4x02 "Five Autopsies"

[jimsmyth]

"Stand aside, or face the power of Thor!"

"Thor, you're blocking my light."

"Yes'm."

[AndrewJ]

Just finished the new episode. Dr. Frost is a sad scary lady.

[kvon]

I liked it until the penultimate line.  There is no left vena cava, just superior and inferior.  I would not expect Dr Frost to make such a mistake.

[kelachrome]

I am not typically a forumite, but I had to say that I love that it's Chaz on the phone at the beginning of Act IV.
I'm going to go finish reading now. *not looking at spoilers*

[rekre8]

I about cried when they mentioned the IGB videos.   Alas, I heartily dislike Frosts denial of it. 

[Bibliophile]

A whole Frost episode! It's like an early, very depressing, Christmas present from the PTB.

[eschatonic]

Just finished the new episode. Dr. Frost is a sad scary lady.

goddamn, yes she is. I think that's the scariest* episode we've had in a while. I really felt bad for her in the middle part. Now I'm back to thinking she's scary and only not dangerous because she has made a decision not to be.

I don't think she is helping Danny Brady get more sleep. Or me.



*not counting the small dark teatime of the soul movie of your life.

[tylik]

Folks, I am really, deeply disturbed by the handling of transgender folks in this episode.*

So... Considering that the episode was so much about Frost, I normally wouldn't be bothered by the introductions through autopsy. But it's really not okay for us to meet transgendered people only as murderers or victims of murder. And an autopsy, which focuses so much on their bodies and what our society tends to obsess over anyway about their bodies - the ways in which their sex and gender and not in conformity with social models - ends up coming across as creepy and exploitative. Even when distanced and softened by Frost's viewpoint. (The Frost centric stuff I did generally greatly enjoy.)

And then there's the discord between the IGB videos, which are talking fairly reasonably about the processes than can be involved, and Leslie James who... gets turned down for gender assignment surgery by all these doctors? What? I mean, the first bit at least alludes to standard medical practice. The second really doesn't, and makes no sense at all. Where's her therapist? Where's her prescribing physician? Why is she talking to surgeons? Where is she that there are all these surgeons who do gender reassignment surgery in one state?

And then there's the basic problem with having the murderer also be transgendered, which kind of writes right over the fact the transgendered women get murdered hugely disproportionately, and not by each other. (There is apparently a transgendered murderer trope, though I had not previously been aware of it. But it's similar enough to the lesbian murderer trope...) I mean, there was kinda sorta an allusion to that in that people originally took this to be a hate crime, but not really.

As with many of these things, it's not that this is a story that can never be told. It's about context. It's about what you're saying in what environment, and what it means in that broader setting. I feel like some care was taken to make the transgendered characters sympathetic... and yet the whole framework was just weird.

Color me squicked, and saddened.

* As an aside, I just talked through much of this with an intimate friend who is transgender, who is visiting, and was greatly helpful at clarifying my thoughts.

[Leah Bobet]

Folks, I am really, deeply disturbed by the handling of transgender folks in this episode.

Would it be useful to you if we discussed some of the logic of those decisions a bit, or would that come off as justification/excuse-making and thus inflammatory and sucky?

Thanks,

~L

[tylik]

I think it depends a lot on how it's done... which isn't an answer, but it's the best one I can give you.

I think acknowledging the problems first would be pretty helpful, to me personally, anyway. I can't speak for anyone else. On the other end, saying something along the lines of "Oh, we were aware of these potential problems, and decided to go ahead and do this anyway." Would be pretty hard to deal. (Which in my case means I probably just wouldn't. I debate for entertainment value. This seems more likely to slide isn't sadness, apathy, and silence.)

[Leah Bobet]

No, "it depends" is a perfectly valid and honest answer, and thank you for it.

I'm sorry that my work has caused hurt.  That's not what I like it to do, and please (both generally, and to Tylik, and seriously, thanks for broaching the topic) accept my unconditional and sincere apologies for making work that's caused hurt.

I think there have been two failures involved here -- one element being a failure of craft and effectively communicating what I was after with "Five Autopsies", and the other being a failure to, as Tylik said, completely think the scenario through past the borders of this story and into the world of all the other stories and the narrative tropes around transgendered people, and how those ideas translate into the real world and serious, life-or-death consequences for people who have to live with them every day; the people who can't just put them down to start the next story.

Which is basically the cardinal fault of privilege, right?  Not thinking all the way through, to the realistic consequences, the things you don't have to think through every day.

I do want to emphasize though, if I may, that it's my work: it's not Emma's, or Bear's, or Will's, or Amanda's, or Sarah's, or Holly's, or Chelsea's, or Stephen's.  So I hope nobody holds against them my own failures of craft and failures to think through my text and subtext in a responsible and considerate manner.  They're mine solely, and I will gladly take responsibility for them.

Thanks for the patience, and for graciously raising the issue -- which I appreciate immeasurably.

~L

[jimsmyth]

Poor Madeleine.

  ==

I was upset to see each of the victims referred to as "Male" in the paperwork, without a comment by Frost addressing the dichotomy between official and actual.  And this without being sure it's the sort of thing Frost would comment on.  Aside form the mythology (and good scary work with the butterfly thing), there was pretty much no reaction to the transgender issue.  This is fine for Frost (who would only care if it affected her efficiency or her sense of medical wrongness), and good for the team (who we hardly see anyway), there is no other option expressed by any of the extras onstage, or Madeleine's understanding boss (who I would expect to use preferred pronouns at least because it's the politically expedient thing to do.)

Also, Frost was right.  And I miss Daphne too.

  ==

And reading this from a place of insomnia may not have been my cleverest move.

[Emma Bull]

To Tylik, and to all of you, I want to apologize, as the executive producer and showrunner. I think I'm too familiar with the way Madeline Frost sees the world to have realized her point of view would make the story seem generally insensitive to transgendered people and the personal and political issues they face, the hurt that lurks in the most common daily experience. I won't try to explain away the hurt that anyone felt reading this story, because it can't be explained away. It's real pain, real discomfort, and I apologize for causing it, particularly when it wasn't my intention to do so.

Shadow Unit frequently causes pain and discomfort to readers. Usually, it's the entertaining sort. But under the entertainment, I think all the SU writers are trying to grapple with suffering, the daily injustices and agonies that humans experience and inflict on each other. It's an almost impossible thing to come to grips with. The cry of "How can a just and loving God allow these things to happen?" has risen from human throats probably since the concept of a just and loving God was first embraced.

When we created the anomaly, I know I thought about that: the terrible, almost unimaginable cruelty that humans can indulge in. I didn't mean it to be an excuse for evil, a "the devil made me do it" monster. It was a metaphorical element--it stood in for that thing I don't understand in my species, the thing that results in monstrous behavior from creatures I refuse to believe are inherently monsters.

Yes, I believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity. That, apparently, is why I'm writing and producing a webfiction series full of appalling psychological horror and evil. So the thing that hurts me most in Shadow Unit is something we do over and over: characters who deserves love, help, and healing, who could be happy and fulfilled, who could by living a joyous life pass joy on to others, instead are devoured by hopelessness, anger, fear, misery, injustice, physical and emotional pain. Some of them fight what's trying to devour them to the very end. Some accept the darkness as right or inevitable, and act on it immediately.

When they do, they darken or destroy the lives of other characters. Those characters, too, deserve love, joy, justice. Some have triumphed over their own darkness, their own pain. They're still cut down, stopped short in their progress toward their own happiness. And when they're ripped from the world, their absence spreads the bitter darkness to the people who knew and loved them--another circle of humans who will either fight against the idea that the world is a wicked, hopeless place, or who will embrace it.

Thus the infection model of the anomaly, of evil. I'm always trying to figure out where the human immune response to evil comes from, because I want to make it stronger. I tend not to write tragedy, because what I want more of in the world is the snatching of hope from the jaws of despair. But tragedy is a way of examining what went wrong, why the system didn't work. It's a necessary sorrow, a powerful experimental tool in the fight against humanity's cruelty.

"Five Autopsies" is a tragedy. Not only because Audrey, Simone, and the other characters who die before we even get to meet them are cut down almost in the act of triumphing over pain. Not only because Leslie is gunned down, robbing her of a last chance to have her own triumph over suffering. It's also a tragedy because Madeline Frost doesn't believe it gets better. She rejected the idea at age nine, and everything she's done since then has reinforced her disbelief. Her very choice of medical specialty--pathology--both reinforces it and expresses it. Tumors grow, and kill their host. It gets worse. She knows this; she performs autopsies on the evidence every day.

There is no redemption, or salvation, or triumph over adversity in the text of this story because it's from Frost's point of view. She saw the possibility of triumph; it was there in video after video. She revisits the It Gets Better Project at the end of the episode, listening to voice after voice telling her she's misread the evidence, that she's failed to take into account the contrary evidence, that her research is flawed. She's watching those videos trying, trying to see what she's missed, to be convinced that the darkness she's lived with and in since she was nine is not the whole of human nature and destiny. But she can't do it.

At the end of the episode, we, the readers, hear the voices that say there's joy, and triumph. In spite of Leslie's rage and despair and what she did at its prompting, the story tells us that victory is not impossible. Even though the character who's point of view we hear those voices from doesn't believe it. That's a difficult thing to accomplish in fiction. Even when the writer has given us the clues that tell us the viewpoint character is wrong, the headspace of the POV character may still overwhelm the writer's efforts, especially in a case like this, where the reader's pain makes the point of view character's vision too hurtful, too powerful, to see beyond.

Every character who's died in Shadow Unit has been a victim of cruelty, of injustice, of the terrible ability of humans to turn their fellow beings into prey. They have all been in the midst of planning and working out their destiny. They have all deserved to live. But in writing fiction, I've had to face the evidence that I want so much to ignore: that violent death comes to people who deserve a free, joyous life, and that the means of that death is too often human cruelty.

I guess the Anomalous Crimes Task Force is a metaphor, too, just as the anomaly is. They're the metaphor for that immune response, the thing that makes humanity, flawed and petty and stumbling, still rise up against evil and put themselves at risk to help one another. I think Frost is wrong, you see. Well, she thinks I am, for believing that humanity is more than the sum of its failures. But even Madeline Frost, who will never believe that it gets better, who has overcome her own inner darkness by emptying both good and evil out of her heart, is still trying to do the right thing. And that gives me the hope she thinks I'm a fool to embrace.

[Lioness]

Poor Madeleine.

Poor murderous Madeleine.

I'm worried about her, actually.

I was upset to see each of the victims referred to as "Male" in the paperwork, without a comment by Frost addressing the dichotomy between official and actual.  And this without being sure it's the sort of thing Frost would comment on.

Me too.

And I also expected her to comment. I don't know in what form I expected her to -- would she make some icy uncomprehending observation about the way cisgender people were screwed up about dealing with gender in general and particularly with transgender stuff and transgender people?  would she make notes about gender presentation in the autopsy? -- but I thought there would be something. Frost is always observing how people act... because she's not entirely people, in her mind. (Actually, I don't know that. I am curious about it, too.)

Aside form the mythology (and good scary work with the butterfly thing), there was pretty much no reaction to the transgender issue.  This is fine for Frost (who would only care if it affected her efficiency or her sense of medical wrongness), and good for the team (who we hardly see anyway), there is no other option expressed by any of the extras onstage, or Madeleine's understanding boss (who I would expect to use preferred pronouns at least because it's the politically expedient thing to do.)

Chaz used "she" consistently for the two murder victims he talks with Frost about. 

Reyes uses "he" for the UNSUB during the discussion with Frost on the phone, but hey, UNSUB and statistics, maybe? But then he also uses "he" when talking with Frost on the phone, about Leslie being turned down. So I dunno. What's in character for Reyes, here?

Brady uses "he" for Leslie.

Also, Frost was right.  And I miss Daphne too.

Me too. A lot.

Jumping back for a moment, the part where I really lost it about the murdered women is where Frost thinks about all the families claiming the bodies, all except for one. It's a macabre form of It Gets Better, but... the ones who made the videos were at least claimed by their families. I know people who wouldn't be.  (Well, and then I also know people who might be claimed by their families who would completely cover up any of the transgender truth of things....)

Sadness.

[Korvar]

I was upset to see each of the victims referred to as "Male" in the paperwork, without a comment by Frost addressing the dichotomy between official and actual.  And this without being sure it's the sort of thing Frost would comment on.

I think that was the intention - that we begin to question that bald statement of "Male".  I mean, in a sense, it's true, in that the body, the meat on the table, is, physically, male.  But just as there's more to us than our physical body, there's more to those people -  Audrey, Simone, Vin, and even Leslie - than their chromosomes and physical attributes.  That labelling them "Male" like that is wrong. Or at least, not enough.

And I think part of the point was that the audience wouldn't have to be hand-held through that, that they would come to that on their own.  Certainly I was feeling like that by the end.

But I would suspect for that someone who's already gone through that thought process, either because they are transgender themselves, or because someone they care about is, or just because they've come across this before, it would just seem like society's relentless pushing of binary, physical gender.  Doesn't matter who you know yourself to be, as far as Society is concerned, you're what your body says you are.

And given the Frost viewpoint, we're not going to get that softened, or explained. 

This is where I would put my concluding sentence, if I had a conclusion to come to.