It was always a question of when, not if, really. No name is more synonymous with the backlash against superhero cinema than Martin Scorsese, the octogenarian auteur who compared comic-book movies to theme-park rides in an interview once and is now variously thought of as an old man shaking his fist at the clouds or the movie industry’s last hope, depending on whom you ask. So it’s unsurprising that The Franchise has brought him up; it also confirms that the show, as enjoyable enough as it can be, is happy to be a whistle-stop tour through the many grievances that have plagued the genre it satirizes in recent years, and not a lot more.
That’s fine enough. By this episode, we know what The Franchise is and isn’t: It is an intermittently funny peek behind the curtain of an industry that dominates our present entertainment ecosystem; its satire is not especially novel or scathing. It would feel like a fool’s errand to have watched this show through to its penultimate episode and start rallying against its lack of bite or to now lament how the satire feels dated. Besides, I found this to be one of the more interesting, fresher episodes, aside from being framed around Eric’s response to another anti-Marvel (in this universe, anti-Maximum?) Scorsese quote. It throws Eric for a loop, forcing him to confront his complicity in the laser-eyed murder of cinema, an inner conflict that has been present throughout the series and now boils over in the form of a mental breakdown.
It’s unhelpful for the below-the-line lads and lasses on The Franchise that this occurs not at the studio, where the budgetary consequences of their director going AWOL might be relatively contained, but on the day of a mega-expensive location shoot in Armenia. From the start of the episode, it’s clear that Eric has gone a bit Francis Ford Coppola during Apocalypse Now — mania induced by the prolonged creative compression of the Tecto shoot, chronic hiccups, and the inability to find a screen-acting goat that can do comedy. (“I’m joking, but I’m serious,” Eric says. Daniel Brühl continues to nail Eric’s tragicomic balance: His performance is at once a funny caricature of a certain breed of obnoxious male filmmaker and, more sympathetically, the portrait of a guy who has unwittingly stumbled into a Sisyphean task from which he will never, ever escape.) The Coppola comparison is supported by the fact that, in the first scene of the episode, the forest clearing they are in looks a little like a jungle.
How Eric’s journey into his personal heart of darkness will conclude is anyone’s guess (right now, a betting man might put money on suicide). For now, it’s time to shoot another big practical sequence following the last episode’s fireball: They are going to destroy an old Armenian bridge, a scene that they only have one chance of getting right and which the Armenian government supports with a healthy wad of tax credits. I can’t imagine how they’d fuck this up! You say that, but Anita and Daniel’s success with the fireball did prove that they are at least competent and can step up in Eric’s absence. Before they can get the camera rolling, the Scorsese quote ripples through the set, and Pat dryly informs Anita that Scorsese might actually be right: “We ran the data … Tracking’s in the toilet, more multiplex closures incoming. I had Shane on the phone, freaking out, asking me if we killed cinema. Obviously, I had to say no.” Aside from playing on the real-life debate over whether superhero movies have irrevocably destroyed filmgoing culture as we know it (probably), it also reminds us of the stakes for the crew. Right now, Maximum is a sinking ship, and if Tecto wants to survive, it’s going to have to justify its place in a lifeboat.
What they need more of in this dire moment, then, is stability and security; a steady hand on the wheel, guiding them past the incoming iceberg. Eric … does not have the capacity. The Scorsese quote spooks him into coming up with an entirely new climax for Tecto, which will not feature the destruction of the bridge, rendering the crew’s journey entirely moot. Also, the rewritten ending would see Tecto and The Eye strip off their costumes for a “frank exchange of views.” Needless to say, it’s a fucking insane idea, and Daniel resolves to go ahead with the original ending, inspired by his newfound confidence inspired by the fireball shoot. (Eric is too caught up in madness to realize that Daniel has usurped him, and Anita and Pat don’t really care who is directing the movie as long as it’s getting done; in fact, Pat approves.)
But one must always beware hubris. In this case, less so on Daniel’s part so much as that of Dag, who leverages her way into taking over as first AD while Daniel is busy with directorial duties. She imposes herself on the cast in an effort to improve her worth; this results in her misunderstanding a question from the Armenian demolitions chief and then dismissing him entirely, so he rigs the wrong bridge to blow. In a mad rush to shoot the scene before the shoot’s environmental coordinator — who had earlier told everyone that if they come across an endangered breed of bat native to the area, that they would have to shut down set, and later found one said bat dead — can stop them, the explosives are triggered, and it’s bye-bye, bridge. Reminder: the wrong bridge.
Daniel, Anita, and Dag resolve to cover up the mess, destroying all of the drives that contain footage from the shoot — imagine if Martin Scorsese found out about this. (Bryson, who spent the day chaperoning an uninterested teenage visitor and his stony-faced parents, destroys the kid’s phone after one of the crew points out that he also filmed the scene.) Will it come back to haunt them in the finale? Hey, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
