Sometimes I enjoy laughing and crying in the span of one episode. This is not one of those times.
This episode was originally intended to air right after The Genuine Article,” the November episode in which Maggie sells Dean and Ginny out to save her career. I’ve lamented Pan Am’s seeming lack of consequences for the actions of its characters from, well, from right after “The Genuine Article” so this is a nice reality check… four months too late.
I spent the first half-hour of “Romance Languages” trying to figure out what the hell was going on, mostly by making faces at the television and asking Boyfriend on every commercial break, “What the hell is going on?” You see, Pan Am previously left us at a rather intense cliffhanger with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Ted learning that his fiancé likes women, and Laura dealing with the fallout of her nudie pics. But this week, everything is roses and Dean’s former fling, Ginny the High Ranking Pan Am Executive’s Mistress, is back to get all Lifetime Movie Crazy when he tries to break things off with her.
Awesome, except it was implied that he had already broken things off with her four months ago.
Ginny proves to be problematic on a few levels. Even after the use of internet magic to figure out what the hell is going on, Ginny’s characterization prompts a new round of squinty-face and helpless flailing of limbs. Previously, Ginny was characterized as a bit of a free spirit. She was not, however, completely out of her mind with the crazy. So when Ginny starts lobbing bottles of milk at Dean’s head in the middle of a New York street, and later, shoves her face through a glass window (yes, shoves her face through a glass window) in a Rome hotel room, my brain is melting for a whole new reason and I end up watching the rest of the episode through the spaces between my fingers as I mumble in a clearly unhinged voice, “I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
It doesn’t help that I’ve recently started watching <a href=”http://tvgeekarmy.com/post/tag/mad-men”>Mad Men</a>, which is just so elegant and subtle in its storytelling and characterization that Pan Am seems to come off more and more like someone tried to recreate the Mona Lisa with crayons and construction paper, but for goodness sake, ABC, there’s no need to make things worse with sheer sloppiness.
I don’t know if airing this episode in its original spot would have helped much, I mean, we still have Ginny shoving her face through a window, but it might have helped. I suspected that there was going to be a problem earlier in the evening when I read the summary for the episode on my TV guide listing and legitimately thought that it was going to be a rerun. If I can’t tell whether or not an episode is new based on the summary, there’s a problem. Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve had such an experience with Pan Am.
Ads for next week’s finale are still calling it a season finale, and Christina Ricci herself insists that a decision hasn’t been made yet concerning the series’ future, but judging from the way this week’s episode was shoehorned in, I’m willing to bed that Pan Am isn’t at the top of anyone’s minds over at ABC.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.