[spoilers] Lucas Discussion 2

[binkie]

(07-03-2011 03:12 PM)Saerwen Wrote:  My faith in the writers have been severely dented that the couldn't be bothered following the continuity of such a marvellous program.

Saerwen, you hit the nail on the head. As Byatil, xRuthx, BravoNine and others have pointed out here (and in other threads), this really is one of the most intractable problems with season 9.

I know there has, at times, been criticism of a perceived lack of detail in the background of this character. Clearly, there was an extent to which the production agreed, and determined to supply this detail in the form of John. What should have happened, as 9.7 unfolded, was that the reaction of viewers to the increasingly bleak undoing of Lucas should have been an emerging recognition of John. We should have had a lightbulb moment. Our reaction should have been the same as Maya's in 9.8: "It was the first time you made sense." But Maya was talking bobbins, and we did not - for the most part - have that lightbulb momemt. This was largely a result, as you suggest, of inadequate translation of Lucas' context, character logic and rhetorical value. Not to mention the problematic operative logic of Lucas-is-John (which, by the sound of it, has still not been addressed on the season 9 DVD).

I feel some recognition of BravoNine's dispirited response to xRuthx above: I almost don't want to talk about this any more. (Almost!) It is just so wearing to be locked in this seemingly endless cycle of frustration, resignation, and frustration. I want to be able to leave this alone because I want to be able to return to a fuller appreciation of this show, which I still admire and enjoy. But every time I think to myself that I should just accept Lucas-is-John for what it was (a rug-pulling narrative flourish in an ongoing wider narrative of self-deception, self-sacrifice and moral compromise), I find myself incapable of moving past my own awareness of the continuity failures to which the show is apparently oblivious. Worse, where the production acknowledges the existence of these failures - as in the commentary of 9.7 - it seems to feel no responsibility for its lack of investment in resolving them.

It's not that I hated the storyline in itself, because it's not as if I can't see the cleverness in the conceit. But it didn't work for this character because there was more than just a sequence of events to be explored and explained: there was a complex moral and logical construct also. This is what was neglected in the creation of Lucas-is-John, and this, I suspect, is why the misery is so keen and so persistent for those of us who cannot just shrug and move on to the next thing. The re-drafting of the character's attitude towards his time in prison as punishment-for-another-crime is absolutely the foundation of the problem encountered by the show in executing this storyline. This was not just a temporal event, like buying milk or driving to work, it was an existential experience: a long moment in a process of becoming and being. Season 9 tries to deal with the existential element by means of the crowbar that is "because [I deserved] it". But this does nothing to address the responses and reactions we saw in seasons 7/8, and is entirely inadequate as an explanation of either moral perseverance or intellectual survival and rehabilitation.

Spooks created a complex character, with a background that was rich with potential. And then it took fright at this complexity, and reduced the character to little more than a piece of thread linking a sequence of events. The paradox is that in rendering the convoluted and complicated explanation of Lucas-is-John, the show rather simplified the material it already had in the form of Lucas-is-Lucas.