Of Kings And Prophets Season 1 Episode 2: Review

There are two ways to drive from Pretoria to Cape Town. The one is straight forward: you get onto the N1 and you drive straight, not turning off anywhere. The other way is to digress constantly, taking the scenic route, discovering small towns and seeing sights you otherwise never would have. The end result is the same: arriving in the Mother City. One of the routes gets you there quicker; the other enriches you. There’s no need to fight about which is the right one.

This week’s episode, “Let The Wicked Be Ashamed”,  were something of a “scenic route”-take, which I assume is going to be par for the course for this series. Again, not necessarily problematic when it comes to interpreting the Old Testament. The Bible tells a lot of things; it also omits a great deal. How would Saul’s sons react to a statement made by Samuel such as the one that he has? How would the kingdom’s people react? What would his wife have said? Why can’t we ask these questions just because the book of 1 Samuel doesn’t? The Israelites did not have silver and had to trade with the Philistines for weapons (1 Samuel 13:19-22). It would be quite plausible that people would try a lot of things to gain the upper hand when it comes to battles and wars. The portrayal of the tribe of Reuben’s effort to betray Saul was quite interesting in this regard. Not included in the original narrative, but also not implausible. This is part of the art of adaptation – and, as all visual renderings of Biblical narratives are, this remains an interpretation and one that this viewer is getting more and more on board with.

Olly Rix continues to give a strong performance as David, setting up quite a few of his far-off future flaws. This man is not necessarily against, well, sexual adventures (Bathsheba anyone? But that is still a long time coming) and found himself this week in a kind-of Joseph-Potiphar’s Wife situation with Ahinoam (Simone Kessell) that he didn’t see coming, prompting his return to Bethlehem, just in time to be anointed by Samuel (Mohammad Bakri), who still annoys the crap out of me. He is not believable as the great man of God he is supposed to be. This oke reminds me of a cross between the Soothsayer in an Asterix-comic and the blind Seer in Vikings, but with a lisp and a nifty little blood-axe. I almost wish he got assassinated, even though I knew it wouldn’t happen. Maybe they are trying to portray him in the same violent way that the Old Testament portrays God? There might be a correlation there. Either way, he doesn’t work for me as a character.

Saul, on the other hand, continues to be absolutely tremendous. Whether Ray Winstone is simply the best actor on the show, or that the writers are nailing his journey as a troubled king – I think he’s brilliant. There were some gems that Saul planted this week (“This is the price of kingship!” – something David will learn in many ways when he is to rule in future) that foreshadowed the trials that he is yet to go through, which works really, really well. Not every little decision he makes gets sanctioned by God – neither does God sanction every decision we make today. It should not come as a surprise to any viewer.

Lastly, Mikhal (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) continues to be intriguing. Along with her dad, they seem to be the only two real believers in Israel. Ish-Baal (James Floyd) and Jonathan (Haaz Sleiman) are still to really turn into something other than stereotypical bloodlusters (I am sure we will see more dimensions to them further on) and her sister is still mourning her dead husband-to-be. So, she is the still small voice of religion that the show opts for, while David is seemingly not yet “the man after God’s own heart”. The show desperately needs to bring some of that in, otherwise we will fail to care for David out of any other reason than that we simply have to. An opportunity for this is very much present in the next episode which apparently will give us the epic battle that inspired a plethora of songs, sayings, pictures and renditions.

This week the show also wisely omitted the explicit nudity that I guess the producers were tempted to show between David and Ahinoam. Less is more, my friends, and suggestion in film is often stronger than simply blatantly forcing stuff down a viewer’s eye.

Building up, setting up, carving away at the marble statue that is to come, this week’s episode scores a strong 7.5/10.

Theology and Friday Night Lights: season 2 episode #05

“I sin daily and I’m a better Christian than you, Garrity…”
Being there, together, with the people that needs us – that is one of the practical implications of Christianity that emerges in this episode of Friday Night Lights. Riggins and Layla want to stage an intervention to get Jason Street to forget the whole stemcell-surgery. He would have been implanted with shark-DNA! Craaazyyy. But she is reluctant at first and after Riggins threw her that line, she reconsiders. Looks like, so far, she is taking her recent conversion seriously.

So she agrees to the booze cruise Tim suggested, albeit reluctantly at first…the ends we will go to for the people we care about needs to be extreme sometimes!
At the eventual intervention, Layla and Tim tells Jason that they don’t want him to have the surgery, to which he responds with the expected rage and “you don’t know what I’m going through”-type attitude and comments. The Layla in her over-eagerness tries the religious take: “God has a reason for everything that happens to you.”
Jason: “God and I aren’t exactly friends ever since He decided to break my neck.”
Layla: “Okay, fine, you don’t want religion? How ‘bout this is a stupid idea and you’re being an idiot!”
Jason: “Maybe I’ll just let some Jesus freak dump my head under the water and wash all my troubles away. It’s that easy, right?”
Which, of course, it isn’t.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt… So Tim Riggins resorts to giving Jason the cold, hard facts: Best case scenario, he loses 10 grand. Worst case scenario, he ends up dead. He loves him and will knock him down and drag him back to Dillon if he needs to.
So Jason jumps overboard…and after it looks like he’s gonna drown, he starts swimming! With the realization of hope dawning on his face, he swims joufully to the shore. There his friends meet him and he apologizes to them, saying that he’s not having the stemcell surgery anymore. Maybe his realization that his life is not necessarily over when he figured out that he is able to swim got him thinking that God still has a purpose for him after all…
As they go back to the hotel, they pass the Jesus-statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro or San Something (are there more than one of those statues?) and Riggins suggests they go for a drink first “unless it’s against your religion, Garrity.”
Layla: “Yeah, that’s funny, Tim.”
So at the beach pub she kisses them both whilst dancing with them both (apparently quirky threesomes with paralyzed guys and line backers are not against the rules of Christianity or something…) Realizing what she has done/is doing, she says: “I gotta go pray.” And she walks off. Mmmm. Looks like old habits die hard…

We may come to a dead end place in our lives and then we start grabbing for straws, thinking that maybe it will change everything back to the way it was. But things will never be the same as before, no matter what we do. We gotta go forward. Life is not a Turning Back-business. It is a Going Forward-business, where we have to decide what to do now, how to handle life from now on. We might make mistakes again, but that’s okay – as long as we keep on going (remember Dory from Finding Nemo? “Just keep swimming!”). We can’t change things back to the way they were. But we can find new ways to define ourselves in life, to make our lives better from here on.

Another thing: when we enter into an intervention with a person, it is not wise to “pull Christianity” while such a person is not acceptible to it, especially a situation like that on the boat. Layla probably is not far off – I, too, think that God can use us in any state we are, and that He has a purpose for our lives, but you need to read the situation correctly. Don’t try to bring a message of hope while you are confronting a person, you will only infuriate them more. Calm him/her down first, get them to think straight and then witness about hope/peace/love/faith. It is difficult for us to actually agree to the whole “purpose of life”-thing when we can’t see past our problems, but when we are comforted and when we feel loved, then we can start to, little by tiresome little, gnaw our way back to hoping again.

Other stuff that happened in this episode: Coach Taylor’s “taking care of his wife” because now he’s back and like a normal man he wants to have some “together time” with his wife…nice! But aaawww, Tammy’s not ready yet after her pregnancy. So after some incidental advice from another coach he sends her on a girl’s night out, hoping that she will come home and he can take advantage of her relaxing. Turns out, all the other women knew that men do this – and she is still not ready yet.

Landry’s lies (to his very supporting father) are twisting him further down, and his father is calling it – so he forbids Tyra to hang out with his son: “I won’t let you drag him down with whatever it is you are involved with.”

Inspirational winning quote during half time in the Panther Locker Room: Landry’s bit about winnig together or losing alone to which Coach responds: “Clear eyes, full hearts…”
Team: “CAN”T LOSE!”
Apparently Landry is quite a tackler and after a huge hit on one of the opponents, Smash and Saracen want in so bad (they’ve been benched because they have been fighting the past few weeks continuously) that they “decide to kiss and make up”, resulting in them playing in the very last play of the game. At first, Landry gets hit and they lose the ball as the final whistle blows, but then the touch judge calls a fowl, so they get another chance in the end zone and the game ends with Smash making the touch down, causing the Panthers and Coach Taylor to win his first game back.

So at the after party Tyra ends it with Landry, according to his father’s wishes, but she is obviously unable to tell him the truth why, so she lies to him about it and she sucks when she does it: “Did you ever think in a million years if that didn’t happen that we would end up together? Take a look in the mirror. I don’t know what I was thinking with you. This is over.”
Eish. Because Landry, the New Kid on the Block in Football Hero Town, is not an oil painting. Stardom means nothing when your girl dumps you because your father doesn’t like her.

Brownie points to Saracen for telling Julie (who came crawling back to him after they broke up and asking him to a concert, to which he at first agrees) straight that he is still pissed off at her for cheating on him and lying about it. Something all of us men should do when our exes come crawling back. At the Republiek van Kollegetehuis we have the Squash-ball Theory: “The harder you hit them, the fatser they come back to you.” Saracen seems to understand that.

Brownie points to the producers too for not treating Christianity like an easy answer with prayer as some sort of magic spell. It contains far more than that. I’m really looking forward to see what they’re gonna do with it.

And finally, Coach gets lucky after the game when his wife asks him if he wants to fool around.
Coach: “Do you want to?”
Tammy: “Yeah.”
So he responds appropriately…

Friday Night Lights is back! Yeahh!!

Yeah! FNL season 2 is here finally!
Okay, I know I sound a little overexcited or what not, but I like the show and it is back so…yeah!!!
What I want to write about is the show’s theology, or take on Christianity if you want to call it that. We start the season with Layla Garrity’s sudden conversion and baptism, beautifully depicted in a river and everything. We then see her pray at school, with intentions towards Tim Riggins. Does she want to convert him as well? Looks like it, I mean, she sounds sincere and all. She invites him to her church, the more charismatic one in town, where the preacher claims that Jesus said He will take your past away if you follow Him in His burial. (When did Jesus say that???)
Riggins, later (and this made me burst out laughing) tried to kiss Layla back at her home, claiming that he feels closer to God when he is with her. She chases him out, asking if he really thought that line was gonna work on her.
So she turns to the juvenile hall to witness there or something and ends up helping a young guy on probation getting a job at her divorced father, Buddy Garrity’s dealership, after he accused her that outside of prison she would not have been caring but would have ran the other way. So she decided (and said that) to put her money where her mouth is.
Interesting to note her is something we learned in the Faithful Witnessess course we did the past few days with Professor Malan Nel – we can’t all do everything, but we can all do something to evangelize or to help people.
Then there is the other side – Landry and Tyra’s covering up of a self defence murder…by throwing the body in a river!! Now, everybody knows that bodies in rivers always manages to reappear.
The take here is on Landry’s spiritual crisis, struggling to live with himself, especially after the reverend in the Reformed church service preached on David and Batsheba’s adultery. He didn’t even hear him talk about forgiveness, he just stopped listening at the part where David was found out! But he said then, afterwards, he would rather spend his life in jail than to live a life trapped within his guilt.
So this is as far as we are with the series. As we go along, I will keep you posted.

Friday Night Lights

I have just finished watching the season 1 finale of FNL and I can tell you it’s great! There are some twists and turns that is not expected, but it will keep you glued to your seats!
There are some unanswered questions left which, if there is going to be a second season, will probably be answered then – otherwise, they are open for interpretation. But you don’t get that “hanging in the air”-feeling like with some other series such as One Tree Hill or The OC (I’m a fan of both by the way!) or even Prison Break.
Enough of that. Go check it out for yourself. What I want to talk about is the way they handle their explicit views on Christianity throughout the season (pun intended!). From the word go the producers made no secret that the townsfolk’s faith and religion is an integral part of the story, even if it is just a constant sub-plot. We see scenes in various churches and we see a lot of pre-match and post-match prayers. There are also some references to the “Christian thing to do” in certain situations and even a Gospel hard rock-band called Crucifictorious (interesting name, by the way!). So you are constantly reminded that this town and its people are (or pretend to be) deeply religious/spiritual.
What are interesting are the statements (or comments, if you will) they make about teen sex and “forbidden” relationships, like Buddy Garrity’s adultery (or, in his own words, “straying outside his marriage”) and Jason and Layla’s relationship and the extensions thereof. Yes, in the case of Julie and Matt, Julie’s mom rant and rave on how dangerous it can be in physical and psychological ways. What scared me was that Julie thought of it as “just one body part going into another body part”, which her mom, thank goodness, corrected. Yet they went ahead, but they weren’t “ready” for it…We never actually see them having sex after that and it is never brought up again, so we are left to think that they kept it tat way. Or aren’t we?
Jason, Layla and Tyra’s case, on the other hand, is a different story. Layla cheats on Jason with his best friend, Tim Riggins, who went out with Tyra before, and end up being called the school skank. A huge rambling is made over it, as if she is the first girl to ever have done something like that in the whole universe. But, as the episode’s title pointed out rightfully, “It’s different for girls”. A guy can get away with something like that, but a girl makes one mistake…Later, it comes back to bite her in the ass yet again when Jason cheats on her with a girl he actually barely knew from the quad-rugby national try-outs (that is a really random sentence!) because “she was so easy to talk to”. Please.
Then there is Buddy Garrity’s “straying” outside his marriage. His excuse? “I’m a sinner. I’m a weak man.” I think he says that about four or five times over two or three episodes. We all know the Buddy Garritys of the town. He is the bigshot, the rich guy that is at all the matches and socializes witht the team and the coahces and he is almost like their patron. He also goes to church every Sunday and is a real family guy. He also pisses us off big time every time you see him and in your heart of hearts you actually wish something bad will happen to him, like an attack of stomach flu or something, just to get that cheesy smirk off his please-hit-me-face. Yet, he is a team player and extremely loyal to the coach and the team and he is the one to screw up eventually, and then it is usually something bigger than just a stomach ache. His marriage fails (we don’t really know why he “strayed”, just that he is a sinner) and his kids suffer the consequences. Their marriage will never be patched up and his wife will hate him till the day she dies.
Another thing is that the one reverend’s daughter is diagnosed with a bipolar disorder – depression. I wished that they would make a little more of that, as well as Smash’s steroid-problem, because that is also problems that high school kids suffer from, not just casual sex.
There are lots more to say about this series and we can get into some serious analyzing later on. What I’m really glad about is that they never made religion or Christianity cheap or a quick fix in a tight spot. Problems can hit anybody, no matter who you are, and it is in your hands to decide how you are going to handle them. Are you going to try on your own, and risk the chance of screwing up big time? Or are you going to open up to other people and let them and God help you to handle the difficult situations in life?
It is only in following his real passions that Jason found healing (coaching Saracen for the last 2 games) and that Coach Taylor made his final decision (I think) to stay in Dillon.
Go watch it. It is great stuff.