Series 9 Episode 8 discussion

[binkie]

(30-11-2010 02:55 PM)Byatil Wrote:  Lucas was the dominant persona, whilst the traumatised John was buried deep within L/J's psych. Whilst Lucas was the dominant persona, he had no recollection of ever encountering any other version of himself. I'm not quite sure how multiple/split-personality disorders work, but someone once told me "it's like a revolver", with each different personality surfacing just as a revolver shoots out different bullets. If we accept this theory to be correct, then it is possible that the dominant Lucas persona simply had no idea of the John persona...

My response probably belongs in another thread, but I’m not sure which. I’ll leave it here, and see how quickly it gets moved!

The dissociative identity disorder explanation – while obviously being the conclusion the production would like us to draw – is one that I still find impossible to accept on its own terms. This is the recurring theme of season 9 for me. Even if we attempt to leave aside the contradictions and leaden-literal reinterpretation (or misinterpretation) as it relates to previous seasons, this season did such a terrible job of setting out its own narrative mechanism. It’s not that I don’t understand what the writers want me to conclude, or that I don’t understand what it is the writers think they are telling me. The problem is, and will continue to be, that there is insufficient evidence in the structure and content of the writing to support the direction of that writing. One very obvious example of this is the casual approach to the sense in which John is hidden at all.

If the revolver analogy is to hold true, the script would need to establish, and maintain, a context for the conceit of discrete Lucas / John personas in which the two values never touched. Perhaps they would slide across each other, but they could never converse, and there could be no exchange of information or quality. However, because season 9 trod back into seasons 7/8 to retrieve elements of Lucas’ behaviour that were suddenly to be taken as evidence of John’s conscious influence in Lucas’ unconscious life (such as the utterly unconvincing explanation for the lack of personal possessions), we cannot think that the writers are applying this logic. It gets worse when we consider the way in which John’s ownership of the means of survival in Moscow is expressed as an element of Lucas’ own awareness of that experience. Lucas, the writers are saying, accepted the punishment-for-a-different-crime justification of those eight years, even though the crime was John’s. Either the writers want us to accept this detailed exchange of information between ignorance and hiding (which contradicts the obliviousness line on which the rest of the plotline seems to depend), or they mean us to conclude that Lucas is a part, created and played by John on a conscious level (which renders redundant any need for the briefcase of doom).

I don't expect a clinical discussion of psychiatric reasoning, but neither do I expect that good quality drama should be so relaxed in holding to a coherent narrative plan. Pass me the bottle of wine. And a straw