Shadow Unit: Sugar
Apr. 6th, 2009 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerFirst: the return of Dyson Cieslewicz! Hurrah! (His episode is one of my favorite Shadow Unit stories.)
...otherwise, I'm not so keen on this episode. I have a few specific problems with it (detailed below, because I do love to talk), but mostly I think it lacked focus; the Idlewood and Cape Cod sections never quite connected (and the Idlewood section - awesome as it was to finally see Idlewood - went on too long) so the episode sort of sloshed around half-formed.
First: I think Esther Falkner was supposed to serve as the linchpin that pulled the two sections together, and her ruminations on motherhood are supposed to be the thematic backbone; unfortunately it's rather a one-note backbone, which can't sustain the episode.
Shadow Unit has some interesting things to say about family dynamics - especially the quasi-family aspect of the Shadow Unit team, which are one of my favorite things about the show - but children (in the loose "anyone who can't legally drink" sense) don't seem to be one of the writing team's strengths.
Like the scene where Todd is impressed that teenagers in a coastal town know what a manatee is? Oh, come on. Five-year-olds in Indiana, which is as far from the sea as you can get, know what manatees are. Shadow Unit tends to skew child characters in an implausibly dim-witted direction, possibly to avoid writing them as miniature adults, but this cure is worse than the ill.
Which leads me to point two: I don't think Susannah sounds like a sixteen-year-old at all. The section in her POV reads, to me, much like Melinda Grossman's voice in the first season, and Melinda sounded about eight even though she was supposed to be...twelve?
I realize I was a peculiar child in a school full of peculiar children, so my idea of the appropriate voice for a specific age is skewed. But the small vocabulary, the relentlessly concrete thinking, most of all the lack of self-awareness in Susannah's voice - it all sounds like a much, much younger girl to me, and (given the comment that Susannah's grades are "decent to middling" - she's supposed to be at least average intelligent) I don't think that's intentional.
So yeah. I think the Shadow Unit writers should familiarize themselves with some child psychology and/or their own old diaries, because really, this is just so irritating.
In other news, I need a Shadow Unit icon.
...otherwise, I'm not so keen on this episode. I have a few specific problems with it (detailed below, because I do love to talk), but mostly I think it lacked focus; the Idlewood and Cape Cod sections never quite connected (and the Idlewood section - awesome as it was to finally see Idlewood - went on too long) so the episode sort of sloshed around half-formed.
First: I think Esther Falkner was supposed to serve as the linchpin that pulled the two sections together, and her ruminations on motherhood are supposed to be the thematic backbone; unfortunately it's rather a one-note backbone, which can't sustain the episode.
Shadow Unit has some interesting things to say about family dynamics - especially the quasi-family aspect of the Shadow Unit team, which are one of my favorite things about the show - but children (in the loose "anyone who can't legally drink" sense) don't seem to be one of the writing team's strengths.
Like the scene where Todd is impressed that teenagers in a coastal town know what a manatee is? Oh, come on. Five-year-olds in Indiana, which is as far from the sea as you can get, know what manatees are. Shadow Unit tends to skew child characters in an implausibly dim-witted direction, possibly to avoid writing them as miniature adults, but this cure is worse than the ill.
Which leads me to point two: I don't think Susannah sounds like a sixteen-year-old at all. The section in her POV reads, to me, much like Melinda Grossman's voice in the first season, and Melinda sounded about eight even though she was supposed to be...twelve?
I realize I was a peculiar child in a school full of peculiar children, so my idea of the appropriate voice for a specific age is skewed. But the small vocabulary, the relentlessly concrete thinking, most of all the lack of self-awareness in Susannah's voice - it all sounds like a much, much younger girl to me, and (given the comment that Susannah's grades are "decent to middling" - she's supposed to be at least average intelligent) I don't think that's intentional.
So yeah. I think the Shadow Unit writers should familiarize themselves with some child psychology and/or their own old diaries, because really, this is just so irritating.
In other news, I need a Shadow Unit icon.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 12:31 pm (UTC)Completely agree that the teenagers' voices were not authentic. She was scared, but where was the anger and frustration, especially if she is a gamma - surely the anomaly would have harnessed these emotions? Chaz sounded more like a 16 year old, and he's meant to be 25.
Otherwise, I liked the Hafidha section; her character hasn't been explored much, and it was good to see another dimension to her. Also the flashes in Reyes, of coldness and amusement at all those pathetic humans. I like the idea that he's such a good profiler he's learned all his emotional control, rather than it being natural, or an extension of his own personality (like it is with Lau).
PS - more Brady and Lau next time, please.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 07:46 pm (UTC)And yes, exactly on Susannah's lack of anger and frustration. The backstory Hafs dug out of Facebook shouldn't have been a surprise to the readers; it sounds like the sort of thing Susannah would have been stewing over, and should have been included in her POV.
I'm not sure I would go so far as to say Reyes feels only coldness and amusement at pathetic humans. I'm thinking of the part in the DVD extra Consumption where Reyes is thinking, "Living gammas are a rare commodity, and he can't bring himself to waste one, even while he despises himself for thinking of a human being as a research tool." There is coldness there, but there's also sympathy; I think one of the reasons I find his character so interesting is that he has a lot of both qualities, and they fight each other.
I do agree that coldness is the quality he general lets the world perceive, though.
Re: Lau: are her profiler skills an extension of her personality, or her emotional control? I'm confused which you mean, although either works.
I think Lau is a lot more damaged than she comes across at first. (I would love to pretend that's a brilliant character insight on my part, but it's heavily influenced by this extra (http://shadowunit.org/truth.html). Do you know about the easter eggs hidden in the episodes?)
Given that extra, I suspect you'll get your wish for more Lau, at least.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-07 08:40 pm (UTC)I hadn't read that extra (I've been through the reading list (http://wiki.shadowunit.org/index.php/Reading_Order), though. It makes a lot sense though - add it to the Brady/Lau extra Mumm-ra (http://www.shadowunit.org/mumm-ra.htm) for added back story. What I meant (sorry, I wasn't clear) was that Lau makes herself so perfect, so "bulletproof" in her life, that the careful, precise personas she needs for work come easily to her (and, by extension, she can see when others are projecting personas).
Oh, they are all so broken, aren't they? I think that was one of the first comments you wrote about Shadow Unit that I read, and you were very right.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 03:25 am (UTC)I think Daphne might not be totally broken yet (although she's getting there - suddenly I have this horrible feeling that we're going to have a "breaking Daphne Worth" episode soon), but other than that - yeah, they're all irredeemably cracked.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 12:34 am (UTC)I really do need to finish reading it, because I'm a little curious about what was going on.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-09 03:26 am (UTC)