a belated UnREAL post for Valentine's Day

[pocochina]

UnREAL: quite possibly the best new show of 2015. All of the praise that it's gotten has been well-earned. The one thing sticking point I have is the repeated claim that Rachel Goldberg is “the female Walter White.”

Now, I have nothing against the idea of a female Walter White character. Walt's comedic doppelganger was a woman; some day soon he'll

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[sunclouds33]

There's a direct parallel that there's something mentally and emotionally rotten in Rachel so it's not wrong to assume that she needs therapy. However, the way that her mother and Jeremy went about it is its own kind of sick. Meanwhile, there's also something deeply unhealthy in how Peggy entered into her affair with Pete in S1 and how she convinced herself that she wasn't pregnant until she was delivering the kid. However to a great extent, Peggy and Rachel absorb the sickness of their society to become their own mental illness which society than pathologizes them for. And the sickness continues in the end of S1- with Jeremy/Olive trying to get Rachel somehow committed and Peggy actually being committed to a mental asylum. Don and Quinn offer similar advice to slough off the familial concern, abusive familial control, wrong diagnosis or correct diagnosis all in one.

Rachel: My mom things I"m seriously ill.
Quinn: There's nothing wrong with you. You're a genius.
Rachel: I'm never getting out of here.
Quinn: Why would you want to? You're home.

Don: What's wrong with you?
Peggy: I don't know.
Don: What do they want you to do?
Peggy: I don't know.
Don: Yes, you do. Do it. Do whatever they say. Peggy, listen to me. Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.

[pocochina]

Rachel is very meta on this level. Like, part of what's wrong with her probably is just a lifetime of being told that something's wrong with her. But Quinn just telling her that pain doesn't exist is another way of manipulating and controlling her.