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Recap!

We begin as Shauna enters Mike’s mind, where she finds herself on a foggy football field.  She soon encounters an entire team of faceless players, each one representing a certain aspect of Mike’s personality, as well as a scantily clad, super peppy version of herself and a hyper-cruel version of Katherine.  Eventually she runs into Mike himself on the sidelines; he doesn’t realize he’s talking to the real Shauna, and therefore doesn’t put up his normal cheerful attitude.  She talks Mike into confronting the mental representation of his father (and his own insecurities about being weak and ineffective), and after he steals a quick kiss, the two awaken.

The next morning, Katherine has commandeered the kitchen to make sure everything is perfect for Mike’s first breakfast, but everyone’s good mood is spoiled when Mike proves to be confrontational and ill-tempered.  Katherine storms out, and no one else is quite sure what to do to fix the situation.

In an effort to cheer Mike up, Fesmer and Jareth take him and Shauna to a local Brikka match.  It seems to perk him up a little, but everything is ruined when Mike runs into some very unpleasant University students.  A fight ensues, and Mike is rescued only by the timely arrival of Jareth.  Mike finally cracks, and yells at Jareth for saving him; life has moved on without him, his dream of playing football professionally will now never come true, and he can think of himself only as useless – exactly what his father claimed he’d be.

Comments:

- “Mike, is that you?” “Don’t you even know?” Aww, I can’t help but picture sad puppy dog eyes when he says this.

- “I seek Michael Archer and I will not endure one-dimensional shadows of him!”  I like that Shauna is genre-savvy enough to see right through this trope; it would have been a little much if she didn’t.

- It strikes me that Mike’s probably never had anyone dislike him as much as Katherine does.  He told Fesmer a couple episodes ago that he was raised to be the All-American golden boy, and here his psyche admits just how much he tries to get people to like him.  No wonder she aggravates him; he’s never had to deal with someone who questions him so much.

- Okay, going back to yesterday’s point on comedic relief characters.  I’ve always had a bit of a problem with characters who are created solely to provide laughs, particularly when they appear in a story where everyone else gets to be fully rounded.  It’s just…unrealistic, I guess.  In the real world, no one is comedic relief.  Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are funny and good at making others laugh…but there’s more to them than their sense of humor or knack for getting into wacky hijinks.  They’re people, complete with their own flaws and desires.  On the flip side, often when a writer tries to develop a character designated as comedic relief, that character almost completely loses their humor.  So when a piece of fiction develops a character who was comedic relief without them losing their humorous side, it makes me very happy…and Mike is a perfect example of this.  After his coma, we know that there are sides to Mike other than his penchant for making bad jokes, but he never stops being funny – or at least, he never stops thinking that he’s funny, which is just as good.

- On a similar yet random note, the fictional character that Mike reminds me most of has got to be Sokka from Avatar the Last Airbender…and reminding me of Avatar is ALWAYS a good thing.

- “We’re all just acting, Shauna – you most of all.”  Years on, and I still vacillate on what exactly Mike means here.  I would think that he’s referring to how very, very unhappy Shauna is, how trapped she feels – and by her own volition.  But is his subconscious really perceptive enough to pick up on that?

- Why hello there, Mike’s ableist dad!  No wonder he’s sick of you.

- “You can find a lot in books.  I found something that wasn’t already yours.”  How did I JUST realize how much of this show is about growing out of the shadow of your forebears?  Because I just did, and that’s ridiculous, seeing as I’ve been listening for 4 years.  Seriously, this is a major theme for 5 out of our 6 Main Cast: Mike and Katherine both have issues about their parents just using them to live vicariously, Arkahn has to move out of the long shadow of her parents and their (let’s face it) evil actions, Jareth has to become his own man and not just his Grandfather v2.0, and Fesmer has to deal with the fact that his father was not the man he imagined him to be.  Shauna’s arc is slightly different, but it still culminates in her learning to live for herself.  HOW WAS THIS NOT CLEAR TO ME?

- So much of Mike makes more sense after we get a chance to look in his head.  You can trace his almost-frantic desire to have people like him right back to his relationship with his father, for instance, and his foolish decision to jump right into the action in Laundi actually becomes understandable if you know how often he was kept on the sidelines back at home.

- If I recall correctly, this scene before breakfast (specifically, before Mike comes downstairs) is one of only two times in Season 1 where no one in the Main 6 is mad at anyone else, the other being…well, pretty much the entirety of Retreat.  …damn, they fight a LOT.

- Katherine being headmistress of the kitchen is a really nice, subtle way to demonstrate how well, she and Shauna have integrated themselves into life in Laundi.  She knows where everything is, what all the foods are, jokes around with the Laundians in Charendraen…really nicely done.

- Things I wish we could see more of: Fesmer and Jareth hanging out and having fun.  We know that they care for each other, this much was established from the beginning, but the tensions created by the arrival of the Boston Trio drive them apart for most of the series.  This is, of course, integral to the plot at large, but them being happy together really makes me happy.  If we’d had a Season 3 (err…Season 3 being an expanded version of 2 & 3, not just an epilogue to the current Season 2, for obvious reasons), I would have wished for more scenes like this, with them just enjoying each other’s company.

- Aaand the seeds are sown for the epic argument that’s quickly coming down the pipeline.  Ugh, it’s tough to listen to this initial argument, before it all devolves into ridiculousness in Civil War, because honestly?  Mike and Katherine are both right.  Mike is correct, Katherine has always put him down, and she storms off without even thinking that he might not be in the best mood after waking up from a coma.  But Katherine does have a right to be mad; she worked and worried and cared for him for 6 straight weeks, and probably had to confront the fact that she cares more about Mike than she thought she did…and right when she’s ready to apologize for her past actions, he shoves it all back in her face.

- And here we get the first subtle hint that Arkahn is kind of into Mike, in that Shauna points out how much she cared for him too.  Nice touch!

- Zana is a woman after my own heart, in that she too enjoys solving other people’s problems with food!

- Oh Jareth.  When are you going to learn: if it isn’t about magic, you suck at giving advice.

- I just now got that the Terontenadi Terrors “curse” is a Red Sox joke.  I suppose that’s what I get for not paying attention to sports.

- “I didn’t know you fished, Zana.” “Since I was a child!  I am full of surprises, voluna…”  Man, I can’t help but reflect on just how honest she’s being here, even if the others aren’t aware of it.  If there is one thing true about Zana, it’s that her past holds plenty of unknowns.

- Man, listen to how fast Arkahn tries to jump off the topic of her parents, how quickly she tries to dissuade Shauna from thinking anything’s wrong.  If we weren’t suspicious by this point, we should have been.

- We have the first mention that Shauna hasn’t been sleeping well, which will be incredibly important down the line.  I am continuously impressed by how well seeded the events of the season finale were; I’m fairly certain that not one thing happens that hasn’t been mentioned at least once beforehand.

- When we finally got more information about David, his relationship with Katherine, and the type of person he really was, a lot of Katherine’s personality clicks into place (just as Mike’s did after the dream sequence).  From all the evidence we see later on, David seems like he was at least a little emotionally abusive, and Katherine still bears the emotional damage from that relationship.  Looking back, it makes sense that she’s not able to trust people once they wrong her – in her mind, she can’t risk giving anyone more than one chance.

- “There was a time when one path was right and the other clearly wrong.  I miss those days.”  HELLO THERE, MAJOR THEME OF THE SHOW.

- “Of course not.  That’s far more advanced stuff than you’ve been teaching me.”  Shauna’s pretty brilliant at dancing around the truth, isn’t she?

- Okay, beyond setting up how casting a large spell can be sensed by those who are attuned, there’s some interesting information Jareth gives us; namely, that one person entering another person’s mind can have some strange affects on one or both parties.  After hearing the last few episodes of Season 2, this makes me wonder: (SPOILER) how much of Shauna’s 900 year dream was influenced by the fact that she’s very similar to Oren, and how much was influenced by Oren himself being inside her head?

- Oh man, I’m with Shauna: brikka makes NO sense to me either.

- Y’know, when I think about it, “doki-luna” is a very nebulous term.  As far as I can tell, it can refer to a relationship that’s anywhere between “Cute Girl I Saw on Campus” and “Person I May Very Well End Up Marrying (Only Her Dad Doesn’t Like Me Much)”.  In fact, the only type of relationship I don’t remember it being applied to is between an actual married couple…but that may be because we’ve never heard two married individuals refer to one another in a casual setting in the context of the show.

- Even in the midst of his post-coma funk and fighting with University students, Mike still has the time to make nerdy jokes.  See what I said about internal consistency and comedic relief characters not losing their humor for becoming better rounded? 

- I find it kind of interesting to think about the way certain Laundians treat the Boston Trio, particularly the University students who harass Mike.  It’s kind of rare to see fiction where Americans (and here I qualify: Americans as they are generally pictured in media, which is to say, relatively attractive, straight, affluent, and white) given shit for being foreigners, because even in foreign media, Americans aren’t treated the same way as immigrants in the US.  This must be a very odd feeling for Mike in particular, seeing as he’s the quinticential “All-American” boy.

- “You want one to match, Malfoy?” Okay, not gonna lie, because of what day it is and where I am as I listen, this made me laugh out loud IN PUBLIC.

- It’s kind of rare to see Jareth be riled up in righteous fury…and have it be completely and totally justified.  It’s actually very enjoyable.

- Much as I disagree with his choices here, I can at the very least understand why Mike acted the way he did.  The dream at the beginning of this episode makes it very clear what Mike thinks his father thinks of him – namely, that he’s weak and incapable.  Now Mike fears that both of these things are true, and feels the need to prove otherwise.  It explains why he snaps at Shauna and Fesmer, why he can’t stop himself from fighting, and why he responds to Jareth the way he does.  In his head, death would be preferable to proving his father right about him…and unfortunately, he’s not mature enough to deal with the sort of emotional pain this causes in an effective way.

- “Katherine?  Katherine hates me.” “No, Meek, she cares for you a great deal.”  Now if only this had stuck, maybe we wouldn’t have had the explosion that we did.  Ah, well.

- The bloopers for this episode really, really just make me want a musical episode.  It’d be EPIC.

- Okay, confession time: I’ve written the majority of this while waiting in the line for the very last Harry Potter midnight premier.  Because of this (and because this is precisely what the Boston Trio were doing when they got shifted!), I’ve decided to be COMPLETELY FRIVOLOUS and sort everybody!  Alright…Shauna would be in Hufflepuff, no doubt; she works way too hard and is way too dedicated to her family not to be.  Fesmer would have been difficult to sort from Season 1 alone, but Season 2 has proven to me that he’s a Slytherin, in that he’s willing to do anything to accomplish his goals.  Arkahn is probably a Slytherin as well, but more because she’s subtle and clever than because she’s ruthless.  Jareth and Katherine are both Ravenclaws, Jareth as he’s so dedicated to study, and Katherine because she’s so dedicated to truth (similar concepts, but slightly different).  And Mike is, like, the textbook definition of the Gryffindor that bravely charges ahead without thinking (and I say this with love, as I am a fellow Gryffindor).  AND WITH THAT, MY NERD QUOTA IS FILLED FOR THE DAY.