Why viewers turn on Skyler White, Lori Grimes and Elizabeth Keen

Being inconvenient to Walt is not a moral failing

The series gives us privileged access to Walt. We know where he has been, why he needs another explanation and what danger is approaching. Skyler receives the evasions. An audience already invested in the criminal plot can experience her questions as a delay.

That feeling is understandable as a response to suspense. It becomes a poor ethical judgement if the delay itself is treated as evidence that she has behaved badly. A spouse does not become unreasonable because the audience knows the lie she is investigating.

The contrast is especially clear around Walt's account of provision. His criminal life can be discussed through necessity, pride, illness and humiliation. Skyler's anger is sometimes assessed as though it needs no context at all. The analysis has changed scale between characters.

The rehearsed gambling story gives the viewing problem a sharper test. Skyler's precision is enjoyable when it helps the cover work: she can anticipate a question, correct Walt and keep an explanation plausible. The same attention felt obstructive when it was directed at exposing his lie. The contrast does not require us to excuse her participation. It asks whether our pleasure has started to depend on her becoming useful to the crime.

Her later conduct still needs to be judged. In “Rabid Dog,” fear for the family helps her contemplate Jesse's killing as a solution. That is a serious choice. The chronology matters: responsibility for making it does not retrospectively turn her early questions about Walt's absences into hypocrisy. She has moved into a different moral position, under conditions the earlier Skyler could not yet know.

Anna Gunn's public account of hostility towards her establishes that some responses crossed into personal abuse. That fact should remain distinct from criticism of an episode or a fictional choice. Abuse is not made more analytical by calling it passionate fandom.

A fairer complaint about the early writing is that Skyler has less independent interior space than Walt. We often encounter her through the questions his secret creates. Later episodes give Gunn more opportunity to make the effort of maintaining appearances visible.

I find Skyler's trajectory coherent because competence does not save her from the moral conditions of the work she is doing. She can understand laundering better than Walt and still misunderstand the possibility of containing his ambition.

For the full argument, including Ted, the children and the “Ozymandias” phone call, see our Skyler essay. The point here is narrower: criticism becomes useful when it names the choice. “She is annoying when Walt needs to act” has not yet done that work.

The audience knows Rick is alive before Lori does

Lori's relationship with Shane is often judged using information she does not have. She believes Rick has died. Rick's return changes the circumstances, and she ends the relationship with Shane. Describing the whole situation as a straightforward affair conducted behind a living husband's back erases the belief under which it began.

That does not settle every criticism of what follows. Her conversations with the two men can be evasive and contradictory. She wants safety, emotional distance from Shane and a workable family life while the group is becoming more dangerous. Those desires do not always produce clear or considerate speech.

But Shane is not an inert object moved by Lori's words. He has his own desire, resentment and capacity for violence. Assigning her responsibility for managing both men's responses can make male agency disappear precisely when her agency is being most severely judged.

The strongest writing complaint concerns allocation of competence. Rick and Shane are repeatedly given practical action through which the audience can experience their usefulness. Lori is more often placed within domestic disagreement, worry about Carl or a decision that creates another problem. The range matters.

The car crash makes the distinction concrete. Looking away from the road at a map is a credible mistake by a frightened person. The writing question is what follows from choosing this mistake for Lori: her attempt to find Rick becomes another emergency other people must resolve. The incident gives her danger without an equivalent discovery or competence. That can be frustrating even to a viewer who fully understands why she went looking.

A discussion on r/thewalkingdead includes both criticism of Lori's conduct and criticism of how the crash is written. That is a more productive distinction than treating all dislike as one emotion with one cause.

Rick's account of Shane's death delivers more than one shock: he killed his former friend, and Carl then shot Shane after reanimation. Lori's recoil is not given a long, separate explanation for each part. It can therefore look like a reversal of her earlier alarm about Shane, or like horror at what the confrontation has required of husband and son. The ambiguity is a fair objection to the staging. It should not be turned into certainty about a single motive the scene has not made clear.

I do not think every ambiguity is evidence of subtle character writing. Sometimes the script wants the emotional disruption without giving Lori enough space to make it intelligible. Callies is then asked to carry a shift the programme has not adequately prepared.

Her final childbirth scene gives her a direct relationship to the cost of survival. It is moving partly because the practical stakes and the feeling finally occupy the same space. She is not just responding to what the men have done elsewhere.

The corrective is neither to declare her faultless nor to make her the author of Shane's choices. It is to ask why the programme so often lets a man's flaw coexist with visible capability while presenting her flaw through the trouble it causes.

Red's charm does not give him ownership of her history

Elizabeth has a strong reason to question Reddington. He enters her life possessing information about her family and past, then makes access to it conditional. His protection can be real while his management of her knowledge remains coercive.

The audience experiences that management differently. James Spader turns withholding into a performance worth watching. A story that might feel evasive from Elizabeth's position can feel generous from ours because it arrives as an entertaining scene.

That difference does not mean she should trust whoever offers the next answer. The programme's repeated use of possible relatives, competing accounts and reversals makes her judgement a legitimate subject of criticism. A person trained to investigate ought to be capable of learning something about the reliability of apparently complete explanations.

The discussion “What were the writers thinking with Elizabeth?” on r/TheBlackList centres on that frustration. It illustrates a complaint about repetition and decision-making. It is not evidence about Megan Boone's reasons for leaving, however freely commenters speculate.

My own criticism is structural. The mystery needs Elizabeth to remain dissatisfied, but it also repeatedly needs her to attach herself to an explanation before the audience can trust it. The same movement can therefore look less like a particular person's error and more like a requirement for producing the next reversal.

Red benefits from the arrangement. His knowledge makes him appear ahead of the plot. Her lack of it makes her appear behind it. When an apparent mistake is later explained by information only he possessed, the programme can reward his authority without having given her a fair chance to evaluate it.

Sam's killing is a useful test of the imbalance. Red's ability to act gently in some relationships does not remove his willingness to decide what another person may reveal. Elizabeth's wish to know should not need a defence more elaborate than his decision to prevent disclosure.

“16 Ounces” makes the limit impossible to leave abstract. Liz targets Red with a bomb in his hospital room, believing him alone; Ressler's presence puts another person inside the danger she has created. Sony Pictures Television's clip identifies the episode and that mistaken assumption. Her rage has an intelligible history. It does not grant reliable knowledge of who will pay for the act. This is a concrete objection to her choice, not a demand that she remain grateful to Red.

I find the best Elizabeth scenes in the gap between the profiler's attempt to understand and the daughter's need for an answer. The least convincing passages require the same uncertainty to generate another extreme commitment without a sufficiently different emotional basis.

The problem is not that she opposes a charismatic man. It is that the writing does not always give opposition the sustained development it gives his ability to outmanoeuvre it.