Critique: A Teacher

This programme was… interesting. It follows the relationship (and fallout) between a teacher Claire and Eric, her student. Admittedly the dialogue was off a lot but this was made up for by the superb acting from the two lead characters.

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

Claire’s teacher friend pesters her to say who she’s having an affair with.

I can’t believe Claire actually did so! Why would you do that? Why risk destroying your career and marriage? At first her teacher friend thought it was a joke and Claire could’ve agreed: she’d just been given a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Considering Claire’d only just had the one drink, there’s no way the alcohol would have kicked in by then. Besides, even if it had, she wouldn’t be drunk enough to be so stupid. She went to a good university so she’s clearly intelligent. The writers could have done better.

 

The town finds out that Eric has been sleeping with Claire and chaos breaks loose.

When this happens, Eric convinces Claire to run away with him. The police treat it like a kidnapping. But he’s eighteen, a legal adult. If it’s their idea, it’s only kidnapping if they legally can’t give consent, such as being disabled or a child (neither of which applies to Eric). So I don’t quite understand what happened there.

Claire went to jail for shagging Eric when he’s seventeen/eighteen, i.e. above the age of consent Why, I don’t know. I can understand losing your teaching job for sleeping with a student but jail seems a bit extreme. I suppose the laws on age and consent could be different in the USA but my British perspective, nothing seems to line up. (I’m not trying to justify what Claire did. She definitely shouldn’t have done it. I’m just looking at it through a legal perspective.)

 

We see from Claire’s perspective once she gets out of jail.

On one of her first jogs, she gets given a pastry for free so we expect the rest of her day to go well, like going into a shop to get a job. But then someone reveals to the shop manager Claire’s criminal history, Claire runs out. By putting a good event before a bad one, the writers made the bad one feel worse. It makes you feel almost sorry for Claire. The audience definitely needed some kind of boost to feel for her.

We also see her having sex with her date and he calls her ‘a dirty slut’ for sleeping with her student. Why on Earth would anyone say that during sex? You could see her face drop and then holding it in her hands. You could see how uncomfortable she was. So even if you were weird enough to say this, how could you be dysfunctional enough to not stop?

 

Ten years on, Eric comes back to town. He’s shown whistling in the car which was a good and clever way to make him appear older. He bumps into Claire. He blames her for the fallout (like how he quite university). That’s fair, considering she slept with her student and that power imbalance isn’t healthy.

But Eric’s reasons are bizarre.

Apparently her agreeing to tutor him and for him to use her first name were part of the problem. Agreeing to tutor a student is very common in the USA so I don’t see how that applies.

Getting Eric to use her first name would have broken down the official barrier between the two. This could have added to the general sense of closeness that led to the sex.

So those two reasons, out of all the reasons he could have chosen from, were an extremely weird choice.

 

Two episodes are spent pursuing the relationship. Three episodes are spent on the relationship. Five episodes were spent on the fall out of the relationship.

The fallout section was the perfect size. But this seems poorly balanced compared to episodes spent on the relationship itself. The fallout can only happen because of the relationship, after all, so it seems rather out of proportion.

The emotional fallout for Eric means his feelings were deep (whether love or obsession I don’t know) but from what the writers showed us I’m not convinced that his feelings did run that deep. They were there, to be sure, but not at a convincing level.

 

Whilst there was a lot of things that could’ve been better, this programme was one of the most engrossing shows I’ve watched and I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because you know your school friends had crushes on teachers and you wonder what would happen if they’d acted on it, or if they did act on it. I think a new set of eyes for final editing would have smoothed out the kinks and to make this programme a more rounded show.