Emerald City - 'Everybody Lies'

Guess who's coming to dinner.

This week on Emerald City, people being shitty to one another. Surprise!

Eamonn is actually surprisingly pleasant to the captive Lucas, whom he knows as Roan, a good friend who disappeared. Lucas lacks Eamonn's conviction that he must have been loyal, and manages to run down a guard who witnessed him apparently bugging out and turning on his own. Convinced that he is scum, Lucas hands himself in.

The Munja'kin chief hands Dorothy over to West, in exchange for the promised – but never delivered – release of his wife from the Prison of the Abject. West wants to know why Dorothy killed East and for whom she acted, and using her mother's image to get close steals some of Dorothy's memories. She becomes convinced that East was going to warn her against Glinda's machinations and becomes even more paranoid than usual. At the same time she embraces Tip as her new favourite and sick burns her former top maid. When Tip helps Dorothy to escape, the former favourite tries to stop them, but Tip is able to pin the blame for the escape on her rival.

Jack accompanies his new mistress and her father, the King of Ev, to the Emerald City, where the Wizard is seeking to secure a supply of weapons to use against the Beast Forever. Anna and Elizabeth publicly dispute the nature of the Beast, however, damaging his credibility as the leading authority on the subject. The Wizard tries to deal privately with Ev, but realises that the King is quite senile and that Langwidere blames the Emerald City for abandoning Ev to the Beast last time. Riding high, she tells Jack that she bought him to be her friend. Touched by her confession that she actually has no better idea how to make friends, he agrees to pal around the Festival of the Beast with her. Langwidere gets harassed by lunks and Jack flattens them – on account of how he's literally metal AF – which turns out, in one of the series' most predictable moves, to really rev Langwidere's engine.

 

"Why would I make my own friends; I have people for that."

There is one interesting note in this sequence, which is that when Langwidere kisses Jack, he tells her 'friends don't do that.' This statement is incorrect in an insidiously toxic fashion, but is a not unreasonable takeaway from his recent smooch-related fall.

Finally, Dorothy reaches the Wizard and finds him listening to Pink Floyd on a gramophone. She asks if he knows her mother, and he responds: "Dorothy? You've come home."

I kind of don't know what I make of Emerald City. It's… interesting, without being involving, if that even makes sense. The ideas are good, the aesthetic is kind of unique, but like the original Tin Woodman it lacks a heart. Large chunks of the action are predictable, and consequently lacking in emotional punch, and there's a lot of expository dialogue. The whole thing is actually kind of stagey. Unless next week's episode inspires me greatly, I shall probably keep watching, but stop reviewing, at least episode by episode.