There’s a bizarre and strangely unnecessary scene in season one episode three of ‘Young Royals’: It’s Parents’ Day, and August’s mother arrives with her new husband Rickard in tow. Rickard drives up to the school, and then, for no discernible reason whatsoever, he is suddenly told that he cannot park his car there, that he has to park it in the parking lot instead.
Before you argue, “What’s so strange about that request? He can’t park his car right in front of the school. He was being a stuck-up prick to think he could just get away with this. Of course, they had to tell him not to do that.” So, before you argue that, remember what we’ve been saying on this little blog for quite a while now already: These aren’t real people. They’re fictional characters. And fiction is not reality. Rickard doesn’t have a mind of his own. He is a figment of some writer’s imagination. There is no reason why he should have driven up there, let alone tried to park his car in front of the school. Rickard doesn’t exist. Some writer made him do that.
This whole scene, this entire bizarre exchange is the brainchild of a filmmaker, and the big question here is, of course: Why?!
Why did some writer (or writers, plural) think it was necessary to show one of the guests on Parents’ Day to be in breach of protocol?
Why did the show’s creators decide to include a scene of Rickard trying to park his car somewhere that wasn’t the parking lot in the first place?
See, that’s why I said this scene is bizarre.
From a plot point of view, this scene is completely unnecessary. It doesn’t really link up with anything else in the script. It’s not useful for anything. (I mean, it’s not like we get another scene later on in which Rickard and Louise want to get their parking ticket validated because they haven’t got any money to pay for it themselves or anything.) This whole scene is seemingly useless for the show’s plot.
And remember that on TV every second costs money, every little moment, every shot requires a huge amount of work, time and effort by the cast and crew. It is for this very reason that there simply are no useless moments on television. Everything is there for a reason (if that’s not the case, then you’re looking at a bad show or movie, and ‘Young Royals’ is anything but that). So, if a reason is nowhere to be found in the text (plot) of the story, then the scene probably exists for the subtext.
(And if you now scratch your real or imaginary beard and go, “Something…something…‘car’ metaphor…Yeah! Wasn’t there a ‘car’ metaphor on ‘Young Royals’?” then you’ve got it exactly right, dear reader.)
That moment of Rickard trying to park his car right in front of the entrance exists…for Rickard. It’s there to tell us something about Rickard. Rickard is the focal point of this bizarre exchange.
If there is one thing this blog is trying to teach, it’s that side characters aren’t just insignificant fillers.
Supporting characters and even really, really minor characters aren’t just there to brighten up the scenery. Their function is not to play for time, so the writers of a show like ‘Young Royals’ can fill the mandatory 45 minutes of that episode you’re currently watching with some more meaningless chatter.
Side characters also don’t just serve textual purposes, i.e. often they’re not literally who the text tells you they are.
Once you look back on this blog because it will have ceased to exist (or at the very least will have ceased to be updated regularly) at some point in September/October, there’s one lesson I hope will have stayed with you, dear reader:
Side characters are incredibly important!
They exist for a reason. And that reason is often subtextual.
It’s the subtext of a show or movie, not the text, that they were often created for.
A side character is where a writer will typically hide the things they’re not spelling out about their main characters. A side character is where you have to look for more information about the main protagonists of a show or movie.
Rickard, the current partner of August’s mother, is an incredibly fascinating side character. And the reasons for that are…subtext, subtext, subtext! Nothing else, really.
Why am I saying this?
Because Rickard is a stepfather!
The moment you find out that he is a stepfather is the moment you should be leaping up off your sofa, snapping your fingers and pointing at your TV accusingly, yelling, “Ahaaa! I cannot believe they did this! He’s a stepfather? Wow, just wow!” Because clearly this detail is very important.
There’s only one other stepfather in this story. And the parallel should be immediately obvious to you here.
Rickard doesn’t appear on this show all that often, which makes it simultaneously easier and more difficult to analyze him.
Easier because you don’t have to fast-forward through hours and hours of this show in order to catch each and every little appearance of his in the script, every tiny line, facial expression and gesture, the way you have to if you want to understand, say, Stella and Fredrika or Henry and Valter – the way we did in earlier character posts when we analyzed their subtextual function in this story. Rickard just saves you an enormous amount of time. You don’t have to go hunting for him in the text.
It also makes it more difficult: simply because you don’t have as much material to work with.
With characters like Stella and Fredrika, for example, you get so many obvious hints by the writers as to what their function in the script is, and they come up so very, very often that eventually – even if you didn’t quite get what their function was at the outset of the story – you will still get the hint and go, “Ahhhh, now I’ve got it. Now I know why these two girls were written into this story.”
You can watch the entirety of season one and not understand who Stella and Fredrika are on a subtextual level, but at some point in the first episode of season two, you will see how they are seated as exact mirror images behind Simon and Wilhelm in the classroom, and then it will suddenly click for you. Remember that brilliant shot?
Stella and Fredrika are these vine-type side characters; they seem to cling to each and every surface of each and every episode, growing in each and every crack of the text, twining around every scene, never leaving you alone. It’s impossible to miss them, for they are everywhere.
With how often these two appear on screen, it’s impossible not to get, eventually, that they are supposed to be mirror characters.
There are, however, other types of side characters, too. Characters that are incredibly tightly written and play their cards much closer to the chest. They appear once, twice, thrice if you’re lucky…but if you haven’t worked out what they’re there for by then, if you just happened to blink that one time they appeared, if you went to the loo leaving your half-asleep significant other in charge of the remote and in the role of chief reteller of ‘what happened’ while you were gone, well, then…shucks. Tough luck! You’ve just missed an important jigsaw piece of the subtext, and it probably won’t come back.
Rickard falls into this category of side character.
He’s dark. He’s quick. He’s elusive. You have to pay close attention to what he says and does. And if you blink or misinterpret some detail about him, he will be gone, and you will be none the wiser. (Blinking is generally not recommended while watching TV, of course. Hee! …Oh! What, you thought the Weeping Angels on ‘Doctor Who’ were merely science-fiction villains, just a harmless, meaningless bit of fun, not a giant metaphor? Oh, dear! However will we cover all of that before autumn? Anyway…that’s a headache for another time. Sorry, I got slightly sidetracked there.)
So, Rickard might not be quite as terrifying as a statue that’s only a statue while you look at it and can move whenever you blink or look away, but…only slightly less so.
If you want to find out what is going on with Rickard and why he is such a dark and fascinating character, read on.
We will look at what he has to tell us about the subtext of ‘Young Royals’, how he is linked to other parts of said subtext (such as several other metaphors, for example), and we will revisit the ‘car’ metaphor, of course, which we had already briefly discussed earlier on this blog.
We will ask ourselves why the writers included Rickard’s bizarre parking antics in the scene mentioned above. We will discuss why Linda originally not being invited to the Parents’ Day luncheon is such an important detail for understanding the entire subtext of this show and its political message. And we will take note of the fact that that infamous boardroom meeting at the castle at the beginning of season three is a scene that’s written around Linda and Rickard being at each other’s throats.
Follow me under the cut for a post about one of the most elusive characters on this show. (Fair warning: This is going to be a pretty dark and bumpy ride, and I don’t offer any valet parking services. Désolé.)