"What goes on in that honey-blonde head of yours?"

[queensgirl]

I’ve been watching the early episodes lately, and I’ve noticed something. More than a few times, it seems Maddie worries primarily about whether she finds what the client and/or victim did to be ethical or not, and she’ll talk about for whom she feels sympathy. Being able to justify a person’s actions can be a big problem for her. Later on, this changes a little: note her acceptance of the McLafferty case even though she doesn’t seem to like any of the people involved. Whereas Dave, by contrast, is more businesslike and often opts to take the case no matter whether he finds the clients tasteful or not. It’s not that he doesn’t have sympathy or compassion, I think he looks at it the way cops or lawyers do—you have to do your job, there are certain procedures that must be carried out in order to work, and that’s that.

It seems Maddie often wants to trust people, once they’ve told her their story, and she can be pretty shocked to find out they were up to no good. Either that, or she intensely dislikes them from the beginning, as with Mr. Bower in “The Man Who Cried Wife.” At times like that, it’s hard for her to feel sorry for anyone, and keep her personal anger out of the way, even though certain facts may come up that affect the atmosphere of the case. (Such as, Mrs. Bower was cheating, which in most people’s minds is no ‘reason’ to beat and murder someone but sheds a little light on why James was so angry.) How many times does she say, “We are not taking this case”? It’s a black and white world for her.

In a lot of the cases, there is no clear “good guy”—in true film noir fashion, almost everybody has a bad side! Conversely, once she finds out some of the “behind the scenes” story, she can change her feelings, from abject disgust when she first hears about Paul McCain’s personal behavior in “The Next Murder You Hear,” to being wrapped up in the romanticism of his storytelling once she’s heard his tapes. I wonder if this is because she’d been in the modeling world, having a lot of fun up until the crime that happens to her at the beginning of the pilot, and before that, she maybe didn’t have as much experience with the flip side of human nature. David, on the other hand, had to grow up working-class, in a much different world, and he also had spent a few years as a detective before she walked in the door.

In fact, both ways of thinking, creative and realistic, can be useful, especially when you deal with cases that are based on emotional motives—such as cheating, or cheating that leads to violence. People do a lot of things based on feelings and gut reactions. (Men and women both.) So it’s not as if she’s a third wheel all the time. It’s just that, especially early on, Maddie seems to want so much for things to turn out well. She sort of digs for that good person buried in all the mess, and can be mighty let down when they’re not as they seem. She’s hopeful almost to the point of being a touch innocent, as when she has to figure out what her father did in “Every Daughter’s Father is a Virgin.” No one wants to think bad things about their own dad, but the way she talks about the matter, for most of the episode she’s in denial. She wants to wish it away, rather like she’s a younger girl, still at home and actually thinking of these people the unknowing, ‘surface’ way that kids first become acquainted with their parents. (What? Mom and Dad are part of the real world and sometimes they do bad things? Oh no! They’re going to break up! They’re going to leave me!) It’s as if she doesn’t want to acknowledge that even ‘nice’ people can do ugly things, and she wants to be protected from this aspect of them. Or, she expects people to react one way all the time, always good or always bad, and she doesn’t see that they may be some of both. As she gains experience as a detective, things change a little, but it takes time.

Maddie is very skeptical in certain matters—religion, spending decisions for the company, etc.—but not in others. For all that she’s sometimes labeled cold and unemotional, it’s clear that it’s not true—it’s just that her emotions tend to come out in the case. They are reflected in the way she reacts to the people around her.

[adyjdy]

queensgirl said:

IMore than a few times, it seems Maddie worries primarily about whether she finds what the client and/or victim did to be ethical or not, and she’ll talk about for whom she feels sympathy. Being able to justify a person’s actions can be a big problem for her.
Later on, this changes a little: note her acceptance of the McLafferty case even though she doesn’t seem to like any of the people involved. Whereas Dave, by contrast, is more businesslike and often opts to take the case no matter whether he finds the clients tasteful or not. It’s not that he doesn’t have sympathy or compassion, I think he looks at it the way cops or lawyers do—you have to do your job, there are certain procedures that must be carried out in order to work, and that’s that.

I often chalked this difference up to D's blue collar roots and M's somewhat more affluent ones too. Simply put, I don't think she understands as well as David does what it means to go without money, since she'd really always had it. In fact, when she's arguing for turning down those earlier cases, I find myself thinking this lady isn't nearly hungry enough yet.

The way you describe her innocence in those early years is great as well. She really is such a little girl in so many ways. It's really easy to like her!

And, I'M PURELY SPECULATING HERE, Isn't it interesting that as she develops as a person, (choosing money over b/w ethics; growing more distrustful in the goodness of human nature, etc.) her attraction for David grows? It makes you wonder if her attraction for him, also strengthening later in the series, wasn't partly a product of--gasp--Maddie embracing this new set of somewhat lowered standards as well. Please don't flame me! I love David, but it's just a thought.

[queensgirl]

I think you’re on to something. In the early cases, she did not seem to understand how to make money with the agency. True, in the 1980s we went through some rough economic times, but she seemed to turn down quite a few opportunities and if David hadn’t pushed her, she might not have picked up on many of them (and the attendant paychecks). Maybe she thought there would just be a lot more people coming in the door. We can expect her to be a little wet behind the ears when starting out in a different job, especially since it seemed to be her first in the regular 9-to-5 environment, but sooner or later she would have to adapt to her new surroundings.

She also underestimates how weird and dangerous many of the cases would be. Not a difficult thing to do, as who could have foreseen she’d need to know how to handle running from a crazy person with a laser cannon, or taking a flying leap off a roof! They seem to be cursed with bad luck—so often, the clients turn out to be either part of the crime, or else shifty and nasty in some way. Thus, quite a few times, no one seems to be offering to pay them. That’s partly a lack of a ‘nose for business,’ and partly due to the unpreventable quirks and dangers of their field. To their credit, though, I don’t think they ever left a case completely unsolved. (Please correct me if you remember any.)

I wondered if there might be any number of everyday cases we just don’t hear about, because those wouldn’t constitute long and interesting stories that make good plots for the show. You probably can’t write an hour’s episode about finding a cat or doing background checks on the new employees of a corporation. (These days, a lot of agencies actually do the latter type of thing. I’ve had to sign release forms the last couple of times I’ve applied to jobs. Don’t worry, I’m clean. )

I think the first time she starts to use a healthy sense of suspicion is in “Knowing Her.” David very nearly runs off with this woman, and that would have been his undoing. David interprets this as Maddie’s jealousy, which is part of the truth, but the other half is that she is canny enough to see when things are going wrong. Without her as an extra observer, poor lovestruck Dave might never have been heard from again. I mean that quite literally, considering what sort of person Jillian turned out to be.

She goes through times of the giddy attitude versus the skeptic on and off during the second season. We can see her at the former extreme during “Portrait of Maddie,” when she’s very sorry for the deceased man, but at the same time happy that somebody was so interested in her (before he died). By the time of “In God We Strongly Suspect,” though, once she pushes past her initial distaste for these people, she is quite adept at figuring out some of the tricky details of the case. She goes to see the magician, and then at the end, hides out in the morgue and waits for the doctor to come along. The Maddie of the first few episodes would have run screaming out of the room. Remember her objections to going into the dive bar in “Gunfight”—not just because there were nasty people in there, but also because Dave wanted her to mess up her outfit.

David tries to hint at something important a few times—Maddie actually does have talent for this detective business, has a mind that’s good at working on complicated puzzles, and should perhaps have more confidence and give herself a chance. “You’re Maddie Hayes,” he says, I think during ‘Atlas Belched,’ “a far bigger fish than Lou LaSalle will ever be.” Every so often, when he’s not royally ticked off at her, he actually throws her a few big compliments, and urges her to stick with a problem until it’s solved. Dave grew up having to really dig for everything he had. Maddie’s world was quite a bit different. (Not that modeling isn’t work, but it’s another circle entirely.) Even though there are times she doesn’t like him at all, we have to admit she learns from him.

She becomes more of a questioner from perhaps the middle of the second season onward. By the early third season, she has a sense of the different shades of human nature Jim Thompson would have admired. There are few times she comes close to just wanting to give up. The notable exception is “The Man Who Cried Wife,” but that seems to be because she is even more aware of how bad these people are. The series opens with a Maddie who is so little used to moving among general circles of society that she’s quite stunned to find out what people can be like, as if she’s a tourist in the real world; the Maddie of year three has had quite an education, thank you very much. With the McLafferty case, she is keen to accept because they need to make money (nothing wrong with that), and even says to David that “maybe fidelity is not so black-and-white.” This is the person who used to slap people if they said a bad word to her.

As hard as it is to put up with Dave sometimes, he is for her an invaluable introduction to the warts-and-all reality of life. Being a detective, much like being a cop or lawyer, involves seeing people at their worst. It’s a steady stream of thieves, cheaters and gun-wielding ne’er-do-wells. If Maddie had kept her blinders on as she was at the beginning of the series, she might never have survived.