Same Archetype, Different Show, Same Result, Different Opinion

[clueless_02]

Okay, this is me so not reading about Public Administration to do a post about fannish things, but hell, I have come to realize that PA is just one huge exercise in post modernistic frustration so it's not like I'm going to take anything definitive away from my reading. Anyways, the whole remake of LFN and daybreak777 's comment to me about our shared love of

Comments

[nell65]

I think the 'mole reveal' in LFN felt wrong because it had never been set up -- I'm not even sure they dreamed it up until practically the last minute, and it *certainly* was NOT something they'd been laying the ground work for for THREE seasons! So it didn't ring true at all, especially with the tail they gave it.... If they'd dated it maybe to sometime after the whole Adrian story line, when Paul was gunning for her on the sly and she couldn't find Michael -- it would have made ALOT more plot sense for her to be open to an approach from above at that moment .... but still you have to wonder why, at that point, she wouldn't have spilled all the TR secrets she knew, which was hardly all of them, but plenty to give George/Mr Jones what they needed. So, we're back to it making no real sense and being wholly inorganic to the plot/characters established right up until that point.

Why, Hello there fanwank!

As for Xena - I missed most of those episodes in the middle where I gather G emerges as more central, so for me - the ending, Xena's ending, did seem like the ending to the story I started watching - the Xena story.... I guess, someday, I'll just have to watch the whole series start to finish!

[clueless_02]

Yeah, the time frames you picked out make a lot of sense in terms of Nikita being a mole. I mean, even though I have very biased opinion in favor of TR, I could see myself rooting for Nikita if they had given indications that she was becoming a mole during S3 or right after the *RoboNikita* arc. I know season/series finales are where you want to go out with a bang, but a little build up or a few hints scattered throughout the show would have made a lot of difference.

With Xena, it is a really good show and the middle is my favorite. As a warning, though, the show undergoes so many tonal shifts that it almost feels like you are watching a different show each season. The first two seasons are light camp with the occasional episode of substance ("Callisto," "The Price") and the third and fourth seasons are Greek tragedies mixed in with off-the-wall crack! The fifth season, well we don't talk about the fifth season because whether you buy into the subtext/maintext or not, the show's real strength-at least to me- is the interplay between Xena and Gabrielle and that is dead in the fifth season.

The sixth season feels more like ... I don't really know how to describe the sixth season because it felt like the rules had changed. Where the fifth season when out of its way to kill any kind of relationship between X/G, the sixth season made them practically MAINTEXT so they went from this weird business type relationship back to the soulmateness of S4 without little explanation. Plus, in the S6, they only had like three comedy episodes where the previous seasons comedy/crack!/drama were split fairly evenly.