spockvarietyhour asked:

into the badlands characters q (keeping in mind im only on ep4 of s3) I how do you feel abt the Widow and Tilda's tortured relationship? Bajie and The Widow's past as well? Doesn't Nick Frost bring much needed comic relief? And I loved seeing Lance Henriksen as some spiritual leader (that got offed offscreen).

little-brisk answered:

almost every story on this show is wildly under-told but i think the one that suffers least form this is the agonistic intimacy between the widow and tilda, which almost reaches the complexity you want from it. tilda’s need for the widow to be something she isn’t and can’t be is so poignant, and there’s something moving too about how tilda is the single point through which the widow can see the brutal compromise at the heart of her cause. i’m halfway thru s3 and will be interested to see how this ultimately resolves; it seems to me that tilda is one of a very small handful of characters marked to survive this mess, if anyone survives it, and i’ll be very interested in where it all leaves her.

as for bajie, i completely agree that nick frost steals the entire show—and i love that he and his shape get to do all the cool fast martial arts shit that the skinny ripped boys do and it’s never a joke). the backstory with the widow feels very under-told; i also haven’t quite been able to make all the pieces of her story fit into the same timeline—her life as flea, her life in chao’s household, her relationship to her own baron, all feel like different conveniences manufactured to suit different stories, and the result feels very incoherent. i could have stood to spend a little more time with little flea, and to have had the reunion between bajie and grown minerva drawn out a little longer.

i was also into henriksen, but lydia and her dad is one of the most under-told stories, which is a symptom of the dumbest (not worst, necessarily, but dumbest) narrative move in the entire show: the time jump between s1 and s2 that skips over all the interesting developmental work to just reset and get on with the various pretexts for battle choreography they call a storyline. it’s also a symptom of the show’s unwillingness to actually engage with its own major thematics of morality and violence; it can’t sustain engagement with a pacifist ethics because the show’s total reliance on extreme violence for its entertainment value can’t hold up under that scrutiny. (this is also why sunny’s central conflict is never really credible, and why the contradiction at the heart of the widow’s agenda can never really develop: you can’t be meaningfully critical of violence when you are literally selling it.) i could have stood to spend more time with the totemists, or at least to have the challenge for lydia of finding a way to protect them be given more weight than a single line of dialogue.