Day 24 - Best quote
Jul. 16th, 2010 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseConsidering the way two of my favorite shows use quotations, I could have an interesting and flippant discussion about the uses of quotations in popular culture. The Beauty and the Beast episode, "Ozymandias," didn't just use that as a title. Vincent read the full poem.
Criminal Minds sets its scenes with quotations, using them, and by selecting which character reads them, to enhance characterization. Most work. There's an occasional misfire, but we never get entire poems. So Beauty and the Beast is a little ahead on points.
However, at the end of season 4, Hotch, the Unit Chief on Criminal Minds started talking about the horrific case they'd just closed. I'd worked out a couple of bits of the torture that others at Television without Pity hadn't and got to explain it, so, yes, a very nasty episode. And rather than go for a simple quotation, Hotch fractures the fourth wall a little and starts to talk, though the actor doesn't address the camera directly -- the words are spoken over a series of pans and dissolves showing the team dealing with the ramifications of the case -- this is the character speaking his mind about what they face:
Sometimes there are no words; no clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes you do everything right -- everything exactly right -- and still you feel like you failed. Did it need to end that way? Could something have been done to prevent the tragedy in the first place?
89 murders at the pig farm. The deaths of Mason and Lucas Turner make 91 lives snuffed out. Kelly Shane will go home, and try to recover, to reconnect with her family, but she'll never be a child again. William Hightower, who gave his leg for his country, gave the rest of himself to avenge his sister's murder. That makes 93 lives forever altered; not counting family and friends and a small town in Sarnia, Ontario who thought monsters didn't exist until they learned they'd spent their lives with one.
And what about my team? How many more times will they be able to look into the abyss? How many more times before they can never recover the pieces of themselves that this job takes?
Like I said. Sometimes there are no words; no clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes the day... just... ends.
Criminal Minds sets its scenes with quotations, using them, and by selecting which character reads them, to enhance characterization. Most work. There's an occasional misfire, but we never get entire poems. So Beauty and the Beast is a little ahead on points.
However, at the end of season 4, Hotch, the Unit Chief on Criminal Minds started talking about the horrific case they'd just closed. I'd worked out a couple of bits of the torture that others at Television without Pity hadn't and got to explain it, so, yes, a very nasty episode. And rather than go for a simple quotation, Hotch fractures the fourth wall a little and starts to talk, though the actor doesn't address the camera directly -- the words are spoken over a series of pans and dissolves showing the team dealing with the ramifications of the case -- this is the character speaking his mind about what they face:
Sometimes there are no words; no clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes you do everything right -- everything exactly right -- and still you feel like you failed. Did it need to end that way? Could something have been done to prevent the tragedy in the first place?
89 murders at the pig farm. The deaths of Mason and Lucas Turner make 91 lives snuffed out. Kelly Shane will go home, and try to recover, to reconnect with her family, but she'll never be a child again. William Hightower, who gave his leg for his country, gave the rest of himself to avenge his sister's murder. That makes 93 lives forever altered; not counting family and friends and a small town in Sarnia, Ontario who thought monsters didn't exist until they learned they'd spent their lives with one.
And what about my team? How many more times will they be able to look into the abyss? How many more times before they can never recover the pieces of themselves that this job takes?
Like I said. Sometimes there are no words; no clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes the day... just... ends.
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 12:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 03:07 am (UTC)That entire speech worked perfectly, and it wouldn't have worked if it hadn't come at the end of several seasons of preparation -- the audience being keyed to listen to the quotations -- and a season that had far more losses than wins.
As you say, powerful.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-21 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-21 03:30 am (UTC)