dreadedcandiru2 | Jim: Good, but not THAT good.

As howtheduck reminded me yesterday, Will and Carrie were probably perfectly content with what ever the hell their son did in life. This raises the question of what Jim really thinks about things, doesn't it? For all the love he has for his daughter, there's a widely-held belief that might prevent him from taking her part: the double standard. She was royally and rightfully honked off when Jim gave Phil a free pass for shacking up with his girlfriend when she knew she wasn't allowed that sort of break. What made it worse was the reason she was more or less given; Phil had a penis and she didn't and that was the end of it. Jim's old-fashioned expectations of the world allowed him to ignore the alarm bells that went off in his head whenever John hove into view. Besides, like all predatory types, the smirking pig knew how to say all the right things in order to disarm his father-in-law's defenses. This left his daughter in an undesirable position, didn't it? Not only was she maneuvered into giving up her dreams by an insufferable jackass who set them at naught, her Dad thought it was her fault and told her to deal with the consequences of her folly. Even worse, she may never consciously realize her domestic bliss was founded on a rather loathsome act of sexual assault. There is a strong case to be made that Train Man doped her up on nitrous, violated her when she was too stupefied to know what was going on and made up a lie about how she was all over him. What's more, he may just have held that bright, shining falsehood over her head as a bullshit sword of Damocles hovering over her reputation. That horrible fact may not have even occurred to Jim because he was unaware that sort of thing went on. They didn't start running stories about that until well into to the eighties, after all. Imagine his horror when he wanted John to share his outrage at such a breach of professional ethics and saw a brief flash of panic in his son-in-law's eyes. There he was, with two grandchildren and a third on the way and it was possibly based on a lie. All the huffing and puffing he did about her having to accept the consequences of her actions were all for nothing and the clean-cut young man who so impressed him was nothing more than a glorified pervert who made a fool of his little girl with HIS permission. Do I really have to explain why an example of railroad terminology has become an ersatz curse word now that Jim can't say much else? Or why Elly may have an excuse to let him rot in the home?