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Post by trisha on Mar 8, 2004 8:52:16 GMT -5
So I'm not the only one who wanted to see it a second time before commenting? Not since Happy Family have I been so intrigued by the characters in an episode. I loved watching these people unravel and Goren's reactions to all of them. I was a little concerned that he didn't notice being spoon fed leads by "Carmen" at first, but she was certainly the most interesting cog in the murder machine and knowing she was our killer early on only made the story more interesting to me. Out of time, more later...
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Post by darmok on Mar 8, 2004 18:56:42 GMT -5
I do want to watch it again, but first impressions - I liked it. Things I remember without watching it twice yet: How the doctor got really close to Goren when they were in her office, the reference to "Art" when Eames asked if that was art that made him think, and the description of Goren as a megalomaniac. That was great.
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Post by trisha on Mar 8, 2004 20:35:26 GMT -5
Yeah, I love those little throw backs like the comment on art you can think about.
I laughed out loud when "Carmen" called Goren a megalomaniac. The girl used every opportunity available to show her parents she knew psychology to the point of using their own pathology against them, but still, "She's just a grammar school teacher."
Since Lilee knew a bad head shrinker, I look forward to her comments.
I'm also looking forward to hearing from coth on Brent Spiner. Did he throw you?
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Post by pompusone on Mar 8, 2004 20:47:39 GMT -5
I was a bit surprised, especially having watched Suite Sorrow so recently, that Goren wasn't more sympathetic to the daughter. She wasn't that different from the daughter in Suite Sorrow; both being kids who were totally messed up by their parents.
What am I missing here?
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Post by Metella on Mar 8, 2004 21:18:53 GMT -5
I also wondered at first why Goren was being so casual with the daughter, in fact, he was getting aggressive at some points. But I missed her age when she was first being shown & didn't realize how old she was .... I at first thought she was 16 or 17
So, as an adult woman, he was still harder on her than he usually is until he is SURE he has the "bad girl".
The father figure was much WEAKER than I expected; he was a simpering fool using risky actions to make himself feel manly & the wife was also a bit weak, letting him cheat on her & then only being able to come up with an affair with a young buck? I don't think they would have eaten a marriage councelor for luch - I think they would have talked him to sleep unless courtordered to be there & then they may have ended up weeping all night long.
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Post by CurrerBell on Mar 8, 2004 21:25:41 GMT -5
Please excuse me while I do a little meta-analysis. This episode felt kinda old school, if there can be an old school for a show in its third season. Old school in a good way. It made sense. Everyone's motivations fell into place, and unlike "Mislabled" and "Pas de Deux", there were no obvious plot holes and no rush to explain everything in the last scene. I can't say that it is the most memorable episode. Although I'm not sure I can articulate why. Maybe things were too neatly explained. Or I am just really hard to please. I do like the positive reinforcement of Eame's reference to "Art". Little dedicated-viewer rewards go a long way. Meta done. For the episode's particular characters, I definitely think they were well executed and well written. I wish Goren had maybe spent a little more time teasing out "Carmen's" repressed emotional life prior to the last scene. Instead, in the last scene he mostly *stated* that she had emotional reactions to her parents instead of proving/showing that she did. Kind of took the kick out of her final admission. I will have to rewatch it later this week, but that's my initial reaction.
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Post by domenicaflor on Mar 9, 2004 12:27:48 GMT -5
So I'm not the only one who wanted to see it a second time before commenting? <SNIP> Out of time, more later... Exactly right. I enjoyed the episode, and liked many of the points it made. But I need a second viewing that I could not get yesterday. So this is my placeholder to say "Very Good", not excellent, for now. Will edit later- D.
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Post by Observer2 on Mar 9, 2004 12:59:59 GMT -5
“Very good, not excellent” is about my reaction to this one, too. I’m not sure why I don’t like it more than I do. It seems like a good ep, though not a very pleasant one....
I thought the writers did a good job of giving Eames a balanced role in this episode.
I loved it when she said, “Is this what you mean by art that makes you think?” Even for someone who hasn’t seen the 1st season episode called Art I think it would be clear that she was referring to a previous conversation the two of them had. There are a couple of people I can do that kind of thing with.... pick up a conversation months or years later, when something new refers back to it. If it’s something that stuck in my mind well enough for the new thing to remind me of it, they usually remember it, as well.
The role-playing, with Eames as the harpy wife and Goren the cowed husband was fun. But even more, I enjoyed the fact that she was a natural part of what was happening. In the school, for instance, she identified the sound of the air wrench – which fits with her interest in cars – and made the connection to used car batteries. No doubt Goren made the same connections, but she’s more naturally verbal than he is, so it made sense for her to be the one to say it out loud. Even so, many scripts would have had him say it to her. It even seemed to me that she had a more active role in the final interrogation than usual. I enjoyed the stronger writing for her. I hope it’s a trend.
Turning to Goren, I found it particularly interesting seeing this episode so soon after seeing the Suite Sorrow repeat. The parallels between the pivotal interrogation in Suite Sorrow, and the final scene in Shrink-Wrapped, make the differences between them more striking.
In both episodes the parents of the suspect have behaved in ways that echo Goren’s parents. In Suite Sorrow he uses that echo to build rapport with the suspect – to make a genuine, human connection.
In Shrink-Wrapped, in the moment when he refers to the central aspect of that echo most directly, he turns his back to the room, giving no one (except, perhaps, Eames) the chance to see that he knows all too well the feelings of a child whose parents didn’t put the child’s needs above their own.
It seems clear to me that he identified with many aspects of Camilla’s experience, yet he allowed no rapport. He pushed, pulled, prodded, and even became the audible whisper of her own bitter inner voice; but he offered no genuine connection. It was disturbing to watch him manipulate her so ruthlessly when he so clearly identified at least with much of her experience, if not with her.
Only as he arrests her, as he walks behind her, with his back to her parents, does his face show the strain of it, and his eyes go to where Eames is standing.
I was not thrilled with the final exchange – the L&O-style soundbite summation. I think Carver is too intelligent, and too aware of human nature, to believe what he said; and the audience is at least intelligent enough to have gotten the point already. I would rather have heard Carver regret that he couldn’t bring the parents to justice, as well, and Goren and Eames reassure him that evidence of their ethics violations would find its way to the proper authorities, so they would both lose their licenses and never have an opportunity again to betray a patient’s trust just to get at each other. Too bad no such protections exist for children.
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Post by popularlibrary on Mar 9, 2004 14:05:11 GMT -5
I really liked this episode, with its wicked picture of two utterly self-absorbed shrinks whose whole marriage is a series of power games that exclude every one else and have absolutely no room for the demands of a child. I can't recall a more horrible/pathetic indictment of parental malfeasance than that picture of a child sent to celebrate her birthday all alone, in a restaurant. Wasn't there even a nanny?
So why was Camilla so different from Julie Turner in Suite Sorrow? And why did Goren have so little sympathy for her? I suspect because Julie took her fury out on her parents, and not on a surrogate. She played no games. She did not try to frame someone for her crime. Her rage has heedless and devouring, never focused into intellectual weapons. She was not a psychopath.
Camilla was. Her parents' lovelessness stunted her as surely as would physical abuse, and their bizarre relationship helped destroy her capacity for love. She seems to have seen herself in the children she taught, but she was otherwise a silent, predatory, secret partner in her parents' games. Unlike Julie, she did not explode into revenge and what she saw as self-defense - she planned and carried out the notably ugly murder of an unstable young man already abused by her mother for the sole purpose of seizing power in the family, and gaining the upper hand over her parents. Goren may understand monsters, but he rarely has much sympathy with them.
Camilla did not want or need love. She has never had any notion of what love is, thanks to her appalling mother and father. She is more ambitious - control over her parents, beating them at their own game, and taking out her boiling hate on an innocent who preferred her mother to herself and could be used to punish that mother.
In so many ways, Camilla is still an infant in need, and like an infant, still concerned only with herself - she has never truly been socialized. The pathetic scene after the competency hearing where she begs her mother to take her away from Goren's relentless pursuit particularly displayed her lack of emotional development. She has brought her father to this pass, and used her testimony to further entrap him and punish her mother, but the moment she is threatened she cries in panic for the protection no one has ever given her. Her father's danger, her mother's need to stay fall away from her awareness as she cries, like a terrifiedl child, "save me!" I think it is the defining moment of the episode, and encapsulates the tragedy in all its complexity. And Goren uses it without compunction. He may understand. He may even feel for her on some level. But she has gone past the boundaries that allow for sympathy and beome a violent predator who has to be removed from social interaction.
I thought the performances by Colin and Spiner were particularly brilliant, walking a perfectly balanced line between apparent professional competence and personal ghastliness. Colin's Eloise, clearly the dominant partner, managed to be sensual, cold, brilliant and emotionally oblivious - a powerful woman who seems to have no awareness how twisted her behavior is. Colin conveyed wonderfully Eloise's conception of herself as a sane and superior professional in complete control of her life and family. She made the disparity between her self-view and the reality striking and unsettling. Brent Spiner's Graham, creepy, weak, enchained by his wife, was a perfect portrait of a masochist so self-involved, he sees nothing, especially his daughter. There was nothing surprising is Eloise's choice of a lover - he was all too much like her husband.
It was just another happy family in the L&O parlor, where bad parents are always producing murderous kids, though rarely with such a fascinating pathology or such an ironic edge.
Elena
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Post by pompusone on Mar 9, 2004 18:44:33 GMT -5
Elana,
While I agree with some of your analysis I do not agree that Camilla neither needed nor wanted love. I think it was because she wanted love, because her mother's lover rejected her, that she responded as she did by killing him. I don't think a person who didn't want love would have gone into working with underprivileged children.
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Post by darmok on Mar 9, 2004 20:02:02 GMT -5
I liked how they actually got deceived on severaloccasions for a change. It really was one big game. First, Eloise made them suspect Graham. Then there was the false hit list. And then Camilla leads them to suspect her parents. Goren and Eames figured out, of course, but they were being played for a while.
It was very sad how the parents were so uncaring and oblivious towards their daughter. The birthday is the obvious example, but there were others. When they had Graham committed, they didn't even have the courtesy to tell the daughter. She had to find out when the cops came. When she was trying to tell them about the cops, they pretended that she wasn't even there. If the cops came and searched my house, I'd be very anxious about it and would need to tell someone; they didn't seem to know she was there. In the car, Eloise talks about Camilla like she's not even there. In the last scene, she is begging them to leave with her. Elena, I hadn't thought about how childlike she was there, but the parents didn't know how to be parents. What parent can ignore the hysterical pleas of their child? They had never really been parents to Camilla. It makes you wonder why they had a child in the first place.
On a happier note, I also noticed that Eames' role was much stronger. I think it has been since her return. Goren still makes most of the leaps, but she follows easily. As pointed out, she noticed the air gun. She's not being spoon-fed anymore. Although, in Eloise's office, Goren turned to Eames and explained what to her what transferrence was. That might have been more for Eloise's benefit, to show her indirectly that he knew understood pyschology. I think if Eames had wanted to know what it was, she would have asked (and maybe she did - off camera) when Goren discovered the CD.
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Post by trisha on Mar 9, 2004 20:15:22 GMT -5
Observer, I guess I assume too much because I pretty much figured they both were ruined. Graham was done just by being at a competency hearing and Goren is not the kind of man to let a shrink take sexual advantage of a patient without notifying the licensing board.
I agree with Elena on why Goren held back sympathy for Camilla. She had crossed the line with her cold manipulation of Christian and pretty much everyone else she came in contact with. But even with her desire for power and control, the human parts of her seeped through and begged to be caught. Her ego may not have wanted her mother to hear that recording, but she did leave the shortcut on her desk top even though she deleted the file. She also revealed herself by directing her rage at her father being committed at Goren and by telling him "this is not over." It was very much like Nicole Wallace's compulsion to divulge that she enjoyed being able to hurt people without feeling guilt and that Elizabeth Hitchens was an embezzler. They wanted to be recognized beneath the rubble and gave him exactly what he needed.
Elena, great post, you really hit the nail on the head. That picture of Camilla on her birthday was my first clue that she was our killer. How unfathomable to me it is that her parents would not be in the photo. Even worse, once we knew that they had sent her out alone that they would frame it and put it on display. She was just another accomplishment to them socially and just another pawn privately and they let her know it by manipulating her or dismissing her completely.
Having her own trophy head pushed in her face by another pawn in the game was just another jab and only strengthened her resolve and propelled her on her mission. But this pawn is smart. He moves on to another very telling photo, another trophy on the mantel piece. This one belongs to her father alone, but is horribly overshadowed by the one belonging to her mother which she is sure to draw attention to.
Pompusone, I have to agree with Elean here. Love was not the greatest common denominator here. Control is the central theme in this episode, and all of the participants of the game are keen to exact it, even Goren and Eames.
Eloise certainly stands out as the central power holder and thus is the object of all of Camilla's rage, jealousy, as well as a twisted form of admiration for the way her mother plays the game. There was no love there. They are all selfishly fulfilling their own needs by emotionally cannibalizing each other.
Who knows why Camilla decided to be a grammar school teacher. With her mothers lowly opinion of it, it's my guess it was her idea. Teaching at a poor school left her with little income, not that teacher make much to begin with, and that would keep her under her mothers roof and her thumb.
Darmok, I agree about Eames. I have always thought she is not well versed in psychology, but that's Goren's angle on the show. I do think that the writers use her to explain things to the audience, but she is getting stronger. Though she may not have taken any classes on psychology, her gut reactions to people are very keen. Goren did need to point out the meaning of the titles of Christian's CD's, but she needed no help to see that Eloise planted the wallet to end Grahams affair.
I almost forgot to mention how much I loved seeing Carver in action. Yippie! He also delivered my favorite line in this episode, "This family makes me want to go home and kiss my wife."
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Post by Metella on Mar 10, 2004 18:59:02 GMT -5
Carver's statement also struck me deeply;
it is what I think observing some situations in life should be all about - be grateful for what you do have, do your best always without giving in to the pain- and when you have to deal with people like this - give your loves an extra kiss that night just for breathing the air with you.
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Post by NikkiGreen on Mar 10, 2004 19:15:38 GMT -5
I need to see the episode a second time. I'm confused about a few things. I'm glad I've read all of the fab analysis before I rewatch it.
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Post by Observer2 on Mar 11, 2004 0:08:05 GMT -5
Elena,
Some of your discussion of the differences between Julie and Camilla makes sense to me, but I disagree with your diagnoses of Camilla and her father.
I see no sign of Camilla being a psychopath (aka sociopath, aka antisocial personality disorder [APD]), or that she, “...did not want or need love.” On the contrary, I think she desperately needed and wanted her parents’ love. Her reactions to them were emotional in ways that a psychopath’s would not have been. There are also other points that argue against her being a psychopath, including the fact that the kid at school said that, yeah, she listened to him.
A psychopath might tutor kids after class, if they saw a potential payoff in the form of advancement or a merit raise. But there would be no payoff in making the effort to make the kid feel listened to – not something that a psychopath would do naturally – so that would not be likely to happen.
You referred to Camilla “...taking out her boiling hate on an innocent...” I would probably characterize it more as boiling rage, though with some hate and self-hate mixed in; but the point is that psychopaths are generally not capable of sustaining any emotion at such intense levels for any length of time. Psychopaths kill for a thrill, because they’re irritated, on impulse, or to get a payoff, but not generally out of sustained intense emotions.
I did see the quality in Camilla that you describe as being like an infant. I agree that, as you suggested, she was ‘stunted’ in her emotional development. But neither that, nor being able to murder her mother’s lover, indicates that she’s a psychopath. I think her diagnosis would be more complicated but less dramatic. Psychopaths are fairly rare. Families of psychologically damaged and destructive people are all too common. Only a small proportion of them produce overt murders, but the number of walking wounded they produce is amazing.
I agree that Brent Spiner's Graham was "creepy, weak...” and “...self-involved...” but I don’t think he “...was a perfect portrait of a masochist...” He was portrayed as seeking situations that had an aura of danger (though they actually sounded well-controlled and relatively safe) to get a thrill. When the guy took him to an after-hours joint down on Avenue D, he told stories of his own exploits – apparently seeking approval/acceptance/admiration from the tough characters there – but he didn’t pick a fight with them.
Trisha,
I agree that control was a central theme in this episode, but I disagree on why Camilla wanted control. I think partly she was striking out at her parents out of rage and pain, but her main, driving motivation was to try to force them to see her, recognize her, acknowledge her existence as a meaningful human being... love her.
It’s the same reason she chose a school in a dangerous neighborhood. She’s not the thrill-seeker her father is – the story of the goat tells us she freaked out. She chose that school trying to impress her father, trying to gain his approval... his love.
Most likely she felt some empathy – liberally mixed with projection – for the kids, especially those who had no parents. She may have reached out to try to help them for the same reasons so many psychologically warped and wounded people become therapists – trying to heal their own wounds in other people.
Like you, I really enjoyed Carver’s work in the hearing – I thought it was well written and well played. I don’t want very much courtroom stuff, but I wouldn’t mind a few bits like that, from time to time, as well as more of his work with pressuring suspects in the investigation phase. Of course, the occasional bits of real teamwork with the detectives, such as his role-playing and wrong turn in Maledictus and his careful detailing of the legal situation – hypothetically, of course – in Malignant, are wonderful bonuses, and all too rare.
Metella,
I like what you said about Carver’s comment. I’m not sure I know what you mean about not giving in to the pain... I think people need to let themselves react to pain, and sometimes even seek comfort for it. But perhaps you meant not give in to it in ways that cause harm to others. I would agree with that, and I agree with all the rest – I think you said it very well.
Nikki,
I love the butterfly!! It’s beautiful. Are there more where it came from?
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