How, after 7 seasons, do Joe, Devalos, and Scanlon still doubt Allison? I could see them being skeptical for awhile, but she earned the benefit of the doubt from the people who saw her talents first hand the most. All I can think is that there are a lot of events in between episodes that we never saw that never panned out.
shareBad writing, that's how.
"That's like putting your whole mouth right in The Dip!" - Seinfeld
I'm not a psychic but I do dream of things that will happen in the future. I might have one or two dreams a year that become true but its unpredictable, and you have to figure out what they mean to you, not what other people think. I've had doubts but they stopped when I kept dreaming of my mothers death, repeatedly and it scared the hell out of me. Unfortunately, everything I did dream happened exactly as I had seen in my dreams. They say that if you are thinking about a person before you go to bed, there's a huge chance that you will have a dream about them.
Her dreams don't always say this will happen when and at this time. She doesn't dream the entire dream all at the same time. It comes in sections and she needs to interrupt the dream and what it means to what she might be working on at the time. The more she dreams the more things change as more information becomes available to her and the investigation. I've never seen what she does as a talent, its more like a curse of being able to see the future and know you really can't change what happens in the end or very rarely change what happens in the end. 😨
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Season 4 Scanlon is a total jerk acting like he has no clue who she is and doubts every single thing she says. Are they kidding - They would never have the high solve rate that the city has without Allison. At least Joe starts to quit doubting her as much in Season 3.
shareyes..although we all love the show.~
1.Allison's dreams give Devalos and Scanlon a million murder 1 busts and convictions, many with 'special circumstances" even, that they would otherwise have been totally clueless about...both of them have made their careers crackle off her back.
2. Allison's dreams save countless lives of people who would otherwise be Murder 1 roadkill by spouses, stalkers/serial killers, or just people who fell down old desert mine shafts and ran out of food and water and stuff.
3. Allison , alone and unique in human history to my knowledge, gives an impressive compelling demonstration of, and apparently proves the bona-fides of, psychic phenomena/ESP/clairvoyance.
4. She IS after all, not just an outside psychic who keeps coming in or calling in tips, the dept actually employs her on salary.
5. Everytime Allison comes to Devalos and Scanlon with a new tip, she is brushed off and treated like she just escaped from a sanitorium.
Even in the early seasons they go from one episode where everyone believes in her and say things suggesting that she is totally reliable to the next episode where they act skeptical and as though she has never been right at all. Drives me nuts because it was so inconsistent.
shareExactly. You said it in one sentence and summed it up very well. My recent long comment in this thread is about the same issue; there are a lot of intelligent people in this series whose actions from episode to episode are inconsistent this way.
The same kinds of scenarios happen again and again but it's like they have completely forgotten all previous occurrences. Like they have learned nothing.
Then occasionally an episode comes along where they do seem to recall the way things work with Allison, and trust her.
Or Allison will remember that when she does not see the person actually commit the murder that they might not be the murderer, and she doesn't jump to the conclusion that they're the killer.
But usually she does jump to conclusions, and usually those assumptions turn out to be wrong. And the writers use this trope over and over again in their plots. When they use it too much, as I think they do, it makes it harder for the viewers to buy into the story. It lacks verisimilitude.
A good fictional story, even fantasies, have to have roots in reality. Verisimilitude means that events should be plausible to the extent that readers consider them credible enough to be able to relate them somehow to their experiences of real life.
And when the story features intelligent people who are well informed and experienced regarding certain issues act as though they are ignorant of those past experiences, and act that way repeatedly in episode after episode, then viewers like us notice. We realize that such a thing could not happen in real life, not to smart, well informed people.
To buy the fiction we have to suspend our disbelief sometimes, and viewers are willing to do that for the entertainment, up to a point.
Characters need to react and respond like real people do for the most part. Exceptions are allowed of course, but if exceptions become the rule then viewers cannot relate the the characters.
And I think that is happening in this series too much. The writers use this trope a little too often. It allows them to create conflict, so I understand why they do it. But it is overdone.
Alison's dream is fragmented and doesn't reveal the entire truth from the beginning. What Alison says seems really implausible. However, it gets better throughout the seriesand instead of Devalos simply rejecting her, he starts saying that he needs more evidence than just her dream. The series finale was godawful but Alison finally tells off Devalos for always questioning her. I thought that was a nice touch but nobody else seems to have noticed :/
shareFinale was terrible...I forgot the part where she finally reams Devalos for "I don't know what to tell you, Alison"-ing her..
shareYeah, they use this trope over and over again. It's not the only one they use excessively too.
It's like nobody in this show ever learns anything. Think of all the things which happen over and over which nobody seems to ever learn from.
-Allison dreams of a murder and tells DeValos or Scanlon or Joe, and they respond skeptically, saying that it seems far fetched or something, even though the dreams have been accurate messages so many times before.
- Allison dreams about a murder and sees the face of someone with the murdered girl, but does not see him actually kill the girl. Then she urgently tells Scanlon or Devalos that she saw the murderer. She insists that the man she identifies is the killer. Later she learns from another dream that the man she saw did not kill the girl because she sees someone else actually kill her.
This has happened many many times, and Allison never seems to learn from the previous occurrences. In fact, Allison jumps to conclusions quite often, and finds out her assumptions were wrong later on. She assumes that the dream represents something which happened the night before, or any number of other specifics. At some time or other, all of those assumptions turn out to be wrong. But she never seems to learn to stop making assumptions. She doesn't learn to say "here is what I dreamed, but I don't know when this happened. I did not actually see this person commit the crime, I only saw him standing over the body.etc. "
- Someone asks Allison for psychic knowledge about something, and Allison is hesitant to explain how it works. Sometimes she does, but other times she seems unable to bring herself to tell them how it works.
My point is that the writers use these same plot devices way way way too much, like it is the only way they know to write stories.
There is something called verisimilitude. verisimilitude is likeness to the truth i.e. resemblance of a fictitious work to a real event even if it is a far-fetched one.
Verisimilitude means that events should be plausible to the extent that readers consider them credible enough to be able to relate them somehow to their experiences of real life. People in fictional stories need to react to situations familiar to the viewers in ways enough like real people do so the viewer can relate to them.
The writers make the people in this series, and I mean intelligent people, too stupid to learn from events which happen over and over again. And that stretches credulity too far.