Tonight’s Episode: “Complications”
(I’m watching the 9PM PST showing, so it’s up to the rest of you c*cks*ckahs to carry this discussion.)
“As a convalescing Swearengen bridles, Doc Cochran [BOTTOM PHOTO, LEFT] schools Burns and Dan Dority [BOTTOM PHOTO, RIGHT] how best to assist his recovery. Alma Garret [TOP, LEFT] is also feeling unwell, mornings. Unexpected profits at the Chez Ami lead Tolliver to an unexpected discovery about Wolcott. Merrick posts a provocative statement from Yankton on title to the claims; Bullock protects Commissioner Jarry from an angry mob, which redirects its ire. After returning a horse to Hostetler at the livery, professional go-between Samuel Fields finds a kindred spirit in Jane.
Some of the best lines from last week:
Martha Bullock: “In the morning, in the quiet before we each take up our work, is also a pleasant occasion for such intercourse.”
Alma Garret [PHOTO ABOVE, LEFT]: “Miss Isringhausen, Cotton Mather would have found hard and joyless the standards you so resolutely apply to me, and Sofia, and of course to yourself.”
Francis Wolcott (Hearst’s emissary): “The noise is terrible, isn’t it Mr. Ellsworth. Like Fate.” (This line FREAKED ME OUT! He lays one hand on Ellsworth, and I’ll …)
More great lines from last week:
Marvin the prospector: “Don’t be looking over my shoulder when I’m signing my f*cking X.”
Maddie [PHOTO, RIGHT]: “They get led by their d*cks. Our c*nts lead us, we lose our only edge.”
Ellsworth: “The Creator in His infinite wisdom Mrs. Garret salted His works so where gold was, there also you’d find rumor.”
Tolliver: “A man might use that time to put some stink on his Johnson.”
Burns, to Wu: “Why don’t you learn to speak American?”
Alma Garret [TOP PHOTO, LEFT]: “Name your price. How do you males put it? Sh*t or get off the chamber pot?”
Say somethin’, you hoople-heads! Conversation should commence shortly after the episode? Can you wait just a few f*ckin’ minutes?
I’m watching at 9:00 PST too. Opening day Yanks-Red Sox on ESPN2 is more urgent than waiting 3 hours to catch Deadwood.
ah, baseball. we have the radio on. TV baseball sportscasting is just too shitty.
baseball.. not the Yankees though, God forbid! This Brooklyn gal’s a waitin’ fer the Met game tomorrow. So I watched the 9pm EDT showing. Interesting alliances are being formed, and not just Bullock and Swearingen.
Why is it that every woman who gets preg – especially if they’re not sure they want to be – in every TV show or movie gets morning sickness?
Forgive me for asking, but what the heck is this?
Is this a TV show or something? Or a movie or what? I’m utterly confused, plus all the cursing. Is there cursing on American TV now?
That photo looks like people dressed in clothing from the past but one woman seems to be smoking a factory-produced cigarette. Is this a “Western” or something?
Any help you could give us people not living in America would be greatly appreciated Susan!!
Pax
http://www.hbo.com/deadwood/
Best show on television.
That doesn’t tell me much but thanks.. the HBO tells me why there is cussing anyway.
I think the best show on television is Cronicã Cîrcotaşilor, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree 🙂
Pax
It takes place around 1877 in the Black Hills town of Deadwood.
South Dakota is still a territory but the Feds are moving in.
It features a low-rent saloon/whorehouse vs. a higher rent casino/whorehouse, plus some other interesting characters.
It uses the word cocksucker about once every 2 minutes.
Now you know almost everything : )
YOU FROG-FACED FUCK!
did that to you!
But I didn’t have the heart…
I love Jane’s mouth! (soj, that’s Calamity Jane — as you surely know, a real historical figure who was in Deadwood a brief time, along with Wild Bill Hickok, who was played last season with the greatest heart and poignancy by Keith Carradine.)
not just cussing – the writers have been careful to have the characters speak the way Americans did back then, as far as they know. That’s why some of the language sounds very formal and artificial, even though mixed with those timeless 4, 6 and 10 and 12- letter usages we all recognize.
Soj, do you subscribe to a DVD rental service such as Netflix? If so, you can rent the first season DVD of Deadwood.
The acting is superb and it’s written by David Milch, one of the most fucked-up, ex-addict, ex-Yale-prof, brilliant writers around. (He used to be a regular guest on the Tom Snyder talk show, and Tom just let him go on, and he is nuts in the most fantastical, great, Hunter-Thompson-iesque way.) Good New Yorker piece on him last month.
Ha! I went searching and — even though The New Yorker doesn’t have it on the ‘net, it’s here. The beginning of the article:
How David Milch got from “NYPD Blue” to “Deadwood” by way of an Epistle of St. Paul.
BYLINE: MARK SINGER
BODY:
The moving images on the camera monitor offered, I thought, a plausible depiction of one of the drawbacks of life in the Old West-an invasive urological procedure conducted without benefit of anesthesia. “A situation involving significant unpleasantness” was how David Milch, the creator of “Deadwood,” had described the scene being filmed on a soundstage at Melody Ranch Studios, in Santa Clarita, thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles. One of Milch’s inventions, Al Swearengen-or, rather, Milch’s conception of the real Al Swearengen, owner of the Gem Saloon, a tavern and bordello in the town of Deadwood, just outside the Dakota Territory, circa 1877-was about to have a metal probe called a Van Buren’s sound inserted into his urethra by Doc Cochran, a tormented physician on the verge of a breakdown. If the procedure succeeded, Swearengen would pass a bladder stone and, presumably, resume hatching schemes of byzantine deviousness-a poetically unjust outcome, considering the inventory of murders and casual brutality he was responsible for. If it failed, the next recourse would be surgery, which the doctor dreaded because of its high risk of mortality. That Swearengen, the chief protagonist of “Deadwood,” an unlike-any-Western-you’ve-ever-seen Western that ran for twelve episodes last year on Home Box Office and returns next month with twelve more, might be allowed to die seemed improbable. Yet, ostensibly important characters were not immune from getting shot or having their throats slit or their brains dashed, so who knew? In any event, it turned out that I had only a dim grasp of what I was watching. …
Where do you find the previews? And the still photos?
I envy you ability to memorize and spell the names of all the characters and to remember who did what to whom and where and why. I have to see it at least two or three times to get all that you do.
Your prediction that Alma was pregnant was right. Trixie knows, and now Doc knows, and Alma seems to be planning to go through with it. She won’t be availing herself of the pennyroyal and black cosh(?)/ Pennyroyal can be found in housekeeping books of the times which recommended it for menstrual cramps. So it must be a decoagulant of sorts. It’s also a poison.
Miss Isringhausen(?) is trying to stir things up against Alma – for revenge(?)- seems too paltry a reason. Anyway, she’s sleeping (euph.) with Adams – who is still a dark horse to me. It’s anyone’s guess who’s forming alliances here. But Susan seems to have summarized it all at the top.
Back at Chez Amis, Woolcott is reading Wild Bill’s last letter to his wife Agnes,aloud to Carrie(?) as she grooms herself. (Where the hell did he get the letter?) It was he in another shape who murdered Wild Bill, but I guess he doesn’t remember. He asks her if other people have been initiated sexually by a relative. (not those words), and she responds, “It’s a big club.” When the time comes to get down to business, Woolcott declares he’ll take his pants off this time.
Back at the hardware store, Trixie shares a smoke with Alma, and then goes back to make love to the other Sy.
Are the outlanders trying to cheat the prospectors out of their claims by publishing notices written in doublespeak? What’s Tolliver’s part in this” He seems agitated all the time, and his language is getting dirtier.
As Al recovers, he and Seth grimly come to an agreement about something to do with the new people in town.It will all become clear when I watch it next.
By the way, what did happen to Alma’s father after Seth beat him bloody? Fill in the gaps here and correct my misapprehensions. What’s E.B. Farnham’s nasty little plan.
When you watch those back room surgeries with dirty hands and unsterilized tools and no antibiotics, it is a wonder anybody at all survived, much less procreated.
And the food! What is it that Richardson is always chopping up and putting in his stew? Sometimes, after reading history, I feel a funny nostalgia for a time I never lived in. This is not one of those times. A cruel life.
I don’t live in America and I don’t even know what this show is about really, but I was just reading your comment about pennyroyal.
Pennyroyal was used two hundred years ago in the US to induce abortions. Not sure what relevance that has to you as a watcher of the show, but I thought I’d throw that in there.
Pax
oops, I forgot to mention that pennyroyal is mixed with cohosh, which is also called mugwort, to make the abortificant.
It causes the uterine muscles to contract, although this mixture is not recommended nowadays due to some nasty adverse reactions.
Pax
Yes, that’s what I figured. Trixie (one of Al’s stable of whores) thinks that’s what Alma (the genteel lady with lots of money whose husband was murdered in Deadwood for his gold claim — which then passed to her)wants. Sorry for the clumsy catching up. Black cosh is a very strong purgative, sort of like molasses.
Alma, as we see, has other plans.
With so many minds bent on murder, I won’t be surprised to see pennyroyal showing up in somebody’s tea some time soon.
By the way, when someone “dies” in Deadwood,the body is laid on a sled which is dragged down the road to the Chinaman’s pig butchery. The body is then thrown over the sty to be eaten by the pigs. And you get to hear all the chomping and squealing.
There used to be a preacher in Deadwood who wanted to have funerals and say prayers over the departed. However, he soon succumbed to brain fever and fell into a babbling coma and sadly died. I can’t remember if he was taken to the pigs. I do remember there was a wake for Wild Bill held in a tent where the townspeople passed through to stare at him and swat the flies away. The aforementioned preacher presided over Bill’s funeral.
the preacher had a funeral.
The pigs are more for destroying evidence of a murder. The biggest evidence of a murder is the dead body.
What shocks me is that I am no longer appalled or revolted when someone goes to the pigs.
The show is corrupting my morals.
is that Sy is buying up the claims of prospectors at low prices.
The low prices are a result of a coordinated plan to sow panic about the Indian Treaty being used as a pretext to nullify all claims.
But Sy is just a front man.
By showing up when Swearigen was out of commission they have badly misunderstood the natural dynamics of the camp.
I am baffled by the n*gger general…any care to explain?
And the ghost of San Francisco? How does it tie in with Wu?
I think the ghost of San Francisco is the tall Chinese who accompanied Woolcott to the Bella Union. It was from him Sy was to buy the opium and — there was something about buying more whores. Obviously, this Chinese is no friend of Wu. I don’t know anymore about that, except opiates were much in demand then. Remember, Alma was hooked. There was always some available.
It was widely used as laudanum in anesthesia. Like dilaudid is now. And morphine.
Also, – I just remembered – Wu had always been the source of opium before. So there’s that rivalry. I forgot to look up the Opium Wars in China to see if that coincided with Deadwood.