Dark Brown Waffles

The Good

-…the City Councilor’s verbal dismissal of Nelson Hildago was right and good. 

-Sonny’s stuff getting broken was delightful, mostly because he remains the most show’s most loathsome character. If such a response is unbecoming, I apologize, but I watched and felt not a moment’s sadness for the man. I’m not even sure I was meant to. 

-The look on Antoine’s face as he sees that suit hanging up is wounded, pouting child. 

-Poor Jim True-Frost. Cast as the screwup Prezbo in The Wire, his second appearance on Treme featured Delmond firing him for his utter incompetence. Such is life.

-Jacque! He still longs for Janette in a quiet way that one doubts he’ll ever acknowledge. 

The Bad

-Annie is the show’s weakest character. She says and does little, and in tonight’s episode, upon discovering the photograph of Sonny pulling a baby from a roof, the seeds of a return to him were planted. 

-Did I say Sonny was the show’s most loathsome character? Because I meant Chef. That guy is awful. The fact that he has the audacity to lecture Janette about character? Shameless. 

The Ugly

-Blazed through The Good and The Bad, mostly because tonight’s show was easily its most brutal. The antagonists in Treme have always been distant. The storm, although immediately in our characters lives on a daily basis, has long since passed. The bungled government response, although powerfully potent in its own right, is omnipresent. The despair, although forever lurking and occasionally rising up (as it did when it consumed Creighton), has no face. In all of these things, there was distance between us as the viewer and the forces at work. 

LaDonna’s brutal attack shatters that distance in a way that the show hadn’t done previously. It feels grotesque to write that scenes like this are what Simon does best - it was reminiscent of Wallace’s death from the first season of The Wire - but his refusal to shy away from the grim reality is his calling card. 

From the moment LaDonna is left alone at the bar, viewers had to know something was wrong, that tension only building with her recognition that the young man at her door had malicious intent. She wisely chased him off but was then abandoned by the police department (the same police department that would then repeatedly insist that she give a statement). She had no way of knowing what was coming, the attackers finding her again leaving, cornering her, and then beating her and raping her.

Her discovery later - by a man who immediately reminded me of Wes Studi’s Magua from The Last of the Mohicans - was itself fraught. For a moment, only briefly, there was hope that it wasn’t her, even if every shred of evidence suggested that it was her on the floor. The man carried her to the hospital apparently, only to be confronted by a nurse stating that while LaDonna would be cared for, did he know if she had any insurance? At that moment, we have the distant threat (a hospital asking about insurance when confronted with a badly injured person) and the immediate one (the badly injured person). 

Simon’s asking which way we want to go. Can we be horrified at such a question? Of course. Can we be concerned for LaDonna? Absolutely. But what then? The injustices continue: the NOPD repeatedly try to get a statement out of the same woman they refused to protect when phoned, the rape kit is admitted to a swollen and disfigured LaDonna who by a barely concerned professional, she is given a handful of medication to protect her against STDS and HIV and pregnancy by an again barely concerned professional, and as she is at home presumably not telling her husband that she has been raped. 

Then, finally, as her husband goes to fetch more medicine, LaDonna’s eyes close only to re-open suddenly, full of shock and horror. We’re not immediately sure of what - the rape? the second pill for Plan B? something else? - but it hardly matters. LaDonna’s world, barely held together after the storm, after the death of her brother, after her mother’s departure, is destroyed.

There are plenty of directions for her story to take from here. There has been talk elsewhere that a(nother) character will die this season. LaDonna? Perhaps, although she has always been frightfully strong. What of the concerns about pregnancy or illness? Again, perhaps. But mostly likely it seems, if only because it would be the most searingly painful, is significant damage to her marriage, because she’d never left New Orleans, because she’d been raped and didn’t tell him, because she’ll still want to go back even after. Whether or not her husband is right to take those positions is another matter, and all of this is entirely meaningless speculation, but LaDonna’s strength so far has been her ability to endure. But this? Her brother, her mother, and her husband to varying degrees, but this?

There was other violence tonight: in the police at Sonny’s, in the squatters at Janette’s, in the death of Abreau. There was also the distant violence that the show has up until now traded in: the slimy double-dealing of Hildago, the waiting room at Road (To) Home, the dismissal of Janette. None of it though was so immediate or unforgiving as what happened at GiGi’s and what happened afterward in that hospital. 

-For another time: this story arc will change the show considerably. How can it not?