"Servant" 2.07-2.08: A pair of disappointments
'Marino' goes off the rails while 'Loveshack' struggles to get back on
Contents
“Marino” Review
When you regularly watch a great television show, you might encounter the occasional bad episode, which - owing to the high median quality of the series - stands out like a sore thumb.* Up to this point, Servant has managed to avoid this issue. Sure, episodes 4 and 5 from the first season were a tad wobbly, but they were nowhere nearly as messy or miscalculated as “Marino.”
*Lost, for example, has been haunted for years after the fact by the third season disaster “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the events of which were largely forgotten.
Bear in mind, I don’t want to badmouth the cast and crew. Ishana Night Shyamalan had already proven herself a strong director on this series and will have later demonstrated that she can whip up a good script as well. But her debut as a writer constitutes what is by far the weakest episode of the second season and the first true stumble for the series. If I had to guess, I’d say many though far from all issues plaguing “Marino” stem from the complications imposed on the show by Covid-19.
After filming 2.06, the producers had to shut down production and restart it several months later. And if you know anything about Covid’s effects, you can bet that it probably led to some significant unforeseen script changes for the final four episodes. Maybe the producers couldn’t get some necessary guest stars to come in due to the revised schedules. Maybe some locations or ideas fell through due to the budget crunch. Whatever the case is, the results were not good.
So, where to even begin? How about with the fact that the opening of ‘Marino,’ even by Servant standards, doesn’t really make a lick of sense?
Leanne kicks things off by deciding, for no discernible reason, to simply go back up to her prison in the attic. Perhaps she realizes that it doesn’t make sense to leave now anyway, given that it’s too late to help the people she was supposed to save, or maybe she wants to focus on trying to save the little kid that might still be alive. Either way though, the action doesn’t really come across as believable under the circumstances, especially given everything that she’d been through over the last three episodes.
But that is just small potatoes compared to the nonsense that happens with the Turners. First, despite catching Sean trying to get Leanne out of the house at the end of last episode, Dorothy inexplicably never once questions him about this. Hence, there is no confrontation between them about how Dorothy has treated Leanne and why letting her go was the right thing to do. Instead, Dorothy turns her attention to George, and leaps to the conclusion that the Church had something to do with the death of Marinos after he tells Leanne that this was the cost of her disobedience.*
*Putting aside the fact that Dorothy should’ve realized by now that Leanne was working for the Marinos because the Church sent her there, it’s still rather unconvincing given where Dorothy was mentally in the previous episode.
And then, ‘Marino’ puts its greatest asset, the amazing and creepy Uncle George, into an unexplained semi-catatonia, which immediately saps everything of the portentous atmosphere established in ‘Espresso.’ We are then treated to a Weekend at Bernie’s riff, with the Turners having to move around George’s body after the police show up again in a manner that is so over-the-top that it breaks immersion.
Look, Servant usually excels at combining disparate tones, especially horror and dark comedy, into a single whole. But here, the mixture just feels wrong. And I’d say that’s because there is a pretty big disconnect between the two halves of the episode where each tone occurs. I mean, the episode tries to deal with the tragedy of an entire family dying in Leanne’s half of the story, while at the same time engaging in slapstick hijinks that have nothing to do with it in the Turners’ half.
And unlike with Leanne, there is no effort to actually have the Turners face any sort of consequence for their actions, no effort at interrogating what this truly means for them on an emotional and psychological level. Even Sean, who should at this point logically recognize that what happened to the Marinos is his and Dorothy’s fault, is never made to reckon with any of their decisions.
Honestly, everything happening with the Turners here feels like a distraction, a means to keep audiences ignorant of what the episode should really be dealing with. And that highlights a larger problem that has been simmering in the background for a little while now - the fact that S2 has really lost the plot with Dorothy. Once again, the show is actively ignoring the events of 2.04 both in terms of plot and character, as though what we saw happen between Dorothy and Leanne never happened.
In many ways, I am reminded of how some folks critiqued the way Wandavision ultimately treated the behavior of its main character, Wanda, who basically tortured an entire town of innocent people. A quote from FilmCritHulk’s review of the season finale feels appropriate here:
“Characters make “mistakes,” but in the end, they’re never really wrong… To be super clear, I don’t feel like Wanda needs to be “punished” for her role, nor even for anything she does here. I think there just needs to be a real display of understanding for actual behavior, en route to some larger point of dramatization. Lots of people called it out, but at the same time, the fault didn’t register at all to some, which I fear is a symptom of the very thing I’m talking about.”
Quite simply, if everything going on with Dorothy now seems confusing, it’s because of the show’s failing to display a legitimate understanding of her behavior. And that is starting to undermine pretty much every single scene she’s in.
But even though the Turner side was badly miscalculated, ‘Marino’ is not a complete waste of time. Leanne’s better half features some legitimately great acting on the part of Nell Tiger Free, as the formerly stoic and saintly nanny really lets her emotions loose and rages against God. Nimrod Antal executes the episode with some true panache here and there. And thankfully, it ends with George coming back online, which essentially guarantees he will be put to better use in the next episode.
Grade: C
“Loveshack” Review
There is a sequence that begins about a third of the way through ‘Loveshack,’ which is a solid if unremarkable rebound from ‘Marino,’ that I find downright baffling.
Roscoe, the detective that had an unsettling experience with the Lesser Saints earlier in the season, has suddenly shown up sans explanation to talk to Sean, which forces him to come clean to Dorothy about the fact that he had Leanne investigated. Dorothy seems really bothered about the fact that he did not share this with her and this becomes a point of contention until Sean apologizes and Dorothy tells him that they cannot lie to each other. Now, in and of itself, this isn’t a bad scene. But in the larger context of Season 2, it really constitutes a failure from a dramatic standpoint.
Because the scene is all about recalling and dealing with past events of the series. Yet, much like ‘Marino,’ it paradoxically ignores the developments of ‘Espresso’ and thus tries to pretend that its Dorothy problem doesn’t exist. To be more precise, I honestly do not understand why the episode makes the Roscoe stuff seem so important to Dorothy - and by extension the audience - but doesn’t at all address the fact that Sean tried to get Leanne out of the house behind her back.
Given how seriously the former is treated means the latter should’ve already led to a pretty big emotional blowup between the Turners over what they’ve done to Leanne. Are we now supposed to pretend that Sean trying to get Leanne out never happened? Or that Dorothy doesn’t really mind him having done this?
Look, I don’t want to carp on this in every single review now, but let’s face facts: the decision of the writers to backpedal from Dorothy going into full-blown villainy is a major issue of the season. It has left her character’s writing incoherent and confusing. So, once again, the Dorothy stuff falls flat and brings the episode down.
Fortunately, ‘Loveshack’ has a lot of things that work in its favor, and considerably moreso than ‘Marino.’ It doesn’t suffer from the weird tonal whiplash, for one thing, and is also a slower, moodier episode than we’ve gotten lately. After the rushed storytelling that has dominated this season, it’s nice to see the producers ease off the throttle a little and do more character work, especially between Leanne and Julian.
I don’t entirely understand why Julian decided to suddenly approach Leanne and talk to her about her past, but their connection and the progress of their relationship here feels convincing. At the same time, it’s interesting how Julian perhaps unintentionally corrupts Leanne, convincing her to give into human vices, including sex, and to blame God for man’s suffering. At the end of the episode, when George recoils in horror after Leanne again accidentally starts a fire, it seems as though there’s something demonic happening in that attic. How does the fire not burn down the house? Why does it extinguish itself? And how does it not produce any smoke?
Given all the supernatural things we’ve seen Leanne do, it’s hard not to read this as a sign that Leanne has fallen from grace and is possibly channeling the Devil. As cool as the ending’s implications here are though, it’s hard not to be somewhat disappointed with the way it resolves the George subplot.
Boris McGiver continues to give a riveting performance as the creepy adoptive uncle, easily stealing every scene he’s in, and the episode benefits tremendously from his taking up Leanne's old role as the weird, indecipherable, inhuman outsider. (Which is rather fitting, now that Leanne is acting more human than ever before.) But at the same time, what happens with George is all build-up with no payoff, with the episode obfuscating what he was doing way too much.
George decided he couldn’t “do it.” But what exactly was it? Sure, it seemed pretty much a given that George was supposed to use the dagger to ‘reunite’ Leanne with God, but the details were really sketchy.
Like, what was it with all those ritual preparations he was making, like the music and the headbashing? And wasn’t he supposed to show Leanne that Betamax tape? Why didn’t he bring it up again after making such a big deal about it in the last episode? Was he always going to perform the dagger-related ritual, whether she saw the tape or not? Could he not wait because the note specifically told him to ‘reunite’ her by Christmas Eve and the Turners didn’t have a Betamax player?
The episode seemed to be teasing some kind of reveal that showed how all those individual puzzle pieces fit together and then – nothing. And if George was ultimately supposed to simply kill Leanne, then the lack of clarity just undermined the emotional impact of the story. That is, that moment where he decides he can’t do it would’ve felt legitimately impactful emotionally if we knew what exactly he was intending to do and why. But as it is, it’s just confusing.
As a whole then, “Loveshack” is a step up from ‘Marino’ but still a mixed bag. Thank God the show will have gotten really back on track in the final two episodes.
Grade: B
Notes and Annotations:
I might do more two-episode reviews in the future. Not sure yet.
Officer Reyes, like Natalie, Roscoe, and Tobe, feels like another Servant side character that the show wanted at one time to do big things with, but could never figure out how or when. Her pocketing a crucifix certainly implies that she would’ve come back in some form in the future, possibly to investigate the Turners and/or Leanne further. But unless the series somehow finds a place for her in its final two episodes, it looks like her character and plot thread is pretty much dropped as of the end of ‘Marino.’
I might be misremembering things, but how does Sean know that the mixture George made is his salve? Like, was there a scene establishing this? Or is this another hole?
Not sure I really understand the timeline. They got Leanne back about 3 weeks ago at the most but now it’s around Christmas time?
So, it’s again implied that Leanne died in the fire that killed her family. She was ‘buried in ash’ when George and May found her, and they claimed God had given her a ‘second chance,’ which implies resurrection. This, of course, fits the idea of the lesser saints having resurrected bodies (“what is raised is imperishable.”)
Leanne starts to dress in black clothing in “Loveshack,” which is a notable contrast to her traditional appearance. This change arguably symbolizes the fact that she is no longer all that saintly and is becoming more human. Or it could mean that she’s now growing closer to the Devil.
I like to think that if Servant were still following the original six-season plan, then the events of ‘Espresso’ would’ve occurred in the finale of S2, while a better, longer. more coherent version of ‘Marino’ would’ve been the opening of S3.
Fire is a recurring element in ‘Loveshack’ and Leanne confirms that she basically burned down her house, though this was not intentional. I’m wondering then if we might see fire play into the series finale.