Revenge thoughts
Jun. 22nd, 2012 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthSo over the last few days I’ve been marathoning Revenge. On the whole I like it, but I feel like this is probably the right way for me to watch it, it seems like a show that works better as one big story than watching on a week to week basis (with hiatuses).
It reminds me a little of Veronica Mars, with our heroine after revenge and justice and answers, but with a far more elaborate schemes and less mystery of the week plots. The first is iffy, as I feel...Emily’s (we’ll go with that since it’s what she’s using these days) plot is needlessly complicated in places and I still don’t understand why marrying Daniel was supposedly an important step. Actually the second point is iffy too, as after the first few episodes we didn’t see any revenge being taken on anyone besides the Graysons (until the killer guy entered the equation, but even then he was treated as an extension of the Graysons until close to the end); I’m glad there weren’t really unrelated episodic plots, but there was more potential stories we weren’t told.
Unsurprisingly Emily is my favorite character it is her show after all. But I’m not even going to get into shipping on this show because that’s just a mess. I want Emily to be happy, but I think she needs a lot of other things before it becomes a question of who she should be with to be happy. Just to say that if I were Daniel I’d be way more concerned about her relationship with Nolan than Jack; even if we the audience know Nolan’s wouldn’t be in the race if there was one, doesn’t mean Daniel had no reason to wonder about the nature of that relationship. And the finale was pretty much eye rolling in terms of needless shipping drama.
I’m honestly not sure I like any of the characters all that much, they’re all pretty awful people. I certainly enjoy watching most of them (it took me a while to warm up to Nolan, but I enjoy him now), but I don’t actually like them very much. This is an area where VM had a definite advantage because there were at least a few actually good people (Veronica, Keith, Wallace) that we could directly root for here...yeah Emily’s cool and all, but she’s only the hero by default, not because she’s really heroic.
Was this renewed for a second season? Because if not I really wish they had actually wrapped the story up more in the finale. If so...okay, but I hope they have a game plan for how they want to go forward with this. I feel about this kind of the way I feel about OUAT, that it would have made a really excellent BBC show with half as many episodes and a definite end point (with some open ends in case they get picked up for another year but structured to work as one story). I don’t think it dragged too much this season (but I watched them in rapid succession, something tells me I would see more flaws watching it in real time) but even with how I came at it I could see it being tightened up and probably better for it.
The weirdest thing about the show is how it isn’t a mystery. Or what mystery there is isn’t the point of the show. Emily isn’t there to find out who wronged her, she already knows and it here to punish them. And even what was presented as a mystery of what would/did happen on the beach wasn’t a focus and once it happened the audience and Emily got the answers quickly. Then, even going into next season (which I assume there is) it’s not exactly a mystery what happened, even in the show because most of the major characters know that. The mystery may be how deep this particular rabbit hole goes and who’s going to shake out on whose side but they’re less in the game of solving the mystery of what happened as proving it and getting revenge That would be a big change for next season, if it *was* more of a mystery this time around, especially since Emily seems to have contented herself with not getting specific revenge on anyone else who was involved, just them taken down with the Graysons.
One of my main problems with the show is the timeframe of everything. The first 2/3 or so of the season practically used TVD timing (although actual episodes covered a little longer) and then suddenly we started skipping months at a time. I have plenty of issues with the time scale on TVD so I’m not encouraging other shows to use that one, but the packed story followed by huge gaps doesn’t exactly work either. At least this show seemed to have kept track of where it was, so the end of the season was clearly still the middle of winter, unlike TVD which doesn’t keep track of that since I’m pretty sure it was the middle of winter (if not still fall) at the end of season 3 there, but nobody acts like it.
So I’m currently thinking I’ll watch this in big chunks next year too, maybe not one big chunk, but while I want to see more I don’t think I want to watch it week to week either. I like it, I think it could continue to be interesting, but it’s not on demand TV for me.
It reminds me a little of Veronica Mars, with our heroine after revenge and justice and answers, but with a far more elaborate schemes and less mystery of the week plots. The first is iffy, as I feel...Emily’s (we’ll go with that since it’s what she’s using these days) plot is needlessly complicated in places and I still don’t understand why marrying Daniel was supposedly an important step. Actually the second point is iffy too, as after the first few episodes we didn’t see any revenge being taken on anyone besides the Graysons (until the killer guy entered the equation, but even then he was treated as an extension of the Graysons until close to the end); I’m glad there weren’t really unrelated episodic plots, but there was more potential stories we weren’t told.
Unsurprisingly Emily is my favorite character it is her show after all. But I’m not even going to get into shipping on this show because that’s just a mess. I want Emily to be happy, but I think she needs a lot of other things before it becomes a question of who she should be with to be happy. Just to say that if I were Daniel I’d be way more concerned about her relationship with Nolan than Jack; even if we the audience know Nolan’s wouldn’t be in the race if there was one, doesn’t mean Daniel had no reason to wonder about the nature of that relationship. And the finale was pretty much eye rolling in terms of needless shipping drama.
I’m honestly not sure I like any of the characters all that much, they’re all pretty awful people. I certainly enjoy watching most of them (it took me a while to warm up to Nolan, but I enjoy him now), but I don’t actually like them very much. This is an area where VM had a definite advantage because there were at least a few actually good people (Veronica, Keith, Wallace) that we could directly root for here...yeah Emily’s cool and all, but she’s only the hero by default, not because she’s really heroic.
Was this renewed for a second season? Because if not I really wish they had actually wrapped the story up more in the finale. If so...okay, but I hope they have a game plan for how they want to go forward with this. I feel about this kind of the way I feel about OUAT, that it would have made a really excellent BBC show with half as many episodes and a definite end point (with some open ends in case they get picked up for another year but structured to work as one story). I don’t think it dragged too much this season (but I watched them in rapid succession, something tells me I would see more flaws watching it in real time) but even with how I came at it I could see it being tightened up and probably better for it.
The weirdest thing about the show is how it isn’t a mystery. Or what mystery there is isn’t the point of the show. Emily isn’t there to find out who wronged her, she already knows and it here to punish them. And even what was presented as a mystery of what would/did happen on the beach wasn’t a focus and once it happened the audience and Emily got the answers quickly. Then, even going into next season (which I assume there is) it’s not exactly a mystery what happened, even in the show because most of the major characters know that. The mystery may be how deep this particular rabbit hole goes and who’s going to shake out on whose side but they’re less in the game of solving the mystery of what happened as proving it and getting revenge That would be a big change for next season, if it *was* more of a mystery this time around, especially since Emily seems to have contented herself with not getting specific revenge on anyone else who was involved, just them taken down with the Graysons.
One of my main problems with the show is the timeframe of everything. The first 2/3 or so of the season practically used TVD timing (although actual episodes covered a little longer) and then suddenly we started skipping months at a time. I have plenty of issues with the time scale on TVD so I’m not encouraging other shows to use that one, but the packed story followed by huge gaps doesn’t exactly work either. At least this show seemed to have kept track of where it was, so the end of the season was clearly still the middle of winter, unlike TVD which doesn’t keep track of that since I’m pretty sure it was the middle of winter (if not still fall) at the end of season 3 there, but nobody acts like it.
So I’m currently thinking I’ll watch this in big chunks next year too, maybe not one big chunk, but while I want to see more I don’t think I want to watch it week to week either. I like it, I think it could continue to be interesting, but it’s not on demand TV for me.
