Summary
Episode 7 of The Franchise provides a change of pace and scenery as the Tecto crew head to Armenia for a doomed location shoot.
You can tell The Franchise is approaching the end since it’s running out of things to make fun of. We’ve already had the big and obvious touchstones of superhero movies and moviemaking; we’ve laughed at violating continuity, the empowerment of women, pointless cameos, product placement, auteur directors, insane producers, invisible hammers, sticks of maximum potency, fireballs, steroids, and Bluetooth vibrators. What’s left? In Episode 7, “Scene 113: The Bridge”, we’re mocking location shooting, which compared to all of the above seems like a small affair.
But not to worry – as it turns out, location shooting in a doomed production like Tecto: Eye of the Storm can be lots of fun, at least as far as the audience is concerned. For everyone working on the movie, the local wildlife, and UNESCO, perhaps not so much.
The place is Oshakan, Armenia. The point is another of Eric’s practical explosion shots. He wants to blow up a bridge, and his production team has found one nestled perilously close to another bridge of protected status and real historical significance. Pat, for once, is up for it. “It shall not survive our franchise,” he says of the bridge at one point, a line that could be applied to almost anything or anyone associated with Tecto, including the endangered bat species in the area.
After that long week of night shoots, the crew isn’t really in it. That vibe of just waiting for the whole thing to be over persists here, but the longer it drags on, the more that’s going wrong on an interpersonal level. Steph and Rufus, aka Mollusc Man, have now slept together, for instance, which Steph thinks cements their love – and perhaps their future, if she’s pregnant – and Rufus would rather forget about. And the increased proximity between Daniel and Anita results in a flirty finger-sucking come-on that ends when Daniel has to confess that he just used the same hand to pick up a dead bat and Anita thinks she might have contracted rabies.
‘The Franchise’ Episode 7 Still | Image via HBO
Like Christopher Nolan’s visit in a previous installment, Episode 7 of The Franchise flirts with the real world by making several mentions of Martin Scorsese telling the media that superhero movies are killing cinema. This deeply bothers Eric, who once again starts mulling, sequesters himself away with his overworked VFX guy Dave – who claims to have been working 27-hour days for 17 weeks in a row – and reworks the ending of Tecto: Eye of the Storm so that Tecto and The Eye simply resolve things with an adult conversation.
Needless to say, this is an enormous problem, not least because Maximum Studios have gone to great expense to facilitate Eric’s vision of destroying a real bridge. This leads Daniel to once again take the directorial reins while Eric remains hilariously locked up in his trailer while the crew keeps him there with looped video feeds and fake rain. Despite Daniel’s obvious aptitude, the whole thing still goes wrong – the protected bridge gets demolished, the endangered bats are rendered homeless, and it still seems impossible for this movie to make it to a premiere in any workable state.
There’s only one episode left for us to find out whether or not this happens, though I doubt it’s the point. I’m much more interested in some of the emerging character-based subplots, like the outcome of Rufus’s tryst with Steph, the question of whether Anita and Daniel will get back together, what Daniel’s post-Tecto career might look like, and the worrying signs that Dag has been corrupted by her on-set responsibility.
Is it too late for everyone? Or might Tecto yield just a few more surprises yet? We’ll have to wait and see.
