The Hour: "Episode Three"

A placeholder episode just wastes our time

“Just because you’re one of them, don’t act like ‘em.”

-Freddie

“We just do it. We just obey these ridiculous rules because Christ help us if we don’t.”

-Hector

I understand the show’s impulse to make an episode that revolves around the English countryside, and by extension one that gets at the heart of the emotionally suppressed culture of Britain in the 1950s. It’s such a trademark of its era, and a narrative felid ripe with possibilities, that it would be insanity to pass up the opportunity to do an episode like this. Heck, half of every episode of Mad Men is dedicated to emotional suppression, and if The Hour is going to ape The Greatest Drama On Air, it might as well go at it whole hog.

Yet “Episode Three” doesn’t work, plain and simple. Oh, there are elements at play here that work very well (and I’ll get to those in a moment), but on the whole, the episode feels like a place holder that doesn’t tell us much about the characters that we don’t already know, and doesn’t have any real plot momentum apart from the last 10 or so minutes. The story here is quite beautifully told, but when the story doesn’t add up to much, the look of it doesn’t really matter.

I think what tripped this episode up was the fact that the show seems stuck between being a character study, like we saw in the first episode, and being an episodic mystery, as we saw last week. So far, it’s the latter that make for more interesting television, and it was the spy bits that were more interesting tonight, even if they too felt blasé in execution. Watching Isaac follow Kish around the office all day certainly didn’t do anything to advance the story – we already knew that Kish was a shady character, thank you very much – nor was Freddie breaking yet another secret code exactly new territory. Having the two comes together, to the point where we learned that “Bright Stone” was a person, and that McCain may or may not be involved with The Conspiracy, does give the show’s mythology a new stretch, but there’s no real explanation for why these events had to happened now, after a large amount of lull time. (It’s quite possible all of this will become clearer in retrospect, but right now it just frustrates me.)

The events at the Marnie’s family’s country home, meanwhile, were about as perfunctory as one might expect, and just as boring. Starting from the top of the list, we finally saw Bel and Hector hook up, which is expected, but the whole thing felt very lifeless, apart from the beautifully shot scene where they crept around the house, trying to avoid being caught by those playing sardines. It seemed as if the episode was trying to show the moral qualms Bel felt about hooking up with Hector, given how she seemed to be pulling away from him in the beginning of the episode, but then it was a quite sudden turn to them making out, and I was left confused. This plotline gets points for having Marnie actually be smart enough to realize what was going on, but that too seemed like an outlying piece of morality that didn’t have any connection to the actual cheating going on, and so as whole tonight’s inevitable hook-up felt like one muddled mess.

There were a few other bits of the 50s morality – Adam Le Ray is gay, apparently, and McCain arraigned his marriage to Ruth so it could stay hidden – and we learn a bit more about the flack the government is taking for their handling of the Suez crisis, but none of this met up with the main bit of plots – not the love triangle, nor the program, nor The Conspiracy – so none of it felt like it mattered. In fact, I’m calling the entire episode a wash, and considering that this is the third episode in a six episode season, that’s pretty sad.

Quotes, Etc:

Apparently the BBC saves money by having Le Ray’s program, The Man Who Knew, film in the same studio as “The Hour” does.

Man, the Beeb’s so cheap, they don’t even spring for separate sex bathrooms.

“Oh Christ. I won’t actually have to hold a gun, will I?”

“Whose idea was it to sit me next to a journalist?”

“Anything they shoot in London is films and each other.”