*sigh*

[innerslytherin]

I am breaking up with Criminal Minds. The emotional blackmail of this last episode, combined with the sloppy storylines and decrease in actual profiling, has combined to end my love.

Also, I avoided this for as long as possible, but it's clear I need a Loki icon or six. Because Loki. Probably at least one Cap/Coulson icon, too. Or Stark/Coulson. Because yum.

Comments

[innerslytherin]

Honestly, this week's episode is really just the straw that broke the camel's back. I got pretty ticked off a couple of seasons ago when they ditched their two strongest female leads, then brought in a good actress but in a poorly written role to replace the two women they cut. Fans campaigned to get the actresses brought back, and we were successful.

Then last season, one of those said actresses, Paget Brewster, decided she was done being jerked around, and while I can't blame her for that, I also thought it was sort of a slap in the face to the fans who worked so hard to get her job back for her. So anyway, they wrote her out at the end of last season, and I planned to keep watching anyway, despite that she had been my favorite character. They said they weren't going to replace her. Of course, a few weeks later, they did just that.

Jeanne Triplehorn is a fine actress, and she's the one who replaced my favorite. She's done a good job with what they gave her, so I don't care one way or the other about her. But this season... Well, the writing has been going downhill, in my opinion, over the past season. The cases are more out there, and the focus isn't nearly as zoomed in on the profiling aspect. In addition there have been a lot of "Oh, come on!" moments for me, just little things that I could overlook in the beginning, but they began to pile up.

SO. All that was leading up to last night's breakup, but that was just basically making me feel restless and discontent and cynical. Last night was what pushed me over the edge.

Reid is probably the single most damaged character on the show. Genius who graduated high school at 12, was bullied and has actually been killed once, during season 2. His heart stopped, the good personality of the multiple personality kidnapper did CPR, he came back from the dead. During his subsequent PTSD he started using drugs. His schizophrenic mother has inadvertently sicced a delusional psychopath on him once, and also helped cover up the murder of a local child molester when Reid was a kid. His father disappeared when he was like 7 and only showed up again when he was almost 30. There are probably other issues I'm entirely forgetting. But anyway. Reid.

So for most of this season so far, Reid has had a telephone girlfriend. They "met" 10 months ago (in show time) when she wrote him a fan letter (he's got all these PhDs and she liked his work), then they talked on the phone, etc., but they never met. She had a stalker who was dangerous, so they talked in code and he paged her from payphones and all kinds of crazy stuff. This week, Reid got a call from a disguised voice that used a chess term to taunt him. Turned out the GF had disappeared, and the team went to save her.

Long story short, we've had a huge buildup this season about when Reid and the phone GF would meet, why she was so scared to meet him, etc.... and last night they found the stalker, tried to talk her down (the stalker was a thwarted doctoral candidate, which I actually thought was clever), and failed. The stalker shot herself in the head while she stood next to the GF, so they both died. The show faded to black with Reid in tears.

And... the thing is, I don't care about the GF. I think it's shoddy writing with cheap emotional manipulation to do it the way they did. I also found it incredibly predictable, since so far on the show, the team leader's wife divorced him and then was brutally murdered by a serial killer fixated on the leader; another profiler's wife asked him to help her kill herself because she had a terminal illness; another profiler's woman friend was brutally murdered by a serial killer fixated on that profiler...

So you see where I'm going here. I knew the romance wouldn't work out. We've only ever seen that happen once in 8 years of the show. So I hadn't bothered to invest in the GF in the first place. Maybe that's why I was a step removed and felt no emotional engagement when they killed her. But to me, it all felt overdone and manipulative. So I'm done with CM.

[valis2.livejournal.com]

I got pretty ticked off a couple of seasons ago when they ditched their two strongest female leads, then brought in a good actress but in a poorly written role to replace the two women they cut. Fans campaigned to get the actresses brought back, and we were successful.

Oh wow! That's pretty amazing that the fans got her back.

But this season... Well, the writing has been going downhill, in my opinion, over the past season. The cases are more out there, and the focus isn't nearly as zoomed in on the profiling aspect. In addition there have been a lot of "Oh, come on!" moments for me, just little things that I could overlook in the beginning, but they began to pile up.

*nodnod* I get it. My own experience with watching TV shows has been similar; at some point the quality starts to really diminish for many shows. I'm watching Hawaii 5-0 and it's had a couple eps this season where I absolutely rolled my eyes--they keep doing "stunts" for rating like involving Victoria's Secret models in a really skimpy plotline. lol.

His heart stopped, the good personality of the multiple personality kidnapper did CPR, he came back from the dead.

Right there I'm already thinking, um, what? *blinks*

I think it's shoddy writing with cheap emotional manipulation to do it the way they did. I also found it incredibly predictable, since so far on the show, the team leader's wife divorced him and then was brutally murdered by a serial killer fixated on the leader; another profiler's wife asked him to help her kill herself because she had a terminal illness; another profiler's woman friend was brutally murdered by a serial killer fixated on that profiler...

That's why I finally stopped watching CSI. Over and over again we would see similar plotlines until I finally couldn't take it.

I used to watch it nearly religiously, and then there was one episode with Katie Segal that was my camel-back-breaking-straw. It was so badly done, the show was trying to have a "funny" episode, to the point of having one of the characters walking around with a handcuffed clown in the beginning scenes. And it just got worse and worse, and I was cringing, and when the ep ended, I turned to G and said, "Okay, that's it, I'm done. No more." And i haven't watched since.

*hugs* Thanks so much for the explanation--I found it fascinating!!