on following the fannish crowd
Mar. 23rd, 2013 06:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xparrotJust started watching Person of Interest because everyone else is doing it!
As much as the show's trappings scream "gritty", I really can't tell if it's meant to be taken seriously at all, and spent most of s1 trying to figure that out. It's shot super dark and ~dramatic~ but the only way it makes sense to me is that it's a comic book, and knows it's a comic book, and just is having fun playing it straight. Jonathan Nolan is Christopher Nolan's brother and the co-writer and writer of his last two Batman movies, and this show is pretty obviously, "that was cool, it should be a TV show!" Which is the only way I can watch it. (And so whenever I shriek about the unlikeliness of people wielding machine guns on mysteriously empty NY streets in broad daylight, Gnine reminds me that it's actually Gotham City, so that makes sense!)
Being a comic book, there are Good Guys and Bad Guys. So the fact that all the heroes kill people constantly doesn't bother me as much, because everyone they kill must de facto be Bad Guys. It cracks me up how bad the Bad Guys are, too. Not just the crazy head honchos but all the henchmen and hitmen - every single killer shown, other than Our Heroes, have no compunctions about killing anybody - or more often everybody! Repeatedly there are cases where the target marked for death is with a bunch of other people, and the solution at that point invariably is to slaughter everybody, or at least make a good go of it. And killing innocent people, women, kids - no problem! So it's hard to feel bad when they get taken out.
It's the kind of show that my own mood matters very much in how I react to it - I know that sometimes I pretty much would've hated it, because it does so much that does bother me at times. (I don't like homicidal heroes, and Reese's gf being fridged in the pilot nearly made me turn it off...) But right now ridiculous fictional morality and codependent maladjusted outcasts is apparently what I'm in the mood for. Finch & Reese can't help but push my "most important person" button - I'm not sure I can slash them (Finch reads as pretty ace to me - fiancee notwithstanding; I can easily read that as a platonic romance ) but their whole not-having-anyone-but-each-other-no-really-NO-ONE thing...yeah. Especially Finch, since he doesn't do most of the helping personally, and even Carter and Fusco think of him as basically a safety on the loose cannon that is John Reese - he vanishes and Reese is the only one who knows or who really would care, but Reese cares a whole lot to make up for it. Aww. (yeah, I'm so predictable...)
I also suspect it helps that I never watched enough Lost to get to Michael Emerson's character (or at least don't remember if I did) - Finch is my favorite in POI, but it sounds like his char in Lost was such that it might've taken a while to win me over had I known him then. And Reese took a season but I'm coming 'round to him; he's so very inappropriately amused by things, up to and including his own incredible creepiness. (He reminds me of John Sheppard, except that Reese's character is clearly meant to come across as creepily weird/borderline sociopathic/back-away-slowly-and-don't-meet-his-eyes, while as Sheppard should've been a standard heroic leader and someone - Joe Flannigan? The writers? - didn't get the memo...)
So far s2 is shaping up to be fun, and I am especially enjoying Carter and Fusco bonding over annoyance at their mutual friends. (Carter and Fusco are both great characters, more original than the leads - Carter is one of those chars who'd be dime-a-dozen if she were a guy, but as a woman is pretty unique; and Fusco is fun for being a pretty classic background redemption-ish character who actually survives his redemption and becomes one of the leads. And I'm wondering if Reese's treating him as an asset might change. The "I only have one friend." *outraged gag mumble* "Okay maybe two friends" was hilarious.)
I also am wondering where the POI/White Collar/Burn Notice crossover is - you know, the one where Peter Burke's number comes up, and then Reese discovers that Burke's partner Neal Caffrey is also aware of the trouble and is calling in a favor from an old Agency acquaintance of his down in Miami...(Michael Weston and Reese both served in Eastern Europe, and by my calculation had at least an overlapping year before Michael got burned...)
That, and the Sentinel AU (The show reminds me quite a bit of The Sentinel, between the comic-book cops-and-robbers and the bugfuck ex-Ranger hero + weird nerdy sidekick, and having diamonds of pure fanbait squee buried amidst lots of urgent and somewhat nonsensical action...)
(Also, if there's any good Finch h/c out there, I, uh, wouldn't mind being hooked up...)
As much as the show's trappings scream "gritty", I really can't tell if it's meant to be taken seriously at all, and spent most of s1 trying to figure that out. It's shot super dark and ~dramatic~ but the only way it makes sense to me is that it's a comic book, and knows it's a comic book, and just is having fun playing it straight. Jonathan Nolan is Christopher Nolan's brother and the co-writer and writer of his last two Batman movies, and this show is pretty obviously, "that was cool, it should be a TV show!" Which is the only way I can watch it. (And so whenever I shriek about the unlikeliness of people wielding machine guns on mysteriously empty NY streets in broad daylight, Gnine reminds me that it's actually Gotham City, so that makes sense!)
Being a comic book, there are Good Guys and Bad Guys. So the fact that all the heroes kill people constantly doesn't bother me as much, because everyone they kill must de facto be Bad Guys. It cracks me up how bad the Bad Guys are, too. Not just the crazy head honchos but all the henchmen and hitmen - every single killer shown, other than Our Heroes, have no compunctions about killing anybody - or more often everybody! Repeatedly there are cases where the target marked for death is with a bunch of other people, and the solution at that point invariably is to slaughter everybody, or at least make a good go of it. And killing innocent people, women, kids - no problem! So it's hard to feel bad when they get taken out.
It's the kind of show that my own mood matters very much in how I react to it - I know that sometimes I pretty much would've hated it, because it does so much that does bother me at times. (I don't like homicidal heroes, and Reese's gf being fridged in the pilot nearly made me turn it off...) But right now ridiculous fictional morality and codependent maladjusted outcasts is apparently what I'm in the mood for. Finch & Reese can't help but push my "most important person" button - I'm not sure I can slash them (Finch reads as pretty ace to me - fiancee notwithstanding; I can easily read that as a platonic romance ) but their whole not-having-anyone-but-each-other-no-really-NO-ONE thing...yeah. Especially Finch, since he doesn't do most of the helping personally, and even Carter and Fusco think of him as basically a safety on the loose cannon that is John Reese - he vanishes and Reese is the only one who knows or who really would care, but Reese cares a whole lot to make up for it. Aww. (yeah, I'm so predictable...)
I also suspect it helps that I never watched enough Lost to get to Michael Emerson's character (or at least don't remember if I did) - Finch is my favorite in POI, but it sounds like his char in Lost was such that it might've taken a while to win me over had I known him then. And Reese took a season but I'm coming 'round to him; he's so very inappropriately amused by things, up to and including his own incredible creepiness. (He reminds me of John Sheppard, except that Reese's character is clearly meant to come across as creepily weird/borderline sociopathic/back-away-slowly-and-don't-meet-his-eyes, while as Sheppard should've been a standard heroic leader and someone - Joe Flannigan? The writers? - didn't get the memo...)
So far s2 is shaping up to be fun, and I am especially enjoying Carter and Fusco bonding over annoyance at their mutual friends. (Carter and Fusco are both great characters, more original than the leads - Carter is one of those chars who'd be dime-a-dozen if she were a guy, but as a woman is pretty unique; and Fusco is fun for being a pretty classic background redemption-ish character who actually survives his redemption and becomes one of the leads. And I'm wondering if Reese's treating him as an asset might change. The "I only have one friend." *outraged gag mumble* "Okay maybe two friends" was hilarious.)
I also am wondering where the POI/White Collar/Burn Notice crossover is - you know, the one where Peter Burke's number comes up, and then Reese discovers that Burke's partner Neal Caffrey is also aware of the trouble and is calling in a favor from an old Agency acquaintance of his down in Miami...(Michael Weston and Reese both served in Eastern Europe, and by my calculation had at least an overlapping year before Michael got burned...)
That, and the Sentinel AU (The show reminds me quite a bit of The Sentinel, between the comic-book cops-and-robbers and the bugfuck ex-Ranger hero + weird nerdy sidekick, and having diamonds of pure fanbait squee buried amidst lots of urgent and somewhat nonsensical action...)
(Also, if there's any good Finch h/c out there, I, uh, wouldn't mind being hooked up...)
