User blog:Eikakou/Anne (CBC series) season 2, episode 1 - Youth is the Season of Hope review

Hello again, everyone! It took awhile (aka, CBC had to start airing again), but I've been catching up on the new season of Anne with an E (which even CBC has adopted now as the title). I'm sure many people have already seen it on Netflix (again, CBC, why?), so I'll try to keep my reviews shorter (also, LilyLacreag has already made an excellent review).

That and the fact my browser got frozen earlier and I'm too frustrated to retype everything from memory. ARGGH, it is one of those days.

(Hopefully tomorrow will be fresh and only small mistakes to come.)

SPOILERS I think.

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As the opening episode of the second season, it nicely eases the audience back into Avonlea with Anne, being very much as dreamer and loving the world around her as much as before. That being said, there are two storylines the episode focuses on, both of which are wholly originally.

The first is set in Avonlea. The boarders that Green Gables took on at the end of the last season have managed to integrate themselves very well in the past nine months. While the audience knows they are con men who mugged Jerry, everyone in Avonlea knows them as Nate and Dunlop. Dunlop is a helpful man, a former soldier from the Boer War, who helps the harvest at Green Gables, teaches Anne baking recipes, and is very friendly. Nate, the younger of the two, is more interesting - he claims to be a geologist working for a chemical company in New York. They claim not to know each other. Their con? Nate pretends to have found gold and uses Mr. Barry and Anne to spread the rumours, Dunlop reinforces the con by making Nate seem reliable and trustworthy because neither men have any stake in trying to cheat them. Frighteningly, the townsfolk begin to seriously consider Nate's claims. Anne's so excited by everything that she goes to write a letter to Gilbert, but when she goes to take some paper from Nate's room, she finds a suspicious notarizing stamp, which she unwisely ignores. Nate does not ignore that someone has been in his room...

In other news, Anne and her friends in the Story Club have been asked to send their best stories to Diana's Aunt Josephine. Diana calls Ruby out on how all stories are about thinly disguised versions of Gilbert, and Ruby tries to counter that Diana gets stuck and kills everyone off. These girls are golden. Anne also decides that Jerry needs to discover literature, so she's going to teach him how to read. Reading saved her life once, nobody should miss out on that.

The other plotline shows up what Gilbert's been up to - he's on a steamship to Trinidad and he works shovelling coal into the ship's engines. He irritates the foreman with his carefree nature and songs, but his new friend Bash is less than amused. Gilbert is rather contrite when Bash makes him very aware that while Gilbert can treat his time on the ship as an adventure and learning experience, Bash cannot. As a black man, he has limited opportunities in the world and working as a coal shoveller is probably as high as he will ever go. While the storyline establishes that Gil and Bash have become good friends, it seems to be an unusual friendship within the setting and one that's really forcing Gilbert to see more of the world, not just in terms of geography, but social dynamics and privilege. It's a nice introduction to the world outside of Avonlea.

The episode was an excellent re-entry into the series and the start of season 2, picking up plotlines from the end of the first season. The acting for the established characters and new ones was great. I definitely do not like Nate - being a con man, it's honestly terrifying how easily he knows have to affect Marilla because he already knows she's a woman who is not used to the flattering charm and attention he's been giving her. And Anne (distracted by the excitement of it all) ignores any sort of suspicious feelings she has because she doesn't want negative attention from someone she thinks highly of because of Nate's seeming intelligence. Matthew seems neutral about the boarders, cautious about the gold, while Jerry doesn't seem to recognize his muggers, even if he has a bad feeling about them. I do love how the argumentative sibling dynamic still continues with Anne and Jerry, but it's less hostile.

Hope to see more great things this season!

Eikakou (talk) 01:53, October 23, 2018 (UTC)