‘The Tourist’ and The Ethan Problem
Sequels can have many afflictions. The side character a writer can’t give up is one of them.
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As a proud member of the Middle Aged Fuckers Club1, I spend an inordinate amount of energy and time negotiating What The Hell Are We Gonna Watch, Because We’re Damn Well Gonna Watch Something2 with my wife, The Duchess. When I die and my life passes in front of my eyes it’ll be 65% conversations about finding a TV show that can entertain us for 45 minutes or so before we go to bed. And I will have no regrets3.
This dynamic leads us to engage with a lot of ... cromulent television. The sort of stuff that has always existed: Passably well-done stories with more-than-competent actors, solid production values, and even the occasional whiff of creativity. Shows like that—good enough to enjoy, mediocre enough to forget almost immediately4—have always been the entertainment industry’s bread and butter. A mediocre, middling show can go on for years and years, its mediocrity a sort of camouflage. Brilliant shows burn out fast, and terrible shows usually fail to attract much of an audience. But those cromulent shows can just chug along for a surprisingly long time, because they don’t call attention to themselves. One day you sit down to watch the first episode, then you blink and its 20 years later and you’re watching the series finale from the old age home5.
This brings us to The Tourist, a show originally produced by the BBC which showed up on HBO Max in 2022 and currently resides on Netflix6. The show is almost what would happen if you asked an AI to create a cromulent TV show using some shopworn tropes: A man eventually sort-of named Elliot Stanley (Jamie Dornan) wakes up from a car accident with no memory of who he is7, and proceeds to discover that he was not a particularly good person as he meets some old friends—and some new ones.
The first season is a brisk descent into a fairly convoluted plot involving Elliot, a Greek drug lord, and a grifter named Victoria (Shalom Brune-Franklin), and its one great achievement is making Australia appear to have a total population of about two dozen people and be composed solely of emptiness and dirt8. But it’s an enjoyable enough little ride. The second season time jumps a little, and makes a classic second season mistake, however: It keeps a supporting character around for no good reason.
Are We the Baddies?
In Season One of The Tourist, the character of Ethan Krum (Greg Larsen) has a very specific role. He’s the fiance of Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), a police officer in training who gets involved with Elliot and tries to do right by him. She’s sunny and sincere, and spends the show trying to do the right thing. Ethan is written to be a terrible person (and Larsen’s performance is terrific), a preposterous little gaslighter who treats Helen like shit. He undermines her, belittles her career ambitions, and generally acts like a redpilled asshole to the point where you can’t imagine what in the world attracted her to him in the first place9.
He’s unpleasant, but the character has a purpose: As clumsy as it is, the character’s presence makes it okay for Helen to eventually fall in love with Elliot and leave Ethan without being a bad person herself, and it offers Helen the opportunity for a classic This is Why You Suck speech, which can be very cathartic if you don’t see it coming from six episodes away10. He’s a character engineered to be so loathsome you want Helen to leave him and possibly kick him in the balls for good measure.
All well and good. At the end of Season One, Helen does indeed tell Ethan off, and when Season Two opens she’s traveling the world with Elliot, screwing in train compartments and smoking dope and generally living some sort of fantastical life that does not require money or a job11. Aces! Good for her, get yours and all that. But then the show inexplicably brings Ethan Krum back. It airdrops him into the story with all the grace of a sedated dog falling off a couch12, and the problem is that Ethan no longer has a purpose.
Awful In a Different Way!
When you want to extend a character’s presence in a story after they’ve lost their narrative purpose, you have to find a new purpose, which usually requires warping either the character into a new shape or warping the narrative into something novel. In The Tourist, the decision to hang onto Ethan past his usefulness is supported by a heel turn: Ethan, who in the first season was a self-involved gaslighter who tried to control Helen’s life is now a self-involved recovered gaslighter who believes that by admitting his terribleness he is exonerated13, and Helen will take him back. So he travels to Ireland to try to demonstrate to her that he is a changed man, assuming that this is what she has been waiting for instead of, you know, living her life.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, necessarily, from a plot or character point of view. Sure, why not: If Ethan still had a role to play, why not? The problem is that he doesn’t have a role to play. The character wanders around at the edges being terrible, and produces—at best—some mild comic relief14. By refusing to let Ethan go off into that good night, the show has transformed him into a plot inhibitor: Every time we have to pay attention to Ethan’s lame character, the plot grinds to a halt while we stare in dumb horror at what’s happening. Remove Ethan from season two and not only do you not notice or question his absence, the story actually improves.
Of course, The Tourist also exists in a universe where no one has any money, no one ever showers, and Jamie Dornan’s disturbing 1,000-yard stare is considered charming, so maybe the normal rules simply don’t apply.
NEXT WEEK: Elspeth cribs from the classics.
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It’s not so bad! For example, when I was 25 my desire to eat dinner by 6PM every day was regarded as freakish. Now people are just impressed that I can still chew my food adequately.
The alternative being staring into the void and contemplating death.
Well, no regrets concerning all the truly awesomely terrible TV I’ve watched in my life. Some other things, maybe.
Is “Good Enough to Enjoy, Mediocre Enough to Forget Almost Immediately” the title of my memoir? Might as well be.
Or possibly from the Probing Cell of an alien mothership, who knows what the future will bring?
All shows wind up on Netflix eventually. It’s like a black hole of entertainment.
This is why I carry a card in my wallet that reads YOUR NAME IS JEFF SOMERS AND YOU ARE AWESOME. You wake up with no memory in a dumpster in Mexico after an evening drinking Tequila Fanny Bangers as often as I have and you learn to cover your bases.
Although this may simply be the reality of the situation. Just how accurate was “Mad Max: Fury Road”?
This is a frequent problem with characters intended to be bad people: The impossibility of anyone ever liking them enough to date them or even care about them.
Trust me: I give this speech to myself in the mirror every few days and it never fails to make me break down into blubbering tears. Therapy? No, never, why do you ask?
I tried living this life once and I wound up shivering and yellow in an Emergency Room.
I am inexplicably proud of this metaphor.
Sadly, as I know all too well, this does not work. You can’t just walk into a room and shout “I DECLARE I AM AN ASSHOLE” and be forgiven all your sins.
It’s cringe comedy, which counts, I suppose.
The sedated dog falling off the couch is perhaps the best piece of writing you will ever do. Congratulations!