"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

Sunday, December 27, 2020

Your Honor 1.4: The Dinner


Another wrenching, heart-in-your-mouth episode -- 1.4 -- of your Your Honor tonight, in which I thought the dinner at the Desiasto home, with the Judge and Adam, Grandma (good to see Margo Martindale!), the detective, the lawyer/the Judge's girlfriend, the Mayoral candidate, and even Django the dog all in attendance, was just a perfect set-piece for what is going on this riveting story.

The dog goes for the bloody rag he hid a few episodes ago. Only Michael knows for sure where that blood came from, and probably Adam, too.  And, yeah, we the audience.  But the other people around the table?  As smart as they are, they have no idea.  Nancy the detective realizes there's blood on cloth, but that could have come from a cut Michael or Adam had.  There's no reason she or any of the other guests at that table would even think that it came the hit and run which is gradually eating this family up alive.  Or rather, not the hit and run per se, but the Judge's understandable attempt to cover it up.

Which is already exacting an awful price.  Kofi was killed because of it.  And at the end of this episode, his home and who knows how many members of his family are burned up, as the mother of the hit and run victim exacts her revenge.   On a family that had nothing to do with her son's death, because only we know the truth.

And because of that knowledge, we flinch every time the slightest thing happens to Adam.  He gets into a fight in school.  That kind of thing happens all the time with boys that age if a friend makes some kind of sexually provocative comment about someone the boy has a crush on.  But we immediately worry that Adam is reacting to the hit and run, showing his guilt for something the Judge wisely wants his son to keep out of his mind, and certainly not act out in any public place, let alone a school.

A harrowing situation getting more so every episode.  Just what we want to see in a narrative.


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