Fantastic fantastic, elastic elastic

[crypto]

I probably shouldn't be posting when I'm several days overdue on replies to comments from last week, but I need to clear my head.

I'm a casual and irregular viewer of <em>Chuck</em>, but I was really thrown by the season premiere episodes.

So Sarah asks Chuck to run away with her, and he says no? Because he wants to be a spy? Wow. I thought the lesson from the first two seasons is that the spy business is deadly and dehumanizing, it means keeping secrets and hiding your identity from your loved ones, the bosses treat agents and assets as disposable, if Chuck gets on their bad side they'll just lock him up in an undisclosed location and throw away the key, and his connection to the spy world perpetually puts his friends and family in danger. Why on earth would he choose that over Sarah? I just don't buy the idea that it's to make a difference and protect the people he cares about -- it felt more like a selfish, childish glee at the prospect of running around playing secret agent, especially now that he knows kung fu (sometimes). And why wouldn't what Sarah wants -- not to mention her greater knowledge of what the life of a spy really entails -- factor into his choice?

I don't know, that kind of ruined the character for me, and I'm left feeling that Sarah is better off without him.

Also, was it just me, or did Yvonne Strahovski look completely non-plussed in the scene where Sarah & obligatorily hot female guest star were shot lasciviously in their bra & panties? After a certain point, that stuff stops being "ironic" or whatever it was supposed to be in the first place.

And I don't know if this was ever a plot point or canon fact earlier, but Chuck's decision to be a spy felt even more grating in the context of Casey recounting his past assassination attempts on a foreign leader. Maybe I'm naive, but -- didn't there used to be at least a superficial consensus that assassinating foreign leaders is a bad thing that the U.S. shouldn't do?

Separately, a couple of posts worth linking to:

solitary_summer on Torchwood, slash, fetishization, and RTD

smirnoffmule: On Slashing While Straight and Writing While Queer

Lastly a SHINee music video for More Joy Day eve:

Comments

[sara]

Somehow I'd missed the news that someone wrote fic where RTD discovered homophobia. Ye gods and little fishies. I think chances are real good he discovered that in primary school, just like the rest of us. *very exasperated sigh* But then, there's been a genre of post-CoE posts that people have made where it's been obvious to me after the first few words that the person posting, er, really needs to educate themself.

(There are SO MANY things to criticize about the writing of Who and Torchwood; why pick the one thing which is almost certainly NOT the actual problem? Sheesh. If you're gonna crit, crit right, humanity.)

And yes, I think that's been an active executive order since Carter's day.

[crypto]

Yeah, there was some ugly stuff post-CoE which I'd somehow assumed had died down. My fandom New Year's Resolution is not to let myself get appalled by random posts & stories by people I've never heard of, which applies to 99.99% Torchwood fandom (I'm sure that a much smaller percentage are appalling, but I really don't have a clue who any of them are, since they don't overlap with my flist).

I know Chuck is action/comedy and not The West Wing, but we must be living in a post-Jack Bauer world when assassinating foreign heads of state gets played for laughs.

[anatsuno]

I watched Chuck 301+302 with increasing anger and disbelief, wondering if it was just me and an enhanced sensitivity to sexism and clueless white guy shite or not; glad to see the bra and panties scene raised your objections too - seriously, I felt like I was watching an episode from season one (in terms of, wow everything is rehashed, little is new, shouldn't we have moved on from this in the new season?), except that yes, at some past point things could feel ironic and now they just don't. I don't buy the character, I don't buy the plots where I can see everything coming from a mile away, and I just don't like it.

There was a point during those 2 eps where I thought the big Thing was going to be that no, it's not being Cool and Collected that helps Chuck activate his wondrous flashing power, but being Emotional and Roused by either Sarah's own exhortation, or her being in danger, or even something like, the sound of her Voice. There'd have been a distinct 'woman as pretext' feel to that, but it would still have been New and Different and while I thought they were maybe building up to it, I could swallow all the same old same old. but it turns out they weren't.

I watched 303 before reading your post because I thought the fact that you were posting about 03 and not before was maybe a sign that there was an interesting Reversal of the setup happening in that ep, but, still not!

I might just stop watching, at this point. Blargh.

[crypto]

It's not just you, and I'm glad it's not just me! I was never quite fannish about Chuck, though I could enjoy it for what it was last year, but -- what were they thinking? For me, the third episode was less irritating, but also kind of boring and predictable.

I'm guessing that they will move towards 'emotions are good if you can just channel them' over the course of the season instead of 'Chuck learns to repress and become a robot', but right now it mostly feels like a plot device to prevent him from instantly becoming superspy and losing the charm of the original premise. Which feels like it could get old very quickly.