Is there something wrong with this sentence?

[RobertN]

Here's a sentence from the website Rotten Tomatoes, about the TV show Better Call Saul: [link]

Better Call Saul remains as masterfully in control as Jimmy McGill keeps insisting he is in this final season, where years of simmering storytelling come to a scintillating boil.

My brain got confused in there, and I'm not sure why. What do people think of the sentence? Does it have a problem, or is it just me?

I think the problem is that there are two ways to parse it. The phrase "in this final season" could attach to "Better Call Saul remains" or it could attach to "Jimmy McGill keeps insisting he is".

 

[Sage]

Yes, in that it’s just confusingly worded.

If the second half of the sentence (starting with “in this final…”) was put up front, the whole thing would be clear.

OTOH, it seems like this is someone else’s review on a website, & I’m not sure that’s okay to critique here…. ETA: So what, I suppose, does one gain by figuring out how to fix this very specific example that you have no power to edit?

 

[Maryn]

Ah, this is what happens when you edit! I bet "as masterfully in control" at one point had a comparative, even if it was just "as ever."

But yeah, we probably shouldn't be critiquing the work of writers who didn't ask us to. We can just have a little chuckle and move on.

Good show, BTW.

 

[RobertN]

Ah, I didn't even think of that ownership issue, sorry. It's useful to think about sentences that I encounter when I read, but in the future I'll bring examples that I produce myself.

 

[ChaseJxyz]

One thing to keep in mind is "if you can be misread, you will." If enough people read something, someone is going to process it in not the expected way and end up confused or walk away with incorrect information. I'm sure you've cooked from a recipe and screwed something up at least once in your life because of this lol.

The sentence is a little clunky, in my opinion, but it's not world ending. If someone mis-reads the sentence, they're not going to hurt themself or someone else. Also, it's entirely possible that whoever writes the "critics consensus" is someone who has English as a second language and they're working for $2/hr, if they work quickly enough, so making sure everything is as perfect and readable as possible isn't high on their priority list.

 

[AW Admin]

It's not a critique. It's a question about syntax.

The technical name for this kind of structure is a vague antecedent. We are not absolute sure which previous noun phrase is the one "in this final season" is referring to, as RobertN noted.

It's a fairly common issue for writers in that we know what we mean, so we read what we mean to say, rather than what we actually wrote.

It's socially awkward to discuss the writing of someone who can't participate, but it's also a risk taken by all writers, paid or not.