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Jun. 1st, 2005 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckScott bought me the boxed set of season 1 of The Pretender as a late (end of March) Valentine's Day present. I got hooked on the series in the early days of my disability. It was airing at 7 pm every weeknight on TNT then. I happened to catch a few episodes and then see a marathon of sorts. I was rather confused by some things that didn't become clear until I saw the series in sequence. I wasn't sure who the good guys were supposed to be or how the various characters were interconnected.
I ended up watching the series through twice on TNT. Once just to see it and once to get it on tape. Then Scott found me an archive of Pretender fan fiction, one with thousands of stories. I read my way through it, trying at least one story by every author. As is usual, most of what I read was crap, but I didn't have to leave the house to get it or spend money I didn't have for it (an especially iffy thing when buying books online).
By the time I finished the archive, I'd more or less burned out on Pretender fan fiction and didn't seek out any other archives. Then the one I'd found disappeared. I didn't think much about it except when I created my page of fanfic recs for my website-- There were fics I wanted to recommend but couldn't because, as far as I could determine, they weren't available anywhere else.
Anyway, The Pretender occupies a special place in my heart. I can forgive the show for the fact that none of the questions it posed ever got resolved (and that resolutions offered early on were later discarded without explanation) and that the background conspiracy kept getting bigger even when it didn't make sense for it to do so. I forgive the fan fiction similar flaws plus the baby fics. (Writing in this fandom almost requires either that the author create new characters or that she take characters who appeared in only one episode and magnify them.)
Rewatching the first season reminded me of the things I loved the first time I saw the show. The acting is excellent. The A plots and B plots provide a reasonable balance of episodic and arc plot. It still seems possible that the writers could provide a satisfying solution to all of the characters' questions.
Then I started thinking about the end of the show, season 4. I can't actually say that it jumped the shark. The episodes, taken individually, were excellent. The story arc, however, frustrates me because it keeps getting bigger, adding embellishments when it should be offering resolutions to old questions. Resolutions can lead to further questions, but when every possible resolution turns out to be a false hope... I can't even read fan fiction that resolves the storyline because nobody can manage to juggle all of the conflicting pieces in a satisfactory way.
I'm not sure I'm going anywhere with this. I haven't drawn any brilliant conclusions about the series or the fandom. I just wanted to write some of my musings down.
I ended up watching the series through twice on TNT. Once just to see it and once to get it on tape. Then Scott found me an archive of Pretender fan fiction, one with thousands of stories. I read my way through it, trying at least one story by every author. As is usual, most of what I read was crap, but I didn't have to leave the house to get it or spend money I didn't have for it (an especially iffy thing when buying books online).
By the time I finished the archive, I'd more or less burned out on Pretender fan fiction and didn't seek out any other archives. Then the one I'd found disappeared. I didn't think much about it except when I created my page of fanfic recs for my website-- There were fics I wanted to recommend but couldn't because, as far as I could determine, they weren't available anywhere else.
Anyway, The Pretender occupies a special place in my heart. I can forgive the show for the fact that none of the questions it posed ever got resolved (and that resolutions offered early on were later discarded without explanation) and that the background conspiracy kept getting bigger even when it didn't make sense for it to do so. I forgive the fan fiction similar flaws plus the baby fics. (Writing in this fandom almost requires either that the author create new characters or that she take characters who appeared in only one episode and magnify them.)
Rewatching the first season reminded me of the things I loved the first time I saw the show. The acting is excellent. The A plots and B plots provide a reasonable balance of episodic and arc plot. It still seems possible that the writers could provide a satisfying solution to all of the characters' questions.
Then I started thinking about the end of the show, season 4. I can't actually say that it jumped the shark. The episodes, taken individually, were excellent. The story arc, however, frustrates me because it keeps getting bigger, adding embellishments when it should be offering resolutions to old questions. Resolutions can lead to further questions, but when every possible resolution turns out to be a false hope... I can't even read fan fiction that resolves the storyline because nobody can manage to juggle all of the conflicting pieces in a satisfactory way.
I'm not sure I'm going anywhere with this. I haven't drawn any brilliant conclusions about the series or the fandom. I just wanted to write some of my musings down.
