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piranhai've been watching "bones", which i overall mostly like (though not quite as much as CSI, which has more nuance). but just now i finished an episode i want to throw against the wall. hard.
season 3, episode 3, "death In The Saddle" deals with the murder of a man who engaged in pony play. the show is quite disrespectful of the fetish, mainly in the form of agent booth whose conservative, catholic, white-bread personality can't seem to keep a professional front; aside from various dismissive comments towards the people who're involved in the subculture (who all are shown to be quite cooperative with his investigation), he actually assaults one of the ponies (grabs the guy by his reins and pulls him forward). bones, on the other hand, gives us a few anthropological insights about fetishism, and mentions that she, too, has engaged in some role playing, albeit not pony play. ok, that's something, at least.
at the end, however, they're sitting in a restaurant, and booth pontificates some more about fetishists, culminating in the claim that it's crappy sex. why, asks bones? booth goes on about how we're all lonely, and forever searching for that real connection with somebody else, and now and then, in lovemaking we reach the miracle of becoming one with another. and that fetishists and their little role playing games are nothing compared with that.
and bones says "you're right".
*barf*. of all the time to let him win an argument, this isn't it.
i really hope they'll never end up together. i can tell they will; the show has that feel to it, the never-ending sexual tension between the two main characters who don't admit to it until the show has had a good run (and then they get thrown together and the show goes downhill). but i dislike booth a lot, and wish bones (whom i like a lot) somebody less mired in pablum philosophy.
this makes me want to go back and rewatch the CSI episodes with lady heather -- that was so well done in comparison.
season 3, episode 3, "death In The Saddle" deals with the murder of a man who engaged in pony play. the show is quite disrespectful of the fetish, mainly in the form of agent booth whose conservative, catholic, white-bread personality can't seem to keep a professional front; aside from various dismissive comments towards the people who're involved in the subculture (who all are shown to be quite cooperative with his investigation), he actually assaults one of the ponies (grabs the guy by his reins and pulls him forward). bones, on the other hand, gives us a few anthropological insights about fetishism, and mentions that she, too, has engaged in some role playing, albeit not pony play. ok, that's something, at least.
at the end, however, they're sitting in a restaurant, and booth pontificates some more about fetishists, culminating in the claim that it's crappy sex. why, asks bones? booth goes on about how we're all lonely, and forever searching for that real connection with somebody else, and now and then, in lovemaking we reach the miracle of becoming one with another. and that fetishists and their little role playing games are nothing compared with that.
and bones says "you're right".
*barf*. of all the time to let him win an argument, this isn't it.
i really hope they'll never end up together. i can tell they will; the show has that feel to it, the never-ending sexual tension between the two main characters who don't admit to it until the show has had a good run (and then they get thrown together and the show goes downhill). but i dislike booth a lot, and wish bones (whom i like a lot) somebody less mired in pablum philosophy.
this makes me want to go back and rewatch the CSI episodes with lady heather -- that was so well done in comparison.
no subject
on 2010-07-11 19:54 (UTC)Bones has has some episodes which are really good on queer and trans issues (and I can't think of another mainstream TV show with an openly bisexual character whose relationships with men and women are treated pretty similarly--even if she did end up with a guy in the end, at least her relationship with a woman was portrayed as real and valid and ending for a normal, non-gender-related reason). And then it has some episodes which are really, really bad (e.g. the episode with the visiting Japanese scientist where everyone was trying to figure out zir gender in a really offensive way). Overall, I've felt that Bones does better on queer and trans issues than average, and about as bad on kink as all the other crime/forensics shows.
Booth's characterization is all over the place. He has moments (I really liked how he handled one of the main characters coming out), but he also has fucking stupid pompous speeches. I think the thing I hate the most is that Booth's religious moralism almost always trumps Brennan's more reason-based worldview.
CSI did some stuff pretty well (Lady Heather, if not necessarily the other stuff in the Lady Heather episodes) and a lot of stuff really badly. Ditto Castle; I wanted to throw stuff at the screen during the BDSM episode last season.
no subject
on 2010-07-12 04:56 (UTC)who on bones is openly bisexual? i'm just in season 3, so maybe that comes later? i expect it's angie. and i haven't seen anything trans-positive yet either. incentive to keep watching.
i think the show comes in pretty well generally when it comes to feminism -- strong female lead characters who can take care of themselves. i really enjoy that bones never cowers in a corner, afraid and waiting for the man to rescue her, but that she kicks butt for herself. though i am worrying about the bones <-> booth dynamic, and other comments lead me to think that unfortunately the writing won't continue to favour bones as a strong, independent woman.
no subject
on 2010-07-12 05:33 (UTC)Bones--yeah, it's Angela. There are hints of it prior to season 3 (the scene with the delivery girl), but I don't think it gets discussed until one of her exes enters the picture. I pretty much like how Angela's sexuality was handled.
The episode with the trans character I'm thinking of involved a formerly conservative former evangelical preacher turned (iirc) liberal pastor, murdered for completely un-trans-related reasons, and had some stereotype-challenging scenes with her son. I thought it did pretty well, even though the trans person was the murder victim. (There's another show I caught a few episodes of a while back that is the only positive portrayal of an FTM trans person I can think of on mainstream TV--I wish I could remember the name of it. Weirdly, religion was a theme again there.)
I have complicated opinions on the Booth-Brennan dynamic. I'd say she remains strong and competent, but that I'm really dissatisfied with the long, drawn-out, stupid tension between them and the fact that neither of them seems to be allowed to genuinely date other people wholeheartedly. The end of the season that just finished has them both going off to do other things for a while, and feels like they're trying to reboot to the roots of the show (they've practically forgotten that Brennan's an anthropologist!). I dunno.
In some ways it is the beloved geek show of my heart, and in others it's utterly infuriating. It has the best gender balance of any of the forensics shows currently on TV, and frequently handles social issues better than I would expect. It has mostly convincing geeks. On the other hand, when it screws up it screws up hard, and I wish the women talked about stuff other than work and men more often.
no subject
on 2010-07-12 06:55 (UTC)the drawn-out tension makes no sense, because they both jump into the sack with other people without too much thought (regardless of whether they're colleagues), so it feels incredibly artificial to me. it also overplays the "opposites attract" trope, which i find tedious at best. and in its service, booth is becoming more and more of a caricature -- in the very beginning i didn't dislike him as heartily as i do now, despite disliking david boreanaz as an actor (a visceral thing; he repulses me). but now the character also annoys the shit out of me, which is just a losing proposition.
*sigh*.
no subject
on 2010-07-12 22:45 (UTC)Amazingly, it does semi-recover in other respects, and the rotating interns are actually pretty great (with the exception of Daisy, who is both deliberately obnoxious and implausible, and Asshole Depression-is-Cool Intern).
The reason Booth and Brennan hop in the sack with other characters but not each other seems to be a fundamental fear of real emotional connection or something. They care about each other, so they fuck other people and then break their hearts (as much as I hope they're kind of rebooting, it really bugged me that in the finale, they worried about temporarily separating from each other, but NOT THEIR ACTUAL SIGNIFICANT OTHERS).
I sometimes like Booth, and don't mind Boreanaz these days, but I really hate how the show has ended up handling their relationship.