing her and shaking her and which she doesn’t know how to reason about. Why did he do something like that to her? I love Brennan in this scene. She seems so angry and vulnerable at the same time. She even accuses Booth of having taken a bullet for her “just once” and when Booth stands up she almost loses her voice in the end. Then, when he sits down again, she follows him with her eyes, swallows and licks her lips. I like her especially when Booth tells her that he will find out why she wasn’t told, she answers with a sulky and very feminine “If it’s important to you…”. And Booth too. So involved in the conversation that he forgets that he’s in the bathtub and tries to impose himself as he always does, with his physical presence (obviously he does it even better when he’s naked). I’d been hoping for a scene like this for a long time.
And now a little digression about Booth’s house: finally we get to see the front. And a few details more. For instance, in the room next to the bathroom we can easily catch a glimpse of a hockey t-shirt numbered 66 hanging on the wall, a lamp, and a window showing the buildings opposite. So it seems like more than one room has been furnished, meaning that maybe we’ll see some scenes in Booth’s house in the next season. It was about time… And… uhm… why do you think Booth has a collection of clocks (each one with a different time) in his bathroom? Oh, and did you notice that Booth wasn’t listening to the music with a radio or a cd player, but with a record player? Very in character.
Going back to the episode, after the bathtub scene the tension fades a little. While Booth wants Brennan to understand that he didn’t betray her, she behaves again in her normal way , after thinking about her excessive attitude with a clearer mind. Although her refusal to forgive Booth still looks like some sort of obstinate, feminine way to punish him, especially in the scene where she says she understands the reason why Sweets decided not to tell her, but then, when Booth is out of the hearing range, she orders Sweets not to use them again for his experiments. And don’t forget Booth, who stops offering her pie, just because Sweets said that his insistence on offering her pie might be interpreted as some kind of seduction… And then Gormogon’s case takes over and the tension is put aside. There’s a deeper grief to share. Booth could have hugged Brennan in the last scene? Yes, he could, but he already gave her much more. He gave her what he’s always been giving her, the right word or the right act, when she needed it. Sometimes he’s fallible, sometimes he’s inconsistent, sometimes he takes a bath in a tub with strange accessories, but…this is Booth, in my opinion. Just a man, wonderfully defective. Who knows that Brennan is devastated by the idea that she never gave Zack anything and who finds the most beautiful present she gave him: the letter with which she accepted Zack at the Jeffersonian, and which Zack had always kept. “I think you gave him something great, Bones”. Few words, the right ones. There’s no need of others. There’s no need of a hug either, because he’s there. In this moment all the misunderstandings, the loss, the tension, and all the fears and possible solutions and consequences still hanging between them don’t matter. It doesn’t matter if they’re going to be a real couple one day or if they’re going to be just friends. It doesn’t matter if sooner or later they might be separated and go their own way. At this time there’s something bigger going on. And as always only Booth arrives at Brennan’s broken heart in the right way. She lets her head drop on his shoulder, he rests his cheek on her hair. His support, which Brennan never has to ask for. Lastly, I really liked Booth and Brennan in this episode and the shade in their relationship, especially Brennan’s attitude towards Booth. And now the new spoilers about season four make even more sense to me. I thought that a possible temporary sacking between them might have been caused by a “cooling” on Brennan’s side. But actually it might be the exact opposite. Maybe Brennan runs away because she realizes that she “warmed up” too much towards Booth and she gets scared. It makes sense. Neither in this case I can tell if Hanson will be able to exploit the elements that he created. It would be nice and I hope so: this fiery step in B&B’s dynamic could create some interesting implications and make this fourth season full of surprises. In fact they seem to understand each other quite well as friends and colleagues, but when they approach each other as a man and a woman (we’ve seen something in 2x17 already) they get confused. Booth loses his intuition, and Brennan loses her rationality… Stimulating, isn’t it?
Conclusion
There are many other things that could be said. About the squints, who were all so intense in this episode (especially a touching Cam and a charming and ambiguous Jack). About Sweets, perfectly consistent with the behavior that he’s had throughout the whole season (in his own way, he’s a squint too, he measures the world according to his science and he’s so intrigued by Booth and Brennan that he doesn’t yield to experiment on them). But personally I found all the answers I was looking for. The season finale was imperfect for many reasons, but honestly I think Hanson has to do a lot more than that to disappoint me. A really disappointing episode in my opinion is an episode lacking in subjects, flat, that doesn’t give any cue, any message, and without contradictions. While this episode, with all his fault, was surely rich, important and generated conflict, shock, anger, emotion. Whether you liked it or not, it had its own reason. Could it have been done better? Yes, of course. Or even worse. It happens often that a season finale is not at the same level as the season itself (and unfortunately it happens even more often when it’s a season finale that ends the whole show). But this one wasn’t so bad at all, in my opinion: it gave me something to think about, it made me laugh, it caused me pain, it made me indulge in fancies about the future of the show, it gave me a cue for some fanfictions. Considering the sad context, what could I expect more? The third season was the one dedicated to the heart, the season about love, about family, about children, about holidays and smiles, and it didn’t contradict itself after all. It was about heart till the end, also the other side of the heart, the side that breaks, the side where grief lies. And this is what life is like, isn’t it? Maybe after years and years of Joss Whedon’s cruelty, I’m easily satisfied. But I’m happy and look forward to season four. And I’m expecting something special from the two-hour season premiere in London. Unlike the season finale, this is one of those opportunities where you have both the resources and the favourable conditions. If Hanson won’t be able to exploit them, then…yes, that would really be a wasted opportunity. So let’s keep our fingers crossed.
[/QUOTE]
|
|