Post by queensgirl on Feb 20, 2006 3:39:01 GMT -5
Throughout the early years of the series, and especially the four-episode cycle, Maddie and David struggle to express their feelings to one another. Were they more often prevented from being able to speak their minds, or were they motivated by fear of getting hurt?
At times they’ll get in an argument and the whole possibility of the moment will be swept away by the anger. Other times, something comes out of the past to remind them of what scared them before, and their attempt to get close again slows to a halt.
Then there are times when they seem to be on the verge of saying what’s really there. Think of the opening of “Symphony,” when it seems each of them has dreamed of how to take the other on a date for a long time. Earlier, there was Maddie calling herself an “idiot” when David seemed to be going back to Jillian in “Knowing Her.” There’s David and his legendary race against Sam.
So. Maddie and David are both adults, why should they be scared to just get their feelings out in the open? Or, were they trying to do so, but something always seems to be getting in the way?
Maddie flew all the way to New York to support David during his brother-in-law’s funeral, in “Big Man on Mulberry Street.” She didn’t have to do that; in fact, hadn’t been asked to. Maddie really gets torn up by the fact that she can’t go with David to the funeral. I mean, she cries and throws a fit. About a funeral. That is extremely important, right there—she wanted that much to be with him. David is completely confused as to why she’d be so eager to go, as well as needs to cover up the real identity of his ex-wife, but why would Maddie feel so strongly about it? There is, of course, the jealousy—she as yet doesn’t know what really happened behind the scenes, and at this point still thinks the ‘competition’ between David and the former wife was another man. Still, she really had invested quite a strong well of emotions in the idea of protecting David, and now that it appeared he didn’t need her or want her around, where was all that to go?
Jealousy is different, but it does stem ultimately from wishing you could be the primary person in somebody’s life. She wanted to show she cared about him, yet not be caught doing that “in so many words.”
A thought here—what did she believe he would think, after she showed up? What else was he supposed to believe? This is really quite funny here, not to be mean at all, but it seems like Maddie is playing this little schoolgirl’s game—I’ll show I like him, but I don’t want to cross the line yet. So how much can I say to have him catch on, but sort of not have a hold on me as well?
In “The Man Who Cried Wife,” there’s that stunning scene of Maddie just wandering down the hall, wishing David would come walking in, and he doesn’t actually show up until much later. Her entire posture and the way she behaves screams that she wants him to be there. Yet when he does arrive, although she has some reason to, she picks a fight with him. She can justify being angry about his breaking instructions. However, it’s clear from the way she was moping and hugging her elbows and idling in the hall that she was dying to have him come back. How is she going to burn off this tension without him guessing what was one of the real reasons underneath?
Ahem.
Like kids on the playground, they cover up the fact that they like each other by starting a fight. This one’s real, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
One of the few mutual situations they’re able to get into at this point is in “Symphony.” And it works just great, until weirdness breaks out and both ‘dates’ go to heck in a hand basket. ;D They appeared to be on the verge of saying some very important things; when the first date begins, Maddie is going crazy with joy, David is riding the wave, and it’s only a little later that disaster interrupts. This being the story world, things can’t go right for long. ;D
Then there’s David’s side of the coin.
David literally begs Maddie to tell him what’s hurting her in “Blonde.” He says some very meaningful things, and although we realize this is the way the drama has to develop, she rebuts him at first with her refusal to talk, and then blazes out of the gate with her declaration of wild abandon. So, it can be taken that David was just about ready to do something serious, and then she threw that curveball, and everything went someplace different.
On to the comedy of errors in “Blonde on Blonde.” David ran around trying to save Maddie from what he feared would be some mysterious treachery; he gets the daylights knocked out of him, then winds up in jail, where it takes the lady in the cell next to him, plus the crazy inmates on the other side, and the cops themselves to finally badger him into getting over his fear and just telling the truth.
Then the enemy shows up at the door of Maddie's house, and it’s back to square one. We don’t know where David ends up that night, at home or off to kill his sorrow in several bars, but the next day he looks like he’d been run over. Must have been a nightmare.
Although David’s been bounced around pretty roughly, he still decides to go chasing off to the dinner between Maddie and his rival. He butts in, and is blushing up a storm, trying desperately to get these crazy words out, when just in time, the other man comes back to the table. Arrrrrrrgh! Foiled again! (I think the timing was absolutely no accident—I think Sam knew this was one of the few weapons available to him.)
In “Sam and Dave,” there is that speech of his, once again straddling the line between open confession and trying to cover up his feelings as something else, where he yells at Maddie about “wanting to throw two years of hard work down the drain.”
Whoa! Stop the horses!
When David says Maddie is “acting irresponsibly,” since he has not let on that he knows who Sam is and that Maddie spent part of the night at a bar, David is on the edge of a Freudian slip here. Maddie walked into work late. Not good, all right, but certainly not the end of the world, and not even close to the equivalent of career-ending irresponsibility. (Maddie has a point—Dave should be the one to talk!) Clearly he is referring to her escapade of the night before, but he hasn’t told her just exactly what he means by this. (We know.) That’s why Maddie’s so angry—how does her ‘sleeping through the alarm’ equal his legendary feats of debauchery? It doubtless confuses the heck out of her that he should be so worked up over what is comparatively a footnote in the mess-ups of life.
The proposal from Sam hasn’t even happened yet, but they are definitely getting very close in a hurry. That scares the bejeezus out of David. He may be thinking that’s where she and Sam are headed, even if it hasn’t been said.
Now why, exactly, would her staying out late, dating somebody, or even getting married mean throwing the years of work down the drain?
Most women no longer quit work right after getting married. Even when children come along, with day care, the mother is often able to go back to work fairly soon. Would he expect Maddie to quit if she wound up with the astronaut, since she might very well not need her day job at Blue Moon anymore? That’s a possibility. Still, Maddie being who she is, you never know, she might not want to stop working anyway. So what exactly is David talking about when he says she’d be throwing something away?
We know.
Watch that scene; he is clearly far more torn up than you would think over the mere prospect of not seeing someone at the office. We all know what he means, and it’s not closing case files or sending off the bills.
And that line of his. “When was the last time I sent you on a stakeout so that I could go out and get…”
Oho nelly! I have no idea how David gets away with this one. Not only does Maddie very nearly bust him saying something he definitely shouldn’t say to his boss, but David is jumping the gun, imagining all sorts of things that are going to happen between Ms. Hayes and her boyfriend if he himself isn’t the one to be there instead.
David stops and mumbles an apology. But clearly he’s driving himself crazy. This is really torturing him.
In “Maddie’s Turn to Cry,” David sort of moves into the background, as it’s time for Maddie to show what she’s going through. She had asked Dave what he really meant to say when he came to the dinner. He made up the fib about Herbert getting a detective license. Now, even Dave ought to know that’s not going to pass the laugh test. If the subject was really Bert on the previous night, that should have taken Dave precisely five seconds to explain; it could have even waited until the next day at the office. But no. What he did instead was walk up to the couple, refuse to leave, blush like a madman while obviously getting ready to say something very important, and once the other man came back, proceed to still sit there all night and drink the entire contents of a winery vat.
Just to talk about Bert Viola getting a license.
Yeah. Uh-huh. And the sun rises in the west.
I’ve often wondered why David thought his excuse would fly with Maddie. I mean, he was so wasted at that dinner; you’d never get that worked up about just promoting an employee, not in a million years. What was he thinking?
When Maddie goes to see Dave, and is this time determined to get the real answer out of him, David once more stalls. Maddie also talks around the true issue. She claims to be there to talk about the case.
Ha ha.
She too fails at her little attempt to pretend this is not about what it’s about. She leans sobbing onto his chest. “What are we going to do?”
Indeed.
In the middle of thinking about this slightly important development, Maddie comes up with the puzzling question about the case: how could the woman’s makeup be perfect if she’d shot herself? Hello, ‘prevented’ again. They run off to question the husband and then the mystery lady is found there too. And it’s time for a drive, and then why not some bowling? ;D
This time it was Maddie who was on the verge of saying something very serious, but then got sidetracked. Good ol’ reality jumps up again. Just when we thought we were getting somewhere!
Forward to “I Am Curious.” When Maddie gets to the office, David, having heard of the proposal from the source, is already in a pique.
Yet notice as he chases her up and down the hallway, he can’t bring himself to say those words. He says, “He asked you, didn’t he?” instead of the full sentence, “He asked you to get married, didn’t he?” (And the first thing he said in her office was, “Why didn’t you tell me?”)
Why can’t he get all the words out?
Is it because he’s tired of hiding the fact he’s already been talking to Sam and feuding with him since they met at the door? Tired of hiding how he feels about Maddie? Or is it because he can’t stand being upstaged by the fact that the other man worked up the nerve to ask her first? (Remember David’s very startling lines in “Father Knows Last.” Remember why he says he really went to the door that night in “Blonde on Blonde.” Anybody who had just been to jail, even with pressing matters on his heart, would logically try to head home and get some sleep. Not David. He had other things on his mind.)
Was he ever really afraid to say what was on his mind, or was something else always just getting in his way?
Once they’re back in her office, Dave says, “I just want to talk to you about this.”
Maddie: “What difference will it make?”
David (shocked): “It’ll make a lot of difference.” Oh really now, will it? ;D
Maddie pushes back. Literally. She puts a hand over his heart and makes him backpedal.
And in one of the most striking moments ever, he says nothing. Clams up. Just rock solid total silence.
That always shocked me. I don’t care how many times I see it, it still does. It’s like a thunderbolt. It’s pure anguish. David Addison, of all people, and at a moment like this in particular, has nothing to say.
Even after Maddie hammers home the questions about how he feels about her, to the point that she echoes the traditional phrase of objection in a wedding ceremony, David can’t come up with words that will make her stop or change her mind. Is it that he can’t, or he doesn’t want to? Is he deliberately holding back because he is so shaken and angry? Does he fail to object because he thinks he can’t compete with the other man? (Does Maddie take this as a signal that he doesn’t care after all and doesn’t really oppose her being with Sam?)
Incredible.
Despite the power of the look on his face, I still have to wonder why David couldn’t say anything at all. Especially since he’s the one who started this fight!
(And does Maddie really want him to make her stop? Look at her when she says “Speak now…” She’s almost tearing up. This could tie in with the idea that what she said at the beginning of "Blonde on Blonde" really was a dare. It’s all to provoke David into saying what his own feelings are.)
Later, in the garage, David blocks the car. When they stop, he pounds on the window and yells at Maddie. “I want to talk to you. Get out of the car!” In the fight, when David is knocked down on the floor he again says that he “just wanted to talk to her.”
I always wondered what would have happened had this chance come true. What if Maddie had stepped out of the car, told Sam something like, “At least I’ll get him to leave,” and then gone to the side to hear whatever Dave had to say? Would Dave have been able to go through with it at last? Or would he have frozen up again?
No wonder the final sequence in “I Am Curious” begins in confusion and rage. It’s all been bottled up, for both of them, for so long that it almost couldn’t be any other way.
At times they’ll get in an argument and the whole possibility of the moment will be swept away by the anger. Other times, something comes out of the past to remind them of what scared them before, and their attempt to get close again slows to a halt.
Then there are times when they seem to be on the verge of saying what’s really there. Think of the opening of “Symphony,” when it seems each of them has dreamed of how to take the other on a date for a long time. Earlier, there was Maddie calling herself an “idiot” when David seemed to be going back to Jillian in “Knowing Her.” There’s David and his legendary race against Sam.
So. Maddie and David are both adults, why should they be scared to just get their feelings out in the open? Or, were they trying to do so, but something always seems to be getting in the way?
Maddie flew all the way to New York to support David during his brother-in-law’s funeral, in “Big Man on Mulberry Street.” She didn’t have to do that; in fact, hadn’t been asked to. Maddie really gets torn up by the fact that she can’t go with David to the funeral. I mean, she cries and throws a fit. About a funeral. That is extremely important, right there—she wanted that much to be with him. David is completely confused as to why she’d be so eager to go, as well as needs to cover up the real identity of his ex-wife, but why would Maddie feel so strongly about it? There is, of course, the jealousy—she as yet doesn’t know what really happened behind the scenes, and at this point still thinks the ‘competition’ between David and the former wife was another man. Still, she really had invested quite a strong well of emotions in the idea of protecting David, and now that it appeared he didn’t need her or want her around, where was all that to go?
Jealousy is different, but it does stem ultimately from wishing you could be the primary person in somebody’s life. She wanted to show she cared about him, yet not be caught doing that “in so many words.”
A thought here—what did she believe he would think, after she showed up? What else was he supposed to believe? This is really quite funny here, not to be mean at all, but it seems like Maddie is playing this little schoolgirl’s game—I’ll show I like him, but I don’t want to cross the line yet. So how much can I say to have him catch on, but sort of not have a hold on me as well?
In “The Man Who Cried Wife,” there’s that stunning scene of Maddie just wandering down the hall, wishing David would come walking in, and he doesn’t actually show up until much later. Her entire posture and the way she behaves screams that she wants him to be there. Yet when he does arrive, although she has some reason to, she picks a fight with him. She can justify being angry about his breaking instructions. However, it’s clear from the way she was moping and hugging her elbows and idling in the hall that she was dying to have him come back. How is she going to burn off this tension without him guessing what was one of the real reasons underneath?
Ahem.
Like kids on the playground, they cover up the fact that they like each other by starting a fight. This one’s real, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.
One of the few mutual situations they’re able to get into at this point is in “Symphony.” And it works just great, until weirdness breaks out and both ‘dates’ go to heck in a hand basket. ;D They appeared to be on the verge of saying some very important things; when the first date begins, Maddie is going crazy with joy, David is riding the wave, and it’s only a little later that disaster interrupts. This being the story world, things can’t go right for long. ;D
Then there’s David’s side of the coin.
David literally begs Maddie to tell him what’s hurting her in “Blonde.” He says some very meaningful things, and although we realize this is the way the drama has to develop, she rebuts him at first with her refusal to talk, and then blazes out of the gate with her declaration of wild abandon. So, it can be taken that David was just about ready to do something serious, and then she threw that curveball, and everything went someplace different.
On to the comedy of errors in “Blonde on Blonde.” David ran around trying to save Maddie from what he feared would be some mysterious treachery; he gets the daylights knocked out of him, then winds up in jail, where it takes the lady in the cell next to him, plus the crazy inmates on the other side, and the cops themselves to finally badger him into getting over his fear and just telling the truth.
Then the enemy shows up at the door of Maddie's house, and it’s back to square one. We don’t know where David ends up that night, at home or off to kill his sorrow in several bars, but the next day he looks like he’d been run over. Must have been a nightmare.
Although David’s been bounced around pretty roughly, he still decides to go chasing off to the dinner between Maddie and his rival. He butts in, and is blushing up a storm, trying desperately to get these crazy words out, when just in time, the other man comes back to the table. Arrrrrrrgh! Foiled again! (I think the timing was absolutely no accident—I think Sam knew this was one of the few weapons available to him.)
In “Sam and Dave,” there is that speech of his, once again straddling the line between open confession and trying to cover up his feelings as something else, where he yells at Maddie about “wanting to throw two years of hard work down the drain.”
Whoa! Stop the horses!
When David says Maddie is “acting irresponsibly,” since he has not let on that he knows who Sam is and that Maddie spent part of the night at a bar, David is on the edge of a Freudian slip here. Maddie walked into work late. Not good, all right, but certainly not the end of the world, and not even close to the equivalent of career-ending irresponsibility. (Maddie has a point—Dave should be the one to talk!) Clearly he is referring to her escapade of the night before, but he hasn’t told her just exactly what he means by this. (We know.) That’s why Maddie’s so angry—how does her ‘sleeping through the alarm’ equal his legendary feats of debauchery? It doubtless confuses the heck out of her that he should be so worked up over what is comparatively a footnote in the mess-ups of life.
The proposal from Sam hasn’t even happened yet, but they are definitely getting very close in a hurry. That scares the bejeezus out of David. He may be thinking that’s where she and Sam are headed, even if it hasn’t been said.
Now why, exactly, would her staying out late, dating somebody, or even getting married mean throwing the years of work down the drain?
Most women no longer quit work right after getting married. Even when children come along, with day care, the mother is often able to go back to work fairly soon. Would he expect Maddie to quit if she wound up with the astronaut, since she might very well not need her day job at Blue Moon anymore? That’s a possibility. Still, Maddie being who she is, you never know, she might not want to stop working anyway. So what exactly is David talking about when he says she’d be throwing something away?
We know.
Watch that scene; he is clearly far more torn up than you would think over the mere prospect of not seeing someone at the office. We all know what he means, and it’s not closing case files or sending off the bills.
And that line of his. “When was the last time I sent you on a stakeout so that I could go out and get…”
Oho nelly! I have no idea how David gets away with this one. Not only does Maddie very nearly bust him saying something he definitely shouldn’t say to his boss, but David is jumping the gun, imagining all sorts of things that are going to happen between Ms. Hayes and her boyfriend if he himself isn’t the one to be there instead.
David stops and mumbles an apology. But clearly he’s driving himself crazy. This is really torturing him.
In “Maddie’s Turn to Cry,” David sort of moves into the background, as it’s time for Maddie to show what she’s going through. She had asked Dave what he really meant to say when he came to the dinner. He made up the fib about Herbert getting a detective license. Now, even Dave ought to know that’s not going to pass the laugh test. If the subject was really Bert on the previous night, that should have taken Dave precisely five seconds to explain; it could have even waited until the next day at the office. But no. What he did instead was walk up to the couple, refuse to leave, blush like a madman while obviously getting ready to say something very important, and once the other man came back, proceed to still sit there all night and drink the entire contents of a winery vat.
Just to talk about Bert Viola getting a license.
Yeah. Uh-huh. And the sun rises in the west.
I’ve often wondered why David thought his excuse would fly with Maddie. I mean, he was so wasted at that dinner; you’d never get that worked up about just promoting an employee, not in a million years. What was he thinking?
When Maddie goes to see Dave, and is this time determined to get the real answer out of him, David once more stalls. Maddie also talks around the true issue. She claims to be there to talk about the case.
Ha ha.
She too fails at her little attempt to pretend this is not about what it’s about. She leans sobbing onto his chest. “What are we going to do?”
Indeed.
In the middle of thinking about this slightly important development, Maddie comes up with the puzzling question about the case: how could the woman’s makeup be perfect if she’d shot herself? Hello, ‘prevented’ again. They run off to question the husband and then the mystery lady is found there too. And it’s time for a drive, and then why not some bowling? ;D
This time it was Maddie who was on the verge of saying something very serious, but then got sidetracked. Good ol’ reality jumps up again. Just when we thought we were getting somewhere!
Forward to “I Am Curious.” When Maddie gets to the office, David, having heard of the proposal from the source, is already in a pique.
Yet notice as he chases her up and down the hallway, he can’t bring himself to say those words. He says, “He asked you, didn’t he?” instead of the full sentence, “He asked you to get married, didn’t he?” (And the first thing he said in her office was, “Why didn’t you tell me?”)
Why can’t he get all the words out?
Is it because he’s tired of hiding the fact he’s already been talking to Sam and feuding with him since they met at the door? Tired of hiding how he feels about Maddie? Or is it because he can’t stand being upstaged by the fact that the other man worked up the nerve to ask her first? (Remember David’s very startling lines in “Father Knows Last.” Remember why he says he really went to the door that night in “Blonde on Blonde.” Anybody who had just been to jail, even with pressing matters on his heart, would logically try to head home and get some sleep. Not David. He had other things on his mind.)
Was he ever really afraid to say what was on his mind, or was something else always just getting in his way?
Once they’re back in her office, Dave says, “I just want to talk to you about this.”
Maddie: “What difference will it make?”
David (shocked): “It’ll make a lot of difference.” Oh really now, will it? ;D
Maddie pushes back. Literally. She puts a hand over his heart and makes him backpedal.
And in one of the most striking moments ever, he says nothing. Clams up. Just rock solid total silence.
That always shocked me. I don’t care how many times I see it, it still does. It’s like a thunderbolt. It’s pure anguish. David Addison, of all people, and at a moment like this in particular, has nothing to say.
Even after Maddie hammers home the questions about how he feels about her, to the point that she echoes the traditional phrase of objection in a wedding ceremony, David can’t come up with words that will make her stop or change her mind. Is it that he can’t, or he doesn’t want to? Is he deliberately holding back because he is so shaken and angry? Does he fail to object because he thinks he can’t compete with the other man? (Does Maddie take this as a signal that he doesn’t care after all and doesn’t really oppose her being with Sam?)
Incredible.
Despite the power of the look on his face, I still have to wonder why David couldn’t say anything at all. Especially since he’s the one who started this fight!
(And does Maddie really want him to make her stop? Look at her when she says “Speak now…” She’s almost tearing up. This could tie in with the idea that what she said at the beginning of "Blonde on Blonde" really was a dare. It’s all to provoke David into saying what his own feelings are.)
Later, in the garage, David blocks the car. When they stop, he pounds on the window and yells at Maddie. “I want to talk to you. Get out of the car!” In the fight, when David is knocked down on the floor he again says that he “just wanted to talk to her.”
I always wondered what would have happened had this chance come true. What if Maddie had stepped out of the car, told Sam something like, “At least I’ll get him to leave,” and then gone to the side to hear whatever Dave had to say? Would Dave have been able to go through with it at last? Or would he have frozen up again?
No wonder the final sequence in “I Am Curious” begins in confusion and rage. It’s all been bottled up, for both of them, for so long that it almost couldn’t be any other way.