There is a sequence in episode 7 which makes this series special.
It begins with a distraught Martha at a street curb while the prelude of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde plays. It moves to Liddy in prison as ''Brunnhilde's Immolation'' from Goetterdammerung plays, and as he reaches a moment like Isolde's transfiguration, deranged and abstracted, the music switches to ''Siegfried's Rhine Journey''; the music of the dead hero.
This montage is sardonic and brilliant. It works so well and is moving, even if someone does not know the source music, but the irony of it linked to the victims and villains of Watergate is excellent.
It expresses a wider feature of this series: that it plays with the specific, with the individual human stories. The marriage of John and Martha Mitchell is at the center; the security man, Frank Wills, who discovered the break in, and that of John Dean's own romance and marriage being the cornerstones of the work.
The people associated with Watergate are all, in some or another, crushed by the events they can neither escape, nor control. Their relationship to the center of power, Nixon, is expressed in reportage, in what news and conversation is passed to each person which could affect them - his favor, his need to use them - and their futures. They are ancillary objects.
Where the series is slightly ambiguous is in the broader story arc, that is in the time and events of the Watergate cover up, where, to a degree there is assumed knowledge that at certain intervals the progression of events to each individual has particular consequences.
This angle on the human stories makes this retelling of the original 'Gate' conspiracy well worth the time. And that sequence of Wagner with Martha Mitchell and G Gordon Liddy exemplifies it perfectly. There is a Wagnerian sense to Watergate, even if the building was not destroyed and collapsed into the Potomac.
It begins with a distraught Martha at a street curb while the prelude of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde plays. It moves to Liddy in prison as ''Brunnhilde's Immolation'' from Goetterdammerung plays, and as he reaches a moment like Isolde's transfiguration, deranged and abstracted, the music switches to ''Siegfried's Rhine Journey''; the music of the dead hero.
This montage is sardonic and brilliant. It works so well and is moving, even if someone does not know the source music, but the irony of it linked to the victims and villains of Watergate is excellent.
It expresses a wider feature of this series: that it plays with the specific, with the individual human stories. The marriage of John and Martha Mitchell is at the center; the security man, Frank Wills, who discovered the break in, and that of John Dean's own romance and marriage being the cornerstones of the work.
The people associated with Watergate are all, in some or another, crushed by the events they can neither escape, nor control. Their relationship to the center of power, Nixon, is expressed in reportage, in what news and conversation is passed to each person which could affect them - his favor, his need to use them - and their futures. They are ancillary objects.
Where the series is slightly ambiguous is in the broader story arc, that is in the time and events of the Watergate cover up, where, to a degree there is assumed knowledge that at certain intervals the progression of events to each individual has particular consequences.
This angle on the human stories makes this retelling of the original 'Gate' conspiracy well worth the time. And that sequence of Wagner with Martha Mitchell and G Gordon Liddy exemplifies it perfectly. There is a Wagnerian sense to Watergate, even if the building was not destroyed and collapsed into the Potomac.