doting

Victorian audiences were repelled by Henrik Ibsen’s fatally attractive newlywed who appears to have it all — the fancy house, the doting husband — only to be violently bored.

He was born in 1936 in Sacramento, Calif. His father was a well-respected local lawyer, and his doting mother had been an assistant in the state Senate.

So if “Peacemaker” viewers were puzzled as to how a backwards, murderous bigot like Earth Prime Auggie could manifest as a doting father and an affluent man in a nearly identical world, now we know.

We’re introduced to him not as a thief, but as a doting father who wakes at the crack of dawn, tenderly lays his son in bed next to his sister, and heads off to work.

They noted that such tokens of affection didn't erase motive - after all, a "doting mother" can also be a "suspicious wife," they said.