#also brianna is a lesbian and roger should have been a woman but thats not relevant to this post

[thewingedwolf]

4x03 isn’t a terrible episode but the framing of it is all wrong. We shouldn’t have started with Roger, we should have started with Brianna. A scene of her out with friends and struggling to relate to and communicate with them. Everything reminds her of her parents - the way someone holds their beer reminds her of Claire, the way someone adjusts his glasses reminds her of Frank, she sees a flash of red hair and starts wondering about Jamie. She has lost three parents within the span of two years (if that). She’s effectively been orphaned before she’s been able to do anything with her life. She’ll graduate alone, she’ll work alone, she’ll live alone, she’ll get married alone, she’ll have children alone.

She talks with her roommate about Roger coming to visit, and how she feels about the relationship and distance. Have her smile fall when she thinks about the distance between herself and her mother. Show her visibly psyching herself up to be happy when Roger visits, and then show how when she’s with him, she doesn’t need to think about being happy bc she just is. The whole episode should be thru her eyes - his landing, the dance scene, the serenade. She’s fascinated by her father’s culture, desperate to know more yet unsure of how she fits into it. So by the time Roger proposes, we know where she’s at - she’s DEPRESSED. Brianna loves him dearly but she’s 20 years old and facing a wide open future without her family and now Roger wants to pull the rug out from under her again. Of course she says no.

And good lord rewrite the argument. Don’t have Roger call her a whore. Don’t have him get weird about sex. Or like - he’s being weird but the weirdness is that he’s noticed she’s so withdrawn and it feels like she doesn’t care about him. So he wants some sort of reassurance that she does love him before they have sex. But Brianna isn’t in the right headspace to have that conversation and Roger can’t connect to her grief - Reverend Wakefield was old when he died and Roger was solidly into adulthood. Brianna was 18/19 when her still young and healthy family just disappeared from her life. So whereas Roger approaches his grief with “I need to grow up and make my own family bc it’s what my father would have wanted” Brianna has turned into “everyone I love is gone and there’s nothing I can do to make it better” which are two VERY DIFFERENT ways of looking at loss. They’re effectively talking past each other.

THATS HOW IT SHOULD HAVE GONE. You can’t have one of your lead characters not have her own PoV for a whole ass season and expect the audience to understand and like her. Especially when we KNOW Sophie has the acting skills!!!!