Season Five -- spoilerish

[Myrtle Groggins]

I watched the fifth season in its entirety and must admit I enjoyed it immensely. The Steele That Wouldn't Die and Steele Hanging in There are hilarious. In the first ep, Wouldn't Die, we get to see the RS duo at their best. Love the way Steele mentions the movie and Laura responds with one of their cases with a similar outcome. Favorite lines:

Tony: Those two have a hell of a code.

Mildred: And I pity the guy who tries to crack it.

I says it all, about our favorite couple and how they work, and exactly how we feel about anyone coming between them. Fantastic.


Other fun lines from Wouldn't Die:

-- ".......the big dick from Los Angeles." The look on the ever so proper Steele's face is priceless even if he isn't dressed in his lovely Steele duds at the moment.

-- "the family jewels" and the related lines about inherited items "from my great-great-grandmother who got it from his Greek uncle who got it from".......................etc.

All references to The Lint.



And from Hanging which is hilarious from the get-go:

References to the Rat.

Sister Steele

"I'd like you to meet my brother."
(I nearly choked on my popcorn with this one.)

Laura to a client after he meets RS:
"Wellllll, was he worth waiting for?"

Loved the extended chat under the table in the night club - shades of the award banquet in "What's Up, Doc?"

Also like that they play the music "Chattanooga Choo Choo" when Tony and Steele are talking about Steele's meeting on Platform 29............Parden me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo? Track 29....

www.mamarocks.com/chattanooga_choo_choo.htm

I know there are more great lines but those are the ones I can remember at the moment.

[Myrtle Groggins]

Some observations from the Fifth Season:

Laura's hair in Steele Hanging In There is much like it was throughout the run of the show. She wears it off her face most of the time, whereas in The Steele That Wouldn't Die and Steeled With A Kiss, she wears some fringe (bangs) and that tight curled look. Most distracting are her Steeled With A Kiss bangs. I do prefer her without bangs where her hair appears to fall naturally and wavily around her face as it did throughout the first four seasons.

Both Laura (SZ) and Steele (PB) appeared more mature in the fifth season, having aged nicely since the first season, with PB filling out a tiny bit more from his ultra-thin frame. In many of Season Five camera shots, he looks like the Taipan of Noble House. They used many of the same camera angles used in Noble House, too.

As for Daniel (EZ), I was glad his hair was silver in Steeled With A Kiss. Makes him look very distinguished.

Mildred looked like Mildred and never seems to change much, like Doris Roberts. Amazing.

In this season, I loved that all four of them worked together (Laura, Steele, Mildred, Tony). It's too bad the season didn't have more episodes. I thought they made a great team. Even though Tony and Steele didn't like or trust each other, a good comradarie was forming by the end. I loved that RS wanted to help Tony. It showed what an upstanding guy our RS is. This foursome played out much smoother than the original foursome because Bernice never did anything and Murphy was never a true rival for Laura's affection like Tony. Mildred truly loved her bosses and it shows.

I have to say that Season Five was very enjoyable for me. Only thing I would have changed is the very end. I'd have added one more line, as the lights went out, Laura would be saying,"Oh, Mr. Steele."

[Ace]

MG, I have to say your take on Season is so different from what I've been reading and writing myself for the past couple of days on the Yahoo RS group Stelewatchers that it put a smile on my face. I'm glad that season makes some people actually happy.

Alas I am not one of them. There are good things about the last season but unfortunately hardly any of them have to do with Steele and Laura's relationship and NONE of them have to do with Laura & Tony or Laura's entire behavior as regards Tony and Steele which make me queasy. I have no idea why Steele was helping Tony except that he's a really a good guy because Tony is a jerk, a really unlikeable person who personally tries to use Steele as cannon fodder while blackmailing him and putting moves on his wife.

But really that wouldn't even have mattered too much (except for the time he sucked up that should have been given to Laura and Steele together or any other more interesting character) What makes Season 5 so difficult to watch for me is that Laura a complete faithless fickle jerk. Why is she leading on Tony? Why is she kissing him in front of Steele and doing heavy breathing afterwards as if she was really overcome? Why is she telling Tony that a year ago she might have gone with him with (a YEAR?) but now that's she's invested so much time in Steele (like a commodity I guess) she needs to see it through. My, that's romantic. No wonder Tony thinks she doesn't really love Steele and then calls her again. Nothing in these episodes shows she loves Steele, quite the contrary. Even when Tony calls her she doesn't tell him she loves her husband. It's all rather disenheartening. I know when it was written it was probably a set up for if the series was going to continue. But:

a) it had already been canceled mid filming of the 5th Season so they could have written lines with better closure

b) the idea of an entire season of Tony with Laura torn between Tony and Steele and Steele being spineless enough to even bother with Laura anymore makes me thankful the season was canceled after 6 episodes.

On other notes -- some brighter:

I liked the idea of Daniel as Steele's father but didn't care for the execution. I thought the way it was handled with Steel bordered on heck teetered over the edge into the cruel. He was given no opportunity to be he hurt and angry for more than 5 minutes which is ridiculous, gets 2 minutes with knowing Daniel is his father and then Daniel drops dead on him.

I do like a lot of the non Tony/Laura plot in the 3 episodes. The mysteries themselves are fine as are all the other main sub characters (save for Tony). Keyes is always interesting, the stuff with the multiple kidnapping and traitors in Season 3 and the bit with coffins at the end is clever and fitting for a Daniel sendoff. And Shannon is a great fun screwball character. The scene at the club with them all on the dance floor and under tables is a wonderfully choreographed screwball scene.

Oh and Pierce -- looks fantastic, which is always a highlight. His extra bulk comes from working out for The Fourth Protocol and Bond. And it looks very nice on him as do the extras years since Season One. Some of my favorite scenes with him are strangely with Tony. The one in the meeting where he cooly slices Tony to pieces and the archery scene which easily trumps him again.

The one truly fun scene of Laura and Steele together, that's intimate, playful, sexy and fun is their discussion of how if she plays her cards right she can get some nifty office furniture sleeping with the boss. I wanted much more of that and alas we didn't get it.

And as much as I hate almost everything that leads up to it as regards their relationship in these last episodes and the quick fade to black after -- I do love the scene of Laura in Steele's lap and him carrying her up the stairs.

[Lauryn]

It's a measure of just how "all over the map" things became in character terms when you recall that at season three's end W. Westfield, (the Social Register version of Murphy Michaels) is thrown into the mix as Laura's safe, blandly re-assuring alternative to the dangerously attractive but unreliable Steele -- but by the fifth season Steele is re-cast as the loyal retainer, waiting in the wings while Laura trangresses with a dodgy Italian job whose merest brush of lips to hers turns her into Ms. Apassionata Von Climax. Oy!

Speaking of lip locks that incident where Laura saves Tony's hide on the train by kissing him oddly reminds me of the bizarre behavior of Moonlighting's Maddie Hayes who went so far as to marry a stranger on a train, whom she met, named Walter Bishop. Of course, after one dream sequence too many we're meant to understand it was for David's sake (really!) that she did it because she knew that if she and David got married David would try so hard to become domesticated for her sake, that he'd lose himself and turn into a blander Mr. Blandings -- and bye-bye, love, or at least, sexual frisson. It has to be this way? (Is that the show's writers' secret fear or the character's?) Talking about jumping to extremes! Even worse than Laura's top-down decision in "Steele At It" deciding how her partner will feel and act and when and making choices for him.

Addendum: One other reason the Moonlighting Fallacy was a fallacy was that, like peace, the "apres-sex" relationship was never given a chance. After Maddie and David were "together" -- as in "birds do it, bees do it" -- they were hard pressed to be seen in the same frame again, with every soap opera contrivance in the book thrown in to keep them apart. (Something with which we RS fans are all too familiar, except for the boinking part, LOL!)Sure, we know that some of it had to do with the real-life logistics of Cybill Shepherd being sporadically MIA due to pregnancy, but it set the post-shagging period on such capricious terms that things weren't addressed until we all stopped caring. (Again, it wasn't the sex, but the long hangover after the sex.) The fifth season of RS and SWAK did give us a resolution but, like Moonlighting's fourth, Laura and Steele were apart much of the duration, emotionally and physically, so that getting to the consummation, while that scene is still romantic, is kind of a cheat.

[Myrtle Groggins]

I can't compare RS to Moonlighting because I never watched that series.

I posted my views on the 5th season of RS because I knew other people's intense dislike of it already and just thought I'd share my reasons for why I liked it.