Warning: the comments below contain spoilers.
For their 25th issue, the Queen and Country Players proudly present a staged reading of Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge.
Tara Chace takes a bit of time off to visit her mother, much to the chagrin of both. See, Tara finds her mother gratingly self-indulgent and immature. Mumsy is marrying a man half her age, much to Tara’s consternation.
There isn’t much balance between the opposing forces, really. Mother Chace seems like a decent enough broad — a little selfish, but living the way she pleases with available means. Tara’s criticisms seem sulky and misplaced; her mother seems to have a much more reasonable grasp of the situation.
So, the consequence is that Tara spends most of the double-sized issue being a pouty brat, threatening her mother’s fiancé and snarling at her mother. And what are we meant to learn from this? Did Tara go into service to avoid the horrible fate of becoming like her mother? Is Tara punishing her mother by constructing a life that doesn’t make her happy or fulfilled?
It’s always risky when a piece of serial fiction strays from its formula. QUEEN AND COUNTRY has always been more of a procedural than a character study, though the reader can learn a great deal about the cast while watching them work. When a procedural sinks deeper into the personal lives of its cast, it should be for a concrete purpose. After a couple of readings, I’m still not clear what writer Greg Rucka had in mind with this outing.
As a final note, I really can’t stand the un-translated dialogue in this book. Tara is obviously the point-of-view character, the access point, and it would be more sensible for the reader to be able to understand what she does. (If she runs across conversation in a language she doesn’t know, fine. That would be fair enough.) The use of extensive, un-translated passages in this issue seemed pretentious, and while I could figure out what was happening in context, they took me out of the story.
Hopefully, things will be back to business next issue. Then, maybe in issue 50, they can do a riff on One True Thing.