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xRuthx · 07-03-2011, 06:42 AM

(29-12-2010 10:39 PM)binkie Wrote:
(29-12-2010 09:43 PM)BoHenley Wrote: I'll just add this, and I apologise if it's not quite in the right area. The following is point 6 from author Steve Berry's "8 rules of writing (fiction)":

"6. Don't lie to the reader. It's OK to mislead, but don't lie. If you say the character's motivation is A and it turns out to be B (and you haven't foreshadowed it at all), the reader will feel cheated."

The problem is I feel cheated. The Lucas=John storyline was NOT foreshadowed until Vaughan turned up with the suitcase, and then it was poorly developed as so many of us have said. I don't think of the L/J character as "John" at all because my brain won't accept that part of the story. If it was a dark past for LUCAS, I would.

This is such a big part of the problem. I appreciate that it is tiresome for people to keep seeing the same thing in different threads littered across this forum, but the fact of the matter is that season 9 did not succeed on this most fundamental structural level. The story of the-man-who-was-John is not a facet of the Lucas narrative. It is a projection onto that narrative of a story which played no structural part in it. I do not think it is either pedantic or immature to keep pointing this out, or to articulate the range of difficulties arising from this. Rather, I think it is indicative of the tensions between an intelligent audience and a production displaying an attitude of rhetorical indifference to that audience. Our dissatisfaction would be churlish if we had been lied to by the character, and yet continued to assert the need for an alternative conclusion. However, in this case, we were lied to by a poorly executed, inconsistent and emotionally unsatisfying secondary narrative which sought to maintain an insistence that we had been lied to by the character. The difference between the two is more than semantic, and is absolutely worth highlighting.

My feelings about this matter all summed up in a couple of paragraphs! Thanks for saving me typing the exact same thing out!