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calliopecalling · 2 years

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QOTS Rewatch: Season 4, Episodes 1-7

As you can see… I didn’t do individual episode recaps for this season, largely because there are only a handful of gifsets for each episode and writing a whole-ass meta every day or two is too much, even for me 😂 However, there is a lot of ground to cover. What I’ve realized anew on this rewatch is that, wow, this season has so much plot. Like I almost wonder whether Peter backed out after the bulk of the season had already been sketched out and so they had to fill in his absence with a bunch of random extra characters and story lines that wouldn’t disrupt the main arc of the season…? I mean, who knows. That’s pure speculation. But it really feels like there are some stories that you could just cut right out on the dotted line and leave the rest of the story intact, lol. In any case, while this season definitely feels a lot more rushed and a bit sloppier (hello, major timeline issues 😒) there are still things to appreciate and characters and plot elements I really do find strong. More of My Thoughts™️ behind the cut.

First I just want to address the elephant in the room which is the absence of James and how the writers dealt with it. Like pretty much everyone else I wish it had been handled better. I watched this season live and after the first episode, the silence around his absence felt too noticeable. For the most part I still enjoyed the season--maybe because Teresa's my main girl, so I still got my eye candy all season--but I definitely was like... okay so they're just going to basically act like James no longer exists? On this rewatch, though, I'm finding more and more of her missing him obvious in her acting choices. My sense is that when the season was written, they didn't really know if Peter would return for season 5 so they were just trying to put a pause on the whole story line in any explicit way. But also, I guess it really feels in-character to me that, six months in and James still a total ghost, Teresa decide to just box him up and put him in the far corner of the attic. She decides to get the message and move on already. Which means never mentioning him again.

I mean: could there have been some kind of conversation between like Teresa and King George where she opened up a little? Sure, though I kind of imagine that would've happened off-screen in the gap between the end of season 3 and beginning of season 4. Would it have been a stronger season if they'd figured out how to weave it in? I'm not sure, though it would've been gratifying as a James and Jeresa fan to have him acknowledged. I think part of what made it frustrating was just the waiting each episode and being like ok what is happening?? Do they really think they can just leave that relationship dangling and we'll forget about it? I guess my point is: it was definitely a bummer that Peter decided not to do the season, and James and his relationship with Teresa left a big gap in the show, especially because it was in her relationship with him that we saw a lot of her humanity. But, her character would've needed to go on this darker journey this season anyway. And with the writers having no idea what Peter was going to do, I genuinely have had a hard time figuring out where I would've handled specifically the James relationship differently.

HOWEVER. I do think there are things they could've done differently, even without James, to improve the continuity of this season with the earlier ones. Rewriting canon to have Teresa present at Tony's birth is a HUGE "no" to me and that's the number one thing I would change. Second, with all the antagonists from the first three seasons having been bested by the end of season 3 (Epifanio, Cortez, Camila being the ones with multi-season arcs), it would have been wise to carry over more of the story elements from those seasons so that it didn't feel quite so much like literally everything was starting over. I've said before: Castel needed to become a main character. Devon could've been written in on some level (though without knowing what was going to happen with Peter/James, I can kinda understand steering clear of that). Keep Taza around even for minor plot developments. SOMETHING. And while I understand the expense of filming in multiple locations with multiple sets, I think that having some episodes take place back in Phoenix or even Mexico would have provided a helpful bridge. (There are a few Boaz scenes that do take place in Mexico but they're few and far between.) Any of these things would've helped this season feel less like a brand new show that's totally written all the prior characters out of existence.

AAAAAaaaaanyway, so much for the big picture what-I-think-the-writers-could've-done issues. Now I'll try to just stick to the show we actually have, lol. I'm not going to do an episode-by-episode breakdown here. Instead, I'm going to talk about each of the key story lines in turn and what its significance is in terms of Teresa's character journey.

El Gordo

When the season begins, Teresa is just about to open her bar and it seems she's taken the last six months to set up her routes into New Orleans. I THINK she's still just selling on the dark web at this point (well, and presumably in the local market in Phoenix too?) because she has no interest in selling her product in New Orleans. Instead, she wants to use New Orleans, and its port access, as her distribution hub. So where does El Gordo come in? Well, she wants to expand her business so that she can buy the waterfront property and go legit, and he sells product from his hub in Miami up the east coast. So if she can convince him to sell her product, she'll have a huge new market at the snap of her fingers.

The other thing that's in it for her is that right now, El Gordo is buying from independent farmers in Colombia. And those are cutting into Castel's market dominance. Castel showed up at the beginning of the first episode, worried that Teresa was buying from other suppliers behind her back. If Teresa can get El Gordo to buy from her, then she can prove to Castel that she's got nothing to worry about.

El Gordo is a great character in my opinion. What I like about this story line is that it connects to Castel, which means it connects back to earlier seasons, and also he's believable somehow. He's delightfully eccentric and scary but without feeling contrived. Business-wise, wanting to work with him makes sense, especially because of his relationships up the east coast (which pay off in 4x05 when he connects her to Oksana). He serves a clear plot purpose but doesn't feel like he only exists for plot. I like the unpredictable energy between him and Teresa. Basically, so far so good with respect to new characters and stories.

Javier and Boaz

Javier this season to me feels a little forced and I wish there was more Boaz somehow to play off him because it's kind of hard to understand his character without feeling like his back story is clear. He's Boaz's younger cousin, which explains some of his tension between wanting to follow Teresa's way but also having a hard time setting clear limits with Boaz (and still getting into trouble with him too). But then there's also Emilia, who we first meet in 4x06, and whose role doesn't feel totally natural to Javier's characterization in my opinion. It's also a little unclear to me exactly how Javier and Boaz play into Teresa's bigger story this season. Are we meant to understand how Javier is less reliable than James and so Teresa is more alone? Are we meant to see, via Boaz and Emilia, how his loyalties are never 100% solid? Obviously his major arc is that he gets into this trouble with Boaz at the beginning, killing the Judge's nephew which of course will come back to haunt Teresa in a major way later (and by this point in the rewatch, 4x07, Rene's death is only just surfacing). But something about this whole story feels a bit hasty and contrived to me and so this is one that doesn't totally work in my opinion.

The Judge

Speaking of the Judge, he's another big player this season. He steps into the gap created by the demise of Camila and Cortez last season and he's definitely a slimy opponent. I said in a gifset reblog that I do appreciate the way the show tries to show a more politicized antagonist than it has in the past. But, we get TOO much Judge side story in my opinion. All the stuff with his son feels like screentime that could've been spent on Teresa in more character-developing ways. Or.... on Castel or Boaz or Taza... (I'll never shut up about how those characters should've been used more this season.)

The Judge's role with respect to Teresa and her character arc, though, is to show how no matter how much she tries to play nice, she can't avoid getting caught up in the drama of people far more evil than she is. By the end of 4x07, they still have a tentative peace, but it's at the cost of $3 million/month in hush money, and he's fanned the flames between her and Dumas, too. Way more trouble than he's worth and I wish she'd just take care of him.

Marcel Dumas

I've already ranted in my gifset reblogs about Marcel. So, let me clarify here that he is one of my favorite new characters this season and I love the spark he and Teresa have on-screen. Alimi Ballard is fire. I am also glad the show didn't kill him off (the writers have said they'd planned to until they saw the chemistry between Alimi and Alice) and glad that--especially given the setting in NOLA--we get a major Black character. However.... he really makes it hard for me not to bear a permanent grudge in this first half of the season. By the end of 4x07, he and Teresa have finally struck a truce, but, as I explained in my tags on this gifset, I really don't think Teresa was the only one who owed an apology and in fact so much about Marcel and how he treated her early on really set me off.

His role with respect to her character development though is great. It really highlights how, even when she's cornered time and time again into doing things in a way she doesn't want to, she still tries to hold herself to higher standards. At the same time, the costs of her business are adding up, and she has to harden, become colder. In her relationship with Marcel, we see her transformation unfold and she definitely has a more queenpin-like energy, even when finally making peace with him.

Pote, Kelly Anne, and Tony

Alright I'll just say it: I don't really care for this side plot. I think its role is to try to be the place where Teresa's softer side can show up (especially with Tony) and where that growing divide between the life she wants and the life she has is highlighted. Without James, there needs to be some other place to show this. My problems here are (1) this story ends up making Pote's role as her bodyguard a lot murkier and I've realized on this rewatch that really... he doesn't do anything for her. He doesn't help her or save her or anything! The role of his character as someone willing to take a bullet for her really is kind of neutered. Instead, he's agonizing over how to show up for Tony. I'm guessing the idea here is to humanize Pote, complete his redemption arc, make us root for him, too, in advance of the final season. But in my opinion it ends up actually separating him too much from Teresa. Especially because unfortunately the actor that plays Tony really doesn't sell him for me. I don't find him believable. I also just... CANNOT forgive the timeline issues with Tony being almost 16 years old and Teresa was at his birth.

I know that I do like Kelly Anne's story in the latter half of the season, and as I've said, Teresa with pretty much any female character is great, so I'll have more to say about her later. And in general, the role of her family vs. her business will become a lot sharper in the back half of the season, too. It's just, in this first half, it feels like it drags.

King George and Birdie

I'll keep this short and sweet; Birdie was essentially just a plot device for the war with Marcel but I did think her scenes with Teresa were generally sweet and I loved the moment she shared with King George, not least because, as I think I said in a gifset reblog, George is one of the few threads connecting this season to previous seasons, and I love that his grief about Bilal and the trauma from s3 is still so palable, and Birdie helps him with that. Sorry, that was an extremely long sentence, I'll never do that again. Anyway, I said early on that I was meh about Birdie, but I changed my mind. She was a great character and I wish the writers had done more with her than just plot service.

Eddie

ALRIGHT Y'ALL. Want my Eddie take-down?

Look.

Eddie serves a very clear plot purpose. He's there to show Teresa that it's no use: she is no longer the person she used to be; nor can she pretend she's "normal"; nor can she pretend to care about someone she doesn't give two fucks about. He's an obvious rebound. For six months she held out hope that James would reappear, but she finally had to bury that hope six feet under and her job is stressful, I can't blame her for wanting some action. It's not like she meets a lot of eligible guys in her line of work.... so Eddie might've genuinely been what her options were. And I even didn't mind their first kiss: it was cute, huddled up at the piano like that. It felt kinda tentative on her part, like she was clearly a bit nervous (like the OPPOSITE of how she was with James--she was so steady and sure with him 😭 brb gotta watch 3x05) and a bit girlish, more like how she was with Guero in all her flashbacks, but it didn't seem unwanted, and it was slow and sweet and he wasn't pushy or annoying.

But the good stuff pretty much ends there lmao. First of all the man cannot spit out a full sentence without some godawful cliche to save his life. Literally everything he says makes me roll my eyes all the way back into my head. He's got this whole "I'm so profound" attitude that is just suuuuuuuch a man thing and it is so unattractive. He asks her limited questions and never with any sincerity, though to be sure she always kind of nervously brushes them away. She's not looking for him to be a safe place for her to bare her soul or anything, so I can't blame him solely, but it's painful to watch him treat her like an empty vessel that he can just pour himself into. Ew, sorry, I didn't intend for that to sound so euphemistically sexual, but it really does seem like he thinks of her as this blank slate that he just gets to write on or something. Like she has no past before him. He's just not curious.

On this rewatch I feel so sure that the writers did this intentionally. I know that back when the season was airing, Dailyn was on Twitter trying to drum up excitement for Eddie, but I just am going to ignore that and think maybe she was trying to just support the actor who, god help him, was probably doing his best with the trash lines he was given, but I really can't believe that the writers didn't know they were making him this cringe.

My belief--and my evidence is that the writers this season in general are not all that subtle (other examples abound though I'm blanking off the top of my head)--is that the whole point was to show she just couldn't get into him, the whole point was for him to just be a dumb cringey rebound so that no one would actually ship them accidentally and mess with Jeresa lol. YES I KNOW that's my shipper lens, but like this season's show runners wrote entire episodes of seasons 2 and 3, including some of the best Jeresa ones, and they KNEW what gold they had. The Eddie story sets Teresa up for feeling like romance is completely incompatible with this business but also sets her/us up for the OMG YES FINALLY when James finally comes back.

Because listen. Let's take episode 4x04 as an example. The episode opens with her waking up in his bed naked after having presumably hooked up the night before. She startles awake and then kinda looks around uncomfortably. She kiiiinda smiles? But it looks more like a grimace? And looks away and buries her head in the pillow a little. Call me crazy but girl looks kinda disappointed to me. She was blowing off steam but... wrong person kinda vibes. Anyway, she gets up while he's still sleeping and starts getting dressed like she's about to bounce before he wakes up. Then he wakes up and needles her until she agrees to go to brunch with him. She cleeeearly seems uncomfortable but she's like alright. I'll give this a go. Meanwhile he calls her distillery a "tequila factory" -- even after she corrects him. WINCE. Yes, she winces too, I swear to god she does.

Then at brunch he's all "I'm starting to like you" to which she responds with a forced smile and an "I'm starting to like your city." BURNNNN.

I MEAN. This is intentional, guys. Call me crazy but I think we're meant to find him awful. Maybe not THIS awful? Like I readily admit that my intense shipping of Jeresa makes my hatred of him a bit extra. But c'mon. The guy is a total tool. The same writers who were responsible for James's character development in season 3 cannot possibly have actually believed that Eddie was an interesting person or a serious love interest for Teresa.

Nope. He was not. He was so out of touch with her that when he brought her with him to Nashville, it was alllll about him, all about showing off how hot and deep he was, and he couldn't even be bothered to pry at all into Teresa's cover story about how she "slipped in the bathroom" at his show. Noooo, he could only manage to be offended that she'd missed his special song for her, and then think that her breaking up with him was because he'd confessed to her that he'd accidentally killed his friend. GOD EDDIE GET A LIFE.

When I watched this season live, I remember being just extremely puzzled by Eddie. I wasn't even perturbed by her moving on because she so clearly hadn't actually moved on, Eddie was so clearly a glorified sex toy (which, you go girl). I was just like wow Teresa you can do so much better than that. But she wasn't even trying to do better, and that's kind of the point. I feel like the whole point was that her heart wasn't actually in it. I can't even muster up being offended by the plot line, even though Eddie is so detestable, because it's just so obviously a placeholder for her. A very final nail in the coffin of whatever idea she had that she could go back to the person she'd been with Guero. A piece of candy on the arm of a smarmy guy who only cared about his own romancing. So in some ways, the Eddie story to me actually parts the seas for James to be the only possible real deal for her. It just... takes way too long for him to come back. (PETER, I'M LOOKING AT YOU.)

Just had to end this with a James gif. Sorry Eddie. James I hope you are off pining somewhere extra hard because your girl is going through a helluva lot of bullshit and a helluva lot of heartache and thinks she basically has no shot at love ever again 😭

Thanks for reading this far, see y'all again in like, a week (😂😂😂 sorry this is going so fast, there just are only like 3 gifsets per episode this season lmao) for the rest of the season breakdown.

#queen of the south #qots #qots s4 #2021 rewatch #txt post #qots reaction post #qots meta #listen I really tried to find a good Birdie gif for this but tumblr's gif insert functionality is really weird and I couldn't #get one to show up #anyway god this is so fucking long #I'm impossible #sorry #I do try

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