| |
|
He was going to get married to Brenda. Then she spent a series fucking a succession of people relatively randomly, for reasons even she doesn't quite know, but it's something to do with committment. The season ended with the other clip shown in the previously segment - Brenda packed up her house and moved away. Yes, they were going to get married, but even Nate has a bullshit-threshold.
This is a little one-sided. In the first place I think there's a strong case for saying that the problems in Nate & Brenda's relationship followed on directly from events at the end of season 1: namely, Billy's attack on Brenda and subsequent commital, and Nate's diagnosis with AVM. In fact, I think there's a strong argument to be made that Nate's initial decision not to tell Brenda about his condition is where things start to go wrong. Okay, so Brenda is pretty screwed up by both Billy's absence from her life and the fall-out from him trying to mutilate her (as I recall the first is mentioned explicitly by her, the second you have to infer but if you think about it at all, it's pretty obvious), but I doubt she would have withdrawn into constant weed-smoking and eventually random sex with strangers were it not for the fact that Nate rapidly becomes distant and withdrawn himself. She can tell there's something he's keeping from her on some level, and this in turn prevents her from sharing everything she's going through with him (because his attention is elsewhere, and because communication between them is breaking down). By the time he does tell her, a lot of damage has been done to their relationship, with the result that it just sends her spiralling into self-destruction that much more quickly (because 'Your Brother's A Wacko & Your Fiance Is Going To Die').
Oh, and in the meantime he's fucked somebody else. Funny how a lot of people keep forgetting that technically the first person to be unfaithful in the Nate/Brenda relationship is Nate, who sleeps with Lisa when he visits Seattle, conceiving Moya the Baby Leviathan in the process. Of course, Brenda doesn't know that when she cheats on him for the first time (in the same episode wherein Nate finds out that Lisa's pregnant and we get confirmation that he slept with her), and she'd arguably "crossed the line" before that. But I think that Nate has to be assigned major culpability in the (something he admits in the final episode of season 2), or at least more culpability than a significant proportion of viewers seem willing to give him.
With Brenda's arc in season 2, I gather (and I'm basing this on interviews with Rachel Griffiths as well as the show) that the writers wanted to see if they could show a lead female character engaging in certain kinds of behaviour whilst keeping the sympathy of the viewers. I don't think they succeeded, but when I've read certain response to season 2 I get the impression this has more to do with the viewers than it does with the show. Personally, I only got really annoyed when she was using psychobabble (or worse, her 'novel') to justify her actions - Brenda's personal brand of denial is one of the most annoying I've seen. I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say that season 3 does an extremely good job of making Brenda more than likeable to surely all but the hardest hearts. With that in mind, Lisa is definitely there to remind us what was likeable about Brenda. Squirmelia, if she's annoying you so far, I fear for your eyes and television set in the next few weeks... |
|
|
