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East of Eden<\/a><\/p>\n The Great Try<\/p>\n \n Season 1<\/p>\n Episode 6\n <\/p>\n \n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n 4 stars<\/p>\n ****\n <\/p>\n \n East of Eden\u2019s penultimate episode introduces the teen versions of Cal and Aron, and wonders what it means to be good. As someone who is forever thinking about the excellence of Tony Gilroy\u2019s Andor<\/a>, three words from that series kept running through my head while watching this penultimate episode of East of Eden: \u201cRemember this: try.\u201d<\/a> Those words are written in \u201cThe Trail of Political Consciousness,\u201d a manifesto by young anti-Empire rebel Nemik<\/a>, and they go directly against Yoda\u2019s \u201cDo or do not, there is no try,\u201d from The Empire Strikes Back. Gilroy was telling us that actually, life isn\u2019t a series of binaries. You\u2019re lucky if you get the opportunity to take multiple stabs at something, to start again, to keep throwing yourself into a cause<\/a>. The entirety of your existence does not need to be defined as one experience. The world might put limits on you, but you don\u2019t also need to put limits on yourself. Don\u2019t do the work of the system for it. Dare to try.<\/p>\n Nearly all of our East of Eden characters are at inflection points. Time marches forward. War is coming. Technology is advancing at a rapid clip. How are they going to meet this moment \u2014 through judgment and isolation, or camaraderie and involvement? How will they hold onto their morals in a time that is making it easier to abandon them? These questions involve Adam, Lee, and Kate, but mostly they concern Cal and Aron, who midway through the episode become teenagers played by Joseph Zada and Joe Anders. Zoe Kazan has talked about<\/a> how budget limits cut the series from eight episodes to seven, and that squeeze is felt in \u201cThe Great Try.\u201d With the brothers especially, there\u2019s a little bit too much telling us via dialogue, rather than showing us with full scenes. What kind of \u201cbad\u201d things does Cal think about? In what ways has he not taken responsibility, as Adam says? How do the brothers relate to each other when they spend time together? It\u2019s part of the text that Cal evokes Charles, and Aron evokes Adam, and there\u2019s a family lineage that\u2019s plaguing the boys. I just wish there was more interrogation of the theme in this episode, rather than repetition of it.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with Lee, whose storyline in \u201cDeparture\u201d gets its concluding chapter here. Whatever equality Lee hoped for in San Francisco, he doesn\u2019t get it. To the white blonde man at the real estate office, Lee isn\u2019t an American, and the guy refuses to rent him a space for his bookstore. When Lee steps back out onto the bustling streets of Chinatown, amid the red hanging lanterns and people in traditional clothes, he stands still, and everyone moves around him; they don\u2019t register him at all. There\u2019s tragedy in this image, but it\u2019s another of East of Eden\u2019s messages: don\u2019t feel sorry for yourself. Lau says as much when Lee finally meets with him. Lee had avoided Lau for years, we learn, because he was embarrassed by his work as a domestic, and he thought Scholar Lau would be disappointed. But Scholar Lau is really Lucky Lau running a baccarat game, and he won\u2019t accept Lee\u2019s self-pity or his disapproval of how Lau is living. \u201cAre you so much a child still to think anyone gets the life they planned? Make what you can with what you have,\u201d Lau advises him. Go back to the home where he felt like he belonged. Try again with the bookstore another time. \u201cLife, if you\u2019re lucky, is long.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the new mindset that Lee brings back to the Trasks, who were lost without him. (Adam doesn\u2019t know how to wash dishes, bless this utterly useless man.) Lee will no longer allow himself to feel lesser in this family to whom he\u2019s devoted his life. He\u2019ll take Adam\u2019s offered raise, but more than anything, he wants free rein over the household, and Adam\u2019s acknowledgment that Lee is raising Cal and Aron correctly. \u201cTry harder,\u201d Lee says when Adam insists that he\u2019s been a more present parent, and I love the rhythm of this conversation between Christopher Abbott and Hoon Lee, how they measure each other\u2019s words in a calm, adult argument. And I also love that Adam doesn\u2019t treat Lee like he\u2019s a failure for not opening the bookstore, and Lee doesn\u2019t treat himself like he\u2019s a failure for not opening the bookstore, his \u201cgreat try.\u201d A dream doesn\u2019t die if it\u2019s impossible. It can be put away, like a treasure in a jewelry box, to be reconsidered down the line. There\u2019s such beauty in that idea, and such grace. (When Cal touched Lee\u2019s hand and said \u201cLee, you came home,\u201d is about when I started crying.)<\/p>\n \u201cThe Great Try\u201d then jumps forward four years, from 1912 to 1916; the boys are now 15 years old, and further apart than ever. Aron is inseparable from Abra and helps Adam at his ice plant. Cal is a poor student \u2014 \u201cIf I tried, people might expect something of me\u201d \u2014 and frustrated with how little time he gets to spend with his brother. (Is he jealous of Abra for hogging Aron\u2019s time, or Aron for hogging Abra\u2019s time? Discuss.) And when Cal tries to help Adam with his \u201cbig try\u201d business idea to transport California produce across the country in refrigerated train cars, Adam shuts him down. I\u2019m assuming if Adam knew what that rejection would inspire Cal to do, he probably would have let the boy assist. But instead, Cal ends up wandering the streets of Salinas, and then \u2014 after learning from Adam\u2019s old ranch hand Rabbit that the proprietor of Kate\u2019s is \u201cpoor old Trask\u2019s\u201d wife \u2014 inside the brothel. Kate sees Cal, Cal sees Kate, and their shared look is pained, shocked, bittersweet, all those ugly things that Adam never wanted his sons to experience but that Cal now is, because Adam never told them the truth.<\/p>\n Kate has her own problems. Four years after Charles\u2019s death, she\u2019s still hearing his voice, which has become half-conscience, half-devil on her shoulder, and one of the employees who knew her from Faye\u2019s, a woman named Ethel (Amelia Reynolds), is back in town, threatening to spill her theory that Kate killed Faye. Kate gets her muscle Joe (Brad McMurray) and the judge that she has incriminating pictures of to bounce Ethel from town, but Charles is her paranoia, all those worries she\u2019s kept at bay for years finally beginning to crawl up her spine. \u201cShe could come back,\u201d Charles whispers, and I wrote in my notes, \u201cShe\u2019s losing it.\u201d Kate has all kinds of leverage on people, but she wasn\u2019t prepared to be genuinely threatened, just like she wasn\u2019t prepared for Adam to actually walk away from her back in 1911. And she certainly wasn\u2019t prepared for Cal to find her, this boy she abandoned and never thought about again.<\/p>\n Kate\u2019s conversation with Cal is another version of the conversation she had with Adam, and again, Kate\u2019s thrown off by the honesty of the Trasks, the guilelessness. Florence Pugh plays Cathy\u2019s \u201cOh, you like them\u201d as if she means to mock Cal for loving Adam and Aron, but in the face of Cal\u2019s innocence, her cruelty is embarrassing. It\u2019s only when she is honest \u2014 quietly telling Cal, \u201cChrist, no\u201d in response to his \u201cDon\u2019t you ever wish that you hadn\u2019t left?\u201d \u2014 that she genuinely hurts Cal. Her steadfast rejection, coupled with her teary admission of the \u201cmeanness\u201d Cal fears so much (\u201cI fooled every one of them, just when they thought they could tell me what to do\u201d), tears this boy apart. The truth tears Cathy apart, too, seen by how quickly she tosses back a little bottle of something \u2014 some sort of sedative, maybe morphine? \u2014 after Cal leaves. Charles\u2019s voice warns Cathy, \u201cDon\u2019t drink too much,\u201d but Cathy already feels too far gone.<\/p>\n And maybe Cal is too far gone, too. His conversation with Cathy seems to wipe away an earlier lesson Lee tried to give him about how he\u2019s not his ancestry. Lee had insisted, \u201cWhatever you do, it will be you who does it,\u201d but the choice Cal makes to hoard beans in order to sell them at a markup later on, as the Great War progresses and Europe starts running out of food, isn\u2019t altruistic. His entrepreneurial ambition is driven by wanting to show up Aron, who is horrified at the idea of being poor after Adam loses most of their money on a failed shipment of lettuce to New York. Cal isn\u2019t doing all this out of the goodness of his heart. He\u2019s doing this to get one over on his brother, and war profiteering (which Adam was disgusted by) is a particularly nasty way to do it. All of this leads to a question that East of Eden is circling broadly, but that it wants us to answer for ourselves: How do you teach morality? The Trask boys are meant to represent a spectrum of good to bad, but as they\u2019re encouraged to make individual choices, that also opens up the possibility of evil choices, selfish choices, destructive choices. How do you reconcile the power of free will with its ability to harm other people? Just having a choice doesn\u2019t mean the choice you will make is correct.<\/p>\n \u2022 In the book, we don\u2019t follow Lee to San Francisco; he leaves, and then he\u2019s back, telling Adam, \u201cNothing happened to me. I got lonesome \u2026 Isn\u2019t that enough? \u2026 I don\u2019t want a bookstore. I think I knew it before I got on the train, but I took all this time to make sure.\u201d I appreciate how much time the series devotes to his excursion, and to giving us another father-and-son moment between him and Lau.<\/p>\n \u2022 Joseph Zada plays young Haymitch in the upcoming adaptation of The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping<\/a>, and you should check him out in the Australian series Invisible Boys, about four queer Australian teens struggling to live authentically in their conservative community. Joe Anders (Kate Winslet\u2019s son) was in the recent Cape Fear<\/a> adaptation on Apple TV, but there is no world in which I can recommend that to you.<\/p>\n \u2022 Kate\u2019s whole madam look, from her underarm hair to her little sunglasses, is perfect. Also, the show Cal sees in the brothel reminded me very much of how the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre des Vampires are introduced in Anne Rice\u2019s Interview with the Vampire, feeding on a human victim onstage<\/a> in an orgy of sex and violence. Kate\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s not always so clear who is doing the sacrificing and who is sacrificed\u201d only added to that vibe for me.<\/p>\n \u2022 Do we think Mad Men got the storyline in which Roger refuses to fund his son-in-law\u2019s refrigerated-truck investment from East of Eden?<\/p>\n \u2022 An important Lee moment: Cal admits to him that he knows who Kate is. A heartbreaking Lee moment: When Adam says to Cal that he\u2019s never had anything but a bad father, and Lee, who was watching their conversation, quietly walks away. Adam, who the hell do you think Lee is, if not the boys\u2019 good father?<\/p>\n \u2022 Aron whining, \u201cI\u2019m a poor kid\u201d \u2026 what an asshole.<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Vulture Newsletter<\/p>\n Entertainment news, for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Netflix\n <\/p>\n