“Nicky” is more dreamlike than any of the episodes before
it, not just because of the music and editing—though the last two minutes lean hard into the dream-like music and
editing—but because the entire narrative hangs together like a dream. Nicky
floats in and out of different scenes, and people float in and out of her
proximity, with little or no explanation. Her friends disappear in the blink of
an eye. Puck pulls her away toward an unclear destination, for no reason they’re
willing to say aloud. Awhina flags Puck down and then immediately moves on.
Puck hands Nicky a set of pajamas and then leaves the room without saying
goodbye. She passes by Bryn being sick in the garden, Poppy and Thea looking
after Awhina in the bedroom, Puck laughing at Deme and Zander in the hall. More
of the cast shows up in this episode than in any other, most of them for less
than a minute.
The episode therefore works to the extent that you can deal
with uncertainty. We’re entirely inside Nicky’s head. There’s no cheating—no
camera angles or music or lingering shots that emphasize anything Nicky wouldn’t
find important. The camera keeps its distance. We see only what Nicky sees, and
by and large, we learn only what Nicky learns. Why is Awhina looking for Bryn?
The answer isn’t in this episode. Why does Bryn blow up at Puck? You might be
able to tell from information in “Puck” or “Bryn,” but nothing in “Nicky” will
tell you. Why does Puck latch on to Nicky? Nicky herself has no idea, so the
episode provides no obvious clues. These questions have answers, and they take
only a little thought to figure out, but that little bit of thought is
important. It aligns the initial viewing experience of “Nicky” with the experience
of Nicky, who doesn’t know most of these people, and who has no context in
which to understand Bryn or Puck or Awhina’s actions.
In contrast to the impenetrability of the plot, much of the
dialogue in “Nicky” is pointed. Nicky and Puck basically speak in nothing but
thematic statements (digressions on the fashion of rock stars excepted).
Neither teenage nihilists nor teenage activists are known for keeping their
life philosophies quiet, so the conversation doesn’t read as particularly
forced or unrealistic, the way it might if two adults met at a party and
immediately started arguing about the meaning of life. But we’ve already seen
Nicky and Puck have this argument, in “Petra,” and their conversation here covers
no new philosophical or personal ground. Nor is it as funny or tense as the
conversation in “Petra.” In fact, it drags a little, something no other scene
in Bright Summer Night has yet done.
Tellingly, the most interesting—and revealing—part of Nicky
and Puck’s conversation has nothing to do with philosophy. Puck, trying to
elicit a reaction from Nicky, steals a drink from a passerby and splashes it on
Nicky’s shirt. Nicky leaves the room, and Puck follows her, saying, “Are you
angry at me, Nicky? Tell me that you hate me.” “It’s okay, Puck,” Nicky says. “I
forgive you.”
It’s been clear from the start that Puck intentionally alienates
people to cover up their real desire for connection, and here’s a concrete
example of that: Puck antagonizes Nicky, spills a drink on her, but also
follows her from the room. And though Nicky’s speech in the wash room about
kindness mattering more than being cool tells you something about her, her
reply to Puck tells you the same thing much more convincingly. One character’s
actions match their philosophy, and one’s don’t. Puck talks a lot about nothing
mattering and no one watching, but when it comes down to it, they want to
matter to others. But Nicky both speaks and performs kindness, and the giraffe
pajamas prove pretty well that she doesn’t care about being cool. There’s no
artifice to Nicky. She’s not covering for anything.
Nicky knows who she is, and she’s bursting with things to
say, but she has no one to say them to. That’s the story of “Nicky”: a girl
wandering through a confusing world, looking for someone who will listen to
her. Perhaps that’s why the tone shifts when Puck disappears. For the first
time in the episode, Nicky is alone, and the music turns “eerie” and “unnerving,”
as the closed captioning accurately puts it. Then she stumbles across Awhina,
who’s high out of her mind, and is perhaps the one person at the party who’s
happy to sit and watch the girl in the giraffe pajamas rap about climate
change. The music clears—still dream-like, but now pleasant, almost triumphant—and
Nicky finally gives her performance. Now that Nicky’s story is resolved, the
camera leaves her for the first time in the episode, pulling away in a series
of jump cuts until she’s just a blur in the background. The music turns eerie
again as Deme and Zander and Lena run by, Puck laughing behind them, heading
straight toward the next episode.
It’s an incredibly effective sequence, of a kind with the
endings of “Lena” and “Bryn,” with its moody, off-kilter open-endedness. Some
of the most memorable endings in film and television are questions; they leave
you in the middle of a thought, with the unsettling feeling of having run off a
cliff. Think of the spinning top in Inception,
or Jack and Ana Lucia staring at each other in Lost’s “Collision,” or Dawn’s hand reaching out to but not quite
touching the cadaver in Buffy the Vampire
Slayer’s “The Body.” None of BSN’s endings are quite that good (“The Body”
is in the running for the best episode of television ever made, so, y’know),
but they’re in the same family. They stick in your mind the same way. The
Candle Wasters know how to end an episode.
Random Bits
Still no water, hmm?
I laughed for a full minute when Nicky put on the giraffe
pajamas. If TCW were really committed
to transmedia, they’d have had a note thanking Beatrice Duke for her
contributions to costuming. (Although I note that Harriett Maire and Jake
McGregor are credited as Beatrice Duke and Benedick Hobbes, which is kind of
hysterical in its own right.)
“And I shall sing that they shall hear, I am not afraid!”
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