As always: consult this before discussing the episode. Also, feel free to crank anything here in the background.
"THE JAR-JAR BINKS OF TREME" ROUNDS INTO FORM: I know everyone else hates Davis, but if his role wasn't clear from the onset, it is after this episode: Davis is a random event generator, a person drawn as much to New Orleans for its erratic pace, disorganization and permissive open container laws as for its music. Note: I've never seen Davis actually eat or effuse over the food, which played a huge part in the episode tonight. It's his blind spot, NOLA-wise, and a telling hole in his uneven character, especially when he's hooking up with someone with smoking culinary chops like Janette.
There is a real-life model for Davis, but not nodding in the direction of Ignatius Reilly when you consider Davis' tendency to end up eloquently underemployed and organizing quixotic, incoherent charges into the teeth of authority would be in error. Davis' non-campaign to not-run for city council is Reilly's "Crusade for Moorish Liberation." If the patent absurdity of his campaign (and the cross-cut lobbying of fellow musicians to do it for free) didn't at least make you not hate him, then you had the comfort of watching Davis get punched for using the N-word in a moment of overplayed comfort in a largely black Treme bar and then waking up on his gay neighbors couch after passing out on the pavement. (He moves the speakers. He's learning. When he shaves the soul patch, you might even love him.)
GOOD SAMARITANS: Davis is picked up off the pavement by the neighbors he abuses; Antoine has a trombone bought for him by a Japanese stranger who only knows him from records he hoards as imports; Toni continues to batter away at the derelict New Orleans legal system for her clients; Big Chief Albert almost assaults a politician to reopen the projects for returning displaced Orleagians.
There's a flip side, of course:
RANDOM ACTS OF MALICE: The shootings at the end of the second line parade were the flip side to that. The detail of the show and the little touches continue to stun me so much it makes me wonder how much I missed watching The Wire. After the shootings the men clutching the wounded victim are wearing red bandanas. I worked in Clarkston with refugees in low-rent apartment complexes jammed with Katrina refugees, and the red bandanas there meant the same thing, but they belonged to displaced NOLA teens who simply started the same gangs in Atlanta. (In Clarkston they were called the Kings, but the red came from New Orleans.) Again, that's the management letting you know that if you care to look, they've layered the show as deep as you'd like to go.
(Unlike Justified, which for all its script-genius and energy can't bother to shoot a show about Kentucky in Kentucky. Worst use of California hills for Southern scenery since Dukes of Hazzard.)
YOU CAN REALLY COOK: Food is an underrated motif in most kinds of fiction, and usually reserved for Like Water For Chocolate erotic wankery. "The chicken was my womanhood; the sauce, the memory of love unrequited..."
/BOOKISTHROWNACROSSTHEROOM
So how pleasant is it, then, to not only have Janette have a moment of elegant victory over her surroundings, but to get to stare at another one of the visceral pleasures of the city in the middle of the show for no reason other than the thing itself? It's an aspect that to this point has been undersold on the show, so some future Good Fellas-style layering of food as a motif would be totally welcome since the city's gastronomy is as important to its appeal to outsiders as its music. (Or in my case, even more so. Holy shit, I want something in a crawfish cream sauce right now.)
For a minute or two, you just got to hang out with characters for no reason other than the moment itself. It's a kind of television decadence you only find here and on shows like Mad Men, shows made with such ballsy confidence they'll leave the viewer like an unattended child in a crowded mall just to see if they're smart enough to wait around until they're picked up by mommy and led to the next scene.
The real life chefs appeared to be firmly in the method acting mode during the post-dinner Scotch scene. Eric Ripert was giggling like a real-life giggly tippler, while Colicchio looked every inch like a guy who can inhale scotch by the quart.
SONNY AND ANNIE ARE DOOMED. The rogue bouncer will turn up again, but he's just another crack in the facade of Annie and Sonny's relationship, which is threatened by Sonny's drug use, their growing talent/ success differential, and Sonny's mounting inability to live within his means. (We've seen him borrow money twice already. It will get him in trouble down the line.) Whether they're Andersson and Osborne or something far, far darker remains to be seen.
CREIGHTON'S GONNA GET PAID. There's no way the publisher wants the money back. He's going to get a big offer to rant about Katrina in book form. Of all the characters in the show, Creighton's the one who makes the least sense to me. He's successful already, happy at home, and not really affected in any real direct way by Katrina. This episode showed him to be an insecure wannabe writer, sure, but...is that compelling enough to compare to any of the other characters locked in life-or-death struggles?
ON THE OPENING DREAM SEQUENCE: If we're going to ditch realism every now and then here...can we have iguanas? Please?