#cissy smith

Well well, what have we here??

EXCEPT for this one

Spoilers, as always

Manaaki was twenty-eight, a decorated sergeant of the Great World War, and living in Hamilton with his sister, raising his child with his new wife. He’d resigned his commission after the war ended, and now did the manual labor for Awa’s store.

It was a chilly spring evening in 1920, no different from any other, when someone knocked on the door. Manaaki answered with little Harry Manaaki on his hip, as he happened to be nearest to the door.

A gentleman was standing there, fiddling with a watch-chain. He blinked at Manaaki.

“Can I help you, sir?” Manaaki asked, a little shortly. Harry was chattering noisily and grabbing at his ear.

“My God, how you’ve grown,” the gentleman said, staring at him as if in a trance.

Manaaki froze, thoughts racing. A yawning emptiness, ancient and painful, opened suddenly in his chest. “Are you…”

“Your father, lad,” the man said, and now Manaaki could see it, a face that refreshed the very furthest corners of his memory.

“What are you doing here?” Awa asked. Manaaki managed a look over his shoulder, and saw that she’d come up behind him, scowling.

The gentleman — Manaaki’s father! — smiled. “And look at you, my skinny little—”

“Get out,” Awa spat. “You think you can just come here, after twenty-five years? Get out.”

“Could you really be so unforgiving toward your own father, Awa?” the gentleman began, but Awa elbowed past Manaaki and slammed the door.

“Who was that?” Cissy asked curiously.

“No one,” Awa snapped.

“It was our father, Awa,” Manaaki said, and he put Harry down to run around on the floor.

“Father! Don’t make me laugh.” Awa said.

“I don’t understand,” Cissy was looking between them.

“He abandoned our mother when Manaaki was three, and she died,” Awa said. “We were orphans, and I provided for us — me, Manaaki, don’t you forget it!”

“But he came back,” Manaaki began.

“Because he recognized you in a newspaper when you got a medal, I’ll bet,” Awa snapped. “The old Prophet back in the nowhere-village has a better claim to be your father than that man ever will.”

“Maybe I wanted to meet him, at least!” Anger felt better than the hollow ache in his chest, and he hid inside it. He looked to Cissy, certain she would be on his side.

But Cissy was staring at him. “Harry didn’t know you when you came home from the war.”

Manaaki blinked. “That’s not the sa— I did come back!”

“I didn’t know if you would for years,” Cissy said. “And I know it’s not the same, but if you didn’t make it back, Harry still wouldn’t have a father.”

“Papa!” Harry decided he wanted to climb Manaaki again, so Manaaki picked him up. He hadn’t been there, when Harry was born. He couldn’t imagine, now, not coming back to him. And Cissy! To get her pregnant and then to leave her?

So first off, let me just talk about what I like about the Manaaki/Cissy storyline, because there’s quite a bit.

First off, can we get an A in chat for interracial relationships? I don’t know what the racial politics are like in New Zealand, but here in the US, you still can barely get away with an interracial relationship in a piece of media, and the pair usually aren’t allowed to get anything close to a happy ending.

And I really like that Cissy in particular was allowed to, like, want him. And to try and make moves on him, even if her family and friends (can you call Violet a friend?) mock her for it. I love how much she clearly likes being sexual with him.

I love that, after Manaaki comes back to the Smith house after Harry’s death, it’s Cissy who lights up his world and makes him smile. I love how much they clearly like each other’s company (as opposed to Some Other Couples on this show), and how much the show seems to approve of their being together - look at this scene in the garden! Look how they’re framed in all this beautiful light, look how Cissy’s costume complements the flowers!

Best of all, I love the way the scene in the bedroom takes a lot of trouble to let both of them make the active choice to say ‘yes, I want this.’ It’s like this perfectly choreographed little dance where at every turn one of them chooses to escalate just a little further. I love how the scene shows them as equally vulnerable, and how tenderly they handle each other. I love everything about the performances of both Freya Milner and Alex Tarrant, and I don’t care how much the intimacy coordinator was paid, she deserves to have it doubled. Tripled, even.

And now for the things I ... don’t love as much.

I really, really wish Cissy didn’t look and feel and act so very young. I’m not saying that she should’ve been invulnerable to men like Guy Featherstone, that she should’ve known everything about life, that she shouldn’t be allowed to make dumb mistakes, yada yada. In essence, my complaint is not with the writing or even the casting choices, but the directorial and/or acting ones. Freya performs a lot of Cissy’s scenes like everything is flying over her head, and I don’t know if this was a directorial request or her choice, but the end result made me feel like I was looking at a fifteen-year-old figuring out life ... which then made it viscerally uncomfortable to watch her unbutton her shirt and basically say ‘do me.’

Which makes the pregnancy arc just that much more ick. I don’t like that this show chose to have Cissy’s one sexual encounter, with her one brown paramour of all people, end up as an unwed pregnancy that permanently alters the course of her life. And sure, I guess it only takes one time, but come on show, you don’t have to take every single opportunity to be an afterschool special! And to make it just a little worse, the show doesn’t technically tell us whether or not Manaaki ever came back to at the very least co-parent the baby, and considering that Manaaki’s own father walked out, I don’t love the implications. Again, I don’t know the media conventions or racial politics of New Zealand, but here in the US, absent brown fathers are a stereotype resting on some really nasty racism.

Well, there you have it. Me and my complex feelings on Manaaki and Cissy (though I very much wish I could just like it and move on).

EDIT: all right well. One other thing I don’t love, and it’s purely a taste thing. I personally like ships where I can believe the partners can meaningfully communicate and share vulnerable parts of themselves. I do appreciate that Cissy is like Manaaki’s sunshine in the middle of a storm, but it very much feels like any mention of his myriad traumas, or even his religious background and inclinations, would be met with a blank, doe-eyed stare from her. And I know he initially finds her chatter endearing and a welcome distraction, but he seems like eventually he’d just become the kind of partner who’d tune her out, and I think she deserves rather better than that.

I dunno, their “cute contrast” energy feels more like the top layer of a pretty fundamental mismatch, and it’s not really to my taste.

(Not to mention she doesn’t seem inclined to call him on his sexism!)

EDIT 2: Maybe I'm being hypercritical but ... on like my fifth rewatch of this show I'm not sure that he likes her nearly as much as she likes him. He smiles when he's around her, which is really nice because he's at the peak of his War Trauma, and I stand by what I said about their garden scene and their bedroom scene. But the episode as a whole spends its Manaaki runtime bouncing him back and forth like a ping-pong ball. The emotional whiplash is jarring!

Its like ... he's back at the house, and Cissy surprises everyone in bright pink, and he immediately runs away. Then it's Cissy cheering him up after the photograph. Then OMG Detective Blaine is here to interrogate, plus bawling his eyes out on Mrs. Smith's shoulder. Then it's 'oh let's have a nice picnic with Cissy!' Then it's OMG the detective's back and there's more trauma! Then it's makeout time with Cissy. Then it's 'I'm going back to the war front, I don't feel like I should be around regular people,' running away from her yet again! My God.

And to make it worse, Manaaki is literally sitting in what used to be Harry's room, looking at a photo of Harry, when Cissy comes in to check on him. Again, I love that bedroom scene in a bottle, but paired with the literal frames before that and the scene they have after, it's all pretty bleak in the final count.