InsaneJournal

Kings: Episode Four

Leslie Bibb tries to buy a seat in Parliament. I don’t know what that was about but I’m sure we’ll learn.

Silas returns all the territory taken in “The Battle of Prosperity”, which means he’s just given away David’s hometown. This goes over as well as you'd expect.

David goes to the protest, which turns into a riot in spite of his attempts to convince them to calm down. The people don’t want to give up the land because their families died to get it in the first place, but they’re being asked to give it up in order to avoid further war, and they don’t have to leave but if they choose to stay they will be living in Gath, not Gilboa and this is all sounding very, very familiar.

Michelle is taking hostage when she goes in to try and talk the rebels down. David goes in after her after he learns that Saulas’s snipers will shoot his brothers- David talks them into surrendering. As usual, his good intentioned attempts to fix situations totally screw things up only to end up making him look even more like a hero.

And then we find out that that half the stuff that happened in this episode are the result of Saulas pulling a Lord Vetinari.

Jonathan has convinced his uncle to give him a tv network. You know, he still remains the least appealing aspect of this show and there is only one way they can fix it. That’s by slowly and subtley doing a personality switch with him and David, the more like Jack, David becomes, the more like David, Jack should become.

What’s strangest about this is that you can tell from watching the show that the writers know this story very, very well, they even remember the names of minor characters like random brothers of David (the only thing they skipped out on was Saul's other children, but most of them never do anything important to the story and would just bloat the cast on a tv show anyway). So why did they make this choice to portray Jonathan this way?

There is a scene with Evil Corporate Brother in Law and Reverend Samuels in what appears to be the city’s main temple. And this is intriguing, the way they’ve designed the temple. So far, we’re all pretty much assuming that their religion is Abrahamic. Obviously, I mean, the story is, so their religion must be. Most people are probably also assuming these characters are Default Christians, since a)they haven’t been specifically identified as something else and b) the head priest is called Reverend…and yet the temple contains no crosses or pictures of Jesus. And while it has the “two sections of seats separated by an aisle with a lectern at the front” setup of both Christian churches and many Jewish synagogues it doesn’t *exactly* have Jewish symbolism either. It has this decorating scheme that suggests both but without being either one. Because that’s the only way it’ll work, since we’re not even sure this is happening in our reality.

Oh, and Wes Studi is Avner, hurrah for diversity casting! I mean, he even started getting character development in this episode.