Rectify: Running with the Bull
June 19, 2014 10:22 PM - Season 2, Episode 1 - Subscribe

"Nineteen years ago, Daniel Holden was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of his teenage girlfriend, Hanna Dean. Thanks to newly discovered DNA evidence and the efforts of his sister Amantha and lawyer, Daniel’s conviction has been vacated. Season 2 of RECTIFY finds Daniel Holden committed to living in the present. Unfortunately, there are many places and faces in his hometown that remind Daniel of the past..."
posted by homunculus (7 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 


The first season of Rectify was brilliant and totally riveting. Here's a bit about a scene from S1E3: Here's the Scene That Made Me Fall in Love With Rectify
posted by homunculus at 1:31 AM on June 20, 2014


homunculus dear, could you tag the post with the name of the show? Helps classification. :)
posted by subbes at 8:01 AM on June 20, 2014


Thanks much. I'm running through S1 on Netflix right now!
posted by subbes at 10:09 AM on June 20, 2014


The season premiere was a bit of a let-down for me, but I really loved the first season so maybe my expectations were too high. Daniel's interactions with the outside world were what made it so fascinating, and this episode obviously didn't have any of that. Hopefully when he wakes up it will get more interesting again.
posted by homunculus at 3:41 PM on June 21, 2014


Just in case anyone missed it, Damien Echols reviewed the first season opener and pronounced it very realistic. I have been intensely interested in the case of The West Memphis Three and only recently found this show and Damien's review. I like this paragraph:

"One other thing McKinnon (the show's writer Ray McKinnon was married to the late Lisa Blount, who corresponded with and supported Damien) manages to capture is the wonder a man experiences once he's returned from the land of the dead. The main character walks through a convenience store, staring at the hot dog rack like it's a minor miracle. And to him, it is. For me, it was Chinatown. I would walk up and down the streets of Chinatown staring at all the flotsam and jetsam being sold on the side walks in awe. They were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen -- colors, shapes, smells -- I couldn't get enough of it. I could stare for hours at the pigeons everyone else seemed to find revolting. Everything was amazing to me. Everything. I would lie on our balcony in the rain, staring at this beautiful beast of a city that I had fallen head over heels in love with. I would look at the skyline of Manhattan and be so overwhelmed with the monstrous beauty that I wanted to sob and kiss the filthy sidewalks. McKinnon manages to catch something of that energy."

I'm enjoying the coma flashbacks and dream sequences. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to miss his joyous meeting with the shade of his late row friend. The coma is a decent device for moving a lot of pieces around the board and, realistically, he's not going to snap back from that kind of beating in a hurry, if at all. I guess the pace of the show doesn't bother me. I like that they leave out the dull parts and give more time to dreams and deliberation; it seems to fit.
posted by Anitanola at 2:32 PM on July 2, 2014


I've almost given up on this show twice: once in the episode where Kerwin's sent to his execution, and the big thing he wants to tell Daniel isn't that there's a message he has to deliver to his family, but that he knows Daniel is innocent--that, to me, seemed utterly false and reminded me of nothing so much as the Magical Negro trope. And then I almost gave up on it again when Kerwin reappeared in the dream sequence, which struck me as ham-handed, clichéd, and obvious, and again reminded me of the Magical Negro trope.

I feel conflicted about this show. I think it is, for the most part, very good. But I also think its treatment of race is problematic.
posted by johnofjack at 4:00 PM on September 19, 2015


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