I’ve been watching a new series called Jericho, a post-apocalyptic drama that’s going… I don’t know where. They’re setting up some kind of mystery, but frankly I’m finding it fairly predictable and not very well-written. That said, a lot of the female characters have been refreshingly worthwhile. There are constant emergencies, and the women handle them according to how well-prepared each of them are, just like the men do.
But there are a couple of elements on here that are getting on my nerves. The main one is Mary, and her titillating sex life.
Mary is the woman who owns the town bar. She is having a secret affair with Eric, who is married to April. Later, we learn that Mary was under the impression Eric’s marriage with April was effectively over. When she finds out it’s quite alive and well as far as April knows, Mary breaks off the relationship. In Mary’s next scene, someone comments to Mary, “I don’t like him”, referring to Eric. Mary says, “Neither do I.” The next scene involving Mary shows a man hitting on her at a party while she watches Eric with his wife. The final scene of the episode shows Mary in bed with Eric. Why? We don’t know. I even gave it another episode to see if they’d tell us, but no.
Once again, the writers feel no need to explain why a woman abandons her ethics for a roll in the hay. Eric’s responses reveal him to be a philanderer who never had any ethics about fidelity, so his behavior makes sense. But Mary expressed moral outrage about the relationship, then continued it anyway. Every other (un)ethical choice characters have made in this series has been reasonably explained. We don’t, for example, have anyone expressing outrage about looting, and then in the next scene joining in the looting wholeheartedly.
I guess we’re to assume women’s ethics aren’t as strong as their emotions.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I found that profoundly annoying, particularly since don’t both Mary and Eric’s wife basically disappear from the plot? The wife dies in childbirth (which makes Eric’s brain explode from guilt) and Mary, like, leaves town? And this all makes Eric grow as a person? It was totally weird… and was only a plotline that made sense if the scenes involving the women characters were like anecdotes one of the male characters was telling to another male character, since they didn’t actually work to develop the fem. characters at all, and instead only developed the male ones.
Maria(Quote) (Reply)