later, ask me what I think about keen little gadgets in the shape of dismembered women. (Guess.)

[brown_betty]

So the other night, more or less by accident, kphoebe and I ended up watching Criminal Minds together. I had read the one sentence TV guide blurb, but honestly I had more or less forgotten about that by the time I started watching. Twenty minutes twenty three seconds later, (by my chat log) we were on AIM together boggling at the bafflingly insensitive

Comments

[kutsuwamushi]

I had the same reaction. I love the show, so it was a nasty shock. I kept expecting it to get better, up until the closing credits.

I got the impression that the episode was written with the Roma imagined in the role of the villains, and then the single line about how they're perverting Roma customs put in afterwards. The line was even acted in a throw-away manner. It barely registered unless you were paying attention to the race issue.

[brown_betty]

Yeah me too. Me and Karen were both like “uh. Are they doing what I think they're doing?” AND THEN THEY DID.

I'm not sure if the 'perverted customs' is meant to indicate that these people aren't ethnically Romani, they're just, what, really big fans? Or that these are Romani who somehow got their own culture really confused at some point. AUGLKJDF.

[cimness]

Well, if they're speaking Romanian, maybe they're fans who never even met (or, apparently, read about) the Roma.

[brown_betty]

I GUESS. The writing was, in my opinion, not of the highest calibre in ways other than racist fail. Its rather unclear what's going on.

[ratcreature]

Or that these are Romani who somehow got their own culture really confused at some point.You know, reading that it occurred to me that they actually could have made this ep with the bizarre child stealing plot, and included Romani, and still gone with the shows better trends to make the perpetrators still human if they had done something like this: Obviously the "wave" thing needs to be scrapped, and just one additional kidnapping in 1971 for history. Then they could have given the father who started this thing some history of having been maybe removed from hisown family as a child by some sort of crappy, racist social services, alienating him from his culture, maybe telling him lies about it, or maybe he only remembers fragments from when he was a child (like say endearments), then he gets out of whatever traumatizing institution or foster care system they had him in, is not stable, but want to have a family again. So he kidnaps a girl a few years younger than him, to get the Stockholm syndrome wife, and things proceed from there.

[brown_betty]

Your re-imagining sounds a lot less failful and actually potentially un-bad. I really wish that had been the show I washed.

[ratcreature]

TV episode scripts really need better beta readers, or editors or whatever the position is called in that medium. It's hard to believe how these things can get onto the tv screen, when even five minutes of thought with half-a-brain gets you less disastrous plots and through fixes within the same general episode parameters even.