^ETA: No, no one will mind about the double-posting in here, lol. These are clearly not short, spammish responses meant to up post-count, that's for sure! :lol:
I agree he was focused on helping Danny during that episode, though that's kind of why I've always assumed he told him about Lindsay being worried after - in one of those offscreen moments that we should get to see, but don't. Although Danny did leave the station at the end of the episode, it's possible that after never happened. But in that case, I guess I could see Flack having unconsciously let the fact that Lindsay was worried slip - which I can't think was meant out of rivalry. If he worries about Danny's well-being that much, he can't have not realized that Danny would be helped by knowing how many people care about him.
I admit, I get hung up on the offscreen stuff. Unless we hear about it, it's hard for me to assume such and such happened. I mean, it could have, but on the same hand, it may not have. It's the same with Danny supporting Flack off-screen in the episode where Flack was suspected of killing a suspect. Did Danny reach out to him off-screen? Probably, maybe, possibly...but without seeing it on screen, I can't really feel comfortable making that assumption. The same is true of Flack telling Danny about Lindsay's involvement, or Lindsay reaching out to Danny to talk. It could have happened...but it also may not have.
I totally have to watch Child's Play again. :lol: But I'm not seeing how RND could've been too little, too late, given that that's the point he seemed to have hit rock-bottom; and it probably would've helped to talk, had he wanted to. There were only four episodes between Child's Play and Right Next Door - in that time we saw her find him in the morgue/possibly chase after him, cover his shift (and he had to have figured that someone did this for him, since he didn't get in trouble for missing said shift), send Flack after him, try to get him to go to lunch with her...she didn't try with the tenacity he did in season 3, and maybe she should have. But all things considered, she didn't do horribly, and we didn't see him throw her a bone even once. A bone that he threw Flack, Mac, even Adam/Angell/whoever-it-was-in-that-scene-in-Happily Never After.
The only effort we know for sure that Danny knows she made was the attempt in the morgue. And if she never even tried again to approach him, I can see why it would have come off as half-hearted to him. He's supposed to be someone she cares about, and she only tries once? Four episodes in between...and not one effort from her (that we know he knows about). All he got was a complaint about him missing her birthday. I can see why he'd feel it was "too little, too late," yeah.
As for the shift, for all he knew Flack asked someone else to cover for him. Or maybe he did know she covered for him, but he could have seen it as payback for "Snow Day," when he took her shift.
True, she was closer with the team in S4, which would probably make it easier (when happy) to drop her walls than it would've in S2. Only I don't know, it really seemed like the happiness-thus-wall-dropping was related to Danny. I mean, theoretically she should've been even more comfortable with the team in season 5 than season 4, but there was that whole roundabout-conversation with Stella about the "friend" who was pregnant. Lindsay was the one making all those comments about Drew "wanting to get physical" with Stella, you'd think after that she'd be more comfortable with telling Stella about her own pregnancy.
Well, we've established she's not very open with herself and her own issues. It's one thing to joke about a hot guy interested in her colleague; it's another to tell said colleague about her unexpected pregnancy. Just another reason I don't really see a lot of girl bonding between Lindsay and Stella.
I definitely agree she seems happier with herself now than she did in seasons 2-and 3, when she wasn't letting herself care about anyone. And the trial did provide some kind of closure (probably explains why she's at least letting herself feel enough to get hurt in S4 and 5), but I don't know, I guess it's just troubling that the repressed-14-year-old emotions and the walls - all things that seem to have been a consequence of her friends' murders - are still around. I don't see the writers going back to the trial or the murder either, but I do think if something else traumatic were to happen, she'd probably end up dealing the same way she did leading up to the trial.
Maybe...although with a husband and baby, I don't think she can deal with her issues in the same way. If she pushes Danny away while they're married that will crush his confidence, and likely destroy their marriage.
Determination gives a sense of strength, I think, though I don't necessarily agree that one must equal the other. And I know you have to be strong to at least want to face something, but I also think most of the strength would actually show in her being able to stick out the full situation. Which we've never really seen Lindsay do without some sort of crutch. It's not unhealthy that she wants to face her battles, I'm looking more at the fact that she often doesn't seem able to. Because when she's thrown herself into things, and then finds out she can't see those things through to the end, her coping mechanism (retreat) ends up being more destructive to her than her determination. Realistically, Mac should've fired her in LWFM.
He should have at least reprimanded her, but I see that as more of a careless action than a direct line up between her determination vs. her coping mechanism. An better example of weakness might be her going back to Danny in "Personal Foul" when he hadn't said he loved her, too, even after she repeated her declaration and when it was pretty obvious he was just saying enough to lure her back in, to presumably get to the point where he could offer her something he thought would be able to convince her for real--sex.
I definitely agree with this, about Lindsay and about Danny. But the thing is, everyone knows Danny won't get to okay on his own, and that's why they rush to him. If Lindsay doesn't get to okay on her own - well, people might rush, but they'd first have to figure out that she hasn't gotten to okay. And maybe that's where I can't agree about whether Lindsay's okay or not - she sorts stuff on her own, but never really seems to deal with them. I still think Danny's showing up (and the relationship that evolved from that) was the crutch that helped her find peace with the trial and her friends' deaths. Yeah, getting through the trial was probably a larger bit of closure, but we don't know if she would've been able to do that without Danny.
I think she would have been able to do it without him--he still seemed the needier of the two, even in that sequence. I don't know if it was so much about her needing him there as it was about him needing to be there for her. I think having him there helped, and she was obviously grateful, but I think she would have gotten through either way. We won't really ever know, though, since he did show up.
Exactly. I came to the same conclusion, but what does that say about his current relationships? He seems able to trust Mac and Flack and Hawkes, at least.
To an extent. He keeps expecting Mac to give up on him or chastise him (or he did in earlier seasons) and Flack really has to push to get him to listen sometimes.
But that's kind of why I have trouble with that interpretation of Danny's behaviour. I can see how he may have felt that the door wasn't opened enough when it came to Lindsay-after-Ruben, especially given most of Lindsay's behind-the-scenes support. But I'm still not buying that he had no idea she was helping him, or that she was concerned. Even assuming Flack didn't eventually tell him about her worry (still think this has to be a big if, though Flack may have been overly-focused on just Danny), he had to know someone covered his shift that day. It's not like he called in sick. He knew it was her who came to him in the morgue, because he reacted to hearing her concern. And unless he really did just see her being a clingy girlfriend, I don't know how else he could've interpreted her offer to buy him lunch (especially given how peeved she was about him missing her birthday - at the very least, he had to have seen it as a peace offering).
I still think all he knew about was the morgue, and the fact that she never followed it up probably nagged at him. With the offer to buy lunch, I wonder if he was purposefully distancing himself from her at that point. He needed people around him who cared about him, she showed him she didn't, so he was holding her at arm's length.
It's a good question, why he blew her off for that lunch, since as you guys have mentioned, he could have gone. Maybe he didn't want her to find out and get hurt by what he was doing with Rikki, even though in his mind they were over? Maybe he thought the birthday thing hurt her and he should avoid causing further damage? I don't know. I still come back to him being hurt she didn't reach out to him/wasn't there for him and not feeling strong enough to open himself up for more of that. She sounded pretty light and cheery on the phone when she called him--maybe he didn't want to meet her for lunch and have to pretend everything was okay when it really, really wasn't.
Oh, I know I'm double-posting this time, but this is exactly what I mean! Yes, Lindsay does seem more like the stereotypical guy. :lol: It's just beyond weird how Danny, the guy who used to complain about talking with his girlfriend, is always the only one who seems to want to talk when it comes to D/L. And Lindsay seems to be so much better at the behind-the-scenes support than she is when it comes to direct emotional support.
I really think Danny complaining about that girl one time was a one-off--he's so the stereotypical "woman" in the relationship! :lol: Danny loves to talk about his feelings...he's constantly letting people know how he feels, reacting to things, even turning to guys like Mac and Flack when he needs help. Lindsay doesn't seem to want to talk about feelings and the like.
I can see that having been Danny's thought process about Rikki - Lindsay not caring, therefore they must not be together - but I'm not sure about the pulling away. I've never really quite gotten the shock over Danny's behaviour (toward Lindsay) after Ruben's death, because to me he never really seemed to be pulling away any more than he had been at the beginning of season 4. I'd agree about the pulling-away if he hadn't been all friendly-ish with her in Playing with Matches, being happy because she reluctantly laughed at his lame joke (something about people coming from another galaxy). At that point, he seemed to have viewed her as at least a friend [and he's always seemed fine with her in a just-friends capacity], and it couldn't have been that shocking that a friend would want to buy you lunch even if they weren't reaching out. I totally think he would've said yes if it had been Hawkes offering to buy lunch. I think he said no to Lindsay because he knew perfectly well what going to lunch with her would entail - talking about how he was doing.
See, I kind of think the opposite. Lindsay hadn't checked in on him at all, emotionally, so maybe he didn't want to have to go to lunch and pretend he was okay, make small talk, get chewed out about her birthday again...when he had much bigger things on his mind.
I agree his relationship with Mac is always a little more off, but I guess I always viewed this being because of its slightly-paternal nature (Danny is the only character who seems to view Mac as an actual father-figure - the others see him as more of a leader). With Mac he's always seemed more desperate for approval, rather than just attention - the thing in Crime and Misdemeanour read more like he was hoping Mac actually would give him a pat on the back for finishing the case, maybe that Mac would approve of his tenacity. And then he seemed genuinely shocked when Mac ... you know, didn't. He only seemed to go to that psych evaluation in the baseball episode because he wanted Mac's approval, and then seemed disappointed again when he didn't get it. It really seemed to cut him badly when Mac showed his disapproval in On the Job, then he was so desperate to prove he wasn't in the wrong in Run Silent. Heck, I think half the reason he asked Lindsay to marry him was because he seemed to think Mac would approve of it if he did. I guess what I find weird is why Danny would always look to Mac to be a father figure that was proud of him. That would definitely read like Danny was abused by his father in the past.
Yeah, I wonder if Danny's father was abusive as well. He hasn't said too much about him aside from the gypsy cab driver story, but the fact that Danny seeks a father figure so desperately in Mac and seems so determined to win his approval--and so crushed when he doesn't--says to me that his relationship with his own father was messed up on some fundamental level.
I know that Flack flipped once he found out Danny's gun was in Rikki's hands and that became his focus, even more so than Danny's emotinal well-being. I kind of got the impression that he was once again cleaning up someone else's mess, even though it was Danny and he cared about him as a friend. Nothing wrong with that.
Really? I got the sense that he was really, really worried for Danny and scared for him, not that he was cleaning up his mess. I think he was scared shitless that Danny would do something stupid and get himself hurt. The look on Flack's face in the alley when Danny stepped in between Rikki and Ollie--and in front of the gun--pretty much said it all to me.
And the fact that he didn't tell Lindsay could have had more to do with the gun thing than anything else cause he didn't tell her much. I think it was wrong if he didn't tell Danny she was concerned, because as you said, it would have let Danny know that she (anyone really) cared about what he was going through and reached out. Especially in light of the fact that Don knew she was lying for him to Mac and probably doing his work (my assumption on the work thing. I can see it as something she would do for him). That scene at the station at the end would have been the perfect time to include others but Flack restricted the statment to himself. A bit disappointing for someone with so much integrity.
Even Flack is only human. I think Flack has a bit of a superman complex,
especially when it comes to Danny. This is hardly the first time he's dropped everything for Danny--in "On the Job" he rushed to the diner to meet Danny when Danny was an emotional wreck, and in "Comes Around" he met up with Danny to ease his mind about the trial. Even in "Snow Day," he tried to swoop in when Lindsay was already helping Danny out of the van. So there's something a little proprietary there. It wasn't so much that he excluded Lindsay as his worry for Danny kind of too precedence over everything.
I never thought of that. I had to go back and find the scene from ReCycling and watch it after reading this. They never even commented on that specific part of the scene in the commentary but I can see where you could go there with the thought. It's interesting as well that they have never done a case with a pedaphile on the show since then. They have done just about every other deviant in the book but have never touched on that one, to my knowledge. If you know of one let me know. So you may just have something there. And if they've never thought of it in the writing process it would be a great episode, even better now that he's married with a child of his own. Hopefully we will see what Danny's past is before the show ends.
Yeah, that scene has always stuck in my mind. It went beyond disgust--Danny basically challenged the guy to look at him in a sexual way by putting himself physically in front of the guy and saying, "What, am I too old for you?" It wasn't even quite threatening/intimidating... it just seemed a really off thing for him to do, and has always made me wonder if that's the source of his damage. And yeah, they've never really done another case like that. It would be an interesting way to explain Danny's issues.
Nah, he was on a cell phone so he had her number.
Couldn't he have had the lab's number on his cell phone?
I thought the unease came from the fact that they were hiding what they knew from Mac so Danny wouldn't get in trouble at work. I'd be uneasy if I were running tests I shouldn't be for someone that I'd just lied for:shifty:.
Maybe. I'm sure it came from worry for Danny, too. But had it been, say, Flack and Stella, or Mac and Lindsay, I think there would have been more warmth there.
