Servant 2.03: 'Pizza' burns through plot with style.
Servant 2.03: 'Pizza' burns through plot with style.
"Pizza" is a rushed yet masterful installment
Original Airdate: January 29, 2021
Written By: Nina Braddock & Tony Basgallop
Directed by: Ishana Night Shyamalan
Plot Summary: The Turners decide to open up a pizza delivery business to make their way into a house
Grade: A
Review:
So, in my review for the season premiere, I mentioned that Servantapparently wasn’t going to rush to get Leanne back to the house. And then, about a day later, arrived “Pizza,” an episode that essentially burns through three episodes-worth of plot in one half-hour. In short order, the Turners find a house that they suspect may be the Church’s hideout (having apparently done a lot of detective work off-screen), start up a pizza delivery business, create enough flyers and an online presence to seem legit, have Tobe deliver to the house, find Leanne there… and then kidnap Leanne, bringing her back to the house. That’s not counting Dorothy’s flashbacks to events prior to Jericho’s birth, when she was still pregnant.
From a storytelling perspective, the results feel rushed. The show has not really devoted enough time to truly make Leanne’s absence impactful for the audience. Multiple beats and details in the Turners’ search for her are glossed over and, while we do get a tantalizing look into the process of pizza preparation, it is all too brief. But despite having these issues, “Pizza” remains among the series’ best episodes and a true high point of the season thus far. Part of it is attributable simply to the switch-up in style and POV. This is a Dorothy-centric episode, a fact that director Ishana Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night, accentuates formally in almost every scene.
That becomes evident from the opening sequence, where we first see a younger, visibly pregnant Dorothy crawling into the house, the sight framed through a small opening between the front doors. This communicates to viewers Dorothy’s sense of isolation even before we get to the scene, where a doctor prescribes her a month-long bed rest due to a complication in her pregnancy. The stakes here become clear: if Dorothy steps onto the ground, she could go into early labor. That setup, of course, primes the audience to expect that Dorothy will indeed put her feet down sooner or later. And, because we don’t know whether or not she is pregnant with Jericho, it also raises the possibility that she could lose her baby.
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Tellingly, in what becomes a motif for the flashback storyline, Sean is framed in this scene, so you don’t really see his face. This is reiterated later, when we see Dorothy bedridden and asking Sean for more food. The camera again stays with Dorothy, while Sean hovers out of frame, suggesting that even when her husband is around, Dorothy seems to be alone.
Though the director makes every flashback scene visually stand out in its own way, her real calling card is the sequence, where Dorothy, seemingly unable to get anyone to help her by phone, is forced to go downstairs by a blaring fire alarm. The hypnotic shots of the staircase, as the house slowly fills with smoke, foster a great deal of suspense, with every agonizing step Dorothy takes suggesting that something bad will happen. There is a dreamy, not-quite-a-nightmare aspect to the whole thing that is reminiscent of Hannibal yet also calls to mind a sequence in M. Night’s Unbreakable.
When Dorothy slips and falls, the moment feels both shocking and inevitable. Yet, it’s telling that Dorothy ultimately tells Sean, who seems flabbergasted by her decision to take care of the burning cloth herself, that she “handled” the situation. It’s possible Dorothy couldn’t reach him via phone, contrary to his claim that she didn’t call. Yet the real issue appears to be that Dorothy doesn’t want help. Rather, she wants to handle things herself and is willing to go to great lengths to prove it.
This directly parallels and so informs her actions in the present-day timeline. As in the past, Sean is constantly suggesting caution and patience, while Dorothy seems restless and eager to do something. He wants to strategize and find a way to get Leanne back safely. She wants to take matters into her own hands. It’s ironic that, shortly before passing out, Leanne explains that she left because she had grown disillusioned with Dorothy as a person, finding her to be selfish, cruel, and mean. Everything that Leanne says is proven true by the Turner matriarch’s choice to both drug her former nanny and manipulate Tobe into kidnapping her. Her decision seems motivated not so much by the desire to get her son back, as by some innate need to not feel powerless, to dominate and reassert control.
What makes “Pizza” work so well then, despite the rushed plotting, is the fact that its style works in harmony with its substance to examine Dorothy as a character. It’s fitting that the “big reveal” of the episode is that Leanne is actually working for a sick woman that apparently really can’t leave her bed, someone that truly needs help. It strongly suggests that Dorothy Turner is indeed not a righteous person, that she’s not deserving of miracles, and thus that Leanne was correct to take Jericho away.
In that sense, perhaps the true revelation of “Pizza” is that the series’ apparent victim may have been the villain all along.
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Notes and Annotations:
I want to add that there is a sheer boldness and confidence to the visual language here is astounding for a new director, especially in the flashback sequences. I look forward to seeing more Ishana Shyamalan episodes.
The creepy sequence of Tobe walking through the house has the feeling of a surveillance horror movie, complete with a jumpscare-like sound cue when we finally see Leanne suddenly show up on camera.
It’s difficult for me to not draw some connections between the faster pacing of S2 and M. Night Shyamalan’s recent announcement that his plan for the series has changed from 6 seasons to 4. Presumably, when S2 began development, the plan was for the show to run 50 more episodes. Yet it seems at some point that the decision was made to compress that into 30. According to the math then, Season 2 should encompass in its 10 half-hours what was initially going to be about 16 or 17 episodes.
One can imagine that in a longer or slower-paced season, we’d have one episode of the Turners building their business, and getting an invitation from that house, one episode devoted to them making it inside the house to find Leanne, and then one episode devoted to getting Leanne back.
In the previous season, Servant would really delve into the process of food-making, resulting in images that could be both beautiful and ugly, sometimes both at once. It seems there’s been a conscious decision to cut back on that this year, and I miss it.
Interesting how everyone just seems to ignore the huge muddy pit in the basement. It’s like a metaphor for how the Turners pretend that real, internal problems don’t exist.
So, did Dorothy actually lose her baby when she fell? This doesn’t appear to be the case but then again, it is not clear if in the flashbacks Dorothy is pregnant with Jericho or if what we are seeing is an earlier pregnancy.
I don’t know if this was intentional, but Dorothy’s predicament and desire to actively do something while being ordered to stay in bed certainly rings familiar to anyone adhering to the stay-at-home orders of the Covid-19 pandemic.