Date of release: August 9, 2019 (Netflix)
written by: Liz Flahive, Carly Mensch
directed by: Claire Scanlon
And for the first time in the show’s run, a real-life event has been used to bookend an episode while also defining the emotional state of most of the characters throughout the half hour plus change. I was wondering when that would happen, but in hindsight, it was sort of logical that the characters would not be interested in the national news when they were working for a local network. Granted, if something tragic happens, you are being emotionally affected no matter what, but at least back then, the women and Sam had the opportunity to work through it and cancel the live taping and maybe collect themselves for the day and try again the next evening.
Opening Night in Las Vegas is a little more complicated – cancel one
performance and your entire engagement is in danger. Opening Night is
the thing everyone looks forward to, and if that gets canceled for
whatever reason, people might think the show is not ready, which means
they will not think about it watching at a later date. And voila, you get
emotionally tortured whether or not to perform on a tragic day like
this. Now I am wondering and asking myself what happened with shows that
were playing on September eleventh in 2001. I cannot imagine that either Las
Vegas or Broadway and Off-Broadway had opening nights (I think an early
September date is still outside the season, but do not quote me on that),
but shows were most likely canceled. Then again, 9/11 was a much darker
day than the Challenger explosion, even though in the initial stage,
you were not watching 9/11 happening live on screen. That coverage began a
few minutes after the first plane hit, but in the case of the
Challenger explosion, you saw all of it as it happened from
the beginning to the end. On 9/11, only local New Yorkers witnessed the beginning.
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| They bear witness to one of America's darkest days. |
It was quite the solid season premiere. The fire alarm halfway through the episode was the metaphor of where the episode stood with its characters and the story in general: It is a reboot, it is a way to turn off and back on again and to get some new gas in the tank because you were forced to get out of this casino comfort zone. GLOW is sort of in the same boat at the moment: The characters have left Los Angeles and need to get situated in their new surroundings, with their family and friends 300 miles in the distance. Doing your job in front of different people whom you would consider strangers is a little harder to do when you have anxiety or are not used to crowds like this.
Besides that, wrestling in front of a daily crowd of a few hundred is a little more heart-racing than wrestling in front of a live audience crowd of less than a hundred and a TV audience of more than a thousand – of course you would get a little nervous in the process, which showed when you look at Ruth. She needed Opening Night to be perfect, but because a tragic and deathly disaster happened just hours before opening night, she thought that the show would be made better by acknowledging the explosion. She was right, but she also did not know any better. People go see a wrestling show on opening night not to get assaulted by real-life events and emotions, they go see those shows to have fun, to distract themselves from what just happened. You are certainly allowed to mention the disaster at the beginning of your show for a few seconds and have a minute of silence if you wish, but then everything is back to business. Damn, this is opening night and the women had to deal with this stuff already...
I was a little disappointed that the viewers were not allowed to celebrate opening night as well. Sure, the rehearsals looked like the first show was cobbled together from what the first two seasons established already, but I would have loved seeing how the crowd reacted and whether the show could be considered a success (the latter might be a premise of the season, so I can understand that the writers did not want us to see whether or not opening night was packed). I also would have loved seeing some stuff from the opening night afterparty, but either some of it might come with the next episode or there will be nothing because this season of GLOW is less about the fun spectacle and more about the emotional state of and the relationships between the characters.
So, where do we stand after this episode when it comes to the characters? Ruth and Debbie seem to have buried the hatchet for good, making me wonder if their conflict has been resolved (with the ankle break in the previous season being the inciting incident in the conclusion of that story) or if it might come back to haunt them in the future. Ruth and Sam seem to be flirting with each other, but because one of them already has a partner at home, it is turning into the simple “unrequited love” kind of story, which you can watch on most of the television shows in existence.
Bash and Rhonda are a newlywed couple, which means this will either be a marriage taken seriously by the two characters, or Bash will come to realize whatever feelings he has for other people. I still think he is closeted, but at one point this has to become a character arc for him, right? If he realizes he is in the closet, it would add drama to his marriage with Rhonda, who will most likely get her heart broken momentarily.
And Debbie is probably making her way through the penises
and six-packs of Las Vegas, which she is definitely allowed to do.
Having her sample the pool and comment on everything may be a great way
to bring some sexy humor into the narrative, and I do not mind that at all. Yes, even I want to see some nude people on my television shows, I am only human.
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| Finding all the sins is not hard to do in Vegas. |
All this does not promise that this season has a lot of wrestling though. Sam and Bash were talking about doing the same show every night, which means there will be the same matches and the same storytelling night after night, essentially breaking the unsaid promise that the wrestling show will also be a variety show. One can only hope that GLOW is not taking the wrestling out of this season and has it replaced with character arcs left and right, because then I would have to question if the writers even knew what kind of cultural phenomenon they could have had in their hands. I guess the next episode will showcase whether wrestling is still an on-screen topic for GLOW or if the writers have decided to circle around and make a character drama out of it.
