Summary
The Franchise has a stronger dramatic core than usual in Episode 6. The jokes pay the price a little bit, but the trade-off is mostly worth it.
There’s something a bit sad hanging over The Franchise in Episode 6, “Scene 110: Baptism of Fire”. The crew is at a breaking point after a week of night shoots and is on the cusp of revolt. Eric’s ego has taken so many hits that he keeps second-guessing himself and his latest big scene, a problem made worse by the imminent arrival of Christopher Nolan. The set might blow up. It’s a reminder that most tentpole movies are fraught with misery and that their biggest, flashiest moments are just pyrotechnic tricks and contractual obligations.
The episode doesn’t play this up, obviously, but it’s there in the background. The steady stream of ridiculous set-ups and punchlines hasn’t stopped, but you can see what they’re obscuring a bit more clearly. Eric and Adam are insecure. Daniel barely has a relationship with his kid. Dag can’t get laid. Even Peter is worried that his wife will lose interest in him if he can’t get his phone’s Bluetooth to connect to her remote-controlled vibrator. It’s all a mess.
This all makes “Scene 110: Baptism of Fire” probably the least funny episode – although it has its moments – but gives it the strongest dramatic core. There are not one but two ticking-clock devices here: The imminent arrival of Nolan, prompting Eric to worry that his gas-powered fireball will pale in comparison to the practically-recreated atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, and the crew getting so sick of Eric’s mulling that they down tools.
And then there’s the worry that the set might actually explode, but that’s contained mostly to Daniel, who is conscious of the brewing mutiny and wants to just get things moving (he also thinks that if he’s there when his kid wakes up the psychological damage of him never being present won’t take – not sure that’s quite how it works!)
Isaac Powell in The Franchise | Image via HBO
I feel like The Franchise Episode 6 acknowledges the supporting players more than usual. Peter gets an HR-violating subplot to accompany his vibrator woes; he has a permanent erection as a supplement side effect that will need to be wiped out in post, but the anxiety he feels about his wife being neglected is the most human side we’ve seen of him. Likewise, it’s Bryson’s birthday, but he’s scared of revealing it because Shane will be angry that he didn’t buy himself a card on Shane’s behalf. He’s the classic beleaguered young assistant who is so eager to please that it’s coming to his own detriment, evidenced by the fact he’s now wearing an eyepatch because he forgot to remove a contact lens and it fused to his eyeball.
There’s even a little payoff to the odd Steph and Mollusc Man subplot; the former makes a move on the latter after spending all episode plucking up the courage and then gets softly rejected. “I’m going to go home and kill myself,” she says quite cheerily. It’s all going wrong!
But for once the shoot goes right, entirely because of Daniel. It’s easy to believe that Daniel and Dag’s skillset is basically crisis management, which is true, but he proves here that he has been around film sets for long enough to know how things work. In Eric’s absence, he makes the executive decision of nixing a newly rewritten monologue and filming the fireball scene with an unsafe amount of gas. It’ll produce the best effect, but it’ll only give them one shot before something melts. It’s a gamble on a production where everything that can go wrong has already gone wrong, but Daniel takes it anyway, and it pays off.
Of course, he doesn’t get the credit for it. But he was never looking for it, really. At least he’ll be at home when his kid wakes up.
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