NCIS:LA - Missing
Jan. 28th, 2010 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eleanorjaneI just finished watching the most recent episode of NCIS: Los Angeles - "Missing", episode 13 of season 1.
The episode starts out with one of the main cast getting kidnapped, and I didn't find out until afterwards that the actor in question was being written out. Obviously that affected my viewing, because I was expecting the plotline to wrap up, and the lack of 'solution' made the denouement feel like a real anti-climax.
(Also, boo to the fact that it was a CoC that they wrote out - although admittedly it's a reasonably diverse cast, at least. Three white men, a white woman, a latina woman, and two African-American men. Well, one African-American man, now.)
On an ensemble show, Episode 13 of Season 1 is too early to run a storyline trying to capitalise on our emotional investment in the characters. Nobody cares. On the one hand, that's fine; obviously, if nobody cares about the character, he's a good choice to write out. On the other hand, that lack of engagement means that all the main characters emoting all over the place about his abduction comes across as My Angst Is Pastede On Yay.
In fact, the episode helped me crystallise some things that I don't like about NCIS:LA, some of which are factors in why the show just hasn't grabbed me the way the original did.
* It's not particularly funny. NCIS has wit in its dialogue. NCIS:LA has Sam And Callen Bickering.
* It heavily promotes Mock The Geek - to be fair, so does NCIS, but I give that a pass because it earns it on other strengths; NCIS:LA doesn't.
* The Srs Manpain from Callen is almost more than I can take.
* The plots do not feel as well-constructed as NCIS plots; they frequently have stuff happening simply to drive the investigation onwards, that makes no sense in the bigger picture. In today's example, Dom's phone gets turned on for just long enough to send the "agent needs help" alert but not long enough to get a GPS fix. How convenient. And then it gets randomly turned on by a bad guy for just long enough for them to get a GPS fix. It feels like those things happened just to give the team another clue, not as an organic part of whatever was happening to Dom.
And here's another example of sloppy writing: Dom's alert gets paged to all the team's phones. But a) they arrive in sequence, not at the same time, which doesn't make sense, and b) the first three recipients turn their phones off or on silent - yet when we see the alert on Hetty's phone it's a giant red box that covers most of the screen. There's no way you could miss that when even glimpsing your phone, yet we're expected to believe that Kensi, G and Sam all 'didn't notice it', just for the sake of humour/dramatic buildup. It's just a minor niggle, sure, but it's sloppy, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
* There's way too much melodrama; G's the worst offender, although the episode where a Navy SEAL was a suspect and Sam devolved into frothing irrationality and emo manpain was memorable too. This is way too early in a show's run to try to manipulate the audience with melodrama; we simply don't know (or care) enough about the characters yet for it to be effective.
This is where NCIS really shone; it gave us many, many episodes of well-written procedural crime-solving and only slowly started using our attachment to the characters to tug on our heartstrings. That's why NCIS:LA's failing in this area is so glaring, I think; it feels like they're trying to cut corners to make the cast as beloved as that of the original, without actually laying the foundations for it.
I had more, but I've been awake for a ridiculous number of hours. I must sleep!
(Cross-posted to LJ, as I know a few of my LJ flist watch.)
The episode starts out with one of the main cast getting kidnapped, and I didn't find out until afterwards that the actor in question was being written out. Obviously that affected my viewing, because I was expecting the plotline to wrap up, and the lack of 'solution' made the denouement feel like a real anti-climax.
(Also, boo to the fact that it was a CoC that they wrote out - although admittedly it's a reasonably diverse cast, at least. Three white men, a white woman, a latina woman, and two African-American men. Well, one African-American man, now.)
On an ensemble show, Episode 13 of Season 1 is too early to run a storyline trying to capitalise on our emotional investment in the characters. Nobody cares. On the one hand, that's fine; obviously, if nobody cares about the character, he's a good choice to write out. On the other hand, that lack of engagement means that all the main characters emoting all over the place about his abduction comes across as My Angst Is Pastede On Yay.
In fact, the episode helped me crystallise some things that I don't like about NCIS:LA, some of which are factors in why the show just hasn't grabbed me the way the original did.
* It's not particularly funny. NCIS has wit in its dialogue. NCIS:LA has Sam And Callen Bickering.
* It heavily promotes Mock The Geek - to be fair, so does NCIS, but I give that a pass because it earns it on other strengths; NCIS:LA doesn't.
* The Srs Manpain from Callen is almost more than I can take.
* The plots do not feel as well-constructed as NCIS plots; they frequently have stuff happening simply to drive the investigation onwards, that makes no sense in the bigger picture. In today's example, Dom's phone gets turned on for just long enough to send the "agent needs help" alert but not long enough to get a GPS fix. How convenient. And then it gets randomly turned on by a bad guy for just long enough for them to get a GPS fix. It feels like those things happened just to give the team another clue, not as an organic part of whatever was happening to Dom.
And here's another example of sloppy writing: Dom's alert gets paged to all the team's phones. But a) they arrive in sequence, not at the same time, which doesn't make sense, and b) the first three recipients turn their phones off or on silent - yet when we see the alert on Hetty's phone it's a giant red box that covers most of the screen. There's no way you could miss that when even glimpsing your phone, yet we're expected to believe that Kensi, G and Sam all 'didn't notice it', just for the sake of humour/dramatic buildup. It's just a minor niggle, sure, but it's sloppy, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
* There's way too much melodrama; G's the worst offender, although the episode where a Navy SEAL was a suspect and Sam devolved into frothing irrationality and emo manpain was memorable too. This is way too early in a show's run to try to manipulate the audience with melodrama; we simply don't know (or care) enough about the characters yet for it to be effective.
This is where NCIS really shone; it gave us many, many episodes of well-written procedural crime-solving and only slowly started using our attachment to the characters to tug on our heartstrings. That's why NCIS:LA's failing in this area is so glaring, I think; it feels like they're trying to cut corners to make the cast as beloved as that of the original, without actually laying the foundations for it.
I had more, but I've been awake for a ridiculous number of hours. I must sleep!
(Cross-posted to LJ, as I know a few of my LJ flist watch.)