Sometimes something about the media i consume just gets me real good or stays with me for a bit but it’s not enough to write a whole essay about it or it doesn’t connect to a larger issue I can talk about. Sometimes I don’t even really want to recommend the movie or show or novel in general and it’s just that one thing that I have thoughts and emotions about.
This is what this series of posts is for. Enjoy short thoughts about things I saw.
(This is also probably gonna be more rambly than my other parts, just a warning.)
First up: Deception
Deception is a fun, breezy crime procedural about a successful stage magician that helps the FBI solve (often magic related) crimes. It reminded me of The Mentalist sometimes in that Cameron, the protagonist, is lovably full-of-himself and mostly puts on a sort of stage persona when interacting with people. It’s generally a good time, if wildly improbable.
What gets me, however, is Cameron’s backstory. The reason he helps out the FBI in the first place is so that he can help get his innocent brother Jonathan out of prison. His identical twin brother, who no one knew about until he got arrested. No one knew about him because their father raised them like that, so that he could do the most amazing disappearing children magic tricks. That’s so messed up. From the first episode on, I was blown away by how messed up that was and how little the show acknowledged that.
Their father only proves more messed up, the more we learn about him, training his sons, one of which he takes great pains to hide from the public, to be the perfect stage magicians from a very early age on. He, for example, locked child Cameron into a tiny box and just left him, so that he would learn escape tricks. Oh, and additionally he was an accomplished thief, who once took Cameron to a bank that he knew would be subject to a bank robbery, effectively traumatizing him. What joy.
The show’s primary antagonist, a mysterious woman with a grudge and an obsession, in the end manages to convince Cameron that he is ultimately to blame both for Jonathan’s imprisonment as well as his less than ideal existence in the shadows, which ignores that Cameron suffered under their father as well, even if his suffering was different.
The whole concept of their upbringing and the nature of their relationship resulting from that, is just something that is really interesting to me and that I’d love to see explored more deeply. The show’s mostly too light for that and, anyway, won’t ever get a second season, so I’m alone with my thoughts and feelings, which is precisely why I made this blog.
Satori over and out
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