#sorry if this is disjointed btw I wrote it very stream of consciousness while watching the episode

[microsuedemouse]

Blood Wedding is so. [heavy sigh.] The case is perfectly fine, but the b-plot with Cully’s wedding… :/

I don’t know if there’s anything floating around out there from the writers or anything that might help explain it, but. Cully and Simon’s relationship is so rushed in general. Their wedding is only six episodes (and, admittedly, a hiatus between seasons) after they meet! Those two episodes aired 17 months apart, and Simon doesn’t even appear in most of the eps in between. It honestly feels like they were suddenly hurrying to get Cully married so that she as a character could have some kind of… conclusion, or closure, to her character before she eventually leaves the show. (And we’ll not address right now what a lazy/lame/honestly sexist idea it is to use marriage as the ‘completion’ of a female character’s arc. That’s beside my point right now.)

Cully fades in and out of the show, I’ll admit, and maybe the showrunners had reason to believe that Laura Howard wasn’t going to be available much after this… but this is such a disservice to her character. In the past she’s always been strong-willed, independent, and unafraid to pursue what she wants. At times when she’s more present in the show, she’s a pretty engaging character.

This whole episode Cully and Simon are facing issues with the wedding and their feelings about it. Things keep going wrong, and both of their careers are getting in the way of their honeymoon plans; Simon fucks up and Cully is left wondering if she’s making the right choice. Now, if Simon was a character we’d had time to get to know and really care about - if we’d been given any chance to really get invested in Cully’s relationship with him - then yeah, of course we’d be rooting for them to work it out. We would want them to make up and for the wedding (and marriage!) to go well, and we’d feel something about the stakes! But because we barely know him, or really anything about their relationship, the episode winds up… kind of feeling like it’s pointing to them calling off the wedding. Or at least postponing it.

And then the wedding happens anyway, and Cully is married to honestly her least compelling love interest in the whole series, whom we will never see again. You can damn near forget it ever happened at all. She and Simon decide to prioritise their wedding, and then their careers, and then their honeymoon. Which like… I guess I appreciate that at least they didn’t have her turn down her upcoming role in favour of the relationship, but still. After the degree of uncertainty and anxiety throughout the episode, the conclusion of ‘oh, we love each other, so actually it’s gonna be fine’ doesn’t have a whole lot of weight. (Especially when that love has, from a viewer’s perspective, been told far more than shown.)

It’s just. Like. Cully is a character we’ve known and loved for over a decade at this point. And we want the best for her. And Simon is just… so lacklustre.

This show has always prioritised episode-by-episode plot first and foremost, and - unfortunately - long-term character arcs barely at all. It’s not a surprise that Cully’s marriage is a one-episode b-plot with minimal satisfaction and no real lasting impact. But it is a bummer.

The best thing about this episode is the Gavin cameo.