On March 21, 1963 three hundred and two inmates, guards, and staff vanished in the night and started to reappear today.
Johnny McKee’s episode deals with chemistry, poisonous gas, the effects of being bullied, unrequited love, and episode full of pop culture references!
Out of all the 1963-ers presented so far, I have to admit that Johnny is one of the few I couldn’t find much empathy for. He wasn’t a soldier, he’s was just a guy who understood the world through it’s timeless exploration of invention, innovation, and pursuit of knowledge through one’s imagination, but his understanding couldn’t compensate for the adolescent antics of those who have yet to understand such things, as his high school love interest Ginny set him up for an ultimate embarrassment in front of her friends, the jock males of the football team.
McKee explains this one moment in a flashback, as he was in the cell next door to Jack Sylvane---The moment young teenage Johnny was told by Ginny that she understood him, that he was smarter than all the other boys, and then kissed him. But the actual actions only misleading him to a place where he was subjected to cruelty like a bug or a lab rat by being exposed, physically injured in a VERY personal way by means of fire crackers, and laughed at, shortly there after led to cyanide poisoning of Ginny's face and eventually 70 other people's deaths.
Johnny McKee’s flash back too dealt with an authoritative Alcatraz figure asking McKee to kill another inmate by the name of Gingly--. He was suppose to kill him during movie night…In the present again does McKee tending a night club find himself spouting great lines of French science fiction writer, Jules Verne, only to be laughed at again, which leads to crushed glass mixed in with their drinks which leads to suffocation.
The Future is Now:
McKee’s interest in Jules Verne plays a great deal to the series so far. The mid 19th century French writer wrote many intriguing stories about men exploring the world in conjunction to new technologies. One work mentioned was "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and connected to McKee’s third target in present day, one of the city’s under water subway tunnels. Jules Verne occasionally showed dichotomy in his views however, none more so then "20,000 Leagues" spinn off/crossover "The Mysterious Island". Verne had a way of allowing humanities pursuits with science to be out done by nature itself, suggesting a belief in a fate of the universe, that the universe may only ever let us go so far, but suffice to say that memories of those explorations are still important, because of the people we explore them with. Generally Verne was optimist and pro humanity and his works usually had happy endings.
I would like to briefly home in on "The Mysterious Island", because I feel it may have a great deal in common with Alcatraz. Verne wrote a lot of his works during and after The American Civil War and this is one novel that addressed that war directly. As some you know from other recaps, I feel strong that Alcatraz’s history with The American Civil War may also play a role. Doctor Diego Soto happens to also be an American Civil War historian ("The Pilot") and in "Kit Nelson" we get exposed to Edwin James' American Civil War match box, passed onto Kit Nelson…It’s my belief that mysteries of Alcatraz may go back that far, and that perhaps even some of our characters, specifically I lead towards James himself, are from the time of The American Civil War, and hence he knows and protects it’s secret door to ‘the hole’ under ‘the hole’.
The Mysterious Island also deals with a man named Captain Nemo, from "20,000 Leagues". "The Mysterious Island" tells the tale of 5 stranded survivors of a balloon crash. Everything the survivors experience is unexplainable until they meet Captain Nemo…However, there are still chronological discrepancies between "20,000 Leagues", "In Search of the Casaways", and "The Mysterious Island". Captain Nemo terms out be an Indian Price who ran away from home, tying India into the works. Nemo is also a reference to Homer’s "The Odyssey", as both Odysseus and Nemo's names mean “nobody”. --Additionally there is also a famous comic by Wincer McKay (not to be confused with McKee) called, "Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland!"
Nemo of the comic is a boy that dreams of his adventures in Slumberland and often goes on adventures where he meets characters referenced from popular lititure such as, Alice and Santa Clause. It’s seems evident that McCay barrowed the character from Verne, as Verne’s character was deeply associated with water. Water something writers associate with dreams and ultimately the various conscience states of humanity, as water is fluid, maluable, can take the shape of any container, is reflective, and can be both shallow and deep, pure, and natural.
The past few episodes in particular have really dealt with these concepts. Hinting at sleep, sedation, transformation, attempting to fix a broken conscience. Lucy still sleeps and dreams, and nothing Beauregard knows can help Lucy, he only suggests that the sound of Hauser’s voice, the sound of a voice that loves her speaking familiar words of a favorite novel, could be the key to bring her conscience “forward”.
One other Verne work that comes to mind when thinking of Alcatraz, "gas", and cause and effect is
"Dr. Ox's Experiment"
From Wikipedia:
"Dr. Ox's Experiment" ("A Fantasy of Dr Ox")[1] (French: Une fantaisie du docteur Ox) is a short story by the French writer and pioneer of science-fiction, Jules Verne, published in 1872. It describes an experiment by one Dr. Ox and his assistant Gedeon Ygene. A prosperous scientist Dr. Ox offers to build a novel gas lighting system to an unusually stuffy Flemishtown of Quiquendone. As the town bore no charges, the offer is gladly accepted. The hidden interest of Dr. Ox is however not lighting, but large scale experiment on effect of oxygen on plants, animals and humans. He uses electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. The latter is being pumped to the city causing accelerated growth of plants, excitement and aggressiveness in animals and humans. The story ends up by destruction of the oxygen factory of Dr. Ox – by accident, oxygen and hydrogen got mixed causing a major explosion. Jules Verne acknowledges in the epilogue that the described effect of oxygen is a pure fiction invented by him.
Ovid’s Metamorphosis:
Lucy’s book like Lucy is in disguise. What lies beneath is the first Latin Poet Ovid’s work, “Metamorphosis”
From Wikipedia:
Metamorphoses (from the Greek µetaµ??f?se??, "transformations") is a Latin narrative poem in fifteen books by the Roman poet Ovid, describing the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework. Completed inAD 8, it is recognized as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature. The most-read of all classical works during the Middle Ages, theMetamorphoses continues to exert a profound influence on Western culture. It also remains the favourite work of reference for Greek myth upon which Ovid based these tales, albeit often with stylistic adaptations.
Ovid works his way through his subject matter, often in an apparently arbitrary fashion, by jumping from one transformation tale to another, sometimes retelling what had come to be seen as central events in the world of Greek mythology and sometimes straying in odd directions. The poem is often called a mock-epic&&&&. It is written in dactylic hexameter, the form of the great heroic and nationalistic epic poems, both those of the ancient tradition (the Iliad and the Odyssey) and of Ovid's own day (the Aeneid of Virgil). It begins with the ritual "invocation of the muse", and makes use of traditional epithets andcircumlocutions. But instead of following and extolling the deeds of a human hero, it leaps from story to story with little connection.
Titian's Danaë, one of innumerable paintings inspired by the Metamorphoses.
The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is love—be it personal love or love personified in the figure of Amor (Cupid). Indeed, the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated, and made ridiculous by Amor, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon, who is the closest thing this putative mock-epic has to a hero. Apollo comes in for particular ridicule as Ovid shows how irrational love can confound the god out of reason. The work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.
Apollo and Daphne by Antonio Pollaiuolo, one tale of transformation in theMetamorphoses—he lusts after her and she escapes him by turning into a bay laurel.
The Metamorphoses can be said to be unique in that it is the only Latin mock-epic to have an epilogue. This epilogue (Book 15, lines 871-879) is Ovid's way of telling his readers that everything is in flux, but that the exception to this is the Metamorphoses, "Now stands my task accomplished, such a work as not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword nor the devouring ages can destroy". The idea that this implies is that the authors gain "immortality" through the survival of their works.
Uniquely this work ties into the episode and the series, s really a mock-epic exaggerates a heroic tale sometimes by placing a fool in the role of a classical hero. For McKee it is him who is made into a mock-epic by the boys of the high school football team, and also the criminals themselves are put into similar situations in some these flashbacks in Alcatraz.
But is Alcatraz a mock-work? Does it have nothing but Alcatraz to connect to each story? I say not exactly so. I would agree there is all of this variation with a lack of anything yet constant other than the reappearance of character’s and their reenactment of previous actions that gives Alcatraz any constancy, but there are characters that are constant in terms of being in both time periods, characters blood related to each other, and themes of love, conscience awareness, criminology, arrested development, ect. So I would say Alcatraz is not a mock epic, but rather a very scary psychological horror story that in turn, as crazy as some of these actions of the criminals are, and even at times give great comic relief, really express the complexity of their pain, the things they’ve lost, and the things that they are still searching for. Perhaps not all mock-epics don’t discredit epics at all, but rather find another way to reinforce the epic, just by adding a darker sardonic layer to the piece, that is really a type of overwhelming nervousness towards the subject matter and not really comical. I would find it hard to believe we were being lead down a seemingly unconnected endless road. No I believe Alcatraz opposite of Lucy’s book is a mock-epic in disguise and true identity a dark-passionate-drama.
Oh the Love!
Of course Lucy and Hauser’s relationship seems rather central to the series and I really like the idea of it. The effort of one of them having a time that they lived with out the other -But once again Jack Sylvane made an appearance and was brought to Rebecca to answer questions about Johnny McKee. For whatever reason I can’t explain, I can’t help to think that Jack and Rebecca have good chemistry and that Rebecca tends to act different with him then she does with any other character. Jack too recognized her kindness for not shooting him in the grave yard and I think he attempts to be kind in return by telling Rebecca she has Tommy’s eyes, despite that both characters, as far as we know, are at odds with Tommy Madsen. I can only hope that Jeffrey Pierce stays on board and becomes a series regular, maybe even join the team!. There is something about Jack Sylvane that is sinscere and warm and I think it would be shame to throw that away. Diego too goes and talks with Nikki again. It’s clear Deigo likes her, but can’t stomache her day job, but it’s also clear by her never ending amount of comic character t-shirts, that she could be everything Diego needs. --I can’t help but root for them either.
Until Next Time,
We're Running out of Chickens! (This one's a little harder than usual to pin point!)
