The Moth Chase

To be honest, that didn’t even feel like a season finale to me.  It felt like what should have been a decent, mid-season episode, with character development, plot movement and an indication that we might get the same next time.  Hung has been so frantic this season – dashing from plot to plot but not doing much with each.  And in a way, I’ve wondered if that’s purposeful – a comment on everyone’s attitude post economic-collapse.  Everyone scrambles to maintain, maintain – even if that keeps us in some sort of crazed holding pattern devoid of meaning.  And I almost wished the finale had kept that up – at least that way it would have felt intentional.  Moving to traditional storytelling as it did, it just felt like the rest had been paced to try to figure out whether we’d get a season 3 (we are, but I’m not sure I want it). But let’s get to what actually happened. Read the rest of this entry »

After a season that’s felt like it’s creeping along with little focus, everything sort of came together last night.  For the most part, this worked – if only because we could sigh some relief that finally Tanya gets caught, finally Ray figures out the Mike-Francis situation, finally Jess connects with her daughter, finally Ron freaks out and finally Ray and Jess come back together.  But even as we could enjoy the pace of something finally giving, I wondered why we had to cram every climax into the penultimate episode.  It’s an annoying form of narrative that leads to uneven storytelling.  Nevertheless, it was fun to see some shifts. Read the rest of this entry »

I know Tanya is supposed to be ridiculous; that we’re supposed to think she’s pathetic and that’s why we root for her.  But I think last night’s version of her walking into a situation she didn’t like and running away idiotically was one too many for me to have any sense of taking her seriously in even the slightest way anymore.  Any kind of grown woman I could even begin to imagine doing that is not someone I’d want to spend more than 30 seconds in the same room with.  And it leaves me wondering what exactly it is they are going to do with her?  Is Ray the only character grasping toward some sort of redemption here?  Is everyone else doomed to become more and more wretched?  I had expected some sort of success gene to kick in on Tanya by now, but it just doesn’t seem like that is going to happen.  Her world really is closing in on her – perhaps Read the rest of this entry »

Having left the “…or…” types of titles for the episodes, this one landed us squarely in the territory of childish puns which, while it could have been stupid and annoying, kind of worked for me.  I noticed on the blogs this morning a series of complaints about how obvious these puns or allegories or whatever were, but I just don’t think that’s the case.  Yeah, ok – so Ray’s the masculine, trap ‘em the right way guy and Ronnie’s just a failure at all things beaver related (and like last week his pursuits get tinged by a strange, scary violence that raises my hackles), but in the end Ray too is a bit of a failure (at least with Liz – see comments after the jump).  And Jess is the pathetic one left flitting between two pretty awful catches/traps (however you want to painfully extend that metaphor). Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the erotics of family life.  Not the least complex issue Hung could choose to tackle in an episode with a high teenager, a cranky mother-in-law and a potential love-match between two lonely, lonely souls. The line between acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to families and bodily life together is thin – but we have the sense we know when it’s been crossed.  While seeing one’s mother and step-father naked might be enough to escalate a bad drug reaction – it’s certainly not worse than watching one’s father masturbate or needing to scrub one’s mother’s back in the shower at 14 years old.  But, we can probably all agree, all three situations are situated along various points of the ‘not ok’ side of the scale.

But Damon’s poem about being a twin was a little more difficult to judge. Read the rest of this entry »

I think one of the things that makes it difficult for viewers to connect with this show is that it refuses to do the work for us.  It produces more questions than answers, leaving us always with a sense of irresolvable ambiguity.  Was Damon creating art, or was he just relieving a Big Gulp, and can he himself even know?  Is Happy Birthday on repeat (with an accent) perhaps the creepiest thing we’ve ever seen?  And if so, why?  Would Ray and Jess have been friends with their kids in high school and, perhaps more importantly, would their kids have been friends with them?  Let’s take each in turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Does anyone else understand what the deal is with the …OR…titles?  They used to feel like actual contrasts – two different ways we could encounter the episode.  But now they feel like they’re just the two lines that the writers couldn’t decide between for naming.  These were certainly two of the funnier lines in the episode, but aside from that I had a difficult time figuring out their relationship…any thoughts, readers?  Help me out!

That being said, there were a bunch of other great lines in this one, ranging from funny to thoughtful to devastating.  Read the rest of this entry »

I love Ray like I love a helpless puppy.  That the first season of Hung coincided with economic collapse was perfect.  A man struggling to find his masculinity using his, um, manhood in the midst of his own crumbling life offered the perfect metaphor for the strange ways men are seeking to evolve in a changing world. Journalist Hanna Rosin recently pointed out in an extremely popular Atlantic article that men have suffered much worse from the Recession as women’s careers have actually benefited from it.  A gender tip might finally be happening, reports Rosin, allowing women to occupy more places of prominence and power than their male counterparts.  But if I learned anything from last night’s Hung, just a tip ain’t enough! Read the rest of this entry »