Predictably, Valley Forge is one of my all-time favorite episodes of Turn. I know that Washington isn’t supposed to be a main character of Turn’s overall narrative, but man did I love that we got to have a Washington episode (and man do I wish there’d been more)!
[More under the cut because this got a lot longer than I intended.]
And again, I’m sure there’s other fictive media that does this, but this show let George fucking Washington have a breakdown. Like, demon-possessed Washington sounds like so much fun (obvs that would be right at home on, like, Supernatural or something), but I think what we got was even better. He was insecure, he was afraid, he had daddy issues, he was doubtful about his decision-making abilities (because he’d been fatally wrong!), and he was at the point of hallucinations and violence over it.
(Plus, am I crazy, or did Washington spend more time than usual without his uniform jacket? Eh, I’m probably crazy.)
Also, technically, he failed! I mean, obviously the choice he makes to write the letter sparing Hewlett is meaningful insofar as Washington’s mental health, but the captain lowkey was NOT going to spare that man and then Simcoe came along anyway.
And I love the little details. Like the bloody teeth and the Dutch angles on Washington’s face, Billy literally putting Washington back together by re-dressing him, the ripple of wind when That Letter snaps into focus, Washington hiding half in the shadows before vanishing into the darkness of the woods, the homage to McRae’s Prayer at Valley Forge, and of course the use of Lawrence’s watch.
Beyond that, the episode really allowed Washington to be not just a Man Who Owns Slaves but also abusive with it. I mean, even the act of asking Billy, whom he owns, to ‘treat me as an equal’ is already putting him in a position where he can’t win; but then getting physically violent when he tries to do exactly that? And then not even apologizing afterwards! Personally I really like this, because it doesn’t allow Washington off the ‘problematic’ hook even by the ending. I was not at all surprised to find that a black woman wrote this episode (actually the woman who produced the first and second season of Luke Cage, Aida Croal — cool!).
And on that note, I really love how much the episode cares about Billy in specific; the camera lingers with him for significant amounts of time without Washington present. In an interview Ian Kahn mentioned that the filming of that episode took place during Ferguson (Michael Brown, if you don’t remember), which I honestly did not put together because I watched Turn in 2020/21. Gentry White, besides being generally dignified and beautiful, really shines here, and his chemistry with Ian Kahn is off the charts. He plays a Billy struggling to hold his own amid the debris of Washington’s spiral, fearful but incredibly powerful once he finds his voice.
And of course there’s Lawrence, whose presence in the story is established as early as the scene with Dr. Thatcher, except you don’t really notice it until you’re rewatching the episode. Washington talks about him like a son about his father, but especially a father whom he idealizes (perhaps because he lost Lawrence so young and/or so long ago). And the encounter Washington has with Lawrence in the woods really is like a prayer — demanding answers from God, and when Lawrence speaks, it is very explicitly a theophany (the homage to McRae really drives it home).
But yeah. Valley Forge is a rollercoaster of an episode where my favorite Turn character is probably at his most human, vulnerable, unstable, and problematic. And it’s my favorite episode to rewatch.
