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Post by maherjunkie on Dec 11, 2005 13:46:17 GMT -5
Yes, but seeing Heather Locklear at the faux Styx concert makes it almost worth it.
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Post by Greeble on Dec 11, 2005 14:10:43 GMT -5
When Goren was "caught in a lie" by the psychiatrist he lied on purpose to see if she would catch it. He then asked her how she knew, to see if she would mention the signs that Robby had been showing. He wanted to know if she had been the one coaching Robby.
Later, when he lied to her about turning the lights of and piping music into the room (without her lawyer present, I noticed... using her deepest fear against her..) he lied WITHOUT displaying those signs. See, he knows about them and can display or suppress them at will.
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Post by joanie on Dec 12, 2005 14:10:17 GMT -5
Goren lied on purpose???
That does explain how the psychiatrist was able to be tricked into thinking Goren and Eames would really turn the interrogation room into a mini-torture chamber.
Wouldn't it be great to have the ability to tell when people were telling untruths? I would forever be wagging my finger at people with a smug smirk on my face telling them, "Your lying my little pet".
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Post by mimi1802 on Dec 13, 2005 12:24:13 GMT -5
Joanie,
Are you actually surprised that Goren would lie in order to get what he wants out of people?
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Post by Metella on Dec 13, 2005 19:04:39 GMT -5
I don't find you argumentive, just point-counter point & you could be "on point" ah, stop me now .......
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Post by JoniJay on Dec 13, 2005 19:24:27 GMT -5
Joanie, Are you actually surprised that Goren would lie in order to get what he wants out of people? I know Goren lies but I have a tough time figuring out when he is lying. It flew over my head that he was purposely trying to get caught . Silly me, I was so impressed with the psychiatrist ability to read Goren.
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Post by trisha on Dec 13, 2005 20:28:33 GMT -5
I think he probably shows the same signs that everyone else does, except when he's making an effort to conceal those tells. Many people are able to do this, but as Goren pointed out with Robby's napkin and button, another tell usually rears it's head.
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Post by Observer2 on Dec 16, 2005 17:12:32 GMT -5
I have a slightly different take on that scene. I don’t think Goren was lying the first time Pinchon “caught” him – I think it was a genuine acknowledgement, though he may well have voiced it in an attempt to be disarming.
I don’t think that at that point he had leapt to the conclusion that Robby’s therapist was coaching him on how to lie about murdering someone. I think he was still seeing Pinchon primarily as a source of information about Robby. But she was very direct about resisting his attempt to get information out of her, so he switched tack. His head wasn’t tilted to the right because he was lying... Goren is left-handed, complete with the usual reversal of such neurological signs. But Pinchon hadn’t noticed that he was left-handed, so she made the assumption that he was lying. Goren’s reaction to her accusation looks to me as though he’s startled by it, and then his mind goes into high gear as he registers how she’s interpreting his head-tilt and connects that with Robby’s coaching.
It’s only when he talks about his girlfriend that he deliberately mimics the technique Robby had used. When once again Pinchon assumes that means he’s lying, he gets her to explain why she thinks that – confirming the connection. I have a slight quibble with the writing there – I wouldn’t expect Eames to throw it in Pinchon’s face that way, alerting her to their suspicions, when Goren was keeping it so low key. I suspect Eames’ line was put in to help some of the viewers connect the dots. On the other hand, Eames *is* more of an old-style, direct-approach kind of cop, so I might be wrong.
Either way, it seems to me that Pinchon is written and portrayed not as someone with a great ability at reading people, but as someone who has read books about reading people, and who thinks Robby can get away with lying to experienced detectives just by consciously controlling a few of the more obvious signs.
I agree with Greeble that Goren knows about the signs of lying – including much more subtle signs than Pinchon has any clue about – and can suppress them at will. I still remember, in One, watching him see something disturbing in the autopsy report... there was nothing in his affect at all that suggested he was lying about AIDS being in the report. The only reason I even suspected it was because of the way he handed her the autopsy report – and even then it was only a suspicion. Making her open the report, rather than just look across to see the words, could have had a value of its own in the questioning process.
I think there are times when suppressing the tells is more difficult for him – when he was setting up the coach in Mad Hops, for instance. But I wonder whether his difficulty with that was even noticeable to anyone who is not hypervigilant. (I’m a bit like Goren in the old coffee factory, asking Eames if she could smell it... I’m often not sure whether what is obvious to me is even noticeable to someone else.) But with most suspects/witnesses, I think when Goren decides to, he is capable of lying without any noticeable signs at all.
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Post by maherjunkie on Dec 17, 2005 11:04:12 GMT -5
I have a slightly different take on that scene. I don’t think Goren was lying the first time Pinchon “caught” him – I think it was a genuine acknowledgement, though he may well have voiced it in an attempt to be disarming. It’s only when he talks about his girlfriend that he deliberately mimics the technique Robby had used. I think the big mystery/shocker here was that Goren actually had a girlfriend.
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Post by Sirenna on Feb 7, 2006 16:18:29 GMT -5
I liked this episode in spite of the inconsistencies everyone's mentioned. What an awkward way to murder someone and Robbies weedy arms stretch credibility. I've found a lot of the episodes throughout the series have had errors of fact that, which although a bit aggravating, don't detract from the story itself or the creativity of the episodes. This is no exception. I really enjoyed it.
I liked that Goren made Eames her coffee without commenting on her sugar habit. He accepts her, and her wierd idiosyncratic method of getting through her day. (She was a bit resitant at first but finally accepted his weird and idiosyncratic methods too...)
Robbie did look otherworldly, sprite like: well, spotted, Janethyland. His facial expressions were a bridge for us, the viewer, to travel between his innermost thoughts and his outward actions, between his insular mindspace of paranoia and terror and his outward accoutrements: his sister, his work, his apartment.
I liked too, how the episode showed the conflict between his thoughts and his realityand how both merged into this muddly pool of other people's desires and objectives completely submerging his own psyche. He never really thought what he thought or, worse, felt what he thought. He was a puppet on strings for his sister, his psychiartrist and finally for Goren to solve the case.
I have to admit, I don't see Goren as "reaching out to touch people at all". I think he avoids people unless he has to interact. He has his own inner and most loyal circle of collegues and friends but he's not a extrovert.
I don't believe he is compassionate in the same sense that Eames is compassionate. I see him understanding motives more than she does but involving himself less emotionally than she might. She comments on how crap the criminals are and feels the injustices. He just profiles them, he gets inside their heads but leaves them to Carver at the end of each episode. It helped him understand the guy who liked to munch on women's calves but didn't make him excuse the murderer in Acts of Contrition even though in that episode the murderer was the victim. I like that about him, his intimate, yet detached knowledge of people. I like that about the show. It turns it all upside down and inside out.
Goren accepts the way the world is built. He understands the orwellian aspects of companies, the military, psychaitry but it's not his concern. It the product of those worlds and the choice those products, like Robby and the psychatrist make that he's bound to oversee. To him the psychiatrist was on the same level as her lab rat, Robbie and, in the end, they both ended up in his own lab, food for his own theories.
He does have a relentless committment to finding the truth. I believe it to be the guiding principal of his life. but he's not trying to change anyone or seek redemption for anyone. If you commit a crime, he will catch you. He would not be the one to punish you; that's Carver's role in the LO:ci world but he won't lift a hand to stop the mechanisms in place to meet out justice if you are guilty.
Except in this episode he did. He stood up to Deakins and Eames stood up with him and I cheered them on from my armchair. It was wrong what the psychatrist did and it didn't make any logical sense just like Robbie's actions didn't really make any sense to him but he was stillcompelled to do what he did.
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Post by trisha on Feb 7, 2006 20:41:23 GMT -5
Wow, your idea of Goren seems pretty cold to me, Sirenna. While I agree that Eames sometimes tends to connect more emotionally with the victims and their loved ones, I think this is accentuated by Goren's refusal to deny the humanity of the perpetrator. Unless the perp has killed for money, vanity or some other purely selfish reason, he really doesn't even look down on them. His understanding of their emotional and psychological motivations is part of what makes him one of the most compassionate fictional characters I've ever seen -- even to my annoyance at times.
I definitely don't agree that Goren accepts the world as it is. I think he sees a world full of preventable suffering, and he, being a victim of such like so many of us, has (unlike many of us) taken a proactive role to stop cruelty, negligence, apathy, and greed from destroying lives. American law is designed to enforce a democratically decided set of ethics, which makes Goren, literally, an enforcer of morality. I think he takes on this position seriously, with passion, and, to the best of his ability, without prejudice. And to this end, his most important tool is not his library card, but his compassion.
I think Observer said it best when she broke him down in terms of his ability to separate people from the horrible things they've done. The action may have been terrible, but the person who did it is not necessarily a terrible person. Are there terrible people? Yes, I think there are, and I think Goren would agree. But those are so few and far between on this show. Even Nicole Wallace, for all her 16 murders, including her own child, is redeemable in Goren's eyes if she faces what she did, why she did it, and not only accepts her punishment, but also the fact that she deserves no less.
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Post by Sirenna on Feb 7, 2006 21:46:12 GMT -5
I didn't say he wasn't compassionate, Trish. In fact I've written a lot about how much more so he is than the average detective or person. But my point was when he solves a case he's not out to redeem, even though the theme of redemption is an intergral, even crucial aspect of the show itself. It's by-product of solving a case.
It remains that his interviews make the characters realise what they are i.e See Me, Cold Comfort. When they make the connection, then comes hope for a better life for them. But it's a by-product of his relentlessness to solve cases. He'd find them out whether or not it was good for them to face the truth and he would use what ever means necessary to do it. In See Me he worried the opthamologist did not have the strenghth yet to face his schizophrenia but he still made him face it because was bound to solve the case.
As for not accepting the world as it is, he's not preventing it's ills, he's arriving there after the fact - after the damage has been done and he's preventing it from continuing but, yes, I'd agree that he and Eames chose policework because they have a vision of a better world and they're doing all they can to achieve that and yes,as Eames said "an ethical man and an effective police officer." I'm not out to compare who's more compassionate.
I guess my point, if any, (LOL!) is that Goren has a cerebral side to him that overrides whatever he may feel in term of good and bad. In other he never judges who he arrests. He does his job and once in a while we get a sense of his stand on issues, like in this episode. We know he thought what the psychiarist did was nothing more than systematic torture for politcal ends.
Some of us write of as a knight or a saviour but my point is that's not his aim. But, conversely, it's why he's so great, so different and why the show can go down so many avenues where the accepted idea of what good and bad gets so turned around and we can even, sometimes, end up agreeing with the motives of the murderer and being agravated by the victim.
If Goren stood as judge at the end of the episode, I know I wouldn't watch because I really can't stand Horatio in CSI for exactly this reason. Goren is salvation for the characters in the show but it's because he leads them to a choice by the final scene. He doesn't make the chocie for them and he doesn't make it for us either.
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Post by Sirenna on Feb 7, 2006 22:26:42 GMT -5
I do think, however, he works within the world as it is, and doesn't try to change it. He stays within it's rules whether or not he agrees with them - unlike his criminals who literally, try to carve up the way they want it to be.
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Post by kawaiidragonfoe821 on Feb 8, 2006 17:25:30 GMT -5
I think that Goren realized just who he was dealing with when she caught him in the lie, he looked a little *too* surprised & disconcerted upon being 'made' to have expected it. But I also believe that him being caught in that lie (even though he may not have intended it) allowed him to adjust his tactics to be able to fool her. I love Goren & Eames' reactions to Carver's compression btw them & the Doctor's methods.
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digresser
Silver Shield Investigator
Posts: 149
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Post by digresser on Feb 9, 2006 8:29:18 GMT -5
Does anyone know anything about the actor who played Robbie.Is he well known over there? He is remarkable. His name is DJ Qualls and while he isn't very well known he is probably recognized by most teen movie-goers as being in Road Trip and starring in The New Guy.
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