Duranalysis: Arcadia’s Goodbye is Forever

Sometimes it’s all about Nick.

My apologies in advance to Simon, who is doomed to get a little shortchanged in the praise department this time around. I’d feel worse about that, but I’ve already given him plenty of tongue baths -- strictly in the metaphorical sense, alas -- in earlier reviews. Simon does a fine job here, but really, Arcadia’s video for “Goodbye is Forever” belongs to the lovely and strange Mr. Rhodes.

The original plan was to give this one a pass and wrap up this whole Duranalysis business this week with “Girls on Film.” Because the Duran Duran universe is a never-ending rabbit hole and because time is finite, I’d intended to stick to the videos produced in their Golden Age (1981-1985) and, with the exception of Arcadia’s “The Flame,” which is far too much fun to ignore, skip over all the later albums and side projects. Then someone suggested I tackle this one, which turned out to be a great idea. There's nothing quite like a whopping dose of pure, uncut, pharmaceutical-grade Nick.

Nick, as I’ve mentioned before, is magical.

“Goodbye is Forever” was directed by Marcelo Anciano, who also wrote the treatments and made the storyboards for the earlier videos Duran Duran shot with Russell Mulcahy. While Roger plays drums on the track, he doesn’t appear in the video. And unlike “The Flame,” there’s no surprise John Taylor cameo. It’s just Simon and Nick, nothing more. In this case, that’s enough.

The video opens on an enigmatic title card, which adds a stylish touch. Whatever your opinion of Arcadia, it’s hard to deny they put out some graceful, polished videos.


Nick and Simon sleep in ornate, high-backed chairs, which are mounted upon rollers on a long track and adorned with suns and crescent moons. Nick wakes and looks around, perplexed. He glances at his watch, which runs backwards.


Oh, man, I love Nick’s whole Arcadia look, with the dark suit and the gobs of eyeliner and all that crazy, gorgeous, jet-black, Jo-Polniaczek-in-later-seasons-of-Facts-of-Life hair. He’s mesmerizing in this video, hyper-alert and dazzling and delightfully weird. All the traumatic memories of his awful “Planet Earth” hair have been expunged from my brain.


In the chair behind Nick, Simon is still fast asleep. A white feather, held by white-gloved mechanical hands extending from the back of his chair, tickles his nose until he wakes.


Simon, blessedly, has finally ditched his unfortunate “Wild Boys”-era mullet in favor of a close-cropped, freshly-brunette ‘do, paired with a tasteful hoop earring. It’s a good look for him -- streamlined and unfussy -- but he’s blown out of the water by the full-tilt glamour and glory of Nick. Nick doesn’t often grab the spotlight from Simon, but when he does, it’s hard to wrestle it away from him.


The chairs lurch forward, wheeling along the track. Nick and Simon look startled, though not especially concerned, at finding themselves suddenly in motion. They glide up an incline toward an archway, then enter into a dark chamber filled with floating timepieces, calendar pages, and heavenly bodies.


Next, the chairs rise up into the air, suspended on chains. The boys float in front of a chaotic, crazy, colorful backdrop of clockwork and tangled pipes.


What does it all mean? You’ve got me. If there’s more to this video than maybe a hazy theme of Time, it’s gone completely over my head. Doesn’t really matter -- the charm of this video rests largely with the gorgeous production design, not with the plot. Between the vintage clock gears and the puffs of steam and the floating celestial objects, there’s almost a cool Victorian/steampunk vibe to it.

Simon, always ready to add a fun random element to any situation, launches himself out of his chair. With the aid of some sketchy special effects, he plummets to the ground.


He lands on an inflated mat lining the bottom of a makeshift wire cage. Nick follows his example and flops on the mat beside him. They both seem absurdly pleased with their current predicament. You’re in a cage, boys. I don’t know that you should look happy about it.


Durans-in-gratuitous-bondage alert! Simon is now tied to the hands of a clock rotating above a gigantic dial, while above him, Nick is bound to a swinging pendulum. It’s not quite in the same realm of kink as that scene in “Wild Boys” where John writhes helplessly while strapped down across the hood of a car, but I appreciate the spirit behind it nonetheless.


Nick seems delighted about this unexpected foray into bondage. In fact, Nick seems downright chipper throughout the whole video, which is a refreshing change of pace; I adore Nick at all times, but he tends to default toward pouting and glowering whenever he’s on camera. There’s a brief behind-the-scenes segment on the making of this video, in which both Nick and Simon appear to be having themselves a fine old time during filming. At one point, director Anciano stands beside Nick and, while the camera rolls, gives him instructions: “You’re having fun! You’re having fun!” In response, Nick flashes his lovely and too-rare grin. This makes me wonder: In all the fifteen or so videos Duran Duran made prior to this, did no one think to simply tell Nick to smile?


Then the boys fall through the air some more (special effects: still dubious) before finding themselves back in their chairs. The white-gloved mechanical hands pop up again for the express purpose of totally wrecking Nick’s meticulous makeup job. Aw, don’t mess with Nick’s face! It’s pretty!


(Full points to Nick for always being the first to joke about his makeup, by the way. There’s a good article about him in the June 1985 issue of Spin in which, upon showing up for an interview with smudged eyeliner, he quips, “Although I’m vain enough to wear it, I’m not vain enough to carry it around with me to touch it up,” which is sort of awesome. The same article, which features some great photos of Nick with crazy black-and-blonde hair, also compares him, aptly, to an expensive kitten. “Expensive kitten” replaces “magical pixie” as my new favorite two-word description of him.)

Still in their chairs, Simon and Nick roll through another entryway into a chamber filled with languid, glamorous women dressed in satin evening gowns. Nick and Simon stare at the women in baffled wonder. Visibly bored, the women can’t be bothered to spare them a glance. Just a couple of gorgeous Durans in magically rolling chairs. Yawn.


The track next leads them in front of the face of a gigantic cuckoo clock (alternate theory: the clock is normal-sized, and Simon and Nick are just really, really tiny), which strikes twelve just as they pass it. Somebody involved with this video had an unhealthy fascination with clocks.


A quick roll through a gauze-draped fairytale garden with softly-falling snow and urns of flowers, and then their chairs come to a halt in front of a brick wall. When Simon and Nick rise from their chairs, the wall dissolves away, revealing the outer world.

The boys gaze wistfully behind them, then stroll off into the sunset together, which is dreamy and poignant and even sort of romantic. Then Simon succumbs to an inexplicable urge to end the video on a jaunty note. He hops into the air and clicks his heels together. Fade to black.


A lovely video, strange and melancholy yet oddly good-natured. Good stuff.
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Duranalysis: Planet Earth

Here we are, back where it all began. “Planet Earth” was Duran Duran’s very first video from their very first single off of their 1981 debut album. It also marked the beginning of their long and successful collaboration with director Russell Mulcahy. While less ambitious than their expensive, expansive later efforts (no cavorting on yachts, no exotic locales), it does a solid job of introducing the band to the world. It’s slick and fun. Somehow, though, the process of analyzing it here -- watching it multiple times, searching for fun facts about it, grabbing screenshots -- has left me a little cranky.

Frankly, I blame Nick’s hair.

The opening image features Roger, shirtless and smoldering, his upper torso emerging out of some kind of primordial haze with the Earth glowing behind him. This video is an excellent showcase for Roger. He’s so quiet and low-key that it’s sometimes easy to overlook him; shots like this serve to remind everyone that, while he may be less flashy and mouthy than the rest of the boys, he’s still a stone-cold fox.


The boys perform on a platform on an upside-down pyramid made of ice. Or maybe it’s made of diamonds! We’re talking about Duran Duran here (glamorous, frivolous, drawn to sparkly things…), so a diamond pyramid is not out of the question. It looks like they’re performing in a vast, icy chamber, like they’re the house band at the Fortress of Solitude, though I would’ve pegged Superman as more of a Springsteen man.


Even from a distance, Simon’s outfit looks awesomely bizarre. Poet shirt! Enormous jodhpurs! Huge leather belt! Weird knotted rope-thingy dangling around his neck!


John, as always, looks elegant and lovely, albeit a little on the pouty side. And those bangs are crazy. John probably spent much of 1981 walking into walls and tripping on the sidewalk, unable to see anything through that heavy shock of magnificent hair. Great beauty comes with a price.


Oh no! Poor Nick’s being strangled by a frilly white boa constrictor! It climbed up his chest and is throttling the life out of him!

…Yeah. Nice shirt, Nick. I’ll address that hairstyle a little later on. I have to give myself a pep talk first. It’s too demoralizing otherwise.


By the way, check out Nick’s one-handed technique in this video. Nick, of course, is an influential and respected synthpop pioneer/keyboard artiste, but in the early years of the band, learning how to, like, play the blasted thing seemed low on his list of priorities. Here’s a fantastic quote from Nick, extracted from the cover story (“Nick Rhodes: The Dashing Duran”) of the May 1984 issue of some odd teen-geared publication called Tiger Beat STAR (which is not to be confused with plain old vanilla Tiger Beat), explaining why simplicity is the key to successful Duran songs: “I have to be able to play everything with one finger. If it’s two fingers, it’s too complicated.”

Just to drill the point home, here’s an Andy Taylor quote from a gleefully spiteful interview he gave in 1986 after he’d quit the band for the first time, as recounted in Steve Malins’s Duran Duran Notorious: The Unauthorised Biography: “I taught Nick the difference between a major chord and a minor chord. I couldn’t get him all the way to diminished, but I did teach him the difference between major and minor.” Bitchy! But funny, and maybe kind of true! But still, bitchy!

Simon lies on his side, shirtless, his arm tucked beneath his head, giving the general viewing public a provocative glimpse of his armpit. In his autobiography, Andy claims Nick was highly disgruntled about this shot. Nick evidently has strong negative opinions about visible body hair. This comes as no real surprise.


In case anyone was wondering, there’s no plot to be found anywhere around here. It’s just a bunch of performance footage mixed with a series of tableaus, all sort of loosely centered around a general theme of, yep, Planet Earth. Here, Simon cuddles with a terrified blonde, who’s wearing a hat worthy of the Royal Ascot. They’re standing in front of a blue backdrop with flashing lights and moving patterns, and I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just wildly guessing, but it seems to be either the birth of the world, or the end of the world. Or both. Or neither.


Now Simon's lying on his back, his hands upraised, with water streaming up from his face to his fingers in flagrant defiance of the laws of gravity. Spending too much time puzzling out the images in this video is a sucker’s game.


And then there’s a bunch of shots of the boys striking dramatic poses while a glowing digital display of random numbers and bits of trivia flicker across the screen. Holy hell, Nick, what’s going on with your hair? I can ignore it no longer. Nick’s hair makes unicorns weep. Here are the levels of wrongness: 1) It’s been bleached into straw. 2) There are strange pinkish patches. 3) Some misbegotten soul has taken a crimping iron to it. Wars have been started for less.


Given my giddy delight at All Things Nick, it seems blasphemous to even type this, but Nick looks like hell in this video. I mean, sure, he’s still just a kid here, so it’s understandable. By the time the Rio album came out the following year, by the time he turned twenty, Nick had transformed himself into the sleek and dainty magical pixie we all know and love, but it didn’t happen overnight. His gorgeous, glammed-up public image came about as a process of trial and error. Thanks to this video, some of those errors are preserved for eternity.

On the flip side: This is an amazing shot of Andy, all pale eyes and platinum hair, paired with that wide-eyed, unearthly expression. He looks startling and doll-like and unreal, like he’s the android cousin to Pris, the pleasure-model Replicant played by Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner. And if you’d ever asked me to pick the Duran who could most convincingly look like a sexbot, Andy would have been a distant fifth on my list.


While John and Simon pose in their fancy ruffled blouses, a pair of punk-haired folk dancers cavort in the background. In his memoir, Andy claims one of the dancers is Sigue Sigue Sputnik frontman Martin Degville. Which goes a long way toward explaining the fantastic gravity-defying hair.


While the dancers cavort about, factoids flash across the screen: “1,003.5 MEN ON EARTH FOR EVERY 1,000 WOMEN,” and “THE OLDEST KNOWN SONG IS THE SHADUF CHANT.” I was lost at sea about that last one, so I did some digging: A shaduf is a rod-and-bucket contraption used in ancient Egypt to lift water; the Shaduf Chant was sung by workers along the banks of the Nile.


I learned something from a Duran Duran video. That doesn’t happen every day.

The video ends on a freeze frame of Simon flinging himself off the ice pyramid into the abyss, which seems 100% like something he’d do. Over on Duran Duran’s official website, Simon gives a totally bonkers response to a fan-submitted question about an anecdote involving falling out of a window. His reply manages to encompass two entirely separate incidents, one which took place following a ménage-a-trois with a beautiful French woman and an unidentified rock star, and another which involved fifteen naked girls in Nick’s hotel room and far too much tequila. As a general rule of thumb, it’s best not to regard anything Simon says as gospel truth, but still, this sort of thing is exactly why Duran Duran is the greatest pop group ever.


And that was “Planet Earth.”
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Covert Affairs: Good Advices

Okay! That was approximately eighty times better than last week’s episode!

Annie goes on a mission in Paris to meet a young woman named Salma, who works at the Syrian Embassy, in the hopes of cultivating her as a CIA asset. Paris! Annie’s scenes were actually shot in Paris, which was a good call -- for once, this show actually looks like a real, grownup spy series, instead of a pretty good pretender. After much dithering around, Annie manages to orchestrate an encounter with Salma: She secretly exchanges Salma’s ridiculously expensive handbag with her own exact duplicate. When Salma contacts her to arrange a trade, she coerces her into sharing a bottle of wine, engaging in some giddy girl-talk, and accompanying her to a fancy-dress event later that same night. When Annie gets herself in gear, she works fast.

At the event, Annie and Salma run into Eyal Lavin, the dashing and roguish Mossad agent whom Annie had tangled with last season. Oded Fehr! Very pleased to see you here again, sir. Please show up on as many episodes as humanly possible -- heck, if Covert Affairs wanted to make Eyal a regular character, I’d have no complaints -- because you brighten up this show whenever you’re around.

As Mossad also has a keen interest in cultivating Salma (her job puts her in close contact with a Syrian figure of great interest to many governments), Eyal has been romancing her under false pretenses. This ruffles Annie’s feathers, as Eyal is essentially beating her at her own game.

Salma, who turns out to be no fool, almost immediately picks up on Annie’s and Eyal’s respective ruses. She coolly outlines the deal: She’ll become an asset to the highest bidder.

Back at Langley, Joan gets called into jury duty, which she does not handle with grace and dignity. During her absence, she leaves Auggie in charge of the DPD, in a move expressly designed to annoy Jai. No worries. Jai is extra-sexy when he’s annoyed.

A bidding war erupts between the CIA and Mossad for Salma’s loyalties. Auggie, through Joan, authorizes Annie to offer Salma fifty thousand Euros. Salma accepts the deal and agrees to meet with Annie at a café to complete the transaction. Salma stands her up; Annie and Eyal later find her dead in her apartment. When her murderer tries to flee the scene, Eyal chases him across rooftops (Covert Affairs has had some pretty good foot chase scenes, this one among them. Certainly better than their car chases, which tend to bring episodes crashing to a halt). Salma’s killer falls to his death from a high rooftop to avoid capture by Eyal.

While Annie was in possession of Salma’s expensive handbag, she’d taken notice of a Post-It Note listing a train route number and arrival time. Even though her mission ended with Salma’s death, she stakes out the train station in the hopes of spotting Salma’s mysterious Syrian contact. Thanks to a surprise bit of assistance from Eyal, Annie manages to snap a valuable photograph of the man. However, when she goes for celebratory drinks with Eyal afterwards, Eyal swipes her camera’s memory card and takes off.

Dashing and roguish spies. They’ll lead you into trouble every time, Annie. It’s what they do.

Annie chases after Eyal. She spots him being bundled into a van, presumably by the Syrians. She follows them to a cabin in the woods, torches the van, creates a big messy disturbance, and, after a series of hijinks and foibles and crackling romantic sparks, manages to get both herself and Eyal to safety.

Covert Affairs? Forget Ben. Eyal is where it’s at. Trust me on this.

Annie returns to Langley, her mission a success, except for the part where her would-be asset got totally murdered. Acting on Eyal’s advice, she comes partially clean with Danielle, who thinks she was on an innocent trip to Topeka for the Smithsonian. She doesn’t go as far as to tell her sister she’s a CIA operative, but she does explain that she was actually in Paris, so… baby steps.

Excellent episode. For once, the main plot, while a little lightweight, didn’t seem like an afterthought. Annie and Eyal are fun together, and Joan and Auggie and Jai were delightful. No progress was made on any of the long-running plots -- the Ben situation, the mole, the negative campaign against Arthur -- but the episode itself was brisk and breezy enough to stand up on its own. Let’s hope they keep this up.
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Duranalysis: Lonely In Your Nightmare

Of the three videos Duran Duran shot with Russell Mulcahy whilst in Sri Lanka, “Lonely In Your Nightmare” is both the least known and the least impressive. Granted, the standard set by “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Save a Prayer” is pretty high, but still, this one’s a dud.

At least… well, one version of this video is a dud. You know how Duran Duran kept tweaking and revising their videos, to an extent that even George Lucas would consider overly fussy and excessive? (You know how there’s five different versions of “New Moon On Monday” floating around out there?) Two significantly different versions of this video exist: There’s the original, which was cobbled together entirely from footage shot in Sri Lanka, and a later version, which also contains a bunch of scenes shot in London. The revised version, while not among the all-time best Duran videos, has some good moments. The original version, on the other hand, is… how shall I describe it? I’m going to go with “unwatchable.”

Yeah. That pretty much sums it up.

The original version focuses on a leggy brunette, who is played by Vanya, the model who dances with Simon in the “Save a Prayer” video. In the original version of “Lonely In Your Nightmare,” Vanya writhes around in a gauze-draped four-poster bed while dreaming of frolicking with Simon. That’s pretty much it. The video clocks in at just under five minutes, and almost a minute and a half of that features the same quick snippet of Vanya tossing and turning in bed, over and over and over again. It’s almost farcically repetitive and mind-numbingly dull.


The revised version takes the bare bones of the original and adds a framing device, which is set in London. It’s shot in black-and-white and is shown mostly from Simon’s point of view. Wise choice -- Vanya is lovely, but she can’t hold the screen as well as Simon can.

In the opening scenes, “Planet Earth” plays faintly in the background as Simon prowls around an abandoned apartment. It almost seems apocalyptic -- the apartment is fully furnished, but piles of dust and signs of decay are everywhere. Simon unearths a stack of Polaroids from beneath an inch of dust on a dresser. He flips through them while looking anguished and glamorous.


He leans against the wall and stares out the window. He catches a glimpse of a dark-clad woman -- Vanya -- walking down the street, away from the apartment.

Simon lapses into a daydream about his past with Vanya, and here’s where the Sri Lanka footage first appears. Vanya writhes around in bed, deep in troubled sleep. Simon slinks up to her side and nuzzles against her forehead.

He also reminisces about seeing her draped in a white gown and veil, almost like a wedding dress. She’s standing in the carved archway of what looks like an outdoor shrine, while he approaches her, dressed in a white suit. This is from the original version as well; as dull as the finished video ultimately turned out, at least it had all that gorgeous Sri Lankan scenery working in its favor.


In London, Roger and Andy hang out at a produce stand at an outdoor market. Roger spots Vanya. She’s now bundled up in heavy dark clothes, in marked contrast to the filmy dresses she wears in all the Sri Lanka scenes. Roger nudges Andy to alert him to her presence, but when Andy turns to look, she’s nowhere in sight.


Andy and Roger both look ridiculously wholesome and cute here. Sometimes these two rival the formidable John-Nick team in terms of overall adorability. Remember “New Moon on Monday,” where Roger and Andy scurry down cobblestone streets while toting their special moon-powered, laser-shooting kite? Yeah, this is approaching that level of cuteness.

(Ah, that moon-powered, laser-shooting kite. Even by Duran Duran’s standards, “New Moon on Monday” is pretty much bonkers.)

Back in Vanya’s flat, Simon stares at the Polaroids again. They’re shots of Vanya in Sri Lanka, no surprise. He lapses into more daydreams: of Vanya at a colorful outdoor festival, of Vanya cavorting on the beach with a couple of small Sinhalese children… Yeah, you know what? Even the revised video uses that shot of Vanya writhing around in bed far too many times. At least it’s padded out with a bunch of other scenes.

In London, Vanya sits outside, still bundled up in her heavy black clothes. John plops down on a nearby bench, then looks up and recognizes her. He’s distracted by a flock of pigeons; by the time they fly off, Vanya has disappeared. John looks… surprised? Thoughtful? Sleepy? Sometimes it’s tough to suss out what’s going on inside John’s pretty, pretty head.


While Simon is obviously Vanya’s former lover, the connection between Vanya and the rest of the Durans -- Andy, Roger and John at least, since thus far Nick has been sadly MIA -- is more nebulous. Also, is she even really there, or are the boys just seeing things? The combination of her dust-covered apartment and the way she keeps vanishing makes me suspect she’s not really around. Factor in how it looked like she and Simon were getting married in Sri Lanka, and there’s actually sort of a cool, creepy little mystery emerging here, which was entirely absent from the original version.

Back to Sri Lanka: Simon wanders around a beach while wearing a natty suit and tie. He spots Vanya standing at a railing, staring out at the sea. Her dress billows up behind her, giving her a marked resemblance to a Maxfield Parrish painting.


A gala outdoor festival takes place at night. All the Durans are in attendance, looking sunburned and sleepy and dopey. Except for Nick. Nick! The last thirty seconds of the video, and Nick finally puts in an appearance! Nick looks hilariously pissed off, like he’s on the brink of pitching a full-scale pixie hissyfit. By multiple accounts, most notably his own, roughing it in Sri Lanka while filming these videos did not make our fussy, high-maintenance Nick a happy little pixie.


The line between “magical pixie” and “malevolent gremlin” is sometimes a fine one.

In the original version of the video, for some unfathomable reason, the face of one of the dancers at the festival is briefly superimposed over Nick’s face. I can’t even take a stab at unraveling the thought process that led to this bit of bizarre whimsy. Unless it was done just to mess with Nick, in which case I can sort of understand and even respect it.


London: Nick, who has been reunited with a working blow dryer and his full array of high-end hair care products, looks sweet and beautiful and not at all like he’s thinking of murdering someone. Nick doesn’t serve any purpose in the new footage other than to look doe-eyed and lovely while giving sexyface to the camera, but really, isn’t that enough?


Sexyface is contagious. Even camera-shy Roger gives sexyface. Roger!


Now it’s John’s turn. Wow. So pretty! John is the unparalleled master of the fine art of sexyface. Young twentysomethings everywhere looking to update their Facebook profile photos could learn much from him.


And then there’s Andy. There is not enough cash out there to get Andy to pout sexily at the camera. Sexyface is not in his genes. Nonetheless, he looks pretty damn great here. All the guys look great in the London footage, which is good, because they were starting to look a little rough toward the end of their Sri Lankan jaunt.


The video ends with some footage of Simon leaving Vanya’s apartment and walking down a flight of stairs, the Polaroid photos clutched in his hand. Funny -- the revised version of Duran Duran’s “Careless Memories” video also begins with a scene of a Polaroid-clutching Simon descending a staircase. The exact same scene, in fact. Recycling! If the boys are ever feeling especially self-amusing, they should release freshly-revised versions of all of their videos and include this shot somewhere in each.


And that’s the video. Quick added bonus: The awesome Classic Albums episode about Rio contains some cool behind-the-scenes footage of the boys in Sri Lanka while they were shooting this video. Here they are, filming the outdoor festival scene. Nick and Vanya engage in a bit of canoodling, which is sort of fascinating right there, while Andy and John look baked, in every possible sense of the word.


It also has more footage of John and Nick having a blast on that elephant from the “Save a Prayer” video. It’s all too adorable for words, though I question Nick’s decision not to wear pants that day. Rough elephant hide plus water plus sun plus pasty English skin plus a long day of filming can only equal horrible, nasty, painful chafing. No wonder he looked so venomous and cranky during much of the trip.


Even better: There’s footage of multiple Durans on elephants! All of them! I can’t believe they shot this, then didn’t manage to shoehorn it into at least one of the three Sri Lanka videos.


By my way of thinking, if you have footage of Durans riding elephants, you pretty much have a sacred duty to show it to as many people as possible. That’s gold right there.
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Covert Affairs: Begin the Begin

Season Two of Covert Affairs kicks off with this adequate yet unspectacular installment. Some quick notes right at the start:

1) If this episode title is any indication, it looks like they’ve moved off of Led Zeppelin songs and moved on to R.E.M. this season. Excellent choice.

2) Peter Gallagher is now a full regular cast member instead of a guest star. This is good news for the show, as Gallagher is a force of great awesomeness.

3) The animated opening credit sequence has been tweaked to include Gallagher and to show images of Sendhil Ramamurthy and Anne Dudek instead of merely name-checking them.

4) Sendhil Ramamurthy is still smoking-hot.

The episode opens in Guam, where Annie tends to a wounded Ben in the hospital. Ben, who was shot at the end of last season and appeared to be hovering on death’s door, seems pretty healthy and chipper now, at least judging by the way he enthusiastically canoodles with Annie. Their canoodling is interrupted when gunmen randomly burst into his hospital room and open fire; Annie and Ben barely escape with their lives.

In other news: Annie and Ben still make for an extremely insipid pairing. It’s a shame. Annie has so much personality and spark with almost everyone else she encounters -- Auggie, Jai and Joan in particular -- that it’s weird and depressing to see her formidable charisma sputter and fizzle whenever she’s around the great love of her life.

Ben gets transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda. Sexy Jai makes his first appearance of the season when he brings Ben a Sudoku book and growls at him for being an asshole. Oh, Jai. How I’ve missed those outstanding cheekbones and that weird sexual tension you bring to all your scenes. Welcome back, babe.

Annie returns to the home she shares with her sister Danielle, who believes Annie has been spending the past several weeks in Missouri as part of her cover as a mild-mannered Smithsonian employee. Danielle offhandedly mentions that their garage was broken into during Annie’s vacation. Combined with the still-unexplained gunmen in Guam, this makes Annie very, very nervous. Auggie arranges to have CIA technicians, posing as carpet cleaners, sweep Annie’s house for listening devices. The sweep comes up clean.

(Auggie, by the way, doesn’t do all that much this episode other than act supportive of Annie and make a few wry quips and do some chin-ups in a totally unnecessary scene set at the gym, but it’s good seeing him anyway. I like these characters an awful lot, even if my enthusiasm for the show itself has waned a great deal since last season.)

Liza Hearn releases a series of damaging investigative reports about Arthur. He’s being advised by Langley’s in-house counsel, though Joan, fearing the CIA will cheerily throw her husband to the wolves at the first opportunity, urges him to retain his own high-priced and flashy lawyer. Arthur protests at first, but eventually follows Joan’s advice. Yeah, you know what? As much as I love Arthur and Joan, I kind of hope they find a more exciting ongoing plotline than Arthur’s ongoing struggles to retain his job.

Annie’s new assignment: making contact with a tennis pro named Nadia, a CIA asset who has missed her last couple of information drops. Nadia is the mistress of an Estonian mobster named Morozov, whom the CIA has under surveillance for his shady dealings with the Russians. When Annie meets with Nadia, Nadia gets flustered and botches their ritual protocol. Although Nadia insists nothing’s wrong, Annie believes she’s in danger. Joan is skeptical, but agrees to let Annie follow her hunch and trail Nadia.

This Nadia plotline is a little on the dusty and hackneyed side, so let’s check in with lovely Jai. There’s nothing dusty about Jai. Jai and his cheekbones are having a clandestine meeting with his boss/surrogate daddy figure Arthur. Even though Jai’s original assignment -- get close to Annie to draw Ben out into the open -- has reached a natural conclusion, Arthur orders him to remain with the DPD instead of transferring back into Arthur’s own department. Thanks to Liza Hearn’s damaging articles, Arthur believes it’s best for Jai to maintain some distance from him. “Funny. Someone just gave me the same advice,” Jai snarks, referring to the way his evil (and awesome!) father Henry Wilcox advised him to steer clear of Arthur at the end of last season.

You know what this episode needed? A healthy dose of Henry Wilcox. This show always perks up enormously whenever he’s around, engaging in verbal jousting with Arthur and not-so-subtly undermining his son.

After Ben mysteriously vanishes from Walter Reed, Annie confronts Joan. Joan, who is her usual crisp and competent self, manages to reassure Annie that no harm has befallen Ben without divulging any concrete information about his status.

Through the usual muddle of exposition and coincidences and staggering leaps in logic, Annie figures out that Nadia is in no danger from Morozov. It’s the other way around, in fact: Nadia is being coerced by her tennis coach, at the behest of sinister Russian forces, to assassinate him. While Auggie whisks Morozov to safety away from Nadia’s tennis match, Annie tries to escape with Nadia. Nadia’s coach opens fire, the requisite car chase ensues, my eyes glaze over a bit with the tedium, and the evildoers are thwarted.

Denouement: The CIA agrees to give Nadia asylum in the United States, but not protection from the Russians, which means her professional tennis career must come to an early end. Auggie poses as a lawyer and interrogates two troublemaking urchins who have been arrested for the break-in at Annie’s house. And Auggie and Annie meet for drinks at their favorite local watering hole.

Hmm. This episode was no stronger or weaker than any given episode from the first season. That’s a bit of a problem: The first season, while entertaining and fun, was all about unfulfilled potential. The self-contained plots last season were the show’s biggest weakness, and just going off of this premiere, that problem hasn’t been fixed. There’s plenty of room for this series and these characters to evolve and grow, but as of yet there’s no indication that’s going to start happening any time soon.
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Duranalysis: Is There Something I Should Know?

You know, I planned this all wrong.

Back in March, when I first embarked upon this ongoing analysis of Duran Duran videos, I opted to tackle them in random order instead of knocking them out chronologically. So, naturally, I ripped through all the fun, juicy videos right at the start, both the ones I shamelessly adore (“Wild Boys,” “Night Boat”), and the ones I enjoy mocking (“View To a Kill,” “New Moon On Monday”). My mistake. Now that I’m fast running out of material from the band’s Golden Age of Video, I’m stuck with the dregs.

Hello, “Is There Something I Should Know?”

Let’s put this video into the proper historical context: “Is There Something I Should Know?” was a stand-alone single, not part of an album. It hit airwaves in 1983, after the release of Rio but before Seven and the Ragged Tiger, and became the band’s first number one hit in the UK. The video, which was directed by their frequent collaborator Russell Mulcahy, was crafted with no shortage of effort. It’s stylish, it’s slick, it’s attractive, it’s witty, and so help me, it bores the snot out of me.

The bulk of the video features a bunch of surreal stuff happening inside a white room. Here, for instance, we have four Simons wandering about. Not that Simon isn’t awesome, but one Simon Le Bon is really the maximum any universe can be reasonably expected to contain.


Simon seems to be toting around a fork. It might have some deep symbolic significance. It might also mean he was hauled off to the set to start filming while he was smack in the middle of his lunch (I’m going to guess… lobster thermidor, washed down with an excellent Beaujolais and a handful of gummi bears).


For this video, the boys all wear cute matching outfits -- blue shirts, white neckties, black pants -- perhaps as a nod to the Beatles, to whom they were frequently compared during this time. It’s preposterous for any band to rank themselves alongside the Beatles, of course, but in the case of Duran Duran, there’s some (slight) weight behind the claim. Thanks in large part to the Beatles’ films like Help! and A Hard Day’s Night and to Duran Duran’s high-profile music videos, all the members of both bands cemented themselves as individuals in the collective pop-culture consciousness in a way very few other bands have managed. Simon, John, Nick, Andy and Roger don’t have anywhere near the same level of widespread first-name recognition as John, Paul, George and Ringo… but they come a whole lot closer than most groups.

Something else they have in common with the Beatles: Chicks dig them. Like, a lot.

Simon climbs up a staircase while John toys with a sextant in the foreground. Here’s my personal interpretation of this video, which may be wildly off base: It’s about charting a course from childhood to adulthood. Hence, John is fiddling around with a navigational instrument. Later, we’ll see an old man -- an aged version of John, perhaps -- sitting at a dust-covered table, upon which rests the same sextant. Tempus fugit.

Remember back in my “Rio” analysis how I mentioned that John and Nick sometimes have a weird, magical ability to look like each other? They’re doing it again. I thought this was Nick at first until I took another gander at the hair. Nick’s hair has gone through a wide array of colors over the years, but he’s rarely a brunette.


You can see the influences of various artists in the set design -- there’s clearly some Magritte, and a whole lot of Escher, and probably some other artists my single art history course didn’t prepare me to identify. Pour a few champagne cocktails into Nick, and I’m sure he’d be happy to point out all the homages to various artists in this video, most likely in great and comprehensive detail.

Hmm. Getting drunk on champagne cocktails with Nick Rhodes just became one of my new Wildly Improbable Life Goals. That’d be awesome. Oh, sure, he’d probably chide me for the gaps in my knowledge of the art world and make withering comments about my cheap shoes, but it’d totally be worth it.

I’m going to rip through a bunch of scenes pretty quickly, so hang on: We see some shots of a baby watching Duran Duran videos, “My Own Way” and “Save a Prayer” in particular. I’m guessing we’re meant to interpret this as the baby catching a fleeting glimpse of his possible future, but mostly this just reminds me I’d rather be watching “Save a Prayer.” Or hell, even “My Own Way.”

Also: Out of all the bare asses that could possibly be flaunted in this video, this is entirely the wrong one.


Simon climbs the staircase leading out of the surreal white room and finds himself on the front steps of a building, surrounded by briefcase-carrying men in bowler hats and suits. Everything’s now shot in dreary black and white.


He winds up in a wooded area, where a toddler carrying a red ball is chased by a cluster of other children. The men in bowler hats perform a bunch of fussy measurements on trees and create some kind of triangular vortex. The toddler stares at the vortex, then chases the red ball back into the white room.


It’s all subject to personal interpretation, but here’s my take on all this: Both the baby and the toddler represent young versions of Simon, who is serving as a surrogate for the viewer. We see various pathways leading to adulthood -- the baby could join the glorious Technicolor lifestyle of Duran Duran, flamenco dancers and all, or he could grow up to wear a dull suit and a bowler hat and lead a drab life of nine-to-five drudgery.

Tough call.

Let’s check in with the rest of the band: They spend a lot of screen time looking up at a high window, singing in unison while looking super-earnest. Heh. All the time and care that went into making this video, and no one bothered to fetch an apple crate for poor wee Nick so he could be properly seen in this shot. It looks like John’s shoulder has sprouted a crazy tuft of vibrant orange hair.


For some reason, we’re treated to the sight of Roger, Nick and Andy crowding around an old-time microphone while doing a finger-wagging synchronized routine to the famous/infamous “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war” lyric. Er… they’re also dressed in fancy 19th Century French military uniforms. Yeah, I don’t know.


(There’s a cute and far too short clip on YouTube in which Simon and Nick watch their old videos while making sarcastic quips and going into fits of mad giggles at the absurdity of it all; I have no idea where the footage originally comes from, but it’s adorable. Anyway, here’s what Simon had to say about this shot: “I’d asked for West Point military uniforms for that. Officer and a Gentleman. What’d we get? Napoleon Bonaparte!” Yes, because West Point uniforms would have made complete sense.)

Nick somehow manages to look simultaneously ethereal and sinister here, which is a neat trick. It is not altogether easy for a fine-boned, pocket-sized pixie with tangerine hair and matching lipstick to look gritty and tough, but damned if he’s not pulling it off. If he were a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, Tyra would call him “Fierce!” and hand him his photo first.


(Guilty secret: I watch a lot of America’s Next Top Model. I’m reasonably certain Nick does, too.)

And we get a flashback to what I’m guessing was picked as Nick’s single most iconic moment in their videos up to this point: It’s the bit in “Night Boat,” pre-zombie attack, where he’s slinking around the dock and peering into windows and generally acting odd. Excellent choice.


John, while heart-wrenchingly lovely as ever, is a little low on energy and star power in this video. Under usual circumstances, John’s phenomenal beauty torpedoes all his bandmates out of the water, but I’m going to have to award the Prettiest Duran title and tiara to Nick this time around.


John’s most iconic moment: Getting his makeup applied in “Girls on Film.” Eh, sure. Why not?


And here’s Andy. Oh, Andy. I’m not going to comment on the hair. I’ll limit myself to saying this: Andy is even shorter than Nick, and almost as slight, and yet I’ve never even considered referring to him as a “pocket-sized pixie.”


Let’s see what they’ve chosen as Andy’s iconic video moment. Ah, here we go, it’s him flipping over a table in “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which totally seems like something he does on a semi-regular basis. The small problem with this, of course, is that he didn’t do it -- it was Simon, not Andy, who flipped the table. It’s sad to realize that Andy has been too under-represented in these videos to have any single defining moment to showcase here.


Last up, as usual, is Roger. On Duran Duran’s official website, when asked by a fan if there were any video moments he regretted, Roger picked this business here, where he’s singing to the camera: “I look very uncomfortable doing this and cringe every time I see it to this day.” Aw, Roger.


Roger’s iconic moment: the opening shot of “Planet Earth,” where he’s shirtless and sculpted and gorgeous. Yeah, that’s a good one.


Simon is not given a single iconic moment, probably because, as I’ve pointed out before, Duran Duran videos tend to be All Simon, All the Time anyway. Fair enough.

And… that’s the video. Whenever I watch it, it’s always with a faint sense of irritation, because at this point in their career, they had the resources and energy and enthusiasm to pull off something bigger, wilder, splashier, sillier. They could have posed as… I don’t know, space explorers. Vampires. Pirates. Circus performers. Mercenaries. Film noir detectives. Drug lords. Edwardian prostitutes. Anything! Instead, they stood in a white room and sang earnestly at a window. If that doesn’t rate as a missed opportunity, I don’t know what does.
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