Is there some Hollywood calculus that determines that just after the mid-season break is the right time to kill off the hero's love interest's law enforcement fiancé?
I began to wonder as I watched two untimely, brutally violent, but romantically necessary deaths on Friday's back-to-back episodes of Flash Gordon and Moonlight.
Joe, the third wheel from Flash Gordon, definitely got the better death, electing to manually trigger an explosion that shares the tyrant Ming's stolen lake (yes, stolen lake) with the oppressed peoples of Mongo in order to prevent an alien implant in his brain from causing him to once again betray Flash and Dale ("Ebb and Flow"). I'm pretty sure I would do the same thing if I were ever in that position.
That's a lot more noble than what happened to Josh, Beth's prosecutor boyfriend, who was shot in the back while bound and gagged in the trunk of a drug dealer's car, the bad guy having shot him from the cabin through the back seat ("Love Lasts Forever"). And that was followed by a long scene in which Mick and Beth try to save his life, fail, and fight over Mick not having rendered Josh immortal by turning him into a vampire.
Josh has been treated pretty raggedly since his introduction as the Handsome Hurdle to Mick and Beth's love, and this death was the culmination of this character's mistreatment. Every moment he lay in the dirt bleeding to death laid bare the extent to which Josh's entire reason for being was as a prop in the melodrama over the two leads' romance.
Contrast this with Joe's death, which served an additional and perhaps more important purpose than freeing Dale to hook up with Flash: Joe and Flash have been bonding over various dangerous events on Mongo over the last few weeks, and clearly his death is going to be a catalyst for Flash to step up, stop being a victim, and start proactively fighting against Ming's tyranny. About time.
Flash 2.0
The best part of this is that this transition was clearly evident in Eric Johnson's performance: his communication of Flash's conviction has never been stronger or more engaging. Not only that but we finally got clarification on exactly why Rankol (Jonathan Lloyd Walker) has been seeming at cross purposes with Ming's designs: he belongs to the order of monks that serve the Prophecy, which has already revealed that Ming is fated to be displaced by a usurper from afar. The first several episodes were played for their camp value, but Flash Gordon, to the amazement of us jaded onlookers, has gradually been developing a third dimension.
In fact with all this going on I'm actually looking forward to Flash getting his game on over the next few weeks. Yes, you heard me: I'm actually looking forward to Flash Gordon.
Clearly the same thing is happening in both shows. The male lead and female lead in each case have a history. They remeet and obviously have feelings for each other, but have to be just friends because she has a fiancé (who's also incidentally useful to their adventures because he's in law enforcement). That leads to a few months' worth of juicy sexual tension. But their growing attraction eventually seals the fiancé's doom, so that the last shows of the season can be about the male and female lead falling in love.
So let that be a lesson to you, guys: if you're caught in a love triangle, check the opening credits to see if you're the male lead. If the other guy is higher up in the credits than you, then it's probably a good idea to concede the game and break up with her, by Christmas at the latest.
After two fiancé deaths in a row I was very interested to see if anything similar would develop on my other Friday night show, Stargate Atlantis. But the Stargate folks are too efficient for that: the father of Tayla's unborn child, an Ethosian named Kanan, was gotten out of the way (along with his entire race) weeks ago. The only brutally violent deaths on this week's Atlantis were a Wraith queen and a few thousand clone warriors. Considering last week they blew up a planet, that's a pretty mild death toll for them.
