ATWT: Another Doomed Wedding

Monday, August 2nd:

This episode alone just goes to show the annoyances that can really made a potentially decent show suffer. First of all, again, lack of Noah is driving me insane. Especially when we go back to the fact that the Snyders have made an extra special effort in order to have Noah as a part of the family. Hell, they just did this two months ago! It made no sense not to have him on. Not just that, but there could have been some great awkward scenes between Noah, Luke, and Reid to spice things up. It could also help make this storyline an actual TRIANGLE, which this mess is not.

And the logistics are a joke, as usual. Craig somehow conveniently makes it back to the US from France by the show’s end but Holden and Lily do not? Um, no. I really do not understand the writing process with this show.

Tuesday, August 3rd:

Okay, this is one rare instance where I actually see Reid’s side on something. No matter how I feel about the guy generally and even though this is not coming from a Luke/Reid fan I can't say I'd blame him for at least wanting to take it to the next level. Basically I put myself in Reid’s shoes and said to myself: “If I were in a relationship with Luke, would I want to take it to a physical level?” The answer to this question is a resounding and overwhelming “yes.” So, no, I can't blame Reid for simply putting the message out there. I would do the same and I would be hoping too.

But this week shows one of the problems I have with Reid’s character and why I can‘t like him as much as I possibly could. It’s nice that Reid respects Luke’s views on sex in a relationship, and stuff like the scenes with Molly weren’t bad either. But the problem is that if they’re trying to loosen this guy up and tone him down, it’s done inconsistently. It almost reminds me of Dallas. Reid began to tone himself down then too, but the progress was thrown out for the plot. Or they have him act a complete fool and within the last 5 minutes have him hold a baby or fix a teddy bear, like it’s supposed to erase all the nastiness that occurred. It’s why Reid’s rant to Noah about treating Luke like garbage smacked of blatant hypocrisy. It also renders scenes like Luke teaching Reid manners useless because with what happened on the 2nd and 3rd alone we’ve seen that Reid can be nice or at least tolerable with other people without being coached by anyone.

This is one of many examples of lazy writing to me and it really does characters on the show a disservice and proves why in soap storytelling, character driven material owns really hard over plot driven material.