Welcome back everyone to another week of Now and Then, Here and There! There’s a lot of posts coming, what with the new season, so glad you were able to find this one. We have a fair bit to talk about this week so lets jump into it!
Starting off, and god do I hate to bring it up again but its just so obvious, the visuals. Now and Then is wildly inconsistent here. When properly framed, lit and contextualized, Now and Then looks gorgeous. Just look at Nabuca confronting Boo, Shu breaking the glass or Nabuca finding Shu at the end. All of these are beautiful shots! The background and foreground contrast nicely, I love the colors they use, it’s great! And yet in the exact same episode, right before some of these shots even, we get pitch blackness. I’m talking about Shu climbing out of the pit, or running through Hellywood, etc. This isn’t just darkness, it’s… advanced darkness. I literally cannot see a thing and that’s just not acceptable. I don’t know what happened with Now and Then, if it’s just my copy or what, but it could look something special if it fixed this.
On to the story, where Shu has escaped! I was a bit surprised by this. Not that Shu escaped per se, but that they made it back to Hellywood and he took Lala Ru with him. I figured the escape would happen on the trip back. And that returning to Hellywood to save Lala Ru would be the climax rather than a mid-series inciting incident. If I’m being honest, the way this panned out stretches belief a bit. That Shu would not only be able to escape from the Hellywood complex, but that he could sneak up and take Lala Ru as well. Yeah a lot of things went his way to make that happen. From flooding the building to Nabuca letting them go. But it still felt like a bit much. It’s not so egregious that I won’t believe it for the sake of the story though.
As for the escape itself and how it was executed as a sequence, it was fun! Stumbling upon Tabool, climbing the outside, the collapsing pipe. It’s exactly what you want from these kinds of chase sequences. And the cherry on top was Shu breaking the glass ceiling, Lala Ru’s prison, and the visuals surrounding that. Made for a great culmination to the whole thing. I especially liked that, throughout the whole thing and meeting Shu again, Lala Ru finally got to do stuff. Whether it be Hamdo’s reaction to her protecting Shu or summing the water, she’s doing things. She’s still very unemotive, and Now and Then certainly suffers for that. But my hope is that now that she is free we will start to see her open up and become a bit more of a character. I really need her to start earning her place as a heroine.
Speaking of Lala Ru and her power, she used it! It’s real! And maybe the source for how/why Hellywood is able to travel across dimensions/to Earth! We don’t know much about how Lala Ru’s power works just yet but I’m glad we finally got to see it. My suspicion is that she has some kind of connection to Earth, and that the water is just draining from like… our oceans or whatever. This would explain how they were able to go to Earth despite their odd technology level as well as where her water is coming from. Of course I have nothing to prove this just yet, but my hope is that with Lala Ru free Now and Then can also start educating us on what exactly is going on here.
This brings me to Hamdo, my only real issue with the episode, though calling him an “issue” is an overstatement. He just sort of felt like a bit to much this week? His voices are amusing and his paranoia/insanity was engaging enough when the series first began. But the lack of complexity around him is starting to grate a bit. He’s a very pathetic man, all things considered. And this point my interest in him relates more to his relationship with Abelia than to him as an individual character. Once again, and I’m saying this a lot I know, my hope is that as Lala Ru is allowed to express more we get to learn more about her and Hamdo’s past. I want to see what turned him into who he is today, how he got into power, etc. Just something to spice him up a bit is all.
Finally we come to Nabuca, the kid who stole the show in the final moments! I liked what went down here. How he not only found Shu but seriously considered his offer. Seriously considering his offer but eventually turning it down, no doubt for all the kids he would leave behind if he accepted. Between this final scene and his confrontation with Boo the episode feels just as much his as it does Shu and Lala Ru’s. Now and Then is doing a great job of slow-rolling us with his character arc. Introducing him as a hardline Hellywood, then showing he only does it to survive before slowly planting and revealing the doubts in his head. I’m really glad Now and Then isn’t rushing this and instead is allowing Nabuca to become the voice of reason inside Hellywood while Sara and Shu fight it from without.
So yeah all in all I think this was another successful episode. Not as good as episode 6, my easy favorite, but asking anything to reach those highs again so soon would just be ridiculous. So long as Now and Then can keep up this general level of quality it will end up as something special. The question now is simply: Where do we go from here? Will Shu and Lala Ru run into Sara? Will Nabuca lead a revolution from the inside? Now and Then has a lot of avenues open to it and I’m interested to see which it will pick. None of them are bad in my mind, and its entirely possible it chooses one I’m not even aware of, like it did with episode 6. Only time will tell. And I’m looking forward to finding out.
Honestly Lala gas a reason to be quiet and withdrawn or have you never seem trauma before? Not every heroine needs to be bright and sunny like Queen Hilling
I’m not asking for her to be bright and sunny. Im asking her to be expressive. Sara isn’t bright and sunny, she’s being crushed beneath very similar trauma to Lala Ru. And yet we get to see a lot of her emotion on her face and through her body language/actions.
Thats what I want for Lala Ru. I want her to express that trauma. Want to be quiet and withdrawn? You can do that with more than a blank face. Want her to be traumatized? Again, you can do that. I just want her to have more ways of expressing herself than staring blankly into the distance, unblinking, unfaltering.
We got a bit of that when she shoved Hamdo away a few episodes ago in that painted garden and it was good! She finally did something other than stand still in a scene. Now I want that to happen again.