Episode 51 Morals

In plain English, these are the morals from Episode 51:

In asking for a second paternity test, is Danny placing himself in the line of fire?

When I saw Danny going to Katherine, I thought: why doesn't he do this more often. Poor Katherine must be so lonely, and Danny has so much on his mind, she'd be a fine person for him to talk things over with. Does he just ignore her now because his father is dead, and he doesn't think of her as family? I don't think so--he doesn't think of family in that way. (Probably it's just the writers who forget, not the character.) But it also made me think that maybe he'd been there for some other reason--that maybe she should be more than a wall decoration in the scene--maybe she should have something meaty to tell Danny that would put a whole new spin on the situation. So I thought up this thing about Danny's past, and I wondered how Danny would feel thinking about the idea that his `father' might have pushed him away and let him grow up alone, and how it would have changed his life. For one thing, he wouldn't even have Katherine there to talk to. It seemed rich in possibilities for adding perspective. So I went with it.

There's also the part in this about cloning. Well, that's maybe a little silly, but the reason I thought of it was not that I was looking for another way to reuse the overhyped cloning joke. Actually, I had been thinking of what would happen if Phyllis wanted to swap blood samples to make things work. She has to either find the real father and substitute his blood for Danny's, or she has to find another child of Danny's and substitute it for Little Daniel's. I don't know how she plans to do either of these. If she gets Danny's blood and substitutes it for her son's, she'll end up with the same blood, and it will look like a clone when in fact it's only a false clone. So that's the real truth--this is not an episode about a clone--it's just an episode about a mistaken diagnosis that someone is a clone.

At the Private Dining Room tonight, will there be more fireworks between Jill and Meg, Meg and Victor, or Jill and Victor?

Ok, so it's the end of the Dark_Lady plotline for now and I promised I'd make a few remarks about this. There are several points this plot was trying to make:

One of the things is that in cyberspace you focus on aspects that relate to the computer medium such as typing speed, ability to spell and punctuate, and word choice rather than skin color, hairstyle, or whatever. This means sometimes replacing one set of superficial features with another, but it can lead to surprising pairings between people because differences in age, height, weight, etc. that might otherwise be the obvious ways that people discriminate about who they will spend time with are missing.
Another thing is that this difference in the features one focuses on allows one to wear masks. Sometimes, as in the stories we've all heard about child molesters, the masks are evil. Sometimes, though, they are beneficial masks that allow one to overcome a hurdle that would normally amount to discrimination--to meet and get to know someone on even terms without them being able to see that maybe you're not the most beautiful person, or tell that you're deaf, or tell that you have a big age difference. In this case, Meg is virtually an adult (perfect for a virtual relationship) and will be an actual adult next week (I decided, so that I didn't end up writing kiddy porn myself). Anyway, at that point, there's nothing illegal about Victor seeing Meg, but people would find it silly because people are prone to meddle. The mask of cyberspace hides these differences and allows the two to get to know each other on the basis of what their common interests are. Since I suspect both have an interest in money and boinking, I'm sure they're a fine match. So I think the involving of cyberspace is a good way to mix things around, and a good way to bring about plausible surprises because surprise is part of the real-world nature of meeting someone you've known from cyberspace. Everyone who's done it remarks on how strange it is--like merging two utterly different people--the one in your mind, and the one you meet.
I also think cyberspace can draw out interesting facets of people's personalities. Interactive virtual reality settings have been seen to take real world introverts and draw them out in a way that no real world situation can. It's as if there was something (perhaps falsely) safe about talking to a computer as if it were not a person (though in reality one must always realize that there are people on the other end). Still, Victor is so introverted in some ways that the computer seems an interesting vehicle for trying to draw him out.
There's also something about computer interactions that leaves a lot to the imagination. This can allow for some interesting fantasy sequences as people imagine who they are going to meet, and some interesting drama when they really meet--or think they do (as happened in this episode).
And, finally, people have been wanting Meg to be in some meaty plot line. I figured this was a way to do a little one-upsmanship with her sister and Ryan. This way, she really hits the ground rolling when she emerges on the social circuit.

If this story had gone on, I think I'd like to have seen it to the Cyrano De Bergerac thing a little, with Meg getting Victor all keyed up and then Jill never delivering. It might have been fun.

When push comes to shove, will Grace risk getting fired to avoid a sticky situation?

It had recently been ambiguous to me whether Grace had been going to consent to sex with Tony. (I guess I got my answer when, out of the blue, after resisting him for weeks, she suddenly hopped up and wrapped her legs around him. Sigh.) It had occurred to me then that it might be an interesting thing to see her being forced into sex with Tony as a price of babysitting Cassie. This would make her a lot more sympathetic in other cases because she'd be carrying a big piece of baggage with her.

Then, even more recently, it's seemed to me like Jay is coming on to Grace and I'm really tired of employers coming onto their employees on Y&R. I was then thinking that if both of them were going after her, it would really stress her out.

In fact, if both of these things had happened and then she'd done the thing with Nick, we might have thought very differently about her desire to trick him into sex. On the one hand, we might have felt she should be more sympathetic to him after all she'd been through; but on the other hand, we might better understand her desire for some friendly sex, even if she felt she had to trick someone into it.

Since the thing with Nick happened a while ago now, I just accepted that part as a done deal and worked it into a general `snapping' here. But there was really a lot more to work with in terms of motivating some of Grace's recent actions if some writer had been so inclined.

That's all for Episode 51's morals. Don't miss Episode 52 and its morals!
If you missed any older episodes, see the index.