hth | urban myths in action

Here's the question I have. Why is all of fandom so convinced that Carson has some kind of totally sick, maladjusted obsession with his mother? I'm curious.

My memory is perhaps not what it used to be, but here's what I recall knowing about Carson and his mom:

1) In "Rising," we see them smiling lovingly at each other as she serves him dinner. This does not seem terribly odd to me, given that he knows he may never see her again and she must at least know he's going incommunicado for a while. It seems normal enough to me, for close relatives who are enjoying their last moments together before being apart indefinitely.

2) In "Letters to Pegasus," Ford sits him down with a camera and tells him it's his turn to record a message. ACTUAL DIALOGUE:

Carson: What shall I say?
Ford: Uh, "I miss you?" "I wish you were here?"
Carson: I wish who was here?
Ford: I don't know, who do you wish was here?
Carson: Nobody! I wish *I* wasn't bloody here!
Ford: Doc, I got a lot of people I gotta get through.
Carson: All right. Uh...I suppose I could say hello to my mother.

I'm saying, for someone who's obsessed with her, it doesn't seem to occur very quickly to him that he should seize this one last opportunity to contact her. Maybe he's only pretending not to be thinking about her from the very beginning, but what reason would he have to do that?

3) I'm not going to transcribe the whole thing, but in a nutshell, Carson tries to record a rather bland, greeting-card kind of message, Ford rags on him for it, and he bursts out that he doesn't want to "go all emotional" and get her upset. He calls her "as sweet a soul as you'd ever meet" and a few other affectionate things and seems to feel responsible for her. When Ford prods him to be more emotional, he loses it, says "I miss you terribly," and starts to cry. I imagine this is where people are getting the mama's boy thing, and I wouldn't necessarily dispute that Carson is a mama's boy. He appears to be her only child, and she his only parent. She's pretty old; he believes her health isn't great; he's not likely to see her again. I don't know that it's so strange that he feels protective of her or that he's in a sentimental mood about her. I'm not saying he's not being a little intense about her; I'm just saying it doesn't strike me as pathological. I'd be a lot more of a mess if I were taping a message for one of my parents under equivalent circumstances.

4) In the second take, once he's gotten control of his fear (remember, they all think they're in their last week of life during this episode), he records a message reassuring her and giving her medical advice. He ends with "And Mum? I do love you," in a sweetly awkward way that implies to me that he doesn't come out and say that very often. Carson's probably one of those guys who says things like "Keep up with your prescription" and intends them to be understood as meaning "I love you."

I feel vaguely as if I may be forgetting another reference to Carson's mother, so if I am, feel free to remind me. But just looking at these brief scenes, and factoring in the immense loneliness everyone in Atlantis must feel at that point, a year away from any contact with their loved ones and under incomprehensible stress, he seems *appropriately* emotional about an old woman he won't be able to take care of ever again.

The thing that wigs me out, I guess, is that he's the only character we see in "Letters from Pegasus" who actually cries, instead of bearing his pain in a noble and manly way, and I wonder if the readiness of fans to label his feelings as disturbed or badly socialized in some way comes from that. Are we really still so John Wayne in this culture that we don't know how to deal with a person who's afraid for his life, who loves and misses his own mother, who's stressed and helpless and feels like a failure, and responds by crying? Are we so conditioned by the expectations of television, where heroes bear up and soldier through, that we see someone reacting to genuine and legitimate like a real person would and immediately start asking ourselves what's wrong with him? Or is this just one of those weird fandom groupthink situations, where somebody said it once and everyone assumed that if it was said, it has to be true? Or are my standards for "weird about his mom" just really, really high after having gotten used to pop fandom, where *everyone* is weird about his mom?

ETA: Somehow, this turned into a big, honking referendum on whether or not Carson is a dick. I mean, carry on, say whatever it is you need to say, but I would just like to stress that I wrote this particular post neither to praise nor to bury Carson. My feelings about his characterization overall and/or "his" medical ethics (quotation marks because it's not like he's cooking this shit up under the floorboards where all the other deeply ethical characters on the show haven't yet noticed it) are a whole different post, which will probably not be forthcoming any time soon.