Retcon Patrol: 1-08 “Mistakes Were Made 1″ Part 5
Today we conclude our search for inconsistent or comment-worthy moments in the Brothers & Sisters first season with a look at the fifth and final part of Episode 8. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 if you need to catch up, then dive right in here with Part 5.
31:09
Alright, I think this is the first OMG Waking-Up-in-Bed-with-Someone scene of the series. Or did we get one with Kitty and Warren? I know there are many more ahead, though. I’m going to count them, and see if they all use this same Music of Gentle Whimsy.
32:20
Sadly, Nora has no one to hide in the bathroom and play phone tag with, but Kitty’s in the kitchen to see her sneaking home shamefaced, so who needs cell phones?
33:11
Nora says “Glass jumps,” a line that was originally the title of this episode. And while it’s hard to argue now that “Mistakes Were Made” is a pretty accurate moniker, it’s also worth nothing that the concept of sharp things jumping out across the years to cut you is one the writers should take to heart. I think there’s a fair amount of glass under their feet right now.
33:49
When Kitty says Justin wants to go to Mexico, Nora cries, “He’ll go to jail!” Guess Mom’s not giving him the big bucks for that passport.
34:01
Have we ever seen this sloping view of Holly’s house, on such a hill? I honestly didn’t know whose house we were getting an establishing shot of in until I heard Sarah yelling.
34:13
Sarah accuses Holly of condemning them to bankruptcy or worse to keep the “truth” from coming out, but Holly gave tons of information on Rebecca, as Sarah requested in case her father “misunderstood.” At that point, Sarah was allowing for William thinking it without it being true. Now, she’s all accusations and scorn. I hate what Holly hate did to the character of Sarah. Yet another reason to resent that it was all for nothin’.
34:20
Sarah says, flat out, “I know that Rebecca is my father’s daughter.” C’mon! He put her in a password! What more proof could you possibly want? A plate with her initials?
34:24
When Holly again denies that Rebecca is William’s child, Sarah says triumphantly, “Then why did adding her initials to ours open the files!” At which I would very much have loved for Holly to laugh uproariously and say, “Are you kidding me?” ‘Cause that’s what Sarah deserves.
34:38
Sarah accuses Holly of working hard to keep the truth from coming out. How has she been working hard? She was asked if it was true, and she said no. But she still provided tons of identifying information on her kid. Sarah is unhinged here, and that means this entire plot is unhinged.
34:43
And the fact that Holly hasn’t told Rebecca who her father is proves that her father is William … how?
34:53
Alright, I’m going to throw the writers a bone here. The outraged and unforgiving may just want to skip to the next time point.
Right here, freeze-frame, at 34:53, Holly is turned away from Sarah and Saul, and she has a smile on her face. If we’re going to have to live with the total overturning of everything we know from Season 1 to accommodate the writers’ latest whim, here’s where we start. Holly is smiling — as though, perhaps, she realizes that she’s being invited, nay forced, to link her child’s future to that of a well-off family, a family she’s always been on the outside of. She takes a step away, smiles that smile, then turns around and gives a performance. She’s an actor, after all, so she gives a performance designed to admit what Sarah is insisting to be the truth, in a way that makes William and herself look good and makes Rebecca look most pitiable. I always thought that speech was over the top — really, William would leave his wife and five children for her and his one baby? — but as an impromptu performance, it’s a nice little set piece. Comes around to bite her in the butt eventually, but really, if you have someone unwilling to believe the truth and insisting upon a truth that works out better for you, and you’re Holly, why not grab it?
I’m not saying this is what the writers intended at the time, or that they deserve the favor of spin; just that the issue has never so much been what Holly said as what Sarah believed, and Sarah was not prepared to believe anything but her stupid Password Theory. I’m surprised she’s taken Rebecca’s DNA test at its word. Labs make mistakes, ya know. I guess she’s still clinging to that theory beyond all logic, just with Ryan attached.
36:00
Okay, let me get this straight: Sarah knows Rebecca is William’s because he put her initial in the password. And Holly’s response is that yes, she is William’s, but he never knew, or he would have left his family. Except … if he used the initial, then he knew, but he didn’t leave his family. And if he didn’t know, then the initial “R” means something else, and what the heck are we doing here. Honestly, this whole plotline was a pathetic mess even before history got rewritten on it. I might not have minded giving the writers a do-over if they hadn’t gone for exactly the same thing with a different “R.” The password and the photo still prove absolutely nothing. Somebody, anybody, please, learn from your mistakes!
36:26
Good Lord, Sarah, if you wanted Holly to stay the hell away from your family, why did you make such a big stinking deal about her daughter being your half-sister? None of the Rebecca drama would have happened if Sarah hadn’t forced the issue.
36:47
Oh, my, Kevin’s apology. I still haven’t quite forgiven Scotty for not accepting this apology. So has it really been three Martian years now? Turned out to be shorter than human years, then.
38:04
I do like that Scotty asks for the check, though. Perhaps this is the dawn of his realization that sometimes you have to come down off the high horse.
38:25
Where did Tommy come into this little Justin rescue party? Last we heard, it was just going to be Nora and Kitty. Seems like Tommy would be the last person you’d want on an expedition to help Justin.
38:43
Nora says Justin’s overdose all her fault, which is kind of refreshing, because normally she’d say it’s Kitty’s.
38:49
I wonder if Dave Annable got a headache from the way Sally Field was manhandling his head there? It looks like there’s nerve damage, but … wait, it’s the Blinding Light of Flashback.
39:35
It’s a Walker dinner, and the idea is floated that they just stop talking for a minute. Ha!
40:01
William says, “Family is the only sure thing in life. Always was, always will be.” Wouldn’t be too sure about that, there, Pops.
41:16
It’s kind of creepy the way the past-dinner/present-OD ends up in the past. I guess Justin’s still there, in his unconscious reverie?
42:20
Justin announces, in the past, that he enlisted today. Is that the first proactive thing he’s ever done in his life? Bad time to start thinking for yourself, bro.
42:25
And that’s it. We’re left with a twofold cliffhanger — in the past, how the family will respond to the enlistment announcement; and in the present, will Justin die? Justin’s had two will-he-die cliffhangers, and nobody else has had any … well, okay, maybe Lizzie. And William Sr., I suppose, lest we thought he might rise from the pool. Still, Justin’s special, isn’t he? How will they almost kill him this season, do you suppose?
And that’s five days of catch-up on Episode 8. Next up: “Mistakes Were Made Part 2.” Road trip!
Photo: ABC.com
Brothers and Sisters, ABC, Mistakes Were Made Part 1
July 26th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Your attempt to spin the Holly confession is valiant, Terri, but for me it simply doesn’t work.
For one, I don’t see any “devious” smiling consistent with her making up a story on the fly. If there’s any smiling, it’s born of nervousness and insecurity because she’s finally revealing the truth and she’s scared what the truth will do to her daughter, who’s been lied to for 20 years. IMO, it’s indisputably how Patty played the scene and was directed to play it.
Additionally, this interpretation presupposes that Holly was willing to throw her daughter to the wolves for…what? To get back at Sarah?
I do not for a second believe that a mother with any semblance of love for her daughter would ever expose her to such vulnerability by having her rely on a piece of information that so wholly transforms her life but which Holly does not know for a fact to be true. Just…no.
So we’re left with a situation where Holly is either (a) clearly telling the truth about Rebecca’s paternity, which makes the David story a complete joke, or (b) she’s lying and is callously doing so at the risk of exposing her daughter to emotional devastation.
Either way, it sucks.
July 26th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Also, I wanted to add that I thought were were awfully harsh on Sarah. Sure, later in the season her telling Rebecca was out of line, but here? I was totally in her corner.
I think she was justifiably angry over Holly’s reluctance to tell the truth because, in these circumstances, it potentially affected their ability to save Ojai. Sarah was under tremendous pressure, and I too would have been incensed in her position.
July 26th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
On the other hand, Holly DID everything she could to help Sarah and Ojai. Holly did not know what William’s password was and that the “R” added to his other children’s initials would be the key. I mean, Sarah just fell on in by accident.
Of course, now it turns out that William never used Rebecca’s initial, but Ryan’s who for some inexplicable reason MUST be his illigitimate son.
So basically, Holly didn’t know what the password was, William was told Rebecca was NOT his child, William never showed much interest in Rebecca, Holly has no reason to assume that Rebecca is in any way connected to the password. She could have have been flabbergasted that her daughter’s initial was used by William (not knowing aobut Ryan ofcourse) maybe Holly felt that William tried to, posthumously, acknowledge Rebecca as his.
So Sarah is not entirely right to be so angry. But if I had been Holly I would have maintained that Rebecca was NOT William’s. To hell with the Walkers! What would Sarah have done then? Demand a DNA-test to prove she’s right?
As for Kevin/Scotty,…(sigh)… they were clearly not ready for eachother yet, but boy, did they ever break my heart.
July 27th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
The main point is that this whole storyline is an absolute mess, whichever way you slice it. There’s no logical character motivation because the writers changed courses midway.
July 27th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Aw, Scott, I agree that the storyline is an absolute mess, and I think it was already that way before they changed courses midway. It makes it more frustrating, especially since they’re going back to the same well of stupid, but it was pretty infuriating to begin with.
I hate to be hard on Sarah, and really, what I’m hard on is the way the writers wrote her as an IDIOT. I can see her accusing Holly of leading her father on with the belief that Rebecca was his, but baldly stating that she must be a biological Walker ’cause her initial’s in the password? It’s just silly, and it makes me want to throw things at the screen. And now they’re doing it AGAIN!
As for Holly, I guess I don’t see why it would be terrible of her to want her daughter to be a Walker. The kid’s life was pretty much in turmoil already, with the teacher affair and suicide. At this point, Holly doesn’t have any expectation of a windfall inheritance, and her sugar daddy’s dead. I could see her thinking, especially if she did believe it pretty likely that Rebecca was William’s and David was a loser, that maybe hooking her daughter up with this stable overprotective well-off family would benefit her. I don’t think she would have anticipated Sarah breaking the news in such a hurtful way.
If things were reversed, and Holly had come forward after William’s death and claimed that Rebecca was his, everybody would have accused her of lying and gold-digging. Instead, at every turn, they came after her. I don’t know that I’d blame her all that much for saying, “Well, if you insist …”
July 28th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Sylvanie wrote, “As for Kevin/Scotty,…(sigh)… they were clearly not ready for each other yet, but boy, did they ever break my heart.”
I totally agree! I’ve loved how they found their way back to each other and I’ve enjoyed each step on the way. This is what I love about B&S - true human relationships and emotions.
I can’t even read all the gyrations about the password and Rebecca/Ryan because I am so bored by it. Terri, I give you credit for trying to make sense of it (and thanks for the alternate suggestions, very funny). I’m not a fan of Holly or Rebecca. All their lying and meddling is just annoys me.
If “this Ryan person” is interesting and has good interactions with the other characters then I’ll accept him. If he’s just a troublemaker then I’ll endure his scenes and try to forget them as quickly as possible.
July 28th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
But for me, Sarah’s telling Rebecca was beside the point. Not to let Sarah off the hook for that (it was wrong of her), but you can’t escape the fact that Holly set these events in motion by not being fully truthful about her daughter’s paternity and proclaiming that Rebecca was a Walker, without any equivocation.
I guess for me it comes down to the fact I still do not find it credible that Holly would lie (by omission) to her own daughter, ESPECIALLY when Rebecca started bonding with the Walkers under the belief she was their biological sister.
What then excuses Holly’s nondisclosure? Aside from her own selfish desire to remain William’s One True Mistress?
July 28th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Just a couple more points, lol…
Holly saying, “Well if you insist…” Again, that is all about HOLLY. It would be about Holly’s feeling victimized by the Walkers. The problem is, nowhere would it be about the person who stood to lose the most from this deception: Rebecca.
Alternatively, you theorized that Holly didn’t tell the full truth because thought Rebecca would “benefit” from being a Walker. Under this theory, then, Holly would be *consciously* taking the chance that Rebecca was living under a lie. She knew she slept with David and it was a possibility.
It just doesn’t excuse Holly being so reckless with her daughter’s sense of identity and emotional well-being. (After the teacher affair/suicide, I would think it highly imprudent to allow one’s daughter to get into a situation that may or may not be based on a false belief.)