And now a post with even LESS substance!

[trinityvixen]

ivy03 loaned me (ages and ages and ages and ages and ages ago) the second season of The Pretender on DVD. I used to watch this show with my parents on Saturday nights over dinner or just before/after. I seemed to remember liking it and borrowed it to complete the "mythology" of the show.

I'm thoroughly convinced that they were less plotted out than the worse seasons of Battlestar Galactica, LOST, and The X-FIles combined. This is the still the "oooh, look, we have plooooot" stage of shooting television. It's still an essentially episodic show with the ongoing "plot" hanging on the ends. The episodic stuff is ridiculously bad--the new version of The Outer Limits bad, Tales From The Crypt-but-taking-itself-seriously bad, bad-guys-always-confessing-on-CSI bad.

The frame story, though, is really fun. The shadowy Center group trying to reclaim their lost prize project, said prize project fucking around and making them crazy, politics at the Center changing the game a little. Mostly, I love Ms. Parker. She's a stone-cold bitch, and I love her. They keep trying to humanize her with the murder of her mother, her dependence on Daddy, that sort of thing, but where she really shines is in being a cold-hearted psycho cunt. I mean that in a good way, I actually do.

Some kids thump into her while tearing wild. Ms. Parker: "Where's Planned Parenthood when you need them?" Yes, she made a birth control/abortion joke. I LOVE HER. A bunch of the Center people are being grilled about who shot the head dude; everyone vacillates, but Ms. Parker goes, "Oh yeah, I would have shot him, sure. But I wouldn't have missed." Naturally, she is so intimidating, just about everyone believes her.

Psycho cunts for the win!!!

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

On it they said they deliberately gave every character only one name. Jarod, Sydney, Broots, Raines, Miss Parker. It's meant to be some kind of post-modern representation of the fragmentation of the character's identities or some such, so no, Miss Parker does not have a first name.

I think it also lends importance to relationships. Notably, Ms. Parker's referencing of her parents solely by "my mother" or "Daddy." (Which, in their different levels of formality, are a psychological minefield of their own.) Jarod's relationship to Sydney is strengthened and made both artificially and genuinely loving by the idea that they are on a one-name basis. Conversely, a name like Broots, which is clearly a family name, can convey distance and subordination (he's Broots, she's Ms. Parker; if someone wanted to turn that around, they could really insult Ms. Parker by just calling her "Parker"). I don't know jack about "postmodernism" but I do see the dramatic effectiveness of the results of the one-name system (combined with the restricted use of signatory epithets).

Also, you do realize this is by the same people who brought you Tin Man, right?

Suddenly, the lack of cohesion makes so much more sense! No, really? Faaabulous. So the good parts on top of the nonsensical is a theme of theirs, is it?