In the aftermath of Tuesday night's slash-fest NCIS epsiode, Bounce, my flist has been abuzz. What started as specific squees of delight, often degenerated into actual reasoned discussion of the episode.

I know. What is the world coming to?

A great deal of what's been said has been percolating, as things do, in my head and I think I've finally got something coherent to offer up. This is more than just this one hour of television. A lot of what's been discussed and pointed out and hashed out and rehashed has been around for, well, let's see. Since Honey West and her ocelot first strutted across the small screen? In short, we were talking about Unresolved Sexual Tension (UST), that holy grail of all television executives. Yes, indeed, UST is the holy grail... and I think American television has just about as much chance of getting it right as the bad guy had of finding the actual grail without Indy's help.

See, here's the deal.

You get a nice action/adventure or mystery show set up. It's got good characters played by attractive actors delivering snappy dialog presenting interesting plots and WOW! It's gonna be a hit! The cameras roll, the sponsors vie to pay for it and the audience is eating it up.

So it goes for a season. Or two. Or maybe three (I'm lookin' at you, SG-1) and everything's great. The quirky team, it's always a quirky team (unless it's quirky buddies) has worked out most of its differences. Strengths and weaknesses are known, growth has occurred (YAY for character growth!). The geek is slightly less geeky. The tough guy cracks the occasional smile. The tough woman in a man's world has learned to trust her male teammates to treat her with respect. The outsider has found a home.

And this is often where it all starts to crumble.

Why?

I could say because television executives spend too much time reading self-referential marketing reports and too little time actually consuming the product.

But I won't.

That would be rude.

But I will tell you something that flows out of those overly self-referential marketing reports that I'm not going to mention and that's "We need to spice things up! We need to add some pizazz! The show needs some zip!"... 99 times out of 100 what they reach for is UST. Pick one of the men and have him and the woman (after all, there's only ever one woman) start making eyes at each other, flirting over dead bodies or in the middle of firefights and watch the ratings soar.

Um. Sure. Whatever.

This is the Tried and True[tm] way to excite viewers, to get people talking, in short, to generate the all important buzz. There's only one problem.

It rarely works.

Oh, it'll likely cause a slight boost in ratings, at least at first, but it's also when a large number of loyal viewers start to grumble. In some cases those loyal viewers do something else and that's change the channel. I think I figured out why.

Let's see a show of hands around here. How many of you rarely get all excited over the Perfect Couple[tm] in your action/adventure, mystery, whatever non-romance show? Given my flist, I'd say probably a goodly number. Face it, 90% of you are probably at least part time slashers. I know some of you do enjoy some of the UST-Designated Couples and that's fine. But one of the things that came out of the recent discussions of Bounce kept making me flash on many of the problems I had with Stargate SG-1.

We had several seasons of dedicated universe and character development. Characters, and their relationships, grew as dictated by the events in the stories. For example, Sam Carter got the shock of her life when she watched Daniel Jackson blow away a tank full of infant Goa'uld in Family. For those of us who knew Daniel from the movie, it was perfectly in character. Carter had only known him for a few "episodes", so she was still learning about her teammate. That event was something she had to incorporate into her world view and it changed, subtly, how she related to him later in the series. To my mind, it was necessary for her to start to realize that Daniel wasn't just the mild-mannered civilian geek he quite often appeared to be on base. She got a boost along the Jackson learning curve in that episode.

In short, the events of the episode and the growth of the characters were tightly intertwined and interdependent in those early years. I've noticed the same thing in my latest fandom, NCIS. As long as characters are allowed to be changed by the stories the show was designed to tell, things feel good, feel right, everything's in sync and all's right with the world.

Until about the third season when, suddenly, whoever it is that makes these decisions decides it's time to New and Improve[tm] what isn't broken.

Which brings us back to UST.

In American television, that means the only woman in the action/adventure or mystery show (because, as we all know, there's generally only ever one - sometimes we get gasp TWO! I know everyone's thinking back to the "S" word I used earlier) is automatically tagged to carry half the burden of the UST (though I've yet to see her only carry half). One of the men (and it could vary, depending on the show and cast changes) gets to dance the other half of the UST tango (though with enough whiskey, they might move from tango to foxtrot - yes, I do know exactly what I said).

And here's where the problems start.

You've got this kick ass action/adventure/yadda show with its great continuity and wonderful characters played by attractive actors saying snappy dialog and suddenly, in the midst of the bleeding, broken bodies and threats of global destruction and the odd visitation from the scourge of the Dark Ages, there's suddenly supposed to be this burgeoning relationship all played out in four acts across 42 minutes, 22 times a year.

*headdesk*

Now, I know what you're thinking. "What about Farscape?", "What about Babylon 5?", "What about Scarecrow and Mrs. King?" (Hey! I liked it! Stop looking at me like that.) In each of these, the romance elements were there pretty much from the beginning. I'm not talking about those shows. I'm talking about the dreaded bait and switch. Because with the S3 UST bait and switch, we've suddenly got the characters serving two masters. They're serving the stories and they're serving the Gods of UST.

Face it. We started watching the show for all the good stuff we were offered in the beginning. We stuck with it because it worked. All the sudden there's this thing hovering over two of the characters like an albatross looking for a way to hang itself (I may not have liked The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but I get symbolism). Instead of solving the mystery, or stopping the terrorists, or saving the blinkin' universe, the UST-Designated Couple[tm] (that's annoying, from now on, it's UST-DC) will pause and stare meaningfully into each other's eyes before, regretfully, Risking it All for the Greater Good[tm]. When the team needs to be divided up for some reason, no more will the Best Friends[tm] or Friendly Rivals[tm] be paired up, no, now the UST-DC, regardless of their individual skill sets, experience or position, will go off into danger together so as to give them more screen time to stare meaningfully into each other's eyes. With each and every instance where the Gods of UST are worshiped, little bits of the characters' credibility are sacrificed and that damned albatross gets that much heavier.

Now, lots of us here write fic. It's an obsession a hobby many of us enjoy. A way of indulging ourselves in these universes we've grown to love. And many of us are slashers. The "why slash" is a basic question for another essay (many other essays, for that matter) so I'll only speak for myself. When I watch a show like SG-1 or NCIS, I don't look for romance. I don't generally look for romance, period. In fact, fic is about the only place I do enjoy romance, with a few exceptions like the shows I mentioned above and musicals (btw, off topic, but it managed to come up in a discussion thread - "Gotta Dance" is from Singin' in the Rain - that sequence was just on - yes, I'm writing an 'anti-romance' essay while watching a musical - wanna make somethin' of it?). What happens is I'll be innocently watching a show and something about the way a couple of the characters relate to each other will click with me. It's that vaunted "chemistry" that everyone always talks about. When I see a certain type of chemistry, the slashy portion of my brain lights up like a Christmas tree and the bunnies start to breed. One of the major things that must be in place for that chemistry is character integrity. I'm not talking about moral code (nice as that is), I'm talking about the character's integrity as a character.

Every show has the odd blips and bumps and things we fans end up having to hand wave. That's fine and can actually be fun to try and find good rationalizations for why Gibbs said his dad was dead (when he wasn't) or how Apophis was able to open a wormhole in Children of the Gods (when he didn't have a DHD or, apparently, knowledge of, or access to, the SGC's computer systems).

But the Gods of UST are relentless. As the episodes slip by, there's often a slow erosion in the character's integrity. "Why is she in this scene?" "Why wasn't he the one who went back to report in?" "She's a doctor, not a bricklayer!" (Sorry, gratuitous TOS reference.) By forcing characters into situations that serve the Gods of UST, it often means the character otherwise best suited for the job in the scene isn't present. Yes, it can be wonderful to see characters forced into positions where they have to perform against type. Make the macho guy comfort someone; make the meek guy protect someone; have the technophobe have to puzzle his way through disarming a bomb with his only aid at the other end of a crackling cell phone. That is the stuff of drama and angst and all those other lovely words fans and fic writers live for. But when the technophobe is only in the scene with the bomb so he can make eyes at his UST-DC partner, it shows. Whoever made the decision, in the story, to put him there loses a bit of credibility. We can forgive one or two because humans make mistakes, but it's never just one or two. It's three or six or a dozen and slowly the cracks begin to spread. Eventually, we start to wonder why this idiot was ever put in charge because he has no freakin' clue how to allocate his personnel resources.

Then the writers break out the duct tape and our foreheads become intimately acquainted with the nearest desk.

So, now we've got these poor sacrificial characters covered in duct tape with honkin' huge, stinking, dead birds hanging around their necks and we're not really happy about it. So, being the versatile and creative types that we are, we start shopping for characters we can believe in. One of the things that's often quite interesting is that when you separate the UST-DC couple, they miraculously heal and go back to the interesting, well-integrated characters we all fell in love with. Sometimes they heal. Sometimes the damage is too dramatic. Oh, we can stick our fingers in our ears and hum while remembering them as they were, or as one of our fellow-fans managed to write them, but sometimes they become so tainted, we can't face them without remembering the stench of rotting sea bird. The sacrifice to the Gods of UST have ruined them for many of us.

So we look for characters and/or relationships that were allowed to develop without the added pressure of serving such selfish and, by this time, rather ripe, gods.

Given that we're talking about American television, there is now and may, for a long time to come, continue to be, one type of relationship able to fly completely under the radar of the ravening Gods of UST.

Enter slash.

Male characters' relationships in American television, while not completely safe, are far less likely to be compelled into servicing the Gods of UST. They may suffer due to reduced screen time due to the constant need of the UST-DC to make eyes at each other, but that's another one that's easy to hand wave. It's far easier to hand wave what isn't seen, than to hand wave what's been, frankly, shoved down our throats. *cough*Divide and Conquer*cough* (But when hand waving isn't enough, at least it frees up our fingers so we can stick them in our ears while we hum loudly.)

Let us return to the beginning of this piece. Bounce was a wonderful episode. While there were some questionable plot elements, overall, the characters were served far better than they have been in recent episodes. One thing that was completely missing from Bounce? The UST-DC (as if Tony hasn't been through enough and Ziva doesn't really seem to even like him half the time). Oh, Tony and Ziva were both in it, but there wasn't any flirting (from Tony), mooning (Ziva) or ineffectual stalking (Ziva again - you'd think someone trained by Mossad would be a better class of stalker). What we did get was Tony and Gibbs getting some long awaited screen time.

The two characters (and the actors who play them) have amazing chemistry together. Nor am I simply talking about someone wearing slash goggles. They are incredible to watch as mentor/student, even father figure/adoptive son. This is a relationship rich with shared history and all sorts of fascinating intertwining emotional threads. (Early Jack and Daniel shared the same kind of symbiotic relationship in SG-1. We not only learned to hum loudly, I think we could probably start a kazoo orchestra.) We have seen so much of this relationship played out over the seasons and last night was like a gift. Gibbs and Tony are, by far, the most complex of the main characters. We know quite a bit about Gibbs, and precious little about Tony (except that he hides well in plain sight). What we do know about him has been slipped in here and there in drips and drabs and off-hand comments and reaction shots meant for our eyes only. That some of us enjoy the challenge of transforming the relationship on the screen into something else (though no more or less meaningful), is for us to enjoy. Sort of a television Easter egg.

So, the upshot of all this is I'm happy that the Gods of UST are shippers, rather than slashers. I'd rather they go away completely and take up a more worthy cause like cleaning up that mess in the asteroid belt, but as long as we're stuck with them, at least they're not messing with our slash couples. As long as our slash couples are never burdened by the weight of that damned stinky carcass (the feathers get everywhere) they can continue to develop in the same way they started, driven by the stories, their personalities and their history rather than being shoehorned into an ill-conceived, market driven UST-DC relationship that has to be covered in duct tape and rotting bird juice to hold up at all.

Perhaps I'll start dedicating my fic to the Gods of Slash, or even the Gods of Gen. They are far more subtle and less prone to meddling. Not terribly fond of wearing carcasses, either.

ETA: many thanks to my lovely and talented flist for pointing out a few errors that crept in, including misreferencing the origin of dead stinking fowl carcasses. Corrections made.