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Mar. 31st, 2013 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhen newredshoes was visiting this weekend, we ended up watching most of The Bletchley Circle, and I just sort of feel like talking a little bit more about Susan, the mystery-solving protagonist.
I mean, I've said this before, but the thing that gets me about Susan is that she has all the hallmark traits of a Sherlock Holmes or a, I don't know, Patrick Jane (I've never watched The Mentalist) or any of the other flawed civilian crime-solving geniuses who tend to anchor the kind of shows where geniuses solve crime. She sees the world in ways that other people don't; she sees patterns that most people don't see, and that leads her to have exceptional insights. She's incredibly intelligent, and very bad at explaining herself to people who aren't as intelligent -- she doesn't have the communication skills or the patience for it. And she LOVES her intelligence. She loves being right. She loves being right sometimes to the point where she forgets to have the appropriate reactions of horror at horrible things, and forgets to take other people's horror into account, because those horrible things prove her deductions correct.
But she isn't a Sherlock Holmes, because she isn't an independently wealthy upper-class white man who can afford to be dismissive of the rest of the world. She's a fifties housewife, a woman who has been socialized to be polite and conciliating and to always put other people at first. So she doesn't say, "I'm brilliant, I can see things you can't;" she says, "I'm good with patterns." And the way these impulses are at war in her -- her knowledge of her own intelligence and skills and the fact that she is smarter and better than other people, and the fact that she knows she's not supposed to be, and no one will take her seriously if she is -- is what makes her fascinating, and what anchors the show, for me.
And I don't think I've seen another character like this, and I want to.
(This is of course a request for recs, I am always requesting recs.)
newredshoes was visiting this weekend, we ended up watching most of The Bletchley Circle, and I just sort of feel like talking a little bit more about Susan, the mystery-solving protagonist.I mean, I've said this before, but the thing that gets me about Susan is that she has all the hallmark traits of a Sherlock Holmes or a, I don't know, Patrick Jane (I've never watched The Mentalist) or any of the other flawed civilian crime-solving geniuses who tend to anchor the kind of shows where geniuses solve crime. She sees the world in ways that other people don't; she sees patterns that most people don't see, and that leads her to have exceptional insights. She's incredibly intelligent, and very bad at explaining herself to people who aren't as intelligent -- she doesn't have the communication skills or the patience for it. And she LOVES her intelligence. She loves being right. She loves being right sometimes to the point where she forgets to have the appropriate reactions of horror at horrible things, and forgets to take other people's horror into account, because those horrible things prove her deductions correct.
But she isn't a Sherlock Holmes, because she isn't an independently wealthy upper-class white man who can afford to be dismissive of the rest of the world. She's a fifties housewife, a woman who has been socialized to be polite and conciliating and to always put other people at first. So she doesn't say, "I'm brilliant, I can see things you can't;" she says, "I'm good with patterns." And the way these impulses are at war in her -- her knowledge of her own intelligence and skills and the fact that she is smarter and better than other people, and the fact that she knows she's not supposed to be, and no one will take her seriously if she is -- is what makes her fascinating, and what anchors the show, for me.
And I don't think I've seen another character like this, and I want to.
(This is of course a request for recs, I am always requesting recs.)
