October 14, 2008

That’s an intriguing line from The First Born–Joe doesn’t yet know that Clay is his half brother and tells him that his Pa has said that his mother was like having spring in the house year-round.  The Marie we see in Marie My Love is very bitter and not spring-like at all.  It’s hard to reconcile the picture painted of her in The First Born with the woman portrayed in Marie My Love.  Why would Ben fall in love with someone so bitter and angry with the world?

A couple of months ago, I started a WHI for Marie My Love (MML).  There’s been a discussion on one of the BZ boards about episodes we wish we could change and MML seems to be one that lots of people (not just me) wish had been written with Marie portrayed differently.  My version will only go as far as her marriage to Ben or maybe her arrival on the Ponderosa.  I want to explore what really happened to make Jean leave, why Madame de Marigny hated her so much, and how Ben’s arrival in her life made her willing to put the past behind her and live only for the future she could build with him. 

If Marie was anything like Joe, she was quick-tempered, a bit of a flirt, and enjoyed a good time; however, that’s not the Marie we get in MML.  We get to see how Adam is like his mother in some ways in Elizabeth My Love and how Hoss is like his mother in Inger My Love and Journey Remembered.  Marie deserved a better episode and especially a follow up. 

Hope to have my WHI finished and posted before the end of the year.

September 7, 2008

What Happened Instead

• A Tangled Web (Inspired by The Lady From Baltimore)
• A Hatful of Guilt (Inspired by No Less A Man)
• Devil’s Bargain (Inspired by Death at Dawn)
• Fevered Dreams (Inspired by The Savage)

What Happened Next

• The Swedish Grizzly (Some missing scenes for Old Sheba)
• Ponderosa Pachyderm (WHN for Old Sheba)
• No More Security (WHN for The Hayburner)
• Seeds of Doubt (WHN for The Lawmaker)

September 6, 2008

Some episodes just seem to have huge plotholes that beg for a What Happened Instead (WHI) story.  For me, one of those was The Lady From Baltimore.  Adam and Joe have disagreed before but why did Adam ask Pa if he could leave for Tucson after being seen kissing Melinda?  From the beginning, she was fascinated with Adam even though her mother insisted that she trap Joe into proposing.  It didn’t make much sense to me that Adam would leave (and take Hoss with him), which is why I wrote a WHI where Melinda decided to accuse Adam of trying to rape her when Joe and Ben came upon them kissing at the forge. 

Some stories seemed as if they should have continued for an extra scene (or maybe several) or had a sequel.  I really wish the Cartwrights had kept Sheba for a while, so I wrote a What Happened Next (WHN) where the elephant was used for harvesting timber for a railroad contract.

I’ll be posting the motivation(s) for my WHIs/WHNs here.