I mean, I’ve never been in a love triangle with my sister-in-law, so I’m not speaking from experience here, but I just feel like Em is in the right here. “You are having my brother’s baby,” she says, which, duh! Sue: “So what? That doesn’t change anything.” I feel like that does, in fact, change everything. (I know I’ve complained before about these actors not having chemistry, but I’ll say that they seem to click a lot more in this scene … although the show didn’t convince me of their relationship last season, and even the time jump isn’t selling me on Em being okay with … whatever this is.) Em is the only one of the two of them clinging to reality. (Mama Dickinson: “It is a woman’s job to make sure everyone else is happy at all times no matter the cost.”) Really, what Sue needs is some sensual handholding. Austin was so hung-over he missed the funeral, which Sue also missed because no one gave her a ride.Īh, Sue. We learn pretty quickly that Austin has spent his wife’s pregnancy drinking, partying, and carousing, obvious cries for help that aren’t treated seriously. He started out as this foppish kind of dilettante who was laughably clueless about his beloved and his sister’s flirtation, but now he is someone whose life is genuinely tragic: a loveless marriage to someone he knows is in love with his sister a father who never let him grow but now berates him for failing to thrive also, there’s a war. But she believes poetry can be even more powerful than Death.īack at the Dickinson house, Austin is MIA. Em isn’t really all that helpful because she’s on a tear of her own: She wants to give people HOPE. How does Em stay inspired when her life is so boring? Like, no offense, but her life is just endless repetition and drudgery and overwhelming lameness. Now it’s just gangrene and more gangrene, ugh. As Bo Burnham once sang, Death reports, “ I feel like shit.” War has taken all the FUN out of deciding who dies and how. “We have so much to catch up on,” she says, but Death isn’t really in the mood. Then she pops into Death’s carriage, dressed, of course, in her Death getup (such a great dress). Hope is a … bird? Hope is a … tweet? Em leaves the funeral with “hope is a TBD” in her brain. The funeral is basically a wash for everyone but Em, who sees a tiny yellow bird that she believes is her aunt - a sunny optimist in life - communicating with her from beyond, telling her, Don’t lose hope.
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Even the pastor (priest? Someone help me all I know here is what I’ve learned from Fleabag) is like, I don’t have time for this, we have SOLDIERS to bury.
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Mama Dickinson is devastated: Her loss, which crushes her, is overlooked by the rest of the world nobody cares about an old woman dying when young men are dying, too. The Dickinsons are at a funeral for Mama Dickinson’s sister, Lavinia (Vinnie’s namesake). Relatable! But Em’s imaginary combat sequence ends where she lives: hair slicked back, at her desk, ready to write. So it appears one of our big questions is, was she a war poet? “Does she speak for a nation?” To this end, she imagines entering combat with a cute messy bun with face-framing tendrils, which, yeah, if I were going to have a war fantasy, I would also make sure my hair looked the just-right amount of undone. But we are reminded that Em wrote “furiously” during the war and that, of course, the Civil War oozed into her poetry, even if she didn’t want it to.
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Our series, via Em’s voice-over, wants to assert that Dickinson has been sidelined from the canon of war poets for all the reasons you might expect: (1) not being a soldier, (2) being a shut-in, and (3) being a woman. The Civil War was brewing, and as season three dawns, it is well underway: taking a whole lot longer than the moderates among them expected, slaughtering young men by the dozen, the end nowhere in sight.
BANACEK SEASON 3 EPISODE 1 TORRENT
When we last saw Emily Dickinson (“Em” to her close, personal friends, which is to say, to us), she was hallucinating-slash-prophesizing the death of Frazar - beautifully reimagined in the show as the “Nobody” of “ I’m Nobody, who are you?” - in a torrent of bullets.