"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller...it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." -- Jack Dann, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Monday, August 24, 2020

We Hunt Together 1.3: Fine Tuning



We learned a lot about our major quarter of characters in We Hunt Together 1.3 on Showtime last night.

Baba doesn't like to kill.  In fact, he wants to recapture some of the small boy that he was in Africa, before being a child soldier claimed his body and a lot of his soul, and turned in him into a killer.  Freddy says she wants to help him in that quest, but of course she lies about just about everything.

Indeed, she wants Baba to do her killing.   Significantly, she doesn't follow through on her threat to kill the captive, leaving him instead for Baba to dispatch.  But she isn't angry about Baba when she discovers he let the captive go, because he wound up dead, anyway, the result of jumping out of nowhere onto a highway in the path of a speeding vehicle.  Does that tell her that God is on their side?  Possibly, though I doubt that Freddy much believes in any deity other than her own rapacious sense of self.

Meanwhile, Jackson is coming forth as a very likeable character.   His easy smile and laugh and overall manner are an excellent invitation to take his razor-sharp logic to heart.  Further, though he talks a good case for boundaries, he's on the clock almost 24 hours a day on this case, more than Lola, whose intensity and appetite for hard work is muted into unconsciousness brought on by the drug she takes at night.

Jackson's wife, though, sees how much he enjoys working with Lola, and would like to meet her.  Jackson so far seems like a straight arrow, but it strikes me that anything is possible in this unfolding story.  Jackson's ethics would almost no doubt enable him to resist of any of Freddy's flirtations, but what if he found himself alone with Lola on a long night, and she was in need of some sort of comforting.

At this point, she remains the most difficult character to categorize.  Flawed for sure, but not in a way that seems to compromise her reasoning powers as detective.  She's a fine match for Freddy, who isn't flawed at all - unless you consider being a psycho killer, along the lines Villanelle in Killing Eve, who also combines nonchalant humor and murder to a tee, to be a flaw.

See you back here next week.  I do wish We Hunt Together was streaming rather than being doled out on a weekly basis.  But I'll take it.

See also We Hunt Together 1.1: Compelling Pairs ... We Hunt Together 1.2: Upping the Game 

 

No comments:

InfiniteRegress.tv