In a weird way, the thing I admire the most about 11.22.63 is its restraint. It’s hard to restrain anything when your show is based on an 849-page book and involves nothing less than time travel and the future of our country. To say nothing of the show’s huge scope (Jake has to stay in the ’60s for three years). Any story like this involving fictional encounters with real people is ripe with opportunity for exaggeration of both kinds: do you make them romantic heroes, or do you make them preening villains?
11.22.63, with both its biggest figures (Kennedy and Oswald) elects to do neither, and the show is better for it. In “Other Voices, Other Rooms”(which takes its title from Truman Capote’s first novel), we finally meet Oswald, Kennedy’s would-be assassin (if you ignore all the conspiracy theories, which for the purpose of these reviews we will, even though Oswald absolutely didn’t kill Kennedy). As played by relative unknown Danny Webber, Oswald is just as awkward and borderline misanthropic as we’ve heard he was; but Webber makes the smart choice of aiming for unsettling instead of just menacing. The strange, stilted cadence of his speech, coupled with the soft landing his consonants make do a great job of making Oswald seem just the right amount of “off.”
And it would be easy to romanticize the past in a show like this, another pitfall which 11.22.63 routinely and deftly avoids. First there’s the Kennedy question: how does the show want us to think about him? Al, in voiceover, sums it up nicely, saying he never bought in to “that Camelot shit,” referring to the adoring nickname the press conferred upon the Kennedy White House. But the show follows that with a blunt truth: “Something had been broken in all of us and it could never get repaired.” That, coupled with Jake’s admission to Bill that “About 2,000 books have been written about it and no one knows for sure what happened,” is a great way to demonstrate just how murky the details surrounding the assassination are, even fifty years removed. Whether it was Oswald, the CIA, the Mafia, or any combination of the three, the fact remains that the Kennedy assassination is something that we’ve never quite recovered from as a nation.
But all of that is bigger-picture stuff. An important question to ask is: does the episode work? The answer being: oh yes. The show was smart to have Jake reveal himself as a time traveler this early on, and he and Bill (George MacKay) make for a good team. It’s a refreshing change, and another way that the show breaks from tradition – inasmuch as there is “tradition” in time travel narratives, but let’s not split hairs.
Another wise choice this episode makes is the time jump. The intervening two years aren’t really germane to the story, as it basically consists of Jake and Bill sitting on their hands waiting for Oswald to move to Fort Worth. Beyond that, it shows the risks the show is willing to take, and its commitment to nonstop storytelling. Every episode has moved the plot ahead, even detours like last week’s “The Kill Floor.”
And that brings us back to that restraint. The show is able to introduce a love interest – Sarah Gadon’s Sadie Dunhill, who we met in the pilot – and even take time for her and Jake to share a dance, and somehow it avoids coming off as wheel-spinning. Without giving too much away, I will say that Jake and Sadie’s relationship is a major part of Stephen King’s book, and it’s nice to see it represented well in the show. It doesn’t hurt that James Franco and Gadon have sweet, easy chemistry, and are a pleasure to watch. In many ways Jake might be Franco’s most likable character. My favorite scene of the episode was him standing up for Miss Mimi at the gas station, capping off his intimidation of the attendant with a polite “Excuse my language.” Small human moments like that keep 11.22.63 from being just a thriller, and move it into the realm of something far more original.
A Few Thoughts
- That was Justified‘s Nick Searcy as the principal Deke Simmons, ironically parroting his real-life conservative views by saying that “That Salinger book will never be in the library.”
- Great, eerie shot of the empty Dealey Plaza. Something about a future murder site is somehow creepier than a past murder site
- “We could’ve spent the last two years learning fuckin’ Russian!”
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