Belated Summer Rewatch Post: "Coming Home"

[youngeratheart.livejournal.com]

I cannot believe that I somehow managed to let the fact that the day was Sunday pass me by, as well as Monday. Real life and a few other distractions must have confused me. 

My sincerest apologies to everyone on the comm. This rewatch series is important to me, and I'm sure it is to more than just me. This is a chance for us to rewatch, review, and re-enjoy.  Okay, made up the last word. Still, we get to see favorite moments, shots, or important plot points again.

This episode is a big one. The pilot. The one that got it all started. "Coming Home."

I'm running behind, but I'll put the episode on now and refresh my memory of the book one more time before adding thoughts. Join in, everyone. :)

Comments

Some Initial Thoughts...

[youngeratheart.livejournal.com]

I'll be back with more later.

Coming from the books, it was always very interesting to me to see the accident in full detail. The books only show Amy's point of view, so the story starts just before she finds Spartan/Gerry (he was stolen, his real name is Dancing Grass Geronimo) and when the accident happens, Amy blacks out. We don't see Marion's funeral, don't see the time spent by Lou and Jack worrying in the hospital, so that was an addition I found interesting.

The way the situation was handled with Spartan jumped a bit too far forward for me, since I'm used to the books, and Spartan coming to Heartland happens in book two, after Lou has decided to stay and Amy has taken up her mother's role.

One of the biggest differences I keep coming back to with the books and the series is the use of "horse whisperer." In the episode,Amy tells Ty that's what her mother was, but in the books, she and Marion refused to be called horse whisperers. I figure that must be done for our benefit as a reader because people understand that concept more than the delicate balance Marion and Amy of the books had with "listening" to the horses, join-up, and their natural remedies.

Also, in the books, Ty had been working for Heartland, with Marion, for three years when this all started. He was close to her and admired her work so much so that he dropped out of school and went to work with her full time. It's a huge difference from the series.

Ty being on probation gives the show lots of possibilities and allows them to go in a direction the books didn't, while giving someone "new" to Heartland to explain its history to.

Do I think it could have gone another way? Yes. Bad Boy Ty is okay, but I loved the sweetheart he was in the books.

Re: Some Initial Thoughts...

[youngeratheart.livejournal.com]

A bit more...

Interesting conversation between Lou and Amy about their dad. The subject didn't really come up for Amy, even if her mother had died. She never knew him, and Lou barely knew him. He left when Amy was three, Lou was eleven, and Lou waited for him to return to England, where they'd been living, but he never did.

The addition of Jesse as Ashley's brother/Amy's short lived love interest was also interesting. I thought for a bit he was a substitute for Matt Trewin at first, but he never really came into that role. No one really did.

Val and Jack's friendship surprised me. Val Grant was always big in the books as Heartland's enemy. She wanted to see Amy lose at competition and the sanctuary go out of business so that everyone took their horses to Green Briar.

The way Ty talks Amy into working on Spartan is interesting. His statement about it not being right keeping him locked up like that is interesting, speaks to Ty's own past.

I had been wanting for years to see a join up, and as visually stunning as it was, it hardly comes close to what I thought it would be like. The elements were all there as described by the books, but the feelings, and I suppose that's what I'd want to experience the most, weren't really as clear as I'd hoped.

Amy's other friend that vanishes after the pilot annoys me. I think that's because Amy was never much of a social person in the books and the party seemed contrived. The fight with Ty and Jesse was unnecessary.

I did like the moment at the funeral where they brought what I assume was Pegasus to the grave site.

I'd forgotten that they gave Scott the role of someone who had been in Ty's position before him. Scott went on to become a vet, and it's interesting that Ty made the choice to pursue that as well.

Jack is very different from his book counterpart, far more of a grumpy old rancher, but I love the way he is on the show. His initial interactions with Ty are pretty good, and then later when he accepts Ty as a part of his family.

I really didn't know what to make of Mallory at first. She was kind of just there in the pilot, and I didn't know who she was supposed to be. I thought maybe Hannah, the girl who ended up with Spartan/Gerry, but she wasn't. She's kind of Soraya from the books made younger, yet Soraya still has a part.

The end of the episode is visually attractive, and I do love the theme song.

I wish there could have been more of a definite moment where Amy takes up her mother's role, like in the books when she gets Lou to stay after taking care of Star, saying that she and Ty and Lou and Grandpa can make it work.

Over all, though, a very impressive pilot.

Thoughts on the Episode

[rainpaintwrites.livejournal.com]

(To briefly introduce myself - I got hooked on the Heartland books when I was in sixth grade. I remember sitting in the chair in our old living room and reading "Coming Home." I'm pretty sure I cried [who wouldn't?].) I was hooked on the book series for years, cried when it ended, wrote a fanfic to try to redeem what happened in "Beyond the Horizon," and still have an oddly deep emotional attachment to Amy and Ty as a couple even though I'm now twentysomething. I vowed I'd never watch the show because of the way that they changed so many things, but earlier this summer I caved and now I've been watching episodes On Demand here and there.)

To me, the accident scene in "Coming Home" is one of the most vivid scenes in a Heartland book in terms of imagery. I could picture the dark tunnel, the wet road, the falling tree, and "every little detail, every vein of every green, damp leaf" (47). So it was really interesting to see that scene come to life on the screen, and from the way that I got teary-eyed when the truck crashed, I think it did its job properly.

The (brief) portrayal of Marion as having a sort of joking personality was...certainly different from the way that I had imagined her. Can't say whether I liked or disliked it, but it presented an intriguing contrast between her and the much quieter Amy.

I also thought that it was interesting the way that the show toned down Amy's grief when Lou tells her that Marion is dead. In the book, Amy screams to the point that a nurse has to come in and give her a sedative. But in the show, she just sort of turned her head and moaned a little. Overall, though, I guess that that fit the show's characterization of Amy. When I read the books, I never really imagined her as someone particularly quiet. But the Amy on the TV show is pretty soft-spoken and introverted, and I actually /really/ like that.

With that said, I felt like everyone's grief over Marion's death was toned down quite a bit. But there was so much crammed into this episode that I suppose they couldn't really have just scenes showing the characters' grief. I wanted to feel their loss, because I felt it so keenly in the books, but I didn't.

Ty irritated me, but I guess he's kind of supposed to at this point. I just...like youngeratheart said in another comment, I missed the sweetheart that he is in the books. I don't really get why they had to make him a just-barely-former delinquent. I've seen later episodes, though, so I know that he gets better as the show goes along. I did really, really like one of his lines - when Amy overhears him playing guitar and he asks her about Spartan and he says something like, "He shouldn't be behind bars." The writer in me squee'd because it was /such/ a revealing comment. Plus my heart broke for him just a tiny bit there.

I thought that the party at Ashley's house was really stupid and I actually fast-forwarded through it. It didn't sound at all like something Amy would actually want to attend. And I don't understand why she was dating Ashley's brother.

When I finished watching and tried to figure out what, exactly, I thought, one word came to mind: overload. A lot of the stuff that happened in this show actually happened in the second book - Spartan coming to Heartland, Amy's struggle to reach him. I think that all of that should have been its own separate episode. The way that it was, there was really no suspense over whether Amy would reach Spartan. It was too fast, too easy. I /wanted/ the raging thunderstorm, the hours-long join up (or at least a hint that the join-up took a while), the screams of "It wasn't my fault! It really wasn't my fault!"

(Another issue with the compressed grief - I really didn't get the sense that Amy felt as if the accident were her thought. If they'd taken another episode to deal with the aftermath of the accident, they could have dealt with her guilt more in-depth. I guess I just like emotional stuff, haha.)