As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently working on a documentary about Grant Morrison. We shot some stuff last month, and are heading out to San Diego to shoot at Comicon in July. The film is still a ways off, but the first trailer’s gone live on the Sequart Youtube channel. Watch it now…
Tonight, we got the announcement that Dollhouse has somewhat surprisingly been renewed for a second season. I was thinking it could go either way, so I wasn’t shocked, but still, for a show that was expected to be cancelled from the moment it was announced, it’s nice to see. More Joss Whedon on TV is always good. And the renewal seems as good an excuse as any to talk a bit about the show, and my mixed feelings about the first season.
Watching the first few episodes, there was the knowledge that even Joss wasn’t totally happy with what the show was doing, and the promise that things would click down the line and really come together. The show definitely improved as it went on, but I also think it remained victim to the same basic issues that were there in the first few episodes, and there in the very premise of the series itself. Most genre shows have a basic conceit that we accept as part of the premise, and if you don’t buy into it, you’re not going to enjoy the show. Watching Buffy, you accept that vampires exist and this girl slays them. People who say things like how can this 100 pound girl beat up men twice her size miss the point of the show.
But, I think nitpicking is more apt in Dollhouse because the show hinges so heavily on the conceit for all its content. In Buffy, the show was never about the vampires, it was about a group of people. And, most shows are that way. The conceit of any series exists as a way to look at life in a different way. Buffy and Six Feet Under are very similar shows in terms of characters arcs and emotional content, despite the seemingly radical differences in premise. But, Dollhouse is very much about its premise, nobody has an ‘ordinary’ life, everyone is connected the Dollhouse in some way, and that makes it hard to relate to any of them.
That’s probably because the show isn’t about ‘growing up’ or ‘family’ or ‘getting older,’ which is what the vast majority of shows boil down to. It’s a show about the Dollhouse, and though the dollhouse has a lot of different metaphorical applications, I find a great deal of distance between the subtext of the show and the text. The show is fascinating on an intellectual level, and I’ve read some great analyses of it, but great art, and particularly great TV, functions on a combination of intellectual and emotional stimulation.
It’s the connection to the characters that makes TV great. I don’t think the vast majority of TV matches the production values or artistic precision of film, but I think in the past ten years, the best of movies can’t even come close to what the best of TV has done. On Buffy, the production values were frequently questionable, but because the characters were so well drawn, I didn’t care. Here, without the emotional connection, all the weaknesses of the show are magnified.
And, I think the season finale is a great example of that. While it’s probably the best episode of the run, it also felt a lot like the weakest Buffy season closing battle, the fight against Adam in “Primeval.” Like with Adam, there’s a lot of nattering on about becoming a god and stuff like that, but ultimately all of that is just thematic layering. It doesn’t have any ties to our emotion. The emotion of the finale should have come from Echo’s confrontation with her ‘true self’ Caroline, but because we don’t really know Caroline, or care about Echo in a deep way, the moment doesn’t quite work. We’ve seen glimpses of Caroline, but not enough to really be concerned about her survival.
Now, you may say that this scene was fantastic because of the way it looked at the self. Are we our mind, or are we our body? Where does the soul reside? Can you put a soul on a hard drive? Those are the questions that arise, and it does work really well as an illustration of that dichotomy, but it doesn’t hit on an emotional level. Even after twelve questionable episodes, the first season of Buffy closed on a more satisfying note with her death and resurrection to battle The Master.
I love thematic and philosophical questions as much as anyone, but I don’t think they alone make a work interesting. Evangelion raises a ton of philosophical questions, but it ties them into character psychology and uses the emotion as a way to illustrate its philosophical considerations. The same is true of The Invisibles, which is as thematically dense a work as out there, but it’s matched up with the over the top pop imagery, and very real emotional content that makes you feel things, not just think about them.
Ultimately, I think the show’s problem is that it totally abandons what Whedon does best, building characters. With no really relatable characters to draw on, the weaknesses in his work become more apparent, chief among them the fact that his shows just aren’t that great on a filmmaking level. Don’t get me wrong, Whedon himself has directed some of the most well constructed TV episodes of all time, chief among them Buffy’s “The Body,” “Restless” and “Once More With Feeling.” These are episodes that just light up the screen and take full advantage of what cinema can do.
But, much as I love them, the fact that an episode like “The Body” stands out so much is an indicator that the show just isn’t that well made on a week by week basis. It’s shouldn’t be so special to have an episode that uses filmmaking techniques to enhance the presentation, that’s what every episode should do. Of course, when Buffy started airing, TV was very different from what it is now. Then, you didn’t get good filmmaking on TV. But, things have changed a lot since then. Shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men are absolutely gorgeous, and shot in a way that’s just great filmmaking. On a lower budget, Friday Night Lights and Battlestar Galactica both have a very strong visual sense and consistently produce beautiful images.
Dollhouse feels like a syndicated action series from the 90s a lot of the time. It’s hard to say exactly what it is, but it just doesn’t work visually in the way those shows do. It feels like a show with not that much of a budget, and in the finale, that was definitely apparent, particularly when the climax consists of people running around a power plant and not really doing anything.
That’s not to say there’s no memorable filmmaking. I loved the Blue Velvet homage with Alpha and Whiskey dancing around the man they were cutting up, it looked great, and felt very cinematic, but not many images jump out like that.
That may not sound too positive, but I did enjoy the show. I think it worked on some levels, and with Joss writing it, the sky is the limit. But, I do think they need to rework the premise a bit, and find a way to create more relatable characters, or to push the ones they do in more extreme directions and explore what being that kind of environment does to a person. Why would DeWitt or Boyd commit their whole lives to this organization? That’s a question that’s never really been answered, and could be a great source of drama and character growth.
But, I do think on a key level, the series is flawed because the premise is too specific. It’s about what it’s about, and doesn’t have the room for emotional relatability that the best show premises do. Now, yes, Dollhouse is about our image conscious society, and how Hollywood creates roles and how our self image is created, but all that is meaningless without an emotional link. And so far, that link isn’t quite there. Perhaps it’ll happen in season two though, I’m glad we’ll get to find out.
Over the past ten years or so there’s been a seismic change in the way we consume serialized comic books and TV. Thanks to the rise of trade paperback collections and season DVDs, a lot of viewers are forgoing the initial release and choosing to ‘binge’ on a series after it’s been going for a long time. This can cause issues when a series doesn’t have the support to carry it along during its initial run, but it also leads to a dynamically different experience of the work in question. Some of my favorite TV shows were watched on DVD, and the switch from DVD to weekly release can be pretty jarring.
Side note, it really annoys me when people continually say things like “I don’t understand how they could cancel Arrested Development,” when of course they didn’t watch the show until several years after it aired. Maybe that’s why it was cancelled, since no one actually watched it when it was on. The same is true for Freaks and Geeks, Firefly and countless other shows. These are all great shows, but the reason they were cancelled is because people didn’t watch them.
Anyway, I watched all of How I Met Your Mother’s first four seasons over the past couple of months, and caught up to the point that I could watch the last few episodes live as they aired. When I started the show, there seemed to be a vast world of episodes out there for me, almost four full seasons to go through. I’d read online commentary where people complained about certain episodes, and I was like, chill, it was a decent episode, largely because when you watch a couple episodes at a time, the weaker ones are quickly forgotten and it’s the good moments that linger.
It’s a totally different experience watching a show on a weekly basis. With Battlestar Galactica, I watched the first two seasons in one go, and it wasn’t until I neared the end of season two that I realized there was a good long run of clunkers in there. Because I was just watching the episodes, the individual quality didn’t stand out as much. You see things more in big picture terms. When I watch the show on a week by week basis, each episode was a much bigger deal, and had to not only succeed on its own terms, but also move the overall narrative forward in some kind of meaningful way.
Watching How I Met Your Mother in short succession, I think I got more into the show than I would have watching it week by week. When I watch an episode now, what stands out is how slight the 22 minutes feel. I watch it, but it’s not quite enough time to draw me into the world. I still enjoy the show, but I don’t feel that same connection to it that I did watching a whole bunch in a row.
I think the shows that benefit most from viewing in rapid succession are weaker shows because they become more of a habit. I watched three seasons of Rescue Me in a row on DVD, but quit watching after watching the season four premiere live. Not having the next episode directly available made me realize, I just don’t really care about this show, and I have no particular reason to watch the next one.
I think that in many ways great shows benefit from having a week between episodes. Watching The Sopranos on DVD, it’s almost too much, you don’t realize the full impact of what the show’s doing because you’re racing to get to the next thing. Watching it weekly, you can savor each episode, and really examine what’s going on. The show is rich enough to support that kind of reading. I watched seasons five and six live, and was still really connected to the show, always anxiously awaiting the next episode. But, at the same time, I found the first part of season six much more satisfying on a DVD rewatch. ‘Kaisha,’ the season finale was incredibly frustrating when faced with the prospect of a year without a new episode. On a rewatch, I could appreciate the episode for what it was, and I now see it as a series standout.
Ultimately, I think you get the most out of a TV series when it becomes a hugely important piece of your life. When The Sopranos or Six Feet Under or final season Angel or The Wire were on, a new episode was always a high point of the week, and would leave me eagerly awaiting the next one. But, a lesser show isn’t going to have that kind of commitment and is more just sort of there when watched on a weekly basis.
What is the conclusion? I think watching episodes in rapid succession dulls out the extremes of a series. Your perception is of the whole rather than of the specific pieces, whereas watching a show on a weekly basis, you fixate more on individual elements. And, I think there’s a component of speculation that you don’t get when watching a show all in one go. I pondered and read countless Battlestar theories watching it air live, and someone watching on DVD won’t have the experience.
That said, ultimately a great show is a great show. And, when you watch seven seasons of Buffy is a few months, that can become your life in a way that watching the show weekly never could. I loved watching Buffy all in one go, but at the same time, I would have loved to have seen it live, and I’ll never have that chance.
I saw the new Wolverine movie over the weekend. Short review is it’s not a particularly good movie, but not as bad as others have been saying. In general, I found the Bryan Singer X-Men movies really overrated, I think it’s really hard to capture the essential appeal of X-Men in a feature film. Chris Claremont was Joss Whedon before Joss Whedon existed, and in the same way that Whedon’s work is most interesting as it sprawls and complexifies, the essential appeal of the X-Men is those long running, convoluted narrative arcs, and the sense of family that develops with the characters over time. You just can’t get that family feeling in a two hour film, certainly not one that’s got to cram in the studio mandated action sequences.
I don’t think Wolverine is as strong as any of the previous three X-Men films, though it’s less glaringly nonsensical than X-Men: The Last Stand. I think the project was flawed at a conceptual level, Wolverine works better as a contrast to the more straitlaced X-Men characters, or as a mentor to a younger member of the team. In this film, as the only hero, everything that makes him unique, the rage, the questionable moral code, is dulled since he’s got to try and tone down Sabretooth and the other crazy mercenaries he works with. I’d have much rather seen a Wolverine film that takes place after the other X-Men movies and follows him and Rogue to Japan, or him and Kitty Pryde on some kind of mission.
But, the film isn’t really that interesting on its own merits. What struck me watching the film was how nebulous continuity is in the context of these ongoing superhero narratives. There’s some obvious departures from comics continuity, having Logan and Victor as brothers, having Gambit save Scott on Three Mile Island, but that sort of thing bothered me less than a lot of stuff that was drawn from the actual comics. I don’t like the idea of Wolverine as someone from 1845, or the notion that he fought in all these wars. I also don’t like the idea of the bone claws in general, I think it ruins a lot of what makes the character who he is. But, these are things drawn from the comics themselves, wouldn’t not having the bone claws violate continuity?
I’d argue that there’s a kind of continuity that supercedes the general accepted continuity, and that’s what I’d call ‘pocket continuity.’ Pocket continuity is essentially the idea that you build your own little universe within the Marvel or DC universe as a whole, and you determine what’s in and out of continuity. It’s somewhat along the lines of hypertime, which said that all stories were true, but the better ones are more true because they’re more enduring. But, in this case, it’s more that you pick and choose the aspects of continuity you like, and decide not to mention the ones you don’t.
Grant Morrison is one of the prime people behind this. Final Crisis ostensibly draws on the entire history of the DCU, but most of its continuity is drawn from Morrison’s own works, or the Jack Kirby Fourth World stuff. Morrison built his own conception of the DCU in JLA and Seven Soldiers, and he goes back to that in FC. Beyond his own work, he draws on the stories he likes, the Kirby stuff, some Geoff Johns Green Lantern material, and discards a lot of the material from Countdown or Death of the New Gods that didn’t mesh with his desired continuity.
I can understand why people get touchy with this. To pick and choose the elements you like can invalidate the notion that this is a linear universe. But, I think it makes for better stories, and a more manageable reading experience. You don’t need to have read seventy years of comics to get Final Crisis, just Morrison’s twenty years of DCU work. Doing this makes for a more auteur centric comic, and a more artistically satisfying one.
Even on Batman, where Morrison made a big deal about the fact that every story happened, it was largely about him picking out the stories he liked from the ‘50s, and drawing on those to tell his own story. You don’t have to read every Batman story to understand it, you just have to read the ones that Morrison decided to bring into his own continuity.
Chris Claremont is another writer who did this, crossing the X-Men over frequently with other books he was writing in the 70s and 80s. He built a little universe where characters like Sabretooth and Mystique floated freely around books that he scripted. Only occasionally would he bring in events from the Marvel Universe as a whole, but if he’s writing Misti Knight or Colleen Wing, they’re fair game for the X-Men.
To go back to the Wolverine movie, I, like every other reader, have built my own vision of who Wolverine is. It’s largely based off the zen warrior Wolverine of mid 80s Claremont and Grant Morrison’s run on the title. This is a guy who’s largely conquered his beserker rages, and is a more self aware character. I found a lot of Joss Whedon’s take on the character a bit off at first, because it deviated from this mode for a more animal, violent Logan. But, I’m sure a lot of people thought that was more true to the character than Morrison’s version.
What I will say is that even though the bone claws are in continuity for the comics, they felt off throughout the whole movie. My conception of Wolverine’s backstory isn’t the one in Origins, film or comics miniseries, it’s of a regular Canadian guy who became a government soldier than an X-Man, not a guy who fought in the Civil War. I don’t think the Origin miniseries is a strong enough story to survive in hypertime, it lacks the visceral power of Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X, and I’m guessing a few years down the line, it may be retconned away.
That’s the thing I love about the concept of hypertime continuity. It takes into account the reality of superhero writing. In an ever evolving narrative, things don’t necessarily need to be proven false to move out of continuity, they just need to fade away. The good stories stick around, the bad ones fade away. That’s probably why virtually every X-Men story is still riffing on Claremont’s run, or Morrison’s, they’re the people who told memorable stories, the vast majority of 90s writers, not so much.
I watched The Spirit on blu-ray a couple of days ago. The film was enjoyable enough, bouncing between some really strong, fun material that was baffling in the way only current era Frank Miller can be, and some scenes that just didn’t work at all. I think it’s totally understandable why the film bombed, and was poorly received, but for me, it was more exciting to watch than most movies out there.
Reading a bit about the film, a lot of people are knocking Miller for his objectification of every single female character in the film, a trope that goes back to his comics work. Miller definitely falls into many standard men writing about women tropes, the virgin/whore dichotomy and identifying a woman by her ass before her face, as well as dressing most of the female characters in a variety of fetishized outfits. But, at the same time, the narrative action in the film is largely propelled by the female characters, and they invariably take center stage over the rather blank slate hero, The Spirit. The Spirit actually does very little, he is bounced between various other characters who define him, be it Ellen who draws him to a normal life, Sand who pulls him towards adventure or even Silken who tempts him towards evil. Essentially, The Spirit himself is placed in the role traditionally held by women in action movies, of being a pawn the other characters use as an excuse to fight each other.
Now, that’s not to say that the film doesn’t have some problematic thoughts on gender roles. The Spirit flirts with everyone he encounters, and is able to have a climactic kiss with Sand, then walk right over to Ellen and be cool with her, even as he flirts with Morganstern at the same time. And, you could argue that the entire film is Miller putting various actresses he finds attractive in outfits he likes and making them fall in love with a blank slate male protagonist. But, in lavishing so much attention on them, they control the film, in a way you very rarely see in a superhero movie.
I’d argue that the film becomes its own kind of feminism, a distinctly male brand of feminism, but valid nonetheless. It reminds me a lot of a Russ Meyer movie, where female characters are presented as objects of visual pleasure, but also become dominant actors in the narrative, and control the movie, lording their power over generic beefcake men who have little personality and no say in how the movie proceeds. Look at the film’s climax, it’s really about Sand vs. Silken, The Spirit and The Octopus are just there to backup their female associate.
Yes, like a Russ Meyer movie, there’s a heavy emphasis on showcasing the beauty and particularly the tits and ass of the female characters, but does doing so invalidate the agency of the female characters? I don’t think they’re particularly fully realized characters, but no one in the film is, you certainly know more about Sand than you do about Denny.
I’d argue if this movie were directed by Joss Whedon, people would look at it very differently. In the same way they can overlook the way he dresses Echo in everything from schoolgirl to dominatrix fetish because Whedon is a self professed ‘feminist,’ they would hail the strong female characters at the center of the narrative, and write off the photocopying an ass bit as just having some fun, or presenting a character with a strong sense of her sexuality. Because Whedon makes such a big deal about being a feminist, it’s a lot easier to accept the contradictions of his work, to accept the fact that a high school girl is presented in a sexualized fashion throughout the first three years of Buffy. Or, look at River on Firefly, a mentally challenged teenage girl who is consistently sexualized throughout the series. Because Whedon is a feminist, it’s okay, but if Miller did the same character, people would find it objectionable.
Now, admittedly tone is a big part of this. Whedon’s work is much more self aware, and pokes fun at its own indulgence, even as it still gives you the pleasure of that indulgence. People don’t seem to realize that ever since Dark Knight Strikes Again, Miller has been messing around with the ultra-serious image he had in the 80s and 90s. To criticize All Star Batman, or this film, by calling it self parody, is like criticizing Airplane for having jokes, and not treating its aircraft disaster story seriously. He’s intentionally pushing things to the point of total insanity, and when it works, it’s a lot of fun to read.
More generally, I find it interesting that this film gets so much criticism for the presentation of its female characters, when it’s one of the only recent superhero films to have a female character who’s anything more than just the girl waiting at home, worried about her hero boyfriend. Who’s a more interesting character, Sand Serif or Pepper Potts? Silken Floss or Rachel Dawes? The Dark Knight is a particularly notable offender, using its female character as an excuse for the men to fight, then killing her off to motivate the final act of the story. She’s a cipher, existing solely for plot purposes, with no will or agency of her own. As in many recent films, she’s given her own job, but essentially she’s just there to support the man she’s involved with.
A large part of the problem stems from the fact that there aren’t that many compelling female characters in either the DC or Marvel universes. Thanks to the efforts of Grant Morrison and Greg Rucka, there’s more than there used to be, but they’re still not the brand name characters that can headline a film. Still, I’d love to see Renee Montoya as The Question pop up in a Batman film, or see some kind of standalone movie about Zatanna.
Over at Marvel, there’s a lot of great female characters in X-Men, but very few in the Marvel universe in general, where most of their movies take place. Is The Wasp the best we can hope for in the Avengers movie, a woman who’s best known for being a victim of spousal abuse? In the X-Men though, there’s a ton of great female characters, largely thanks to the effort of Chris Claremont, who much like Joss Whedon, has created a lot of really strong female characters, some of whom are fetishized, but no more than the male heroes were in his run.
Claremont most importantly manages to have a wide variety of female characters in his X-Men run. There’s the Earth Mother goddess type, Storm, there’s the everyday girl Kitty Pryde, the powerful and dangerous Phoenix and many others. Jean Grey or Storm are probably the most well known female superheroes beside Wonder Woman.
The X-Men movies never made Storm really work as a character, and Jean existed largely as an excuse for the Logan/Scott rivalry. There haven’t been that many great female superheroes on screen. The best presentation to date was Catwoman in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. The film has an underlying feminist subtext, but melds it with the narrative such that it never seems preachy. And, the dynamic between Catwoman and Batman, Bruce and Selina, is consistently interesting and challenging. She’s the character with most of the agency, the one who defines their relationship and her own identity. He’s the one who just wants to settle down with her in a big house and have a family.
Again, the character is presented in a sexualized, fetishy way, but I think there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. She’s a fully realized character, who dresses that way for a reason, it’s a means to express something within herself. She becomes a kind of grotesque parody of the sort of “bad girl” that men want. Men want a “bad girl” who’s just bad enough to still be controlled by them. It’s the illusion of a dominant woman. She subverts that by then pushing things further, to the point that her power becomes dangerous to the male order that’s trying to control her.
Compare her role in the narrative to Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight. Selina controls things and actually pushes the narrative forward for her own ends, not just to get together with whatever man she’s interested in. And, though it’s far from the film Batman Returns is, that’s what the women of The Spirit do as well. So, even if you're to say that The Spirit is just pandering to men with its parade of hot women, isn't it better to see hot women who can actually do something and have their own lives, than hot women who exist just to support the male hero?
As much as I was excited to hear that the Battlestar Galactica prequel series Caprica was picked up, I had some major reservations. The series is both a prequel and a spinoff, two of the trickiest works to do. The big issue with either of these is that for all the audience you’re attracting by association with the parent work, you’re cutting off potential new viewers, who are already behind in their knowledge of the story universe. And, you’re invariably going to leave some fans of the original series unsatisfied, since you’re not necessarily giving them the things they liked about the original series.
In terms of production circumstance, Caprica is reminiscent of Crusade, the Babylon 5 spinoff that aired shortly after the main series’ conclusion. Crusade, while not an outright awful series, suffers from pretty much all the problems a spinoff can have. Its premise was stuck in Babylon 5 continuity, and based on a TV movie starring the Babylon 5 cast, but it featured no actual Babylon 5 main characters in the show, giving fans and new viewers the worst of both worlds. In addition, the show never really staked out its own identity. Babylon 5 had defined itself as a space series that wasn’t Star Trek, Crusade was like Star Trek in the Babylon 5 verse.
On top of these spinoff issues, Caprica has to deal with the problem with prequels. The Star Wars prequels started the prequel phenomenon and are also exemplary of the problem with most prequels, they’re generally about watching pieces fall into place. Good stories drop you in at the most interesting point, and let things develop from there. If this time was so interesting, why didn’t the original series start here? The people behind the X-Men franchise are just baffling in their choice to do two prequel movies rather than go forward into the future. We all know what will happen to Caprica, why bother watching this series?
Well, thankfully the pilot totally wiped away my doubts about the shows purpose and quality with a standout pilot episode that managed to fit nicely in to the pre-existing BSG universe, but still carve out its own style and feel. The military aspects of BSG were never my favorite, so it was refreshing to be able to explore the issues of identity and humanity without getting bogged down in action scenes every few minutes. This is a more cerebral, introspective show, one that feels very much drawn from the world we live in today. That connection to our world was one of the best things about BSG, and this one draws even more on the beats of everyday life, the struggle to find meaning in a world where awful things happen.
One of my all time favorite film openings is Miami Vice’s drop directly into a nightclub, and I loved the similar opening here, as we instantly find ourselves at an over the top bacchanalia of sex and violence. The DVD only release gives us a bit more nudity and violence than the series itself will likely have, and I think that added bit makes it clear how far this place goes. This is a world without rules or moral consequences, where people can kill and fight and do all the things they secretly want to do, but society won’t allow them to. Why would you spend your time in boring school when you could be doing this?
I think it’s key that Zoe, Lacy and her friends go to an elite prep school and are so wealthy. These are the kind of kids who have no worries in the world, who can do whatever they want, and that’s why they go so far. It’s also why they burn out on it the quickest. They’ve been able to get anything they want in the real world, and now they can have anything they want in the virtual world, Zoe needs a more substantial transgression against authority, and that’s where the notion of the one God comes in.
It’s interesting to see the scene with the investigator and Sister Willow, where the notion of a single god is portrayed as something to be terrified of. In a world with many gods, there is no central authority, morality can be subjective and slippery, a conglomerate of different voices. One god means one truth, and that can also mean an inability to accept other viewpoints.
The episode’s greatest strength is the mood, and the way that the filmmaking establishes this series as its own world. It draws on the style of BSG, but I was instantly engaged on an aesthetic level. Because the show was shot so well, and created this mix of surreal and hyper-real, I was totally engaged through the exposition. It wasn’t a question of waiting to get to the good part of the story, just the images of the club and the world alone were interesting enough to hold my attention.
Once Zoe died, the show took a more contemplative turn, the energy of youth replaced by the regret and sadness of an older generation. Watching Daniel’s excitement at discovering new technology, we can see what inspired Zoe. The two of them are very similar, and it took her death to make him realize that.
That said, the show wasn’t perfect. I think the mob lawyer stuff could lead to some weak standalone episodes in the future. And, the transition of Zoe to cylon was a bit goofy. I think the major question is what is the show about on a weekly basis. Though this is a far better pilot than Dollhouse, I think it’s similar in that it’s got a lot of interesting ideas, but not necessarily a clear narrative drive forward. I’m interested in seeing them continue to explore the universe, and the world of the holo-club and the disconnect between that decadence and the more restrained surface world. But, if it’s just going to be mob drama and stuff like that, I don’t think it’ll work as well.
But, I was very impressed by this episode. It’s a really strong pilot, with a clear identity and sense of place. The cast is great, the production value is pretty high, and I’m eager to see what happens when the show continues in 2010.
This Easter’s Doctor Who special was, much like the Christmas special that preceded it, a mildly entertaining, but ultimately hollow hour, primarily because of its disconnected feel from the overall narrative of the series. One of the trickiest things in long form serial fiction is making a story feel like it matters. In the case of Who, we know that Tennant is going to regenerate into someone new at the end of these specials, so they serve as an extended curtain call after the massive season four finale.
The primary issue with this episode is that it’s totally without context, and gives us no real reason to invest in it beyond the specifics of what happens on screen. The series gives us a lot of seemingly disconnected standalone episodes, but there we at least have the evolving relationship between the Doctor and companion to keep our interest when the story proper lags. In the case of this episode, we know that the world isn’t going to end, that they’re going to close the wormhole and all will be reset. So, it’s the same exact emotional beats as the Christmas special, leaving us with a sad Doctor alone, with only an ominous warning at his future as any sort of overarching narrative.
I think it’s less true of the old series, but in the current incarnation, the core of the show is the relationship between the Doctor and his companion. Much like The X-Files is ostensibly about scary stories, but is really about the relationship between Mulder and Scully, the various adventures serve as a device to let us get to know the Doctor and his companion better. Each season is defined largely by the chemistry between that specific Doctor and his companion, and without the companion to work with, these specials feel a bit hollow.
That’s no knock on Tennant, who’s as enthusiastic as usual. It’s more a consequence of the fact that no one’s really waiting to see these stories. I’m really curious to see the finale for Tennant, and to see stories with the new Doctor in the Moffat era, but this episode is just a place holder.
I haven’t posted in a while, but fear not, the examination of important issues in comics and culture has not stopped! The reason for the hiatus has been that I’ve been out in L.A. working on what’s pretty much my dream project, a documentary about Grant Morrison. So, over the last week, we shot three days with Grant, talking with him during an interview that he called the longest interview he’d ever done. That interview will form the base of the documentary, which will also include some footage of stuff that I shoot as subjective interpretation of the stuff he’s saying, images from the comics, and hopefully some additional interviews with his collaborators and things like that.
It’s a pretty strange thing to meet the guy who’s pretty much been my idol since I first read The Invisibles seven years ago. How can the reality of the man possibly live up to the image I’ve built up in my head? To some extent, the answer to that question is the core of the documentary. There’s been so much written about what Morrison was going through during The Invisibles, but I had very little sense of the life he’d been living since the series ended, and I think we found out the answer to that. He’s not the crazy drug taking magician of the 90s, he’s a different guy now, and finding out who that person is is a big part of what the doc is about.
I don’t want to go too in depth about what we talked about, since that’s what the documentary is for, but I can say that the interview process was pretty interesting. I would ask a question, and he’d typically talk for five to ten minutes, then we sort of organically moved to the next topic. He answered a lot of questions I’d been wondering about, including such random current ones as the purported 80 page Seven Soldiers script and the exact identity of Doctor Hurt to more general stuff like a look inside his much vaunted notebooks.
I had a great time doing the filming, and I think the man lived up to the image I had of him in my head. He wasn’t exactly as I imagined, but in the transition from myth to human being, the magic lingered on. Anyone who can talk for six hours and leave you wanting more has a way about him. And, between a literal translation of his work like Key 23 and work inspired by his like Universal Traveler and The Third Age, I think I can make some really interesting visuals to match his words.
The documentary’s going into the editing room now, and I’d expect to see it released sometime in 2010. I’m really happy with the way everything we shot turned out, and am looking forward to getting in there and cutting it up and making something as challenging and exciting as one of his comics.
I read Kingdom Come, the Mark Waid/Alex Ross superhero opus, a few years back and enjoyed it, primarily because of Ross’s art. Say what you will about his storytelling skills, he makes spectacle and pages that are just gorgeous to look at. Doing a Kingdom Come sequel without Ross seems like an odd choice, but I decided to check out The Kingdom for a couple of reasons. One is it’s got an issue drawn by Frank Quitely, one of the few things he’s drawn that I haven’t read. I also wanted to check it out because it was the only in story appearance of hypertime, the Waid/Morrison DCU concept that’s a source of continual fascination to me. So, how did The Kingdom read? Surprisingly well, it’s not an all time classic by any means, but there’s a lot of good pieces in here, and it plays as an interesting precursor to what happens in Final Crisis.
One of the most interesting things about the book is its structure. The central conflict is set up in an introductory issue, then we divide off into a series of semi-related stories about various b-list side characters and their role in the crisis, before bringing it all back together for the finale. The obvious parallel is to Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, which used a similar structure. This series doesn’t feature the in depth character work or scope of Seven Soldiers, but the structure still works really well, to the point that the main story is largely beside the point, what lingers is Rose’s troubles in “Planet Krypton” or Iris’s struggle to get equal treatment by her father in “Kid Flash.”
The central story is convoluted, and predicated on a central idea that doesn’t quite hang together. It’s odd that William would so abruptly switch from total devotion to the notion of Superman as God to a mad fury to destroy him across time and space. I suppose someone who had such fiery religious fervor in the first place would be particularly disappointed when it turned out that his faith was built on a lie, but it falls prey to a common problem in these kinds of stories, which is a not clearly defined slippery slope of villainy. It’s one thing to want revenge on Superman, it’s another to go from a normal guy to a cosmic force of destruction. You can justify it, and the narrative reasoning is there in the story, but emotionally it didn’t quite work for me.
But, using his rage as a multi-versal threat gave the opportunity for a bunch of interesting stories about characters hovering on the edge of universal destruction. The core idea is the notion that Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman’s mission back in time will destroy their universe, whether it succeeds or fails. They are the products of a universe built on pain and suffering. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman may be trying to do a good thing, but why should people be punished for the sins of those in control of their world. So, the story becomes largely about these peoples’ struggles to justify their own existence, and show that their universe is worth saving.
The reveal of hypertime at the end of the story is a way to solve the central conflict of the work, which is what happens to the people left behind when the world is changed. In the context of the DCU, the clear parallel is to the characters from the multiversal Earths who were wiped out of existence in the crisis. In “Planet Krypton,” Rose sees the ghosts of characters from those other Earths, and is comforted to know that they’re out there, that she isn’t alone, and also, to find out at the end, that she shouldn’t regret the choices she made, she’s in the place she’s supposed to be. That story was the high point of The Kingdom for me because it managed to make the DCU emotionally relatable and explore the role of the civilian in this universe in a way I’ve rarely seen. The odd structure of the piece meant that there was room for a digression like that.
The thing I really like about hypertime is the way that it reconciles all the different eras and tones of the DCU into a single cohesive whole. The goofy adventures of early Superman can co-exist with the apocalyptic world of Kingdom Come, and comment on each other without rendering each other invalid. I think it does run into a bit of a self indulgent loop of commentary, when you have a story like this, where multiple versions of Superman converge on each other and are used to comment on the nature of the DC Universe itself, but when a character is as mythic as Superman, it makes sense that he’d function as a significant symbol in a work like this. Hypertime is about recognizing the mythic essence of these characters as a core from which everything else flows.
Hypertime is described here as a river built of events, or stories. In Final Crisis, Morrison picks up this idea, I’d argue that the archetypal Platonic Superman seen in Superman Beyond is the “source” of the hypertime river, he is the hero from which every other hero flows, and is defined against. You could argue that each of the “trinity” of heroes are the source, an idea that’s reinforced by the appearance of Jonathan, a hybrid of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, who has power over hypertime. He is the end of the river, the coalescence of the disparate pieces built up by many stories over the years.
I see a lot of echoes of The Kingdom in Final Crisis, which adapts the hypercrisis idea in its tale of a universe built out of stories. Both works end with an attempt to liberate the characters from the notion of a single linear narrative and plunge them into a larger universe without rules or restrictions. On some level, I have problems with this because it plays largely as a way to bring back old stories that Waid or Morrison liked, and seems to spiral further and further away from any real world relevance.
But, stepping back, I think hypertime has a lot to say about the nature of mythology and human identity. People complained that I’m Not There was too insular, something that was only of interest to Bob Dylan fanboys, but I feel like it only uses Dylan as the jumping off point for an exploration of how we all construct our own identities. Similarly, hypertime functions simultaneously as an exploration of DCU continuity and a representation of the way that we construct our own personal narratives. Everything that happened to us exists and is true on some level, but we banish certain experiences to our own continuity limbo, and even build up pieces of ourselves using “imaginary stories” that didn’t really happen, but become a piece of personal mythology.
But, our perception of our own identity is largely based around where we are at the moment. I’ve gone from student to worker, child to adult, all the previous incarnations of my own identity are true, but they aren’t necessarily relevant to where I am now. Similarly, Batman has changed from day-glo 60s Batman to gritty 80s Batman, hypertime is a way to reconcile the growth and change that a character goes through by acknowledging the evolution of fictional personalities rather than trying to create a construct single narrative.
The Kingdom is the precursor to a lot of Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, and certainly the hypertime stuff is really interesting. But, for me, the most significant thing is the great character work on some of the individual stories. The overall story is fairly typical JLA material, but some of those character pieces were really nice.
It’s not easy to write a satisfying ending for a two hour movie, so imagine how tough it is to write a satisfying ending for an eighty hour TV series, to sum up everything that made a show what it was, and pay off all those character and narrative arcs in a way that leaves people satisfied. For some shows, the finale is the series high point, Angel, Twin Peaks and The Office all went out at the top of their game, while others end on a more perfunctory note, hitting the beats and going out in a good, but unexceptional way, think Buffy or The Wire. Battlestar Galactica’s finale is much like the series itself, filled with moments of incredible brilliance like nothing else I’ve ever seen, but also a bit frustrating along the way. I have issues with some of the narrative construction, but the takeaway from this episode is pretty much all positive. The show went out on a really fun, exciting moment, and left me totally satisfied.
There’s a lot to discuss here, so let me cover the first half of the episode first, the assault on the colony and subsequent destruction of Cavil’s forces. On one level, this entire sequence hit that Star Wars sci-fi battle joy place that lurks deep inside me. I love this kind of stuff, and seeing the crew embark on a desperate assault against Cavil and his forces was exhilarating. The effects team was top notch in building those trippy backgrounds and environments for the fight. That said, some of the gun closes looked a bit too CG, and took me out of the story for a moment. But, the general intensity of everything that was going on carried it along and built the tension to a really high level.
The intercutting between ground assault and space battle recalled the end of Return of the Jedi, as did the hypnotic spread and cross of ships across the stars. I also really liked the nearly abstract way that gunshots provided the only illumination for many of the battle sequences.
What bothered me about this sequence is that after all this buildup, it felt a bit too easy for the crew to get Hera back and defeat Cavil. There was a lot of gunfire, but except for the shot where Doral walked out with a gun and just started killing people, you never had the sense that there was any sort of coordinated opposition. I suppose the point was Cavil’s hubris, but you’d think that he’d have more than one person guarding Hera. And, what was his plan for getting Hera back, just walking into the room and taking her? Seems a bit chancy for a guy who’d spent years trying to get revenge on the final five. I don’t buy it, and it hurts the sequence dramatically. In terms of atmosphere and execution, it’s an amazing sequence, but looking back, the stakes just weren’t there. Centurions went into action, but casualties seemed remarkably low for the “last stand” we’d been prepared for.
This section of the finale reminded me a lot of the last episode of Buffy, where all our characters undertook a desperate assault against a seemingly infinitely powerful foe. I have a lot of issues with the Buffy finale, but a single shot made the stakes work for me there, and that was Anya being casually cut through by a Ubervamp scythe. To see a character who’d been on the show for years cut down with such a lack of buildup made it clear that no one was safe, that this is a war and it doesn’t matter who’s a main character, anyone can die. We never got that here, after all the gunshots fired, everyone walks out fine. Except for Boomer, but her death wasn’t really a battle casualty. To have Lee, or Helo go down like Anya did would make it feel more real and emotionally engaging. After it’s all over, that sequence was wonderful in the moment, but didn’t contribute that much to the overall scheme of things. I’m still glad it was in there because it was awesome, but I think it could have been handled a little better.
But, an element that did work was the Baltar/Six last stand. I loved the two of them kissing each other in the heat of battle, and also Gaius’s bemused surprise that he could actually stand up for himself. He’s earned Six’s respect for real now, and she can genuinely love him, in a way she never could on Caprica. These two characters have been written down some convoluted paths, to the point that it was hard to remember who they were supposed to be. They were two of my favorite characters for much of the run, but I lost track of them in the last season. This episode brought them back, both by going back to the touchstone of the miniseries, and by just writing them better, by knowing who they are and playing off that.
This led into one of the episode’s high points, the running Hera/opera house vision sequence. The much built up opera house scene finally plays out, and it’s really cool to see it all come together. In the context of the show itself, the sequence is supposed to foreshadow these events, in the context of the production, I’m guessing they shot the opera house without knowing exactly what it would refer to, then set all this up to mimic it, but either way, it’s a fantastic sequence, that’s shot and cut in a way that builds a hypnotic rhythm, the sense of something very important transpiring. When Six and Baltar pick up Hera, you have the sense that they are stepping up to destiny, that this is the moment where Baltar can finally prove his worth. He brings Hera before the Final Five, who look down from their perch truly god-like. That shot was amazing, one of visual high points of the episode.
Baltar speaks of angels and gods guiding us forward, finally clarifying exactly what the nature of the “head” characters is. So much of this episode is about recognizing that our own individual actions are part of a much larger communal destiny, shaped by a larger intelligence that we might call god, though he apparently doesn’t like to be called that. Some intelligence has brought them to this point, it’s why they saw the opera house, it’s what the entire series has been building to.
However, this majesty leads to some troubled stuff. After Cavil agreed to exchange Hera for resurrection technology, I felt like there was another twist coming. With an hour left in the episode, it couldn’t all be this easy. But, what we got was problematic in many ways. The Final Five stick their hands into the vat, and share each others’ memories, including the memory of Tory killing Cally, which prompts Tyrol to choke her. There’s many levels of wrong here. One is what I’ve previously discussed about the convoluted backstory of the final five and the way that it’s antithetical to the development of further stories. These peoples’ identities waver and fluctuate depending on the needs of the plot, and Tory’s behavior in the first half of the season is a consequence of that. She kills to preserve her secret, but also enjoys it. So, presumably being a cylon allows her to indulge a dark side that she would otherwise sublimate.
I think that’s interesting stuff, but it was never really explored in depth, and she got sidelined in the backhalf of season four. The other final five characters were manipulated to the whims of the plot, and I never felt like I understood who they were, or what drove them to do what they did.
The other level on which the Tory death bothers me is Tyrol isn’t punished for it at all. I get that Tory killed his wife and that’s a big trauma, but shouldn’t someone have tried to stop him from choking her. Consider the fact that they believe their entire survival hinges on all of them getting together to enable resurrection. Where’s some leadership there, and what about the simple fact that it’s not right to kill someone, no matter what she’s done? I also don’t get Tigh telling Tyrol he would have done the same thing, considering he killed his own wife on New Caprica.
This leads to a pretty convoluted sequence where all hell breaks loose, nukes are fired and everyone thinks they’re going to die. I don’t get why Cavil kills himself here, it doesn’t make any sense with the character they’ve created previously on the show. I read a post finale interview where Ron Moore says that Cavil thought they were all going into the black hole, and he figured why not just end it now. But, that doesn’t make sense to me. I feel like he’d have gone down shooting, and at least tried to kill the Final Five along with him. Moore also said that the ship was meant to seem more like it was going into blackhole, but we can only see what’s on screen, and his decision to commit suicide just doesn’t work. It feels like they’re just trying to wrap up all the plots so we can get to the next stage of the story. There’s so many better potential ways to get rid of Cavil, this one didn’t work at all.
But, it did lead into another chill inducing sequence, where Kara finally puts all the pieces together and enters the FTL coordinates for Earth. I love the way the music built as she typed the keys, an echo of the piano playing sequence from a couple episodes back. This is her destiny being fulfilled, and it was great to watch. It also lead right into the startling moment where we see that the Galactica has made it to Earth, this time, the real Earth.
This leads us into phase two of the episode. The Galactica lands on Earth, and this time, it’s our Earth, in the distant past. I love this twist, it’s the sort of really audacious, crazy thing that only sci-fi can do. Stories should be like this, they should jump through time and space, and make us think about who we are and why we’re here. This is why genre fiction exists, to provide a lens to view things in a different way. I love the fact that the show was so tied to contemporary events, but I also like that it can step back and think about eternal questions, like the origin of humanity and the nature of god and fate. These are questions that people will always ask, and they’re just as relevant to our lives as suicide bombers and military coups.
After so many hours spent in the dark confines of the Galactica, the African plains seem endless, and the people who spent years trapped in those ships can’t seem to spread out fast enough. On one level, it bothered me that everyone split up so quickly. Why wouldn’t Adama want to stay near Tigh and Lee, why should he want to live on his own? The obvious answer is that it’s for the poetic power of him speaking to Laura near her grave, but I also think there’s a legitimate point of view saying that these people have been through so much together, they want nothing more than to be alone, to find themselves again and live out quiet, reflective lives.
For Kara, her time’s up. Her destiny is realized and she’s no longer needed. This all links together with the ‘head’ characters that Baltar and Six sees. She’s another agent of that same divine being, and with her destiny realized, she simply vanishes. I would have really liked to see one last scene with her and Leoben, perhaps reprising the Leoben as god imagery from when she died in season three. He is her angel, guiding her forward, and I wanted a pay off on that. He did shoot a new scene in the episode, so he was around, it seems odd that they didn’t pay off that long running thread in some way.
The entire thing with the ‘angels’ and god felt very much like a meta comment on the nature of writing. When the head characters tell Baltar and Six that their lives will be less eventful, it felt like an acknowledgement that the show ends here because we’ve seen all the interesting stuff. From here on out, things will happen to them, but just normal things, normal life. Kara’s destiny could be read as a role in the story, she needed to come back to perform specific actions to ensure that events occurred as planned, and once she’s done, she vanishes from the story.
Her role, and the head characters, feels very much like John a Dreams or the Harlequinade in The Invisibles. In both cases, there is a specific destiny to be achieved, humanity must find Earth and start again, and people will be manipulated to ensure that destiny is achieved. Kara, much like John a Dreams himself plays her role then is gone and never seen again. On an intellectual level, it works. On an emotional level, I’d have liked to see one more scene with her, maybe with her reuniting with the piano player, who we know is her father, and returning to the universal essence that she left to help guide humanity again. Anders did tell her that he’d see her on the other side, perhaps implying that they will be reunited now that both of them have helped humanity get to Earth.
This meta commentary is reinforced by the appearance of Ron Moore himself during the 150,000 years flash forward. Moore looks at an article that reveals that Hera is in fact the “mitochondrial Eve,” the root from which all of humanity grows. What that means is that we’re all actually cylon/human hybrids, and that the entire point of the series was to bring about humanity as we know it. Perhaps that was the Cylon plan mentioned in the series’ opening credits early on.
In the context of a fictional universe, isn’t the writer god? When Baltar and Six walk through a modern city, they speak of a higher power, but the man they’re looking at is the root of the universe. He’s the one who moves the pieces around, the one who makes Kara disappear. The meta commentary is more implicit than in a Grant Morrison comic, but the Moore appearance makes it very clear. Why do these events have to happen, because they are the fuel for the narrative universe. Events will cycle unending until someone steps in to change things. We watch the TV series, then it becomes real before us. We are making the robots that will become the cylons, the unwitting authors of a fictional destiny made manifest in our own reality.
I think people will have trouble with the “ooohhhh, robots are scary” montage at the end of the show, but it works for me because it underlines the connections between the fictional universe and the reality of what’s happening in our world. We could be them, we probably won’t be, but it’s possible, and maybe some of us will journey halfway across the galaxy to find another world and make it happen there again. I like the audaciousness of using the entire history of human development as but a piece of the larger mythology of the series. It recalls All Star Superman #10, in which we find out that our entire world was created as an experiment by Superman to find out what would happen in a world without him. That revelation makes us realize that the comic we’re reading is like a dream memory of “reality,” cutting through the fictional world that we call reality. It’s similar to Flex Mentallo’s closing revelation that superhero comics are the lone surviving testament from the real world we’ve forgotten.
The closing revelations would position BSG as a subconscious retelling of a creation myth, an explanation for the world we have, both a past and a future. The show isn’t a piece of fiction, it’s a channeling from our distant past, and the only way to find out if what happened before will happen again is to live and see our own future. Moore has said that he could never do a direct followup to the series, that’s because our lives are the followup, our history the sequel.
Ultimately, the series closes up on a satisfying and thought provoking final scenario. It’s not as instantly classic and emotionally catastrophic as the Six Feet Under finale, or as controversial and iconic as The Sopranos’ finale, but I think it found a nice middle ground between the two. The show went out on a strong note, and wrapped up at the right time. For all its ups and downs, this show did things no series on TV ever has before. It looked better than almost any other series in the history of the medium, and is the very rare show where the execution actually outpaced the writing a lot of the time.
The show’s writing sometimes seemed lazy, like they’d coast for a while, then blow your mind and make you forget about those weaker episodes in between. But, the New Caprica arc is arguably the best four episode run of any series all time, and I think the miniseries is one of the best introductions to a series ever. And, this is a truly great series on the whole, and one of the best recent sci-fi works around. And, even though we’ve got The Plan and Caprica coming up, it will be missed.
On the eve of the much hyped episode where Dollhouse “gets good,” it’s as good a time as any to catch up on the show’s two most recent episodes. Perhaps the best way to sum up my feelings about the show is to just say that I watched “Gray Hour” Tuesday, and “True Believer” on Wednesday. Before this show started, it would be hard to conceive of sitting on new Joss Whedon for over a week, but I just didn’t have a huge urge to watch either episode. The greatest strength of Whedon’s previous shows was their relentless addictive quality, the way they drew you into a world and got you so attached to the characters that you barely even care what’s happening plotwise, just spending time with the characters is enough.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, the series’ premise seems explicitly designed to prevent that kind of attachment. The show remains intellectually interesting, I like every episode I see, but there’s nothing to love there. It’s the kind of show that I could easily see myself drifting away from if it didn’t have Joss’s pedigree. I very rarely decide to stop watching a show, most of the time, I’ll just have a whole stack of episodes back up on me, until it’s a few months later and I just wind up never watching them. And, it’s largely Joss’s name, and the promise that episode six will be great that’s keeping this show from going down that path.
As I said, there’s a lot of stuff to like. The “man reactions” plot in “True Believer” was great, both for its infusion of humor into the premise, and for raising some interesting questions about the nature of the actives. And, again, I found myself wanting to spend more time with that plot than with the main action. I heard someone describe the actives’ dialogue as sounding like the way that actors in a porn sound, oddly inhuman, and I think that’s a perfect description. It reminds me a bit of “Pornomancer” from The Filth, and I’d like to see more of that weird sleaziness explored.
But, we spent most of our time with the mission, and I just don’t really care about the outcomes of these missions. They succeed, they fail, it doesn’t make a big impact on me because I’ve seen so many of these kind of stories on TV. The hour long network drama has a structural imperative that makes even new stories feel like something you’ve seen before. It’s only our emotional engagement with the characters that makes it feel fresh, and that’s just not there at this point.
Whedon’s previous shows had a wide range of great actors. So far, I’m not so sure we’ve got that here. Olivia Williams is totally one note as Adele DeWitt, and Franz Kranz as Topher is also one note, and annoying to boot. He feels like the Hollywood idea of a tech nerd, where Jonathan, Warren and Andrew felt more like real nerds. I think Eliza Dushku’s doing a pretty good job, but the cast standout is unquestionably Dichen Lachmann as Sierra. You believe her complete transformation into other characters. I love the moment where her eyes open as Taffy in “Gray Hour” and she becomes that characters, a totally different person from who she was in “Stage Fright.” And, she pulls off that drugged porn star vibe better than anyone when wandering the dollhouse.
At this point, I’m waiting for the show to kick it up a notch. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s not great. Hopefully this next episode will be the one to take it up a notch and finally start to get an emotional hook to go along with the interesting concepts.
Things have been pretty crazy this past week, I’ve been shooting a big infomercial, so I haven’t gotten a chance to write up this key penultimate episode of BSG. After moving all the pieces into place last episode, this one is largely about providing some strong character moments before the finale proper hits us with a whole bunch of action. It’s a successful episode, though one that’s hard to assess on its own terms since it’s very much part one of three.
Even though part of me feels like it’s not the best use of screentime with three hours left, I still love the decision to go back to Caprica before the Fall and spend some time with these characters as they used to be. It reinforces the idea that life hasn’t always been like this for all these people, that they have normal lives not so different from our own before the attack on the colonies. For Roslin, it seemed like having her sisters and father die was the worst possible trauma she could ever experience. It’s likely that suffering so much back then made it easier for her to deal with everything that’s happened since. Sitting in the fountain, she seemed to come to terms with things, she let her old self die and was reborn tougher, and stronger. It was an incredibly striking image.
The other scenes were less significant, but still effective. I particularly liked the Baltar story, which reminded me just how effective the Caprica Six character used to be. I respect the attempt to give her increased depth, but I think all the Sixes have been stripped of everything that made the character effective this season. She was all about the glamour of evil, the serpent of the old testament made flesh, a being beyond our morality, beyond our rules. Now, she’s just sort of there, ironically, her character development has stripped her of personality. But, back in the pre-Fall days, she’s a force to be reckoned with.
The episode’s greatest strength was the feeling of apocalypse hanging about. Things are drawing rapidly towards some kind of conclusion, and after an episode of buildup, I’m eager to see what happens when the Galactica finally gets to the colony and they confront Cavil. The promise of something involving a blackhole is particularly interesting.
But, there’s not that much to say specifically here, so let me discuss a few general points about the season before moving on. One thing that’s been bugging me is the absence of D’Anna and Leoben from the end of the series. Particularly with all this talk about Kara’s destiny, where is Leoben? He’d been a huge part of her arc since the beginning, why doesn’t she turn to him now? In theory, both D’Anna and Leoben should be hanging around with the other rebel cylons, what happened to them? I’m guessing it’s an actor availability issue, but it’s a pretty big plot hole.
The other general issue I’ve got with these recent episodes is the problems surrounding the revelation of the final five. I loved the episode where we found out who they were because it was just so out there. But, since then, the story developments haven’t made much sense. It turns out that the five aren’t really cylons, they’re pretty much regular people, who’ve been alive for a really long time, but the people they are now are constructed by Cavil, not who they really used to be. So, even though Ellen and Tigh have been together for 2,000 years, they haven’t been the people they are now for 2,000 years. Anders said that Tyrol and Tory used to be together, so why does the Tighs’ love last 2,000 years, while Tyrol and Tory don’t remember each other? If they wanted to go with the irresistibly drawn together thing, why not say Anders and Tory were together, explaining why they slept together when they first started hearing the music.
The problem with the final five revelation is that it’s the kind of thing that needs to be developed a lot more than it has been. We need more time with the characters to process what’s going on, and see how it affects their identity. Their entire personalities are Cavil’s constructions, shouldn’t that really mess with their sense of identity? I think it opens so many doors of implausibility and convolution that they’ve basically chosen to ignore the revelations, and that’s effectively ended any character development with the five. It’s a bit of X-Files syndrome, where a lack of advance planning backfires and results in a story that’s spending so much time explaining itself, there’s no time for emotion.
But, the core of the show is still strong, and I’m really excited for the finale. Hopefully they’ll give us one final classic episode.
Watching this episode, it really started to hit me that the show is ending. Like Babylon 5, I’m guessing the series will end with the destruction of its titular ship. If Hera’s play is to be believed, the ship will plunge into a basestar, and we may see some of our characters going down with the ship. But, that’s the future, and the three hour finale we’ve got waiting for us. This episode was largely about moving pieces into place, but did so in a mysterious and compelling manner, full of really great images and moments along the way.
The Boomer/Hera plot was my favorite part of the episode, starting with the surreal visions of Hera running through the opera house, and continuing during Hera’s jaunt through Boomer’s imaginary dream house. Hera clearly has some kind of great power, but she’s also still a kid. She imagines a cupcake in her hand, and probably imagines Boomer as her mother, Athena. Unlike Helo, she can tell the difference between the two.
When they finally get to Cavil, he’s housed in a prog rock album cover demonic fortress. That scene just brought me joy, seeing this massive space station, and Boomer’s small ship working its way through it. This show usually avoids those more fantastic flights of sci-fi, but I love that they made Cavil’s fortress so over the top. And, Cavil had a great subtle menace as he took Hera and promised to make her more playmates. Cavil most likely wouldn’t want to create more cylon/human hybrids. He’s seeking to eradicate the humanity from his makeup, so I’m not sure exactly what he needs Hera for. I suppose part of it is ensuring that the other cylons don’t find a way to reproduce.
Another moment that wowed me in this episode was Sam’s transformation into Galactica’s hybrid. First off, I loved the production design on the room he was in, the red code snaking its way up the walls, the interior of the Galactica becoming more and more cylon based. And, Sam waking up and speaking the hybrid code was such a perfect fusion of thematic, narrative and visual development. The Galactica is struggling to cling to its humanity even as it becomes more and more cylon based. Anders struggles with the same fate, as Kara says, the human life he has is fading away, replaced by something new and uncertain.
Kara herself continues down that path. She has died and returned from the dead. There’s not much conclusive from this episode, but I love the moment where she speaks to Baltar from the toilet, and her uncertain feelings at being held up as an angel for the fleet. If she can return from the dead, what does that mean for the fates of all these people who died aboard the ship? Did they simply not want to live enough.
It’s hard to make definitive conclusions from an episode like this. The function was to put all the pieces in place for the finale, and these are often problematic episodes. In Buffy, the third to last episode of the season was often underwhelming because it’s all about laying groundwork for the big finale. I think what made this episode work so well was the fact that the individual scenes were so well executed. Narrative purpose and payoff doesn’t matter so much when you get scenes as visceral as Adama spreading paint around and realizing that he has to abandon Galactica, or the Six being sucked out into space. As such, what lingers from this episode is not its contribution to the mythos, it’s the individual scenes.
I particularly loved Adama and Roslin sharing a joint and reminiscing about their time on New Caprica. With Adama fearing the destruction of Galactica, she tries to convince him that home isn’t a physical place, it’s a community of people, and though the fleet has survived because of Galactica for so long, humanity is now evolved enough to survive without it. The Galactica was a relic of the first war with the cylons, when things happened again as they did before, it served humanity again, but the time has come to abandon warships.
This entire ending is very Invisibles, with the hardliners on both sides being eradicated, leaving a new, more united populace in its wake. My issue with the handling of it is that we don’t get that much insight into the cylon side. The cylons make all these compromises, and seem to be totally benevolent in serving humanity, I want to see more of what’s going on within their group, particularly some more time with Leoben and D’Anna, who have been frustratingly absent. Is not Leoben just another manifestation of the absent father that Kara seeks? Surely he holds the final answers for her destiny.
I loved this episode, as the camera pulled back, I was wishing that the episode was going on. It’s reaching that point where I’m more aware of the series ending, where each moment with a character could be their last. It’s always tough to watch a story you’ve watched for years come to an end. Two weeks from tonight it will be over. I’ll talk more about the legacy of the show in those next two reviews, but I want to say that though this show has frequently frustrated me, it’s also produced some of the most profoundly beautiful and challenging cinema of the decade. This is a show that used visual storytelling in ways that virtually no other series in the history of the medium has, and for that alone, it deserves commendation. And, a great finale could make up for a lot of the rough patches along the way.
It’s impossible for me to offer anything close to an objective review of the Watchmen film. Watchmen the book was a massively important work for me, a work that cemented my interest in comics, and showed me how much they could do as a storytelling medium. Watchmen was the work that made me realize that there were things only comics could do, storytelling methods that drew neither from film or prose, but were unique the combination of words and pictures. So, to attempt to create a film from the most distinctly comic book of comic books is no easy task.
The film is neither colossal failure, nor smashing success. Tasked with condensing such vast source material into a film length running time, the movie loses a lot of the things that make the book so special. It’s not the narrative that makes Watchmen such a legendary work, it’s the way that it builds a world and plays in it for twelve issues. The much lauded opening sequence conveys all the narrative information we need to follow what’s going on, but it doesn’t give us the emotional connection that we get from Hollis’s first person narration in the “Under the Hood” excerpts.
I could go on along these lines for a while, but I want to address the issue of audience expectations in assessing the film. I don’t to be one of those fans who simply reviews the film in terms of its similarity to the book. If your only concern is narrative faithfulness, the movie’s a smashing success. It does a fine job of condensing the book into a film narrative, but I’d argue that’s not enough to make for a satisfying viewing experience. That said, it’s impossible for me to assess the film from anything resembling a new viewer’s perspective. I’ve read Watchmen many times, I know the book, and watching this film, I saw it more in similarities and differences to the source material than as a separate entity unto itself. The film’s consistent faithfulness makes it impossible to view in any other way, it changes some things, but adds very little to what’s already in the comics?
This film follows in the tradition of Sin City and 300, works that exist as little more than replications of the graphic novels they’re drawn from. They’re works that exist largely because the creators love the books, and want to expose them to a larger audience. That’s fine, I want more people to read Watchmen too, but I think those earlier films struggled to justify their existence as anything more than curiosities. Sin City was faithful to a fault, bringing nothing to the screen I hadn’t already experienced in the book. Watchmen feels that way to some extent, though I think it is a more satisfying viewing experience than 300.
I think there’s some things that did work well in the film. Doctor Manhattan was really well realized, he was totally believable as an alien, powerful being who’s more than human, but still rooted in a human reality. I never once felt that he strained credibility, and I particularly enjoyed the recounting of his origin as he stands on Mars. I also thought Rorschach was wonderfully realized. When I heard him speak in the trailer, I didn’t totally buy it, but seeing him in action, I totally believed in the character, and his personality shone through even though he wore a mask for nearly the entire film.
In terms of performance, I had serious issues with two characters, Veidt and Laurie. As Laurie, Malin Ackerman doesn’t bring the humanity that the character had in the book, largely because I didn’t buy her as someone with the weight of a troubled past as a hero. I always imagined her as someone who’s older, and more troubled. This Laurie felt like a rather generic love interest torn between our two male heroes. I do think that the moments with her and Dan in Dan’s basement worked really well and were pretty sweet. Those smaller, human moments are what make the book so special, and occasionally I’d see sparks of that humanity on screen. But, in general, her performance didn’t do much for me, which is a mix of performance, and of a lack of background for the character. She’s much less in her mother’s shadow, which means that both her and Sally’s character arcs are less compelling.
But, my biggest issue was with the dismal performance of Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt, whose sometimes British, sometimes Hans Gruber accent tips him off as the villain pretty early on. Judged solely from the film, he’s a boring character whose motivations don’t quite hang together. But, bringing the book into it, the film completely misses the charisma that Veidt had. In the interview backup segment in issue 11, Veidt is described as the man every woman wants, more than Jagger, more than JFK. And, his inherent likability and charisma is sharply contrasted by the scheme he’s developing. Here, Veidt is treated as such a heavy, dire character, you get no sense of surprise when he’s revealed as the villain, and little of the emotional pull of the book. There’s no joy in the character in the film, and without that joy, he simply becomes a villain in hero’s clothes. You have no sense that he really does care about humanity.
The ending is where the film really doesn’t work for me. I guess there’s not that much more background on Veidt’s plan in the book, but the groundwork is laid by the subplot about the missing artists, which gives the final revelation the feeling of a whole bunch of threads coming together. Here, it comes out of nowhere and doesn’t make that much sense. I see people say the “squid” ending is plausible, but I think it makes perfect sense, and the very alien weirdness of the squid is the whole point.
But, beyond plausibility, what makes the ending of the book work for me is the fact that we’ve seen this entire society built up over the course of the series. We’ve spent so much time with Bernard the news vendor, Bernard the kid who reads comics, Joey and Aline, Malcolm and Gloria, and the detectives that seeing them all destroyed for Veidt’s dream makes it a real moral conundrum. Intellectually, I can sympathize with Veidt’s point, but when Rorschach walks out in the snow at the end, promising never to compromise, I’m with him. Watching him getting torn apart is such a visceral, emotional moment in the comic, and in the film, it just dies there on the screen.
The absence of the peripheral supporting cast basically kills the emotional impact of the ending. My favorite moment in the whole book is those scenes at the end of issue 11, when everyone comes together to break up the fight between Joey and Aline. Even after being scarred by his time with Rorschach, Malcolm is still going to break up this fight. Watching everyone converge, it becomes clear how much we’ve gotten to know these people over the course of the book, and how heavy the weight of Veidt’s plan is. All their lives will be wiped out for Veidt’s utopia, is it worth it?
None of that is in the film. The moral conundrum is entirely intellectual. That’s a prime example of the film losing “inessential” background detail that removes the emotional impact of storylines. It’s possible to tell this story in 160 minutes, but it’s not possible to make us feel it.
My other major issue with the film was the fact that it’s so oppressively heavy. It never seems to stop raining in the world of the film, and the color palette was all greys and browns, nothing popping. It’s not an easy world to spend that much time in. The book was certainly heavy, but there were jokes and warmer moments as well. Most of those jokes have been excised. A lot of the jokes in the film were from the juxtapositions of images with different captions or narration. The biggest one is the Black Freighter story, but there’s also smaller stuff like juxtaposing Veidt’s charity performance with Dan’s failure to perform. I think Moore does get a bit too clever from time to time in the book, but I think for a book that’s so much about using that juxtaposition, the film missed a big opportunity by not attempting to do something similar.
In the case of the Black Freighter, it’s pointless to make it as a standalone story. The point of it isn’t to give us a nice pirate story, it’s to comment on Veidt’s plan, and criticize it. While that’s not apparent on the first read, it does subconsciously prepare us for the reveal at the end of the film, a preparation that’s not there in the film.
Other, more nitpicky issues include frustration at the fact that none of the characters can smoke. I think there’s a major free speech issue brewing with the ban on smoking in films. I understand the need to “protect the children,” but this is an R rated film, with myriad examples of bad behavior, surely Laurie could have a cigarette after beating up the gang with Dan? Taking the cigarette out of that scene kills the gag. Of course, that may be a calculated maneuver, since Synder chooses to not have Dan and Laurie in their costumes when they have sex on the Owl Ship. This takes away the subtextual tie between the costumes and Dan’s sex drive, and instead makes it seem like he just had to reassert his manhood as a hero to get his potency back. That whole scene was handled in a really weird way, with the use of “Hallelujah” on the soundtrack. It was so over the top, it bordered on comedy, and I’m not sure it was intentional.
Ultimately, I can’t view Watchmen as a movie. It’s a filmic replication of a comic that I love. It doesn’t bring much that isn’t already in the comic, and is by no means as deep or challenging a work as its source material. It exists primarily as a curiosity. I do think it’s well worth seeing simply for the experience of looking at one man’s interpretation of the comic, and the time passed quickly. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it’s essential in any way.
What will the film be to someone who hasn’t seen the comic? I’ve got no idea, Will it feel like a jumble of unrealized ideas that don’t quite hang together, or will it play better, a badass hardcore superhero story? I’m curious to see the public reaction once the film passes beyond the fan community. I have no objectivity on this film. I can appreciate what’s there, but the film exists in the shadow of book, and it cannot match its source material. And, I’d argue that it’s precisely its fidelity to its source material that holds it back. Would I have wanted a less faithful film? Probably not, but at the same time, that would have opened up the possibility of making something newer and more artistically vital. For now, this film has the surreal feel of people acting out a predestined script, struggling to find humanity in an elaborate recreation of something that was already done right and didn’t need to be done again.
The good news is each week of Dollhouse has gotten a little better, but none of the episodes have been total winners yet. As with much of the series, this episode has a lot of interesting ideas and thematic content, but the ideas just sort of sit there and don’t really integrate into the narrative in any way. The show has an intellectual interest, but most of the time it doesn’t have the emotional impact or Joss’s best work, or even his middling work.
The basic idea here is to juxtapose the gilded cage of pop star Rayna with Echo’s similar situation. Both have what some people would consider a utopian existence, free of worry and choice, with someone worrying about and caring for their every need. Normal people want to live that kind of life, but for the people living extraordinary lives, sometimes the thing they want most is normality. The confrontation between Rayna and “Jordan” in her dressing room hits the similarities home, perhaps a bit too hard on the nose.
The problem is what does this parallel really say? I suppose on one level it’s a way to explore the way that women are treated as commodities, defined by their relationships to others. That’s how Echo is used, an object to project fantasies on, and Rayna is the same thing. But, just saying that doesn’t make an interesting story, and it’s hard for the show to condemn that attitude when most of the female characters in the episode are shown in the minimal amount of clothes whenever possible.
I have no problem with that, these are good looking people, but I feel like the line between implicating the audience in the same attitude that the characters in the show have and just using sex to sell the show has been crossed. I think part of the problem is that we’re left with no place to view the show from. We’re made to look at Echo in various states of undress, and are still meant to condemn the fact that she’s being used by her handlers. It’s hard to have it both ways. I don’t think there’s anything inherently misogynist about showing women without many clothes. Look at a film like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which keeps its sexuality fun and empowered. But, here, there’s such a mess of viewpoints, it’s hard to know what to think, and my takeaway is simply that sex is being used to sell the show even as it’s being condemned from within the narrative. The show’s trying to have it both ways, and not quite pulling it off.
Anyway, I will say that at least this week’s mission made sense to use a doll on. I don’t understand why they led off with the hostage negotiator story, since these past couple of episodes have done a much better job of saying why someone would use a doll on a mission instead of a regular professional. I’m not saying this should have been episode one, but even more than last week, it pointed to a kind of viable type of future storyline, and was a bit more creative with the premise than we’d see previously.
I also really liked Echo’s interactions with Sierra. More than Dushku, she could easily swerve between personalities, selling us on the meek “number one fan,” then switching back to impersonal doll mode. That said, I’m not sure why she didn’t activate her backup personality when she got kidnapped, surely that would be the kind of emergency she’d have been programmed to get out of.
Also interesting was the revelation that the Russian guy is actually a doll, messing with Ballard, presumably on behalf of his Dollhouse superiors. This raises the interesting idea that the dolls could be used as the ultimate sleeper agents. Think of an Infernal Affairs type situation, where a doll is planted in a criminal organization and doesn’t even know they’re being used as a surveillance op for the police.
Back at the dollhouse, Boyd and Claire get a bit closer. I’ve got a bad feeling about Amy Acker’s future since I believe she’s been cast in a new pilot and is still credited as “guest starring” even though she seems to be a main character. But, for her time on the show, she’s a nice human presence in the dollhouse. Things aren’t totally working on that side of the storyline yet, but I want to see more, and at this point in the show, that’s what’s needed.
While I did enjoy the episode, I think the climax evidenced one of my major problems with the show, and that’s the fact that it feels a bit dated in its production value. I feel like I saw that same above the stage climax in a Buffy season one episode, and TV has come a long ways since then. In a world where you can have shows that are shot as well as The Sopranos, or produced on the scale of Rome, this competent, but unexceptional direction just doesn’t do it. Shooting a show as well as The Sopranos doesn’t require money, it requires great directors. Perhaps they have to shoot this show faster than The Sopranos worked, but still, the lack of production value and technical skill shows.
But, I’m still liking it. This was my favorite episode yet, and we’ll see where things go. Episode six is supposed to be the big “game changer,” so if they can stay this good until then, I’m excited to see how big the quality jump is.
My biggest problem with Battlestar throughout its run has always been its frustrating inconsistency. After an incredible premiere, they rambled through most of this chunk of episodes, before returning to greatness here with an episode that focused on a lot of neglected characters and had some really chill-inducing moments like only this show can do.
I really loved this hour, I think all the stories in it worked, and it built things up to a level of tension where I can really believe that we’re three episodes from the finale now. But, let me first address some of the issues I’ve had with the show since its return from hiatus. There’s been a major shift in purpose and focus since the show returned from the strike. I feel like the cylon/human alliance plot was set up nicely over the course of the first half of season four, but we sort of jumped forward to the point where it’s a foregone conclusion without really seeing the growing pains it would have. I suppose that’s what the whole putting goo on Galactica and munity subplots were supposed to do, but those all skirted around the issue, they didn’t deal with the alliance itself. Where’s D’Anna? Where’s Leoben? They’re the strongest cylon personalities, and I’d like to see how they’re dealing with all this.
I think the biggest issue is that Moore and co. realized that they had to wrap up all the storylines and actually pay off a lot of the mysteries. That led to the construction of the whole the final five were humans who became cylons who then could reproduce so they were indistinct from humans who then got into a war with cylons and traveled across the galaxy to make the skinjob cylons and then got trapped in the human world by Cavil story. It’s a really complex thing, and just explaining it took an entire episode. I loved that episode, but the show, don’t tell problem has been there going forward. All that information just closed off old storylines, it didn’t open up that many new possibilities, and to a large extent, it made the fleet we’ve been following for all these years just pawns in a parent/child conflict between Cavil and the Five. I suppose the point is to have the people of the fleet and the rebel cylons break the paradigm that’s doomed humanity for so many years, but it takes away some of their agency.
Here, the five talk about not wanting to be gods, but what it’s really done is remove character agency. All these people were placed into roles, and their motivations are determined by vague memories of the past. We don’t have a sense of them creating their own story, they’re just playing off of a script written long ago that they can’t quite make out. This has all happened before, this will all happen again was interesting when it was about Kara, because she always maintained agency, but feared getting caught up in trying to live out her destiny. At the end of The Invisibles, Jack says predestiny doesn’t matter, we’re here and we’re living out our lives in the moment. That’s what Kara was doing, with the five, it’s impossible to tell, and that makes them subject to writers’ whims rather than defining their own story.
But, they spent most of this episode sitting at a bar, so it wasn’t a huge problem. We thankfully got to spend some time with Sharon and Kara, two of my favorite characters who have been out of the spotlight for a while. Kara apparently hallucinates a ghost version of her father to talk to, and uses him to process her own issues about her parental abandonment. I like the way talking to the pianist is a way for her to try and understand her father’s point of view. He was committed to his art, and didn’t want to be held back by his wife. That sounds at least somewhat admirable, but how does it feel to Kara, who’s the one left behind. Is she less valuable than his art?
This storyline ties in nicely with the way we previously saw Kara abused by her mother. Her mother broke Kara’s fingers, a way of preventing her from following her father’s artistic path. That’s a well done retcon, enhancing what we saw before without contradicting any of it.
The question that arises now is whether Kara’s father is Daniel the missing cylon. That would knit a lot of things together, and would explain why her father knows the cylon song. That moment was absolutely brilliant, like only this show can do. Hearing the song gradually become the cylon revelation All Along the Watchtower piece, accompanied by that slow zoom on to Tigh and Kara getting lost in the music was perfect. It was something you can only do in cinema. A moment like that makes up for a lot of the troubled elements throughout the season. It’s also part of why the show is frustrating, they can be so good, why can’t they hit that level all the time?
Tyrol and Boomer had some great stuff too, but did raise some questions. The impression I got from season one was that Boomer honestly believed she was human, and was horrified to find out the truth. Even after they killed her, she teamed up with a Six in “Downloaded” to help the humans, so I’m not sure why she’s turned into a hardline Cavil person, who’s this ultimate femme fatale operative here, taking joy in messing with everyone in the fleet. Maybe I don’t remember something from the lengthy hiatus the show took, but the motivation doesn’t seem quite consistent.
But, I did enjoy pretty much everything she did, and if you accept the character development, her manipulation was great. You buy into her and the dream life she’s built for herself and Tyrol. I also loved the skeeviness of making sure to fuck Helo where Athena could see. That’s the kind of scene you can only do in sci-fi.
And, her escape from the Galactica with Hera kicked the story into high gear after it lagged for a bit. Halfway through this episode, I was thinking this did not at all feel like a show that was three episodes away from its finale. But, by the end, the pieces start to come together, even as the Galactica starts to fall apart. I’m guessing like Babylon 5, the titular space ship won’t be making it to the series finale. And, I’m also assuming we’ll be seeing the return of Cavil shortly.
The juxtaposition of Roslin’s collapse with Hera’s departure was evocative. We’ve already seen them tied together in the opera house vision, what will Hera’s departure mean for the future of the fleet? Can the Cylon/Human alliance continue without the embodiment of that alliance.
Ultimately, I’m less concerned with the narrative resolution than with getting more of the great character moments we got in this episode. I loved the Kara story, and I hope we get more moments of beauty like hearing her gradually build the song. If there is a final space battle, I hope it’s a trippy, evocative one. The show’s got itself back in a good place, I hope they bring it home strong.
