Favorite Characters: George Lass (Dead Like Me)

It’s time for another Bryan Fuller creation, which means it’s time for another wonderful mess.  George was Fuller’s first protagonist, but she would be special even without that distinction.  From the opening scene of Dead Like Me, she captures my attention with her deadpan pourquoi narrative, and like so many characters in that show, she keeps me invested in the later episodes when the series loses its way a little.

George is our eyes into Dead Like Me, the voice of this macabre tale that’s an arresting mix of black comedy and surprisingly honest emotion.  Our first look at her is of a scowly, disconnected teen who’s not sure where she fits into this whole growing-up business.  She chafes against her mother’s particularly involved parenting, but at the same time, she’s hesitant about venturing into the adult world of nine-to-five grinds.  She doesn’t know what she wants or what her life is heading towards, but all those decisions are made for her pretty decisively when she’s killed by a stray pieces of falling space junk (a toilet seat.)

Her life is over, but her afterlife is just beginning – seemingly at random, she’s been selected to become a grim reaper who takes souls from the soon-to-be-no-longer-living.  The sullen girl who shirks responsibility and doesn’t like to make decisions now literally holds life and death in her hands, and it’s no surprise that she’s terrible at it at first.  Some of it is the steep learning curve, of course, the difficulty of identifying her mark from the scant information she’s given or the trick of finding an excuse to get close enough to reap the soul, but much of it is her own stubbornness and refusal to fall in line.  Early in the first season, she tries to buck the system at every turn, because she simply can’t face the towering duty of the horribly unpleasant job she’s been tasked with for who-knows-how-long.

She does this for a lot of reasons.  She’s a surly brat who doesn’t like being told what to do.  She’s an overwhelmed kid who’s unused to having any genuine weight on her shoulders.  She’s a scared girl who thinks taking someone’s soul is the same as killing them, and she can’t bear it.  She’s a young dead woman who regrets that she didn’t do anything with her life when she had it.  These and other motivations swirl through her actions, and even as I gape at her selfishness, her lies, and her attempts to cheat death, I appreciate the complicated baggage that informs them.

And just as importantly, George grows.  She never loses her attitude or her distaste for authority, but she matures tremendously over the course of the series.  She realizes she needs to take her calling seriously, learning to reap like a pro and respecting the final moments of the living.  She matures as a woman as well, which is an even more impressive feat, since she’s not actually alive.  However, her day job – grim-reaping is strictly gratis – provides ample opportunity to stretch her wings.  I like watching her struggles at Happy Time, first to avoid her work and later to do it well, and it’s striking to compare season 1 George with season 2 George.  Even her work wardrobe is so much more professional and put-together; I love it.

In short, I love George.  I love her ballsiness, her immaturity, her snark, and her anger.  Whether she’s floundering or succeeding, tough or vulnerable, she’s hugely entertaining and rootable.  I wouldn’t have thought a dead girl could have a coming-of-age story, but, as is so often the case with George, she proves everyone, herself included, dead wrong.

Relationship Spotlight: Rube Sofer & George Lass (Dead Like Me)

 

If there’s one thing a newly-undead girl needs, it’s someone to guide her through the unique challenges of being a reaper and the hassles and headaches of her afterlife.  Though George would argue that it doesn’t always feel like it, Rube is just the ticket.  There’s a lot of shouting, a lot of aggravation, but when it comes down to it, she and Rube care deeply for each other.  Under his supervision, she grows as both a reaper and an undead person, and she gradually finds her way into the regard of the somewhat-closed-off man.

 

When George first becomes a reaper, she’s an absolute mess, no question about it.  She’s furious at a world that let her die when she was only 18, and the last thing she wants is someone calmly explaining her new role in society.  She doesn’t want the nine-to-five grind her afterlife turns out to be, she doesn’t want to take souls from the living, and she definitely doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of Rube’s homespun, usually food-metaphor-based advice.  And so, she acts up and out.  She tries to cheat the system, sometimes to save herself the work or responsibility, sometimes in the mistaken hope of “saving” someone, and to her, Rube is the quiet-voiced warden forcing her to toe the line.

 

This is, of course, because Rube has already been where George is now.  He’s learned what happens when an expired soul sits in a heart, when someone dies with their souls still in their body, or when you bend the rules of fate to make someone miss their “appointment.”  He knows how important their work is, and he does whatever he can, not just to get George to do what she’s supposed to, but to help her understand why she has to do it.  Sometimes, he gives her big, confrontational “shape up, little girl” moments, which is what the obstinate, self-centered George often needs.  She gives him lip, and he gets in her face, letting her know exactly how her irresponsibility or meddling affects people’s lives, and more importantly, their deaths. 

 

But that isn’t Rube’s only tactic.  He also realizes that, for all of George’s attitude and defiance, she’s still a confused dead girl trying to make sense of an impossible situation, and there are times when she can’t deal with hard truths delivered bluntly.  In these moments, he’s surprisingly gentle, fatherly, with her.  They often come after he’s warned her of the thin ice she’s on and she’s ignored him, causing the catastrophe he was trying to prevent.  They’re the moments when she most expects the full force of his ire, but he instead offers her quiet support and concern.  I think of when, against his explicit instructions, she tries to make contact with her mother and gets burned for it, or his considerate advice to think of everything she likes about being on Earth and decide if it’s worth sticking around for.

 

I’d imagine Rube prefers these caring scenes with George over the ones where he has to yell at her – it’d be much nicer for both of them if she would just learn to believe him when he tells her she can’t avoid her duties.  However, I think he knows that the strong-willed George has high enough defenses that she’s only receptive to such conversations when she’s taken a hit.  So, he instead gives her what she needs when she needs it: he’s tough on her to try and protect her from making serious mistakes, and when she falls anyway, he’s there to pick up the pieces and let her know she can come back from it.