Murray Head (muzza@omen.net.au)
Thu, 15 Jan 1998 14:47:10 +0800
Hello fellow PG-loving infobahn travellers,
Kevin wrote:
>I have been promising to review season three for a little while, so I
>suppose I'd better cough something up here.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I'm sure we'd prefer it if you did that outside, Kevin. :)
> Thanks are due to Murray, who's given me some great insights and helped pull
> my own thoughts together. We've been having a lot of fun debating things,
A lot of interesting ideas came out of thinking about these things, which I
thought I'd share with the list (these are my ideas, usually as posted to
Kevin in faux-argumentative style - so don't blame Kevin).
*Note possible Last Word spoiler*
*>The Last Word: I'm not sure I buy the
*>ending Steven Moffat gives us, but it is consistent with Lynda's
*>character.
*One idea that came out of this was whether Lyndas actions in the end of The
*Last Word may have been influenced byt the events of Monday-Tuesday - maybe
*David Jefford made Lynda a bit more sympathetic to the feelings of the ones
*left behind after a suicide, and of the situation of the lonely and
friendless. *Lynda saved him from "going out" as some kind of psycho (which
is ironic, *because...), being the disappointment he always say himself as
in his parents *eyes (okay, I'm reading subtext a bit here, but...).
>WORST EPISODE: CHANCE IS A FINE THING wins this dubious honor hands
>down. As with PG's other turkey, PICKING UP THE PIECES, Steven Moffat
>tries building an unconventional romance between two complete opposites
>and can't pull it off. Unlike PIECES, the subplots can't save this one.
Two opposites - Kenny and the Dublin girl? I didn't really see that as
about a romance (they only barely met after all), but about
"letter-falling-under-a-floorboard" fate or chance.
With regards to this being the weakest of the season, I'd agree the Kenny
stuff might have been a little weak but Colin's stuff was pretty good, and
Spike's involvement in that worked well (the restaurant scene, his great
line about Judy Wellman after he and all the other guys have been rejected
by her - "Well, there's only one explanation - she must be a man!"). :)
>FUNNIEST EPISODE: THE BIG HELLO wins because of some great Spike lines,
>and the Kenny-Lynda office scenes are great. This plays like some of the
>funny second season Spike & Lynda stories, only with a more adult edge.
I agree with this one, it was a great return episode, with all the
refinements you expect from SM. I loved the Spike and Lynda story-chasing
scenes, especially seeing Spike in action.
>MOST INTRIGUING CHARACTER: The mailing list has not too many kind things
>to say about Zoe, so here's a "What if?" for you: What if it was Judy
>Wellman who was Spike's beau and not Zoe? I love Judy's character and
>wish more were done with her. She strikes me as a better realized
>version of Sam Black's vampy character without Zoe's cardboard angriness.
>
>MOST TIRESOME CHARACTER: Zoe looks great, but grates on the nerves. What
>Spike sees in her, I'll never know.
I think the reason Zoe was, ahem, "not one of our favourites" was that she
appeared largely as a Lynda-hating Spike hunter, and we saw little else of
her (what did she do - in the restaurant she was looking at something and
said "I think I've narrowed it down to page ( or was it chapter?) five" -
was she making a joke about her pick from the menu, or was she looking at
some papers of her own - could she _possibly_ be some type of editor
herself? (I doubt it, personally) - I'd appreciate any opinions on what
this line was refering to)). Also, the shortness of series three, and the
place of Zoe's episodes as the "bookends" of the series, creating a reason
for the action to begin and end where it did, meant that we saw her "appear,
disappear, then reappear and disappear" within the 6 weeks (or in Australia
~9 days) of the series, with dramatic results, but never really getting any
insight into her character - The rather obvious status of Zoe as "not up to
Lynda standard" made the character rather weak - I mean, she was obviously a
bit dense (To Spike: "What have I done to your arm?!"), but surely Spike
would have seen something in her.
>MOST IMPROVED CHARACTER: Frazz
Absolutely! He becomes more real, more intelligent, and becomes less of a
"fallback character" who says or does things simply because they have to be
said or done by someone, and he's closest.
Apologies for the long post, but I've been doing quite a bit of thinking
about some of these things lately,
Be good, be safe, be happy
Murray
___________________________________________________________________
Murray Head
muzza@omen.net.au
http://www.omen.net.au/~muzza/
mhead@anhb.uwa.edu.au (Anatomy and Human Biology, UWA)
--
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