Funny you should say that. Just in the last few days I have a few acquaintances on FB that are self-described/-diagnosed aspies talking about how it’s their headcanon that Beth Harmon is on the spectrum. My gal and I are up to the last episode, and I don’t see it.
Her character, certainly, but I don’t think you can extend that to the woman herself in the real world. I guess since the character name was used, that’s what they mean? Once she found her footing she was certainly socially powerful if still undersocialized from her upbringing.
Exactly. Most of whatever ‘social awkwardness’ there was is down to her childhood and her then growing up in an orphanage. The girls at her highschool made initially fun of her because of her apparel and haircut, not because of her behaviour or her being a chess nerd. Same for her being a late bloomer when it comes to relationships.
FYI, the Walter Tevis book that the series is based on is now free for US Audible customers. (Tevis wrote The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell To Earth in a sadly short literary career. But that’s one hell of a hit rate.)
I wanted to wish for a second season, because her chess career just started. There is so much you can do in this chess universe. However, then I remembered season 2 of The Terror … nevermind wishing.
I kept trying to place why Marielle Heller (who plays Mrs. Wheatley) seems so familiar…but her actress page on IMDB really isn’t that full of roles.
;)
But holy shit, I did NOT connect the dots between the name and the actress at all. Marieller Heller, of course, is also a director – Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
I mean…that is a get.
(And also, I figured out why she seems so familiar to me: she reminds me completely of a younger Mary Steenburgen.)
She kind of reminded me of Alia Shawkat, maybe it was the hair
Yeah, I can see that too.
My wife and I just started watching this. The first episode was incredibly good.
It gets better. The series goes places. On my first rewatch and I already noticed something in the first episode I had forgotten partway through. More a testament to the writing than anything else.
I started rewatching episode 2 just check out some details on one scene, and ended up watching it halfway through episode 6. Might as well finish the second run at this point :)
One thing that I’ve noticed in my first watch – and now I’m going to have to re-watch to see if I missed it – is that Beth never hits the clock button or lever with a captured piece. Her opponents often, but not always, do this.
I guess I’m really in the minority, I found the series to be only meh. I played a fair amount of chess, and two of my best friends are Master and Fide Master, so we talk a lot of chess during our board gaming sessions.
The chess was pretty decent, although I got annoyed that all the games were played at blitz chess speed, instead of the slow time controls of the era. The rest of the series, I found entirely predictable, especially the ending.
Thats really interesting to me, since for me it seemed to subvert pretty much every tv-trope it set up. The orphanage, The stepmother, the stepfather (I was really worried about how he looked at her), her drug abuse, the moscov tournament with hints of spygames and so on. Every single thing went another direction than I initially expected, since that was EXACTLY what all other shows would do at those points.
I really enjoyed that part of the series - and all in all, it was a really, really excellent show for it.
I’ve seen people say this, and while I agree on the overall arc I thought in a lot of ways it wasn’t. It may just be a result of other media but there were dark things that seemed telegraphed that thankfully didn’t happen while other tragic things somewhat unexpectedly did. For instance the glance of the adopted father in the car sure did seem to imply we were on a path to sexual abuse that never manifested.
I’d be curious to see on a rewatch how much the clock changes during the match, and if that was a subtle way of showing time passing. In the book she’d do her stare into space thing for an hour, and then blitz her way through the moves.
I also get the rivet counting of the chess being too fast, but spending an episode waiting – or even implying – there is a long delay between moves wouldn’t be fun.
we still have the slow time controls. That’s where the real chess begins. Blitz is nice and fun, but it lacks depth.
And the initial interactions with the stepmother belied what ended up as a strong relationship between two equally flawed characters. It was not only touching, I changed my mind completely about her stepmother as things went by and I was eventually saddened by her character loss.
Yes, it was predictable, but oh-so satisfying. Sometimes a story just needs to hit the right beats at the right tempo.
It’s in the interstitial spaces where personal experience fills in what’s suggested and reveals something about the viewer. Perhaps the whole thing is like one of the models Beth’s friend Cleo scoffs at: you see in it what you want.
I want to echo this – the show seems to delight in presenting you with characters that you have been conditioned to believe are going to be heinous villains, and then show them to be flawed but relatively normal people who may or may not be at odds with the main character. And stunningly, the drama is actually more effective due to that.
Honestly, was there really a single “evil” character in the entire series? I guess the adoptive father… everyone else turned out to have a fairly redemptive arc, but he was pretty much a scuzz-bucket all the way to the end. Or maybe the party-girl (Cleo), if you believe she was an intentional plant from the Russians.