As you might recall, Season 3 ended with a cliffhanger where there were six people standing around but they only cast five shadows. I was curious to see what they were going to do with that set-up, which turned out to be … not much at all. It’s referenced at the beginning of Season 4 as something for them to worry about, but then gets ignored as the professor from the previous seasons leaves to go on a sabbatical which very much upsets Melinda for … some reason, given that when professors take sabbaticals they usually come back after a year or so and while there’s some hint that he might be in danger none of that is referenced again, and it’s only in that arc that the “five shadows” are even mentioned. Later, when Jim himself actually dies it isn’t raised. So that entire cliffhanger pretty much just fizzles out.
Although, that might have been due to the change over in the creative staff, as the show creator who was also the head creative person moved out to become a consultant and was replaced, and the show changed significantly as a result. A lot of the specific horror elements from the previous seasons were dropped, such as whatever was going on in the tunnels under the town (although they are still mentioned) and Melinda’s brother (who isn’t mentioned at all). Instead, a group of women appear to act as some kind of guides to Melinda, warning her while she’s trying to get pregnant that her interactions with the dead might mean that death can touch her and the people around her, and there’s also an addition/focus on the advisory group called the “Watchers” who have plans of their own. So it’s almost like another reboot of the show, as I noted it felt like in Season 2.
This is only more pronounced when we turn to the secondary characters. The expert character of the professor, as already noted, leaves but is replaced with a Psychology professor who after a near-death experience can hear ghosts. He starts out being in the same sort of jerk mold as the professor, but gets a lot of softening so that he’s just a bit snarky, and Melinda seems in general to be more comfortable with him than she was with the professor. That being said, he ends up being mostly a sidekick for her and I didn’t think she really needed one, so he often doesn’t get to do much. And so for the most part I feel that he’s another wasted character, but there are some times when the character really does allow for things to happen that couldn’t have happened otherwise.
Which leads in to what happens with the other characters. As I noted above, Jim, her husband, dies from a gunshot wound while fighting off a killer, when the police detective helping them shoots him by accident (which his grief over the death of his daughter contributed to, which Melinda has to deal with in the next episode). This leads to an arc where he doesn’t want to cross over — which was hinted at in earlier seasons — and Melinda wants him to. Ultimately, he is following her around and someone near them dies, and so he jumps into the body and so “comes back to life” (which they call “stepping in” which the show explicitly notes they had talked about before) but has lost all of his memories of being either Jim or the original guy, which then sets up a long arc with Melinda trying to get him to remember being Jim while his family and other people work to get him to remember being the original person, and also Melinda wanting to let him in on her ghost-seeing ability — especially once they start dating — but his extreme skepticism over that makes it difficult and risks him seeing her as nuts — which he hints at and even explicitly says when she tells him — which, of course, keys into her old wounds of people thinking that she was weird and insane for being able to see ghosts.
Now, when I first started watching this arc, I thought that this was a completely bonkers plot. And, to be fair, I still think it is. However, it actually ended up, at least for the length of its run, fixing my issues with the secondary characters of Jim and Delia. I complained that Jim didn’t have anything to do in the show other than be supportive and worried, and the loss of memory and attempts to recover that and the attempts for them to reconnect give him a lot of things to do, and since he was a ghost that appropriated a new body it’s even attached to the main premise of the show. And I complained that his role didn’t leave Delia room to be the supportive friend, but the show uses this to convince Delia, at least in part, of the existence of ghosts and eliminate her skepticism when she becomes convinced that this really is Jim and not just Melinda hoping that this is Jim, and since Delia had lost her husband it makes her be a complete advocate for Melinda getting back together with Jim and taking her second chance, which then puts her squarely in the “supportive friend” role, which works really well. Of course, they ultimately do have him resolve his memory issues, by having him remember being Jim but not remember anything from the time when he was trying to remember who he was, which I think was a bit of a mistake, as having him remember his experiences while dead would give him a unique view that would avoid him falling back into “supportive but worried” in future seasons. But we’ll have to see how this works in Season 5.
This also is the case where Eli, the guy who can hear but not see ghosts, was actually useful. As Melinda ran around trying to get Jim to recall his memory, it allowed Eli to take point on the normal ghost issue in the episode, particularly in one episode where she takes a road trip with him to try to get him to remember who he is before he decides to marry the woman that the original guy was going to propose to. While there are a couple of small ghost incidents as complications for Melinda in her arc, the big ghost arc in that episode is handled by Eli and Delia, which allows for the show to maintain its original focus while still being able to have a mostly non-ghost arc with Melinda and Jim.
Now, this could be an objection to the storyline, as especially when Jim looks for the woman who might have been his fiancee and when the two of them start dating and Melinda keeps trying to hide her ghost abilities from him the plot really starts to be far more soap operaish than the show had been up to that point. That being said, we’ve had three to three and a half seasons of a show with an empathetic character played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, and so in general we should come in at this point liking her and wanting to see her be happy or at least have her issues be resolved, and so we in general are probably going to be willing to suffer through that because we will ultimately care about what happens to her. Thus, I noticed that the plot was very soap operaish but found that I didn’t really mind because Jennifer Love Hewitt plays it well and shows the emotions that she’d be going through well, so it was interesting enough, and the show is indeed smart enough to maintain some of the original tone and in general always have a ghost story in each episode, and so we don’t lose what was keeping us watching the show while adding the more personal story that does allow Jim to have an arc that is important, meaningful, and emotional.
Interestingly, what I noticed as the season went on is that while originally it was more of a straight ghost story, by the end it was turning into a show that reminded me a lot of “Charmed”. A supernatural love story (Melinda and Jim) coupled with ancestral protectors and mysterious supernatural advisors started to feel a lot like “Charmed”. The end of the season only made that more striking when the advice is that Melinda’s soon-to-be-born son is going to be some sort of powerful force for good that the opposing forces want to stop really reminds me of Piper’s children from “Charmed”, and it moves the show away from the more serious threads that they started with in the previous seasons towards a more direct “good vs evil” plot. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the fifth season.
That being said, it does maintain one thing from the previous seasons where it starts its last arc quite late, usually in the last three episodes. Here, that involves a book called the “Book of Changes” — which, again, seems a lot like “Charmed” — that records information about Melinda and some important notes about her life, which the Watchers want to protect from a group of opposing people (implied to be evil) who want to get their hands on it. Eli suddenly reveals that he had a friend/lover that is an expert on the supernatural, and then she is revealed to be interested in the collection that has the book while he is interested in getting back together with her now that he believes in the supernatural (that was apparently the big stumbling block with their relationship), then she gets killed by accident, and then he has to try to get her to cross over but she claims to have something else to do, but she crosses over once he decides to accept being the protector of the book. This, of course, is handled over the course of three episodes and comes out of nowhere. At the same time, they need to reveal that Melinda’s baby is going to be important and do that with a misdirection on it being a girl with a claim that “she will be important” but that “she can’t be saved”, which I guess refers to the lover but I’m not at all certain about that. So this arc is rushed and comes out of nowhere with some references to previous things, so pretty much like the show has been doing up until now.
However, the season doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but instead on dropping threads for the next season, like the issues around Melinda’s son, as well as Eli taking on the role of the protector of the book, which likely means that he will be moving on after this season (they explicitly say that he can’t stay in one place with the book). Instead of ending on a cliffhanger, then, it ends by resolving the main arc of the season, with Jim-in-new-body remarrying Melinda to make that all legal. Again, that’s a very “Charmed” way of ending a season, but at least it will avoid them raising something as a cliffhanger and then either resolving it in a perfunctory fashion or not at all, which was an issue with the previous seasons.
So, this season changed things up quite a bit, and in some ways that I, at least, thought were improvements. However, the next season is the last season of the series, so perhaps those changes didn’t work out so well for the show. I’ll see how that worked when I watch the last season, Season 5.
Thoughts on “Ten Things I Hate About You”
August 8, 2022I had watched this movie a long time ago, and remembered kinda enjoying it. Then, I was reading “The Taming of the Shrew”, and musing about modern takes on the play that would be explicitly trying to tone down the purported misogyny, and remembered that I had picked this up cheap at some point and never watched it, and so decided it would be a good time to watch it, mostly in order to see how it tried to avoid the issues of the play while still staying true to the overall story. And it turns out that what it did was removing the “taming” aspect of it entirely, which turns it into a more standard teen romantic comedy.
The basic idea does follow on from the basic structure of the play. Kat and Bianca’s father is a obstetrician, and so sees a lot of teenage pregnancies and so does not want his children to end up in that state themselves, and so is a bit overly protective of them in that regard. This is what spawns his demand that Bianca can’t date until Kat does, and Kat doesn’t date. She’s also very aggressive, interrupting her English class to demand more women authors despite her doing that seemingly every class and doing it to a black teacher who points that out to her, and running over people in her soccer match in a way that would get her a red card in most games. Meanwhile, a newcomer to the school falls in love with and wants to date Bianca, while she’s drawn the attention of the Alpha Jock of the school who simply wants to sleep with her. The newcomer finds the guy to date Kat, and he and the Alpha Jock pay him to date Kat, where they clash at times but seem to start to care about each other. Meanwhile, the newcomer isn’t on Bianca’s radar even as he tries to tutor her in French, because she’s interested in the Alpha Jock, but after a party starts to dislike him and like the newcomer, which culminates in them going to prom. The Alpha Jock, upset that he paid money to Kat’s suitor to not get Bianca, reveals the deal and Kat storms off, and when he badmouths Bianca the newcomer tries to stand up for her and gets hit, but then Bianca clocks the Alpha Jock — who had sex with and then dumped Kat earlier when Kat didn’t want to have sex with him again — for her date, her sister, and herself, and the movie ends with Kat and her beau making up while Bianca dates the newcomer.
As it stands, there is no real taming of Kat in this movie. Thus, it works a lot more like a standard teen romance where the two of them have to feel around their feelings for each other around a plot where misunderstandings can occur and get in the road than with him having to really break down her barriers and find a way to get her to let go of her issues and anger and become a better person. So there is no speech where she talks at all about how she’s stopped being so much of a shrew and why she did that, and so no equivalent to the actual taming of the shrew or any real acknowledgement that she ever was. So that aspect is totally lost.
What this does, ironically, is make it so that Bianca has the more interesting arc. In the play, the audience’s perception of her moves from her being all sweetness and light to her becoming more of a shrew herself, while in the movie she is still somewhat sweet but is shown or at least talked about as being more selfish from the start, which she loses at the end of the movie. There’s even a scene where the newcomer, frustrated with feeling that she is using him, asks her if she was always that selfish and she sheepishly and morosely says “Yes”, realizing that she has indeed been a bit selfish. She also picks up or at least demonstrates that she’s not that different from Kat and has picked up her ability to stand up for herself, pushing the newcomer to ask her out and, of course, beating up the Alpha Jock at the end, while realizing that what he could offer isn’t worth having but what the newcomer has to offer is. So she has the better arc and ends up being the most interesting and sympathetic character in the movie.
The movie itself isn’t bad, and is still a movie that I might want to rewatch at some point, so it goes into my closet of movies to rewatch at some point. However, as noted, despite its copious references to the play and to Shakespeare — mainly names and the interest of one of the minor characters in Shakespeare — it doesn’t really capture “The Taming of the Shrew” because it leaves the taming part out (unless you count Bianca’s conversion as that, but she’s too nice from the start for that to work). Still, that doesn’t count against it as its own work, but does make it a poor movie as a follow-on to “The Taming of the Shrew”.
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