Corridors - Tumblr Posts
TOTEM
Observations and Thoughts on She-ra 5x03 Corridors
Reflections are an important motif in this episode. It’s like Catra is looking at herself and trying to really see herself and what she wants. In the opening scene her reflection is visible but it is obscured by the explosions on the planet surface happening past it. Catra is confused. What she really wants isn’t clear to her. Right before she decides to save Glimmer she looks once again at her reflection and it is clear with no obstructions and she hits a breakthrough. She knows what she really wants.
There’s also the obvious parallel with promise that these flashbacks end up bringing with Catra deciding to forgo self preservation and accept her feelings for adora and decide to save Adora when she makes eye contact with young Adora saying “I will always be your friend.” This is mirrored against Catra deciding to abandon Adora and commit to being her opponent after seeing the promise they made as children and making eye contact with her younger self.
Who she makes eye contact with portrays her shift in perspective. In promise she makes eye contact with her younger self and at that point she isn’t able to see Adora’s perspective, that Adora still cares for her and that her decision to leave the horde wasn’t a decision to leave her. Catra at this time is still the hurt little kid in that she was in the memory. She has been so traumatized that seeing outside that perspective is difficult. When she makes eye contact with young Adora it is her finally seeing Adora’s perspective. She can acknowledge that Adora still cared about her even when she left. That she always cared about Catra and that she didn’t want to leave Catra.
I absolutely love the scores that play when Catra is seeing the flashback of her and Adora in the Corridor and also when Catra is trying to save Glimmer and Glimmer says “what are you doing? Are you saving me?” and Catra responds “not you, Adora.” I have rewatched this scene multiple times and I would love it if this score would be released. (If it has, can someone tell me which track it’s on?) These tracks were so intense and just listening to them alone evokes really strong emotions.
I also would like to point out that the flashbacks within this episode sum up Catra and Adora’s entire relationship arc. Catra feels that Adora has chosen something/someone over her and she pushes Adora away. Hurting Adora in the process. Adora keeps coming back and reaffirms that she will always be Catra’s friend until Catra can no longer deny that she feels the same way about Adora and decides to come back to her. It also displays her growth because within the flashback Catra claims she will never apologize to anyone ever but present Catra, in what she believes will be her final act, apologizes for everything to Adora.
This episode probably had the most difficult job of all the episodes this season, believably kick starting Catra’s redemption. I really liked how they handled Catra doing "that one good thing with [her] life" because if her redemption was kick started by her just realizing that the horde was wrong after 4 season of her rising through the ranks I would not have bought into it, but instead it was motivated by her realizing that she can't let horde prime get Adora. This is her realizing the truth that was obscured by her “lie”. Her lie was that she hate Adora and Adora doesn’t truly care for her. Realizing her lie made it so that she could move past her denial and start actually working towards what she needs instead of fake wants.
She-ra Season 5 Re-watch Thoughts
This season the animation and art design is easily at its most beautiful. The actions are more fluid, the use of color is phenomenal, and the character’s faces and bodies are at their most expressive yet. I really loved the She-ra redesign and prefer it over the original design they had by quite a lot. I loved the scenes where softer colors were used. This is especially prevalent in the final episode after Adora defeats Horde Prime. The colors were breathtaking and it’s clear the time and effort that went into making the final shots be ingrained in your memory. I know it will be ingrained in mine. I thought the animation bumps between seasons 2 and 3 and seasons 3 and 4 were impressive but this is on a different level. It’s like everything was taken up to 11.
She-ra never lost sight of its characters and always managed to keep the focus on them and their struggles despite the larger than life stakes that were happening around them. This season paid off the character arcs of Adora, Catra, and Entrapta really well. My favorite episodes were the ones that were intensely character focused (corridors, save the cat, failsafe, heart). The show knows what its strength is and holds to it.
I came into this series not sure what to expect. I wasn’t familiar with she-ra (I had seen he-man) or the characters and hadn’t read Noelle’s work. So when I watched the first season and saw how nuanced and complicated the characters and their relationships were I was enthralled. I woke up every night that a new season dropped at 2 or 3 in the morning (based on which time zone I was in) to binge the season. I was so impressed with the character work of the show. There aren’t many shows that manage to blow me away with its characters. A large part of that is the fact that I could connect with a lot of the characters and understand them. This show managed to help me in ways I didn’t know I needed at the time and helped me distance myself from a toxic family situation. My thoughts on the show are biased because of this but that’s the case with everyone when it comes to media. There are going to be certain things that connect more with some people than others.
There’s a good and bad way of a show knowing what it is. This show takes knowing what it is in a good direction. It knows it’s a character drama that has the relationships and individual character arcs front and center and it uses the war setting as a vehicle for these things. Not everyone will like this because this makes it so the show focuses on consequences for personal actions more frequently than for war related actions. It isn't a war story. This worked for me, but won't for everyone.
In this season it uses Horde Prime and his “cult” as a metaphor for organized religion which is used to complete Catra, Adora, and Hordak’s arcs of self actualization and coming to terms with what you want and that you have a choice. This I think is done well because of how it matches with it's themes of working through programming and unlearning toxic behavior ingrained by your upbringing. I can easily say that She-ra has produced some of my favorite characters and I loved the conclusions to their arcs.
My one real issue with this season is that I think the tonal issues were jarring. To break it down it went from the premiere “Horde Prime” which was pretty dark showing the hopeless position of the rebellion and Adora’s struggle with her identity now that she-ra is gone and her suicidal drive to push herself to be useful to “Launch” which has a lot of things that are played for laughs and just felt like an odd shift especially considering that it is followed by “Corridors” which is an intense character study of Catra and her pain and loneliness and deals with her coming to terms with the fact that a lot of her anger and pain was misdirected at Adora all these years and that Adora has truly cared about her.
Then “Corridors” is followed by “Stranded” which is much more lighthearted and while it does deal with Adora coming to the decision to go back for Catra and her conflict over doing what she wants over what would be best for Etheria while Glimmer and Bow reconcile (or start to) a lot of the episode is used for levity. Catra is in a life threatening situation so while the reasoning for the main characters making this stop make sense the shift and lack of urgency at times doesn't work well in the context of the season.
Then that episode is followed by “Save the Cat” which is one of the most emotionally charged episodes of the show which has Adora refusing to make the same mistake she made in the pilot and refuses to leave horde prime’s ship without Catra even if it is the death of her. Adora places Catra above everything else. This episode is heartbreaking and calls back to all their misunderstandings, pain, history, and disconnects. This episode is followed by “Taking Control” which I think does a much better job of keeping the tone of “Save the Cat” and moving the plot and character arcs along. But then it’s followed by “Perils of Peekablue” which, while it’s a fun episode, it is very jarring to be pulled out of the very dramatic and dark episodes that came previously. Scorpia's sacrifice at the end worked really well as a precursor to what is waiting for our heroes when they get back to Etheria though so this episode had a better transition to the next than the ones that came before.
I am usually pretty good at being able to switch tones with a show and I think the balance between dark and light has been done very well in this show before in “Princess Prom”, “Roll with It”, “Mer-Mysteries”, “Pulse”, and “Princess Scorpia” to name a few. These episodes however didn’t mesh as well for me. I still enjoy watching them, but I think watching season 5 as a whole makes it clear that these episodes break up the tension too much. I will admit I am a bigger fan of drama than I am of comedy so I gravitated towards the much more serious episodes within the show like "Hero", "Promise", "Remember", "Failsafe", "Light Spinner", etc. I understand why there’s comedy, but I think that instead of having entire episodes dedicated to comedy they should have mixed it in like they do with the ones I named above. I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent because, while She-ra does almost everything else I want from a show, I think this is easily its biggest problem.
I think this season is my favorite season. (It’s a very close race between this season, season 4, and season 3) This season managed to pay off just about everything that was set up in the previous seasons and that is a near insurmountable task for any show. I haven’t felt this satisfied by a series finale in a very long time. The final episode tandem heart parts 1 and 2 left me speechless and I immediately started re-watching the series. I don’t know exactly what it was and how to put it into words, but that finale really hit me. It really felt like what the show was always building towards.
The fact that this big grand war ended not with a big battle, but with Adora and Catra finally coming to an understanding of both themselves and each other felt true to the show. Catra and Adora’s love-hate relationship has been the heart of the show since the beginning and it was their falling out due to their disconnect that kicked the show off in “The Sword” so it’s fitting that it’s them fully reconnecting and understanding each other that ends the series. The emphasis and climax of the show isn’t the big epic battle above, but the love confession happening below. The fact that the show manages to stay so personal and focused despite the stakes being the fate of the universe is a testament to how well written this season is in my opinion. The show comes full circle and I couldn’t have been happier with the result.