Noah Wyle as Dr. Robby and Baby Jane Doe in The Pitt Season 2 finale.

📷 ericpot1969 IG

transitions. between scenes. it's so easy to cross-fade, or just hard cut, or fade to black and then open the next scene. sometimes, if a piece of media is putting in a bit of effort, you'll see things like water transitioning to sky or maybe a background being continuous while the characters change or vice versa.

but dead boy detectives. the transitions are fucking flawless. and so creative, like everything about this show. creative transitions are difficult to do, and they keep getting it right. whether it's someone holding up a circle and that melds into the next scene where the railing has a circle in it, or the camera moving downwards from the floor in one location to under a table in a different location, or them falling out of mirrors, they take the tiniest of elements and turn them into transitions so fucking deliciously, and everything is so dynamic, both the camera and the scene.

and that makes it so much more impactful when there IS a hard cut. like in episode 5 (where the You Know What occurs with Jenny). the cut from the mascot at the high school scene to the butcher's shop is BRUTALLY hard, with Jenny again slicing into things with her meat cleaver, and it lends an extra air of violence to that meat cleaver--which is such great foreshadowing for what happens later (even the initial establishing shot of the butcher's shop at the start of the episode makes the cleaver in the sign flash red, drawing attention to it).

the direction helps the narrative so much, giving both atmosphere and foreshadowing without needing to fatten the dialogue with it.

He is acting straight to avoid these truths. he finds that shane is in the pile of 'the dark truths about his life'.

that means that she is behind him in this shot, the light is behind him. he is only showing you HALF of himself to the camera in the shot.

THEN SCOTT COMES OUT

BOOM the light is fully shown on the other half of ilyas face in a dramatic,fast 90 degree shot. the light is on his queerness, his homosexuality. the half of him! he realizes that he can let the light shine on him.

he doesn't have to ignore half of himself and live in the darkness. it ties into the literal 'sunshine' motif of the show.

aka you deserve sunshine.

the light he's had since childhood, he thinks his dad doesn't know him, but he knew he had light since childhood, he had svetlana since childhood.

BUT whos svetlana? her dad is a hockey player, she loves hockey, she's a woman. she's his pathway to normalcy and stardom, the spotlight.

she, is a light born from hockey. that means hockey is the first light in ilyas life.

but, shane kind of has to redirect the light away from that and she's easily like, directing it to shane she doesn't care. she's like okay, you love shane, that's awesome. keep at it.

some lovely moments in 490 in terms of camera work underlying the narrative:

The opening sequence of Julia walking through abandoned rooms to end up with the globe that she has when she was promised that trip to Italy with her family - the distance makes her looks smaller and underlines her abandonment just as well as the return of this specific prop.

Morning sunlight and a modern style font and a frame-dwarfing entrance door for Damián*s new business venture! Even as the colors still echo the old Perfumerías design and the old dependienta uniforms.

This shot, drawing up cozy home entertainment vibes, but also Damián listening to swing and not to, e.g. coplas (which would be the most iconic for a more conservative 1950s Spain) at a point in his life where he looks with new energy and plans into the future.

also realizing that the siblings don’t hate five. they just literally don’t know him at all. he came back a completely different person after 17 years for the siblings, they don’t know five, he’s a stranger so of course they’re gonna be cold to him. it’s like, “i don’t know you well, but you’re always going to be my brother in the end”.

ALSO. for those who ship some of the siblings, uhm… i’ve seen a lot of you guys try to prove that they don’t see eachother as siblings and more like academy students, but they very much say in just about every episode that they see eachother as siblings. they don’t actually SAY that word by word but they say things like “she’s our sister”, or “our dad”. if they say OUR dad… bro. i’m not even going to continue, you can put it together yourself. But, i do realize why people ship the siblings. I am not defending incest shippers but with umbrella academy i can see why people have resorted to it. only 3 of the characters in the main sibling cast has romantic partners. people like shipping people, people love writing romantic relationships, but with only diego/lila, dave/klaus, and sissy/viktor, (i’m not going to count five/dolores for now) people are desperate with the need to ship the rest of the siblings with someone, and since there are only a few actual canon characters in the show that interact with our main 7, people start shipping them together… yikes. anywho, that’s all for that peice. i blame the show writers as well for shipping luther/allison, they did not have to do that, but i’m hoping it was only to convey the severity of what childhood trauma does to people.

ALSO THIS HERE SHOOK ME. I actually think Reginald cares for the siblings. i hate to say it, but it’s true. caring for them does not mean being good, though. he was a horrible father, and person, but he genuinely did care for the siblings, in a like, “being the best is the best thing for you, i will make you better, for your sake, even if you don’t know it now, you will see that i am right” kind of way.

also why has NOBODY MENTIONED THIS. in season 2 when diego first reunites with five in the asylum, while he’s walking into the visitors room, he’s staring at five with this heartfelt, soft look, and then says “five…” in the most soft spoken voice ever 😭 your honor i love them

ALSO UGHHH THIS. IM GOING TO FREAK OUT ABOUT CAMERAWORK AND METAPHORS HERE SO BARE WITH ME. we as a fandom complain about the lack of flashbacks five has due to his ptsd. we’ve seen his first flashback since getting back to his family in s1 during the van scene when he gets triggered by those kids playing and starts thinking about his own childhood, i’m guessing. i ate that scene up, and was sad to see that be one of the only deeply vulnerable scenes he has in the season, and during my first watch i thought they’d never bring it back up. but they do!! i may be stupid for not realizing but whatever. in season 2, when five is trying to explain at elliot’s with all his siblings around that another apocalypse is coming, everyone starts talking about each other. as someone who studies film and camerawork, i love this scene. we see the camera focus on five as it slowly zooms in. it doesn’t switch scenes at all as the siblings voices overlap and echo over eachother. this whole scene conveys him getting overwhelmed and he starts to zone out, starting to think of the nuclear war he saw his siblings in. the scenes of the war start quickly switching through, showing many different scenes of it before it switches back to five, who says “guys, you all die. i want to forget it but i can’t” which just UGH its so well done there. if you think about it, he was starting to slip into another flashback. he was triggered by talking about their deaths in the war but was handling it well until the siblings started fighting, where we see the overlapping voices happen. it portrays him losing control and being unable to pull it back together with too much going on for him to focus on grounding himself. we DO however, see that five was able to pull himself out before he fell too deep into the flashback. i love how they show this through them still having the scene showing the war, but then fives voice starts talking over the scene which is still focusing on the war as if he was pushing it back and forcing himself to come back to the present.

St 5x04 Sorcerer

The Umbrella Academy