Yeah, NCIS NOLA was painful. Wanted to like it, given my fondness for Bakula and Black, but not so much.

I hadn't even been aware that there was an NCIS NOLA. I learn so much here ....

Technically, it's not spun off yet. Last night's episode was a crossover to introduce the soon-to-be spun NOLA gang.

Great essay by Hettienne Park about Beverly Katz's departure from Hannibal, fandom reactions, and Park's experiences as an Asian American woman in theater and film.

And given the changes done to NCIS: LA between intro episode on the Mother Ship series and its own premiere, what you saw last night may not reflect what will actually show up.

Except the Mother Ship was JAG. Hm.

Great essay by Hettienne Park about Beverly Katz's departure from Hannibal, fandom reactions, and Park's experiences as an Asian American woman in theater and film.

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it, JZ. Unfortunately, (spoilers for the source material) there are four characters that pretty much cannot be killed because they are part of what happens later in the novels, and they are all men. Fuller needs to get some credit for creating this great female characters, but since they aren't in the novels, you have to expect that any of them could die at any time.

Isn't this separate, though, sj? He's already diverged from canon in quite a few places.

When you feel marginalized by the world at large, there’s great comfort and empowerment in seeing someone you can identify with on the screen who isn’t subject to clichés or stereotypes. When that gets taken away, you can feel like you’ve been fucked over once again. And unless you’ve ever been hurt merely due to the color of your skin, what’s between your legs, or who sleeps next to you at night, you probably don’t understand that kind of pain.

This. That post was a very thoughtful, gracious response from Park, but that doesn't mitigate how upset I'm feeling over the whole thing. There was this great character on screen, who looked like me, who worked like me, who was competent and funny and compassionate, and now she's gone, largely to fuel men's story. I mean, none of this is surprising given the premise of the show, and what I'm left with is resigned "I should have known better than to expect otherwise." I actually sat in front of my computer and had a good long cry reading her post, that's how upset I am. Of course personal attacks on Fuller are out of line, and of course Fuller did a terrific thing casting Park in this non-explicitly Asian role in the first place. But we are sad and disappointed nonetheless, and it goes much beyond the reasons dictated by the narrative.

I think the problem is, because she got so much more character development by having this rapport with Will, she's the logical one to investigate his claims. Which means she's the logical one to get killed, since Hannibal can't be caught yet.

But they could have let her stay a while longer, and find nothing on her first foray, or have her wait to actually search his house -- she could have searched his office first, for instance.

Yeah, it's a completely shitty thing all around.

There's also this weird awful bind that showrunners like Fuller get into -- he's genderflipped and race-blind-cast several parts that in the source texts were white, male or both (mostly both) and he and the writing team and actors collaborated to make those characters richer, fuller, and more important to the two main characters than they were originally.

And then, since it's a show about someone who eats people and someone else who's trying to stop him, with a killer of the week along the way almost every week, the chance of the meaningful, gut-punching deaths that are inevitable on this show happening to one of those gender and race-changed characters are much higher. And then, then, there's the possible awfulness Park pointed to, of the networks saying, "No more controversial deaths, no more upsetting the fans; stop the weird casting and just cast 'em as they're written" and everything going back to the arguably even shittier prior status quo, because even the showrunners don't have as much power as the money guys.

But the personal sense of loss and grief and guttedness is completely understandable, and I'm staying out of the fandom swamps for now because the few times I've peeked in I've seen some people wanting Fuller's head on a pike and other people dismissing everyone who's upset as a whiny victim-card-playing crybaby, and the reasonable people throwing up their hands and leaving for who knows where.