#his death note killing thing is his jihad. i guess.

[totheidiot]

maashalla brother mikami he is making his pilgrimage for kira

[casualarsonist]

Dune (novel) review and analysis

In commemoration to Frank Herbert’s epic novel, I’ve decided to make this review 10,000 words long.

Frank Herbert’s Dune has long stood as one of science fiction’s towering giants - a monolithic feat of imagination and a landmark science fiction novel. And as a work of fiction, this it true. Over the greater part of a thousand pages lay stories of sprawling civilisations, with dozens of unique characters engaging in complex power-plays whilst battling the brutality of the ecology of the sand-planet Arrakis. Following it’s release in 1965, it was (and still is) regarded as a masterwork in world-building - a milestone for the genre, and the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones of its time. As a work of fiction, it’s a triumph. As a piece of literature…well…

Frank Herbert was great at many things in his life. Writing was not one of them. And while Dune is a standout novel that, all things considered, has aged better than many novels (particularly of the sci-fi genre) of a similar time, it is, at least in my humble opinion, a spectacularly average work of prose. But I say this with the works of Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kurt Vonnegut, and others in mind, so I am probably doing him a disservice in comparing his work to what I believe to be the cream of the crop. But if you’re going to tout a novel as ‘one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time’, I think you have to allow it to undergo rigourous scrutiny from all angles. So with that in mind, let’s scrutinise this motherfucker.

Spoilers abound, including a spoiler for Metro 2033.

It is thousands of years in the future, and mankind has conquered the stars. Dune centres around the Atreides family - one of a number of Great Houses united under the pseudo-feudal collective ‘Lansraad’, owing allegiance to the Emperor Shaddam IV. Duke Leto Atreides - a hard but compassionate man and a competent leader - has been given charge over the desert planet Arrakis, displacing House Harkonnen - the Atreides’ mortal enemies. Leto senses correctly that this dangerous exchange of power is an intentional move by the Emperor to set his family up on the losing side of an inter-House rivalry, and with the help of the traitorous Yueh - the Atreides doctor - and the armies of the Emperor, the Harkonnen’s capture and kill Leto, whilst his son Paul and pregnant concubine Jessica disappear into the desert. There they encounter Arrakis’ indigenous inhabitants - the Fremen - and are accepted amongst them after proving their worth through combat and their uncanny abilities of deduction and prescience, abilities taught to Jessica and Paul by the Bene Gesserit, a powerful sisterhood who wield abilities of superhuman physical and mental conditioning to influence and manipulate society.

Paul, for his part, has been prophesied to be the ‘Kwisatz Haderach’ - the name for a messianic male Bene Gesserit, a child born of generations of genetic manipulation with the power to see through time and space. And when I say he is ‘prophesied’ to be the Kwisatz Haderach, I mean that he is the Kwisatz Haderach, and this, like most questions and mysteries the novel establishes, are answered immediately and conclusively without exception.

But anyway, after their escape the book jumps a number of years ahead, and Paul has had a son with a Fremen woman, while Jessica has given birth to Paul’s sister, Alia, a child imbued with all of Jessica’s Bene Gesserit powers in the womb, who speaks and acts like a grown adult despite looking and sounding like an infant.

Under Paul’s command, the Fremen tribes have been performing successful raids against the Harkonnen forces and reducing the flow of the addictive spice Melange - the galaxy’s most valuable trade commodity, and one that occurs only on Arrakis. This brings the Emperor to the planet, followed by the armies of every house in the Lansraad, and with the Fremen tribes at his back, Paul drives over them like a steamroller, taking back control of Arrakis with little to no complications because he’s the Kwisatz fucking Haderach, as we were told in the first chapter. His infant sister knifes the Baron Harkonnen to death, and Paul forces the daughter of the Emperor - Princess Irulan - to marry him while promising that he will never love her or otherwise show her affection. Jessica celebrates this. The end.   So, I hope you could keep up with all the terms; my spellcheck was going absolutely mental as I was writing that.

But where to begin? Firstly, despite some of the criticisms I’ve read (as well as some of the criticisms I will make), I should note that I didn’t find Dune to be a particularly laborious read. Its length is obscene, yes, but my Tube rides would pass by in a flash when I was buried in the text. And although I personally don’t understand the decades-long literary trend of putting fake songs into a text (I’m looking at you, Lord of the Rings), I never found the numerous pages of songs in Dune to be as big an impediment to my interest as I did in, say, Lord of the fucking Rings (and skipping over reading them sped the whole process up considerably). I understand that saying that Dune ‘isn’t unreadable’ isn’t exactly high praise, but I think it’s worth at least outlining the extent of my criticisms of the text, because I’m going to tear into Herbert’s writing as we go on, but I don’t want you to think that sub-par prose necessarily translates into an odious reading experience. And in any case, Dune didn’t become one of the biggest selling sci-fi novels entirely without reason. The one thing that it does unquestionably well is exercise Herbert’s imagination.

Rarely has a imagined universe been so clearly realised before or since Frank Herbert’s seminal series, and this can be ascribed chiefly to one particular detail: his research and preparation. In reading George Arr-Arr Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, for example, one can detect in the convoluted and meandering text the fact that he doesn’t actually know where his novels are going when he starts writing them. The swelling word count of each successive entry in the series also bears testament to an increasingly relaxed editorial oversight, and this has resulted in each book becoming more bloated and complicated than the last. And while Dune itself is bloated terms of its length and complicated in terms of the language it introduces to the reader, there is a specific and unerring clarity in Herbert’s vision of the Dune universe that one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere, and this is because the world itself was layed out by Herbert in detail, and years in advance, of the final writing and publishing of the novel. One can get a taste of this preparation and backstory in the supplementary appendices in the back of the book, as well as the accompanying glossary, which offers a definition of every single alien term that appears in the course of the preceding nine-hundred pages, and whilst not every creature or machine is described in minute detail, all the pieces of this puzzle fit together in the greater context of the novel.

There is also a sense of uncanny timelessness in the world of Dune, and Herbert has achieved this via a number of paths - the first being that he drew from real-world sciences as a foundation upon which the ecology and engineering of his universe is built. Rooting his fantasy work in a bed of modern fact (and remaining restrained enough in his vision to avoid sending his characters to absurd destinations such as planets made of cheese, or inhabited by talking animals, for instance) bestows a tangibility in one’s mind’s eye to the people, places, and things, and interestingly leaves Dune feeling relevant even to an audience for whom the technologies of the Sixties seem archaic and obsolete. The second factor that gives the novel life is its appropriation of Middle Eastern cultures as inspiration for that of the Fremen. This is obviously an accidental boon, but as with the surge of Middle Eastern cultural influences spreading throughout the Western world in the Sixties, so too has the region, its people, and its customs come to the forefront of Western attention in the last few decades. People are far more common with the word ‘jihad’ now than they would likely have been at the turn of the millenium, and this coincidental familiarity left me feeling a greater understanding of the desert-dwelling Fremen than I might otherwise have had, had I read the book as a teenager, for instance.

So before I launch into a diatribe, it’s worth pointing out that Dune IS a genuine landmark work, and with good reason, but it has its limits. And now that I’ve got that disclaimer out of the way, I can begin the fun part: talking about all the reasons Dune shits me off.

1: It starts each chapter with a spoiler for the rest of the novel.

Now I don’t know how you feel, but if I had to guess, I’d say that one of the main things that keeps an audience engaged in the plot of a piece of fiction is the fact that they don’t know what’s going to come next. Hell - this is why we engage in fictional stories at all, and why every series of Game of Thrones is preceded by an onslaught of social media statuses proclaiming that someone is going to get their eyes gouged out if they reveal whether the Immodium cures Daeneryus’ chronic diarrhea at the end of S03E05.

Frank Herbert has other things in mind, though, for every chapter in the novel begins with an excerpt from a piece of in-universe fiction - usually written by the Emperor’s daughter, and almost always regarding Paul’s actions in the future. Through these excerpts we get a glimpse into the world beyond the novel, specifically, into a world in which Paul is both a god, and not dead. This didn’t seem to perturb Herbert though, and he soldiers on admirably in his endeavor to supply multitudes of cliffhangers, the outcome of which have either already been revealed to us, or are revealed in the paragraph following the incident itself. Tracts of text are rendered wasted and pointless by Herbert’s own premature narrative ejaculation, and the trials that Paul undergoes on his journey towards godliness hold no weight because we know the outcome of his character from the opening of the very first chapter. In the most egregious instance, one chapter ends with Paul near death after poisoning himself. 'Will he survive?' I asked myself, 'Maybe the prophecy is wrong! Maybe something, anything, that hasn't already been revealed to us is about to happen!' In the very first sentence of the next chapter, an excerpt written far in the future that tells us specifically that Paul lives and gains the powers of the Kwisatz Haderach, like a time-travelling dickhead who has come back to the past to spoil your good time. Herbert then decides that blowing his load is no impediment to making the reader sit through six pages in the eyes of a character that doesn’t know of Paul’s situation, and we watch them trip clumsily over their own emotions and agonise over a question of his survival that was answered for us literally as soon as it was posed.This moment is so utterly confounding in its dramatic ineptitude that I was agape, staring at the page in disbelief. It’s as if The Usual Suspects began with a Kevin Spacey monologue directly to the camera talking about how he is Kaiser Soze, and then the rest of the film conducted itself as if it were still a mystery. It’s as if the opening crawl of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ told the audience that Darth Vader was Luke’s father, and then still tried to pull off the reveal. And this pattern is repeated from start to finish - every time you reach a point in which you wonder ‘will they make it out of this?’ Herbert comes back from the dead, strips the book from your hand, smacks you in the face with it, and emphatically replies ‘YES’.

2: Its inner monologues are prolific, and terrible.

No-one thinks to themselves like the characters in Dune think to themselves. If you are at McDonalds and you want to buy a burger, you don’t stand in line thinking to yourself ‘I am at McDonalds, and I am hungry. I wish to buy a burger, and I can see the burger menu in front of me, but I don’t know which to choose. I must hurry because I am almost at the front of the line - if I cannot choose in time, I will end up at the front of the line having not made a choice, and everyone around me will be inconvenienced!’

But Frank Herbert thinks people think like that.

He uses the character’s inner monologues as a medium for clumsy exposition, and eradicates any sense of realism or immersion they may hold. Now that’s not to say that one can’t use an inner monologue for that purpose, but the characters of Dune project a constant and unfiltered analysis of even the most basic social interactions, redundantly vocalising things made obvious in the text. Paul will do a thing, and Jessica will think that ‘Paul is doing that thing!’, and it will all be presented so dramatically that it makes you want to hurl the book into traffic. Herbert takes swathes of description that most writers would simply frame from a third person perspective about the characters and the world, and presents them instead as unedited, actual thoughts that the characters think in real time. In the midst of action and a threat to his mother’s life, Paul stops and takes a minute to recite this in his head: ‘They will concentrate on my mother and that Stilgar fellow. She can handle them. I must get to a safe vantage point where I can threaten them and give her time to escape.’ No-one alive has ever had a thought that forms itself like that, and this actually ends up having a tangible discriminatory effect on the reader, for whom all of the characters whose thoughts we don’t hear seem like pretty normal people, and all the central characters end up coming across as fucking weirdos, and one finds oneself subconsciously disliking them. Which brings me to my next point…

3: The Atreides are fools, assholes, or both, and the writing doesn’t help.

Now to be fair, it’s important to note that one of the key themes of Dune, according to Frank Herbert, is the danger of the ‘superhero’ myth. Through his genetic talents, his lifetime of training, and the legends and prophecies sewn into the Fremen culture, Paul takes a straight-line trajectory towards becoming the foretold Kwisatz Haderach, but despite his triumph over every challenge and his ultimate and all-encompassing victory over his enemies, he is not a character to be envied - he seemingly loses his attachment to the people around him and is consumed by his own myth, becoming more of a dictator than anything else. However, there are two problems with the portrayal of Paul et al. that confuses the intended message. The first is that a large proportion of the Atreides’ characterisation goes into establishing their constant control over their emotions, reactions, and decision-making processes; the effect being that from the very beginning of the novel the Atreides’ all seem to exist in their own little bubble, separated from the world at large as well as those around them by their own singular brilliance - Leto is a ‘great’ commander bearing the burden of the his people on his shoulders; Jessica is a Bene Gesserit and a concubine, viewed with suspicion by many around her due to her powers and her unofficial place within the family; and Paul is a demi-god in training. And since the tone of Herbert’s prose is so lacking in emotional nuance and resonance, it becomes difficult to discern whether he is intending to convey that, in any given situation, a character is displaying an intentional control over his or her reactions, or whether they are actually supposed to be displaying an unhealthy emotional disconnect. Within the text both instances appear the same, and it is only whether the control or the disconnect are explicitly stated that I, for one, could decipher the points in which it was intentional. Such as it is, the off-screen death of Paul’s son reads like a footnote for all the pause it gives him, and I still can’t figure out whether that’s because Herbert is trying to indicate the depth of Paul’s depravity, or whether he’s just a shitty writer who failed to properly demonstrate his character’s emotions, because honestly, it could be either.  

And this brings me to the second problem, which is that the prose itself is complicit in the confusion. As stated, Herbert’s grasp of dramatic tension is so feeble, his demonstrated understanding of interpersonal emotions so poor, and his writing so matter-of-fact and lacking in colour, that it buries whatever philosophical subtext it may have and confuses speculation on its themes by virtue of the simple fact that any supposed ‘mystique’ could just as easily be chalked up to the author’s failed hold over his own material. The way Herbert fumbles with the tension he tries to invoke and the clumsiness of his writing when he gets inside his characters heads leaves it equally possible in my mind that his characters are complex as it is that they are simple - a situation I’ve never witnessed before - and in any other circumstance I’d admit that there was a kind of brilliance to this, if it wasn’t for the fact that the general tone of his writing clearly conveys the infancy of his talents as an author. My inclination, then, was simply to take everything at face value because the novel is written so explicitly. Which finally brings me to my actual point here:

If the novel is to be taken as it is written, then all of the main characters are giant idiot dickheads.

Let’s begin with Duke Leto. It’s kind of strange that everyone in Leto’s shadow exhibits an explicit and almost unfathomable loyalty to someone who’s temperament is almost exclusively characterised by flushes of anger, harsh words, and a deep belief in the feudal hierarchy - the idea of ‘right by birth’ being an absurd inflation of self-importance that Paul himself adopts as an awful character trait later on. Most of Leto’s subordinates seem to display symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, seeing brief moments of kindness following a rebuke or an outburst as a sign of his famed benevolence and compassion. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is an adage that comes to mind when pondering the writing of this character, and for all the tales of a 'great leader' that surround him, we see little of this in the timeline of the novel itself. A man whose idea of ‘strong leadership’ is a calm word after an outburst isn’t a figure of worship, he’s a cunt. And I can see the typing fingers of fans a-flurry as they rush to point out that Leto is supposedly uncharacteristically stressed by the danger his family has been put in - an excuse that would hold far more weight if Herbert had found time to actually demonstrate this somewhere within his novel’s nine-hundred pages, but he didn’t. Instead, we’re simply told that he’s not usually like that, which has as much meaning to a reader as being told your neighbour’s shithead Chihuahua ‘isn’t usually like that’, right after it bites the tip of your dick (true story, don’t ask). And after all this - after all his bluster and bullshit, and after spending a good deal of his story ostracizing the mother of his child in an effort to supposedly fake out the true traitor in his family’s midst - he succeeds in exactly none of his efforts, and the Harkonnen plot plays out without a hitch. To make matters worse, his final living act is to activate a poison gas capsule hidden in his tooth in an attempt to kill the Baron Harkonnen, and he even fucks this up, killing only himself and one of the Baron’s disposable offsiders. His capabilities as a leader are nil, and his compassion limited, at best.

Meanwhile, for her part, Jessica spends the majority of Dune pinballing between disgust and fear of her son because he is turning into the very thing she has been training him to be for the entirety of his existence, and vengeful joy as he rains destruction down upon their mutual enemies. In what you’ll come to see is a pattern amongst the Atreides, any sense of genuineness one may garner from her faint echoes of self-awareness is reversed and erased by the fact that she continually makes the same decisions she spends so much time regretting, and then comes to regret those decisions as well - simply put, she's written to be self-aware, but not written to learn. For instance, as the focus on her dwindling attachment to Paul begins to grow as he gets more powerful, she willingly undergoes a ritual whilst pregnant that bestows all her powers upon her unborn daughter, resulting in the birth of what the Bene Gesserit call an ‘Abomination’ - a child that she once again finds disconcerting. Typically the Bene Gesserit kill these children as they risk being dangerously possessed by the spirits of dead Bene Gesserit, but Jessica doesn’t care about that because she is the mother of Paul Atreides and she can do whatever the fuck she wants. And far be it from me to say that a mother shouldn’t be able to keep her child if she wants to, but there’s a distinct difference between wanting to keep your unborn daughter; and forcing upon her powers that she cannot refuse, making her a target for a powerful order, and then having the audacity to look down upon her as something unnatural simply because she is what you made her to be. The point I’m making is that whilst the character of Jessica constantly reminds the reader that she is disenfranchised or a passive observer amongst the events that take place around her, such claims are a hard pill to swallow coming from a character for whom a core motivation of their order is the pursuit of power, and particularly the desire to manipulate it from behind the scenes. Jessica is demonstrably one of the most influential and powerful people in the universe - she is a master of wits and observation, outsmarting even Leto’s security expert (who, it should be mentioned, is a human computer), and a master of combat, easily besting the chieftan of the first Freman tribe they encounter. She even has the power to force others into doing her bidding by the use of ‘The Voice’ - an ability she uses at least half a dozen times. And yet what is the one thing that gives her solace? The fact that her son plans to marry an innocent girl for political reasons, and then torture her for the rest of her life by withholding any kind of affection in favour of his concubine. These are the last words of Dune:

“Do you know so little of my son?” Jessica whispered. “See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace; she’ll have little else.” A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives.”

After everything that has happened, to the end, Jessica’s one gripe is that she was never treated with the respect of a Queen all those years ago when Leto was alive. Great. What a wonderful person. And make no mistake - she is talking about the innocent daughter of their enemy here; a girl who only wants to be a writer and scholar and will spend the rest of her life recording the history of this woman’s fucking son. And for some incomprehensible reason, Herbert decided that this, a petty display of spite that boils the most powerful female character in the novel down to the desire to be 'a wife', that this would be the perfect way to end his epic science fiction novel.

So what about Paul? We’ve already discussed in brief his descent into war mongering and self-absorption that makes him one of the most singularly unlikable characters in the book, but what makes it worse is that, once again, every single decision he makes leads him directly to the one point that he swears he never wants to go. His one steadfast moral handhold is his understanding of the fact that encouraging the Fremen to worship him and playing into the prophecy of the Kwisatz Haderach runs the risk of drawing these people to the edge of waging a religious war. But he also knows that their military might united under his leadership is his one way of winning back his seat as the ruler of Arrakis. So what does he decide to do?

We already know the answer to that.

Time and again Paul fans the flames of religious fervour and further asserts his singular command over everyone, ultimately leading his army to the brink of jihad. At various points he sets out to demonstrate that he fulfills the requirements of the prophecy, at others he demands fealty based on his birthright as son of the former Leto Atreides. By the end of the novel he literally says that he lives by two separate moral codes - that of a noble family, and that of the Fremen - and that a course of action illegal for an Atreides (i.e. the murder of the fucking Emperor) is not illegal for a Freman. You understand what this means, right? Paul is making the argument of a crazy person - he genuinely ascribes the blame for an illegal murder at the feet of a different version of himself. And while it’s true that Frank Herbert came out a decade after the release of the novel and talked about how it’s supposed to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of hero worship, it’s also true that Tommy Wiseau asserted that The Room was a drama, right up until he realised that everyone was laughing at it.

Dimitri Glukhovsky’s ‘Metro 2033’, for instance, ends with the protagonist realising at the last moment that the assumption upon which his last mission rests is incorrect, and that the race of beings that he is about to destroy are actually intelligent and benevolent, rather than the violent demons they are thought to be. This climax is a crescendo of swelling emotion and tragedy that leaves the main character broken and disillusioned, and it is one of the few times I’ve cried whilst reading a novel. Glukhovsky devotes the entire final section of the book to the failure of his protagonist, and of humanity at large, to realise what they have done until it’s too late, and the emotional repercussions of this.

Frank Herbert devotes a couple of lines to Paul's awareness of his ultimate failure.

And much like the death of the Paul’s son, this too reads like a footnote. So how are we supposed to understand the intentions of a novel that presents itself so dispassionately? One that portrays enormous and important events in such an off-hand manner? I’m not entirely sure to be honest. For certain, I could delve into a debate about the possible meaning of this and that and dive into the encyclopaedia of interpretations, and again, perhaps a certain amount of merit should be given to Dune for opening itself up to that kind of discussion. But I could also just take it for what it is, rather than what it accidentally might be, and that is a very imaginative but flatly-written tome, with passionless two-dimensional characters, and a storytelling style that constantly undermines its own drama. I bought the sequel - Dune Messiah - because it’s about one fifth of the length, and I was keen to see exactly how Herbert expands on the foundation he has laid here. Perhaps it has all the answers? Perhaps it will confirm that every assertion I have made in this turgid article is incorrect? If so, I’ll be sure to let you know. But for now, I only know what I know, and that is that Dune is a phenomenal work of imagination, a great fiction, and a poor, poor text.

6/10

Just Okay

[fursasaida]

what kind of NCIS episode produces the phrase “capitalist jihad”? asking for a friend

s5e11 is a fucking trip

it’s all about islamophobia, basically (WOW this show took a turn in season 5)

opening is in a mosque during prayer. filmed in the traditional “look at this evil hive mind” manner. one congregant seems like he’s sick or drugged. 

the imam’s arabic is...not quite right, and then he switches to english; pretty sure he’s supposed to be arab, so him saying something like “IZZ-lam” is kind of hilarious

the shaky young man leaves, collapses in an alley, is followed in by a white man in a hoodie. hoodie guy takes his gun, shoots him, then takes his wallet, watch, and ring. 

ZOOM IN on dog tags showing our now murder victim is both muslim and a marine. WHO COULD HAVE EXPECTED!!! IMPOSSIBLE!!!!

when Ziva and Gibbs enter the mosque to check it out, the imam assumes they’re there to interrogate every man under 30. NCIS is woke now 

Ziva is more deferential to gender separation in the mosque than Gibbs because “I am Jewish. I understand tradition.”

this from the woman who in her early appearances was a gung-ho mossad volunteer because her sister had been killed by hamas. 

i’m not saying it’s impossible for a real person to have both these opinions, just that IMO the show uses her as a basic cipher for Israeliness and, as is often the case, therefore a somewhat aspirational model for Americanness in certain respects. when she came on board, she was established as supertough, hyperviolent, willing to do anything for the mission, always assuming everything was terrorism, etc. now in this episode, which exists to be a “grappling with xenophobia/islamophobia/racism” episode, suddenly she’s hypertolerant and understanding.

evidence: in this same episode it is revealed that she “likes muslims” because her best friend growing up was muslim and he was killed in an israeli airstrike when they were 12. which is a precise reversal of the backstory about her sister.

this backstory is revealed in a conversation with the dead marine’s father, who is also the imam of the mosque where we opened, lest the symbolism escape us.

(i should note that she killed her half-brother, who was a kind of geopolitical experiment: her father, the head of mossad, deliberately got a palestinian woman pregnant to have the perfect sleeper agent for the palestinian territories. he grew up hating his father, mossad, israel, etc. and was a double-agent terrorist. ziva is entirely defined by the deaths of people around her, is what i’m saying; her only real love interest was a terminal patient when she met him. and aside from this love interest, every one of those deaths is a palestinian muslims killed by israeli jews, an israeli jew killed by palestinian muslims, or a hybrid killed by a combination of his israeli jewish father’s ruthlessness, his own racialized/islamicized terrorist actions, and his jewish israeli sister.)

(my point is that ziva is not a real character, she is always a cipher for some aspect of the GWOT)

explosives residue is found, i shit you not, on the murder victim’s PRAYER RUG. is it because he was handling and defusing IEDs on deployment in iraq, or because he was in a terrorist cell??? THE AMBIGUOUS DUALITY OF IT ALL. HAVE I MENTIONED A MUSLIM MARINE IS REALLY CONFUSING BECAUSE NCIS WANTS TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE CLEAR ON THAT. NO MUSLIM HAS EVER LED A NORMAL LIFE

the imam, with ziva’s help, appeals to ducky not to autopsy his son because it goes against the religion. ducky is immediately sympathetic because of experiences in bosnia. (ducky is often a cipher for colonial britain; he’s been to every poor, war-torn, and/or developing country in the world, always having fun hijinks with tribal chiefs or volunteering unto the less advanced. this despite his proud scots identity, which you’d never guess from his accent or his mother’s accent; as represented onscreen they’re just real-ass english gentry. ducky only goes scots when they want him to seem folksy.) gibbs and the director object.

when ducky hits on the painfully obvious solution of using cat scans and mris instead of cutting him up, palmer then engages in one of those dumb moral exposition conversations about why should anybody get special treatment, no i don’t have a problem with muslims but they seem to have a problem with “us,” etc. this actually leads to a nice moment where ducky declares that nothing will get better until we learn to respect each other, as he hoists the body into the cat scanner.

when the team goes to plant bugs in the mosque, they comment to each other about how it shouldn’t be this easy to surveil a mosque, and if this were a church or a hospital they’d still be waiting on a warrant. they then immediately drop this to compete over who gets to plant the bug before it turns out the FBI is already there! zoinks!!

zoinks again!! new suspect is a white guy who converted to islam in prison!! and this white guy has the real-deal takfiri ideology going on! “ryan” is his “slave name”!!!!!! (”your slave name?” “yes. you want a statement? death. to america.”) 

oh my god @ literally everything

the fbi thinks the mosque is a recruitment site for al qaeda (which, in NCIS, is actively operating on american soil like.........constantly). but there’s not a cell here! al qaeda has a new business model! they pay people! not only muslims! american citizens, even!!!!!

and that, my friends, is how you get to “capitalist jihad” 

ooooh, it seems like the imam might be in touch with this german guy who recruits for al qaeda (don’t even ask). but wait! plot twist! the imam actually called the fbi on his own mosque! his son was undercover for them!! whoda thunk the muslims mighta been on the right side!!

come to think of it, off the top of my head this is the fourth instance of NCIS doing a kind of cold-war-spy thing where the muslim threat is from white or white-passing people, the whole “you never know who has infiltrated” thing. there was a major incident with a swedish honeytrap who was gonna kill dinozzo because she was secretly hamas.

imam: why do you hate us? gibbs: i don’t. imam: your people do. all we ask for is to live in peace and observe our beliefs. gibbs: i think you are. imam: islam came to your country with hostility in 2001, and that was wrong. but YOU came to our land 500 years ago and you have never left! all we wish for is to be left alone to practice our ways, and yet you cannot LEAVE us alone! why? gibbs: the recruiter killed your son. because he said no, or because he said yes?

i don’t even know what to say about this conversation, except that it’s a strange combo of weird and dumb.

after the FBI stuff, the imam says, “find this recruiter and let me have my vengeance.” gibbs: “no. he’s mine.” this is just so hilariously ncis, even as it’s trying so hard to be, uh, a different show than it actually is

ANNNNND heyo, the murderer is indeed the german guy, but the white guy in the alley was our noble dead marine’s personnel officer, the very one who vouched over and over that the kid never would have been involved in any bad terrorism stuff. took a payoff from al qaeda via steiger! a white guy, and not even a muslim! truly, no one can be trusted

(note how the episode moves away from racialized islam toward the unthinkable opposite: from muslims in a mosque, to a patriotic american muslim, to potential other muslims as perpetrators, to a white american convert as perpetrator, to a white american non-muslim marine reservist plus a german as perpetrators.)

german guy turns up dead, it’s basically made clear that the imam killed him in revenge, probably with some sort of help from gibbs. anyway, gibbs isn’t going to prosecute him for it. good ol’ american revenge! woo!!

what an insane triple-decker sandwich of competing impulses THIS was