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So this is an interesting one, isn’t it? The latest episode of Dickinson is called ‘The Daisy follows soft the Sun’, which is interpreted as a love poem to Samuel Bowles, the manipulative newspaperman played by Finn Jones. There it is interpreted that Emily is the daisy and Samuel the Sun — yet the show takes a different tactic, subverting this common interpretation almost completely in reverse.
The road there is set from that classic creative issue, a bad case of writer’s block. In this case it’s clear that Emily is in her head about it because she (for the first time) has given a poem to someone other than Sue, a vulnerability she hates and a mystery she can’t resolve. Of course she still hits a turn of phrase calling herself a ‘useless husk’ so it’s not all bad.
She eventually has a bit of an adventure with the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmstead (Timothy Simons who played Jonah on Veep), who is a creative mind but without any concerns of vulnerability or any lack of confidence. She explicitly calls out the metaphor, calling herself the daisy with Simon as the Sun, instead of being romantic (it would seem) it’s about relying on someone else for fame and success.
But Olmstead provides a very interesting and effective response, that the work itself is the gift, not the praise for it. It’s a tough lesson for any creative person, asking yourself to be selfless or potentially vulnerable or risk failure. But it’s a pretty good lesson. The episode makes it even more obvious that Emily gets lost in a maze and has to find her way out, and then even more so when Samuel finally approves of the poem but in doing so, calls her his ‘little daisy’.
Yup. It’s obvious stuff, but I don’t hate it. It’s still about a pretty useful message.
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Lavinia has a smaller subplot, but it’s essentially focused on her newly developed interest in the mysterious ex of Shipley, the spider dancer Lola Montez. That’s interesting in that she’s not really buying into Shipley’s interest in marriage, but it leads to a pretty awful proposal, where he delivers the priceless line that of course she needs to be ‘fully blindsided by a wild prank in order to commit to a marriage’. Some trenchant commentary there.
And it’s tightly connected to the other blindside, that Austin decides to adopt his cousins, without saying anything to Sue. I couldn’t find anything about this in my research (in fact I found conflicting information) so I have to assume it’s all invented, which does make things interesting from the perspective of how the show can use it to tell a story.
Finally there’s the literal hole that Edward falls into because he’s too busy staring into the sky, fairly soon after calling himself a failure of a father. The same hole that is assuredly created by the cousins he’s brought in to get money, another funny, sort of obvious metaphor. This is continued further when his wife jumps in to confront him about their lack of intimacy — through the conversation, he merely calls them old, so naturally that doesn’t help anything. And this has a pretty clear connection to later, when Lavinia expresses reservations in her engagement but her mother shuts that down right away. It’s an interesting setup for sure.
Overall, it was a pretty interesting episode, with some obvious metaphors and interesting choices about the episode’s poem of note, but I feel like there are some pretty good underlying themes and messages and definitely some interesting stuff for the season going forward.
New music of note are evocative songs ‘the end’ by MiserWives and ‘Lost’ by Jai Wolf and Chelsea Jade — they immediately went on my playlist.
What did you think of this episodes? Start a conversation in the comments section below.
New episodes of Dickinson are available Fridays on Apple TV+.
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