Watching The Pretender...
Jul. 13th, 2009 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerI like this series a lot. Jarod's ability plays into a lot of what I have imagined for my Nyronds. I wish they had made more of it. I'm also very fond of the way Sydney, Miss Parker and Broots are gradually led to the realisation that what they are doing week after week is helping Jarod, and that this is both the right thing to do and what they want; and the contrast between the Centre's obsession with "focus" and the emotions that exclude (anger, hate, greed, ambition) and Jarod's championing of the inclusive emotions (love, hope, forgiveness).
I do see a moral ambiguity here, though, that I hadn't noticed before. Jarod's standard MO, when dealing with the people he punishes, is to put them in what seems to them like the situation they put their victims in. The deadly element is not present, but they don't know that, and Jarod fosters the assumption on their part that he is like them, has done to them as they did to their victims, and that forces them to confess.
And we know what this is, don't we? This is torture.
I suppose I ought to be grateful to George W Bush, for clarifying my thinking on this. (If at any point President Obama locates his spine and does something substantive to outlaw torture for the future, it will be thanks to Bush that it happened.) It's a shame, though, that that clarification has shadowed my enjoyment of this series, because I now realise that anyone, put into the position of one of Jarod's victims and told what it was s/he had supposedly done, would confess just to make it stop. And that this never actually happened in the show is dishonesty on the part of the writers. And that, even if that weren't true, the fact that he does not kill his victims is not enough to make what he does morally acceptable. Understandable, certainly, since it shows the effect of his upbringing by the Centre, but not just or right.
The unregenerate subhuman inside me which glories in seeing retribution meted out to the evil will continue to enjoy those scenes. But I shall never do that with a whole heart again. Le sigh.
I do see a moral ambiguity here, though, that I hadn't noticed before. Jarod's standard MO, when dealing with the people he punishes, is to put them in what seems to them like the situation they put their victims in. The deadly element is not present, but they don't know that, and Jarod fosters the assumption on their part that he is like them, has done to them as they did to their victims, and that forces them to confess.
And we know what this is, don't we? This is torture.
I suppose I ought to be grateful to George W Bush, for clarifying my thinking on this. (If at any point President Obama locates his spine and does something substantive to outlaw torture for the future, it will be thanks to Bush that it happened.) It's a shame, though, that that clarification has shadowed my enjoyment of this series, because I now realise that anyone, put into the position of one of Jarod's victims and told what it was s/he had supposedly done, would confess just to make it stop. And that this never actually happened in the show is dishonesty on the part of the writers. And that, even if that weren't true, the fact that he does not kill his victims is not enough to make what he does morally acceptable. Understandable, certainly, since it shows the effect of his upbringing by the Centre, but not just or right.
The unregenerate subhuman inside me which glories in seeing retribution meted out to the evil will continue to enjoy those scenes. But I shall never do that with a whole heart again. Le sigh.