My favorite moment on television this year arrived in the fourth episode ofLodge 49’ssecond season.
The AMC hourlong is (was?)
Ernie’s worked at the plumbing outfit for a long, long time.
Credit: Jackson Lee Davis/AMC
He used to be outside on the hustle, but now he’s desk-jobbed in the home office.
It wasn’t always thus, he recalls:
I spent my first year on the order desk.
Then I made the jump to outside sales.
All day, every day, for years.
[LAUGHS] I loved it.
And the fire, out over the ocean.
What a performance by Jennings!
What a vision of the splendor in the regular!
AndLodge 49was beautiful is, darn it,isbeautiful!
Creator Jim Gavin and showrunner Peter Ocko have produced an unconventional miracle shard of televised space dust.
Season 2 ended Monday night, without much buzz in whatever ratings are now.
The wrap-up was all-time weird and emotional enough to give we devoted viewers hope for more.
Season 2 couldn’t initially sort out the show’s eccentric tones.
There were unexpected hiccups with serialization, probably too much time spent in Mexico.
The Scrolls loomed like Regionals over a season ofGlee, plot stuff forever on the horizon.
Then came the marvelous sixth episode, “Circles,” written by Ocko.
Here was the fullLodgeexperience.
Jackie’s story dug into local history, national travesty, and the peculiar SoCal blend of industrial mysticism.
In season 2, all the show’s communities had a Lynx-ian quality.
The ending of the (series?)
finale is one final burst of strange.
I’d call it “biblical,” but that’s too monotheist.
Dud and Liz plan a trip to Catalina, just in time for a rainstorm.
Liz arrives at the Lodge and meets Connie (Linda Emond) for the first time.
Something passes between them.
One implication: Liz will be Connie’s squire.
Meanwhile, Dud finds himself a victim of punishing fate yet again.
Is he building the pool or trying to find the hidden civilization hiding beneath humble Long Beach?
Lightning strikes his shovel, and the mud fully buries his unconscious body.
( I thought the show might leave him there, near-death again.)
Allow me to explain:DAFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHH???
I hope there’s more to this story.
Ernie is in a celebratory mood, at last ascending to Sovereign Protector.
He wants to make Dud a Luminous Knight.
And Dud… doesn’t want that.
“I couldn’t be happier than I am right now,” Dud says.
But:
All I can feel is the shadow.
And I wish my dad were here to see where I am.
See where I’m going.
But I know that the only reason that I’m here is because Liz and I lost him.
And sometimes I don’t know how to square that.
I don’t know if I can handle paying that kind of price.
Everything is all tangled, the good stuff and the bad stuff.
It just seems unfair.
And on some days, all of the beautiful things in my life break my heart.
Will it always feel this way?
Ernie thinks for a long moment about how to respond and tells the truth: “Yes.
But that’s the deal.”
The good and the bad tangles, and it all seems unfair.
Those little wonders are still there, though, waiting to be discovered.
Finale Grade: A
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