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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.