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Only two episodes left this season, huh? I suspect they may be the last two I ever watch.
I'm kind of in a quandary here. I've never been shy about saying when I didn't like something about an episode, but there's a potential here for me to get really unpleasantly ranty, more so than anyone would find enjoyable to read. I also don't know if it's possible for me to properly articulate why this episode made me so angry. I think it just may be that the sheer number of things in this episode that pushed my buttons achieved critical mass and I'm overreacting. Let me start with the basics and see how far I get.
Nope, I didn't get far. You can't see it, but I've been writing and deleting and rewriting this entry for over an hour. I think I'm just going to have to let this one go.
So, umm...
Yay for TPTB sending Danny to PT instead of granting him a magical recovery during the off-week. Boo for the way the "banter" scenes between Steve and Danny have become so mean-spirited.
And you know, I mostly do like Grover, but they really need to stop having him participate in the action scenes. Chi McBride is just not up to it.
Sorry, everyone. There were many issues in this episode that deserved thoughtful and considerate deconstruction. There are many things to be said about the plot, the way Steve talked to Dawn, and the agenda TPTB had for this episode that they pushed so hard they didn't care the episode ran short enough to need two epilogues, including a monologue about fish. But they're not going to be said by me. I need to go read some fic. From another fandom.
I'm kind of in a quandary here. I've never been shy about saying when I didn't like something about an episode, but there's a potential here for me to get really unpleasantly ranty, more so than anyone would find enjoyable to read. I also don't know if it's possible for me to properly articulate why this episode made me so angry. I think it just may be that the sheer number of things in this episode that pushed my buttons achieved critical mass and I'm overreacting. Let me start with the basics and see how far I get.
Nope, I didn't get far. You can't see it, but I've been writing and deleting and rewriting this entry for over an hour. I think I'm just going to have to let this one go.
So, umm...
Yay for TPTB sending Danny to PT instead of granting him a magical recovery during the off-week. Boo for the way the "banter" scenes between Steve and Danny have become so mean-spirited.
And you know, I mostly do like Grover, but they really need to stop having him participate in the action scenes. Chi McBride is just not up to it.
Sorry, everyone. There were many issues in this episode that deserved thoughtful and considerate deconstruction. There are many things to be said about the plot, the way Steve talked to Dawn, and the agenda TPTB had for this episode that they pushed so hard they didn't care the episode ran short enough to need two epilogues, including a monologue about fish. But they're not going to be said by me. I need to go read some fic. From another fandom.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-26 05:30 am (UTC)From:Perhaps because instead of broadening the other core three's backgrounds, TPTB seem to just employ the "make everything that's not Steve-related surface and add more players" method of showrunning and I don't get it.
Not that I'm bitter.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-26 05:37 am (UTC)From:I'm not looking forward to it because we already saw this episode back when Steve went to North Korea.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-26 07:08 am (UTC)From:I do feel like they tampered the scenes between Danny and Steve with a precarious balance, but I agree about the mean-spiritedness. While it's lovely to hear them express their feelings, we used to not need that kind of display to assure people that they were never ever taking serious jabs at each other. Now the 'I love you's felt more like they needed to assure each other of that more than anyone else. it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, but there's a Terminator style endoskeleton hiding under the feathers, if you excuse the dramatic metaphor.
The inclusion of the recovering veterans made me tear up from the genuiness of the exchange, but it felt too much like a plot device engineered towards eliciting a specific reaction to not be tainted by what came ahead.
As for the Patriot Act defending attack ad that made up the rest of the ep .... *sigh* it's just another of those examples of TPTB being too heavy-handed in their approach to any kind of sensitive topic, but I understand how this particular one might cut exceptionally deep. I thought the actress portraying Dawn did an exceptional job with the material she'd been given. (I found her more menacing in her shackled impotence than any of those CIA hicks that Steve faced trying to dissuade him from 'the conspiracy'). That said, I did believe her portrayal, but not her character, mainly because the 'explanatory backstory' was shoehorned in with such a lack of deference and the 'off-screen-argument' that I could have pulled my hair.
I wish they had layered her with more than just 'petulant, angry teenager lashing out at her lot in life with murderous extremism' but I liked that her attitude made Steve lose his cool and made him unwittingly expose a bit of hypocrisy coming from the American side of this conflict (someone should sit him down and make him watch the first ten minutes of The Newsroom sometime) and while I acknowledge that that's way too deep to be intentional from the side of the production team, I think it's still a foothold for those who are aware and choose to care about that. Is that going to serve as an educational tool for the masses can't be bothered to look for those subtleties? Certainly not, but then, that's not what the format aims for after all. Still, it's interesting how they comment on themselves with this ep. Either there's that one writer who's actually smarter than everyone else in the club and smuggled that by so far under the radar, or some really poor shmuck who has no grasp of how flawed noble intentions can be.
I'm not sure which one I'd be more likely to believe is true... anyway, that's my first instinct response to watching it, I hope I maybe could articulate some of what's been bothering you about it, though I'll understand either way whether you want to debate or not. Now I'm going back to searching for that x-men first class fic I've been craving because I've been on Marvel's superheroes like white on rice those past few weeks. Take care!
no subject
Date: 2014-04-26 11:09 pm (UTC)From:I think my friend
As for the Patriot Act defending attack ad that made up the rest of the ep .... *sigh* it's just another of those examples of TPTB being too heavy-handed in their approach to any kind of sensitive topic
I think this episode had the potential to be really good, if it had been done as an episode of another show that had better writers. As it is, I think they wrote Steve's "America is the greatest country on earth" speeches first and then tried to construct an episode around them.
I thought the actress portraying Dawn did an exceptional job
As did I. I was very impressed with her, which ironically led to another problem I had with this episode. I hated the way Steve talked to Dawn. She was just as much a militant believer in the cause as anyone Steve would have met in Afghanistan, but because she was white and young and female, Steve talked to her like she'd just let her friends peer-pressure her into shoplifting. Threatening her with death or prison was never going to have an effect because that's what she wanted. Dying for the cause or going to prison (which to her was like becoming a POW) only made her a hero in her own mind, and yet Steve never managed to change gears.
Now I'm going back to searching for that x-men first class fic I've been craving because I've been on Marvel's superheroes like white on rice those past few weeks
I've been reading some Avengers and Captain America fic lately, but I'm in the middle of an enormously long, plotty Hobbit AU fic that I'm enjoying immensely.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-27 06:02 am (UTC)From:Also agreed about the way Steve handled the interrogation. I mean, he's an ex-Navy-Intel counter terrorist specialist who - as it has been alluded enough times - spend quite some time in the dirt, HE of all people should know how to do it. It's like he stepped foot on the island and then did a Never Ending Story (III?) where he loses an important memory every time he does something heroic. *sigh* Again, ah well.
I spend the first two weeks of April nose-deep in post-Winter-Soldier ficcage, but now I'm giving them time to write a few long-fics and not overload myself. And somehow I took a left turn to Inception and how the heck did that happen? I could never actually get into reading LotR/Hobbit fic, which is weird, because they're like the universe of all expandable and unchartered universes. Maybe because I really don't have a ship in there and tend to habitually bypass Gen for some reason.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-27 06:29 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-04-27 08:19 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-04-27 05:19 pm (UTC)From:If you do get an e-reader and want to read fic on it, you should download Calibre (it's free) and the FanFictionDL and EpubMerge plug-ins. FanFictionDL does a much nicer job of creating e-books from fic (there's a major bug in AO3 when it comes to downloading fics that have illustrations, like big bang and reverse bang fics), and using FanFictionDL with EpubMerge allows you to download an entire series as one big fic with each story in the series as its own chapter in the table of contents. It's very cool.
My e-reader pretty old, so there were a lot fewer choices available when I bought it. Tablet e-readers hadn't come out yet, so e-ink was the only option, and the only brands where I live were Kobo, Nook, and Kindle.
I tried a Kobo at an electronics store and hated it. It felt cheap and the page turns were so slow I thought I'd hit the wrong button or something.
Between the Kindle and Nook, I chose the Nook because Amazon had been in the news several times for deleting books that people had paid for from their Kindles, usually "controversial" titles like gay fiction. As a librarian, that deeply offended me. Amazon is also pushier about getting you to buy more titles (their cheapest model is ad-supported, so you get ads pushed at you all the time) so I went with the Nook. I also chose the Nook because there's a brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble near where I live, and the employees are all trained on it, so you can actually take your Nook there and they can help you if you can't figure out how to do something on it. Since it was my first e-reader, I liked that extra sense of security. That said, I know a lot of people who are perfectly happy with their Kindles, so YMMV.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-26 07:27 pm (UTC)From:I'll finish out the season, but I think it's becoming increasingly obvious that I am not the demographic wanted by TPTB for this show.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-26 10:55 pm (UTC)From:Yes! This was my problem, only I was too angry and had too many words about it trying to get out and they all logjammed in my head. I swear Steve's "America is the greatest country on earth" speeches were the first things written, and then they tried to construct an episode around them. They weren't even good speeches. Nothing either Steve or Dawn said was insightful or well-argued. It sounded like they were both just spouting propaganda. And it's not like they didn't have time to include some well-reasoned arguments. The episode ran so short it needed two epilogues.
Also, I hated the way Steve talked to Dawn. She was just as much a militant believer in the cause as anyone Steve would have met in Afghanistan, but because she was white and young and female, Steve talked to her like she'd just let her friends peer-pressure her into shoplifting. Threatening her with death or prison was never going to have an effect because that's what she wanted. Dying for the cause or going to prison (which to her was like becoming a POW) only made her a hero in her own mind, and yet Steve never managed to change gears.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-01 01:42 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-05-02 12:40 am (UTC)From:All of the things I liked about the show have already disappeared. I just keep hanging around because they have the potential to come back; however, my faith in TPTB's ability to fix this show has almost completely eroded.
I don't even remember the last time I saw a good fic. Fortunately I still have a stash of older stuff I never got around to at the time.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-03 03:51 pm (UTC)From:Are show writers usually male? I don't know how that goes, I assume that as in most areas (other than the domestic/carer jobs) men dominate.
I'm not really sure why I still watch. Boredom perhaps, or just not having enough good TV shows to watch. And perhaps some strange loyalty as I've watched Alex for a long time now. Though McGarrett is not my favourite character he has done, he has the potential to be but its slipping away. There were these glimpses of Steve and Danny that were just beautiful, as characters I would really care about. But as it is, well I just hope they don't properly screw this up.
The only other show I can think of that I still watch is Castle, and they seem to have good writers. Though there are things that have changed over the last season and aspects of the past that I miss that have been reduced over the past season. The only other is Doctor Who but that one exists in it's own universe so it can't be compared. :)
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Date: 2014-05-03 04:30 pm (UTC)From:With rare exceptions, male staff writers outnumber female writers, especially on action-adventure shows like this, but there is usually at least one. H50 has had some episodes written by women, but they were widely scattered enough that I don't think any of them were full-time staff writers.
The only other show I can think of that I still watch is Castle
I used to watch Castle, but after awhile I started to realize that all the episodes were exactly the same and I got bored with it. I think I stopped watching early in season 2.
I was also a Doctor Who fan going back to the early '80s (I think I started watching when I was 12) and all the way up through Paul McGann, but I just couldn't get into the the new Who. I sat through all of Christopher Eccleston and most of David Tennant's first season before I couldn't take it anymore. Now I just keep an eye out for appearances by Captain Jack and watch those.
This has actually been a bumper year for me with TV shows. I usually only have maybe 2 that I watch regularly, but this year I had Sherlock, Sleepy Hollow, Almost Human, Teen Wolf, Supernatural, Justified, Arrow, Grimm, and Hawaii Five-0. I also tried Agents of SHIELD and The Tomorrow People, but I didn't like them. I'm actually looking forward to the summer hiatus so I can take a break from all the TV, even if I did make a lot of progress on my cross stitching while I was watching.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-04 03:41 pm (UTC)From:Oh yes, cross stitch, goodness that requires so much patience. All I have done so far are small pieces.
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Date: 2014-05-04 05:30 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-04-30 10:22 pm (UTC)From:For simplify: propaganda. However I saw very worst in NCIS and other shows.
About Steve and Danny I think that writers can't put them toghether (it will be the end of the show) and so they try to put some kind of tension between them.
Sorry for my english
no subject
Date: 2014-04-30 10:41 pm (UTC)From: