Huge thx to Trevor Rabin and Paul Linford for the killer score this week! #AgentX @HEPHNERJEFF @PeterOFallon1
— William Blake Herron (@HERRONBLAKE) December 14, 2015
Admittedly I found some of the cues for episode six, "Sacrifice," to be a bit too expected, but they fit the suspenseful tone as needed. Sometimes you need to blend in, after all. But I can see why Herron made this tweet - beyond an overall appreciation for this scoring team, that is. The narrative arc has turned quite solemn and serious over the past three episodes and Trevor and Paul made some studied choices in "Long Walk Home" to underscore the tension in a compelling fashion. It feels big - cinematic - and as I've stated previously they know how to do this so well. The central conflict of the series is not about whatever bad guys John Case has to take on for flag and country, but the dark side of his mission and his profession, the cost of warring in the shadows, what it does to a man, and specifically, what it has done to his predecessors. I have a feeling the final three episodes are going to implode not only the Presidency but the Brotherhood, the implications of which will be far-reaching. Now whether we get to move on from that is still up in the air (as we don't yet know if Agent X will be renewed for a second season), but the stakes are high, and the scoring reflects that.
What interested me most was almost a throwaway - a jazz tune heard in the hotel bar scene with Case and Marks/Volker. Incidental music choices are akin to wallpaper, of a sort, or they should be. Any scene with incidental music which calls attention to itself is always a poor choice, in my opinion, because it takes the viewer out of the story, if only for a moment. But this was quite well-made or chosen in that it's the kind of music you would expect to hear in that milieu, and that's a testament to good scoring - even for a 30-second cue, you make it seamless, a part of the world of the story.
I found the most important thing in this episode is that it is tonally allied - nothing is played for laughs, and even the action sequences have a touch of gravitas to them. This episode is exposition-heavy, and that can be death to a viewer's attention span, so the score has to engage the viewer's emotional spectrum, to let them know that revelation is as important as action. There's a great deal of emotional resonance throughout this episode because so much is at stake. Even though some of the action is little more than illustrated exposition - such as when John and Malcolm are in the Ops Room getting ready to knock out all the systems - and the camera circles like a shark, the music builds, but it's all manipulation, and it works well to distract us from the fact that there's really not much going on in that moment. The rest of the episode - save the shock of the very last scene - is fairly predictable, but remains propulsive and interesting.
Killer score? Yeah well, that remains to be seen but it is excellent scoring indeed.
