Thoughts on SouthLAnd
So, 4x06 was interesting, wasn't it?
I LOVE Ben's slow slide off the boil this season, with his increasingly poor anger management and his bed-hopping. He's lost, flailing - partly because the recontextualization of what happened to his mother has sent him into a spin, made him doubt who he is, what he wants, what his Reason For Being is, and partly because of Cooper: because the person he's head over heels in love with who taught him how to be a cop, what it really means, let him down, and made him question everything he's learned thus far about how to make judgment calls.
It makes a certain kind of sense that Ben actually believed Sammy planted the crack pipe & tried to frame the suspect, because what it comes back to is this: Ben has Daddy issues on such an obvious scale and so consistently that I've never seen anything like it before. It should be a cliche but as I said, it's so pervasive and so consistent, comes out in so many unexpected ways, that it becomes real and profound.
He craves a mentor, a replacement father figure who he can rely on. That's why he settled so well with Cooper, who was that much older, and with Sammy, who's a new dad. But Ben has issues up the wazoo because he was abandoned and betrayed by his dad, so he's also constantly pushing at the edges, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for his own constructed fantasy image of The Perfect Mentor to come crumbling down... And it's an expectation Cooper confirmed & reinforced, through his drug use. Now, not only does Ben have Daddy issues, he has *replacement Daddy* issues. He's expecting Sammy to fail like his father did, like Cooper did, and he jumped on the first hint that Sammy is Just Like Them - unable to live up to the pedestal Ben's placed him on.
What Ben doesn't realize yet is how badly he's fucked up: Sammy told him you back your partner even if you think they're wrong, but Ben didn't show him the same courtesy. He's really damaged Sammy's ability to trust him in the field (and brought home to Sammy how much not-like Nate Ben is *emotear*). It'll be interesting to see how/if they recover from this as a partnership.
If not, my ideal would be Ben & Cooper back together again (theirs is a bromance for the ages, even if they *weren't* my OTP for this show), and Sammy & Tang riding together (come on, don't tell me it wouldn't be awesome to see those two bonding over their traumas - her beating, him losing Nate - and being cynical & snarky at each other).
Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/101185.html, where it has
comments
I LOVE Ben's slow slide off the boil this season, with his increasingly poor anger management and his bed-hopping. He's lost, flailing - partly because the recontextualization of what happened to his mother has sent him into a spin, made him doubt who he is, what he wants, what his Reason For Being is, and partly because of Cooper: because the person he's head over heels in love with who taught him how to be a cop, what it really means, let him down, and made him question everything he's learned thus far about how to make judgment calls.
It makes a certain kind of sense that Ben actually believed Sammy planted the crack pipe & tried to frame the suspect, because what it comes back to is this: Ben has Daddy issues on such an obvious scale and so consistently that I've never seen anything like it before. It should be a cliche but as I said, it's so pervasive and so consistent, comes out in so many unexpected ways, that it becomes real and profound.
He craves a mentor, a replacement father figure who he can rely on. That's why he settled so well with Cooper, who was that much older, and with Sammy, who's a new dad. But Ben has issues up the wazoo because he was abandoned and betrayed by his dad, so he's also constantly pushing at the edges, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for his own constructed fantasy image of The Perfect Mentor to come crumbling down... And it's an expectation Cooper confirmed & reinforced, through his drug use. Now, not only does Ben have Daddy issues, he has *replacement Daddy* issues. He's expecting Sammy to fail like his father did, like Cooper did, and he jumped on the first hint that Sammy is Just Like Them - unable to live up to the pedestal Ben's placed him on.
What Ben doesn't realize yet is how badly he's fucked up: Sammy told him you back your partner even if you think they're wrong, but Ben didn't show him the same courtesy. He's really damaged Sammy's ability to trust him in the field (and brought home to Sammy how much not-like Nate Ben is *emotear*). It'll be interesting to see how/if they recover from this as a partnership.
If not, my ideal would be Ben & Cooper back together again (theirs is a bromance for the ages, even if they *weren't* my OTP for this show), and Sammy & Tang riding together (come on, don't tell me it wouldn't be awesome to see those two bonding over their traumas - her beating, him losing Nate - and being cynical & snarky at each other).
Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/101185.html, where it has
comments