And did anyone else think he hung onto that sucker for way too long? Someone peed on it! Unexpected pregnancies are a tired, season finale trope hello, Tami Taylor on FNL that benefit from a summer hiatus, which allows writers to shrink a ninth month process down to less than four.
Is it wrong to think the eldest Braverman has his hands full with Haddie and Max? How will Kristina ever go back into a political career with a toddler? Parenthood is best when it showcases its actors ability to put their own gut-wrenching spin on these aged plot lines, but are you on board with this one? Are you behind the pregnancy plot line, PopWatchers? In a pivotal season-four storyline, Amber's younger brother, Drew Miles Heizer , impregnated his girlfriend and she eventually decided to have an abortion, rather than become a teen mother.
It was one of only a handful of storylines involving abortion to actually end in an abortion in TV history, and it was moving television. Additionally, a character on Friday Night Lights , the previous show from Parenthood showrunner Jason Katims, chose to have an abortion as well. And Parenthood actually clears the hurdle of having Amber honestly consider her options in this circumstance.
By episode's end, she seems genuinely conflicted about what to do. But, c'mon, she's having the baby. She's a character trapped in a TV show in its final season, and that final season is going to end with somebody giving birth, dammit, to better copy the movie that gave the TV series its name. And it might as well be her. The problem here isn't that Amber will decide to keep the child.
That's absolutely a wonderful choice for her to make, and Amber is going to make a kick-ass mother, given everything we know about her. The problem is that Parenthood 's story gravity — the force that keeps drawing all storylines toward it — necessitates that the show not really deal with how truly difficult this situation would be for her. There's simply no time to really dig into the complexities of this situation.
For one thing, there's simply no time to really dig into the complexities of this situation. The story essentially has to conclude with the high of Amber giving birth. And while childbirth is incredibly painful, in this circumstance, it would function only as a prelude to everything else that's dramatically interesting about being a single mother.
In TV terms, stories about women carrying pregnancies to term and giving birth are a dime a dozen. Stories about single mothers struggling to make ends meet or dropping everything to take care of a sick kid or just trying to find the time to bond with their child are considerably rarer, since TV is almost completely addicted to nuclear families.
Interestingly, the show did a bit of this with Amber's own mother, Sarah, but her kids were old enough that Sarah didn't have to set aside quite as much of her time for them as Amber would for an infant. But because the show is also self-consciously setting this final season up as a tale of the great cycle of life and death, this means that the birth of Amber's child becomes the flipside of what looks to be her grandfather's death.
It's entirely possible his health scare will be just that, but somebody is dying this season. Katims is too great a student of TV history to not put a tear-jerking death somewhere in the final stretch of episodes. And maybe there's some rough parallelism in that — between the way a woman's body changes when she's with child and the way all of our bodies change as we age — but the show has a whole bunch of other characters to service in just 12 more episodes.
For instance, it seems likely that estranged couple Joel and Julia will work their way back toward each other somewhere in the course of this final season after the show did such deliberate work at shattering their marriage last season , and there's got to be time for the revived relationship between Sarah and Hank which will now involve greater amounts of time spent with his daughter from his first marriage.
And that's to say nothing of Adam and Kristina starting a new charter school, or whatever it is the show can cook up for Crosby to do, or all of the other side characters the writers will want to give an elegant exit as the show moves toward closure.
There's lots of stuff to do, and so little time. And that's almost certainly going to result in Amber's pregnancy becoming a kind of happy ending to any grief the season causes the other characters.
The other characters will rally around their family member as any good Braverman would , and maybe even the father will come back and renew his commitment to the mother of his child. The temptations will be too great, and neither Parenthood nor Katims has ever been all that great at resisting temptation.
It's always dangerous to speculate about TV storylines in their infancy, because it's so very easy for writers to trip them up. Brace yourself, Parenthood fans. The Braverman clan is about to expand. The two new additions are certainly cause for celebration, but after Julia and Joel tried unsuccessfully for months to have a child of their own, Kristina's unplanned pregnancy will be a tough pill to swallow.
Christensen's on-screen husband is already bracing for a rough patch between the two families. I think it may be a little hard for her to adjust to suddenly the other Bravermans getting a chance," Jaeger said. Learning to accept Kristina and Adam's stroke of luck is just one of the obstacles Julia and Joel will have to overcome in the months ahead. There's also breaking the news to the family about their own baby plans.
Watch full episodes of Parenthood.
0コメント