I totally missed this

Hot stuff

Even though I mentioned the Mr. D episode in an earlier post, I only halfheartedly tried to look up to see if she was actually Scott's first partner (whose name I had forgotten) or a pretty ok sitcom actress - certainly better than either Virtue or Moir. I decided she must be an actress playing a sad sack/whipping post character on Mr. D, and moved on (is she that as well? I know nothing about Mr. D).

ETA am informed below that the childhood partner on Mr. D was played by an actress (and the character name is not Jackie Mascarin), so it's just extra fun for all.

I don't review the comments as much as I should (which I should change) as I'm trying to place hold this blog until ice dance wakes up to something other than Papadakis & Cizeron's march to 5 World titles and their already-awarded 2022 Olympic gold. Clearly, stuff slips through the cracks as the blog lens gets wider and more general instead of gathering up the details - to mix metaphors.

So I missed the fun in the blog comments (which are very funny, and my apologies for having not seen them when they first landed) and remained in the dark. I had no idea Mascarin was the actual ex partner and this was a new thing they were doing until I recently plugged Virtue and Moir into a search engine and landed in tumblr:

This account has Lots and LOTS OF FEELINGS ABOUT FANS!!
HAVING FEELINGS!!! STOP!!

I've edited out the account name for obvious reasons.

That sort of post makes me cringe, but obviously VM find this stuff entertaining.

Takeaways. They missed trolling? They're going for it in 2022? The latter terrifies me. But they're just not going away. Is their fame so ephemeral that if they dial this shit back their Q rating and earning power takes a dive? WTF are the elements in the algorithm that spat this thing out? Can't they hawk grocery delivery services, fawn over each other, smirk about partnerships, can't Tessa pull diner imagry she got from some movie* where the people are old, the lighting is misty, they share hot chocolate and get wistful about that time they were young and never got together and now never will but what a time it was - if they retired? Aren't those things retired Olympic champions can do? So why aren't they retiring? I could do mental backflips and think they're not retiring just so they can have an excuse to be cowards and not widen their own lens, but that's what I thought last time, and then they announced.

How come they mix it up with every new program (except their show programs) but don't mix this up? Wait, the parenthetical just answered the question.

In hindsight, the spot is a lot cuter without the 
multiple overlays of "See everything we just did there?!!!
In real life things are the opposite but then it flips back again
and then again!"

I'm kind of creeped out by this configuration. I know why - I think it's because most people had only known he had a previous partner when he and she were both eight and then it was radio silence (she wasn't even dragged in to weigh in in all the years Virtue and Moir competed and their "bio" was served up relentlessly. Nothing that got around, anyway.). Her showing up this late in the game in this capacity is kind of cooties-inducing no matter what retroactive narrative gets stitched together. Ew. But then again:

The W Network, 2014. Tessa & Scott.
Want some "Ew"? Check it out. Still available
on video-sharing and streaming
service websites. And reviewed on this blog.

Yes, with Tessa's 30th birthday just around the corner I was anticipating that the icky days were behind us, but that was just a dream. And then again, a sort of knee-jerk bad taste has often been their metier. Their first sham flaunted plenty of partner-swapping and a kind of smarmy unsavoriness (and also voyeurism), the second started off benignly enough but got ambitious and then offensive (review the reality show if the ways it did so are lost in the mists of time), the third was pretty benign with Tessa showing up routinely as the bookend on (our) left, and this one is like Huh? and Yucky had a baby.

***

So now of course I'm checking out the comments I've missed and right off I see a transcript of commentators trashing P/C's inflated points. Thank you for that. But, it's also scary, because if people are allowed to question the judging instead of talking about PC's ephemeral magic, the door might be creaking open (again) and I just don't want VM to skate through it. I was positive they had the green light last time, and look what nearly happened.

*or Tessa pulled it from somebody's online fan fiction. She's wicked clever, right? Would not surprise as that's where the W Network's "Tessa and Scott" stole its entire script. I'm sure there's a Dr. Zhivago-esque scenario somewhere, only in London and it's a diner, and Old Scott sees Golden Ager Tessa across the street going into a shop, does a double take, rushes out, and gets hit by a car. Life is poignant. The diner schtick, for me, evokes Tessa's tweet of some time past sharing a wisdom-fueled flight she experienced with her seatmate, a man named John who was just the right amount of old (77). If his name had been Larry we'd have never heard about it.