Gettin' My Eps In: Interior Chinatown S1E6, Common Side Effects S1E3

Reality continues to break down in a couple of series that are strange and fascinating.

Interior Chinatown
Season 1, Episode 6: “Translator”
Written by Keiko Green
Directed by Stephanie Liang
Streaming on Hulu

What is the purpose of metafiction? If you’re going to create a story that calls attention to its fictional nature, there should be a reason for doing so, right? While this sort of thing can sometimes come off as experimentation for the sake of itself, when it really works is when it’s used to question the nature of stories being told. Why are certain stories highlighted over others? Why do some characters get emphasized while others fade into the background? What are creators even doing when they deliver popular entertainment that’s so formulaic that plots basically resolve themselves while the characters go through the motions?

Those are the questions that Interior Chinatown seems to be asking, and at its best, it can seem like an exhilarating trip behind the scenes of the kind of TV show that people watch without thinking about too much. At this point in the season, multiple characters are beginning to question why their lives are playing out the way they do, and it’s starting to cause reality itself to break down around them. In some cases, that is making different genres crash into each other, while in others, it’s finally providing some answers about whether they can find a place in a world that doesn’t usually acknowledge them.

In this episode, it seems like Willis (Jimmy O. Yang) may finally be getting some answers from his Uncle Wong (Archie Kao), who seems to have some sort of illegal smuggling operation going on and who may have been involved in the disappearance of Willis’ brother 12 years ago. Except it turns out that what Wong has been doing is helping people who have been showing up in Chinatown, giving them food and clothing and making sure they can integrate into the community. Who are these people? Maybe they’re extras who will be filling out the backgrounds of the cop show that these characters are all living in, and while they’re treated as faceless nobodies, Wong is doing what he can to recognize their humanity.

Unfortunately, Willis doesn’t get very many answers from Wong, because Lana (Chloe Bennett) and the police show up to arrest him. She had been in contact with Willis and believed he was in danger, so she interrupted the case that had been playing out on this week’s episode of Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit and solved it instantly, noting that the mysteries the characters investigate tend to resolve themselves with minimal effort from the show’s leads. By concluding the current investigation, she can force everyone to move on to a new case. While Green (Lisa Gilroy) is somewhat perturbed by this, Turner (Sullivan Jones), who had already been questioning his role in these cases, is delighted by this unexpected turn of events, since it’s a deviation from what he had begun to realize was a repetitive formula that he has been living through.

Now that Willis knows that Wong isn’t a criminal, he’s worried about what will happen, since he knows that once someone gets arrested by Turner and Green, he’s going to be found guilty, because the nature of the show requires them to catch criminals. He and Lana will need to scramble and figure out how they might be able to demonstrate Wong’s innocence.

At the same time, Turner and Green are getting weirded out, because Wong seems to be related to previous cases that have already been closed. Due to the episodic nature of their show, previous cases are usually forgotten, and reopening old cases is unheard of. The show seems to be changing around them, turning into a serialized narrative, which is making them incredibly confused. There’s an amusing scene in which they start pinning pictures of people involved in these cases to a corkboard, but rather than constructing a complex web and connecting items with red string, Turner simply pins a large question mark to the board, indicating that he’s uncertain about what this all means, followed by an exclamation point showing that he’s excited about these new developments.

As the show changes around the characters, it really does seem like reality is breaking down, with people sometimes flickering in and out of existence and the backgrounds glitching into new configurations. Perhaps most notably, a dramatic scene in the interrogation room is interrupted by the arrival of Willis’ childhood friend Audrey (Annie Chang), who is a lawyer. She’s apparently a cast member on a legal drama (in a previous episode, she noted that all of her coworkers at her law firm seem to be sleeping with each other), and she shows up here to rescue Wong from the kind of tactics that TV cops use that would be horrific violations of people’s rights in the real world.

Following Audrey’s departure, we can see that reality has changed because the blue lighting that the show usually assumes whenever Green and Turner are on screen is no longer present. As Willis laments that he’s a faceless nobody, Turner actually calls him by his name, reading from a case file related to Willis’ brother. The show finally seems to be acknowledging that Willis is a real person, and maybe he’ll be able to make some progress in his quest to find out the truth. However, that immediately becomes complicated when Lana confesses that she had been in contact with Willis’ brother, which may start to confirm my suspicions that she’s at least somewhat aware of the nature of their reality and the fact that she is a fictional character.

We’ll have to see how this will continue to develop, but in the meantime, we’re still getting some enjoyable scenes featuring Willis’ friends and family in Chinatown. Choi (Ronny Chieng) is continuing to enjoy success as the mean waiter that white people like. There’s a pretty hilarious scene in which he saunters through the restaurant’s dining room with Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money” playing in the background, abusing customers left and right to everyone’s delight. But while he’s achieving success in this role, he’s still not happy, and he’s angry at the way Willis has abandoned him and has no idea what is actually happening in his community.

As for Willis’ mom (Diana Lin), she’s still trying to make it as a real estate agent, and she has an open house for the apartment of the elderly neighbor who died a few episodes ago. While she does her best to follow the instructions of her more successful colleague and make the apartment seem nice while downplaying the low-class nature of the neighborhood, she doesn’t have much success until a couple of non-Asian guys show up. They’re delighted by how “gritty” the setting is, and it seems like they’ll be moving in and enjoying the close proximity to the Golden Palace restaurant. This might be a comment on gentrification and the ways people who are supposedly looking for an “authentic” experience end up pushing out the very people they believe they’re celebrating.

Getting back to the questions asked at the beginning of this review, it seems like this show is using its metafictional nature for multiple purposes. As I’ve noted from the beginning, it’s about the types of characters that don’t usually get highlighted in TV shows and movies, but it’s also about questioning the types of stories that are being told. Willis’ actions seem to be deepening the show he’s a part of, but there are some growing pains as the characters start to escape from the patterns they have become used to. At the same time, Willis is losing his connection to what had been important in his life, and the show may be questioning what he’s giving up by trying to assimilate into the larger narrative. As always, I’ll be fascinated to see how the show continues to explore these ideas, and I’ll do my best to examine what it’s trying to say. I just hope the journey will be as interesting for others as it is for me.

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Common Side Effects
Season 1, Episode 3: “Hildy”
Written by Emma Barrie
Directed by Vincent Tsui
Streaming on Max

With some shows, it can be difficult to figure out what to discuss for each episode. Common Side Effects seems to be following an “and then this happens, and then that happens” approach, making it difficult to write about a particular episode without simply recounting the events that took place. Three episodes in, I feel like I still don’t fully have a handle on this series, so teasing out its themes and figuring out what it’s trying to say is a work in progress, and more viewing will be needed to get a better picture of the show as a whole.

The show’s version of a thriller is continuing to play out, with Marshall (Dave King) on the run from the people who are trying to hunt him down and stop him from making the mushroom he discovered known to the public. He meets up with an elderly woman named Hildy (Sue Rose) who is something of a mentor to him. It seems that she had spent her life looking for this particular mushroom, which can somehow heal all disease and injury. She has come to believe that it doesn’t exist, but after learning about the circumstances in which Marshall found it, the two of them realize that the mushroom didn’t just appear by happenstance; it developed due to both the climate in the valley where it was discovered and the runoff from a chemical plant operated by a pharmaceutical company. This adds an interesting wrinkle to what the show may be trying to say about natural cures vs. artificially-created medications.

However, rather than dwelling on the implications of how the mushroom came to be, Hildy insists on experiencing its effects, forcing Marshall’s hand by taking out a gun and shooting herself so that he’ll have to give her the mushroom to heal her. This leads to one of the wild sequences of animation that are what made me want to watch this show in the first place, with Hildy experiencing a weird vision of her own head lying on the ground, decomposing into a skull, completely disintegrating, and then reforming, only to repeat the sequence over and over. It’s pretty cool, and I’m definitely hoping for more of this kind of thing as the show goes on.

This vision also starts to indicate that there may be something else going on with these mushrooms, since Hildy sees a strange figure in her vision. It’s a little guy who looks kind of like the characters from the webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship, with rounded features and an inexpressive face. A couple other characters also take the mushroom in this episode, and they see something similar. Perhaps there’s some sort of higher intelligence at work, or something related to a collective unconscious. We’ll have to see how these ideas develop in future episodes.

As for the other main plotline of the series, Frances (Emily Pendergast) may have given up her idea that she can find Marshall’s mushroom, and she’s resigned herself to carrying out the wishes of her pharmaceutical CEO boss (Mike Judge). We get to know some of her motivations, which are not just to make money and get ahead in her job, but to make sure she can provide for her mother, who is experiencing dementia and may not be able to continue living in her current nursing home. When Frances goes to visit her mother, she finds that Marshall had come to see her and left one of the mushrooms. Frances tries feeding some of the mushroom to her mother, assuming that it will be an instant cure like she saw when Marshall demonstrated how it brought a pigeon back to life. But when it seems to have no effect, she despairs at the idea that the mushroom could be the miracle drug she was looking for. However, maybe in cases where people had conditions that took years to develop, the mushroom just takes longer to take effect. We get some hints that Frances’ mother might be experiencing an improvement to her condition, but we’ll have to wait for future episodes to see how this will play out.

There are a few other things that take place in the episode, but they seem like incremental forward motion rather than anything major. It’s probably best to leave any discussion of these events until future episodes, which will hopefully continue to move the plot forward in a meaningful way. As of the end of this episode, Frances is accompanying her boss on a business trip to Switzerland, which would seem to take her pretty far away from the rest of the plot, but hopefully the show will manage to keep everything tied together. Marshall is also dealing with more and more problems, since he’s now being pursued by Hildy as well as government agents and mercenaries working for the pharmaceutical company. I don’t know where exactly the show is heading, but as long as it can deliver nice animation, goofy characters, and strange events, I expect I’ll enjoy it for the most part.