![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bones is back and even better. The icky crimes almost don't matter any more.
It's interesting how Bones kept Zack's job open hoping he'd be back. She griped that Zack was off on some macho trip, as if his feelings meant nothing. But the real problem is that like Zack she can't live outside of the little world she's built up at the Jeffersonian either. When that world wasn't whole, she withdrew into what was left of it.
It seems that Zack has gotten less independent and less normal over time. He's turned into one of those creepy loners you'd see in college, who couldn't begin to relate to anyone around him. We know that Zack had emotional problems over his love for Bones that she didn't even recognize, let alone deal with. He might have felt much better if he'd known how much she needed him to be part of the 'family.' At the same time Jack has changed from a really nasty paranoid to a decent caring guy as his relations with Angela have grown. It was nice to see Angela be straight with Bones and not defer to whatever her boss wanted to pass off as the truth.
Cam (the character not the actress) fit so badly at the beginning of last season it almost made the show unwatchable. Now she fits like a glove.
As other's are saying, I liked the new black guy. I wish they had room for him in the cast.
The War by Ken Burns
This series would have been far better if Burns had put it together right after The Civil War. As it is, it's nothing special. It's been done better with more detail on this subject by other people. The photos and film he's assembled are worth seeing, but his four-towns-at-war theme just isn't working. It's too vague, Burns has to go outside of those towns too often to fill things in. A documentary on race relations would have been fine, but that's not what this is. Unlike in his work The Civil War where race was always an undercurrent, it's just not here all the time. There doesn't seem to be a unifying theme in this series, not even the four towns. Burns neither made much of an effort to distinguish between the four towns (granted, Mobile tends to stick out anyway) nor to show how they fit into the whole of country.
Conversely, where as both sides in Burns' The Civil War are personalized and made very sympathetic, the way Burns presents the enemy in The War is totally dehumanized. There is no room in this documentary for how the average German or Japanese soldier may have felt. There is absolutely no concern for the people whose land is being fought over by the two groups of outsiders. I suppose you could argue that that style would fit perfectly with the way the country felt during the war. But, that was not the case by the mid 1950s. We look back at government propaganda from the war and laugh because it's stilted and one sided. I don't actually laugh at Burns' work, but I definitely feel the missing balance.
The War is a pale shadow of what Burns has accomplished before.
It's interesting how Bones kept Zack's job open hoping he'd be back. She griped that Zack was off on some macho trip, as if his feelings meant nothing. But the real problem is that like Zack she can't live outside of the little world she's built up at the Jeffersonian either. When that world wasn't whole, she withdrew into what was left of it.
It seems that Zack has gotten less independent and less normal over time. He's turned into one of those creepy loners you'd see in college, who couldn't begin to relate to anyone around him. We know that Zack had emotional problems over his love for Bones that she didn't even recognize, let alone deal with. He might have felt much better if he'd known how much she needed him to be part of the 'family.' At the same time Jack has changed from a really nasty paranoid to a decent caring guy as his relations with Angela have grown. It was nice to see Angela be straight with Bones and not defer to whatever her boss wanted to pass off as the truth.
Cam (the character not the actress) fit so badly at the beginning of last season it almost made the show unwatchable. Now she fits like a glove.
As other's are saying, I liked the new black guy. I wish they had room for him in the cast.
The War by Ken Burns
This series would have been far better if Burns had put it together right after The Civil War. As it is, it's nothing special. It's been done better with more detail on this subject by other people. The photos and film he's assembled are worth seeing, but his four-towns-at-war theme just isn't working. It's too vague, Burns has to go outside of those towns too often to fill things in. A documentary on race relations would have been fine, but that's not what this is. Unlike in his work The Civil War where race was always an undercurrent, it's just not here all the time. There doesn't seem to be a unifying theme in this series, not even the four towns. Burns neither made much of an effort to distinguish between the four towns (granted, Mobile tends to stick out anyway) nor to show how they fit into the whole of country.
Conversely, where as both sides in Burns' The Civil War are personalized and made very sympathetic, the way Burns presents the enemy in The War is totally dehumanized. There is no room in this documentary for how the average German or Japanese soldier may have felt. There is absolutely no concern for the people whose land is being fought over by the two groups of outsiders. I suppose you could argue that that style would fit perfectly with the way the country felt during the war. But, that was not the case by the mid 1950s. We look back at government propaganda from the war and laugh because it's stilted and one sided. I don't actually laugh at Burns' work, but I definitely feel the missing balance.
The War is a pale shadow of what Burns has accomplished before.