Plot-holes

[binkie]

(04-03-2011 02:15 PM)HellsBells Wrote:  Interestingly in 9.7 commentary the writer Anthony Neilson says he never wrote the part where we actually see Lucas/John detonate the bomb, that was added afterwards. He thought that if he had written it he would have wanted more of an explanation as to Lucas' thinking about what he was doing. The Executive Producer, Andrew Woodhead, said it was explained in the next episode, 9.8, on the roof scene with Harry. I think, 'it made me feel like someone', is a bit short of an explanation!

Well, that's just depressing


"It made me feel like someone" doesn't even make sense in the context of John as we are supposed to accept him in his personal chronology in Dakar, anyway. As far as I remember, he is less concerned with personal destiny than he is with getting back to England and renewing his romance-of-the-ages with Maya. Vaughan even makes a point of reiterating the repetitive nature of John's conversation, and his one-track obsession with this woman who is, apparently, "the one".

I can understand that a producer might be more alive to the need for bigger-picture storytelling and arresting narrative devices, rather than academic attention to narrative logic. However, from the way you describe it, this comes across as mean-spirited and dismissive on the production side. Not allowing the writer of the episode in which a pivotal event occurs to have a hand in describing that event seems - for want of a better word - unfair. Or maybe I'm too much of a meritocrat for a proper appreciation of the realities of writing for television.

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(04-03-2011 11:55 PM)WhiteSwan Wrote:  So everybody raping a woman, abusing children, killing out of hatred, killing out of religious reasons, killing to get a bit more self-esteem, torturing people for the fun of it, they all could claim that it had not been their fault, because God had constructed their destiny.

And people do claim this in defence of actions like the ones you describe. In philosophical terms, this is referred to as 'hard determinism': the suggestion that free will is an illusion and that all decisive actions are merely the consequence of other instructive actions over which the individual has no functional control. This argument is the reason for the existence in law of the tenet which holds that if an individual carries out an act, knowing the character or quality of the act to be wrong, that individual can be held responsible for their actions.