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arduinnaOkay, what is going on with this show? I started watching it originally sort of intermittently, decided I liked it, and started watching regularly. And for a while it was great! It was your basic cop procedural but I like the characters, and it was all about Sam and G, and their relationship.
It was fun! Sam and G mooned around making eyes at each other; I loved Hetty, and Dom, and Kenzie was okay but not my favorite. And then they started changing things up – got rid of Dom, brought in Deeks, so we lost the chance to watch Sam mentor a young agent and instead got to watch a sleaze leer all over Kenzie. Awesome. (Yeah, yeah, sleaze with a heart of gold, whatever, I don't care.)
(Fair warning, this is long...)
And then we get to this season. Suddenly, this season, Sam and G are more separate. A lot of the focus got shifted to Kenzie, and onto Kenzie and Deeks, and instead of being about Sam and G's relationship and watching them get closer and closer, it was all about watching the white, het couple get closer and closer and flirt even though they kept saying nothing will ever happen.
I mean, okay, I will totally grant that the traditional focus on G’s Incredibly Tragic Past of Sorrow And Abandonment had been terribly overdone and was ridiculous, but instead of figuring that out, they went with Kenzie’s Tragic Past of Sorrow And Mystery, and then even took a page from Criminal Minds, with Kenzie having joined NCIS not to be an agent, but specifically to use agency resources to hunt people down, and basically having been using everyone all this time as a way of dealing with her own past. I just. What?
Then a few weeks ago I saw an episode that was so strange, I was convinced I had missed at least one episode, probably more like half a dozen.
Spoilers!
Sam was off on a mission undercover, and G was desperately worried about him. Which was great! It felt like a long time since they'd had that sort of vibe going on. So G finds Sam off on a mission, and tries to get him to come home because he's been missing for very long time, the mission is very dangerous, and G thinks Sam would be better off at home. With G, is the silent addendum there.
Sam refuses to go because the mission is too important, which okay, sounds like Sam. But as the episode goes along, there're all these weird references where Sam is suddenly talking as though he has family back home. Which was never in any episode before that that I remember, so I thought it was just for his cover. Until the end of the episode where he finally goes home and walks into his house to greet his wife, and goes upstairs to kiss a sleeping child, and puts his wedding ring "back" on for the very first time. At which point, I started scouring the web to find out what in gods name I had missed, because Sam Hanna had never had a family up to this point.
But no, that was it. That was how we found out that Sam has been married with a child all this time. Which made him into something of an asshole, actually, because he should not have stayed on that mission. Okay. Now we'll know that Sam and G cannot be engaged in any true homoerotic subtext, because Sam Is straight, straight, straight. He has the wife and the baby. Straight.
So that explains a lot of the season so far. They're trying desperately to shift attention from the potentially gay relationship to the very much straight relationship of Kenzie and Deeks. Which is really annoying.
But I keep watching because every now and then you get a few moments of wonderful Sam/G stuff - the anniversary episode was pretty great, with them bringing each other presents and everyone wishing them a happy anniversary – and Hetty is always fun. I will say some of the season’s storyline has been about Hetty, which is never a bad thing. It's just that too many of them have been about Kenzie, which is really boring.
Anyway. So on to this week's episode, 'Vengeance'. It is about Navy SEALs, which makes sense since they’re to be investigating Navy stuff, so it's good to see it actually move the plot, rather than having something randomly shoehorned into affecting Naval intelligence.
So off we go, to the Navy training base, or something, where there is a team of SEALs. Or at least half the team of SEALs.
A seaman has been killed, his body left on a shooting range (for missiles and rockets and stuff, not hand weapons), where it’s discovered when one of the missiles fails to go off and a robot goes in to clear the dud, instead finding the dead body. The evidence very quickly points to a member of the SEAL team. Sam is a former SEAL. Oh no, the angst. This is great stuff! Except. The entire episode was about how SEALs have the most integrity, the most awesome, the most honor, the most every good thing in the world.
Now, understand, I am all for this in moderation in fiction. I think in real life it can be overdone because it is just freaking dangerous to think that any military decision is a good decision by default, but in fiction I'll go for a whole lot of military rah-rah whatever. I was and am a Stargate SG-1 fan, and I was all over the military and the requirements thereof for my fannish needs there.
But in this case, it was taken to an extreme that I couldn't even believe. Every other word was SEAL. “Hello, Chief Hanna, you are the best SEAL ever, my SEAL teachers taught me about you and said I should try to be a SEAL like you.” “They won't talk to you, G; they’re SEALs, they’ll only talk to another SEAL, because they’re SEALs.” “Let’s have this conversation, SEAL to SEAL.” “We need to talk, one SEAL to another.” “You don't understand about SEALs. You can't ask them questions about where they were, G, because the very fact of asking a SEAL that question is an affront. SEALs live for integrity and honor, a SEAL can do no wrong.” “SEAL SEAL SEAL SEAL SEAL, SEAL. SEAL?”
It was reaching Smurf levels of SEAL.
And the words in between “SEAL”s were “integrity” and “honor”. Which define all SEALs, because they are SEALs, who are defined by integrity and honor. QED.
Which, you know, fine, except. As the show was shouting “SEAL! INTEGRITY! HONOR!” at us, as loud as it could, it showed a group of men with no honor or integrity, who convinced Sam to go along with a cover-up of a homicide in the name of protecting SEAL honor (which they had utterly betrayed).
Here's what the show tells us happened: A group of SEALs figures out someone has been betraying them; they've lost seven men, and it had to be because of leaked information. They think they know who leaked it. They decide to question him one night of their own accord to find out what he's been doing; they say they don't intend to do him any harm, but nevertheless carefully establish an alibi off-base, then break onto their own base to find and question him. They do so, injuring him in the process, but the wound wasn't fatal, and they field-dressed it before they start interrogating him. He mysteriously dies while no one's looking at him, and they keep quiet about it because they have a desperately urgent mission the next day, to save the lives of two civilians who've been captured overseas; only this team can save them, because only they know the cave system they're being held in. It's all about the mission, and only the mission, and they're unhappy that anyone is doing anything to interfere with the mission, like ask them questions about the dead guy. They're especially unhappy, and offended, that anyone thinks they have anything to do with the dead guy.
All Sam wants is the truth, and once he gets it, they bond over SEAL-ish honor and integrity, and he helps them go on their crucial, urgent mission, and the day is saved.
Yay for a safe day! Puppies and kittens for all!
Here's what actually happened. In what we are told is an ineffable, unswerving spirit of pure honor and integrity, six men:
Charming, right? But it gets better!
Because Sam does indeed announce that after his private conversation, of which there is no record, his determination is that there’s no evidence to support the idea that these men were involved in the guy’s death. This is his official, on-the-record statement about this case.
Meanwhile, we have discovered that the dead man was indeed a traitor; NCIS has traced his movements to a drop box, and have video footage of another man collecting the information (about the mission at hand, presumably) he left. They try to stop the information from being sent overseas, but aren’t sure if they succeeded. The mission proceeds.
Throughout the episode, G has been gently but firmly insistent that just because these guys are SEALs doesn’t mean they’re not potentially culpable for all of this, and that this may well have been cold-blooded murder. He caught them out in the movie alibi lie, he found the break in the fence – he knew these men were responsible, and he kept that knowledge present in the face of Sam’s wish that it not be true. That helped a lot with the rest of the ep.
But then we get to the end. Sam has made his recommendation, and the SEAL team is flying off to rescue two people that only they can rescue (they set it up that way to ratchet up the tension; the victims are in a cave system that these men spent four days in a year or so earlier, and know well enough to find the victims; no one else does, and their captors will kill them in a few hours if they’re not rescued).
Hetty is not pleased, because there’s still no proof these men didn’t kill the traitor, and lets Sam know she’s displeased, but doesn’t fire him. (Seriously, he should have been fired.) G appears, waving a paper excitedly, and tells her that the autopsy report is in – the man didn’t die from the knife wound. He was asthmatic (here he waves an evidence bag of asthma meds that we haven’t seen yet, after hours of investigation), and, as G happily explains, the stress of the knife wound and the interrogation and being tied up triggered an asthma attack, and he just up and died – totes not the fault of the men who… knifed him and interrogated him and tied him up! Just like the SEALs said, he died all by himself!
This is where Hetty loses her mind. Not the way I am losing my mind, though. At this point I am just wtf-ing at the screen at full volume. Hetty’s response? “But Mr. Hanna didn’t know that, Mr. Callan.” I stop shouting WTF because my jaw has hit the floor.
But it gets better! Because now G says, wide-eyed and earnest, “But he did, Hetty! Sam knows these men, he knows their character. Because they’re SEALs!”
I am stunned into silence some more, and keep watching as we are put through a Very Dramatic And Tense scene of everyone watching the rescue on the screen, and hearing “I’m hit!” “I can’t walk” and people shouting each other’s names while everyone looks very sad that these conspirators and killers, sorry, Noble And Honorable Heroes may not make it out.
Then they make it out, of course. And hey, so! They have saved the day! They are heroes! They are SEALs! Puppies and kittens!
We’ll just all forget what they did to the other guy, and ignore the fact that no one ever came up with a plausible reason for dumping his body to be blown to bits and set things up in such a way that they’d never be able to tell their superiors what had happened, and basically had just gotten away with actual murder.
It’s okay! They’re SEALs! SEALs can do no wrong! Because they’re SEALs!
Argh.
All it would have taken for that ep to be really good was for the underlying message to be how dangerous it is for people to think that because they revere honor and integrity, any action they take is inherently honorable; it excuses all their bad behavior, because they can’t possibly have bad behavior, by definition. Which is such an insidious, dangerous, horrible trap.
And instead, the show fell headlong into that trap right with them, and held them up as shining beacons of the ends justifying the means, all the way down to someone dying at their hands. Because he was a bad person, and thus had no right to be a person anymore, or face a fair trial, or anything, and they are good people, and thus have the right to do whatever the hell they want, to anyone they want, at their own perfect, infallible discretion.
Not one single person ever even questioned the disposal and attempted destruction of the body, ffs. Argh.
I just. I think that's it for me. I think I'm done. Dammit.
It was fun! Sam and G mooned around making eyes at each other; I loved Hetty, and Dom, and Kenzie was okay but not my favorite. And then they started changing things up – got rid of Dom, brought in Deeks, so we lost the chance to watch Sam mentor a young agent and instead got to watch a sleaze leer all over Kenzie. Awesome. (Yeah, yeah, sleaze with a heart of gold, whatever, I don't care.)
(Fair warning, this is long...)
And then we get to this season. Suddenly, this season, Sam and G are more separate. A lot of the focus got shifted to Kenzie, and onto Kenzie and Deeks, and instead of being about Sam and G's relationship and watching them get closer and closer, it was all about watching the white, het couple get closer and closer and flirt even though they kept saying nothing will ever happen.
I mean, okay, I will totally grant that the traditional focus on G’s Incredibly Tragic Past of Sorrow And Abandonment had been terribly overdone and was ridiculous, but instead of figuring that out, they went with Kenzie’s Tragic Past of Sorrow And Mystery, and then even took a page from Criminal Minds, with Kenzie having joined NCIS not to be an agent, but specifically to use agency resources to hunt people down, and basically having been using everyone all this time as a way of dealing with her own past. I just. What?
Then a few weeks ago I saw an episode that was so strange, I was convinced I had missed at least one episode, probably more like half a dozen.
Spoilers!
Sam was off on a mission undercover, and G was desperately worried about him. Which was great! It felt like a long time since they'd had that sort of vibe going on. So G finds Sam off on a mission, and tries to get him to come home because he's been missing for very long time, the mission is very dangerous, and G thinks Sam would be better off at home. With G, is the silent addendum there.
Sam refuses to go because the mission is too important, which okay, sounds like Sam. But as the episode goes along, there're all these weird references where Sam is suddenly talking as though he has family back home. Which was never in any episode before that that I remember, so I thought it was just for his cover. Until the end of the episode where he finally goes home and walks into his house to greet his wife, and goes upstairs to kiss a sleeping child, and puts his wedding ring "back" on for the very first time. At which point, I started scouring the web to find out what in gods name I had missed, because Sam Hanna had never had a family up to this point.
But no, that was it. That was how we found out that Sam has been married with a child all this time. Which made him into something of an asshole, actually, because he should not have stayed on that mission. Okay. Now we'll know that Sam and G cannot be engaged in any true homoerotic subtext, because Sam Is straight, straight, straight. He has the wife and the baby. Straight.
So that explains a lot of the season so far. They're trying desperately to shift attention from the potentially gay relationship to the very much straight relationship of Kenzie and Deeks. Which is really annoying.
But I keep watching because every now and then you get a few moments of wonderful Sam/G stuff - the anniversary episode was pretty great, with them bringing each other presents and everyone wishing them a happy anniversary – and Hetty is always fun. I will say some of the season’s storyline has been about Hetty, which is never a bad thing. It's just that too many of them have been about Kenzie, which is really boring.
Anyway. So on to this week's episode, 'Vengeance'. It is about Navy SEALs, which makes sense since they’re to be investigating Navy stuff, so it's good to see it actually move the plot, rather than having something randomly shoehorned into affecting Naval intelligence.
So off we go, to the Navy training base, or something, where there is a team of SEALs. Or at least half the team of SEALs.
A seaman has been killed, his body left on a shooting range (for missiles and rockets and stuff, not hand weapons), where it’s discovered when one of the missiles fails to go off and a robot goes in to clear the dud, instead finding the dead body. The evidence very quickly points to a member of the SEAL team. Sam is a former SEAL. Oh no, the angst. This is great stuff! Except. The entire episode was about how SEALs have the most integrity, the most awesome, the most honor, the most every good thing in the world.
Now, understand, I am all for this in moderation in fiction. I think in real life it can be overdone because it is just freaking dangerous to think that any military decision is a good decision by default, but in fiction I'll go for a whole lot of military rah-rah whatever. I was and am a Stargate SG-1 fan, and I was all over the military and the requirements thereof for my fannish needs there.
But in this case, it was taken to an extreme that I couldn't even believe. Every other word was SEAL. “Hello, Chief Hanna, you are the best SEAL ever, my SEAL teachers taught me about you and said I should try to be a SEAL like you.” “They won't talk to you, G; they’re SEALs, they’ll only talk to another SEAL, because they’re SEALs.” “Let’s have this conversation, SEAL to SEAL.” “We need to talk, one SEAL to another.” “You don't understand about SEALs. You can't ask them questions about where they were, G, because the very fact of asking a SEAL that question is an affront. SEALs live for integrity and honor, a SEAL can do no wrong.” “SEAL SEAL SEAL SEAL SEAL, SEAL. SEAL?”
It was reaching Smurf levels of SEAL.
And the words in between “SEAL”s were “integrity” and “honor”. Which define all SEALs, because they are SEALs, who are defined by integrity and honor. QED.
Which, you know, fine, except. As the show was shouting “SEAL! INTEGRITY! HONOR!” at us, as loud as it could, it showed a group of men with no honor or integrity, who convinced Sam to go along with a cover-up of a homicide in the name of protecting SEAL honor (which they had utterly betrayed).
Here's what the show tells us happened: A group of SEALs figures out someone has been betraying them; they've lost seven men, and it had to be because of leaked information. They think they know who leaked it. They decide to question him one night of their own accord to find out what he's been doing; they say they don't intend to do him any harm, but nevertheless carefully establish an alibi off-base, then break onto their own base to find and question him. They do so, injuring him in the process, but the wound wasn't fatal, and they field-dressed it before they start interrogating him. He mysteriously dies while no one's looking at him, and they keep quiet about it because they have a desperately urgent mission the next day, to save the lives of two civilians who've been captured overseas; only this team can save them, because only they know the cave system they're being held in. It's all about the mission, and only the mission, and they're unhappy that anyone is doing anything to interfere with the mission, like ask them questions about the dead guy. They're especially unhappy, and offended, that anyone thinks they have anything to do with the dead guy.
All Sam wants is the truth, and once he gets it, they bond over SEAL-ish honor and integrity, and he helps them go on their crucial, urgent mission, and the day is saved.
Yay for a safe day! Puppies and kittens for all!
Here's what actually happened. In what we are told is an ineffable, unswerving spirit of pure honor and integrity, six men:
- Decided another man was a possible threat/traitor, and without bringing the matter to their superior’s attention to start due-process proceedings in accordance with military law, took matters into their own hands.
- Went to a movie for the specific purpose of establishing an alibi for their totally honorable actions to come, because all honorable actions require alibis.
- Snuck out of said movie to break into their own base (by cutting through the one section of surrounding fence that had no camera on it, to avoid all detection) – very honorable
- Broke into the quarters (home) of the man they believed was a threat; when he tried to fight off all six of them, one of them knifed him.
- Slapped a bandage on the knife wound, tied the man up, and interrogated him in an attempt to confirm their suspicions (note that so far they’ve broken in, attacked a man, injured him, tied him up, and questioned him entirely on suspicion, with no proof whatsoever, and with zero sanction from above – all on their own base)
- When they couldn’t get proof of any sort from the man that he had betrayed them, they left him tied up (and wounded) and I believe gagged, and went to search his quarters, with no one watching him to guard against further injury (or escape, which, wtf, they’re not just dishonorable, they’re stupid).
- Looked at the wounded man to find that he’d suddenly died – while tied up/gagged, injured from their knife, and while they were illegally searching his home.
- Did not say “Oh, shit, this has gone too far – we’re men of honor, warriors, not burglars and killers. We have to report this immediately. We don’t even know for sure he was a traitor! This was a mistake, we have to own up to it.”
- Did say, in effect, “Oh, look, he’s dead and we still have zero proof that he’s a traitor in any way. For all we know, he could be one of the good guys. Good thing for us we set an alibi in motion before we did all of this! We need to be back in the theater to cement that alibi soon. Let’s dump him on the missile range, hopefully he’ll be blown to smithereens and no one will ever know we did this.” (SO MUCH HONOR AND INTEGRITY I TELL YOU)
- Became deeply offended when G implied that they were lying about having gone to the movie, which they were totally lying about going to see. How dare he accuse them of lying about the thing they were lying about, and impugn their integrity!
- Continue to lie to Sam about their actions after Sam took over questioning because it was inappropriate for a non-SEAL to question SEALs; they could only be expected to respect another SEAL. (Which… omg no, that is not what respect means!)
- All of this lying and covering up was in the face of orders from the DoD to get to the truth of the matter, so they were defying orders on top of all of it. To prove their honor and integrity and true worth as military men.
- Offered up one of their own as a sacrifice to take the fall for their combined actions, so the rest could get away scot-free.
- When backed into a corner by Sam, they finally agreed to tell him what happened – “SEAL to SEAL”, with no other witnesses. Sam agreed and disabled all monitoring devices.
- Admitted everything, but entirely failed to explain the honorable reason for dumping a dead body in a missile range in hopes of its destruction; also failed to explain how it was honorable to specifically set up an alibi for these honorable actions.
- Also failed to explain what they had been planning to do about all this once the mission was over; they had an alibi for the time period, the body was supposed to have been destroyed, so... were they going to tell their superiors about their actions? Somehow I don't think so.
- For that matter, failed to explain why they felt they needed an alibi just to question the guy, if they weren't going to hurt him -- presumably if he'd been left alive, he'd have been able to identify them, so an alibi would have been useless. Or alternatively, they'd have had to tell someone "hey we found out he's a traitor, here's the proof we illegally discovered, go us, please arrest him for us". How very convenient that he died instead! If only his body had been blown up as planned.
- Convinced Sam to overlook everything they’d just said so they could go on a rescue mission. Because after all, they didn’t set out to kill the guy, so really it’s not their fault! He just kinda, like, died! Outta nowhere! Not their fault, bro! SEAL-fist-bump!
Charming, right? But it gets better!
Because Sam does indeed announce that after his private conversation, of which there is no record, his determination is that there’s no evidence to support the idea that these men were involved in the guy’s death. This is his official, on-the-record statement about this case.
Meanwhile, we have discovered that the dead man was indeed a traitor; NCIS has traced his movements to a drop box, and have video footage of another man collecting the information (about the mission at hand, presumably) he left. They try to stop the information from being sent overseas, but aren’t sure if they succeeded. The mission proceeds.
Throughout the episode, G has been gently but firmly insistent that just because these guys are SEALs doesn’t mean they’re not potentially culpable for all of this, and that this may well have been cold-blooded murder. He caught them out in the movie alibi lie, he found the break in the fence – he knew these men were responsible, and he kept that knowledge present in the face of Sam’s wish that it not be true. That helped a lot with the rest of the ep.
But then we get to the end. Sam has made his recommendation, and the SEAL team is flying off to rescue two people that only they can rescue (they set it up that way to ratchet up the tension; the victims are in a cave system that these men spent four days in a year or so earlier, and know well enough to find the victims; no one else does, and their captors will kill them in a few hours if they’re not rescued).
Hetty is not pleased, because there’s still no proof these men didn’t kill the traitor, and lets Sam know she’s displeased, but doesn’t fire him. (Seriously, he should have been fired.) G appears, waving a paper excitedly, and tells her that the autopsy report is in – the man didn’t die from the knife wound. He was asthmatic (here he waves an evidence bag of asthma meds that we haven’t seen yet, after hours of investigation), and, as G happily explains, the stress of the knife wound and the interrogation and being tied up triggered an asthma attack, and he just up and died – totes not the fault of the men who… knifed him and interrogated him and tied him up! Just like the SEALs said, he died all by himself!
This is where Hetty loses her mind. Not the way I am losing my mind, though. At this point I am just wtf-ing at the screen at full volume. Hetty’s response? “But Mr. Hanna didn’t know that, Mr. Callan.” I stop shouting WTF because my jaw has hit the floor.
But it gets better! Because now G says, wide-eyed and earnest, “But he did, Hetty! Sam knows these men, he knows their character. Because they’re SEALs!”
I am stunned into silence some more, and keep watching as we are put through a Very Dramatic And Tense scene of everyone watching the rescue on the screen, and hearing “I’m hit!” “I can’t walk” and people shouting each other’s names while everyone looks very sad that these conspirators and killers, sorry, Noble And Honorable Heroes may not make it out.
Then they make it out, of course. And hey, so! They have saved the day! They are heroes! They are SEALs! Puppies and kittens!
We’ll just all forget what they did to the other guy, and ignore the fact that no one ever came up with a plausible reason for dumping his body to be blown to bits and set things up in such a way that they’d never be able to tell their superiors what had happened, and basically had just gotten away with actual murder.
It’s okay! They’re SEALs! SEALs can do no wrong! Because they’re SEALs!
Argh.
All it would have taken for that ep to be really good was for the underlying message to be how dangerous it is for people to think that because they revere honor and integrity, any action they take is inherently honorable; it excuses all their bad behavior, because they can’t possibly have bad behavior, by definition. Which is such an insidious, dangerous, horrible trap.
And instead, the show fell headlong into that trap right with them, and held them up as shining beacons of the ends justifying the means, all the way down to someone dying at their hands. Because he was a bad person, and thus had no right to be a person anymore, or face a fair trial, or anything, and they are good people, and thus have the right to do whatever the hell they want, to anyone they want, at their own perfect, infallible discretion.
Not one single person ever even questioned the disposal and attempted destruction of the body, ffs. Argh.
I just. I think that's it for me. I think I'm done. Dammit.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-30 02:28 am (UTC)I've only ever seen the pilot of NCIS: LA so I can't comment on the characters, but I kind of like that Kensi is played by an actress who is a Sephardic Jew. I don't know if her character has the same background, though.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-30 03:08 am (UTC)Yep, I took that ep as TPTB's attempt to de-gay the show -- once and for all, dammit.
And if prying apart the relationship that drew me into the show in the first place wasn't bad enough, they started cramming The Deeks and Kensi Show down our throats (because, apparently, TPTB have decided to pander to shippers) to the point where I started ff-ing through scenes of just the two of them.
Srsly, I loved Dom. I thought it was fantastic to see two African-American guys who were SO different doing the same job. And after his kidnapping, there was so much more they could've done with Dom than just killing him off . It kind of came off like TPTB thought they weren't getting enough of the young white male demographic because there was no young white dude for them to identify with, so they had to shove one in -- and the most annoying one ever written (aside from Kirk on Gilmore Girls). Sadly, I've read that he's really popular with viewers, which... bleargh.
And this week's ep may have been the last straw for me, too. I was beyond WTF with the whole SEALs-R-AWESOME thing, but I honestly don't know if I can even like Sam, G, or Hetty anymore. I haven't been very happy with this season (Nell is another shoehorned-in annoyance I don't care for), but that ep was just beyond the fucking pale.
And this is the second show I've been watching for years that's been royally fucked up this season. The crap they've done on The Mentalist, especially to Cho, has pissed me off, big time, and I've only really been hanging on for Cho and post-killing-her-psycho-fiancee Grace, so I'm thisclose to dumping that, too.
GAARRRRRR!
(no subject)
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Date: 2012-03-31 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-31 03:46 pm (UTC)I drifted away from the show after Deeks came on board and the writing amped up around him, and it became apparent that I was supposed to be enjoying the Deeks/Kensi show. And then they added wossname, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the second computer geek. The scripts were increasingly hurtling down a track ever further from what I had first enjoyed (and ever further from the ideas we had in a panel at Escapade that would have made the show better! *g*), and it was clear that TPTB regarded this as a feature, not a bug. For me...bug. Big ugly bug.
Sigh. I'm sad to hear it only got worse after that. And the sheer corrupt jingoism of this particular episode is actually upsetting. It's a mentality that provides a welcoming milieu for war crimes, which we definitely have enough of these days.
Perfect example, too, of "Show Don't Tell, Shithead". If you're going around yelling HONOR! THESE SEALS HAVE HONORIFIC HONOR THAT'S SO HONORABLE!, and yet the actual actions they take are the opposite of honorable, but in the end the story thinks the former obviously trumps the latter? Shitty writing. Period.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-02 04:52 pm (UTC)We really do need fannish greeting cards: I'm so sorry your show has gone so horribly wrong. May another show come soon and bring you joy.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-01 07:02 pm (UTC)BUT I have to point out that while I don't think Sam's wife had been mentioned before, the fact he has children was established in 2.7 anonymous. He talks about his daughter eating cereal for the first time, and about following the bus to school - if memory serves, he specifies "children", and when asked, Callen says that he knew. Given Sam's work hours, it's pretty certain that there must be a wife, ex-wife, partner, or *something* because there aren't enough hours in the day for Sam to be a single dad and an NCIS agent. And I can't see an active SEAL or an active agent jumping through the loops required to have a surrogate or to adopt, yadda yadda.
I mean yup, even season 2.7 feels like they're just making it up as they go along and not with necessarily good motives, but the wife and kid didn't materialise out of thin air in season 3. The kid (at least one) and all the implications of him having a kid have been around since early-ish season 2.
Still a crappy episode, and I don't really understand why the investigation couldn't wait till they get back from their super time sensitive mission? Poor storytelling.