On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Jon Delfin <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 3:18 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hard to be specific without being spoilery, but basically, this hour > of the series felt like it was from a different show altogether. It's > not that the storytellers shouldn't have given us what they did, but > that they should have found a way to integrate it better into the > overall flow. This was, essentially, a plot-free hour in a plot-heavy > series, and I found it jarring and unsatisfying. (Especially since I'd > been having issues with how they'd been handling the plot to date. But > ... that's the spoilery part.) > I guess my response is that the show is only in part a whodunit. I am not sure I agree that it is a plot heave series, in that I think character development has been at least as important. They have had episodes that dealt in some depth with the stories of the parents of the murdered girl, and with the politician, and with the police. One reason I liked this last episode so much was that I thought it echoed so nicely one underlying theme of the show - loss of a child, anxieties about loss of a child, and the different ways parents worry about losing a child (luckily not only and not often to death). And that issue was developed not just in the narrative of the main detective, but mirrored in the implied narrative of the subordinate detective. As a straight whodunit I have a few gripes about the show too - though that is judging it more against the ideal of a detective show, not against the reality of most police work. Police in real life do almost always follow the most obvious suspects and popular motives, partly because the most obvious suspects are usually (though not often enough to meet the standards of our ideals) guilty, and partly because they have limited imagination and independence of thought. The show signaled as well as it could to the audience that things were not just as they might have seemed. We did get what seems to be a major break in the case - and isn't the gripe about most tv police shows that things happen too quickly and easily? This was an episode interposed basically between the detective asking for video from the ATM machines and actually receiving them; on L&O that would have been bridged by a familiar sound effect and scene cut - here we had an hour of character development, back story and plot texture and mirroring. I found it satisfying. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
