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Ex Post Facto
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Ex Post Facto |
| Author(s): | Katherine Robertson |
| Date(s): | 1980 |
| Length: | |
| Genre(s): | gen |
| Fandom(s): | Starsky & Hutch |
| Relationship(s): | |
| External Links: | old link; new link |
Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Ex Post Facto is a gen Starsky & Hutch story by Katherine Robertson.
It was printed in The Pits #2.
This story features Harold Dobey.
Reactions and Reviews
Marian Kelly tried to tell three stories in ‘Ex Post Facto.’ This first, why Hutch felt compelled to resign in ‘Targets Without a Badge’ and how S&H decide to return; second, why Dobey didn’t resign in 26 years; and third: why S&H had been distant throughout the 4th season. There are too many subplots going, they don’t support each other, and they don’t even interconnect. Plus, hopping from one story to another, Marian jerks the mood from camaraderie to guilt to humor to self-sacrifice to intimacy to angler to loneliness to the nigh obligatory ‘I love you’ at the end. There are very good, highly insightful passages in the piece, but they’re all jumbled together and not really resolved well enough to give coherence to the who… I wish this piece had worked, because there are good ideas in it…. [1]
Gear switching is the only problem with ‘Ex Post Facto.’ That story ended – emotionally – with Dobey’s departure. What came after it was almost another story in itself, or at least a vignette. But the ideas handled, the feelings presented, are right on target. Dobey’s behavior was certainly more reasonable that what we saw in the aired show, where he sat around reminding them to get back on the force, boys. His anger at their – actually Hutch’s – thin-skinned sensitivity is appropriate for a black man of his age and experience, and Hutch’s intuitive apprehension is a good set-up for ‘Sweet Revenge.’ [2]
Marian Kelly's "Ex Post Facto" is a brief "Targets" interlude, in which Starsky and Hutch examine the reasons for their job and for their abandonment of it, in the process confirming the bases of their own relationship. Marian has done some growing since "Death Dance", and it shows. The language now reveals its subject consistently, not just in brilliant flashes; and except for some extraneous theological matter, the tendency to externalize the characters' conflict is gone. This is a superb story, dark and rich and dense, the bitter and the sweet so intermingled that it's impossible to tell which is which. It's fiction that does what fiction is supposed to do, and I don't think it requires any more comment than that. [3]