So now that I’ve had both time to process everything that happened and nurse what can only be described as an epic hangover, let me get this off my chest.
Let’s be honest here, I tried. And I suppose maybe it was me projecting my own values and standards onto the show, but I desperately wanted to believe that what was coming across as Eleanor’s increasingly erratic behaviour would serve some narrative purpose.
The one scene in this episode I thought served the character well was her scene in the fort with Vane. It makes absolute, perfect sense. Yes, we all know Richard Guthrie was a liar and a scumbag, but to Eleanor, he was her only family. Even Mr. Scott whom we believed was far closer to a paternal father to Eleanor turned out to only be using her in the end. To Eleanor, just when she had made peace with her father, he was taken from her. She wasn’t allowed to even reap the benefits of her work. It’s the ego of it. It’s that Vane ‘snatched her father from her in the night.’ It was that Vane had made her feel powerless and she hadn’t even been able to enjoy the one moment she’d always yearned for.
And her reaction to Vane, that downright primal scream, was the first time we saw Eleanor in an active role this season. When she beat up an injured and chained man who did not even try to defend himself it was almost animalistic, something terribly raw and primal. A physical lashing out from someone who had lost everything, who had gambled and lost, and who was left with nothing.
It was a violent, cruel and physical reaction of someone who was faced with their own helplessness.
That I got. I was there for that.
After that I braced myself for what I’d been preparing all this season:
Eleanor’s moment of Catharsis.
Vane had dumped a scalding bowl of hot truth on her lap, and she had hated him for it.
But, I figured, someone had finally made Eleanor have to face all those things she had never faced throughout this whole season.
Eleanor, I thought, could no longer hide. She no longer had the illusion of a repentant father to justify her escape from Nassau.
The time had come for Eleanor to face the truth and wake up. It was time for Eleanor Guthrie’s character to face some serious catharsis.
The moment simply never came.
Eleanor freaked out on the fort, but that was it.
Nothing. No follow through. No consequence.
I don’t even want to do a wordcount on how many posts I spent doing logistic circles trying to figure out what the writers intended for Eleanor from the first episode of this season, trying to figure out what I thought *must* have been some subtext hidden under all that hand wringing and pouting.
But with that episode it just became apparent that there was no subtext. There was no ulterior motive.
It wasn’t that Eleanor’s character was under some deep conflict as I believed, it was that she, indeed, had lacked a want for this *entire season.*
She didn’t want revenge, she didn’t want to run, she didn’t want to hide, she didn’t want to escape.
She just simply was there, and the problem is simple: When a character doesn’t want anything, any conflict involving them is going to become hollow.
Conflict can be born out of many thingsl; two people wanting the same thing, two people wanting opposing things, two people vying for the same position.
But when you have a character who doesn’t want anything, whatever conflict they present is absolutely hollow. It’s false conflict, and nothing, I guarantee you nothing, bores an audience more than false conflict.
Despite what I believed, Eleanor had become an antagonistic force simply in order to be an antagonistic force. She had no personal end goal. She had no ulterior motive fueling all her decisions. She stopped being.
The truth is, alcohol or not, I didn’t hate Eleanor Guthrie by the end of that episode.
And that, I believe, is infinitely worse.
I didn’t hate her when the camera panned to her when Vane hung. I didn’t care about her talking to Max. I didn’t care about her conversation with Rogers.
I no longer cared about the character.
For one season she’s been sitting around and, it turns out, she’s wanted nothing. She’s been working for nothing. She’s been entirely reactive based on an outside force. There has been no internal drive no matter how badly I wanted to believe there was one.
And every writer knows: If a character doesn’t want *something*, the audience won’t have anything to care about. This is basic, basic, basic shit. Everyone has to want something. And it turns out all Eleanor wanted was whatever Rogers wanted. That’s simply not good enough for any character. Had she only wanted what Vane wanted or only wanted what Flint wanted it would have been equally bad, but for two seasons we saw that Eleanor Guthrie always had an ulterior and personal motive.
To root for a character to fail or to root for a character to succeed is still to care about that character.
But to sit there and feel that the story has come to a dead and grinding halt every time the character is on screen?
I didn’t hate Eleanor Guthrie, I just nothinged her. It wasn’t that I wished she didn’t exist or anything. She just no longer held any interest because now I knew she had no personal stakes. She’s Roger’s stand in and his second in command and that’s about it.
I honestly would have preferred that there had been something in her to hate. That we had *seen* her being a hypocrite. But her decision to hang Vane didn’t come from pettiness, or revenge, or her being a hypocrite. It came because it was convenient to the story. She seriously gained nothing by hanging Vane, not even a personal victory. She had that when she got to beat him physically and lash out over her father’s death.
So I suppose when the alcohol faded I found I changed my mind. I do believe Eleanor was badly written.
That her blank ‘Ofcourse I love you’ was meant as sincere. That she simply fell in step behind Rogers’ command and ceded every ounce of power she once had and we never even saw her coming to that decision, when we were introduced to her as someone who had fought over simply being known as someone’s ‘girl.’ These aren’t hateabale qualities to me, they just. I don’t know. It makes it feel like the character has slowly been fading away this season, and by the second to last episode without having some hope of an ulterior motive coming to light, I just found I no longer cared.
