Terms of Engagement

I don't know why I've become more squeamish with time instead of more jaded but I'm not listening to above referenced podcast. Scott is 33 years old. Late this summer (and this summer apparently is not as likely for his "wedding" as the following summer) he will be 34. He doesn't seem pressed. 

His eldest will be going on eleven.

For about 14 years or so Scott and Tessa have had a cycle of fake relationships - Scott more than Tessa. But Scott is approaching his mid-thirties and Tessa is right behind him. Scott's been in a holding pattern with his latest ever since he announced she was a "fiancee'" in an incredibly plausible stunt executed in front of a hometown crowd all of whom knew he was lying. 

When part of your image is small town Canadian and you are most emphatically - don't you ever think differently - absolutely the straightest guy for miles, you are gonna have to get yourself married. Scott's getting a little into the old maid, Waity Katy territory now (not that I thought Waity Katy ever made sense/was fair vis a vis Kate Middleton). Even his charming fiancee', a year or so his senior, has a first marriage under her belt, so at least she got her feet wet. As their home town Hall of Fame gambit illustrated, the time for contractual girlfriend relationships has past. I don't think he can be rotating different fake fiancees in and out of his social media as he did fake girlfriends so I'm curious where they think the drop dead line is and what's next. At some point while he's still on the fresher side of 35 he has to pull the trigger in one direction or the other. Those directions seem to be bluster on through with the fake or cut the shit. Naturally their every instinct would be Option 1, but I see pitfalls. 

What I really want is the whole nine yards - fake wedding, fake marriage, and then fake kids. Although this prospect lines up perfectly with the characteristic Moir/Virtue level of taste, judgment and decency, I feel the logistics are tricky. Look at Scott buying himself an additional year and a half before he has to think about it.

The past few - more than a few - years have demonstrated we don't have to worry about the entertainment media, whose capacity for complicity is infinite.

Scott on what I think is a morning radio show. He's asked about his best Canadian memory and unleashes a classic Scott Moir verklempt:

Ah well I mean ... don't get me emotional here on a Friday morning. Umm, Tessa and I were so blessed to be able to represent this country and to and uh any time I can think about taking her hand and skating to center ice ... it's just - now that we've had a little bit of distance looking back we realize how fortunate we really were... my favorite memory will always be uh the flag in her hand and one of her hands in mine and my hand on her shoulder and walking into the opening ceremonies of 2018 and looking back and seeing our teammates and uh - much like this campaign, knowing what this campaign and Canada represents.*

Very sweet, though the promotional pivot at the end is so on the nose it looks too much like Scott really thought he did something. I wonder if Scott has hit the stage of his public life where he's imitating his greatest hits. Just turns it on. With the added embellishment in this instance of laying it on with the accent so thick he sounds like a refugee from Fargo. That's not even Canadian..

*I'm not good visualizing three dimensions while reading in two. But Scott's holding hands with Tessa and another one of his hands is on her shoulder seems awkward.

P.S. rather than tacking on another comment just putting this P.S.

The Moirs are parochial and have a high opinion of themselves. Who you are is shown in action and the tactics during Scott and Tessa's decade and a half of lies have shown a malicious, mocking and self-satisfied stripe. There's now a Gadbois outpost stocked with Moirs and a prospective Ilderton training center. Are these people going to leave themselves on the back foot at this time? "Yeah, we scammed, lied and mocked you! Go ahead and judge us!"

I don't expect the Gadbois outpost to last that long but while it does there is no way Scott and Tessa admit anything. They probably won't admit anything on a matter of principle, but definitely not while the Moirs are up-status-ing their training careers.

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.