Few things are more heartbreaking than seeing innocence broken, optimism shattered, and the enchantments of youth blotted out beneath the boot heel of human cruelty. In the second part of "Nature," *Morel Orel offers its own self-deconstruction. Gone is the cartoonishly terrible father and his blithely cheerful son. In their place is a caustic drunk who doesn't care about his son's happiness or well-being, and a young boy who comes to see his father for what he is.
Orel had an illusion about his dad, that Clay was someone to be admired and looked up to. Instead, he sees him at his most cruel, careless, and vicious: blaming Orel for Clay drunkenly shooting his son with his rifle, tearing Orel's favorite lucky shirt to create a makeshift tourniquet, and sleeping off his hangover rather than getting his son medical help. Those illusions are shattered. The end of the episode, where Orel asks his mother about Clay's drinking, is on-the-nose, but it offers a startling truth for a young child -- the side of his father that he sees when the bottle is out, when his father at his harshest and most reprehensible, is who his father really is; the half-decent family man is the facade, not the other way around. That is a devastating realization, and the way the show has Orel stew in that knowledge at the end of the episode is heartrending.
But that is only half the tragedy. After Clay passes out, Orel is forced to shoot an approaching bear who smells the dog that Clay had been roasting on the spit. It's the last little betrayal on this horror of a trip. Orel has no desire to be at war with nature, only to be a part of it in peace. Instead, because of his father, he is forced to take a life, to bloody his hands, and to do the act of a man that he abhors. Orel tells his father one lie and one truth -- the lie coming when he tells his father that it was Clay who shot the bear, not him, a means by which Orel can deny his father even the tiniest of victories, and the truth coming when he tells his father that he hates him. It's an almost shocking moment from a child who's impossibly good-natured, and demonstrates the limits he's been pushed to, the trespasses (yes, Clay, trespasses) that have been visited against him, to make him admit such a thing.
Clay, however, doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything anymore, except himself -- not his wife, not his family, not the son whom he treats like an anchor rather than a blessing. More tonally consistent than the prior episode, the second part of nature pulls no punches in depicting the ugliness of Clay and people like him, and the tragedy of their "loved ones," forced to suffer their negligence and wrath in equal measure. "Nature," is not a typical episode of Orel. Orel doesn't misinterpret a sermon; there's no fractured commandment at the end; and there's very little that's funny. Instead, it's the sum of all that came before it, the genuine, hideous truth lurking beneath the comedy, the germ of awfulness that undergirds the show's satire, laid bare in its demoralizing glory. It's as avant garde a way to end a season of a mostly silly, sometimes cruel little puppet show as I could imagine. And it's an experience, not a pleasant one exactly, but an affecting and worthy one nonetheless.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-08-02T02:21:30Z
Few things are more heartbreaking than seeing innocence broken, optimism shattered, and the enchantments of youth blotted out beneath the boot heel of human cruelty. In the second part of "Nature," *Morel Orel offers its own self-deconstruction. Gone is the cartoonishly terrible father and his blithely cheerful son. In their place is a caustic drunk who doesn't care about his son's happiness or well-being, and a young boy who comes to see his father for what he is.
Orel had an illusion about his dad, that Clay was someone to be admired and looked up to. Instead, he sees him at his most cruel, careless, and vicious: blaming Orel for Clay drunkenly shooting his son with his rifle, tearing Orel's favorite lucky shirt to create a makeshift tourniquet, and sleeping off his hangover rather than getting his son medical help. Those illusions are shattered. The end of the episode, where Orel asks his mother about Clay's drinking, is on-the-nose, but it offers a startling truth for a young child -- the side of his father that he sees when the bottle is out, when his father at his harshest and most reprehensible, is who his father really is; the half-decent family man is the facade, not the other way around. That is a devastating realization, and the way the show has Orel stew in that knowledge at the end of the episode is heartrending.
But that is only half the tragedy. After Clay passes out, Orel is forced to shoot an approaching bear who smells the dog that Clay had been roasting on the spit. It's the last little betrayal on this horror of a trip. Orel has no desire to be at war with nature, only to be a part of it in peace. Instead, because of his father, he is forced to take a life, to bloody his hands, and to do the act of a man that he abhors. Orel tells his father one lie and one truth -- the lie coming when he tells his father that it was Clay who shot the bear, not him, a means by which Orel can deny his father even the tiniest of victories, and the truth coming when he tells his father that he hates him. It's an almost shocking moment from a child who's impossibly good-natured, and demonstrates the limits he's been pushed to, the trespasses (yes, Clay, trespasses) that have been visited against him, to make him admit such a thing.
Clay, however, doesn't care. He doesn't care about anything anymore, except himself -- not his wife, not his family, not the son whom he treats like an anchor rather than a blessing. More tonally consistent than the prior episode, the second part of nature pulls no punches in depicting the ugliness of Clay and people like him, and the tragedy of their "loved ones," forced to suffer their negligence and wrath in equal measure. "Nature," is not a typical episode of Orel. Orel doesn't misinterpret a sermon; there's no fractured commandment at the end; and there's very little that's funny. Instead, it's the sum of all that came before it, the genuine, hideous truth lurking beneath the comedy, the germ of awfulness that undergirds the show's satire, laid bare in its demoralizing glory. It's as avant garde a way to end a season of a mostly silly, sometimes cruel little puppet show as I could imagine. And it's an experience, not a pleasant one exactly, but an affecting and worthy one nonetheless.