Reviews

How did this happen?

For the first 30, the main emotional pull for us was the relationship between Buzz and Alisha. To do this, the movie spends some time getting a couple of points across:

1. Alisha is the only person Buzz connects with. Alisha is the only person we see Buzz showing interest in knowing; for example, he says he'd "like to meet her" when Alisha brings up the fact that she's engaged to someone. This is crucial because we see that Alisha is important to Buzz.

2. Alisha is a True Friend to Buzz. After Buzz makes the lethal mistake of marooning the entire group of humans on a planet, she doesn't bash him and instead tries to figure out how to move forward. Alisha seems to be a saint because I'd probably at least throw a tantrum when my friend severs me from the rest of my life, but hey that's Alisha. This all makes us, the audience, generally like her.

And those two points makes the ending of the first 30 minutes hit with emotion. I don't want to make it seem like the first 30 is this mindblowing achievement in film. It isn't. It probably wouldn't even reach top 10 moments in Pixar's filmography. They could've made it better by investing even more minutes into Alisha/Buzz's relationship and less into random plot logic things. There's probably only 5 minutes in total of interaction between them. But in film, when you do something right, even if you only invest a handful of minutes into doing it, it can still be fine, if not amazing.

So at the end of the first 30, with the main emotional pull of the movie gone, we're thinking "what now?"

The movie tries to give us an answer to that question. It wants the emotional pull to now be:

Buzz's relationship with the rookies, but mainly Izzy.

And as it turned out, this pull did not work as well as the Alisha story. It doesn't connect. Their relationship feels like it's happening more for logical reasons rather than emotional ones. We never really see what they mean to each other, never really see Buzz sad during the moments he's apart from Izzy.

It's the same for Izzy. When Buzz is taken by Zurg, Izzy does seem distressed for a moment. But then when we cut back to her, she's sad, but not that sad. She seemed more bothered by the fact that she isn't living up to the Hawthorne name. For the rest of the rookies, they're all bantering about instead of being devastated by the fact that Buzz just got taken and is being killed for all they know.

Compared to Alisha's story, the relationships here just don't really seem to matter. I think the writers were just so obsessed with hammering home themes by making the characters tunnel-vision onto their personal issues (Buzz with working with others, Izzy with not living up to her last name) that it overshadowed the relationships. Personal issues we generally don't care about. Relationships we do. It's just how the human brain works. So when everybody reconnects at the end it all feels pretty meh.

I am shocked to see "The Trial ..." is one of the lower rated of Inside No 9. I have some thoughts on why this might be.

This episode has a lot going for it: it might be the funniest episode on the whole damn show ("ecstasy...") and it has a hateful villain who gets his comeuppance. But all of this is tempered with the downbeat ending - that Gadge was in fact a witch. Indeed, the ending is much more of a gut punch than it seems on the surface, because this also means that the bloodthirsty Warren and greedy villagers were after all correct! This is all hard to stomach because it basically turns the theme into "sometimes prosecuting someone without care for truth can still be the right thing" which is obviously hard to accept. I don't think the people watching the ep will be conscious of this fact; instead, they'll just believe it's one of the weaker "meh" episodes because of how "off" the ending feels. I also don't believe that Reece and Steve were going for this when they were writing it. They were most likely just trying to add in one more twist, not realizing the thematic effect on the whole episode that twist would have.

"The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge" is interesting to me because it shows the power of theme. It matters and you should always know what you're saying. And that people will respond to it even if they don't consciously know it.