Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Welcome back Comrades, to another exciting installment of my journey to conquer TV land in the name of the proletariat and free love.

When we last left off, I had been assigned a TV show to dissect analyse, and we had just watched the pilot episode. This time we watched one of the later episodes. As always it was a right rollicking old yarn about boating and boats and a whole Plethora (stick that in your word calendar and use it!) of other little tidbits of humor.

Now let's get down to business.

In this episode, as always, our bolsome protagonist has his internal conflict over Amy, the girl next door (figuratively speaking). This episode further complicates things (we'll look at how in just a minute), and also sheds some light on Kevin's previous ventures into the deep dark sea of dating, revealing all his previous assorted spouses, flings and lovers have all been..not quite right. Somehow they have been.....odd. This shows the audience just how much Kev NEEDS to be with Amy, and causes the audience to scream at him something along the lines of "GET TOGETHER WITH HER YOU IDIOT! SHE'S PERFECT FOR YOU!". Unless of course they're one of those female viewers with a crush on him, then it's something more like "GET TOGETHER WITH ME YOU IDIOT! I'M PERFECT FOR YOU!". This type of internal conflict is reminiscent of Inara and Mal in the first and only season of Firefly.

Of course, internal conflict is just one side of the story. There's also external conflict too. But unlike other episodes, this time it's not from Brad. You see, in this episode, Brad had found....

Dum dum duuuum


A YANDERE!


For those of you who don't know, a yandere is a character, usually female, who appears nice and sweet on the outside, but is absolutely insane on the inside, in a psychopath kind of way too no less. She obsesses over her romantic interest, and, well...let's just say bad things happen to any other girl he even looks at. Seriously. I saw things in 'Nam that look tame in comparison.

So anyway, Kevin's external conflict for this episode is a yandere by the name of Wanda. She's actually very minor in the yandere hierarchy (the girls would have been lucky to be alive by the end of the episode if it were a proper yandere), but she is, nonetheless, not all there, if you know what I mean. Of course, as Jayne* says, "not all of her has to be".

This conflict is important to the narrative because, unlike the previous external conflict, it presents a new problem: Kevin no longer has any reason to pursue Amy for the time being. It is almost the reverse of the problem with Brad, instead of a threat to his success with Amy, he is instead trapped in a relationship with Wanda. Additionally, it tests both his love for Amy and his friendships to the limit, especially as Wanda begins to cause a rift between Kevin and the girls. This is also the spitting image of the Firefly episode "our Mrs. Reynolds", when Mal finds happiness with a woman, who causes problems. They're of a much more life threatening sort, mind you.

Then finally there's Kevin's engagement with us, the viewing class. In this episode we see Wanda duking it out with the girls over Kevin's affections (and eventually duking it out with Kev himself), and we see kevin caught in the middle, confused and misunderstood, so even when he lashes out at his friends or gets into a fight with a girl we still sympathise with him. This is important, because we as the audience need to like him because, you know, he's still our way into the story.This whole "caught in the crossfire protagonist" thing was featured a fair bit in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the TV spinoff of the Terminator films.

Well that's all for now Comrades, two episodes done and dusted. What will happen to our intrepid hero on his adventures? What new ways will he have to probe analyse a character? Tune in next week to find out.

*You know, Jayne, from Firefly. You did read up about Firefly like I told you to right?