Best Friends For... a rather limited time-span? (Spoilers for West Wing, BtVS, AtS and DS9)

[selenak]

Recently I rewatched some West Wing episodes (from early s3, and the one where the Republicans call a tax for millionaires "the death tax" to lobby against it made me go "zomg, Sorkin and friends really were prescient sometimes!"), and aside from revelling in dialogue, character affection etc., it reminded me of a suspension of disbelief problem of mine. It's there in several fandoms. In The West Wing, it affects the Sam-Toby relationship as presented in fanfiction. Now, Sam isn't the only character to fall unter the WW "out of sight, out of mind" category, i.e. once he's written off the show, he doesn't get mentioned by anyone anymore. In fact, Sam's exit is far more carefully executed then some other examples, in that he stops being a regular mid-season 4, but the fallout of his departure continues to be made an issue of for the rest of s4. (As opposed to Mandy, who simply disappears post s1 and never gets referenced again, Ainsley who does get to come back once or twice post early s3 but otherwise doesn't get mentioned again, either, Danny who in the years of his absence gets referenced once that I recall but no more, while once he's back we go immediately back to where he and CJ left of, etc.) Once season 4 is over, however, Sam is not heard of again until the very end of the show. Now, in s7 Toby's fall from grace is a big, big thing we see everyone react to. We get to see Josh call Toby throughout his campaigning, which makes for gradual reconciliation; we get the big "have it out" scene with him and CJ. What we don't get, neither as a scene or via a reference in dialogue, is any sign Sam was either unaware of what happened with Toby (unlikely, as it made the national headlines) or that he was aware and tried to contact Toby at any point, or that he was aware and deliberately decided not to contact Toby. It would have been easy to slip a reference to Sam into one of Josh's and Toby's phone calls, for example. Or in Sam's and Josh's conversations in the last episodes. (BTW, their scenes did the trick of convincing me Josh and Sam kept in contact off-screen. See, it can be done.) But Wells & Co. chose not to. So fanfic where Sam and Toby post-s4 are still close friends rather breaks my suspension of disbelief.

Now this isn't a WW-only phenomenon. In several shows, a close friendship suddenly basically disappears, either because the characters leave or because the writers for some reason or the other can't be bothered anymore. Cases in point: Spike and Dawn after the opening two parter of s6 of BTVS, Garak and Bashir after "Our Man Bashir" on DS9 (i.e. s4 - OMB was the last episode to feature them in a close relationship, they they do occasionally appear in the same scenes later on) until the very last episode, Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn after Disharmony in s2 (as I once said to likeadeuce, any scene between them post-Disharmony might as well have happened pre-Reunion, with the closer bond that developed during the time they were sans Angel being ignored). There might be Doylist reasons for this - for example, in the Garak/Bashir case persistant rumour in ST fandom has it that TPTB were discomforted by the perception of the two as lovers. It can be completely accidental - I think it was Jane Espenson who said this about Spike and Dawn, that in the writers' minds, their close friendship continued until Seeing Red, the scenes just didn't happen. But honestly, these Doylist reasons do not help on a Watsonian level. Don't help me as a viewer, I mean. Basically I have to decide either to assume a lot of missing scenes which I make up in my head, or to accept these friendships for some reasons dissolved, and then come up with a reason. In the case of Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn it's easiest, because at least they still were portrayed as friends per se until Wesley's mid-s3 arc, so I can tell myself they continued to be close until that point. With Garak and Bashir, however, I couldn't buy later season stories were they were still having daily lunches and were still as close as they were in early seasons anymore; it both jarred with what I saw (plus, you know, in late s5 there is even an episode where Garak sounds openly jealous about all the time Bashir spends with O'Brien, which he does bring up early in Empok Nor, so it's on screen canon), so I had to come up with possible reasons why not. (In my own take on the pairing, I let the enstragement start with Broken Link and Garek's attempt at genocide in this episode.) And with Spike and Dawn, the "they still continued to be close until the AR, we just didn't see it" explanation didn't wash, either, so basically my interpretation was that once Spike started his affair with Buffy, he spent less and less time with Dawn.

What do you do, oh flist? When characters are portrayed as good friends in canon (doesn't matter whether or not you also ship them in a romantic sense or see the relationship as platonic or the family type of bond; there just has to be an on screen closeness that awoke your interest), and then these characters cease to have scenes together, and don't reference each other in dialogue anymore, either. Do you go the denial route - "they're still friends, we just don't see a lot of scenes"/"they're still friends, I reject on screen canon" - or do you accomodate for the changed on screen circumstances in your perception of the relationship(s)?

***

And on another note, to wit, one of yesterday's two big subjects, the Marvel/Disney merger: out of all the responses, I this one best. Because I feel like having a sense of humor this morning.:)

Comments

[andraste]

You know, off the top of my head the only example I can think of where this has happened to an on-screen relationship I was strongly invested in is the Garak and Bashir one you mention. Usually my favourite fictional relationships (of any kind) stay close until the end of canon or fall apart in a spectacular fashion. (Assuming the two people involved are not already trying to kill each other by the time canon starts ...)

I'm with you on the potential Watsonian explanation for the Garak/Bashir break-up, but I am glad that they do have that last intense scene in the final episode. In my mind, Julian wakes up three months after What You Leave Behind, realises he's made a terrible mistake, and moves to Cardassia to open a hospital and try to work things out with his former lunch companion.

(I don't think there's any guarantee he'd be happy with Garak, mind you, or vice versa. However, I just don't believe his relationship with Ezri is going to work in the long term. With Garak, there's a chance that it might.)

Now that I think about it, there is a British crime show I used to love called Wire in the Blood where half of the crime fighting duo moves to another country between seasons without telling the other half. While he'd certainly given her enough reasons over the years, it seemed massively out of character for her to do so. My reaction to that was to give up on the show after taking a season to accept that I was never going to love the absent character's replacement.

[selenak]

but I am glad that they do have that last intense scene in the final episode.

Me too. It's one of my favourite scenes in the finale, and I like your three months later fanon. Agreed that there is no guarantee of happiness, but Julian/Ezri is one of the least convincing things ST ever came up with. Plus I think on her part, Ezri is going to realize she's just working through Jadzia's paths not taken - the very thing you're supposed to get initiate training for to prevent - and call it quits before he does.

Contains very mild spoilers for NCIS and Stargate

[sholio]

I followed a link here from, er, somewhere; hope you don't mind me chipping in with my 2 cents. :)

I really groove on friendships (reading about them, writing about them) and tend to spend a lot of time dwelling on canon and reading between the lines in a Watsonian kind of way; even though I know I'm probably putting more thought into it than the writers themselves, it's fun for me. It seems like friendship doesn't tend to get the kind of detailed check-ins in canon that a romantic relationship would get -- I'm not saying that one is better or worse, but usually you know if characters A and B are supposed to be dating, or if character C broke up with their spouse, and you'd expect to hear about a change in their status. But as a general rule the exact status of the character's friendships is a lot more vague, unless it's front-and-center in an episode for some plot-related reason ...

For me I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution to this kind of thing. It depends hugely on the individuals and how they've been presented in canon. All the examples I can think of are in fandoms that aren't any of the ones you mentioned, so you may not be familiar with these characters. :) But, say, take Gibbs and Ducky from NCIS. They are explicitly presented at the beginning of the series as good friends who've known each other for decades, and through the seasons there have been a number of scenes between them that indicate they are still very close, confide in each other, take the time to apologize for a slight and otherwise maintain the relationship, and so forth. For the last couple of seasons, though, Ducky's kind of dropped off the radar in general; he's not onscreen much and it's been a long time since he and Gibbs had any scenes together. But I think it's reasonable to assume that they still *are* close and still do things together when we don't see them. The relationship was important enough to both of them in the beginning that I can't really see them drifting apart without some sort of explicit breakup. Also, they've known each other long enough and are old enough guys (they're both in their 50s or 60s) that it's reasonable to assume they can probably be apart for ages and then drop right back into the same pattern of friendship and banter that they used to have, like longtime close friends do. Even if one of them went off the show, I think I'd still imagine them hanging out offscreen.

But contrast it to, say, Ronon and Rodney on Stargate Atlantis (another show you may not watch *g*). These were two characters who were very distant at first, then seemed to be getting closer and had a number of scenes that indicated a growing friendship -- and many writers, including me, liked this and wrote them as increasingly close friends. Then they didn't have any more scenes together for literally years, and when they finally had some scenes together near the end of the series, they didn't really interact as friends but as slightly antagonistic acquaintances. In that case, I think it's reasonable to assume that the friendship never went anywhere; they didn't really like each other at first, tried to get to know each other and still didn't really like each other, and drifted apart again. If you'd asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said, "Sure, they're pretty close and care about each other a lot deep down!" But recent canon, as well as the fact that they went years without having any scenes at all, has made me re-evaluate the depth of what I thought I was seeing at first; there wasn't really enough of a basis for a close friendship to imagine that it continued in the interstices of canon, and if it did, their most recent interaction doesn't really bear out the idea that they stayed close.

It also makes a difference how much of the between-the-lines stuff we tend to see in canon itself. In a show like, say, Lost, where we see a lot of the details of their day-to-day lives, it's a whole lot harder to say, "Yeah, these people who used to be friends still get together and hang out" than in a show like most cop and sci-fi shows, where usually we just see the characters at work or during some kind of crisis, and there's a tremendous amount of downtime when just about anything could be going on.

And, er, sorry for yakking your ear off. *runs away*

Re: Contains very mild spoilers for NCIS and Stargate

[selenak]

I'm not familiar with either show, but I do get the difference, and you're right, it really depends on the show setting and the situation the characters are in whether one can extrapolate that the friendship is still intact, we just don't get to see the scenes in question, or whether one has to conclude they drifted apart.

[desertport]

Surfed over from meta-fandom, had to mention Without a Trace. We used to have a pretty active small fandom built around Danny/Martin, until they stopped having scenes together starting around S4. After Martin's addiction storyline ended, we got almost literally no shared scenes with them. I really wonder whether TPTB became aware of the slash and freaked out. (Someone wrote to TVGuide saying they would make a cute couple and the letter made it to the print edition; that might have hit their radar.) It was kind of a shame, because once the canon friendship died down, the fandom understandably lost interest in the show and moved on to greener pastures. SGA and SPN fandoms' gain, tho'. :)

[selenak]

It always depends on what the Powers in question are like, I suppose; witness the House ones openly catering to the House/Wilson shippers since ages. On the other hand, there's the example I mentioned, DS9, where the rumours that the sudden lack of scenes between Garak and Bashir were caused by TPTB being taken aback by all the slash about these refused to die. Impossible to prove one way or the other, I suppose, and in the DS9 case, there were more than enough other interesting friendships (and romances) that continued to be shown on screen, so there was no corresponding loss of viewers, as in your example.