#It's cut dialogue but the way Hollow says “...father?...” There is no anger implied there

[littlebittyhollowbugs]

Imo Hollow does have some built up resentment obviously but it so so so deeply repressed for a wide variety of reasons including the big reason that is: every single emotion is deeply repressed as a result of you know.. being the hollow knight.

And also! acknowledging in any way that it deserves to or should be angry because of everything it's been put through would be an absolutely devastating realization.

Realizing that it sacrificed everything, literally everything and suffered all for the king, their father.

Being angry or hateful towards him would be so difficult. Hollow gave everything for him,

And wants to believe that even if he didn't get what he wanted, and the kingdom fell, and the plan failed, at the very least the reason for all of that suffering was good.

That it meant something.

That it was for a good cause at least.

Oh and also also! The Radiance being trapped within it's mind and consistently making it suffer (physically and/or mentally) while also being the greatest PK hater of all time and surely not hiding that from her captor, most likely making Hollow very aware of it, and attempting to turn it against him too, the entire time, I imagine would actually cause Hollow to become even more loyal to the king.

(I acknowledge that PK is deeply flawed, and greatly deserving of any and all resentment/anger Hollow might direct at him. And Hollow should be a little more angry actually or at the very least be willing to acknowledge how badly they were treated. STILL I do not believe Hollow would so easily think this way and would intentionally repress such thoughts or feelings.)

[ganymedesclock]

Following up with my read on the Radiance: I think Radiance is interesting and I have a little more to say on where I’m drawing this information from because I don’t think I’ve talked or written exhaustively about her.

According to Godseeker, Radiance is the brightest and most raw powerful god in Hallownest presently. The implications of the Absolute Radiance fight is also that she has, despite her efforts to the contrary, faded somewhat in the years since she lost the worship of the moth tribe.

Our first perception of her is that she’s an ALL CAPS SORT OF PERSON. This further invokes the idea that she is exceptionally powerful, but it also sort of implies she is kind of, full blast all the time. Which lines up with how she knows that Ghost is bad news but in Dream No More she accepts their challenge anyway and puts herself in fighting distance of them, rather than taking the arguably sensible option and going “y’know? I’m just going to stay out here.”

Radiance seems to have a heart motif (there’s a “heartbeat” distinctly discernible to all concentrated versions of the plague) and the plague itself is cited as powerful emotions and dreams.

It’s also worth noting that people seem lured down by very specific visions; of the sleepwalkers we rescue, Sly is talking to “Esmy”, an individual he seems to have lost a long time ago who he was motivated to follow as soon as he saw them in a dream (which is pretty significant in implications), Bretta is talking about how everyone forgot about her and she ‘knew you would’. Even in Hollow’s cut dream nail dialogue, they’re asking after their father.

So alarmingly, despite being someone who seems ‘constantly on blast’ Radiance seems to show a fairly calculating streak to her anger. In the form of the plague, she seems to manipulate emotions and also carefully trawl her hosts’ minds to find what’s going to hook them; it’s likely the more overt ‘orders’ we see in Myla’s head are Radiance reacting to Ghost’s presence and trying to move Myla’s not-yet-husk early.

Likewise, the soul sanctum bugs share their distinctive homing fireball attack with Radiance herself- who uses a more refined version.

Radiance thus seems to be someone who exploits and enforces basically, viral empathy; she feels bad, angry, lonely, and she wants everybody else to feel everything she feels. She also has a clear spiteful edge- the Hunter points out that the more someone struggled against the infection, the worse it would be when they were overtaken. Those who willingly (or obliviously) served her, like the mantis traitors and the soul sanctum bugs who she seems to have exploited the Soul Master’s malcontent against the Pale King to basically run a cult in his capital city (he also mentions hearing a voice several times in his normal and Soul Tyrant dream nail dialogue)

On the other hand, Radiance seems pretty stubborn and unwilling to acknowledge vulnerability. That she has such a potently antagonistic relationship with the abyss is interesting as the abyss embodies not only death but also regret. When Radiance is clearly not just a rampaging brute but someone with a calculating angle, it’s certainly interesting that, as much as she exploits others’ grief, the implication might be that she carries her own, and does not desire to engage with it at all.

What is Radiance’s hidden regret? We don’t really know. It may have something to do with the sundering of the domain of dreams, it may be related to losing her followers, it might be a lot of them. We don’t know, and I think that’s something interesting. It is known that she seems to think that if she can’t seize or act on something’s mind, it must not have one, which is... interesting since she seems to have been able to infect the shadow creepers, even.

Either way, she’s quite proud and aggressive, but interpersonally clever in a way PK is not really.

[enbouton]

Better Call Saul Rewatch, Part 6/30: Down In The Gutter

Five-O (Season 1, Episode 6)

Written by Gordon Smith / Directed by Adam Bernstein

“Five-O” is the episode I always think about whenever someone raises the issue of watching Better Call Saul without having seen Breaking Bad. I believe it stands on its own. You don’t need to know Mike Ehrmantraut to understand this quietly devastating portrait of a grieving father. Yet if you do know Mike— tough, stoic, unbreakable Mike— it cuts so much deeper. We joke about Mike being expressionless, but Jonathan Banks is one of the most expressive, sensitive performers on the show. He just does it all very subtly. It’s a murmur rather than a shout.

The opening sequence, too, is very quiet, very low-key and deliberate. The train pulls in. Mike gets off. He sits in the building, waiting. He eyes the restrooms. Stacey arrives, and visibly hesitates before going to hug him. Mike goes into the ladies’ room and retrieves a maxi pad, which he uses to bandage a bullet wound in his left shoulder. In his white undershirt he stands out sharply against the tiles. There’s a cold, bleached quality to the lighting. These are close, intimate shots of a lonely person doing something very solitary.

In a dusty back yard scattered with toys, Mike pushes Kaylee on a swing, keeping his left arm by his side. Stacey hangs back, looking uncertain. One of the many quietly jarring things about this episode is her visible discomfort with Mike. Back when we first encountered Stacey and Kaylee in Breaking Bad, Jonathan Banks decided that Kaylee was his granddaughter but her mother was not his daughter, and that whatever had turned Mike to the dark side, so to speak, had something to do with his son. Now we’re getting it. And it’s awful.

There’s very little open grieving in this episode. There’s a lot of stillness and silence, a lot of negative space. That’s where Mike and Stacey’s loss lives, as if it’s too great to fit anywhere else. Stacey says that she’s doing okay— “adjusting”— and that Kaylee still asks where Daddy is. The blocking here emphasises distance. Mike is barely visible in Stacey’s frame, and she’s pushed to the extreme edge of his.

Stacey asks him how long he’ll be in town; he says indefinitely. Seeming very vulnerable, he says that he’s “better”. He’s back, he’s solid. (When was Mike ever not solid?) Stacey’s response is tepid; throughout the episode she approaches Mike with a mixture of fear and resolve, knowing there’s more to the story than he’s telling her, yet afraid of what it might be. She says that in the weeks before Matty died, he wasn’t himself. Mike denies having noticed, although Stacey has clearly hit on something. There’s something very, very sad about the way he says “he seemed okay”.

We learn that a few days before Matty died, Stacey woke up in the early hours to hear him talking on the phone with great intensity. Mike denies, again, that it was him at the other end. Stacey, her arms folded across her chest, pointedly says it’s getting late.

In the cab, Mike notices he’s bleeding through his shirt, and ends up on an examination table as a shady vet sutures his wound. He asks Mike if he’s new in town, and says he knows people who could get him some work. “I am not looking for that kind of work,” Mike says, stiffly donning his jacket. He steps out of frame, the camera moves into the darkness behind the vet’s back, and suddenly we’re behind another person entirely, in an interrogation room, in the present. The detectives from the previous episode, Abbasi and Sanders, try the “we just have a couple of questions” tactic on Mike, who sits stone-faced and says nothing but the word “lawyer”.

Jimmy breezes in in his Matlock linen with a cup of coffee. (He’s in this episode for maybe five minutes; I admire the show’s willingness to bench its protagonist in order to tell a supporting character’s story.) Mike outlines his plan: he wants Jimmy to spill the coffee on Abbasi after the interview so that Mike can lift his notebook. Jimmy seems less bothered by the idea itself than by Mike’s assumption that he’ll do it; affronted, he insists he’s going to behave like an “honest-to-God licensed law-abiding attorney”. That’s another tally mark for the People Telling Jimmy Who He Is column. (He does, in the end, spill the coffee.)

Abbasi outlines the situation: about nine months ago, Matt Ehrmantraut, his partner Hoffmann, and Sgt. Fensky responded to a shots-fired call. (The way Jimmy looks at Mike as he realises they’re all talking about Matt in the past tense is touching.) They were ambushed, and Matt didn’t make it out. Three months ago, Hoffmann and Fensky turned up dead as well, and the detectives have nothing to go on. Mike admits that he saw them at a bar on the night they died, but can’t say any more than that. Dialogue implies that Mike drank heavily after he lost his son.

At home, Mike flips through the notebook, looking troubled by what he finds. One page is a rough timeline of the night Hoffman and Fensky died. Another page references multiple late-night phone calls between Hoffman, Fensky and Matt up until Matt’s death. A third page reads, in part:

… Ehrmantraut killed.

1 week later, Mike E. retires

3 months later, Stacey E. moves to ABQ

3 months later, Fensky and Hoffmann ...

Brimming with anger, Mike goes to Stacey and asks her if she called the cops. She admits that she did, after Hoffmann and Fensky were found dead; she thinks that whoever killed Matt could have killed them too. Mike can’t stand the idea that Stacey might have told the cops that Matt was dirty, but she says she only told them that she found money in the lining of an old suitcase after they moved. She never told Mike because she was afraid of what it’d do to him. Less fearful and more aggrieved now, she continues: “And you wouldn’t talk to me. Every night you were drinking yourself unconscious like you were the only one who lost him.”

To Stacey, whether Matt was dirty or clean would make no difference; she’d still love him, he’d still be gone. But just the idea that she thinks he might have been dirty is intolerable to Mike. He’s struggling to contain his emotions, and when Stacey presses him on the matter of the phone call, he explodes. It’s the angriest we’ve ever seen him. “He wasn’t dirty. God damn you, you get that through your head! My son wasn’t dirty.”

In flashback, in Philadelphia, Mike quietly breaks into a police cruiser outside a raucous bar. Inside, he sits grimacing with an empty glass, seemingly very drunk. Two uniformed cops acknowledge him. He wanders over to them, hugs them, and mumbles “I know. I know it was you.” The same cops manhandle him into their car as he staggers home after closing; one of them takes his gun. In the back seat, he seems to dig himself deeper: “You killed him. You killed Matty. And you killed him for nothing.”

Hoffmann and Fensky drive to a remote area, climb out, and discuss shooting Mike and making it look like a suicide. “Smart,” comes a clear voice from behind them— and the camera swings around to frame Mike between them, his gun drawn. “It’s what I would’ve done if I were you.” And then he shoots them both. Fensky, wounded, tries to crawl away. Mike looks down at him and shoots him in the head.

There’s nothing triumphant about this sequence. Nothing heroic. It’s all grief. It’s cold and hollow and awful. We might admire Mike’s cleverness or respect his motive, but when those shots stop echoing, Matty will still be dead. Mike is framed in a wide shot picking up the shell casings and walking away, small and alone.

Back in the present, Mike, having calmed down in his car, tells Stacey what actually happened. Matt wasn’t dirty; he was. All his colleagues were. That was just how it worked. They all took bribes and kickbacks and because they were all doing it they knew they were safe. But Matt wouldn’t. When Hoffmann offered to cut him in, he agonised. He went to Mike, wanting to do the right thing and report them to Internal Affairs. Was Matt killed for turning on his partners, then? No. It was worse.

MIKE: No, no. I told him… You know what a cop fears most? More than getting shot, more than anything. Prison. Getting locked up with everybody you put away. You threaten a cop with that, you make him dangerous. And that’s what I told him. I talked sense. No one was getting hurt. But if you go to the IA, if you even look like you’re going… He had a wife. A kid. Responsibilities. ‘Take the money, do something good with it.’ I tried. I tried. But he wouldn’t listen. My boy was stubborn. My boy was strong. And he was gonna get himself killed. So I told him… I told him I did it too. That I was like Hoffman, getting by. And that’s what you heard that night. Me talking him down, him kicking and screaming until the fight went out of him. He put me up on a pedestal. And I had to show him that I was down in the gutter with the rest of them. Broke my boy. I broke my boy. He went to Hoffman, he took the money, but he hesitated. Even looking like you’re doing the right thing… to those two, that meant that he wasn’t solid, that he couldn’t be trusted. I got Matty to take the money. And they killed him two days later. He was the strongest person that I ever knew. He’d have never done it, not even to save himself. I was the only one. I was the only one who could get him to debase himself like that. And it was for nothing. I made him lesser. I made him like me. And the bastards killed him anyway.

Mike's voice is breaking and his eyes are full of tears. There’s only one question left for Stacey: if Hoffmann and Fensky killed Matty, who killed them? “You know what happened,” Mike says, turning to face her, opening himself up to her judgment. “The question is... can you live with it?”

You get the sense that he’s only confirming the suspicion that kindled in her as soon as Matt’s partners turned up dead and Mike fled to Albuquerque. Now Stacey’s wariness around Mike makes sense. Her father-in-law, Kaylee’s beloved grandfather, killed two men in cold blood to avenge his son. Can she live with it?

Misc.

According to Sanders and Abbasi, Mike worked for the PPD for nearly 30 years.

During the first interview, Mike looks especially disdainful when Abbasi asks him for a little fraternal cooperation, “you know, cop to cop”. 

The shooting was filmed at the Albuquerque Rail Yards; both BrBa and BCS have used this location several times to represent various different places. It’s the site of one of Mike and Jesse’s pickups in “Shotgun”, and Mike meets Nacho there in “Gloves Off”. In real life, it’s in the Barelas neighbourhood just south of downtown.

Timeline: the present-day scenes take place in late June or early July, 2002. The events shown in flashback took place about three months prior, so late March or early April.

Music

"It Came Out Of The Sky” by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969), playing in the bar as Mike breaks into the cruiser

“Hold On Loosely” by 38 Special (1981), playing in the bar as Mike eyes Hoffman and Fensky

References

Five-O or 5-0 is a slang term for police, apparently originating from the show Hawaii Five-O.

“Say hello to Barney Fife,” one of the detectives quips, referring to Mike; Barney Fife was a deputy sheriff on The Andy Griffith Show, which starred the actor who would later play Matlock.

As far as I can tell, “Juan Valdez bump-and-dump” is a reference to a character used since 1958 to advertise Colombian coffee. 

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[ganymedesclock]

I have more PK Boss Thoughts: It’d be interesting if technically the “Challenge” command doesn’t come up, but, rather, the “listen” option, when you’ve heard what he’d have to say at a particular stage, he’s the one who interrupts with the boss fight.

Because like. Sure, yeah. Ghost absolutely would want to throw down with PK. They have a lot of reasons to hit this guy with a nail a few times.

But the interpretation I’ve always had of the White Palace, that informs my read of PK himself is- PK does not want to be known. There’s something major to be said, in canon, for how everybody in the game, if you spend any time around them, can be observed, you can watch their reactions, you can dream nail them, listen to their dialogue.

PK sets you up to go through hell to even find his body, and that can be dream nailed, but he’s keeping his dialogue only to his convictions. Whether or not enough of him’s left that he’s aware of Ghost’s prying- I think not, but he’d have the capacity to at greater levels of lucidity, as his consort and counterpart the White Lady does- it very much feels like PK does not want to be seen clearly. Does not want anyone to pry at him. Does not want to be evaluated.

It’s a theme consistently repeated if anyone talks about him. And while some speculate it’s on account of vanity (Lemm) or just the general unknowable whims of a god (Hunter)- basically everybody mentions that he was reclusive, hermetic, and of the regions you find in the White Palace that seem especially his- the throne room, and the workshop- are dark places. All of the private rooms in the White Palace are hidden- you have to pry and intrude quite a bit in a hostile environment that really, really, really does not want to let you walk this hallway.

And I think about how Ze’mer, who was one of the ones closest to the throne, says that PK “fled”.

I think it’s easy to see the effect this guy had on others and think of him like a supervillain whose motivations are mostly hauteur and rage, but I think it would be very interesting to characterize PK as a very specific sort of opponent to Ghost- who, spends the entire game, as the Mask Maker and Snail Shaman both allude to- digging deeper and deeper to find the truth.

PK, at several points, is cited to impart instructions or divine insight unto others. But there’s very much this sense PK does not want to be known or seen clearly. As the Wyrm, he’s a creature who abandoned his “true form” and physically shaped himself into something else. He’s reclusive. There’s a lot of mention of him as unknowable, but. there are also many people- even people distant from him- who seem to be able to know him, or guess at him.

If PK is an unknowable god, this is not a natural quality of his. It’s something he yearns to be.

PK does not want to be known. And I think this would be a very interesting conflict to press against Ghost, who, I think, while Ghost is certainly capable of anger and contempt and feeling these things towards the distant father that touched their life only briefly, but to colossal, catastrophic effect to their entire family...

...They’d want answers. They’d want to know. There’s something hollow and unfulfilling to the idea of never knowing what the hell was going on in that guy’s head, when we can frankly even puzzle out much of the Radiance’s motives and thoughts- the patterns she implants in others, the rare places her dialogue crops up, the insight of people who knew her, her own dreams as we can pluck from her during the bossfight.

PK is dead when we find him, but he is dead in a way that shows no struggle. There’s actually cut dream nail dialogue:

"False one… you can not… reach me… here"

And, sure, ‘False one’ is most likely an allusion to the Radiance, possibly implying PK buried himself alive in the memory of his castle as a way of escaping her- but I don’t think that’s the only person he would be afraid of.

Being interrogated, being questioned- Ghost is actively characterized, via Desolate Dive- especially around the Mask Maker- as someone who cuts the layers off something and looks for the “buried truth”. Who does not let things lie.

So I think actually, PK would be leading the hostility in this case, more than Ghost- in that PK in some ways would adamantly not want to be known, and strike against Ghost’s prying to try and deter it. There’s already a bit of this relationship in that, for a dead person, PK certainly is extremely obstinate about letting anyone get anywhere in the palace, given the heavily sealed Kingsmould, and the state of the White Palace itself.