Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s graphic novel series Powers will be coming to FX, as announced at NYC Comic Con.
Being on cable will allow a bit more of the gritty noir-ish-ness that is part-and-parcel with the series. I hope this makes it to the screen in a form that does justice to the original series. The series is a fine choice for a TV adaptation, given that it comes from a genre mash that bridges media. (Supers are to Comics as Crime Procedurals are to TV)
I’ve been both ill and snowed-in this week. Therefore, I’ve seen a few movies of late. Here are some short thoughts.
Blue State ( 2007 ) Breckin Meyer is Bleeding Heart Liberal John, who promises on TV that he’ll move to Canada if Kerry loses the 2004 election. He is joined by Anna Paquin as the cute but guarded Chloe. John is more than a bit preachy, but luckily Meyer carries it off well — he’s annoying about his views, but in the disbelieving desperate way, that gets explained well throughout the film, and it captures the disbelief and despair of the time. Anna Paquin plays cute but world-weary rather than falling into a Garden State-esque Manic Pixie Dream Girl role which is so common for romantic comedies.
100 Girls ( 2000 ) — Tries to examine the conflicting cultural factors surrounding gender in a feminist age, dating, and love. College freshman Matthew (Jonathan Tucker) is trapped in a dark elevator of a girl’s dormitory and meets/sleeps with the ‘love of his life.’ In the morning, he is left with only a piece of her underwear. Matthew spends the year trying to re-connect with the girl, learning and discussing with the camera topics like feminism, masculinity, gender, dating and love. The discussions of gender and love make this more of a meta-romantic comedy, examining the process and the biases as the story plays out. The end product is laudable for its effort if not the execution.
Kung Fu Panda ( 2008 ) Jack Black is the voice of Po, a panda who has grown up on legends of kung fu, but is stuck working at the family soup restaurant. Meanwhile, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) eagerly awaits the appointing of the Dragon Warrior, a prophesied hero who will be entrusted with the ultimate kung fu secret. His students, the Furious Five (Tigress, Monkey, Viper, Mantis, Crane–the five animals of five animal kung-fu) vie for the honor and the burden of the role. When Po is revealed as the Dragon Warrior, Po learns the difficult truth of Kung Fu and the other martial artists re-think their preconceptions as Tai Lung (former disciple of Shifu) escapes his prison and returns for vengence and the Dragon Scroll. Kung Fu Panda is a rare film that succeeds as both an Anthropomorphic Animal Comedy and a Kung Fu Movie. Black is more lovable than annoying, and the moral lessons throughout are clear but not annoying. An unexpected gem of a film.
The Dark Knight ( 2008 ) Christopher Nolan’s vision of Batman returns as Batman (Christopher Bale) is trapped in an escalating conflict between the Joker (Heath Ledger) and White Knight District Attourney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckart)–who is dating Bruce’s former beau Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Dark and tense, emotional and psychological, Ledger and Nolan give us one of the all-time most compelling versions of The Joker. The Joker, Dent, and Batman pull and push one another, vying for the fate and soul of Gotham. One of the best films of the year, and one of the best if not the best superhero film of the decade.
Smart People ( 2008 ) Dennis Quaid is Professor Lawrence Wetherhold, curmudgeonly widower English professor at CMU. Ellen Page (of Juno fame) is his too-perfect teenage daughter Vanessa. Balancing out these two is Thomas Haden Church as Lawrence’s adopted brother Chuck. Chuck tries to lighten his family up, while Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former student of Wetherhold’s, tentatively makes advances. Lawrence and Janet stumble through the early stages of romance while Chuck’s efforts to get Vanessa to loosen up escalate beyond his intent. A contemplative study of people smart enough to be idiotic around other people and the more ‘normal’ people who love them.
Wristcutters: A Love Story ( 2006 ) Surprisingly uplifting for a story about the limbo-world where suicides go to live out some kind of purgatorial life. Patrick Fugit is Zia, who kills himself after being dumped by his beloved Desiree (Leslie Bibb). Zia is joined by his fellow suicide Eugene on a cross-country quest for Desiree, who Zia learns has ‘offed’ as well. They are joined by Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), who would be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl if the suicide-world weren’t one completely bereft of smiles. A stealth/slipstream speculative fiction story about depression, suicide, and finding hope in the depth of darkness.
Gray Matters ( 2006 ) A Coming-Out story wrapped in a Romantic Comedy. Sam and Gray Baldwin (Tom Cavanagh and Heather Graham) are a joined-at the hip duo, actually brother and sister. When they make efforts to find love and distinct lives, Sam meets Charlie and the two have a whirlwind romance that goes from meeting to betrothal in one date. Gray and Charlie get on swimmingly as well–too well in fact, as Gray realizes she’s fallen in love with Charlie as well. The Romantic Comedy between Sam and Charlie is really just the inciting incident for Gray’s own story of self-discovery, as she comes out to herself and then her family, learning to find the balance between maintaining her close relationship with her brother but also searching for love on her own. More than a little cheesy, and mostly un-nuanced in its depiction of lesbianism, but it is one of many small steps towards normalizing GLBTQ culture in the US — Gray’s homosexuality is never condemned, but accepted by her family, work, and therapist — the conflict for Gray is with her own doubt, and in the confusion and hurt feeling between her and her brother.
In the hopefully-not-too-distant future, I want to do a Ethnographic/Cultural Studies project on romantic comedies and how members of Gen X/Gen Y use/are effected by Romantic Comedies in how they approach/consider love, gender, and romance. This intention makes watching only-passable romantic comedies much easier/justifyable.
i09 linked to an essay by Science Fiction writer Alan DeNiro (who has an MFA in poetry), titled “Why I Write Science Fiction: An Apology.”
The essay itself is hosted at Bookspot Central.
Read both of those? Great. Here’s some analysis of the essay and the i09 commentary.
DeNiro’s MFA means that he has a serving of alphabet soup that serves as cultural capital in the ‘literary’ fiction world. But he’s also a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop (sister-workshop to the Clarion West Writers Workshop, of which I am a graduate), which grants him cultural capital in the speculative fiction world. DeNiro is a crossover writer, and by his own admission, writes in a mode that might be more accurately described as slipstream or interstitial. But he’s identifying as a science fiction writer, which means he’s on my radar.
Landscape as character — DeNiro talks about how in sf, landscape acts as a character unto itself. It does, sometimes literally as he says, but also figuratively. But setting/landscape is a character in any kind of fiction. Setting is, however, one of the major tools for commentary/speculation in fiction, often and sometimes expertly-used in science fiction/fantasy/horror/speculative fiction. The setting of Battlestar Galactica is clearly speculative, and much of the story’s drama comes out of the cultural, historical, and technological differences between that setting and our own world. But in another way, the stories of Battlestar are very familiar.
Literalization of the metaphor — The i09 article gives credit to DeNiro as follows:
[DeNiro] sets out a few building blocks of a new theory of appreciating science fiction. For example, he talks about the way in which science fiction turns the metaphorical into the real, and allows the author’s observations to become more vivid or heightened
The idea of SF as a literalization of the metaphor is not new to DeNiro. Samuel R. Delaney established years ago that SF allows for the literalization of the metaphorical, and thus, that critical tool is already established in the SF scholarship community. It is a valuable one, but not one new to DeNiro, though Delaney is already a member of the SF community embraced by the Academy.
DeNiro references Ursula LeGuin (another Literarily-accepted SF writer), who in an introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness said “I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing.” — SF does not need to predict the future when it can comment on the present. Not all SF is written to that intent, but the conventions and possibilities of the genre allow for writers to bring in any number of strange elements to contextualize a story, create a setting, and create a narrative environment that allows for a persuasive and entertaining commentary on the world we live in.
Suvin and Cognitive Estrangement
SF critic Darko Suvin spoke of science fiction as a genre of cognitive estrangement. The difference between our world and the world(s) of Battlestar would be part of the estrangement, but it is matched, tempered by the commonalities, identifiable by cognition.
This interplay between cognition and estrangement can be seen as a continuum, with Cognition/Similarity on one end and Estrangement/Difference on the other. A story could be plotted on this continuum, identifying the balance between elements/aspects of the setting/story that are similar to our own experience and those which produce estrangement as we reach across a cognitive gap to understand those differences.
Some SF shows are more familiar/close to our own setting, things like the comic DMZ, Y: The Last Man, or PD James’ Children of Men. Those kind of narratives make one extrapolation from our world and then examines the social/political/etc. results of a world with that change. The audience is only asked to swallow one new thing (or Novum), be it a new American civil war, the end of human fertility, or a virus that kills male mammals. The degree of estrangement is low, and readers can easily identify with the world (Much more Cognition than Estrangement)
On the other end are narratives where a great number of things are different, and readers cling to the elements that are the same as a way to understand that world. This would cover New Weird stories like China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, Jeff VenderMeer’s The City of Saints and Madmen, Post-Modern genre re-combinations like Astro City, etc. In these worlds, the reader is asked to believe a great many things to immerse themselves in the story, like a world with a handful of unknown non-human species, magical-technological transmogrification as a tool of punishment, dream-eating monsters, etc. (Much more Estrangement than Cognition) With High-Estrangement stories, the New Things (Nova) in the world create a mood and establish thematics, enter into a dialogue with established genre tropes, and more. High-Estrangement stories can provide a high barrier to entry for readers, often requiring a wide knowledge of genre tropes to fully understand what is going on in a story.
The genre label of science fiction or speculative fiction applies to stories from throughout this continuum. Stories with less Estrangement and more Cognition tend to be those more recognized by the Literary Establishment as Real Literature (Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union). This seems to be the kind of SF that DeNiro himself writes. DeNiro also acknowledges the fact that valorizing one sub-section of fiction over others is foolish, but for all that DeNiro admits having ‘gone genre’, he seems to be more in the slipstream/magic realism area.
More important to me is the fact that the title of the essay is still ‘An Apology,’ assuming that one must apologize for writing speculative fiction if one is to maintain Literary Cred. For all that SF has gained in recognition from the Academy, the acceptance seems to thus far extend mostly to the ‘more realistic’ High-Cognition, Low-Estrangement parts of SF.
I’m glad that writers are identifying the literary and ideological possibilities of SF, and pointing out that ‘realistic fiction’ is a oxymoron. Each genre of fiction has its own qualities, possibilities and limitations, just as do genres of music, graphic art, dance, and more. It is again telling though, that in this case DeNiro feels he must ‘apologise’ for it, though I agree with him in hoping that in a few decades or less, no one will have to apologise for choosing to write within any genre.
Procedural dramas are hot in TV, and have been for quite a while. They deliver on a number of levels which make them attractive to viewers and to networks.
They tend to be deeply episodic, making drop-in viewing much easier for a casual or sporadic viewer. This increases their appeal to networks, as it increases the saleability of a show in terms of syndication and makes it less likely that a shows’ ratings will continually decay as viewers who miss an episode or two give up due to falling behind on the story (as is prone to happen on deeply serial, high-mythology shows like LOST, Battlestar Galactica, etc.
Procedurals also allow for characters to display a high level of mastery, such as Dr. House’s Holmes-like diagnostic prowess, or Monk’s OCD-derived attention to detail. There’s a satisfaction in narratives where a mystery (especially a violent or threatening one) is solved. It’s a reassurance that the people in these jobs, (doctors, lawyers, detectives, police, etc.) are competent in their jobs and that we can continue to trust them to protect and serve us.
Since the procedural is a popular and successful mode for television (as well as film and fiction), the ever-increasing number of procedurals produces a problem:
There’s only so many ways to investigate a crime within the normal bounds of the law in the USA. The CSI-style formula has propagated, and in recent years, we’ve seen a proliferation of Specilist procedurals.
Procedurals built around Specialists allow their shows to take a different approach to the procedural formula. House achieved this by being a medical procedural drama, where the criminals/culprits are diseases/injuries, and thus, the detectives are diagnosticians. Shows like The Mentalist, Fringe, Life, Lie to Me, Bones, Castle, and more each take a slightly different angle on criminal investigation, positioning one or more characters with specialist knowledge or methodology to keep the procedural formula fresh.
The Mentalist and Psych take a dramatic and comedic (respectively) approach by re-positioning a psychic as the specialist, relying on their advanced ability to read people and make intuitive leaps based on their training as ‘psychics’ (as neither characters are portrayed as possessing ‘real’ psychic powers). In Fringe, Walter Bishop’s Fringe science credentials allow him to solve mysterious deaths and circumstances propagated by ‘The Pattern’, a worldwide group of Fringe (aka Mad) Scientists. Bones features a forensic anthropologist who consults with federal agencies. Life‘s Charlie Crews is a police detective, but his stumbling efforts towards Zen Buddhism set him apart from a ‘standard’ TV detective. Lie to Me‘s specialist is an expert in the science/sociology/psychology of lying, allowing him to glean more information from suspects/informants than a standard detective. The upcoming show Castle features a mystery writer consulting and then accompanying a detective, using his experience writing mysteries to help solve them.
Of the recent specialist procedurals, a great many of them feature a male specialist and a female handler (Castle, Lie to Me, Life, Fringe, The Mentalist, etc.) This allows the shows to dodge the traditionally-expected arrangement of positioning a strong male character to ‘protect’ a female specialist (though shows like Bones keep to this model). Fringe‘s Olivia Dunham, Life‘s Dani Reese, The Mentalist‘s Teresa Lisbon, Castle‘s Stana Katic all serve one or both of two functions:
1) Protect the specialist (who is not necessarily trained to handle himself in-field). Some specialists are also-field trained, but even they require additional protection as a result of the times when their ‘weird-ness’ gets them into more trouble.
2) Provide a grounding/contextualizing force to the ‘weird’ specialist. The specialist-characters in these procedurals are often portrayed as being un-grounded or disassociated from the normal social world as a result of their special perspective on the world. Each show goes about this in a different way, and it’s not a universal. I’m merely drawing attention to a trend which has been identified in contemporary shows.
This Specialist–Handler arrangement provides a solid dramatic base for the shows, going back to shows like the X-Files (Mulder and Scully were both specialists in different areas, but Scully tended to play the ‘handler’ role more when Mulder went off on his conspiracy-chasing) and beyond. The Handler character acts as a straight-man (or straight-woman in many cases) to the Specialist’s antics, acting as the audience’s stand-in, requiring an explanation or interpretation of the specialist’s arcane knowledge. Dr. Cuddy is Dr. House’s handler, but so are the other fellows on his team.
Production companies will continue to use the specialist model to attempt to find space for their shows in an already-crowded procedural market. Television viewers have seen decades worth of standard police procedurals, and this escalation into increasingly oddball specialists is an attempt to keep the lucrative procedural sub-genre fresh for viewers. In the meantime, we as viewers have a wide variety of flavors of procedural to choose from to get our satisfaction in knowing that at the end of the hour, the criminal will be known even if they aren’t caught, and moreso than justice, mastery of knowledge will be achieved, allowing the specialist to sleep content in their ability and for us to retain our confidence in those specialists and the System which protects us.
At least, that seems to be the idea.
Battlestar is back, and the WTF? factor is high. Here’s my breakdown of the episode, Spoilers Galore.
Big things:
Analysis:
1. This fits in with the fact that the Raptor that Starbuck arrived with after her dissapearance was fresh-off-the-line clean. This leads us to believe that Starbuck is a Cylon, or that she was somehow cloned by the Cylons, based off of the tissue samples they could have taken during the time she was held at the farm during “The Farm.” This is of course all interpolation. Leoban is shocked by the revelation, as it disproves/disagrees with his visions. His religious certainty is shaken, and the connection between him and Starbuck is now in question again.
2. From Tyroll walking the marketplace to Anders remembering playing “All Along the Watchtower,” this fits in line with my reading that that the humans of Earth are descended from the intermarriage of Cylons and humans who settle on Kobol and then leave for the thirteen colonies, as a part of the cycle (hence “all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again”) — This would allow for our civilization as is now to be a part of this cycle, between when the 13th tribe reaches Earth and when nuclear war destroys civilization on the planet.
The Final Five would then be the people who remember their previous incarnations elsewhen in the cycle, who are ‘Cylons’ in that they are the descendents of the re-connected species.
3. Dee’s suicide is used as the personalization of the collective despair expressed by the fleet after being let down by Earth. The people had held up hope for years and years, thinking ‘if we make it to Earth, it will all be ok.’ — and now that Earth has been removed as the great hope, people’s defenses are down and they’re crashing. Everyone of the survivors have PTSD, first from the destruction of the colonies, likely again from the events on New Caprica, and many things in between and after.
Dee had already lost her connection to Lee, before that she lost Billy, on top of the destruction of the colonies. She showed signs of breaking down throughout the episode, from the return trip from Earth to speaking to Hera to the musing about the picture from when she was five. And then, after one more happy moment with Lee, she takes her own life. This is the personalized version of the despair rampant throughout the fleet that we can see on Galactica with people breaking down in the hallways and from the graffiti.
4. Ellen was originally suspected as being a Cylon because of her mysterious appearance in the fleet, then discounted because she was too human-ly screwed up. And by the time she let Saul kill her as they departerd New Caprica, she had achieved a measure of redeption. And now by revealing her as the fifth Cylon (confirmed in the ‘next episode’ preview), they open up the question of another instance of her being alive or able to be activated. It also makes for more of a reason to stay on Earth for archaeological excavation to uncover more information and/or unlock more memories of the Four that remain.
5. This supports my ideas from 2, positing that once humans and Cylons intermingle, they will just distinct enough from humans now so as to register as ‘Cylon’ (ie. ‘Other’) — But I imagine that Hera and Nicholas, our two known human-Cylon crossbreeds would register as ‘Cylon’ under the same analyses.
Next episode — Vice President Zarek makes another power play, looking to divide the fleet. Meanwhile, people try to figure out what the hell to do now that Earth is no longer the safe End Point. Cavill’s fleet is still out there, meaning that there will be more chances for explosions and dogfights and such.
Here are three speculative and/or genre-inclined shows coming up soon in TV-land. Dollhouse, Castle, and Kings.
Dollhouse
Joss Whedon’s anticipated new tv drama, starring Eliza “Faith” Dushku as Echo, one of a number of ‘Dolls’ — people who have had their memories wiped, live in an idyllic but infantile ‘Dollhouse’ facility, and who, when they become ‘Active,’ are implanted with memories and skills to serve as whatever the Dollhouse’s clients want them to be. This will allow Whedon and the show to explore Dushku’s range as a leading lady, explore the theme of memory vs. spirit/soul, exploitation, human experimentation/human trafficing, etc. The show also stars Tamoh “Helo” Penikett as James Ballard, the FBI agent who investigates the urban legend of the Dollhouse. Dollhouse has been troubled by production delays, disagreements about creative direction, and other issues, but it is on track for at least a nine-episode initial order.
Dollhouse premiers February 13th on Fox.
Castle
Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion, of Firefly and Dr. Horrible fame) is a famous best-selling mystery novelist who is tapped by the NYPD as a consultant when a copycat killer starts committing murders in the same manner as Castle’s books. This creates what seems to be a very promising meta-genre component for the series, since we’ll have Castle interpreting everything through the filter of a crime/mystery writer, and provides a variation on the ‘expert consultant protected by bad-ass detective/agent’ dynamic of shows like Fringe, The Mentalist, Numb3rs, Bones, etc.
Stana Katic (Heroes, 24, Quantum of Solace) plays Castle’s detective handler/inspiration for the protagonist for a new series of books. The show is likely to make good use of Fillion’s range, injecting comedy (From the video preview — “Did you see that? That was so cool!”) and romance (Castle asking the detective out, and her brushing him off while acknowledging the chemistry) into what seems to default to a prime-time hour-long crime procedural drama.
Castlepremiers March 9th on ABC.
Kings
An alternate-present America re-telling of the story of King David, Kings gives us David Shepherd (Christopher Egan) rescuing the son of King Silas (Ian McShane), ruler of Shiloh, a city in the Kingdom of Gilboa, David is welcomed into the court and turned into a hero of the people, wrapped up in politics and power. NBC’s promotion has highlighted the alternate-history aspects of the world, focusing on the monarchic nature of the Kingdom of Gilboa (Shiloh, the center of the story, appears similar/evocative of a New York City or the like).
This show appears to be high-production value, since there will not have to be much in the way of SF special effects, focusing on costuming, graphic and set design to highlight the subtle but fundamental differences between our world and that of Kings. The story of King David should provide enough material for several seasons, depending on how close of a re-telling is planned and how quickly the story is to unfold. Early responses to the pilot script paint it as “bold, bizzare, fun”.
Kings premiers March 19th on NBC.
Having recently watched the Doctor Who episode called “Blink,” its tight writing and 4-dimensional chess made me think of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and narratives of time-travel where 4-th-dimensional warfare/thinking is integral to the plot. This advanced use of time-travel allows creators to move past the excitement of possibilities like Bruce Campbell vs. The Army of Darkness and craft narratives that push the dramatic potential of time-travel to its extremes.
Spoilers follow for Doctor Who 3×11 “Blink” and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
“Blink”
In the Hugo-award winning Doctor Who episode “Blink,” The Doctor and Martha are stranded in 1969 after investigating a house connected to a number of dissapearances. The episode’s protagonist is not The Doctor or his companion Martha, but a woman by the name of Sally Sparrow. Sally pieces together clues left under wallpaper, letters delivered by hand, messages given in person, and DVD easter eggs to solve the mystery and rescue The Doctor and Martha from being stranded in time. The Doctor speaks to Sally through DVD extras thanks to a transcript of their conversation made by Sally’s roommate’s brother, who was there as the conversation happened, which then allowed a transcript to exist to be given to the Doctor to refer to when (later for him, earlier for Sally), he would have to record the DVD easter eggs.
This non-linear strategizing/correspondence allows for the Doctor’s presence to be felt throughout the episode, but all interpreted and acted upon by another character. Sally must piece together the puzzle pieces left by her time-displaced roommate, a handsome police detective catapaulted back in time to 1969 (to meet up with the Doctor and Martha), and to engage in a two-way discussion with the seemingly-one-sided ramblings of the Doctor on the DVDs. The Doctor and Sally collaborate across time to solve the case of the Weeping Angels, with critical information held by specific individuals allowing the whole picture to be assembled.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Terminator uses 4th-dimensional thinking, but on a larger scale. John Connor of the future, the Connors of the ‘present’ timeline, Skynet of the future, Terminators in the ‘present’, and other independent agents are all fighting a war across time over the fate of the future, the inevitability or prevention of Judgement Day, when a singularity-derived Machine uprising destroys human civilization.
The show’s opening gambits of 4-dimensional chess are Future John sending “Cameron” back in time to be his protector/aide-de-camp, and the attacks of the Terminator known as “Cromartie”
Cameron and the Connors go to a bank and use a time machine built in the past to allow the group to escape Cromartie as well as possibly delay/prevent Sarah’s death by cancer.
During the series, further characters return from a divergent future time-line where the Future John Connor is increasingly reliant on reprogrammed Terminators, which is easily read as being a result of his reliance on and attachment to Cameron in the series. Jesse brings Riley back from that future to use Riley to drive a wedge between John and Cameron (which Jesse presumably thinks will lead to a better version of Post-Judgement day, where John’s use of reprogrammed terminators is not a liability).
4-dimensional chess runs throughout the show, and even in one-off episodes such as “Self Made Man,” where Cameron discovers the history of a Terminator who was sent too far back in time, accidentally disrupts the timeline in a way that would cause its mission to fail, then proceeds to change the timeline in order to ensure that the timeline shifts back in a way so that it can complete its mission.
Characters such as Catherine Weaver are unknown quantities in the 4-dimensional war, as she acts with an agenda, but has not clearly been revealed as being on either the Connor’s or Skynet’s side.
Concluding Thoughts
Stories that play with time-travel as not just a plot device, but use the non-linearity of time as a multi-use narrative tool gain the advantage of being able to layer decisions, put together characters who know one another but from different timelines or parts of their individual time-lives which would normally be impossible (Sally meeting Billy the detective on his deathbed as an elderly man, having just earlier that day met him for the first time as a young detective). These tools allow for writers and creators to utilize the nostalgic mode of storytelling in compelling ways, and to provoke thought about choices, causality, opportunities past and those that yet remain.
I have a review of the first season of the TV show The Middleman up at the Internet Review of Science Fiction.
Permanent link — http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10495
After another long hiatus, Battlestar Galactica will be returning to TV for its last half-season on January 16th. 10 episodes (of varying length) remain, as well as a TV-movie called The Plan, which is set immediately following the Cylon attacks on the 12 colonies.
In this remaining narrative space, there are a lot of loose ends to tie up. The first section of Season 4 had already adopted an elegiac tone, trying together threads, ‘resolving’ character arcs (of course, resolution in Battlestar often comes at the end of a barrel or at the opening of a airlock).
We’ve still got one last Cylon to reveal, a Cylon civil war to finish up, and in my viewing, the most important task is to create an ending which will cause the series to resonate with one of its catch-phrases — All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. The show’s coda needs to suggest a teleology that will either lead to a re-playing of its story, or prove itself as the repetition that breaks the cycle.
Just as at the end of Season Three we got to see Earth, at the end of Season 4.0 we got to see the home of the 13th tribe from the ground level, ruins and all. The Season 4.0 finale seems to make the Flying Motorcycle ending less likely, but we shall see. The truce between Humans and Cylons is an uneasy one, and I’m sure things will get much worse before they get better, if they do. I’d feel cheated if the show didn’t end with some kind of equilibrium for the humans, whose entire arc has been about finding Earth and completing their Exodus. New Caprica was an interruption,
The progress of Ron Moore’s prequel project Caprica means that the Battlestarverse may continue on past the series proper, but I’ll be much happier with the series if it has its own proper ending.
I feel comfortable in calling Battlestar Galactica the iconic Bush Era Science Fiction series (at least, of those produced during his presidency). It’s fitting that Battlestar will be ending before we get too far into Obama’s tenure as president, as the show is very distinctly a response to the 9/11 political landscape and the Bush administration. Obama will still of course be dealing with a post-9/11 world, but it makes me wonder what the great Science Fiction epic of his presidency will be.
On February 13th, we will be introduced to Joss Whedon’s newest television series, Dollhouse.
I’ll be watching it, for my own interest as a general fan of his work, but also to discover if Whedon is able to get out of his rut. I’ve been a fan since the first season of Buffy, continued on with Angel, and am one of approximately 37 members of the Original Flock (also known as people who watched Firefly on FOX during its original run). The Church of Firefly now sports many thousand devotees, whose rankings might as well be determined by the number of DVD-loaning-genertions one is removed from the original TV run). I’m a Whedon fan through-and-through. But it is a natural part of subcultural fandom to critique that which we love. One could say that Indie Rock fan culture is entirely composed of such critique (or that might just be my intense reading of Questionable Content speaking).
In addition to developing a reputation as one of the poets laurate for Geek Culture, Joss Whedon, writer of witty banter, producer of an ongoing line of bad-ass skinny super-powered adolescents/young adults, has become painfully predictable in his approach to romantic relationships.
Whedon’s ouvre spans over a dozen seasons of television, dozens of issues of comics, several films, and a troublesome through-line.
In Joss Whedon’s universe, happiness in romantic relationships is inevitably followed by catastrophic death/dismemberment/disaster.
Let’s do a quick roll-call of Whedon’s Greatest Relationship Hits — I won’t be pulling any spoiler punches here, so stand ready:
Buffy/Angel — Fated Doomed Lovers. A Slayer and a Vampire, it really is poetic. And ended the first time with Buffy stabbing Angel through the heart and shoving him into a hell dimension just as his soul was restored to him. Ended the second time when Angel moped off to LA to get his own show. Failed to start again when Buffy fell in love with Spike.
Xander/Anya — A strange-but-stable relationship ended by cold feet and then kept from re-uniting by a random death in the Buffy finale because, from a dramatic standpoint, a heroic finale isn’t powerful enough unless someone dies.
Zoe/Wash — Happily married, not without their issues, but those issues proved that you can portray a happy long-term relationship realistically and still have it be interesting. Or it did, until Wash took a Reaver-spear through the middle after having his Big Damn Hero moment.
Colossus/Shadowcat — Pete comes back from the dead and Kitty comes back from being a bartender so they can have a joyous reunion, only so that Kitty can be killed off in the Only-Uncle-Ben-Stays-Dead Marvel universe.
Cordy/Angel — Cordelia Chase, who wins the award for Buffyverse character who has the greatest amount of actual character development (barely beating out Wesley), finally achieves something resembling a happy relationship with Angel before being possessed, killed, returned, then ascending, only to return to bid farewell to Angel.
Fred/Wesley — The sexy and badass nerds of Angel finally get together, only to have Fred hollowed out by a Hell Goddess and used as a vessel. Strangely, the romance continues with Illyria messing with Wesley’s head in ways that alternate between poignant and sadistic.
Dr. Horrible/Penny — Not that it was hard to see this one coming, given the whole Supervillain thing, but Penny’s death serves as a almost self-referential response to criticism of Whedon’s tendencies.
Most if not all of these dramatic twists make sense within the context of their narratives. What is troubling is not that any one of those romances ended in PAINDEATHDRAMA! instead of Happily Ever After, but that Whedon’s ouvre seems to intimate that PAINDEATHDRAMA is the inevitable fate of any and all romances.
Certainly, we have a proponderance of narratives that pat us on the head and say ‘Everything will be alright, you’ll meet the right person and it will be beautiful!’, but appreciating and recommending Whedon’s work is harder to do when you take his Love Interest in Refrigerators approach to writing romance. In discussions of his own work, Whedon is fairly clear that he prefers to show the nuance and darkness in the world, wrapping darkness in a comfy hoodie of whimsy and witty one-liners, but it’s making him into a three-trick pony — and one of those tricks involves the rider getting thrown and stomped to death.
The result of this prediliction is that any savvy viewer/reader would have to approach all of his stories knowing “No matter how much I want these people to get together, if they do, it will probably in one of them getting killed/possessed/turned evil/mauled” — which induces a level of self-aware viewing that can work at counter-purposes with immersing yourself in a show and enjoying it on its own terms.
It’s gotten to the point where the ending of any given romance in a Whedon property seems to have become predictable, which is not something that an artist devoted to developing their art wants to be. Ask M. Night Shyamalan, who has watched his star fade as he delivers “twist” endings one after another.
So I’ll be watching Dollhouse, but I might as well put my money on Dushku and Penikett’s character’s getting together and then something horrible coming along like clockwork to end the relationship and/or Penikett’s character’s life. And any relationships between secondary characters are not only just as likely to end in PAIN, but they’re also fairly likely to end in character death.
I’d love for Whedon to prove me wrong. I’d enjoy his work even more, then, which is saying a lot, because he speaks loud-and-clear to my aesthetic.