Sunday, October 08, 2006

Where's Sydney Bristow when you need her?

One of the things about familiarising yourself with the the phenomenon of the Mary Sue, and all her attendant cliches, is that you start noticing badfic elements in professional storytelling (this may be especially revelatory if, like me, you haven't formally studied literature since you were 16).

In this instance I was watching a recent pilot on ITV called The Outsiders. Ostensibly an attempt to hark back to 1960s-era spy/adventure series, it was about a man being honey-trapped and press-ganged back into the service of his old employers, a somewhat shady mercenary espionage organization run by Brian Cox, who want him to track down and retrieve a priceless painting (said to contain the formula for the elixir of life, of course) that has been stolen from the Vatican.

Now, the dialogue was mostly horrible and the female lead - despite being in the majority of scenes - was given little of any consequence to do, but what really got to me was that the writer had succumbed to that most common of Mary Sue tropes and given our hero a Tragic Past instead of a personality. We were supposed to care about him because he had a small daughter he had never met (although he had tracked her down and spied on her), the result of a failed marriage to a woman - now dead - who had given birth after they split up. He even had a token of angst - a ring on a chain that he would occasionally look at wistfully - which he instructed Female Lead to pass on to aforementioned daughter in the event of his death.

Honestly, it's lazy writing, and it's a shame, because The Outsiders could have been really good fun.

[ mood | amused ]

Liz wittered on at 4:26 PM | 0 comments | #

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