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1. What's up with Parker and Olga?

"Damn, we're gonna have beautiful babies...if we ever get married." - Frank B. Parker, Doppelganger, Part 1

Bottom line: He's fallen for her like a lemming off a cliff; she's not so sure, though she's progressed to the point where she's at least willing to look at the cliff now and then.

It's no surprise that Parker found Olga instantly attractive--after being locked up for a couple of years with nothing but a lot of men and "Nurse Sunshine," hey, it was only natural. Still, he's out now, and there are other women working at Never Never Land, and his attention remains riveted on Olga. They seem to have understood each other in a fundamental way, right from the start--despite their numerous differences, there's an appealing sense of destiny in this relationship.

Olga, too, seems to like Parker right away, but her situation is considerably more complex, and her on-again, off-again reactions reflect that. First of all, when Parker arrives at Never Never Land, she's married. Granted, her husband, Josef, has been gone a long time, but it's Dr. Mentnor who says he's been presumed dead. Olga herself, after Josef is really dead, says, "I would've waited forever." And one must wonder, because Parker's doing for a living the same thing that got Josef lost in the future, whether part of her hesitancy to get involved has to do with the certain knowledge that Parker could end up lost the same way in the course of any mission. It doesn't take much for her to get very worried about him when he's on a Back Step, and it clearly seems more than professional concern for the fate of the mission.

But Olga seems reluctant to break too far out of her professional mode, and probably with some justification. Of all the team members, she's the one with the least job security, what with flag-waving Ramsey never entirely letting anyone forget she hails from "Red Paradise." While no one with the project seems to be discouraging her from becoming involved with Parker, there remains a certain stigma attached to intra-office romance. And both science and medicine demand some degree of objectivity, which would be difficult to maintain while engaging in an intimate relationship with the subject of her study. Olga appears to be paying lip service, if not much else, to that sort of professional standard.

Then there's the question of his approach to her, which is unsubtle at best, and downright juvenile at worst. (If you like your romantic characters politically correct, change the channel.) He's right in her face about it all the time, only backing off temporarily when Josef reappears. Parker has tried just about every ploy imaginable--from spiking her drinks to speeding up his Russian language tapes to getting her to perform mouth-to-mouth by pretending to be dead. His mating dance is all right out in the open, no effort to hide the agenda. He expends a lot of thought and energy on the pursuit. And the more she backs him off, the more he keeps at it. "The man's a pit bull," Donovan observes.

The problem is, as Olga points out, there's nothing especially romantic about this approach--it's more reminiscent of a cheetah trying to run a zebra to ground than a courtship. She complains that he comes off looking like he's in it just for the chase, and it does seem that he's enjoying the challenge. Olga's right up to speed with him mentally, and she handily defeats most of his tricks (although he did pull off the mouth-to-mouth ploy on her). But he keeps coming up with new ones, as if he likes the process, in and of itself, of figuring out the tricks and springing them on her. At one point he even tells her that he's impressed with her ability to "give it back to me as good I give it."

On the other hand, he's also occasionally frustrated that she's not turning around faster. He complains that she insists on retaining the right to define "romantic," and if you believe that Doppelganger's "evil Parker" reflects part of his personality, he has thoughts that she could be more accessible. He has better luck with her when he just talks to her like a person, and he seems to be applying that technique more as time goes on. But he can't seem to maintain it for long before he falls back on the same goofy let's-have-a-bath-in-champagne lines that turn her off.

It's attention-getting behavior, the kind of "look at me!" stuff an eight-year-old does for reassurance of his own importance in the mind of someone he cares for. Often such behavior intentionally tests the limits, as if daring the other person to reject it. And that's consistent with Parker having been raised outside a normal nuclear family. We don't know at what age he was orphaned or any details of the circumstances. But as he's brought up the issue himself repeatedly, it clearly still weighs on his mind. "Nobody wanted to hang out with the new orphan kid," he says, recounting a story of his youth.

Despite his outer cockiness, there are clear signs of insecurity and even low self-esteem in some of what he does. For example, he wonders out loud to Olga if a divorced former mental patient who drinks a lot is really quite the right the person to be undertaking missions as serious as those requiring a Back Step - "I'm an animal," he says darkly, in The Football - hardly evidence that he holds a positive self-image. That little Sally Jensen reached out to him (HAARP Attack) plainly left an impression - maybe he just needs more reassurance than the average man.

For her part, Olga seems to have discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) more of a sense of fun as a result of his influence. She's moved from wanting to make sure her hotel room has CNN to trying to drag an unwilling Parker to a magic show, from putting him on a treadmill in a lab to dancing with him at a nearby bar. She seems conscious that it's his nature to be something of a cut-up and to have adopted an attitude that she might as well have a good time, too...up to a point. She's plainly impressed with his ingenuity and courage, and she has learned to trust his instincts in the field. They work well together. And isn't it interesting that when "Adam" went to manipulate her mentally, it was Parker's image he found in her mind and used to influence her? (Lifeboat)

However, the first few episodes of Season 2 signaled what appeared to be a distinct change in the relationship as it's being portrayed. Olga seems to make an effort (consciously or unconsciously) to shift the balance of power in the sexual equation in The Football, railing against Parker for treating her as helpless and naive. The meaning (or lack thereof) of her avowed willingness to strip for members of the Penn State defensive line will never be clear, because it's impossible to know whether she actually did it or not--we just know she was unwilling to strip with Parker watching. Is that just because she thought it was easier to do it in front of strangers than friends, or because she knew she was going to wimp out and didn't want Parker to think her "prudish"? Parker, on the other hand, was ready to fight for her honor until it occurred to him he might get to see something, too - he seemed perfectly prepared to let her go for it...until she threw him out of the room. There are fans who'd like to forget this episode ever occurred, largely because of reservations about this sequence, and it's easy to see why.

Things get even murkier in Parker.com, which gives us a view of Parker, at the height of his politically incorrect glory, indicating he thinks the best way to deal with an intractable woman is to lie to her - and then have meaningless sex with her. Olga, in the unenviable position of watching on the sidelines while Parker gets intimately involved with a woman who's not even real, responds by giving him an equally meaningless kiss to remind him what is real - and then walking away, as if to underscore what he can't have. There are still more fans who'd like to roll back time and undo this episode for the way it depicts Parker as your basic Neanderthal and Olga as your basic tease.

Recently we were treated to a more intriguing side of Parker; in the otherwise less-than-memorable episode Pope Parker, Frank displays a firm knowledge of what the relationship is about, what stops it from moving forward, and what its potential is. He's even smart enough to know what he can do to move it on, and how to explain it to Olga in a way that won't offend or alienate her. Interestingly, the manner in which he messes it up at the end (what, you didn't think he would? Shame on you!), suggests that he did it on purpose, possibly an indication that he enjoys the "game" a little more than what might come after.

Based on that, it's hard to guess where this relationship might be going. For it to work, they're both going to have to achieve a balance. He'll have to share more of his real inner self with her than he's readily inclined to and treat her more as an adult, and she'll have to overlook more psycho-sexual horseplay than she seems to find desirable--and get over whatever fears she may have of losing him on a mission. They're not there yet, but they have made some progress, and we can hope through the process of trial and error with each other they may find the right balance.

 

2. What's up with Ramsey and Parker?

The fact is, under normal conditions, Ramsey would have a point--it's not usual procedure to use former mental patients who drink, gamble compulsively and are determinedly anti-authoritarian to carry out super-secret missions on which the fate of the world hangs. But in the Seven Days universe, conditions are rarely normal, and Parker never is. However, that doesn't stop Ramsey from trying to impose normal standards on Parker. "You expect him to behave rationally?" Donovan asks in Come Again? "What a concept," Ramsey retorts.

Of course, what Ramsey would regard as normal is an interesting question, as he himself often seems a hidebound dinosaur whose thought patterns froze solid in about 1967. We're told that Ramsey's background is CIA, and he certainly seems to have been thoroughly indoctrinated in a "trust no one" mentality. But that has come in handy at times, like when he continued to pursue the truth about the NSA official in Shadow Play. Once persuaded to keep digging into the situation at the cult's headquarters in Last Card Up, he showed no hesitation in marching "Big Dog" to the prison bus at gunpoint.

You see, "Big Dog" broke the rules, and above all, Ramsey believes in rules, especially the kind you read in an old-style military book. Among his rules:
* Act rationally.
* Don't get drunk.
* Don't gamble and get in debt.
* Don't cheat in sports.
* Stay in your quarters when you're supposed to be there.
* Be careful what you do with women.
* Follow (his) orders.
* Get a haircut.

OK, that last one wasn't directed at Parker, but it's indicative of Ramsey's approach to things.

Now, Ramsey's problem is that he's working with a bunch of scientific types who think all those rules are needlessly constraining--the classic clash between scientists and the military personnel they sometimes work with. Members of the team break Ramsey's rules all the time and think little of it. There's all Ballard's girlfriends and his impulses to share information, Olga's Russian-ness and tendency to follow her scientific curiosity wherever it leads her, and Dr. Mentnor's occasional opting to forget about security and do what he regards as the moral thing.

And then there's Parker, who has an anti-authoritarian streak about a mile wide and flaunts Ramsey's rules partly just to prove he can, and because he enjoys it. Worse yet, it's Ramsey's job, as security chief for Back Step, to enforce the rules. He's supposed to know where everybody is and what they're doing at all times; it's his job to make sure they aren't getting themselves and the project in trouble. Parker can't work inside the rules, and Ramsey can't work without them--there'll never be peace in this house.

On top of Ramsey's initial distrust and disapproval of Parker, he's now got to contend with Parker continually needling him, both in word and in deed--sometimes even inspiring others to do the needling for him. ("Is dis de bonehead Ramsey?" Pyotr Federov asks, rephrasing Parker's description of his teammate. (Last Breath)) Parker appears to take great joy in circumventing Ramsey's security procedures--he just loves doing stuff like rewiring or outright stealing the cameras, and shorting out the lock on his door. He can't resist crawling through the air vents into areas of the Back Step compound that are supposed to be off-limits and going off-mission on crusades of his own, as in Walter and Shadow Play. When Parker does the former, it casts doubt on Ramsey's effectiveness internally, and when he does the latter, it sometimes forces Ramsey to stick his neck out, gambling that Parker is right. And gambling is something Ramsey doesn't like to do.

"Now do you understand why I want to plant a homing bug in his head?" he asks, in a moment of supreme exasperation. (HAARP Attack)

Not that Ramsey's job seems in danger--he's pretty good at it, for the most part, and smart enough to pull off things like unmasking "Big Dog" and figuring out Parker's telephone code in order to find him in the bomb shelter (There's Something About Olga).

Ramsey more than once has shown a willingness--if not enthusiasm--to bet on Parker, as in Walter, when he stuck his neck out to warn Parker that agents were on the way to capture the savant. And his reaction to the several occasions when Parker has been injured or "killed" while on missions have been downright caring.

For his part, Parker opted not to report to anybody officially about the incident in the Pilot episode when a drugged and deranged Ramsey tried to kill him. And three times now Parker's Back Steps have brought Ramsey (among others) back to life. The most dramtic step towards an understanding between these two strong personalities came in the episode Brother, Can You Spare a Bomb?, when Parker altered the perameters of his Backstep to allow Ramsey to keep his job and protect his deranged brother Nick. But the progress toward anything resembling real trust has moved forward with a geologic slowness, and is continually retarded by Parker's aggravations. So get comfortable and enjoy while these mismatched teammates take two steps forward and one step back with each other.

Take me home. 

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