DLM - S1 - E1 - "Pilot"

                                                               

                                                            SEASON ONE - EPISODE ONE - "PILOT"
                                                                                                 Review By MissBeaHaven - 11/24/13



Did you ever wonder whose bright idea it was to decree someone is officially an adult once they turn eighteen? Ten years of life, plus eight more for the road. Eight years of experience multiplied by two. That’s all the time it takes, says the body politic, to gather up all the preparatory knowledge and requisite skills we need to earn our passports into the world of adulthood.

For most people I know (including myself), their eighteenth birthday was something they feared almost as intensely as they dreamed about it. They were eager for the unprecedented, glorious freedoms they would finally attain after enduring years of ass-chapping restrictions, but at the same time they were more than a little terrified of the looming specter of responsibility just waiting to piss all over the party. Everybody tends to rush toward that eighteenth birthday goal, but many find themselves dragging their feet once they’re nearing the finish line. Hanging back a little once they realize there’s so much important shit they’re going to have to figure out by themselves. Eighteen years of life doesn’t quite seem enough time when you finally get there, does it?

Georgia (George) Lass, the charming young cynic at the center of Dead Like Me said it best, early on in her narration of this pilot episode:

“Do you know what it’s like to be cusping on adulthood and not know who you are, what you wanna be, or if even if you wanna be? It’s ten shades of suck is what it is...”

We hear our girl’s voice long before we see her, when she tells us a fractured folktale about the origins of death on earth, one about god (lowercase g), a toad, a frog, and a clay jar. You’ve seen the pilot by now, so you know how that story goes, and how it ends. Death got out of that jar, and hence, all living things have to die (because Frog was an asshole). This tale (and Ellen Muth’s excellent, fireside chat delivery) sets the tone for all the events ahead. Death got out of that jar, and it’s definitely coming for George very soon, but there’s no reason we have to get all gloomy about it.

When we finally get our first glimpse of her (after a fake-out shot of Rebecca Gayheart gazing across the city atop a bell tower ) George is sitting in the waiting area at Happy Time Temporary Services, looking like she just rolled out of bed, slouching in her chair, staring off into nowhere. Her narration continues, and it speaks volumes about her worldview.

“Experience has taught me that interest begets expectation, and expectation begets disappointment. So the key to avoiding disappointment is to avoid interest”

Cynical characters are a dime a dozen, you can’t surf two channels around the television landscape without running into one. So many exist to be snarky for the sake of snark, and beneath their pithy one-liners there is nothing but (tiresome) hollowness. Our George is a breed apart from those token cynics, she has a mind teeming with bright logic, and she has bona fide reasons for her cynicism. She is just eighteen years old, but already she can see the world isn‘t as black & white as childhood storybooks would suggest, she can see the inherent unfairness that comes in-built with life no matter what you do, or how you behave.

“Bad people are punished by society’s law,” she observes, “And good people are punished by Murphy’s law”.

This is a cynic who has earned her snarky commentary by first taking a vested interest in what makes the world around her so painfully predictable. She doesn’t take her jabs at the seeming pointlessness of life because she wants an excuse to languish, she does it because she yearns to find a reason to engage. It’s also her buffer zone, a shield she can put between herself and the things she fears most about her transition into adulthood. She doesn’t know who the hell she is, and (like a lot of us at age eighteen) she’s scared of all the depressing figures she could accidentally become.

One of the unsettling potential identities paraded before her is Delores Herbig (as in, ‘her big brown eyes’), the human resource juggernaut at Happy Time, the woman whose manic enthusiasm serves as her own shield against the mundane nature of her job, a shield which George summarily kicks down by pointing out how little there is to be enthusiastic about. This transgression lands George in the basement of Happy Time, stuck with a filing job given only to the people Delores hates. This woman’s dogged determination to find the bright side of everything in her life serves as a direct foil to George’s dogged determination to see the ugly truth, and it‘s funny as hell to watch them clash. Their relationship is probably my favorite dynamic out of all of them (neck-and-neck against George’s relationship with Rube).

Before George’s death, we also get a peek into her dysfunctional family, in a brief but effective scene around the dinner table. It's here we first get to see another gem in their treasure chest of casting choices with the introduction of Joy Lass, George’s pragmatic and overly critical mother, played with the most searing kind of love by Cynthia Stevenson.

I had only seen Stevenson in passing, on an episode of ‘Hope and Gloria’ long ago. I remember critics lauding her acting through the years, but I personally never really thought much of her until I saw this series. I have women like Joy in my own family, and Stevenson plays the emotionally damaged, control-freak-with-a-heart so accurately it seriously made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. We can see where George gets it from, almost immediately, and it’s a very short sprint to believing these two are real mother and daughter. For every snipe Joy dishes out, George has one to volley right back at her, while more congenial, professor father Clancy and nearly-invisible little sister Reggie sit warming the bench on the sidelines (the floating, disembodied eyeglasses to illustrate Reggie’s non-presence to George were a perfect little touch of whimsy, the kind of touches this show doles out with effective restraint). Joy is one hard-ass mama, determined to get her apathetic daughter moving on some kind of track in life, even if she plants seeds of contempt every time she opens her mouth.

“There’s gonna be a funeral if you don’t get your ass outta bed! Now move it!” are the last words Joy will ever say to her daughter, and it feels more like foreshadowing than trite smartassery when George tells us she’s gonna be sorry for that.

There are lines of division drawn amongst my friends in regards to Joy (A Joy Division, if you will), they either love her, or hate her with the heat of a thousand suns. I personally love her. Her flawed character isn‘t served up with a spoonful of sugar to make it go down easier, she makes it a real challenge to understand and accept her ways. Stevenson is so balls-out in her portrayal, too. She doesn’t hold back those snarls of disapproval or flare-ups of spite, so much that I actually have moments when I take her slights personally. She gets under my skin, that Joy Lass, and hence I couldn’t wait to see how she handled the fallout from George’s death, to see how it might change her (for better or for worse). She’s the kind of woman who won’t even think to stop pushing buttons until something either falls apart or explodes, and in this case, that something is George.

Ah, George’s death. George’s untimely and endlessly amusing death. Enter ‘Toilet Seat Girl’, and George’s first real grown-up job, the job of being an undead reaper of souls.

This is where all the elements start meshing together to create the lasting arc of the series. George is still going to experience all the challenges of burgeoning adult life, only now she’s going to do after her life is, for all intents and purposes, over. It’s symbolism that reaches out and dry humps your leg, but in this particular case, I don’t mind it at all. It’s already hard enough to come into your own, the added challenge of figuring out how to do that after you’re dead is what made this show so damn appealing in the first place (Why the hell didn’t more people watch this? Any thoughts?).

Step by step, we’re introduced to the world of grim reaping via de facto leader Rube (played by our royal highness, Mandy Patinkin) and his merry band of soul taking riff-raff. There’s Betty (Rebecca Gayheart), a chipper debutante type with expensive tastes, who never gets tired of funerals and seems to delight in her position. There’s Mason (Ohhh, Mason, Mason, Mason…) a somewhat dopey Brit who appears content to scrape by on his good humor, whose respect is not earned by crack heads who kill each other, and who greets the sight of executed bodies with a shrug (all played very affably by Callum Blue). Rounding out the crew is Roxy (who is arguably my favorite reaper of them all) a no-nonsense meter maid who can kick your ass, and can’t be rushed in the business of helping you crossover when she has those damn quotas to fill (All hail Jasmine Guy). Even though George is telling the story from an unspecified time in the future, we get to see the moment she first meets them all, and so we’re honing in on each bit of wisdom they have to impart right along with her.

Much like the business of death was portrayed in ‘Beetlejuice’, so is it depicted here, as just another disorganized bureaucracy with nonsensical rules and vague regulation. Reapers are given a name, a location, and an Estimated Time of Death (ETD, for those cats in the know), all of it provided by Rube on yellow Post-It notes. Reapers are placed into different divisions, and George winds up in the “External Influence Division”, which covers “Murders, Suicides, Accidents, Etc” (and she does mean et cetera).

Reapers aren’t directly responsible for the deaths, that is left to a strange group of little leaping lizard-slash-goblin type creatures called Gravelings, and so they are all left to guess how each of their targets will perish (kinda like Clue!). As with most disorganized bureaucracies, the unpredictable nature of reaping souls leaves a whole lot of room for mayhem to ensue, and this mayhem is unleashed with great aplomb in an extremely fun little set piece inside a bank (There are other scenes of mayhem set to “Hell” by The Squirrel Nut Zippers, but I think this one takes the cake).

Banana peels, bumbling robbers, betrayed spouses, and the search for B.M. Moore. Mexican stand-offs, gunshots that bring the ceiling down, and juuuuuust enough gratuitous sex thrown into the loony mix. Even with all of these broad comic elements, it never feels like it strays too far into Marx Brothers territory. During all the chaos, George and Mason simply observe from the floor, and we feel just as secure as they do. We can sit back and enjoy the madness, because we feel pretty assured our main characters can no longer be harmed in traditional ways, seeing as they’re already dead. The tone of humor is dark, but never does it go pitch black on us. Even when the more difficult side of reaping is shown, it goes down a path of wonder and warmth, rather than punching us too hard in the gut.

George’s first solo reaping mission turns out to be a little girl aboard a train, traveling alone with her (very familiar looking) pet toad. George doesn’t want to do her job, but this time it’s not because she’s too good for it, or because it doesn’t challenge her, or because it’s just unbearably boring. It’s because it’s a little girl and, like George before her, it’s just too soon for her to die. She just hasn’t had a chance to do anything yet.

George makes a split decision and makes an attempt to save the little girl, because she does not understand it’s not in her job description to make those sort of choices. The ETD passes, the train car derails and crashes, leaving the passengers camping in the woods beside the accident, waiting for help to arrive. George’s heart is exposed to us, first when she cradles the girl in her arms after the crash, and later when she sits beside her next to the fire, delaying the thing she does not want to do. She eventually finds Rube in the woods, and argues against the grotesque task at hand, indignantly refusing to commit what she currently sees as murder. She does not yet comprehend the finer points in the business of death, and so Rube explains, and reminds us about what we already know.

The cardinal rule? Everybody dies.

Rube tells her that a soul left inside a person will go bad and spoil, just like milk. He hammers this point home to her, trying to make her get it. This is where the casting of Mandy Patinkin as Rube really shows its greatness, he makes you believe all the exposition about reaping souls, he doesn't flinch and he makes it all real. You believe this man has been around the block, and has seen some horrific shit go down when reaping goes wrong. This isn’t clerical busy work at Happy Time, it is dire in its importance. George rightly argues that it is cruel because she’s just a little girl, and while Rube doesn’t contradict her, he gently reminds her there’s no getting around it.

“It IS cruel. It’s cruel she’ll never know what life is really like. Cruel she’ll miss out on so much love, and pain, and beauty. It’s sad for everyone in the world, except her. She won’t give a rat’s ass, she’ll be doing something different. That’s just the way it is”

I don’t know whether it’s Captain Obvious, or something I’m reading too deep, but I felt the speech was about both little girls in Rube’s direct vicinity. That it was his way of acknowledging he really does understand George’s pain over the loss of her own life, as well as the pain she feels having to take this unenviable job in the world of the undead. He assures her that her work is significant, that it does make a huge difference, and he coaxes a smile out of her tears (and, in some cases, our tears).

She does what she has to do, with as much kindness as she knows how. There’s hope for our George yet, as she and Rube lead the now deceased little girl to a dance of lights in the sky. As Pink Martini’s cover version of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ floats hauntingly, but unobtrusively, on the edges of the scene, the lights descend from above to form a luminous, glowing amusement park (the wonder in the little actress’ eyes is just a lovely moment). George is told she cannot go where the girl is going, and it’s not for them to know what those lights are. The lights ascend back into the sky, with Rube and George heading out to the dark unknown together, that familiar looking toad now out of his terrarium on the ground, loose upon the world. Cut to Joy tucking Reggie into bed and closing the curtains, with unseen George lingering in the closet, inside of a home that is no longer her own.

We’re left with some tantalizing questions about all the trappings of reaperhood, what's with those Gravelings, and the mystery of the glowing lights. We’re invested in finding out the answers, and we're invested in seeing what George will do with the ten-plus-eight years of experience she accrued before death came to recruit her. We’re wondering what kind of otherworldly fears might replace the earthly variety she left behind, and which will stay just the same. We’re wondering how this kid is going to juggle her new found freedoms with her newly acquired responsibilities. She is taking her first real steps into adulthood, she has found her own (fleabag) apartment, and she has that brand new job.

One that might even matter.


STRAY OBSERVATIONS:


-- Any ‘Spyro The Dragon’ fans out there? Stewart Copeland did the original score for this series, as well as the score for early Spyro games. I used to play them religiously, and so the background music is strangely comforting in that respect.

-- George's reaction to Mason's post-it suggested there might be some kind of pun or joke connected to the name ‘B.M. Moore‘, but I’m damned if I can figure it out. I looked it up on the net, no joy. Did I imagine that, or am I too dense to understand something obvious?

-- Un-Mason was played by a guy named Jacob Chaos. I thought he must be some legendary front man for a punk band or something, but it looks like he’s just another obscure actor. Sounds like he should be huge, doesn’t it? JACOB CHAOS!!

-- “You dick! You’re sending me to hell?!”

-- Dead Like Me did the "Moist" joke a full four years before HIMYM snagged it. HIMYM doesn't frame it like a pop-culture reference, so I see it as blatant thievery.

-- Look at George’s face when she’s antagonizing Mason and imitating his accent in the bank. Friggin’ adorable.

-- Frankenfruity is a great stand-in for Frankenberry. I feel kind of blasphemous, but I might even like it a little better.

-- “Do your nipples get hard when you sneeze?” (I always mean to check, and I always forget…)

-- Most of Rube’s speech at the end got me choking up, but Patinkin’s delivery of the line “If you don’t take her soul, it’s going to wither, and die, and rot inside her” gave me straight-up shivers.

-- “I can’t talk to you right now, I’m…praying”

-- So, who's your favorite reaper?

-- QUESTION OF THE WEEK: What’s your favorite humorous euphemism for death? Mine is “Taking a dirt nap with baby Jesus”, courtesy of our lovable Canadian friend, Nathan Fillion.