shadow play

What a unique episode! Last night thanks to drugs Spencer took us into a "Film Noir style" world of PPL. I could tell that everyone involved in making the episode (actors, writers, costume designers...) had a lot of fun with it.  The question is did the fans like it. My guess would be no. From experience many people are put off by Black and White films, in a HD, 3D environment many people won't give a classic B&W film a chance. Maybe fans liked this one and it will open them up to viewing some classic Film Noir (the Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon or my fav Sunset Blvd) but I doubt it.

The episode lacked any purpose other than to play film noir dress up. It doesn't further the story, add any clues or revel any secretes. You could watch this whole season without this episode and not miss a thing. I also didn’t like that they went back to the 1940's they could have kept the costumes and B&W but still do it present day, it’s a drug induced vision, it doesn’t have to make sense. Since they did decide to do it in the 40's there were scenes that seemed forced just to show that they were in the past, like the whole Aria explaining the camera to Paige, everyone in the 40's knew that it would take a week to develop film; the only point to put that in was to let people today know there was a time where pictures were not instant. Also 15 cents for a cup of coffee was expensive back then.

One thing I did like was seeing Paige and Toby, we have not seen either one for a while. However I was a little confused by their roles. Paige and Emily are out and have been for a long time so why does time travel change that? It was nice to see what I think is the first ever film noir lesbian scene but the rest just came off as another “look what it was like in the past” you could not be open about your sexuality. And what was Toby a cop, P.I. or just a Bogart want to be, either way the writers were not clever enough to write a scene where he takes his shirt off.

My suggestion would be that they should have picked a specific film or couple of films to homage. I think “the Third Man” would be a good one to do, with Ali as the Orson Welles character (you can look it up to see why). For the most part I think this episode was a fail, it had the Film Noir look but was lacking the feel. I hope they enjoyed making it and more importantly will get more people interested in Classic films (although I doubt the will happen) but I think this is the last B&W episode we will see. I would like to know what drugs Spencer is on because I think it would be fun to have my own Film Noir hallucination! Can’t wait till next week where it looks like we will finally find out that Ezra is not A.

Well that is all I have to say about that.