We ship so hard.
Topics Discussed and/or Spoiled
Sleepy Hollow (MASSIVE 3rd Season Spoilers) X-Files, Star Wars, Farscape, Firefly, Next Generation (Sorry, season 8), Deep Space Nine, Babylon Five, and Due South.
Our outro is Debs & Errol’s My Pachebel Song
Geekually Yoked is a proud member of the Crossover Nexus
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So, as a person who dodged the bullet of this show by watching and enjoying season 1 and then forgetting about it until it became clear that season 2 was a stinker my perspective is the following: I personally liked the platonic nature of their relationship, and would have been fine had the show never dived into a romantic subplot with the two characters…
…AS LONG AS their relationship with each other remained the most profound and important relationships they had. And this is where I think the show went so desperately wrong. By sidelining Abby, who should by all rights be the show’s primary protagonist, and emphasizing Ichabod’s relationship with Katrina, not just as a potential conflict to his relationship with Abby but as MORE IMPORTANT narratively the show lost what made it work. That combined with being intensely disrespectful to their characters, especially their characters of color and with throwing away their carefully constructed myth arc after two seasons seems to indicate that there was trouble in a writing room somewhere which came out in the show and by the time they tried to fix it the damage was already done.
This assessment is of course based on hearsay, since you know, I didn’t actually watch the second or third season and get to pretend that the show went on to live a full quirky life of these two witness’s preventing the apocalypse.
How many shows have been improved by choosing to assume they ended before they actually did?
Condolences on the Sleepy Hollow debacle; that was a seriously disappointing direction for the show to take on multiple levels.
Glad you enjoyed the Shipping Manifest video, though! And that I’m not the only one who remembers Garak/Bashir fondly, ha!
They were meant to be!
Rachel, you could totally have complained to me about Sleepy Hollow! And now I am grateful that I stopped watching partway through season 2. How can the writers have possibly thought that [that spoiler] was a good idea??? I am enraged.
While I watched most of the first season of S.H., I did not follow it closely or into season two – these days I rarely watch TV. A latent sexism and even racism probably influenced the decision about Icabod and Abby, I think it was mostly driven by a Hollywood notion that there are no such things as happy relationship and happy relationship are dull. There are a lot more of Sam and Diane (of Cheers) than there are Chandler and Monica (of Friends) in what Hollywood produces. Even someone as nominally not-sexist and not-racist as Josh Whedon never (or at least only rarely) has a happy, functional relationship in his shows, and where they appear, they do not last.
I cannot help but wonder what this says about the life philosophy and home life of Hollywood writers and producers.
I actually really liked Dax/Worf, although I can’t be objective here because I shipped them SO HARD in high school; I loved Dax and I loved Klingons, and a Dax/Worf ship brought those two things together. (I can neither confirm nor deny that I had a fanfic Mary Sue who was their daughter from the future.) They didn’t make a whole lot of sense as a couple, but their chemistry was good enough that I bought that they were crazy in love with each other anyway, and the fact that we know they were making insane toe-curling whoopie helped.
To be completely fair to the crapsack that was Voyager, it did have Janeway and Seven as a very strong relationship between two women. It wasn’t well-written or anything, but it existed. I haven’t watched the show since it aired, so I don’t remember if Janeway and B’Elanna had a relationship at all.
Also, I think the first time I realized I was a shipper was Evangelion. Then the girl I was shipping the protagonist turned out to be a clone of his mom. Sigh . . .