Blood Ties: Blood Price
This “meta” is mostly my rambling on the episode. I’ve read the books, and it probably shows. Since I think that the writing and the acting is dead on to the character… yeah, my opinions of the characters are carrying over from what I already believed. I don’t really care about the ending. Tanya Huff is a good writer, and I trust her when she makes a narrative choice.
Someone somewhere said they weren’t sure who the main character is. Um, it’s Vicki. This is the Vicki Nelson series. She is the first main we see on the show, she is the focal point for the love triangle, it is her PI company. VICKI, a woman, is the main character.
(Pssst! It’s Vicki.)
And, um, I love her. I’ve read reviews of the books saying that she’s too hard-headed, or that she’s grating on the nerves. ~Love her~ I’m told at the very end of the series, with what happens, she gets worse… Love her!
Yeah… so. This is a really long ramble. Spoilers below.
Vicki/Celluci
LOL SYMBOLISM to Celluci whipping out his gun and laying it out on his desk while talking to Vicki on the phone. You know that's what half of their fights are about for him. Vicki has been a self-sufficient person for a very long time, and Celluci has a problem with her strength. Which kind of makes him an asshole, actually, and it's one of the reasons I didn't like him much in the books. He's a bonehead. As hard as Vicki is to get along with, we establish pretty early on that Celluci is also hard to get along with. He's had multiple partners on the force, and it's a joke that she shot him once by accident. (His current partner, who I like A LOT, seems to be an easy-going sort himself and has multiple partners (wives) of his own.) When she tries to gain information from him about his cases, he is defensive, but at the same time he expects her to break confidentiality with her clients to help him out (and makes a dig about her needing to ask for help). The boundaries of their previous partnership are up in the air. And they both have such strong personalities that it makes their relationship difficult; there's no give and take unless one of them takes a moment to be the bigger man (yeah, that's what I mean).
While the problem for Celluci is his need to assert control/manhood, for Vicki, it is that she NEEDS to be self-sufficient, and she CAN’T do it anymore. Her impending blindness (retinitis pigmentosa) is whittling away at her reserves and how much she can accomplish by herself. Her original phone with her mother call underscores both her original personality issues:
Dating guys- She comes on too strong or just sleeps with them
Blindness and need for control- The moron date READS the menu to her!
Of course she doesn't need this yet, but with her degenerative eye disease, that has to be a reminder of a sore subject for her. So every time some guy comes in and treats her as though she needs protection, it isn't her being an obstinate twit. Well, not JUST her being an obstinate twit. It's part of her having to face the reality that someday soon the hotshot homicide detective is going to be needing assistance from others. She can no longer do the job she had passion for, and she is getting constant reminders from someone she particularly had to keep her guard up around that she’s becoming handicapped. No wonder she gets belligerent.
I don’t want to simplify their dynamic, but these thoughts are surely a consideration. In the same scene mentioned earlier where Celluci is asking for information, he suggests they have dinner and each tries to get the other to buy. Sometimes control is a toy passed between them. Sometimes the disparaging jokes land; sometimes they hurt. Celluci isn’t very sensitive, and Vicki can’t let people know what she needs. It’s a bad situation for them both. They have a lot of baggage to sort out.
Vicki/Henry
Vicki is entirely not impressed the first time Henry goes Prince of Darkness on her. She probably can’t see his eyes. :D
The dynamic between Vicki and Henry is much more interesting to me than Vicki and Celluci. In spite of everything, I’m actually a fan of the two of them. They work very well together. Prior to their actual meeting, they are both on the same ‘case,’ picking up the same clues and coming to the same conclusions. That they both thought to plot the points of the murders, despite Vicki’s rookie status in investigating the supernatural, suggests compatibility/similar thinking.
I want to read the scene in which the vampire is pretty much going though her purse as symbolic (lol symbolism). First of all, he couldn’t get her glasses, so he’s thoughtfully checking to see if there is another pair for her (He’s also being NOSY). He takes her in and gives her a chance to understand him, and finally, he tries on her glasses, a sign of him trying to see from her perspective. When he has her glasses perched on top of his nose, he doesn’t force Vicki to lie down, but he goes in more gently, coaxing her back down and trying to explain in a higher, softer voice. His tone throughout this scene is very inviting.
GOOD vampire!
So we have difference between Vicki and Celluci butting heads, and the conversation between her and Henry. Henry knows how to pitch his voice and smile and pull back his threatening vampiness, and Vicki responds by not shutting down or getting her hackles up. Compare “What are you doing out here half blind?!” to “People with that conditions might want to stay away from nighttime stake outs?” “You just can’t see that I care about you!” to “It’s a shame you’re not the more trusting type.”
Maybe this is obvious. Probably is. Of course the bastard son of Henry the VIII knows how to be sensitive and diplomatic (which isn’t to say he doesn’t have his Imperial Highness moments). And this difference (plus Henry’s sex-on-legs-ness) is probably part of what makes her relationship with Henry so appealing to her right now. She isn’t constantly slamming her head into a wall that is pretty much identical to herself.
As for Henry, it must be interesting for him to know someone so strong-willed (hard-headed) that he has to work with them instead of overriding their will and implanting his suggestions. Not only do they have their partnership, instead of Vicki suggesting the information share, Henry is the one to suggest their partnership. Nice reversal. He needs her for the investigation, but he is clear about his intrigue almost immediately.
“I haven’t met someone quite like you in over a lifetime,” he says. Squee. Vicki feels it too, but… she’s Vicki. She’ll deny it as long as she can. She certainly tried to pass it off as Henry’s vampire magnetism.
Vicki/Coreen
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I do like the addition of Coreen to the cast. I want someone to come along to demonstrate Henry’s bisexuality, but I think Coreen serves a different function. As a character, she’s very useful to the narrative. Since she studies the occult on her own, she’s serving a similar purpose of say Hermione/Willow/Chloe/Sam Wincester in that you can assume when she comes up with lore or solutions, she isn’t some genius really. She READ it somewhere. This is knowable information that she can find, and should have been reading about since we established this as one of her interests. At this point, they’re using her correctly. Not everything she knows is useful or accurate, and it wouldn’t be. But sometimes it can help.
Coreen is pretty stubborn herself. It may take me awhile to have actual insight to her motivations, but in this first episode, it seems as though she is more obsessed with finding proof to back up her beliefs in the supernatural than anything else. She’s a bit of a vamp-hag, isn’t she? The boyfriend becomes secondary to hunting evil pretty quickly.
But the hug she gives Vicki at the end? Cuuuute. Vicki tells her to never do that again, but she smiled a little. Aw.
The Big Bad
Norman is beyond pathetic. I had some sympathy for him in the books (Though not much. He’s pretty much a power hungry little weasel.), but he’s a nice example of a freak of the week, I guess. Although this series requires some sort of supernatural case for Vicki to solve in every episode, I really hope they keep the series character-driven (I mean, it’s LIFETIME for fuckssake) instead of stupid forced plot driven. Because I think that will finish off any non-white hair I have left.
Ahem, anyway. I like that we can visibly see him being twisted further and further by his association with the demons (I refuse to believe it’s just the magic regardless of Henry’s bias). It’s warping him. He’s getting paler, more corpse-like. He feeds off of the leavings of others (their possessions, the girl’s apple). His hair is going white. (Or maybe he’s just a grad student…) It’s good to do this because we don’t have enough insight into what he’s thinking to see what it is doing to him mentally. We DO know that Norman associates success with material gain. He thinks he needs the car, the clothes, to get the girl, who is merely another possession that he wants.
Norman says, “I’m tired of playing the Nice Guy, okay?” Ugh. He’s just like all those idiot guys who pat themselves on the back for… EXACTLY this crap. “Playing” the nice guy so they can get into a girl’s pants. They pretend to be a friend, they offer a falsely sympathetic shoulder, they do all of their ‘nice guy’ things with their ulterior motives and then complain about ‘bitches’ who only want those ‘other guys,’ those creeps who have money and clothes and looks. Damn bitches! How dare you not see my inner self-worth! He’s easily manipulated by the demon because of this attitude of self-entitlement and materialistic view of the world. Pity for him. Should have stuck to role-playing. Don’t you know geekgirls are hot?
See, grad school DOES warp your mind! He’s probably a TA.
Also, I appreciate the contrast with the normal geeks who are proud of their geekery. Really. The addition of the geeks and the professor up on the occult give me hope that all things supernatural are not going to be characterized as evil. (But BOO to the Dungeons and Dragons reference. Come on.) That would be a really bad move (I mean, Henry is a vampire. We HAVE to have some ambiguity). It would be smart of them to continue to show both sides, regardless of Henry chiming in that he hates magic. He’s very religious; we expect it of him. Magic and the supernatural are pervasive in this world, though. I like how the fortunes in their Chinese cookies ring true:
It is easy to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.
Celluci doesn’t understand what Vicki is going through, and he keeps telling her what to do. But the beautiful thing is, he lolz and says it’s The Job, then proceeds to give Vicki advice about how to cope with her eye disease. Take some vitamins. Come back to the force. THIS is how you should adjust. Read your cookie, Celluci. Poor guy is clueless to what he’s doing wrong.
The night will be filled with mystery and budding romance.
LOL HAY GUISE VICKI/HENRY OTP!!! Eheheh… sorry, but her fortune isn’t very deep. Maybe it should have said, Be wary of blundering fuckwits who really do love you quite a bit, you know.
Random Stuff
The side characters:
I like the side characters of the police force’s I Talk to Dead People lady (hee) and Celluci’s partner Dave. And um, if you know me, this is my axe to grind. I know this is an American tv show, but we have all these background non-white characters. Please keep them around and use them regularly. It might even be nice to throw a non-white person into the group of the mains. Hm??
The meta:
TV Corporate Lady walks through an empty car garage talking about violence on television: “What’s more murder at an Act End matter?” *dies at the end of the act*
Hee!
The slash:
I can just see the scene in Norman’s place where Celluci and Henry see each other for the first time being co-opted for a slash vid.
Not that I advocate doing that if you don’t plan on making it a threesome. >:)
Fin!
Someone somewhere said they weren’t sure who the main character is. Um, it’s Vicki. This is the Vicki Nelson series. She is the first main we see on the show, she is the focal point for the love triangle, it is her PI company. VICKI, a woman, is the main character.
(Pssst! It’s Vicki.)
And, um, I love her. I’ve read reviews of the books saying that she’s too hard-headed, or that she’s grating on the nerves. ~Love her~ I’m told at the very end of the series, with what happens, she gets worse… Love her!
Yeah… so. This is a really long ramble. Spoilers below.
Vicki/Celluci
LOL SYMBOLISM to Celluci whipping out his gun and laying it out on his desk while talking to Vicki on the phone. You know that's what half of their fights are about for him. Vicki has been a self-sufficient person for a very long time, and Celluci has a problem with her strength. Which kind of makes him an asshole, actually, and it's one of the reasons I didn't like him much in the books. He's a bonehead. As hard as Vicki is to get along with, we establish pretty early on that Celluci is also hard to get along with. He's had multiple partners on the force, and it's a joke that she shot him once by accident. (His current partner, who I like A LOT, seems to be an easy-going sort himself and has multiple partners (wives) of his own.) When she tries to gain information from him about his cases, he is defensive, but at the same time he expects her to break confidentiality with her clients to help him out (and makes a dig about her needing to ask for help). The boundaries of their previous partnership are up in the air. And they both have such strong personalities that it makes their relationship difficult; there's no give and take unless one of them takes a moment to be the bigger man (yeah, that's what I mean).
While the problem for Celluci is his need to assert control/manhood, for Vicki, it is that she NEEDS to be self-sufficient, and she CAN’T do it anymore. Her impending blindness (retinitis pigmentosa) is whittling away at her reserves and how much she can accomplish by herself. Her original phone with her mother call underscores both her original personality issues:
Dating guys- She comes on too strong or just sleeps with them
Blindness and need for control- The moron date READS the menu to her!
Of course she doesn't need this yet, but with her degenerative eye disease, that has to be a reminder of a sore subject for her. So every time some guy comes in and treats her as though she needs protection, it isn't her being an obstinate twit. Well, not JUST her being an obstinate twit. It's part of her having to face the reality that someday soon the hotshot homicide detective is going to be needing assistance from others. She can no longer do the job she had passion for, and she is getting constant reminders from someone she particularly had to keep her guard up around that she’s becoming handicapped. No wonder she gets belligerent.
I don’t want to simplify their dynamic, but these thoughts are surely a consideration. In the same scene mentioned earlier where Celluci is asking for information, he suggests they have dinner and each tries to get the other to buy. Sometimes control is a toy passed between them. Sometimes the disparaging jokes land; sometimes they hurt. Celluci isn’t very sensitive, and Vicki can’t let people know what she needs. It’s a bad situation for them both. They have a lot of baggage to sort out.
Vicki/Henry
Vicki is entirely not impressed the first time Henry goes Prince of Darkness on her. She probably can’t see his eyes. :D
The dynamic between Vicki and Henry is much more interesting to me than Vicki and Celluci. In spite of everything, I’m actually a fan of the two of them. They work very well together. Prior to their actual meeting, they are both on the same ‘case,’ picking up the same clues and coming to the same conclusions. That they both thought to plot the points of the murders, despite Vicki’s rookie status in investigating the supernatural, suggests compatibility/similar thinking.
I want to read the scene in which the vampire is pretty much going though her purse as symbolic (lol symbolism). First of all, he couldn’t get her glasses, so he’s thoughtfully checking to see if there is another pair for her (He’s also being NOSY). He takes her in and gives her a chance to understand him, and finally, he tries on her glasses, a sign of him trying to see from her perspective. When he has her glasses perched on top of his nose, he doesn’t force Vicki to lie down, but he goes in more gently, coaxing her back down and trying to explain in a higher, softer voice. His tone throughout this scene is very inviting.
GOOD vampire!
So we have difference between Vicki and Celluci butting heads, and the conversation between her and Henry. Henry knows how to pitch his voice and smile and pull back his threatening vampiness, and Vicki responds by not shutting down or getting her hackles up. Compare “What are you doing out here half blind?!” to “People with that conditions might want to stay away from nighttime stake outs?” “You just can’t see that I care about you!” to “It’s a shame you’re not the more trusting type.”
Maybe this is obvious. Probably is. Of course the bastard son of Henry the VIII knows how to be sensitive and diplomatic (which isn’t to say he doesn’t have his Imperial Highness moments). And this difference (plus Henry’s sex-on-legs-ness) is probably part of what makes her relationship with Henry so appealing to her right now. She isn’t constantly slamming her head into a wall that is pretty much identical to herself.
As for Henry, it must be interesting for him to know someone so strong-willed (hard-headed) that he has to work with them instead of overriding their will and implanting his suggestions. Not only do they have their partnership, instead of Vicki suggesting the information share, Henry is the one to suggest their partnership. Nice reversal. He needs her for the investigation, but he is clear about his intrigue almost immediately.
“I haven’t met someone quite like you in over a lifetime,” he says. Squee. Vicki feels it too, but… she’s Vicki. She’ll deny it as long as she can. She certainly tried to pass it off as Henry’s vampire magnetism.
Vicki/Coreen
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I do like the addition of Coreen to the cast. I want someone to come along to demonstrate Henry’s bisexuality, but I think Coreen serves a different function. As a character, she’s very useful to the narrative. Since she studies the occult on her own, she’s serving a similar purpose of say Hermione/Willow/Chloe/Sam Wincester in that you can assume when she comes up with lore or solutions, she isn’t some genius really. She READ it somewhere. This is knowable information that she can find, and should have been reading about since we established this as one of her interests. At this point, they’re using her correctly. Not everything she knows is useful or accurate, and it wouldn’t be. But sometimes it can help.
Coreen is pretty stubborn herself. It may take me awhile to have actual insight to her motivations, but in this first episode, it seems as though she is more obsessed with finding proof to back up her beliefs in the supernatural than anything else. She’s a bit of a vamp-hag, isn’t she? The boyfriend becomes secondary to hunting evil pretty quickly.
But the hug she gives Vicki at the end? Cuuuute. Vicki tells her to never do that again, but she smiled a little. Aw.
The Big Bad
Norman is beyond pathetic. I had some sympathy for him in the books (Though not much. He’s pretty much a power hungry little weasel.), but he’s a nice example of a freak of the week, I guess. Although this series requires some sort of supernatural case for Vicki to solve in every episode, I really hope they keep the series character-driven (I mean, it’s LIFETIME for fuckssake) instead of stupid forced plot driven. Because I think that will finish off any non-white hair I have left.
Ahem, anyway. I like that we can visibly see him being twisted further and further by his association with the demons (I refuse to believe it’s just the magic regardless of Henry’s bias). It’s warping him. He’s getting paler, more corpse-like. He feeds off of the leavings of others (their possessions, the girl’s apple). His hair is going white. (Or maybe he’s just a grad student…) It’s good to do this because we don’t have enough insight into what he’s thinking to see what it is doing to him mentally. We DO know that Norman associates success with material gain. He thinks he needs the car, the clothes, to get the girl, who is merely another possession that he wants.
Norman says, “I’m tired of playing the Nice Guy, okay?” Ugh. He’s just like all those idiot guys who pat themselves on the back for… EXACTLY this crap. “Playing” the nice guy so they can get into a girl’s pants. They pretend to be a friend, they offer a falsely sympathetic shoulder, they do all of their ‘nice guy’ things with their ulterior motives and then complain about ‘bitches’ who only want those ‘other guys,’ those creeps who have money and clothes and looks. Damn bitches! How dare you not see my inner self-worth! He’s easily manipulated by the demon because of this attitude of self-entitlement and materialistic view of the world. Pity for him. Should have stuck to role-playing. Don’t you know geekgirls are hot?
See, grad school DOES warp your mind! He’s probably a TA.
Also, I appreciate the contrast with the normal geeks who are proud of their geekery. Really. The addition of the geeks and the professor up on the occult give me hope that all things supernatural are not going to be characterized as evil. (But BOO to the Dungeons and Dragons reference. Come on.) That would be a really bad move (I mean, Henry is a vampire. We HAVE to have some ambiguity). It would be smart of them to continue to show both sides, regardless of Henry chiming in that he hates magic. He’s very religious; we expect it of him. Magic and the supernatural are pervasive in this world, though. I like how the fortunes in their Chinese cookies ring true:
It is easy to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.
Celluci doesn’t understand what Vicki is going through, and he keeps telling her what to do. But the beautiful thing is, he lolz and says it’s The Job, then proceeds to give Vicki advice about how to cope with her eye disease. Take some vitamins. Come back to the force. THIS is how you should adjust. Read your cookie, Celluci. Poor guy is clueless to what he’s doing wrong.
The night will be filled with mystery and budding romance.
LOL HAY GUISE VICKI/HENRY OTP!!! Eheheh… sorry, but her fortune isn’t very deep. Maybe it should have said, Be wary of blundering fuckwits who really do love you quite a bit, you know.
Random Stuff
The side characters:
I like the side characters of the police force’s I Talk to Dead People lady (hee) and Celluci’s partner Dave. And um, if you know me, this is my axe to grind. I know this is an American tv show, but we have all these background non-white characters. Please keep them around and use them regularly. It might even be nice to throw a non-white person into the group of the mains. Hm??
The meta:
TV Corporate Lady walks through an empty car garage talking about violence on television: “What’s more murder at an Act End matter?” *dies at the end of the act*
Hee!
The slash:
I can just see the scene in Norman’s place where Celluci and Henry see each other for the first time being co-opted for a slash vid.
Not that I advocate doing that if you don’t plan on making it a threesome. >:)
Fin!