Job Hunting the Patterson Way

Today’s strip in For Better or For Worse started a Liz story arc, which should be necessary to establish that Liz is going to be staying in the south. The main complaint about the method used had less to do with the idea that she could get a job at the last minute, or that someone had to get divorced in order for it to happen, but that there was no mention of Liz having even tried to find this job. The curious question is whether or not the new job will cause Liz to have to move again. There was a quite a bit of text describing her housing situation and the 2 other roommates in the last monthly letter. I would expect that there might be a little roommate character development there under normal circumstances, but Lynn is under the gun to get Liz married by the end of the strip, which is a little over a year away. I expect that every time Liz shows up, Anthony will follow soon after. The next question in my mind is when Lynn is going to drop the anvil on Constable Paul Wright. I have been dutifully covering his mixed affections for Liz and Susan Dokis, but I can see the new job as a means by which Liz can say, “See. I can make it in the south. Why don’t you have that transfer yet? You said you would apply for it back at the end of May and it’s been 3 months now.” She still has Anthony / Liz courtship and proposal to do, and one year doesn’t leave much time for wedding preparation in this strip. She has to knock off good constable soon.

Posting for Michael today, caused me to go back and look at those old courtship and wedding strips with Deanna. In it, I was fascinated to uncover that Deanna actually had the expectation that after she announced to Michael she was engaged, she wanted him to ask her to wait. It seemed somewhat ironic to me that this was the exact same message expressed by Anthony to Elizabeth a year ago. From the perspective of the person writing the script for the strip, Anthony’s plea to Liz to wait, which virtually every commentary I have seen attacked because of Anthony’s insensitivity to Liz having just been attacked by Howard, may have been Anthony doing right, what Mike did wrong back in 1998 when he was courting Deanna. Of course, my opinion was that Mike did right by not trying to get Deanna to break her engagement. Sometimes you can’t just use the same plot over and over again.