"Servant" 2.05 goes back to old habits
"Servant" 2.05 goes back to old habits
"Cake" does some backpedaling, for better and for worse.
Original Airdate: February 12, 2021
Written By: Tony Basgallop and Nina Braddock
Directed by: Lisa Bruhlmann
Plot Summary: A mysterious ransom note arrives for the Turners. Leanne decides to bake a cake.
Review:
“Cake” is about reliving the past within the present. Much as the adult Leanne attempts to recreate the relationship she had as a child with her abusive mother, using a creepy mannequin as a stand-in, so does the episode try to revive the character and narrative dynamics of Servant Season 1 within the context of Season 2.
Leanne becoming stoic, often inscrutable, and only letting emotion come through in select moments? Check. Leanne moving more or less freely around the house and doing mysterious stuff, with the audience not being privy to her motivations? Check. Leanne being manipulative, passive-aggressive, and punishing those she believes to be deserving of punishment? Check. An emphasis on food and cooking, complete with some beautiful and disturbing imagery? Check. Tobe having a really weird date with the nanny? Check. Uncle George (Boris McGiver) mysteriously popping up to (presumably) take Leanne home? Check.
There’s much to appreciate with this throwback approach.
The creepiness and unpredictability of Leanne Grayson is a huge boon to the series. When you’re never quite sure what Leanne is up to and why, there is a lot of intrigue and room for viewer interpretation. Also, I’ve lamented how S2 had scaled back, if not completely dropped, the show’s strong emphasis on food and the process of cooking, so it was a great pleasure to see these elements return to the forefront. The final scene in particular, where Leanne voraciously consumes the titular cake she’d baked earlier, while lightbulbs around the area begin inexplicably popping, is a delight and the type of memorable sequence Servant excels at.
What makes it stand out in part is the fact that we’ve never seen Leanne, whose diet seemed to consist almost entirely of tomato soup, previously eat anything with such energy and zeal. It’s hard to say if Leanne actually derives any pleasure from eating the cake, but she does seem delighted, if only by the fact that she gets the baby Jesus figurine hidden inside.
Is Leanne doing this out of a desire to finally “get the baby” and show her abusive mother — represented by the mannequin — that she is, in fact, special? Is she doing this to somehow punish Dorothy for her various transgressions? (As established the previous season, Leanne needs something personal from a person to afflict them with a malady and the mannequin is wearing Dorothy’s green dress.) Are her acts here meant to send a supernatural message to her people, as the timely arrival of Uncle George indicates? None of this is clear, but it is riveting to watch and wonder about.
The problem is that after all the narrative and character progress the second season had boldly made over the course of its first four episodes, “Cake” can’t help but feel like a case of backpedaling. The familiar rhythms of episode five somewhat undermine Leanne’s earlier depiction in the season as a more vulnerable and relatable character. But more troubling is the regression that occurs with Dorothy, whom the season had been steadily pushing in the direction of outright villainy.
After the previous episode had Dorothy reveal an abusive, almost monstrous side to her personality, and promise to resort to outright torture to break Leanne, her sudden shift to using more of a carrot or “pancake” method comes across as disappointing and, to be honest, more than a little baffling. This is bolstered by the fact that the series seems to be playing things as though, just like Sean, the audience shouldn’t consider what happened last week that big of a deal.
More than that, we don’t get any real follow-up to the “doubling” of Dorothy that ended “2:00,” nor indication that her 2am awakenings are continuing. (Though her commenting that she had forgotten about Leanne all weekend could mean, as Terry Mesnard suggests, that Dorothy isn’t aware of her most recent actions.)
The most unconvincing part of “Cake” though has to be Tobe (Tony Revolori), a character that continues to remain a cipher, and one that is not nearly as entrancing as Leanne. The first season didn’t do much to develop him beyond “an assistant chef that likes Leanne.” Season Two is starting to delve a bit more into who he is, but it’s not doing a very good job of selling his behavior to the audience.
Servant has always been an outlandish series when it comes to narrative plausibility, but it has regularly managed to make its principal characters’ actions convincing on an emotional level. One cannot say the same for Tobe. After everything that Dorothy has done to Leanne and the way she had manipulated him, Tobe should at least be suspicious of the Turners, but here he comes across as incredibly naive, if not downright stupid. Overall, he feels more like a plot device than a fully-baked character.
None of this is to say that the episode is bad.
The direction by Lisa Bruhlmann (who made the amazing Blue My Mind) is solid, and the episode’s various pieces come together quite neatly in the final 7 or so minutes, resulting in a beautiful audiovisual sequence reminiscent of the closing passage in “Balloon.” But it is definitely a step down after two excellent episodes, and I can’t help but think that the show is now spinning its wheels story-wise, either due to the writers having rushed early on to get Leanne back to the house as quickly as possible or perhaps getting cold feet at the decision to truly upend the status quo when it comes to the Leanne-Dorothy relationship.
Really, these are concerns for later.
The first season similarly wobbled a bit around its mid-point before righting the ship. And “Cake” ends on a very promising note, with the return of good old Uncle George, the star of one of the first season’s finest half-hours, to the Turner household. I can’t wait to see what weirdness he has in store for us.
Grade: B+
Notes and Annotations:
The first half of “Cake” seems to be going for outright satire. There’s a whole sequence with Dorothy trying to make pancakes and brandishing a kitchen knife in front of Leanne reminded me of John Waters’ Serial Mom. And watching the Turners, especially Sean, part with their prized possessions to make enough ransom money is really funny.
It’s ironic that Dorothy talks about acknowledgement and the healing process, when she herself has not acknowledged anything.
Is Sean even aware that Dorothy has been waking up and torturing Leanne at 2am? Or is he only aware of the one instance that Dorothy has buried her? The show is being a little coy here. Dorothy certainly seems to be aware of Leanne’s cuts and having harmed her, but it is notable that her burying Leanne is never explicitly mentioned.
The moment Sean locks off the entryway to speak to Julian privately has simple yet excellent blocking and cinematography.
From the very beginning of the episode, Leanne is seemingly reliving her traumatic past via the mannequin. It’s not clear why she is repeating her name, but I believe she is repeating what she would say at beauty pageants as a child when introducing herself. Notably, she states: “My special skill is baking cakes.” Later on, she tells Tobe that her abusive mother convinced her that baking cakes should be her special skill, as she didn’t really have any and never won any of her pageants, even as she did well on them four times.
That Leanne had to tell her mother that she was “the special one” indicates that her mother humiliated her in order to elevate herself, highlighting the idea that nothing about Leanne was special. Present-day Leanne becomes legitimately emotional when recounting this.
When Tobe asks Leanne about where her mother is now, she responds: “Burning.” This could be a reference to her dying in the fire that occurred at the Grayson home around 2007, but it could also indicate that her mother’s soul is burning in hell. Assuming that the afterlife indeed exists within the Servant universe, it’s entirely plausible that Mrs. Grayson would end up in hell after death.
The “king cake” that Leanne bakes is, in fact, a real-life dish associated with both Mardi Gras and the Catholic celebration known as “Epiphany,” which takes place on January 6 in honor of the three wise men in Bethlehem that delivered gifts to the newborn Jesus. This, of course, is the true significance of the plastic baby figurine that arrives in the mail for Sean and Dorothy. That Leanne explicitly mentions the Epiphany and the baking of cakes on Sundays can be taken as confirmation that her beliefs are rooted in Catholicism.
When Julian takes the cake out of the oven at the end of the episode, it doesn’t have any brandy glaze on it. But when we see Leanne eating the cake in the attic, it looks finished, complete with the glaze. So, when did Leanne have time to get downstairs to the kitchen, cover the cake in the brandy glaze and bring it back up? After all, wasn’t she locked in? Did Julian not notice? Was there a sizable off-screen time jump between Julian tasting the glaze and calling Sean?