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Post by jaydub87 on Jul 6, 2023 21:17:35 GMT -5
I feel like it cheapens everything that Mary Ellen went through thinking he was dead, mourning his loss and finally moving on. And the episode where Mary Ellen is given a medal that was given to Curt posthumously. That bothers me, and the fact that they totally destroyed the Curt character. He was an often difficult man who loved his family and adored his son. They turned him into a weak, sniveling drunken mess in a single episode. It still annoys me. |
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Post by Easton on Jul 6, 2023 21:45:59 GMT -5
^ The only way I can explain the whole Curt thing is that he survived the attack even though he was injured, making him incapable of fathering children. That can seriously mess with a person's mind. Being a doctor, he would have quickly and easily realised how his injuries would change his life. So, his solution would have been to swap tags with a seriously injured soldier who would have been buried in place of Curt.
That in itself would have created a wealth of problems, not only for Curt and the Waltons but for the family of the soldier who died and was buried in Curt's place. As far as his family was concerned, he survived the battle but vanished of the face of the Earth with no explanation and virtually no chance to find out what actually happened to him.
It was a poorly-written episode which wasn't entirely thought through very well. |
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Post by carol on Jul 7, 2023 0:20:25 GMT -5
^ The only way I can explain the whole Curt thing is that he survived the attack even though he was injured, making him incapable of fathering children. That can seriously mess with a person's mind. Being a doctor, he would have quickly and easily realised how his injuries would change his life. So, his solution would have been to swap tags with a seriously injured soldier who would have been buried in place of Curt. That in itself would have created a wealth of problems, not only for Curt and the Waltons but for the family of the soldier who died and was buried in Curt's place. As far as his family was concerned, he survived the battle but vanished of the face of the Earth with no explanation and virtually no chance to find out what actually happened to him. It was a poorly-written episode which wasn't entirely thought through very well. And something else. Being injured like he was he would have been a patient in the military hospital on Pearl Harbor where he worked so the staff would certainly have known who he was. There was no way he could take someone else's dog tags and identity and the Army not know it. I also wondered why his remains or the remains of who they thought was Curt, weren't sent back to Mary Ellen? They could have had an episode around that with Mary Ellen receiving his casket and then his funeral, even having the family going to Arlington National Cemetery for his burial. Of course The Tempest would have blown this episode to smithereens too. |
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Post by jaydub87 on Jul 7, 2023 22:00:36 GMT -5
^the bodies of many WW2 veterans never made it back home, so that part is at least plausible. The rest of it made for one of the worst waltons episodes ever. Idk about Pearl Harbor specifically, but with a bombing of that magnitude, it’s feasible that some bodies were destroyed or lost at sea.
I’ mentioned this in my intro thread, but it pertains to this. I hated this show growing up. When my parents watched it, I rolled my eyes. A couple years back, just before COVID shut the world down, I got hurt at work and broke both my arms. I couldn’t sleep one night and stumbled across the show, and this was the episode that was on. I texted my insomniac mother and asked “what in the name of God is this crap with Mary Ellen’s dead husband not being dead?!” Fortunately, she was also awake at 1 AM watching the Walton’s and walked me through it.
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Post by csh2088 on Jul 8, 2023 11:54:46 GMT -5
The whole Curtis is still alive storyline told me the writers were running out of ideas.
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Post by nedandres on Jul 8, 2023 20:36:42 GMT -5
That’s exactly what writer Claire Whitaker told me. CBS was trying to up the ratings. Lorimar was the studio producing the Waltons. Remember they brought Bobby Ewing back to life through a dream of his wife. These tactics did improve ratings, at least for a while.
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