#fanote

like, maddie setting up the schedule is maybe partly her response to what happened with her ppd and also partly to the trauma of him almost dying and him being out of reach in a coma, but it also makes sense as also partly because of the lawsuit and/or tsunami and his aftermath of loneliness. but there’s not really a hint of that connection to it made in the show. (or even the lawsuit aftermath why he doesn’t like the hovering, connecting it to the way people blamed him for his pulmonary embolism - which the show still does - how that distrust he doesn’t know his own body is hitting him hard because right now he doesn’t quite trust his own body, his doctor is running constant scans and he feels fine but he did before too...  it even felt like a new conversation when 6x12 was about his potential relentlessness and implication he didn’t need/want to go back to work immediately, rather something in response to s3.)

or, however I feel about the show doing it, they did have the buckley parents at the hospital, which is in direct opposition to the bombing (harder to visually parallel maybe since the show jumped from his first night in the hospital to his being at home to re-certifying, but still a parallel) and their absence.

or for an episode  (and its lead-up) that centered on the bobby-buck parent-child relationship, and the last time show went so heavy or verbal about it was around the lawsuit, there was nothing there either. and like yeah, buck-bobby are in a different (stronger) place, and bobby wasn’t going to hold him back, and it could showcase how their relationship & trust has grown, but the show didn’t set-up so the lawsuit would be compared at all.

the couch is the romantic relationship metaphor, but there’s also something to margaret getting the couch so he could recover on it, the same place he had to recover from his leg and that ali walked away from him when they were sitting on it and really the first major scene of how much being a firefighter means to buck. 

but the real reason I don’t even think that was their goal is because you have the exact same situation happening with chim, and the narrative is overall painting him as wrong for also not forgiving his dad, and there’s even less weight to the argument it’s about chim’s self-healing and not actually about forgiving him for Jee-Yun.

My main problem with how the Buckley parents appeared in 6x10 is because the show, as it quite honestly very often does, completely forgot to take into account the passage of time and how audiences - and I’m not even getting into fandom watching members of it, but times the feeling by about 5 bajillion for them – will build the story in the moments not shown. Consciously or subconsciously, the audience assumed very specific things about the Buckley parents and what would happen post-massive secret breakout, and then waited TWO years before telling the audience, actually, everything became a-ok off screen and just assume that one minor line about therapy sessions five minutes after they were on-screen was true, and worked, and also don’t forget even though this is a show built on found family, blood can get away with anything and frankly, children, you should be saying sorry to them, check and mate.

[The emails to Maddie while she was in Boston don’t count because a) while both are fucking awful, Maddie and Buck do have fundamentally different relationships with their parents, and them “trying” (LOOSE TERM) for Jee-Yun fits with what we saw but also says nothing about how they mended their relationship with Buck; and b) IIRC the emails were in the background to the true emails with Chim that were centered on screen, and while I have great respect for props/set designs, it cannot tell the whole story when it comes to emotional beats; they enhance, they do not do all the work for the characters.]

Now, them being fake veneer nice, that works. A whole airport ride talking about weather cause they can’t talk about anything else? Perfect. Family just pretending the last time they saw each other wasn’t Buck screaming love me anyway, finding out about his dead bro and the 30-yr family secret, and then self-destructing to a borderline suicide level, sure, who doesn’t completely pretend family blowouts from the previous get together didn’t happen at the next get together. Buck forgiving them, and blowing past the fact reasons don’t equal excuses, and they never actually apologized or even really acknowledged what they did to any of their children, that’s in-character. (That’s in-character because of the self-esteem they built into him, which is an extra layer of crunchy.)  I’m fine with that. I find it fucked up, but I don’t think it’s a bad story.

But as seen in 6x10 and continued in 6x11, they did a 150° (not a complete about face) and while there is a lot to be said about the conversations happening in-between dialogue, we are also given Sang Han and that storyline at the same time. [Side note: will you please fucking give Chim some narrative room for his traumas, jfc.]  And we basically got the same story: sibling with the vastly different relationship brings their parents to their home as a surprise, forcing them to interact with parents who were emotionally neglectful at minimum, parents are excused from apologizing for their massive fucking parenting failures as a whole, parents are excused from the fact that the first/last interaction we saw of them were them being massive dicks to their children, and then the child is made to make the effort in accepting their parents because their grandchild “deserves” to have them finally show up. And while I assume there is something more that’s going to happen with Chim’s dad (…that kind of feels optimistic, because again Chim does not get the same narrative time for emotional arcs, but I’m still assuming his dad is dying and Albert knows), as of now that is a very particular narrative argument for this show to be making, and I actually loathe it.

-        Whether you think it’s a good excuse or not (I am VERY MUCH in the NOT camp, being greedy about your grief and “feeling like a failure” don’t make up for 30+ years of shitty parenting that borderlines neglect/abandonment, and was dismissive when it was around), they are forgiven on the virtue of being parents, not because they actually apologized or acknowledged what they did wrong

-        The reason the effort is being shown now is because of the grandchild. Despite it being shitty parent behavior 102, YOU DON’T GET TO MAKE UP TO YOUR CHILDREN BY SHOWING UP FOR YOUR GRANDCHILDREN

-        You can forgive someone without continuing the relationship with them. You can forgive someone for yourself without excusing them

-        You don’t have to accept apologies, esp when they are extremely late, and esp when someone else is saying it on their behalf

-        For a show about found family, which is usually (at least in media) because the blood family is shit, this show has been emphasizing the importance of blood (connected but not quite, I am not expecting a good ending to either the sperm donor arc or Denny’s biodad’s arc). While we see the firefam join Buck’s room after he wakes up, and we specifically see him and Bobby in the hospital room, we are still seeing his bio-parents bring him home, and whatever he said in “letting them go” in the coma!dream (the only sign this was an effort of self-healing and not the narrative saying the buckley parents are ok now), that has weight. Margaret buying a new couch and implied taking over his design choices and Buck just letting it go, that has weight.

One of the main emotional journeys of Eddie’s story is that as a father he wants to do better than his father; he falters, he makes mistakes, he’s made some bad choices, but as he put it, he never stops trying, and we see that. Now, whether Ramon should get forgiveness, that is subjective, but the show made a point with him that he heard what Eddie said to him, he acknowledged that Eddie was right, and he made the starting effort to connect with his son, to better their relationship. The (male) Diaz family as a whole is basically about breaking the cycle, and Ramon took a step in that too.  Whether he was actually redeemed or deserved a relationship after what he did, whether the show did it well or not, the show did make an effort to say one was required, that what Ramon did and didn’t think was a big deal had long lasting affects on Eddie, and Ramon should know that.  

That’s not what happened with the Buckleys or Hans. Everything they did gets waved away because they “did their best” (NO THEY DID NOT, and even if they did, it wouldn’t fix what they broke) and that’s enough for their kids to accept the unspoken apology. The change is surface level and rooted in their grandchild; Roman’s change, meanwhile, was about his relationship with his son outside of his relationship with Christopher (Eddie specifically told him he was doing this for himself.) This show is very big on forgiveness, second chances, moving forward, but there is a notable difference in how they did it with Ramon (Eddie made the choice to accept it without outside interference for one) vs the Buckleys and Han. I wasn’t expecting the show to let them go no contact (though, that’s the dream), but Chim is also repeatedly made to feel wrong for wanting to do so. Even if everything else was different, if Sang made legitimate apologies and acknowledgments, Chim STILL wouldn’t be wrong for wanting to be no contact with his dad. Forgiveness does not always come with a relationship, but 911 has been treating them like because they are blood, they will always get another chance, and that chance means what they want it to mean, not their child.