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hazelkI’ve missed too many birthdays. Belated good wishes to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gwyn_r butterfly and londonkds.
Still haven’t watched Landslide, I’m saving that for tonight. Meanwhile The Hard Part made concrete some thoughts that have been churning for a while.
It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that Mohinder is at once too dumb to live and too pretty to die. I’ll fully admit to having the same first impression and it was a prejudice that was not only easily justified but funny in a mildly gender subversive way. Pride comes before a fall, however, I’ve changed my mind.
In the early episodes of the series Mohinder appeared neuronally challenged for two reasons. Firstly his arc was for him to set out for New York to investigate his father’s death and test his theories. He came within inches of meeting not one but two patient zeroes and then just decided to give up and go home. As hero’s journeys go it wasn’t impressive. Secondly both diegetically (love that word even though I’m not overconfident I know what it means) and in voiceover he was the spokesperson for almost all the crack science on the series and it is pretty cracky. I mean “her nucleotides are decomposing” means what exactly in the context of a cartoon of red blood cells? Still as TV science goes it’s nothing out of the ordinary when you consider what goes down on other series. Scully identifying human DNA from a single band on a Southern and I’m not even going to try and think about Dr Who and the Frankendaleks. The other thing is that when David Tennant or James Callis start babbling about nonsensical antigens the fandom response isn’t to roll its eyes about the stupidity of Ten or Baltar but to blame the writers. So why does Mohinder get treated differently? Tennant and Callis have the benefit of at least looking something like TV scientists, the geeky excitable kind rather than the emotionless proto-Vulcan type, but Mohinder is pretty in a more exotic and self-awaredly stylish way. Or to put it bluntly he’s not white.
Actually that’s quite a subversive bit of casting given the way Asian scientists in the business are often dammed with faint praise about how hard working they are. The guy with the purely mechanical understanding of ‘how things work’ (to the point that his epiphanies come with a clunk of shifting gears instead of the smooth zoom of other people’s insights) is played by the actor so close to the stereotype of a scientific wizard that his next role is to be the young Spock while the creative thinker with the big picture smarts is one Sendhil Ramamurthy.
Away from the science by the second half of the season it turned out that Mohinder’s first big dumb decision wasn’t entirely his own, his mistake if anything was to trust Eden. You could say he makes a habit of trusting the wrong people but I think that’s more a function of who he’s met and that he doesn’t immediately make it obvious whether he’s taking someone at face value (as with Sylar). He also has no illusions about only working with good people with the same goals he has but will compromise and try and use them as much as they use him. Not always successfully, well we’ll see, but being a double agent is hard.
I first began to think Mohinder wasn’t that stupid when it became clear that he had had suspicions of Sylar but simply hadn’t been prepared to act on them immediately. The next ‘dumb’ thing was not being able to kill Sylar soon enough or after Peter took him out but that, while being TV dumb, I sympathise with. Like Hiro is finding, killing people is hard. It should be hard and Mohinder in some ways is even more of a civilian than Hiro. No powers and no espionage training. The other strikes against him are that he worked for the government in Five Years Gone and has started working for the Company. He has his reasons for the latter (I like Molly, I like the way that even though her gift is suppressed she still finds the picture of Shanti that leads to finding the cure), as for the former Mohinder as a (Heroes-style) evolutionary biologist has to have a much more ambivalent attitude to the ‘special’ people than the audience does. According to the way the science works on the show the Heroes really are a kind of Midwich Cuckoo and if Mohinder genuinely believes that then he has a an unenviable moral dilemma about how to respond. To cure them or kill them, how did the dinosaurs feel? I think my favourite Mohinder scene is the one in FutureHiro’s string palace when he suddenly realises that Hiro can go back in time that it doesn’t have to be like this. I like it because it’s one of those TV scientist moments when they genuinely seem to take a whole bunch of disparate information and synthesise it and I like it because he's a good enough man that it gives him hope.
gwyn_r butterfly and londonkds.Still haven’t watched Landslide, I’m saving that for tonight. Meanwhile The Hard Part made concrete some thoughts that have been churning for a while.
It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that Mohinder is at once too dumb to live and too pretty to die. I’ll fully admit to having the same first impression and it was a prejudice that was not only easily justified but funny in a mildly gender subversive way. Pride comes before a fall, however, I’ve changed my mind.
In the early episodes of the series Mohinder appeared neuronally challenged for two reasons. Firstly his arc was for him to set out for New York to investigate his father’s death and test his theories. He came within inches of meeting not one but two patient zeroes and then just decided to give up and go home. As hero’s journeys go it wasn’t impressive. Secondly both diegetically (love that word even though I’m not overconfident I know what it means) and in voiceover he was the spokesperson for almost all the crack science on the series and it is pretty cracky. I mean “her nucleotides are decomposing” means what exactly in the context of a cartoon of red blood cells? Still as TV science goes it’s nothing out of the ordinary when you consider what goes down on other series. Scully identifying human DNA from a single band on a Southern and I’m not even going to try and think about Dr Who and the Frankendaleks. The other thing is that when David Tennant or James Callis start babbling about nonsensical antigens the fandom response isn’t to roll its eyes about the stupidity of Ten or Baltar but to blame the writers. So why does Mohinder get treated differently? Tennant and Callis have the benefit of at least looking something like TV scientists, the geeky excitable kind rather than the emotionless proto-Vulcan type, but Mohinder is pretty in a more exotic and self-awaredly stylish way. Or to put it bluntly he’s not white.
Actually that’s quite a subversive bit of casting given the way Asian scientists in the business are often dammed with faint praise about how hard working they are. The guy with the purely mechanical understanding of ‘how things work’ (to the point that his epiphanies come with a clunk of shifting gears instead of the smooth zoom of other people’s insights) is played by the actor so close to the stereotype of a scientific wizard that his next role is to be the young Spock while the creative thinker with the big picture smarts is one Sendhil Ramamurthy.
Away from the science by the second half of the season it turned out that Mohinder’s first big dumb decision wasn’t entirely his own, his mistake if anything was to trust Eden. You could say he makes a habit of trusting the wrong people but I think that’s more a function of who he’s met and that he doesn’t immediately make it obvious whether he’s taking someone at face value (as with Sylar). He also has no illusions about only working with good people with the same goals he has but will compromise and try and use them as much as they use him. Not always successfully, well we’ll see, but being a double agent is hard.
I first began to think Mohinder wasn’t that stupid when it became clear that he had had suspicions of Sylar but simply hadn’t been prepared to act on them immediately. The next ‘dumb’ thing was not being able to kill Sylar soon enough or after Peter took him out but that, while being TV dumb, I sympathise with. Like Hiro is finding, killing people is hard. It should be hard and Mohinder in some ways is even more of a civilian than Hiro. No powers and no espionage training. The other strikes against him are that he worked for the government in Five Years Gone and has started working for the Company. He has his reasons for the latter (I like Molly, I like the way that even though her gift is suppressed she still finds the picture of Shanti that leads to finding the cure), as for the former Mohinder as a (Heroes-style) evolutionary biologist has to have a much more ambivalent attitude to the ‘special’ people than the audience does. According to the way the science works on the show the Heroes really are a kind of Midwich Cuckoo and if Mohinder genuinely believes that then he has a an unenviable moral dilemma about how to respond. To cure them or kill them, how did the dinosaurs feel? I think my favourite Mohinder scene is the one in FutureHiro’s string palace when he suddenly realises that Hiro can go back in time that it doesn’t have to be like this. I like it because it’s one of those TV scientist moments when they genuinely seem to take a whole bunch of disparate information and synthesise it and I like it because he's a good enough man that it gives him hope.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 02:19 pm (UTC)In regards to s1 Mohinder, I think the problem is that he's introduced basically as the audience's pov character - he is supposed to find out the specials and the mystery - and that storyline goes nowhere and isn't nearly as interesting as some of the others, then he goes home, and spends two episodes staring at a computer screen. Poor Uhura had more interesting stuff to do in an avarage ST episode. However, in the second half of season 1, the writers finally did find something for him, first with the Sylar road trip of doom, and then with Mohinder going to the Company, and THAT is interesting and highlights, as you say, Mohinder's willingness to
compromise and try and use them as much as they use him. Not always successfully, well we’ll see, but being a double agent is hard
- in order to achieve a long-term good. Which continues to get developed in fascinating ways, and yes, that doesn't make him dumb. (Nor does the show present it as such by presenting him as always failing, far from it.)
Like Hiro is finding, killing people is hard.
I loved, loved, loved Hiro's conversation with Ando on the subject, and that the show doesn't just let him - or Mohinder, for that matter - go "Sylar is a serial killer, therefore, I kill him" without a problem. It takes a while for someone who never killed before to get into that frame of mind.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 08:21 pm (UTC)I loved, loved, loved Hiro's conversation with Ando on the subject, and that the show doesn't just let him
Yes, I loved every bit of the Hiro scenes in the episode. Sylar's mother was interesting, teetering on the edge of psychosis herself, I wasn't sure if the antipathy to his father's clock was because the father never became more than a watchmaker or the comment that Sylar wouldn't hurt a fly was because his father did and I liked the ambiguity. And the snow globe was beautiful and wrong. Oh and Claire saying the future couldn't be that lame and Angela's talking to Nathan but suprisingly not using the best of arguments. And Bennet's reunion with Claire was very touching but I couldn't help wondering if he knew what the Walker system really was and if he did would he still go ahead and destroy it all the same?
Also I suppose you could say the episode was all about mothers pushing their sons to be special while a father just wanted his daughter to me normal. But the sons are special and the daughter isn't normal.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 08:35 pm (UTC)And the snow globe was beautiful and wrong.
Oh yes. Also, in addition to everything else, I wanted someone to whisper "Rosebud".
Mothers and sons: back when I saw The Hard Part for the first time, I wrote this meta, which is unspoiled, so you can read it. (Actually, you'll probably know more than I did back then!)
And Bennet's reunion with Claire was very touching but I couldn't help wondering if he knew what the Walker system really was and if he did would he still go ahead and destroy it all the same?
Just a rethorical question: How do you know he doesn't know already what the Walker system is?
no subject
Date: 2007-11-29 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-30 01:29 am (UTC)And, ooo. Interesting thoughts on Mohinder.