{"id":7468,"date":"2020-01-31T13:00:05","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T21:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=7468"},"modified":"2020-01-20T11:39:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-20T19:39:43","slug":"mark-watches-monster-episode-44-double-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2020\/01\/mark-watches-monster-episode-44-double-darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Watches ‘Monster’: Episode 44 – Double Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the forty-fourth episode of Monster<\/i>, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. Yet again. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch Monster<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Trigger Warning: For brief discussion of potential transphobia at the end<\/b><\/p>\n

I just\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 said. I said so many things. Out loud. In the video for this episode. All of them wrong. COMICALLY wrong. And here I am, now in pieces because\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 lord, the answer was SO FUCKING OBVIOUS.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get there. So, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s start first by talking about how much \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Double Darkness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d builds off of what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s established in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Detective Suk.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I do feel like I had a decent grasp on who Suk was as a person, that he was someone who desired the validation of others. I think that plays into his reliance on Anna (NOT ANNA, HELP ME) throughout this story. Obviously, there was someone attraction there, too, but Suk also wanted someone to understand him, to see that he was hurting, to witness the chaos that he was a part of. Because this is absolutely chaos! That opening scene was so demonstrative for me: Suk is now part of a media circus concerning the multiple murders affecting the Prague police department, and he is not ready to handle this at all. Seriously, look how drastically Detective Suk\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life has changed in just a week. His mentor was murdered, he discovered massive corruption in the police force, and multiple of his superiors were poisoned. And now, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s forced to go back to where it all started to just gather information.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Look, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t expect those interviews with the orphans to bring about anything new, and if anything, I assumed that the move was to stick Suk with grunt work. He wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t good in front of the camera, and he still<\/i> wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t experienced enough. Right??? It made a lot of sense! And then\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 lord. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, Suk has no idea what he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stumbled into. He has no idea that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s this massive nightmare surrounding him. In more ways than one, too! Because in those orphans, he is given the first clues that might lead him to Kinderheim 511. Will he pursue it, though? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually know! I know that Suk wants<\/i> to be a good detective. As he tells Anna later, this is the job he always wanted. So, even if the whole bit with Grimmer hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happened, I think Suk would have tracked down as many threads as he could have.<\/p>\n

That being said, his experience with Grimmer felt so meaningful. One thing that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pinging around in my brain: Suk\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world was a binary before this. Black and white. Good and evil. Heroes and villains. And the truth is that our world is so hopelessly, endlessly complicated. It really is! (It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got me thinking about the ultimate point of The Good Place<\/i>, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a completely separate essay.) As these horrific events have unfolded, Detective Suk has been forced to adjust who he sees as the bad guy, as the hero, as the idol, and how he sees his own self within this machine. He began to formulate the idea that Grimmer was his key to unlocking the murder of Zeman, but look what happens once he watches Grimmer with those kids. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a motif here that Monster<\/i> has employed before. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen characters meet Dr. Tenma and experience life in his presence, and many of them realize that Tenma was never capable of being the murderer that the police thinks he is. Here, Detective Suk is presented with a version of Grimmer who is shockingly open, who actually hands over the key to Petrov\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s safe deposit box. I mean\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 Grimmer has to know that Suk will try to find it, right? Is his intent to involve someone else because he knows that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll never be able to get the contents of it himself? Why does he trust Suk?\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the other huge thing I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried about. The subject of those tapes has been next to Detective Suk the entire fucking time. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t explain how my brain works sometimes, but it literally did not occur to me (EVEN AS A TWIN!!! I HAVE LITERALLY PRETENDED TO BE MY TWIN MORE TIMES THAN I CAN COUNT!!!) that it was Johan<\/i> playing as Anna. Literally. Did. Not. Occur. To. Me. And christ, it makes so much sense. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve witnessed this exact kind of invasive manipulation before and recently: the way Johan integrated himself into the lives of Schuwald and Karl. This is his whole THING! To get people to trust him, to make them think they have someone to confide, and then he just twists the knife in their back slowly, so much so that they never even know it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s there.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My guess is that Johan is trying to eliminate any information on himself, which was a theory put forth a long time ago, and thus, killing the members of the ex-secret police force is the perfect move. And now he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s over-the-moon about Suk\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s confession. IT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S ALL BAD. VERY, VERY BAD.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I did want to give a bit of brief space to acknowledge that the twist ending might not come to anything super terrible. I certainly don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think the show is even attempting to say that Johan isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a cis man, so most of my thoughts on this are circumstantial. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a pervasive stigma against trans people\u00e2\u20ac\u201despecially trans women\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat revolves around deception and my hope is that Monster<\/i> doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t veer into the whole trans panic trope with this twist. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to tell at this point, but I still wanted to bring it up as something to think about.<\/p>\n

The video for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Double Darkness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be downloaded here for $0.99<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n

– The paperback edition of my debut, ANGER IS A GIFT, is now OUT!<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"