Redford headcanon

I have a headcanon that Robert Redford’s characters from Three Days of the Condor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Spy Game are all the same guy — and also appears in Sneakers, if you understand that he is played not by Redford in that film but by Sidney Poitier.

In the early 1970s, Joe Turner was a nerd working in a minor CIA analysts’ office sifting through seemingly-innocuous publications and writing reports on his findings.

Turner before the Condor Incident

In Three Days of the Condor we see how higher-ups assassinated the analysts in Turner’s office for stumbling across evidence of an illegal operation. Turner narrowly escaped through a combination of luck and wit, and responded by leaking documentation to the New York Times. This helped spark the Rockefeller Commission On CIA Activities Withing The US, which subpoena’d Turner to testify in a closed-door session. That got him tapped to work on reforms at the Agency, where he took on the new name “Nathan Muir” to avoid reprisals from dirty agents.

Because Turner was smart, diligent, and had a surprising knack for fieldwork by the early 1980s “Muir” had secured a place as a mid-level CIA insider with a mix of friends and enemies. Among those friends: then-young Army Sargeant Nick Fury, who would join the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division at Turner’s encouragement.

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Fury in 1995

During the Reagan era Turner saw enough dirty business and geopolitical chaos to become bitterly disillusioned. The Hydra network paperclipped into the CIA turned him, and he became an effective Hydra recruiter, bringing in S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Sitwell, Rumlow, and countless others.

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Sitwell circa 2015, by then a highly-placed Hydra mole

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hydra wanted to re-deploy him. Spy Game depicts Turner making his exit from the CIA pay off by leveraging it to secure the loyalty of rogue agent Tom Bishop as yet another Hydra recruit.

Turner as “Muir” serving as Tom Bishop’s handler in the early 1980s

Turner then slipped into the increasingly-important hacker underground under the name “Donald Crease”, joining Martin Brice’s tiger team security crew, coyly refusing to tell them why he left the CIA.

(Note again that in Sneakers Redford plays not Turner as he does in other films but rather Turner’s asset Brice-aka-Bishop. In this one film, Turner is portrayed by Sydney Poitier. No doubt the studio made this confusing swap to blunt Brice’s ’60s & ’70s radicalism by eliding his involvement with Black nationalists. It is no coïncidence that Fury & Brice are both brilliant Black men Turner manipulated as assets; Hydra’s history of recruiting racist bigots long predates Turner.)

Turner saw most of Brice’s crew as useful idiots. No doubt his choice to use Tom Bishop’s name when creating Brice’s latest cover identity was a private joke. He did eventually recruit the amoral Carl Arbogast into Hydra.
Turner as “Crease” (left) noting Arbogast’s potential, circa 1995

When Brice’s crew stumbled across Dr. Gunter Janek’s SETAC ASTRONOMY decryption chip known as the “Box”, he coördinated with top-ranking Hydra military intelligence mole James Greer. Posing as “Bernard Abbott”, Greer engaged in a pantomime in front of a team of SpecOps soldiers suggesting that Brice tricked him out of the Box. This persuaded the US government to abandon the Box as lost, so that Turner could steal it and deliver it into Hydra’s hands.

Hydra mole Greer during the Red October Incident in 1984, pictured together with Jack Ryan (left)

This blew Turner’s relationships in the hacker underground, but he no longer needed them. The SETAC ASTRONOMY tech meant Hydra no longer needed as much hacker support because they could incorporate its decryption tech into Arnim Zola’s elaborate computer system.

A Zola System site found by Steve Rodgers & Natasha Romanov in 2014

Hydra directed Turner to build a power base to help accelerate Hydra control of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Fury, still unaware of Hydra, set up yet another new identity for his old friend, fabricating war stories about working with “Alexander Pierce” at the “State Department” in the classic intelligence operative’s cover.

“Pierce” landed a position at the World Security Council. Exercising Hydra’s resources and his personal networks at CIA, S.H.I.E.L.D., and elsewhere, Turner manufactured incidents which burnished both his own reputation and Fury’s. Turner came close to winning a Nobel Peace Prize as “Pierce”, which got him elevated to Secretary of the WSC in the early 2000s. He returned the favor to his asset Nick Fury by appointing him as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D..

Turner as “Pierce” in 2014, meeting Steve “Captain America” Rogers

In command of the WSC, Turner spent a decade supporting Hydra’s orchestration of escalating geopolitical chaos. Turner recruited the resulting fears to set up Project Insight, Hydra’s plan to use intel gathered using the Box technology to target potential dissidents for mass assassination by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s network of helicarriers. This plan for global domination was just baredly averted by the intervention of Steve “Captain America” Rodgers mere hours before it was enacted.

Again, this all starts with CIA Deputy Director of Operations for the Middle East Leonard Atwood killing off low-ranking analysts in an attempt to avoid embarrassment over an illegal operation. It took nothing less than a team of superheroes lead by Captain America to finally stop one angry nerd.

The moral of this story? Fear blowback from burning your nerds.

Andor

Andor : Star Wars
   ::
The Wire : cop shows
   ::
Deadwood : Westerns

It uses Star Wars as a setting to talk seriously about how authoritarian governments actually work, and how to actually fight them, without getting hung up on any historical or contextual specifics. And like those other series, it as well-crafted and entertaining as it is serious. And of course now timely.

Nemik’s Manifesto

Of course it’s my favorite thing. I am very fond of this little adaptation with some very graceful allusions to Star Wars at large.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And …

Remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

A wise internet acquaintance says of it [spoilers]:

I’m sort of a cruel cynic because while that monologue is genuinely stirring, I can’t help but remember the incredibly cynical beat where the idealistic little “read theory!” guy writing his manifesto is literally crushed to death by money (the real power of a rebellion) after achieving very little. Like yes, the monologue is great, but Andor is also cold enough to recognize that what sparks the rebellion after decades of Imperial oppression, is a theft of cold hard cash deliberately conducted to provoke reprisal, not just stirring words alone.

Despite being someone sentimental about the stirring words, I agree. It’s part of what I love about Nemik’s story and Andor more broadly. The series insists that revolution against authoritarianism is no one thing. It warns of the danger of resting the movement on any one thing. Some moves just won’t pay off.

I assume that Star Wars lore will eventually succumb to making Nemik’s Manifesto the rallying cry of the Rebellion. But at least as of today, while we just have Season One, Andor is wise enough to hint that Cassian Andor — Nemik’s “ideal reader” — is the only person who read it and no, the Manifesto didn’t radicalize Cassian Andor.

At first.

By itself.

But even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

A hero

Rescuing a thread from the Bad Place which explains why I caught feelings from a glimpse of a tiny little street sign in the background at the 15-second mark in the first proper trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I will never, ever locate and re-read Marvel Two-In-One Annual ^#7 because I want my memory of it from when I was twelve to remain pristine, because when I think of a hero, I think of that comic and the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing.

In the comic, this big blue zillion-year-old alien guy The Champion comes to Earth. He loves to box and travels the Cosmos challenging people to boxing matches. So when he arrives at Earth, of course he teleports a bunch of Marvel superheroes to his boxing gym.

The heroes are like, dude, we are not getting into the ring with you for your entertainment. The Champion is like, I am not asking, I am telling. Defeat me in a boxing match or my spaceship will blow up the Earth. So it’s superheroes vs. The Champion for all the marbles.

Cut to a huge stadium. The boxing match will be simulcast on all the TV channels.

One by one, The Champion squares off against various brawny superheroes. They get quickly dispatched or disqualified. The Hulk cannot keep his composure and obey Queensbury rules. Thor refuses to put down Mjolnir. Wonder Man probably just got KO’d with one punch because he’s such a doof. I do not recall all of the details.

The important thing is that the last hero left is The Thing.

The Champion soliloquizes: Woe is me, I have traveled from one end of the Universe to the other seeking a worthy challenge, but I am just too good at boxing.

The Thing asks do ya plan to win the fight by boring me to death?

Fans of The Thing know what time it is. But alas, it is immediately apparent that it is not The Champion who will get clobbered. The Thing is outmatched!

Ding. The first round ends and The Thing staggers back to his corner. The Champion soliloquizes some more about how sad he is that his might is peerless. The Thing tells the Champion I’m just gettin’ warmed up.

Ding. Round two. The Thing keeps taking a pounding. The Champion brags that the fight is a foregone conclusion. The Thing says my Aunt Petunia throws a better punch than you.

Ding. The round ends. The Thing is bleeding. The Thing. Bleeding. Twelve-year-old Me was very not okay with this. I had seen him take hits from wrecking balls, kaiju, howitzers, lasers, and what have you … and just dust himself off. This is scary.

As The Thing catches his breath in the corner, the Fantastic Four are there. Reed is like, don’t do this to yourself, Ben. The Thing is all, sorry Egghead but ya know I am just too dumb ta know how ta quit.

Ding. Round three. The Champion continues to mock The Thing while beating the tar out of him. He moans once again I have been denied the glory of a real fight. The Thing tells him I’m from Yancy Street so I know more about a real fight than you ever will.

The Champion lands a punch on The Thing which lays him out on the canvas. People in the stadium and around the world gasp. The ref starts counting.

Just as the count is about to run out, The Thing stands back up and puts up his fists, of course. But he looks bad.

The Champion mocks him some more. Why get up? You are bleeding and your ribs are broken and you can barely stand, Loser. I’m not even winded. It’s over.

The Thing says: The deal here is that when the fight ends the world ends, right?

The Champion says: Yeah, that’s the forfeit since you are such a loser.

The Thing says: Then I’m gonna keep gettin’ up, no matter how many times ya knock me down.

Ding. The fight is back on. But the Champion lowers his fists.

The Thing is all are we gonna fight or what?

The Champion tells him: No. The fight is over. Sure, I could knock you out, eventually. But you will not be defeated, will you? Not really. Not ever. I travelled billions of light-years seeking a worthy opponent and never even knew what one was.

Superheroes are silly. That story is silly. And of course that story is in no way original. It’s older than the written word. But I first got it in the form of The Thing.

I got teary retelling it.

So it was good seeing a little sign announcing “Yancy St”. I know a hero from that neighborhood.

Chidi

Over on Bluesky, my internet friendquaintance Dr. Damien P. Williams snarked a reference to the TV series The Good Place:

Current position on the Chidi Anagonye Anxiety Brain Scale:

“The Sound that a Fork Makes in the Garbage Disposal”

It inspired me to make a silly meme image:

I am proud of my little creation. Assembling it and seeing the two ends of the scale gave me an unnervingly useful realization.

If you don’t know the show, it is one of the best TV series ever made.

An invitation to Buffy

It is hard for me to speak to what it may be like to come to Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the first time now. Both its themes and its craft were breakthroughs in its time, but may seem less inspired now that so many later works have learned from it. I recommend it anyway.

Thematically, Buffy successfully realizes immense ambitions: a meditation on adolescence and feminist understandings of culture, intentionally crafted to create a cultural phenomenon among teenagers. The feminism is awkward in places — it was addressing a different moment, could not learn from its own flaws and failings, and has some conceptual problems — but is legit. Even at its weakest, it is pretty darned good, and at its best it can be breathtaking.

The craft has several strengths, many of which were breakthroughs at the time which may be hard to see given so many later works which learned from its moves. It very directly draws from a broad range of genre sources — mostly horror and fantasy — to explore allegorical questions. To make that work without feeling forced, it artfully mixes tones of humor, horror, action, drama, and melodrama. And it was the first series on broadcast television to exercise the format to at once tell self-contained episodic stories and use the big canvas of the season arc to tell a more sophisticated story and use the huge canvas of the whole series to explore its big themes.

So when David Simon cheekily says that Buffy ranks above his masterpiece The Wire, I believe he is largely talking about its place in the history of TV. I am not sure that I can agree with him that it is the best TV series ever made, but I cannot think of another series which advanced the art so dramatically.

I have been through the whole series a few times — it is comfort viewing for me — and every time I watch an episode I see new things.

If you don’t mind mild spoilers and want to try before you buy, watch these episodes:

• S04E10 “Hush” — a nifty formal experiment (it is almost a silent movie) and one of the scariest things ever put on broadcast televison
• S03E06 “Band Candy” — a mostly-comedic personal favorite
• S02E07 “Lie To Me” — a perfect “basic” episode of the show, with a poignant ending which gives me an allergy attack every time
• S04E04 “Fear Itself” — a showcase for the show’s mix-of-tones trick

Sacrifice play

This is sort-of a spoiler, but really you need to know the things already to recognize them.

A while back I saw a terrific little movie scene in which a character who has been set up as extraordinary only in his decency ends up on the phone with the Action Heroes as they walk him through defusing a nuke.

Absurd thriller stuff, but well-executed in a way that was legitimately moving.

As things of course go wrong, the Action Heroes look increasingly worried but put on a brave face — er, voice — over the phone to Ordinary Guy. “You’re doing great. Here’s what we are going to do next.”

When time runs out Ordinary Guy has to reach in and just pull out the nuke’s core. The Action Heroes know that they are telling him to expose himself to a lethal dose of radiation. Ordinary Guy has no idea.

I was very impressed that the filmmakers trusted the actors to communicate to us how this would kill him without putting it in As You Know Bob dialogue.

The actors delivered the goods. The scene is poignant, and the story puts a button on it when the Action Heroes finally get to the Ordinary Guy.

“Did I do okay?”

“Yeah. You did … great.”

I’m not crying. You’re crying.

This story worked. The Action Heroes had to make a hard, ugly choice. The Ordinary Guy’s quiet heroism, demonstrated earlier, turns into these melodramatic heroics.

But. I felt it failed to pay off the work it had already done establishing that Ordinary Guy would not hesitate to commit his life to protecting other people. I wonder whether someone in the writers’ room wanted a different version:

We see the bomb’s LEDs counting down …

3:20	Ordinary Guy: “Whoa. That sphere is the part that explodes, right?”
3:03	Action Hero: “Yes, that’s plutonium. Now remove the casing over the bundle of wires.”
2:41	Ordinary Guy: “It’s sitting right there. Can’t I just … pull it out?”
2:28	Action Hero: “That would work, but with direct contact, radiation from the core will kill you. Tell me when you have the detonator exposed.”
2:04	Ordinary Guy: “We’re running out of time.”
1:57	Action Hero: “Relax. You’re doing fine.”
1:48	Ordinary Guy [pulls out the core]

The friend who turned me on to this story says:

ugh, yes. you know it would have played out like this. (this is now canon for me)

I was so sure it was going to show us how this was actually an easy choice for him.

“You didn’t have to do that, D.”

“M, you know that I did.”

Partly this is just me being a dead sucker for Horatius At The Bridge. Romantic bullshit that gets me every time.

Partly I think of how Heinlein did a version of that in “The Long Watch”. The internet tells me that in his novel Space Cadet, a would-be Space Patrolman argues that the protagonist of “The Long Watch” was wrong to disobey orders … but another cadet responds with a regulation, saying “the responsibility of determining the legality of the order rests on the person ordered as well as on the person giving the order”. Dude’s politics were twisty.

Partly I wonder whether American popular media is too enthusiastic about characters refusing to compromise, too enthusiastic about making characters sweat tough decisions, too rarely giving us characters demonstrating who they are when they do not hesitate to accept a hard sacrifice.

Yes, 300 is fascist

Unintentional fascism

Both Frank Miller’s comic 300 and Zach Snyder’s film adaptation have deeply fascist sensibilities. I feel certain that neither creator intended this, or even knows it, but there it is.

I have read most of Miller’s work. I am sure he would reject any reading of his work as fascist since he sincerely hates Nazis and US conservatives, and he often is a political satirist. But fascist themes recur in his work. Someday I have to write a thorough examination of them in his masterwork The Dark Knight Returns, but that is a big undertaking; for now, I will just note that at the climax of the story has Batman arrive as a man on horseback (literally), his mere presence immediately turning the violent energy of young men away from the perversion & chaos permitted by decadent elites, turning them toward a restoration of purpose & order, and that then spreads through society.

I also confess to enjoying many of Snyder’s films as a guilty pleasure, including 300. Patrick H. Willems’ video-essay Our Himbo Auteur examines Snyder’s whole filmography; like me, he concludes that Snyder’s tendency toward fascist themes is unconscious. Snyder is well known for seeing himself as a libertarian — he dreams of someday making a film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — which I feel confident that he would offer as inherently opposed to the authoritarianism of fascism. But the fascist sensibility includes more than just authoritarianism.

Both creators describe 300 as apolitical, just a gripping yarn animated by romanticized ideas of heroism and bravery. In that too I take them as sincere … and wrong. I think both were trying to embrace the violence as self-consciously Bad Wrong Fun but stumbled into reproducing fascist themes along the way. All stories have politics, and it is difficult to imagine a more thoroughly fascist work in either medium which is not intentional propaganda.

Fascist themes

• Presenting & romanticizing the Spartans as a society in which men define themselves entirely as warriors, in which war is necessary, noble, and good for the creation of a strong society. Every man a violent hero.
• Presenting this warrior ethos as making the Spartans superior to the other ancient Greeks — superior as men and superior as guarantors of civilization — because the other Greeks are devoted first to their trades and crafts. (A familiar, ahistorical reactionary fantasy.)
• Presents the Spartans as defending Western civilization from decadent, perverse, dark-skinned, monstrously inhuman queer-coded hordes from distant countries with different cultures determined to destroy their society.
• Offering just a glimpse of the other institutions of Spartan society, casting them as hopelessly corrupt in contrast to the soldiers. Miller emphasizes the parasitic priests, Snyder the cowardly ruling council which demonstrates that “democracy” is a sham.
• Depicting Spartan society as made great through ruthless eugenic elimination of the unfit and traumatizing training of boys to be men who refuse to admit any fear, pain, or weakness.
• Presenting Leonidas pitching Xerxes’ herald into a pit as a seeming mistake which proves to save Greece, romanticizing visceral emotion producing violent action as superior to calm, reason, openness, and such.
• Romanticizing the bodies of athletic men, framed in terms which vigorously insist that this is not eroticized.

These fascist themes are not inherent in the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, even as the Greek propagandist-historian Herodotus told it. Miller thanks Victor Davis Hansen at the start of 300; Hanson is a notorious militarist racist neocon enthusiast for the Iraq war whose misreading of Thucydides has long been notorious and pernicious. Every change to the real history in both the book and the film point in the same, fascist direction.

And I have to underline that 300 offering the Spartans in contrast to the decadent queerness of Xerxes, his army, and the other Greeks is a particularly funny and ugly touch if you know anything about the historical Spartans.

B-b-b-but satire!

Defenders of 300 say that its divergences from history are justified by the ending, which presents everything we have seen as actually a telling by the surviving Spartan Dilios, who has romanticizized Thermopylae to gain Greek support for the war against the Xerxes.

Thus, they claim, the hidden meaning of 300 is a satire of fascist propaganda, just as Snyder’s Sucker Punch attempts a critique of its surface text.

Snyder would make this point in an interview with Total Film, stating that he sought to place audiences in a tight spot by showing the Spartans’ savagery in blunt terms as people who are prepared to throw newborn children off a cliff if they’re insufficiently healthy, and posing the question “These are the people you’re supposed to go with on this journey?” Elaborating on the point, Snyder felt that “part of the fun” of 300 was to depict a society leaving its sons to fend for themselves as children and only prepared to allow them to return home if they survive, and asking “Those are your heroes?”

But that does not stand up on examination of the actual film. When we see the “real world” of Dilios telling the story, it looks exactly the same. Nothing in the text of either work suggests that the fascist themes are deceitful, or bad in any way.

“But it shows the Spartans doing obviously bad things!” cry its defenders. But everything bad is shown to us as not bad but romantically badass.

These defenses point to its portrayal of Spartan eugenicist infanticide as showing that the story is unsympathetic to the Spartans. Yes, the sensible reader or viewer should find infanticide morally repulsive. But does the story itself share that reading? Both book and film offer the infanticide quickly, to frame other events which it lingers over.

It shows us King Leonidas as a child, facing a test of manhood in the wilderness, fighting a wolf. That he would be compelled to do such a thing is abusive, but the story revels in how this shows that Leonidas is a badass.

It shows the Spartans encountering the deformed Ephialtes, who survived infanticide and aspires to join the Spartans in their ranks. Ephialtes is presented as disgusting. Leonidas gently turns down his help, which is not just portrayed as a kindness but too much a kindness, since the story goes on to have Ephialtes betray the Spartans to the Persians, who seduce him with queer-coded debauchery with other deformed figures. Ephialtes in the story proves as weak in spirit as he is in body, another fascist theme.

Contrast 300 with Verhoeven’s film adaptation of Starship Troopers, which is a satire of fascist propaganda. Troopers does what 300’s defenders claim 300 does: it presents fascist propaganda on its own terms, expecting the audience to supply its own ironic reading. But unlike 300, the fascist voice of Troopers is not remotely seductive. The soldiers are not badass, they are incompetent. We get not the glorious sacrifice of 300 but screaming agony and mutilitated soldiers. The fascist sensibility is never cool, it is cringe-inducingly absurd. Fascist aesthetics get marked increasingly unambiguously, culminating in a major character wearing an imitation of an SS uniform. 300 includes nothing similar.

It is not satire when a work presents bad ideas. It must actually, y’know, satirize them.

But doctor …

This old joke is best known in the form delivered in the clipped prose of Rorschach, the half-crazy antihero superhero in Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon’s comics novel Watchemen:

Heard joke once:

Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel.

Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.

Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.”

Man bursts into tears.

Says, “But doctor …

I am Pagliacci.”

Good joke.

Everybody laugh.

Roll on snare drum.

Curtains.

It has spawned an array of spoof memes, with this perhaps the best known:

doctor: treatment is simple. go see orville, very funny clown

pagliacci: what about pagliacci?

doctor: pagliacci? man i could not name a more suckass clown

pagliacci:

doctor: just downright dogshit of a clown

I have done one of my own:

Heard joke once:

Woman goes to doctor.

Says she’s depressed.

Says men don’t respect her.

Says they pedantically tell her things about her own area of expertise.

Says it makes her feel all alone.

Doctor says

“Treatment is simple.

Rebecca Solnit has essay.

Go read it.

At least you will see that this is not just you.”

Woman bursts into tears.

Says, “But doctor …

I am Rebecca Solnit.”

This of course has happened in real life:

“At a NASA Earth meeting 10 years ago, a white male post doc interrupted me to tell me that I didn’t understand human drivers of fire, that I def needed to read McCarty et al.

Looked him in the eye, pulled my long hair back so he could read my name tag.

“I’m McCarty et al.”

This moving variant, riffing on a classic SFF theme, is my favorite:

Heard joke once: man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him.”

Man goes to Pagliacci’s show. The theatre is full of laughter from the moment the clown trips onto the stage late. Man is overwhelmed with joy and an impression that life is bursting with meaning. He comes out of the theatre singing, and dances home under the stars.

The next day, he thinks he’ll go again. But when he turns up at the Box Office, they say Pagliacci has disappeared. He looks backstage, but the only trace there was ever a clown there is a very ragged script, which Man pockets.

Man has a burning passion to see Pagliacci again. For three decades, he travels the country and the major world capitals, looking for him. Nobody has seen Pagliacci. Nobody outside that first town has even heard of him, or recognises the script Man has copied out.

One day, a woman comes to his door. “I have heard about your search”, says the visitor. “Alas, I cannot tell you where Pagliacci is now. But I can still help”. She pulls out a strange machine. “This device”, she says, “can send you to the past, where you know where to find him.”

Man seizes the opportunity. He sets the contraption to take him back to that night where he saw Pagliacci, and makes his way to the theatre. When he gets there, he realises there's a risk of running into himself. “I can’t be recognisable”, he thinks.

Not to worry. It’s a theatre, so there’s sure to be costumes backstage. Sure enough, in the first dressing room he tries there’s a harlequin's suit and some shoes — albeit a little too big for him. For good measure he cakes some white facepaint on as well.

Realising the show must be about to start, he runs to the wing, so as not to miss a moment. The curtain rises, but nobody appears on stage. “This is a disaster”, he thinks, “This was the most important night of my life. I can’t let it not happen”.

But Man has had years of reading and re-reading the script. He knows precisely what needs to be said and done, and precisely how it needs to be said and done. He runs onto the stage to take over, trips over an uneven floorboard, and kicks off the evening of non-stop laughter.

At the end of the show, Man leaves a copy of the script in a dressing room, and leaves secretly. Then another thought strikes him: if he was Pagliacci the whole time, then how did the doctor know about the show?

He decides to use the time machine again, and goes back to earlier in the day, so he can find the doctor. He goes to the hospital and, disguised in a white coat and stethoscope, he sneaks into the doctor's office to wait for him to appear.

Finally the door opens, but he finds himself looking not at the doctor, but at a version of himself, thirty years younger. “I’m depressed”, the younger man says. “Life seems harsh and cruel. I feel all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.”

“Treatment is simple”, replies the older. “Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him”.

As the patient closes the door behind him, the older man sits back in his chair and chuckles to himself, “But doctor … I am Pagliacci”.

Land of the Lost

A hundred hokey old movies and TV shows got stupid gritty reboots in the last couple of decades. But not the one which is a natural for that treatment.

Claudia Black + James McAvoy

Claudia Black, a regular on the odd, interesting SF television series Farscape (1999-2003), shared this little story I like in a Twitter thread a while back. I could not find a good archive of it, so I made one here.

As the new Dune premieres in London I’ll share a lil story. I’m the actor in this article whom James McAvoy quotes — pretty bonkers in and of itself. What tickles me about his story is that our respective recollections of our encounter are very different in sweet, powerful ways.

About 20 years ago, as a lead actor in a series on the then Sci-fi Channel, I was invited to a screening — with my co-star Ben Browder — of a Dune miniseries. Ben & I sat together.

I fidgeted a lot; sorry Ben. Undiagnosed ADD and PTSD made screenings at the best of times torturous.

This screening was looooong. I was struggling to stay focused until, I kid you not, in the last three seconds — ok maybe three minutes of this 2, 3 or 4 hour portion — a young man came on screen, walking through a door, chest heaving, eyes ablaze, not uttering a line of dialogue and the credits rolled.

I sat there frozen on the edge of my seat. Ben did too. We needed to know who that young actor was. It felt as though we were some of the first people to witness the rise of this prodigy. (We also knew how artists could be overlooked in science fiction).

This kid could not possibly suffer that fate. He was a supernova. And we needed to tell him; drum it in to him somehow before our beloved yet sometimes wretched and abusive business could wear him down and ever make him doubt his unquestionable talent, skill and abilities.

We’d had a rough ride ourselves. On the same network. On the not quite cool enough show that would not air in my home country despite being its most ambitious production to date, because the Australian network execs loathed & misunderstood sci-fi. We had become a tad despondent.

As luck would have it, this supernova was out in the lobby standing by himself. He was shuffling his worn boots along the carpet, his hands deeply shoved into leather jacket pockets to give their fidgeting refuge. We babbled. We fawned. We likely embarrassed ourselves, gushing.

He was humble & sweet, raw & real. His head bowed down to his boots as our effusiveness came in waves over him. I just needed him to know how damn good he was. I needed him to understand that he was about to become a huge star. His head shook. We parted ways. Never to meet again.

Twenty years later, driving through Studio City my son and I passed a billboard advertising tonight’s latest iteration of Dune. My lad said he was looking forward to seeing it. He’s a mid teen with great taste. I told him that Dune has quite an established cinematic history, but that my personal connection to it involved James McEvoy. I now had his attention. “I love James McEvoy!” (a more animated version of teen than I’m used to) “Me too,” I replied — “In fact I suspect everyone does. And I met him once. Right at the start of his career.”

He enjoyed my recounting of the story & the idea that someone could be that alive with zero dialogue. He also seemed pleased that his taste in actors had not betrayed him. Growing up as a set baby he is all too aware that most of us do not deserve to be unconditionally respected.

A few days later I received an email from a teacher & fellow C-PTSD survivor. We had bonded a few years ago over trauma and sci-fi. (as one does) The title of the email was something along the lines of, ‘You made an impact!’

I was confused. The article was not about me.

Until it suddenly, shockingly was. On the impending eve of the new Dune, a writer had decided to interview Mr. McEvoy asking him about his experience working on it & what advice he would give Timothée Chalamet. Basically none, he said. Because Timothée was a cracking actor.

I was in an adaptation of the second and third [Dune] books. [Timothée Chalamet] is in the first book. And he’s playing a character who ultimately becomes my father, in terms of the character dialogue. So, no. I’ve got no advice for him. And he doesn’t need any advice from me, he’s a cracking actor.

But, he then went on to say something that almost made me pass out. He volunteered, that the best advice he’d been given was from a chick on a sci-fi show from years ago … what was it?

Farscape. That someone named Claudia Black, had given him advice he’d remembered his whole career that he’d found helpful.

But I’ll tell you what's one really good piece of advice that was given to me once, was by the cast of … what was the show called again? Farscape. And it was at the L.A. premiere of Children of Dune, and they said to me, that the thing with this sh*t, i.e. science fiction, is that you have to believe it more than you believe good writing. Good writing, you can just do. It’s easier. But this stuff is hard, because it’s so bonkers, you know what I mean? And I’ve really, I’ve always remembered that advice and taken it to heart. It’s so kept me going really, through a lot of science fiction and fantasy work that I’ve done. Because it was Claudia Black that said it. And I think that’s just good advice for any actor doing any kind of science fiction and/or fantasy, you know?

My jaw dropped. And my arms tingled. I did not recall telling him anything of value. And … wait … this dude knows my name?!

When I picked my kids up from school that afternoon I uncommonly flexed a little as I pointed to the billboard. “Hey, remember that story I told you about James McEvoy? Turns out it has a new surprise twist that involves yer mum.” Again, I had their attention. They smiled proudly.

What followed that evening was interesting and possibly coincidental. My son, who usually keeps to himself in his room, finished his homework early and joined me in the kitchen, offering to help me make dinner. We chatted and danced to some music as we made curry — one of his faves & I felt something I haven’t in a long time; visible.

Being a woman nearing 50 in entertainment, my stock has been plummeting since my late 30’s … Being dragged through family court for the better part of my 40’s in an unspeakably traumatizing divorce, led to social ostracism, an inability to travel for much desired and needed work when most work is in fact out of state … surviving my fair share of #metoo and on the health side — and totally stress-related — a bunch of illnesses that left me somewhat at the mercy of a clueless western medical system … I joke that it’s as if in my 40’s I fell out of the tree of life and hit every branch on the way down. I’ve been picking myself up ever since.

(no pity please, life is hard for most if not all)

Yet on this day, reading that I’d made an impact; somehow cut through the noise in a way that someone I respected had heard me, meant the world to me. It even feels pathetic to admit. But life gets very small for women who have kids. Smaller still for single mums. Some of the focus on minutiae is adorable. And parenting is a privilege. But dreams become elusive luxuries under high allostatic loads, and loads of unassisted chores. Feminism becomes a prequel. Community wanes, the savings disappear & you look in the mirror and realize you are not whom you want your kids to see. So thank you Mr McEvoy. After feeling for years that I’ve been standing behind & knocking on a thick plane of one-sided glass where no one could see nor hear me, for a moment, it was as if someone looked up and heard. Love that it was you.

I’m going to make more curries with the same spice mix though with way more pep, and while I don’t know what this next chapter holds for me, I loudly pray it’s more work. Great work. Juicy work that allows the world to see that I too have loads more to offer … & speaking of names. Think I’m going to name this here longest Twitter thread I’ve ever written, ‘The Comeback Curry.’

Special shout out to everyone out there who has seen my work and supported it, and me over the years. You also mean the world to me. And I’m aiming to make you proud.

👊🏼♥️

A fan somehow rustled up this picture:

Black appended it to her thread:

Holy crap! A photo I didn’t know existed.

At least I remembered correctly that he was wearing a leather jacket 😂

The Lego Movie is cosmic horror

Copied from Tumblr:

was explaining to my mom on the phone the concept of a cosmic horror and she hit me with the one hit k.o. ⋯

me: yeah so basically a cosmic horror is the fear of a godlike being or entity so much bigger than yourself and your perception of the universe that your brain cant possibly comprehend it, often leading to some sort of madness in the stories because of this “break” in your perception of reality because this entity is so incomprehensible to your limited worldview. the concept is credited to h.p. lovecraft because of stuff like cthulu but the guy was also a massive —

my mom, interjecting: ah, so like horton hears a who. i get it.

---

# wait so like # does the LEGO movie count # they manage to escape into the human world and it’s all hazy because they don’t understand # and the people were controlling them the whole time

SURE
SURE THE LEGO MOVIE IS A COSMIC HORROR
WHY NOT

---

The LEGO Movie absolutely counts, and it’s treated that way from the characters’ points of view. Emmett describes The Man Upstairs as having “hands like giant pink sausages, like eagle talons mixed with squid” which sounds like a human trying to describe an eldritch horror.

Just think, everyone and everything in his world is made of Lego pieces. They are as fundamental as the subatomic particles that make up our world.

From the characters’ perspective, the humans are gods that created these fundamental elements as drastically simplified playthings imitating their own world. Imagine finding out that the periodic table of elements was constructed by gods in order to build a simulation of something thousands of times more complex, and we are just simulations being puppeted by these gods for their amusement.

This also explains why objects like the Kragle and the Scepter of Q-Tip are considered “relics” with unnatural powers — they are discarded items from the higher, far more complex reality that follow the rules of THAT reality, not the characters’ reality. That is why they can influence the characters’ world in ways not normally permitted by that reality.

This puts a whole new perspective on the scene where Lord Business uses the nail polish remover on Good Cop / Bad Cop to ERASE HIS FACE.

My trouble with Trek

Numbskull conservatives grumbling about Star Trek “going woke” can go to hell; anyone paying attention knows they don’t understand Trek.

I have the opposite problem.

The mission

A proper Trek story is a parable in which liberal-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin values prevail. (More on how that works in an earlier post.) In The Original Series, this expressed the hopes of Cold War America, countering dread that technology — in particular, nuclear weapons — would doom us all.

For a while I thought that both Discovery & Strange New Worlds Understood The Assignment:

• The pilot episode of SNW ending with Captain Pike talking down a society about to destroy itself with cold war brinksmanship could not be a more direct revival of the spirit of TOS
• The pilot episode of Discovery gave Captain Georgiou my favorite line of Trek dialogue ever: “Starfleet does not fire first”
• In Disco S3E02 “Far From Home” Tilly won over a room full of hard-bitten, hostile people from a brutal society just by relentlessly acting in good faith
• In SNW the Enterprise crew respected Hemmer’s resolute pacifism
• Disco characters called the Mirror Universe Terrans “fascists”, describing their seeming strength as “painted rust”

I could go on.

But.

The problem

It seems unmistakable that the people currently making Trek sincerly think their stories deliver the song of the liberal ethos. But more often they fumble the ball so badly that they say the opposite.

I understand why people took SNW S02E02 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” as first-rank Trek reflecting the values I am talking about … but I could not get past the Federation having regulations requiring apartheid planets.

I was thrilled when S3 of Discovery ended with the Federation refusing to compromise its values in the face of profound temptation, demaning that Osyraa must face trial if the Emerald Chain were to join the Federation. But then I was mortified that the story turned toward Captain Burnham resolving the conflict by running and punching.

SNW gave us big-hearted Dr. M’Benga as the moral center of the Enterprise crew … then revealed that he too is really good at punching … and might be is a war criminal.

The TOS episode S1E11 “Arena” which introduced the Gorn was a perfect exemplar of a proper Trek story: under the pulpy action and monster costumes, we got Kirk resolving the conflict through understanding. So when SNW revisted the Gorn and portrayed them as — in the showrunner’s own words — “not every other iteration of representation of the human other in alien skin, they’re evil”, it altered not just the worldbuilding canon but reversed what a Trek story is.

And worst of all, the worldbuilding of the far future 32^nd Century revealed in Discovery is a worse betrayal than any one botched story could deliver.

Yes, the Federation retained its liberal values for centuries, despite further technological change, but the Burn curtailing space travel shattered the Federation’s strength. Progress did not progress. Humanity did not mature further. Liberal values did not prevail on the merits; the Federation’s ethos only worked under historically-contingent material conditions.

So of course Discovery ended with the Federation refusing the Progenitors’ technology, fearing that they lack the wisdom to use it without it becoming destructive.

The people making Trek cannot find it in them to portray liberalism working, even as a fantasy.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Sean Kelly on Twitter describes how the Trek parody show dodged these mistakes and made a more Trekkian statement than actual Trek has done lately:

Interestingly, the Season 3 finale of The Orville took direct aim at the idea that Star Trek’s utopian future is only possible because of the replicator, and the typically-conservative Trek fans who make the argument.

A woman from an underdeveloped planet keeps begging for replicator technology on the grounds that it would bring her planet into the same socialist utopia that the crew of the Orville enjoys, and the first officer says “You’ve basically got that backwards.” She explains that it was their socialist utopia that brought about the cooperation necessary to invent the replicator, and that had it been invented during Earth’s 20^th or 21^st centuries it wouldn’t have worked, because the rich and powerful would have hoarded the technology.

As @BoomerNiner often says, we have enough resources on the planet right now, without a replicator, to give everybody food and housing — if we wanted to. The invention of a replicator wouldn’t change that.

Zefram Cochrane, famously, tried to invent the warp drive with a profit motive — he thought he was going to get rich off the technology, and it was only the realization that we weren’t alone in the galaxy (and perhaps a few lectures from people from the future) that changed him.

But mankind wasn’t ready for all the various technologies that sprang from this revolution, which is why the Vulcans tried to keep a close eye on humanity’s entrance into the galaxy. A few years after First Contact, Earth’s government launched a probe, called “Friendship-1” that tried to give other planets the means to contact Earth.

Instead, the people the probe found reverse-engineered the antimatter technology and accidentally destroyed their planet.

The same thing happened in The Orville — early explorers, acting like missionaries, tried to bring their advanced technology to other worlds in the hope of helping people — but the technology just created conflict and ruined entire planets.

People don’t suddenly become moved to share because of abundance — Elon Musk had 44 billion dollars and he didn’t decide to share it with the world, he decided to buy Twitter with it. He has always, and will continue to, hoard his wealth for himself no matter how much he has. If Tesla invented a replicator they wouldn’t give that away to everyone for free. They’d patent it, and sell it to world governments with DRM software they could deactivate remotely if those governments didn’t pay a subscription fee.

If governments had replicators, they wouldn’t suddenly start handing out free, delicious, nutritious food to everyone — “that will collapse the economy,” they’d say. “Free food for the needy would be unfair to people who’ve been paying money for food all this time.” “How will people be motivated to work,” the Republicans would say, “if they don’t have the threat of starvation hanging over them? If everyone has enough food, how will we motivate people to join the Army?”

Even though the replicator was producing molecularly-identical food to the real thing, conservatives would insist it wasn’t “real” enough for them. “Real” beef, they’d say, demands the slaughter of an animal. Replicated beef is basically vegan. The beef industry would quickly draw battle lines with their donation money, congressmen from places like Texas would move to outlaw replicated meat from being served on the grounds that it hurts entire industries. Conspiracy theorists would insist that replicated beef is full of additives the government is trying to sneak into them to feminize men and make you sick, even though real beef is full of antibiotics and hormones. Campaign ads would show Republicans personally slaughtering cattle and gutting deer to show their commitment to only eating meat that was really alive. We’re already seeing this type of thing when, like, Cracker Barrel tries to introduce plant-based sausage that’s entirely optional to order. People freak out that you might take their meat away.

In short, inventing a replicator wouldn’t save us — right now, it’d ruin us even faster, as the amount of bounty the wealth plays keep-away with would just grow even larger and more ludicrous.

Capitalism would never allow a replicator to exist to its true potential, too many people would go broke. Replicators didn’t create the Star Trek future, the Star Trek future comes first, then replicators.

A way out

I am not the first to notice how the Federation resemble us culturally more than they should, given the radically different world of teleportation and space travel and aliens and replicators and so forth which they inhabit. Indeed, they are obsessively backward-looking — Shakespeare and baseball and Dixon Hill and so forth.

Consider also:

• They vigorously oppose gene modification, and recent shows have underlined the point
• They recoil at AI personhood, despite the ability to produce it surfacing again and again, including in recent stories

These people are kicking and scratching to avoid the transhuman change implied by their technologies.

In-universe, we can see why they make this turn. The outcomes of embracing transhuman-like change they run into during their explorations are either baffling Pure Energy Beings or nightmarish dystopias.

What if they encounter something different?

I feel certain that someone in the current Trek writers room knows their Iain M. Banks. We just got two stories about the Federation botching their encounters with Excessions! So let’s bring in another thing about the Federation:

• The Prime Directive forbids them intervening in lower-tech societies, even where they could easily correct political and material horrors

We know where Iain M. Banks’ high-tech hippie anarchist Culture stand on this stuff. When they encounter the Federation, they are gonna be pissed.

A bunch of Starfleet officers will turn coat. Do you doubt that Christopher Pike would warp back to Omelas and set things right?

The Ballad of Michael Burnham

a later addition to the post

I wonder what the heck the writers of Discovery thought Michael Burnham’s story was about.

Discovery was going to be a Bryan Fuller project, but he dropped out shortly before its initial release. He has been politely evasive about what he wanted the show to be — letting the people who actually delivered the show own it — but it is obvious that much of the first season was assembled from his work and I have a hypothesis about where he wanted to go which sheds light on where it did go.

In the first episode, after a little prologue, the first real sequence in Michael’s story has her committing mutiny because she objects to the captain delivering the best line of Star Trek dialogue ever written: “Starfleet does not fire first”. Michael is talented, capable, goodhearted, and … bad. Her mutiny was as wrong as wrong can be, and it seems she knows it.

From that very first episode, we of course know that the story will eventually make Michael the captain of the USS Discovery. Starting there makes that look impossible. She’s a mutineer! How will she earn it? How will the show earn it?

I think Fuller wanted to portray a slow, hard process of Federation values redeeming Michael, making her into the person we want her to be. (In this long arc I think she resembles another SF TV antihero played by a charismatic actor whose story changed in the telling.) Fuller needed Michael to be so charismatic that we would root for her despite being a dangerous loose cannon who demonstrates at every turn that she shouldn’t be in Starfleet boots, much less destined for a captain’s chair, so they cast Sonequa Martin-Green.

I think her acting chops and screen presence let the post-Fuller writers tell a lazier story — Michael Is Awesome, Actually — trusting her to sell it without the story working to earn it. In a jiffy, everybody on the ship loves her; there are conflicts where characters disagree with her about what to do, but not out of profound disagreement. And while Michael has feelings — the show does good work with them — she doesn’t have inner conflict shaping what she decides to do, which I think is a serious problem.

In 1973, David Gerrold wrote a book about how Trek works which eventually landed him the gig writing the show bible for Star Trek: The Next Generation. He argued that one can talk about two kinds of Trek stories:

• Kirk in danger
• Kirk makes a decision

Gerrold argues that putting Kirk in danger can be fun but it is not compelling because we know he’s not going to die. Good Trek is about decisions. A morality play.

Most of the time Discovery is not about hard decisions, it’s a variant on danger which is Can Michael Crack The Problem, which is the same kind of tepid because we know that of course she will.

This can be proceedurally engaging, and sometimes Discovery gestures toward an approach to that which could make Michael an interesting character: Michael’s superpower is meant to be that she comes at problems in a unique way that nobody else would think, or dare, to do. This also papers over her mutiny by suggesting that that she wasn’t wrong to want to fire on the Klingons unprovoked, she was a lateral thinker. It could be made to work.

But again the storytelling rarely earned it. Most of the time, Michael succeeds because she is just Good At Everything. A certain kind of hater grumbled a lot that Michael is a Mary Sue, too competent to be interesting, and most of them were motivated by misogynoir rather than substantive critique of the show. The critique is not quite right — a proper Mary Sue experiences no adversity, while Michael encounters plenty — but it is adjacent to the problem.

Worse still, as I grumble above too often the thing that she is decisively Good At is just running and punching. Which is fun, and part of the pulpy joy of Trek, but should not define our central character or the heart of a Trek story.

So: what was the Ballad Of Michael Burnham about? She had good friends and cool adventures because she was so awesome.

Often that was fun. But it wasn’t interesting, and it wasn’t great Trek.

We deserved a better story about her, about Starfleet, about What Star Trek Is About. Given how we were introduced to Michael Burnham, she deserved a better story.

The Lieutenant

The best tabletop roleplaying actual play story I have ever heard.

When the original d20 Star Wars RPG was being released, Wizards of the Coast had a launch party for it at a local Planet Hollywood. Jake Lloyd and Peter Mayhew were there, as were some other Star Wars people of import, and I and several other designers ran intro games for them and anyone else who came along and was interested.

I ran the intro scenario several times, and most of those sessions are a blur. We used Star Wars action figures rather than miniatures, and most groups barely got through one encounter. It was fun, but most people did more laughing and movie quotes than gaming.

But one elderly couple with brilliant British accents came along and said they were on vacation and had just wanted to eat at a Planet Hollywood, but had been told there was a game launch. There knew they were welcome, and had grabbed some food from the buffet, but if there was a game they were interested in trying it. But they had no idea what “Star Wars” was.

So I showed them the good guy figures, and told them these were members of the Rebel Alliance, who fought for freedom and fairness against the tyrannical bad guys.

“Ah,” said the elderly gentlemen. His face was a lean angular shape covered in tiny wrinkles, he walked with a cane, his hair was sheet white, but his eyes seemed bright and alert. “So they’re the French Resistance, are they?”

Well I admitted, yeah basically.

Then he picked up an Imperial officer figure, and looked it over.

“And this is a Space Nazi?”

Ah… yes. Their troops are even called Stormtroopers.

“Oh!” said his wife. “It’s like The War.”

“Right,” said he sitting. “How do we play?”

I had those two wonderful people, with decades of experience and clearly a strong idea of what military work is actually like, and three teen fanboys. The elderly gentleman took charge, got the mission objective out of me, and …

And ran the PC team like real commandos. Scouts. Ambushes. Covering fire. Raiding enemy gear. Firing from cover. Sticking to the objective. I was making stuff up to cover some of the things he wanted to do, because I didn’t know the rules that well. And I was up front about it, and made it clear that was part of the fun. You can try anything in an RPG. The GM just works out what dice to roll.

The teens just started calling his character “The Lieutenant,” and hung on his every word. And unlike every other group I ran that night, they got through the whole short introductory adventure. And won. Without Jedi.

Everyone smiled and clapped when they were done. And the couple decided they’d pick up a copy back home, and introduce the game to their friends. I’m pretty sure they were both in their mid 80s back when this happened, in 2000. But I like to think they are still playing some RPG, with their group of friends in England, merrily making commando raids to this day.

A video telling the tale:

Vampire preferences

Answering a question from an internet friend:

fangs only when feeding || strong preference

I am OK with hordes of pure evil ugly vamps with permanent fangs, but otherwise the fangs should only appear when feeding, else the vamps cannot hide, and what fun is that?

evil || moderate preference

My ideal vampire is the Goatee Spock version of the person they were, but Slowly Corrupted By The Hunger can work if that is central to the story.

sunlight vulnerable || emphatic preference

Yes, I have read Dracula — a few times! — but this is one I am adamant about. Popculture vamps have to be very vulnerable to the Sun; it gives you the day-night cycle for everyone to face. Even Dracula is better that way — Christopher Damm Lee!

garlic vulnerable || mild preference

Fun and works with either very- or not-very-supernatural vampires.

silver safe || mild preference

In my headcanon vamps & werewolves have different vulnerabilities, duh, but it does not bother me when vamps are vulnerable to silver, and if our Fearless Vampire Slayers are action-hero types, then you want them to have guns, so ... fine.

holy symbols safe || mild preference

I prefer holy symbols to be bullshit, but if they do work the wielder must have strong devotion. I am very not OK with Buffy’s cross working even though she never goes to church.

normal reflection || emphatic preference

The mirror thing is just stupid and raises complicated vampire science questions with weird corner cases for cameras and stuff. Only acceptable in a production of the stage play of Dracula.

werewolf enmity || strong preference

If you don’t want monster politics, what are you even doing here?

sleep anywhere || strong preference

The metaphysics of what even counts as The Earth Of Your Gravesite is just confusing, and don’t get me started on the Coffin Of Theseus. But you do need that rule to adapt Dracula properly, which someone really ought to do someday.

running water safe || emphatic preference

Again, this is just weird and a nuisance to include, which is why it is routinely ignored. What about water mains?

entering uninvited || it depends

For a single novel or movie, I have a mild preference for this being Not A Thing, but for a long-running series you need it to create complications for safe havens and keeping the secret.

turned by drinking vamp blood || strong preference

If being killed (or even just bitten) by a vamp turns someone, eventually you just run out of humans. No beuno. Much more interesting to have it a deliberate choice by the sire, which also comes with Who Do You Turn vampire politics. The old-fashioned bite-three-times rule can also be fun for particularly supernatural vampires.

non-human blood || it depends

When vamps are Just Evil, I have a strong preference for requiring human blood, though having them occasionally muddle through and get weak drinking animal blood can play. If vamps are Corrupted By The Hunger, then non-human blood being “nutritionally” adequate but unsatisfying is the way to go.

Lost’s sloppy storytelling was morally wrong

When I call Lost “morally wrong” I’m sort-of engaging in hyperbole for emphasis. But in a small way, I also believe it. A while back I tweetranted inspired by a Film School Rejects post The Evolution of the Mystery Box.

TV shows actively teach you how to watch them. Lost taught its viewers to be hungry, attentive sleuths, rewarding viewers who searched for clues, answers, and easter eggs.

[⋯]

The Lost finale decided to leave a lot of threads open and mysteries unanswered. It focused on character development over plot resolution (a perfectly valid choice). But viewers who were trained to focus on answers – trained to see plot as a puzzle, not as a means to character development – were let down. When the writers infused the plot with ambiguity, viewers rejected it because they were taught that the story was meant to be solved.

I see apologists for Lost saying things like this all of the time. This is not a failing by the viewers — FSR themselves say that the show told viewers to look for answers before refusing to deliver them.

It would be a valid choice for the show to focus on character development over plot. But the show pointed directly to plot all of the time, so the finalé refusing to pay off its promises was a betrayal.

Tactical drama

That quote from FSR compels me to call shenanigans on the way Lost apologists say that the show was “about the characters”. Absolutely not.

Consider Evangeline Lilly’s character Kate. Is she nice, or mean? Smart, or dumb? Brave, or craven? What drives her? What does she want? We don’t have answers, and she got an immense amount of screen time.

The storytelling was structred around the characters encountering a series of daunting dilemmas without enough information to make a clear decision. The characters would yell at each other about what to do, and make desperate moves. The show had very good tactical-level craft in presenting these conflicts — especially in the strength of the actors’ performances.

This kind of storytelling could unfold something about the characters, showing how they change or just revealing who they are. What they want, fear, and value. How they understand the world and themselves. Instead we got only the hand-wave-y-est themes. John Locke “has faith”. Jack Shephard “wants to fix things”. And it kept breaking even this level of thin characterization. Sawyer was “just out for himself” … except when he wasn’t. Ben Linus “understands what is going on” … except when he doesn’t.

These reversals on characterization came from the way Lost sustained interest with twists. Often these picked up a mystery from earlier, hinting that the show had a design undergirding its story, promising the payoff which never came. The twists were a key move in the show’s method of focusing on delviering dramatic moments. In order to deliver these transient thrills, anything could happen without regard for the logic of plot, character, theme, our physical universe, or the show’s own world. Since anything could happen, nothing really mattered.

The show’s craft in constructing powerful scenes sometimes did deliver real magic, like Charlie’s hero moment, Michael’s dedication to his son, the VW bus. But then in pursuit of more moments of drama, the show revisited them until any truth or flavor they had was destroyed.

Mysteries and mystery

One can do a story — even a serialized TV story — which is not a mystery in a detective-story sense but a mystery in a mythic-unto-esoteric sense: unanswerable.

The Prisoner resembles Lost in a number of ways. Our protagonist finds himself in an isolated place which operates by its own unique, puzzling rules, full of characters with mysterious motives: The Village. In the course of an episode, we typically learn both a bit about the characters’ backstories before they arrived at The Village and a bit about The Village itself. Each episode’s opening titles succinctly reminds us how the pilot episode set up that our protagonist was some kind of spy, that he angrily resigned from the work, that the leaders of The Village want to know why, that they refuse to answer when our protagonist asks which side they work for. In the show’s final episode, it steadfastly refuses to answer these questions, and steps up the way in which the fantastical Village is an elaborate metaphorical space for exploring themes about power, individualism, the social order, moral responsibility, human nature. Its rejections of the plot questions from the text of the story are part its point; the show is largely about why they do not matter. It does not break a promise, it tells us how that the puzzle of The Village’s in-world nature was misdirection.

Even a mystery with a detective can become a mystery in this sense of refusing to answer. According to legend, when in the middle of making the film adaptation of The Big Sleep, director Howard Hawkes telephoned Raymond Chandler because he realized that he did not know who had committed the murder which accelerates the plot in the turn at the end of the first act, and Chandler replied, “Now you get it. I don’t know!” The story challenges the logics of detective stories in which a hero can uncover the whole truth, offering instead a world in which digging reveals questions and corruption faster than it produces answers and justice.

But Lost’s refusal to address the plot questions it raised delivers no such thematic payload.

One may protest that not every story driven by twists & reveals needs such a deep purpose to get away with incomplete plotting. Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest have so much momentum that it does not bother us that do not really hold together on close examination. The Usual Suspects actually makes no sense (which is why one should resist the temptation to watch it a third time) but that does not spoil the charms of seeing things seem to fall into place on a first and second viewing.

But those works do not break a promise, because they do not make a promise to pay everything off. Lost had so many little clues and easter eggs that it invited the audience to speculate what they meant.

The moral problem

I submit that this is more than just sloppy or disappointing, it is dishonest. It did not fulfill its promises badly; it broke them. This does not merely fail the audience; it cheats them.

Lost is hardly the first or only TV series to do this. The X-Files teased audiences with a conspiracy-mythos which never quite added up to anything. Battlestar Galactica told us in in every episode’s opening titles that the Cylons “have a plan”, and ultimately revealed in a story sequence called “The Plan” that no, they did not.

This hurts more than the viewer, it robs other artists by eroding the resource of audience trust, rather than enriching the culture with a touchstone which others can build on. Exploitation.

So yes, morally wrong.

Updates

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Trust

This clip of gag alternate endings to Lost makes my blood boil with the comparison to great series conclusions. It admits how lazy and dishonest Lost’s arc really was.

In a very instructive commentary on “plot holes” and trust, Shamus underlines my point:

This trust becomes really important when the audience is presented with something that doesn’t seem to follow naturally. Maybe it’s a plot hole. Maybe not. But something jumps out at the viewer. Hey! This character isn’t acting according to their stated goals, therefore…

1. … I must have missed something earlier. Or maybe this will be explained later. Maybe this will even pay off in a later reveal.
      OR:
2. …THIS STORY IS STUPID.

Here’s the thing: It’s the job of the storyteller to create and maintain that trust. Talking about how to build trust is like talking about how to build creativity or enthusiasm. It’s not really something you can force. Let us agree that it’s a lot of work to get a stranger to trust you, and even harder if you’ve already proven untrustworthy in the past.

If anything can happen, nothing matters.

Worldbuilding

I have been thinking for a while about the relationship between worldbuilding and lasting franchise entertainments, given the pop media world we live in.

Lost’s problem with story rigor extends to a broader problem. It inspires a nerdy temptation to want airtight worldbuilding which I want to resist. Noah Berlatsky wisely argues that some worldbuilding should be shoddy.

Some people imagine carefully crafted realms. Some imagine realms with holes in them. But whatever universe you have in your head, there is no place divorced from the meaning of that place. What we say about the world can’t be teased apart from what the world is; we can’t imagine a world without meaning. We live in a land called metaphor. Even its cartography is a symbol.

Just so. Some of our best and smartest pop entertainments reject making “sense”.

Genre franchise settings often benefit from a looseness which allows telling a range of stories. Superhero comics’ everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sensibility presents powerful opportunities. It’s great that Star Wars is so cheerfully loose and nonsensical that it has room for silly self-referential jokes for kids, tight retellings of classic adventure stories, and sophisticated dramas offering serious ideas about politics.

But I see us having the opposite problem more often. Franchise settings break down if they become too incoherent.

The Harry Potter universe barely held together for one big story. If magic can do almost anything, yet characters ignore opportunities to do stuff we have seen them do before, the stakes dissolve. No more stories there.

Weirdly, Trek has accidentally grown into a relatively coherent big franchise setting, despite all of its paradoxes and contradictions. Maybe it benefitted from a head start on fan overthinking. But I do wish they would tighten things up a little further.

F’rinstance, I love the Trek rule that ships’ shields interfere with transporters. It both prevents story-breaking situations in which our heroes can too easily run away from trouble. It creates interesting problems forcing characters to make tough decisions: do we rescue crew on the planet’s surface, or prioritize protecting the ship up in orbit? I cringe every time a story bends that rule; it erodes the benefit of an ongoing setting.

I think part of why people talk about reviving Buffy The Vampire Slayer without Whedon is how it hit that sweet spot roughly as rigorous as Trek, which enables telling a lot of different stories.

Still, I’m puzzled that our ecosystem of major shared settings does not include at least one with greater rigor, where stories can leverage stuff the audience already knows about the world to set complex stakes efficiently.

Consider the early Thor: Ragnarok teaser:

The audience had a few Thor appearances as background teaching us that Mjolnir is immensely powerful, so when I was in a movie theater full of people seeing Hela break it, it killed with an impact which otherwise would have taken the whole first act of a movie to establish.

Where is our setting built to enable a lot of that?