[spoiler]The transexual in question was definitely pre-op. I recall so vividly because, in the tag, Kate makes a point of laying into Tony for making out with someone who has a penis.
I agree that it’s a disturbing moment in terms of–oh, let’s say social justice. But I still think it’s reasonable for characters to have major flaws. Kate’s apparent homophobia (which, even if she were just talking the talk in order to lay into Tony) is not something I’d call unexpected; and I think we can make an argument that Gibb’ being the common factor in three divorces says bad things about him.[/spoiler]
I love shows that aren’t afraid to create nuanced, realistic, deeply flawed people – Battlestar Galactica and *House *are two of my favorite shows for just that reason.
However, those shows obtain a level of complexity that I don’t think NCIS does. If you’re going to grapple with the issue, fine, grapple with it. But to just have something like that in a show without exploring the ramifications of it seems a trifle socially irresponsible to me.
I mean, to use an obvious example, House is an ass, and everyone stands around saying, ‘‘my god, House, you’re an ass.’’ Wilson is a pushover, and that has real consequences for him. I don’t think NCIS is really structured or written to effectively do that.
Why must every aspect of a a show be socially responsible? Why can’t some characters just be assholes?
Honestly, Kate was, in large part, a bitch. I’m in the minority who thinks Sasha Alexander is a good deal hotter than Cote de Pablo, but Kate, the character, was often unpleasant. It’s not so much that she deserved the grief DiNiozzo gave her (she didn’t), but she wasn’t all sweetness and light either, and as a person I would much prefer Ziva.
I don’t even know who Kate is because I think I started watching the show after that. If it fit with her personality, then I might buy it. But it still bothers me.
Maybe one reason to be honest is that because the show relates to the military with a heavy emphasis on patriotism it’s probably got a decent number of socially conservative audience members that wouldn’t necessarily recognize homophobia as assholish. To them it just might make them feel their bigotry is justified.
I’m a touch sensitive to this right now because I am reading a book written by a transgender woman talking about how damaging these one-dimensional portrayals of trans women in the media are to social perceptions of transgender people. As a one-shot deal it might have no real impact, but the reality is this is the way transgender woman are portrayed all over the place – as the butt of a joke. And that has real consequences for real people.
Y’know, that’s odd, but I didn’t get that vibe at all. I think Kate was ragging on him because Tony presents himself as a real ladies man and was wigging that he’d been unable to tell the difference. She also knew that he was skeeving out, and she couldn’t resist twisting the knife a bit.
I suspect that if Tony had decided a woman he was interested in was innocent of mass murder and turned out to be wrong, she’d have done much the same thing. It had everything to do with pushing Tony’s buttons and nothing to do with the subject, except as convenient ammo.
I think Bellisario has been doing these types of shows for so long he’s pretty good at it and could probably cook up a new show that would sell in his sleep. But, I also think he’s an old fart who perhaps doesn’t always keep up with the times, and his staff probably has to remind him it’s not 1975 anymore.
Well, to be fair, the trans person in that episode was strongly implied to have changed genders to avoid getting caught for IIRC a major crime. We weren’t given any evidence that he (later she) was a “true” transgendered person, i.e., somebody who stole the money to get the surgery to get an outer body that matched his/her inward self as opposed to somebody who stole the money and then lived as a woman to get away with it.
There was another episode where a transvestite (I don’t remember if it was clear whether he was a transvestite or a transgendered person who couldn’t live openly) killed himself and was treated sympathetically. He was a red herring and not given a lot of story time, but as I recall his death was treated as a needless tragedy.
This - While she was portrayed (at times) as a ‘Catholic with high morales’ - was also known to have participated in a Wet T-shirt contest in her youth - a fact that Tony used to his advantage for a while.
NCIS the show failed because the character with the failings was allowed to bleat unnecessary transphobia (not homophobia!) out into the cultural discourse without any countering position. Not a single syllable was uttered to suggest that Kate was being unfair, inappropriate or bigoted in her comments, they were just allowed to lay, for laughs.
That was something that Kate said when she was teasing Tony, but there’s no evidence that it’s true, and runs pretty counter to how hard the character was going after Tony. Not that the internal logic was going to be consistent, but it doesn’t track that she would’ve been trying so vigorously to talk Tony into bed if she wasn’t going to be able to provide the experience he would be expecting, once they were there. Or, for that matter, if it could’ve blown the cover she’d just killed Chris Pacci to keep intact.
We were given a bit. She certainly embraced femininity in terms of clothing and cosmetics, and was quite clearly comfortable enough in that body to act sexually in it. Again, I’m not expecting internal logic here, but the attempted seduction also doesn’t track if she was faking her gender presentation as a disguise.
That actually kind of compounded the earlier failing. Kate was the one who lectured the team on why it was appropriate to call the decedent “she” rather than “he” and then turned right around, in the same scene, and made another transphobic joke about Tony and the trans woman from the first episode. It was more than a little boggling.
Wow. I didn’t know about the transgender thing, and I agree that that was a bad misstep. If you’re going to have a bigot, or even a possibly bigoted comment, you need to make it clear that this is not acceptable.
But, if this is the only case of it, then I can forgive. The apparent bigot is no longer even on the show.
Oh, and Abby has a lot of Character. She’s not just a goth. She’s a sweetheart who finds the world to be a not so sweet place, so she actively distances herself from normal situations. But, underneath all that, she still desperately wants to fit in. But she doesn’t know how to do so and maintain her individuality, her safe buffer from the rest of the world. And she slowly becomes happy with this. A goth would grow out of it as they become happy, but she lets it become a part of her.
The reason why she and Gibbs fit is that he is also protecting himself, but he does so by adhering to an uber-masculine stereotype. They’re both the same, yet opposites. They both try to get the other to let their guard down (though Abby more obviously than Gibbs).
I apologize if anyone has changed recently, as I’m pretty far back. Like Naf, I’m not even watching them in order.
I’m not sure what your point is, as surely you wouldn’t want them to show the actual commute time. But, anyway, I’m not sure it’s ever been presented that way. When McGee was stationed at Norfolk but often working for McGee, it was made clear that he had to stay with someone in the city (Abby) to make that practical.
Oh, I agree. But the fact that she was willing to use the word he-she says something about her. I just don’t think that whatever homophobia or queer-phobia she had means that NCIS-the-series is flawed.
