Underground undercover patriot12/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Another scene finds an especially brooding and aimless John elegantly stewing in a large concrete tube while characters from his life and murky saga walk by - his Milwaukee life passing before him. ![]() ![]() That character, Stephen Choo (Marcus Toji), works on a gradual recovery from a debilitating brain injury, and recall of his accident, one of many intriguing subplots here. Scenes of note, starting in the first 10 minutes, include that of our man John pushing a competitor for his piping job into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Along the way, from John’s fake job with a piping company out of Milwaukee to covert operations in Luxembourg (love those offbeat locations, coloring the loopy feel of the enterprise), he will dip into his old life as a folkie, singing potentially incriminating lyrics about his life, suicidal instincts, and other surreal, alt-indie subjects. At the center is the wonderfully unlikely hero/anti-hero, the depressive would-be folk singer, John Lakeman (Michael Dorman, oozing laconic charisma, and just generally oozing and artfully moping), who has pursued his “fallback” gig - in undercover CIA work, with assassinations as a side specialty, following in the family business footsteps of CIA veteran father (Terry O’Quinn). Story matters, of course, in Patriot, but so do atmosphere, an implied forward/sideways momentum rather than a clear-cut, cliffhanger-goosed exposition structure, and a certain dark mystique that is all its own. On the plus side, though, these elasticized plot experiments take advantage of New TV’s fluidity and can also foil TV/film writers (and makers of dreaded movie trailers) indulging in the increasingly distressing sin of plot spoilage. Secondly, my dog, Harper, literally ate half of my notes (yes, she ate my homework, no doubt perturbed by the big, light-emitted rectangle in the living room robbing her of attention). My own travails - and perverse pleasure - in trying to keep the Patriot story straight was hampered by two specific problems: watching episodes sporadically while also checking out episodes of Fargo and Peaks made for a dizzy swirl of characters and plot-tracking fog. (Side note: As of episode six of Twin Peaks, I still don’t really know what’s going on and how the multiple plot strands will eventually come together, and that blissful confusion is part of the addictive beauty). Gotta love the eccentric plot mapping, characters who don’t necessarily come clean or readily explain themselves, and a dry, quirky humor mixed with occasional bursts of ultra-violence (or the hints of afterglow thereof), cohering into a particular and peculiar new brand of gothic dramedy on the tube.įor further practical consumer advice, I would suggest absorbing the labyrinthine Patriot creator Steve Conrad’s nine-episode series binge-style to avoid distraction. In that spirit: If you like TV’s Fargo and Twin Peaks, you might well like Patriot (full series now available on Amazon), which shares with those other private-screen classics certain endearing qualities (if you’re a person who likes that sort of thing). Amazon’s Patriot stars Michael Dorman as a folk singer/intelligence officer who goes undercover as an employee at a Midwestern industrial piping firm.Īs irritating and ultimately depersonalized as the interweb’s invasive personal recommendation pushiness is (“If you like this, you might like this … or this, or this, or this … credit card info here”), it can admittedly be helpful, especially in an age of overabundant options in our quest for products and cultural diversions. ![]()
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