"I'm Thinking About What I Want And What I Need": Life, Season Two
Not much to say; not as good as Season One, but the high points, oh the high points. This show should have been bigger. This post is mostly to preserve the dialogue at the end of the penultimate episode, which rockets us into the finale.
"Charlie - what are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking about what I want and what I need."
"What do you want?"
"I want a peaceful soul."
"And what do you need?"
"I need a bigger gun."
Damian Lewis' delivery of those lines, as Charlie, should be bottled and sold. (Adam Arkin is pretty awesome too, btw.) Alone on the page they're walking the line between cheesy and badass, but Lewis nails the tone just right, because while Charlie Crews is a badass, he's (as mentioned previously) a Steve McQueen badass, which means he doesn't talk like someone who learned to be a badass by watching badasses in movies. "I want a peaceful soul" he says, with painful longing, and then "I need a bigger gun," he says, in the same serious but informative tone he uses at work, describing the tool he'll use to save a loved one.
That's the little engine at the heart of Crews, and Life: for all the explicit and implicit reference to Crews' discovery and adoption of Zen philosophy in jail, he's not Zen. Perhaps no one can actually be Zen, but Crews is very, very far from being Zen. But he's trying so damn hard, because he thinks Zen is the path to what we wants - a peaceful soul. He wants peace to quiet the beast inside him, the beast that got him through twelve years of wrongful imprisonment (as an ex-cop in Pelican Bay, no less), the beast that erupts when the people he cares about - too few, he realized in an earlier episode - are endangered, the beast that needs to know not merely who really killed his friends, but why he of all people was framed for it, and by whom. Crews never seems certain whether his quest for the truth of why he had twelve years taken away is a quest for peace, that the knowledge and understanding can soothe his deep wounds, or if it's a quest for vengeance, to let the beast do what it wants and savage the people who savaged him. Crews undoubtedly fears that it's both, that succumbing to violence - not very Zen, he would say, but it'll do until Zen comes along, he says in the finale - will bring him to peace. That's the path he tries to avoid, he tries to use Zen to shield himself from, but in the end he can't quite manage it.
He's not quite ready for the peaceful soul, but at the end of the season - and, sadly, the series - he seems closer to it.
He doesn't ultimately get the bigger gun, but he didn't ultimately need it.
"Do you wanna know how I got through twelve years of prison?" he asks an enemy.
"Your Zen?" his enemy laughs.
"Like that," Crews explains after breaking the other man's windpipe.
He wants a peaceful soul.
"Charlie - what are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking about what I want and what I need."
"What do you want?"
"I want a peaceful soul."
"And what do you need?"
"I need a bigger gun."
Damian Lewis' delivery of those lines, as Charlie, should be bottled and sold. (Adam Arkin is pretty awesome too, btw.) Alone on the page they're walking the line between cheesy and badass, but Lewis nails the tone just right, because while Charlie Crews is a badass, he's (as mentioned previously) a Steve McQueen badass, which means he doesn't talk like someone who learned to be a badass by watching badasses in movies. "I want a peaceful soul" he says, with painful longing, and then "I need a bigger gun," he says, in the same serious but informative tone he uses at work, describing the tool he'll use to save a loved one.
That's the little engine at the heart of Crews, and Life: for all the explicit and implicit reference to Crews' discovery and adoption of Zen philosophy in jail, he's not Zen. Perhaps no one can actually be Zen, but Crews is very, very far from being Zen. But he's trying so damn hard, because he thinks Zen is the path to what we wants - a peaceful soul. He wants peace to quiet the beast inside him, the beast that got him through twelve years of wrongful imprisonment (as an ex-cop in Pelican Bay, no less), the beast that erupts when the people he cares about - too few, he realized in an earlier episode - are endangered, the beast that needs to know not merely who really killed his friends, but why he of all people was framed for it, and by whom. Crews never seems certain whether his quest for the truth of why he had twelve years taken away is a quest for peace, that the knowledge and understanding can soothe his deep wounds, or if it's a quest for vengeance, to let the beast do what it wants and savage the people who savaged him. Crews undoubtedly fears that it's both, that succumbing to violence - not very Zen, he would say, but it'll do until Zen comes along, he says in the finale - will bring him to peace. That's the path he tries to avoid, he tries to use Zen to shield himself from, but in the end he can't quite manage it.
He's not quite ready for the peaceful soul, but at the end of the season - and, sadly, the series - he seems closer to it.
He doesn't ultimately get the bigger gun, but he didn't ultimately need it.
"Do you wanna know how I got through twelve years of prison?" he asks an enemy.
"Your Zen?" his enemy laughs.
"Like that," Crews explains after breaking the other man's windpipe.
He wants a peaceful soul.
Labels: TV
posted by medrawt at
17:38
