Unsound Methods

What We Lose When We Lose Chuck

2012-01-26T15:50:00.010-07:00

Chuck is coming to a final end. In the largest sense, big deal—I’ve dealt with far more painful losses lately. In the TV sense, big deal—Chuck had one exceptional season, and thereafter was simply fun and pretty good. Furthermore, it was never a show that had very certain footing. It would get picked up for about half a season, with no promise of any more. So it was written with that in mind, with everything resolving in episode 13 or so, only to get picked up for the rest of the season, at which point the crew had to string together what they could into an ending, a second one, no less. At times, it was sloppy in narrative, and cheap in appearance and execution (I was particularly sensitive to some dreadful ADR), but it was always pretty fun. Still, this isn’t a magnificent culmination on the order of The Wire ending, nor the close of a cultural era on the order of Lost, nor a tragedy on the order of Farscape. Chuck is ending. Oh well.

But it’s not like it goes away unmourned. There are plenty of things about Chuck that feel special or unique beyond a bunch of characters I like to see running around, and TV will be a poorer place when it goes, and as it does, it seems like a good time to highlight and remember them.

Style—The visual patois of Chuck is distinct from anything I’ve noticed on broadcast TV. It’s very fluid, sometimes solid and grounded, sometimes steadicamed and nervous, sometimes evoking Koyaanisqatsi, but mostly, it has a style that’s not particularly easy to nail down. Extreme POVs, actors staring directly into the camera, or an object of focus directly before the camera, freeze-frames, cut-aways, sweep transitions, captions, Chuck uses just enough stylistic flourish to feel silly, but not so much it drowns. Honestly, it seems most like a live-action cartoon.

This is primarily fitting for the show’s universe, where the cartoonishly extraordinary clashes with the cartoonishly mundane in a sly parody of both spy thrillers and 21^st century strip mall aesthetic, where our nation’s deadliest secret agents are forced into our tackiest retailers. The gleaming, ultra-tech spy world lurks beneath the garish, tacky retail world, but the line isn’t terribly distinct. Cool white, black, and steel dominate in spy land, where plain swaths of green and beige dominate retail, but there’s a definite bleed, best seen in John Casey, a ruthless monolith constrained into a cheap golf shirt and Dockers.

The cartoon and contrast style also serves, at least early on, as an expression of Chuck’s jaundiced view of the world—when we meet him, his life seems stuck, and nothing is quite real, and his psychology expresses itself in the show’s style, which is pretty rare on TV. And that expression leads us straight to-

Shameless Self-Awareness—There is a scene, early in season 2, that has Sarah entering the Buy More, and even more than usual, we’re hilariously pulled into Chuck’s mind space:

It’s a funny sequence that says a lot about Chuck, and anyone who’s been infatuated with someone glorious and unattainable can sympathize with. The Buy More Strut sequence became a beloved tradition, with nearly every character getting one over the years. Also, it was immature and tawdry, and the show was clearly aware of that, just like they were aware of what it had in Yvonne Strahovski—an actress who could play the ruthless professional and wounded soul at the same time, looked credible in a wild melee, was funny being silly and funny being terrifying, wasn’t dwarfed by her freakishly tall co-stars, and also happened to be a woman of nigh impossible beauty. Well, why not exploit that? So Chuck did. If there was a chance to put Sarah or a guest star in a sleazy spy staple—cat suits, bikinis, high slit dresses, and once a belly dancer costume—Chuck was going to take it, and shoot it long, and in slow motion.

Exploitation is nothing new to TV, and even if it’s not really a good thing, it’s an understandable thing. We all need to feed our reptile brains on occasion. Now, though, I’ll be honest, I find a lot of the exploitive stuff I’ve run across is pretty alarming. I think you all know I can’t credibly be called weak of stomach. My tastes run pretty dark. Titillation on too many shows gets hidden, and wrapped up in ugliness—they’re viciously exploitive, with lab techs prodding the raped corpses of underwear models, dumped by serial killers in PG-13 versions of BSDM clubs. They’re not fun enough to be sexy, and they trivialize the themes they pretend to deal with. “Fukkit,” says Chuck, “enjoy this simple bit of cheesecake.” I admire the honesty, and the cheesecake. And if you were into beef, Chuck sometimes had that, too.

I admit I’m surprised by just how much I admire that honesty. To wit: when Chuck’s future was uncertain, fans initiated one of the simplest and most successful campaigns to save it in the history of such campaigns—they frequented the advertisers, and wrote them explaining why, until one, Subway, effectively saved the show in exchange for some integrated advertising.

Now, again, this isn’t nothing so strange, lots of shows have to do this sort of thing, and it nearly always sets my teeth on edge. Characters pause to spew a new car’s features as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, or the show winks and tries to play like it’s too cool. Chuck, again, doesn’t play coy, or cool. The over-the-top reverence on display for Subway—sandwiches passed like delicate swords, characters intoning fixings like catechism, choirs trilling the whole time—there’s no winking, just a brazen plea. So brazen, it becomes hilarious. You have to respect it.

Captain Awesome—It’s kind of shocking how beloved a character Devon turned out to be. Among the archetypes the characters started as (Hapless Protagonist, Dream Girl, Best Friend, Caring Sister), Devon “Captain Awesome” Woodcombe would have been the easiest to hate. Chuck's sister’s fiancé, he was Chuck’s contrast, the perfect guy, though the appellation (short-hand for “Giant Douche”) suggested otherwise—we just had to wait to see how otherwise. But that never happened. Awesome, it turned out, utterly deserved the name Awesome, which in turn became one of the show’s best jokes. How often are we asked to laugh at a character’s strengths rather than their failings?

There are a lot of tricks, on both a writing and performance level, that went into Awesome’s awesomeness. He was never written or played as particularly smug or judgemental, rather his beatific grace suggested he sincerely believed his magnificence could be achieved quite easily by others. Early on, he felt most sympathetic towards Chuck, seeming to recognize…well, something we’ll get to later. Applications of Awesome’s awesomeness ran the gamut from comforting to unexpected. His two tragic flaws, for example, are also predicated on his splendiforousness—he’s such a perfect man he can’t bear to lie to Ellie (thus he is awful at keeping Chuck’s secrets once learned), and to the nefarious interests looking from the outside for the spy, Awesome was the obvious choice. It’s a strange way to spin a character, but it worked.

Lester, Jeff, Big Mike, their ends are tragic, but there are plenty of Amoral Idiots, Druggie Space Heads, and Blustery Bosses to imperfectly fill the void. But what could fill the void left by Captain Awesome? What could? He’s like a unicorn. There’s simply no substitute.

Music—Music, such a key component of the cinematic experience, often feels like an afterthought on TV, limited in use and variety. At worst, music is just there to lazily establish the past: “It’s 1969! How can you tell? Jefferson Airplane is playing constantly!” There are oddballs—Breaking Bad loves an ironic montage—but most of the time, it’s either underpinning a scene, or the spine of a montage, fine and effective uses both, unless we're talking some insanity like Glee. Licensing music is a tricky endeavor, too. Often there’s some cross-promotion involved, and, of course, a show-runners tastes.

Chuck stands out to me in the variety, prominence, ubiquity, and uses of music. Chuck the character is a big music geek after all, and if the show visually reflects his worldview, it should auditorially as well. There’s a care in the way the show deploys a song, even when it is, as is common, underpinning an emotional scene. Note, (when you follow the link, alas, embedding disabled) in the scene below, the fade transitions at the start, the rapid edits matching the crescendo bridge near the end: http://youtu.be/TAaMkhYXVaU

Chuck almost seems as if he’s making a music video of his life, an impulse that members in my life and armed with the ability to summon them at will, should recognize instantly. Maybe that’s over-reaching, but it sure seems the show, like its protagonist, always has a song that was unexpected, and yet somehow perfect for the mood or moods at hand, ready to be deployed to lovely effect: www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46EZEXKSYA

Chuck’s use of music gave the show a cinematic touch, and not just in the artistry of a given sequence. It sometimes was strung throughout an episode to create symmetry, contrast, or unity, give a character an emotional throughline, or maybe just tell a great joke, or maybe all of the above. Consider this bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEGOqWrm6Mg

The song, a worthy strutting song, is “Dropped” by Phantom Planet, and it returns two more times over the course of the episode, both times when Chuck has been remarkably clever. And given the name to boot, I hope you can guess what the bad guy does to Chuck at the end.

And on occasion, it was strictly about kicking some fucking ass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Bdsokt4b8

But for all my analytics, there are still music beats on Chuck that delight even as they confound. What is going on here? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOhb0bS3lOc

Yes, that is a cover of Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory”, prime cut from the Young Guns II soundtrack, about as far from a definition of “cool” as anyone could hope to achieve (though Mac and Charlie on It’s Always Sunny are fond of it). The song’s environmental source, the video featuring Jeffster at their deluded finest, certainly speaks to ironic usage, with its overwrought, overblown, silly inauthenticity. But in the actual scene, the stakes have never been higher—and that’s not a glib assessment. It’s is the climax of the 3^rd season finale. The bad guy, Shaw, has been foiled and is on a kamikaze run, rigging the Buy More to explode. He’s killed Chuck’s dad, and has reason to kill Sarah, which he tried to do before. Furthermore, Chuck’s abilities are killing him. So, legitimately, the stakes are really, really high, and yet “Blaze of Glory”. Irony? Or not? Or perhaps both at the same time? Perhaps an acknowledgement that it’s lame, but seemed awesome when we were eleven? Hard to say, but it wasn’t the first time the show spun a joke of a song into genius: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNiIwHB60Mg

Now, I just shamelessly post a few favorite clips:

Such as Chuck and Casey quitting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nuJPm9_Cog

More ass kicking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndUl0typ5tc

Still more ass kicking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmO8E470LlE

And this quintessential sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvYKhAvomPc

Sympathy—We’re a decade into geek cultural dominance, an era when fantasy trilogies and superhero adaptations tentpole our summers. And yet they remain an easy, and often contemptuous punchline. Some call certain programs that purport to be about the nerds and the like “Geek Minstrel Shows”. That’s certainly not to imply equivalent oppression, but it does get the point across—a lazy reference about Star Wars, pause to laugh at the freaks. Those nerds sure do love to obsess about their Stars, be they Wars or Trek, don’t they?

On such a show, I can easily imagine Captain Awesome being driven down the obvious path—as the sneering bully who ruthlessly mocks our weird hero and the weird things he does, booed and hissed by the audience for refusing to let that fascinating weirdo do his weirdness in peace. But like I said, Captain Awesome seemed most sympathetic to Chuck (letting hyper-violent murder-machine Casey handle the scorn)—perhaps a touch condescending at times, but always ready with good advice, and seeing Chuck’s love of video games and sci-fi movies as important, valuable and worthy of respect (naturally, because he’s so Awesome).

Chuck understood and sympathized with geek obsessions, and the comforting value of comics and video games and nerdy ephemera. It recognized the damage often at the heart of the geek experience. The frustration with a world that seems steadfastly committed to remaining unfair, the dispiriting sense of being alone while surrounded by smiling faces, the self-loathing of watching others so effortlessly do what seems impossible, and the alienation of struggling to communicate and failing to be known. Understanding this, the show never laughed at its nerds and geeks because they were nerds and geeks, and at the same time it didn't approach these themes with any bitterness--just a simple acknowledgement that these pains were as real as love of Star Wars. Maybe, Chuck often seemed to say, the problem really is everyone else, but it isn't insurmountable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyW_63_R-o4

I’ll miss that when it’s gone.

The Right and the Wrong Guy for the Job

2011-11-01T00:11:00.001-06:00

Sometimes, going through my Netflix queue is like travelling back in time. I usually can’t pinpoint actual events or anything, but I can see clumps of movies I added when I was feeling up, feeling down, feeling unwisely nostalgic, in the mood for challenging things, in the mood for utter trash, times when I was catching up on great 2007 films I missed, and so on. Sometimes, though, I can pinpoint something more specific—I’m obviously getting to a part of my queue built while I was playing Red Dead Redemption, because there is a whole lot of Sergio Leone in the weeks ahead. Right now, though, I’m clearly in the spot made when director David O. Russell was going to be making a movie out of Uncharted, my most treasured of current games. I’d never seen a Russell film, which isn’t too surprising as he hasn’t made many, so I was curious to see what made him the first choice.

The first film to arrive was 1999’s Three Kings, which instantly made the case that Russell was perfect to adapt Uncharted, and wholly unsuited to such an endeavor. How so? Let’s see.

The Uncharted games are special creatures, deeply mining a genre vein too often ignored by games these days—rollicking treasure hunts that span the globe. Our protagonist is Nathan Drake, treasure hunter and sometime thief, who has a professor’s command of history, a rogue’s charm, a hero’s guts, and an everyman’s exasperation and vulnerability but a superhero’s endurance, which he uses to track down lost relics of antiquity, hopefully before the bad guys get there first. So, clearly there’s a very specific cinematic touchstone here. How specific? Well:

Yes, while Aliens remains the touchstone du jour of games, Uncharted chose Indiana Jones. Nate is very much a modern take on the Indy mold—he’s more self-aware and quippy, and much more marginalized and flawed, frequently with very dubious motives that lead to nasty consequences. But at heart, he remains the archetypal good guy, a ne’er-do-well that can’t keep himself from doing well when there’s real danger, usually getting in way over his head in the process. And getting in over his head usually results in something spectacular—if he happens to be in or around a vehicle at the time, look out. Indy would be proud. An Uncharted story creates the rhythms and characters of classic action-adventure in its own style, and does it with aplomb. Its characters are both stock, and distinctive, familiar and immensely memorable, and characterized with subtlety. The games are remarkably well written in two senses—the remarkably obvious way it gets the most credit for, in that the characters are witty and fun as they bounce lines off each other with screwball zeal, while simultaneously sounding like real human beings, but also the less acknowledged subtlety in characterization and the creation of history, allowing rhythms and acting moments to take the place of relationship exposition.

We don’t, for example, know precisely how Nate and pirate dirtball Eddy know each other, but their casually testy back-and-forth speaks to some antagonistic, but not adversarial history, though it’s never made clear what did or didn’t happen between them, and their obviously contrasting personalities make it such that we don’t particularly need to know, the implication alone is enough to create a history that makes Nate’s confrontations with Eddy richer. The archetypal nature of the roles the characters occupy also plays a part—they fit a structure savvy movie hounds understand, the Hero and the Mercenary Goon, the writing just has to put up the drapes and arrange the furniture, the sort of decorating few games take the effort to do. Sully is the Mentor, Elena is the Action Girl Friday, Chloe is the Sultry Thief, Tenzen is the Local Badass, Harry is the Weasel, Roman the Nasty Patrician, Navarro the Rival, Lazarevic the Evil General, they’re characters you know, made great through the details.

Contrarians like to counter that they’re only great in the game medium, on film, they’d be less so. I disagree. For one, we should consider just how depressingly far blockbuster movie making has fallen lately, too often going for a bigger splash rather than a smaller one involving a character we care about. For another, and even more sadly, Uncharted’s cinematic inspirations are not the sorts of action movies that get made any more, in this, the age of repackaged toy lines and comic book franchise starters. It’s ironic to think that a video game adaptation could count as a breath of fresh human air, but it would.

So, why did Three Kings make such a strong case that director David O. Russell could have brought Nate and friends onto ye olde silver screen?

Firstly, and most importantly, the action sequences in Three Kings are dynamic, lucid, and handled with flair and classicism. The film predates The Matrix and the Bourne movies, but Russell doesn’t seem the type who’d be much interested in aping the style of either. As important as character is to Uncharted, it is an action movie at heart. But, character is important, and Russell shows an affinity there as well—indeed, Three Kings is remarkable for being an action movie largely driven by character.

It’s also a film with a distinct edge and playfulness, often very funny, and often very funny in how it enjoys the bad behavior of its characters. There’s a macabre wit, first seen when Mark Wahlberg asks “We shooting people today or what?”, then promptly plunking a single round into a man when he gets his answer. It’s an atmosphere of reckless immaturity that’s undeniably fun, but very suspect. The characters of Three Kings are, initially, boys behaving badly as George Clooney concocts the heist scam and leads them off into the desert, where Ice Cube tosses grenades taped to plastic footballs from the back of their Humvee. While this all is much darker and more pointed than an Uncharted should be, there are still elements that ought be present in an adaptation. Indeed, while Clooney and Co. start out thoughtless, reckless and selfish, they find themselves inexorably drawn to intervene for the sake of good, and are driven to sacrifice their lives and freedom for the sake of the innocent. There is a similar through-line in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves—each step the villains take is only managed by exploiting one Nate takes first, until suddenly Nate’s plans for a big payday have left a peaceful Tibetan village in the crossfire, and his fundamental decency compels him to make things right.

But as much as Three Kings made the case that Russell was perfect, as I said at the outset, it simultaneously made the case that he was absolutely not perfect. See, suffused throughout Three Kings is the unmistakable mark of a restless auteur. Color, film stock, montage, cutaways, animated sequences, whip-pans, and, to top it all off, it’s a film where Russell has something he wants to say, pointedly and particularly about American military adventurism (and it says something that would have been very prescient on September 12^th 2001, though the message is somewhat old-hat by now)—Russell doesn’t seem like the sort who’d be content with the crafting of art, when he can be crafting Art. His sparse IMDB listing attests to this.

Fact is, Three Kings could have been an Uncharted adaptation without changing a whole lot—call it Uncharted: Nate Begins. The chronology is obviously way off, but it’s easy to imagine Nate as some intern interpreter or consultant, George Clooney’s role grafted to Sully, with Nate getting wrapped up in the scheme and learning hard lessons about the legit world when it all falls apart. There’s little on display in Russell’s work in Three Kings to indicate he’d have any interest in revisiting the same sort of material.

This last bit turned out to be true. Not long after being attached to Uncharted, Russell began sharing his vision. The original game, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, had a simple and direct adventure plot: Nate, Elena, and Sully pursue El Dorado, following clues left by Sir Francis Drake, and are led to a tropical island, home of an abandoned Spanish colony, a secret Nazi naval station, and far darker mysteries, all the while being in turn pursued by Gabriel Roman and his hired goons, pirate Eddy Raja, and shady rival archeologist Atoq Navarro. Russell’s treatment apparently involved Nate as a member of a family of vigilante antiquities investigators, with two newly invented uncles played by Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci. And he’d be played by Mark Wahlberg—an actor who’s played funny, but only funny in relation to his intensity, and who’s never been all that good at carrying a lead role. Tellingly, my reaction was that this sounded like a awesome batch of ideas, but it also sounded like Uncharted not at all. But, temperamental sort that he is, Russell left the project soon after.

So is there someone who I think might be a good idea to helm Nate through a movie? Much of the problem is, like I said before, movies aren’t made in this style all too often anymore, but based on a recent episode of “How Did This Get Made?”, I’ve become enamored with the idea of Lexi Alexander, director of the justly and unjustly maligned Punisher: War Zone. Obviously, the grim brutality of Punisher’s world is a far cry from the gleeful mayhem of Nate’s, but Alexander showed, again, a keen and clear eye for action, a suitably askew sense of what’s funny, an intense understanding of what’s suitable for the world she’s filming, an interesting visual sense, a rather heartening sense of obligation to do right by the original fans first and foremost, and, as confessed on HDTGM, a desire to be a badass woman action director, so that Kathryn Bigelow is no longer the only name cited. It took a woman, Amy Hening, to create Nate and bring his sort of cinematic rollercoaster to games, maybe another can bring them back to movies.

It’s That Sort of Day: Ode to My Favorite Companion

2011-10-21T19:16:00.002-06:00

The danger in sharing an ongoing story is the risk that you’ll have to put an asterisk on your assessments. Most of You’ll Love This covered shows that were done for this reason—they could be definitive, which was reassuring, because invariably quality goes down over time. Settings become strained, stories get repeated, tricks lose their effectiveness, characters wear out their welcome. Right around 4 years, it seems, shows would be well served to start thinking about how to close things out, while the sense of freshness is still a recent memory, before this inevitable entropy infects the shows bones. For a show to enter my favorite phase in its 5^th (or, depending, 47^th) year? Why only the most remarkable man in the universe could accomplish such a feat!

I covered Doctor Who at the end of Series 4, including the specials that completed the journey of the much beloved Tenth Doctor, which seemed like a pretty good point to take stock. Both a new show-runner was being put in charge, and a new actor would assume the role of the Eleventh Doctor—chances were, it’d be a whole new show. Miraculously, it turned from a show I enjoyed into a show I adored. Retro camp got dialed down in favor of something closer to Henson-esque whimsy, serialization increased, plots increasingly became intricate time riddles, character bits and witty jokes abounded. It was a show that featured a more nuanced, interesting and often funny take on the Doctor (who now had an absolutely killer musical cue), accompanied by my absolute favorite companion. With the recent end of series 6, it seems that companion is leaving the stage. If that’s the case, I’m taking the chance to extol the virtues of the Doctor’s greatest companion: the Pond-Williamses. Unfair to call two characters one companion? Too bad!

Modern companions have largely riffed on Rose, the first companion of the revamped era, and Amy Pond, in that respect, isn’t much different, putting the prickly, damaged inner-life of the Rose-contrasting Donna into a young, pretty, infatuated Rose package. But she’s also very much a Wendy Darling for the 21^st

century—appropriate, given the storybook and fairy tale tenor of the new series. A victim of time-travel wackiness, Amelia first encountered the Doctor as a lonely 8-year-old in crisis one night. He promises to return in 5 minutes, only to actually return 12 years later—an interim that saw Amelia take to calling herself Amy (less fairy tale) and endure years of therapy to convince herself he was just the imaginary friend of an overly active mind—arriving the night before a wedding she doubts she’s ready to go through with. Then she floats freely in space still wearing her nightgown, in case you missed the point.

On her own, Amy Pond would have been a strong contender for my favorite companion (indeed, “The Beast Below”, “The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone” are some of the show’s best episodes in my estimation). She’s both a free-wheeling flirty fun sexy space adventuress, and a willful, fascinatingly troubled presence on her own journey, unafraid to call out the Doctor on his bad behavior and unwilling to play by his rules without question, once trapping him with a car door and his own tie until her questions were answered, plotting to remove him from a mystery that would lead to an impossibly destructive choice, and openly telling him that she couldn’t trust him because he always lies (“If I always told the truth, I wouldn’t have to ask you to trust me.”).

But Amy didn’t come alone--eventually, fiancé Rory joined her. Rory is also very much a reaction to Rose, in this case Rose’s own boyfriend Mickey. I always felt bad for Mickey. At the end of the revamped show’s first episode, Rose thanks him before running off with the Doctor. What for? “Exactly,” she says. Ouch. I was rather shocked they brought the character back, but they did, however the character never quite recovered from that initial characterization—Rose’s boyfriend by virtue of being the best option, a placeholder until the Doctor could swoop into her life, leaving Mickey the Idiot (so dubbed by the Doctor) to bumble along behind.

And Rory at first seems cast from exactly the same mold, though he seems, at least, to realize how badly he’s about to be Zaphoded. He does, however, show some early virtues, gathering all the pieces of the puzzle in Series 5’s inaugural episode, even though the picture didn’t make sense. Brought along on later adventures, Rory often seemed reticent when it came to danger, but that what quickly became apparent was that his reticence only related to others—Rory was more than willing to throw himself into harm’s way, he just wanted to keep everyone else out of it, an instinct that led to him sword fighting with a broom, getting killed a time or two, and challenging the Doctor’s attitudes and behavior. Rory proved himself clever and outwardly exasperated but inwardly cool-headed—strangely, an everyman-of-action—and someone the Doctor valued and could rely upon. Quickly, it became apparent that Rory was never a Mickey (after all, in that first episode Amy is not with fellow Leadworth resident Handsome Jeff), he and Amy are together for specific reasons. They just both needed to figure out what they were.

This makes Amy and Rory quite distinct from previous companions, and I’ll just say frankly and flatly how. Their journey isn’t about proving they can be effective sci-fi sidekicks, but effective adults, which they discover through sci-fi adventures. Can Amy deal with her past traumas and become the awesome woman she’s clearly supposed to be? Can Rory overcome his self-doubt and see that he didn’t just luck his way into the woman of his dreams? These are much more resonant dangers than cyberman death-rays—and just our luck, here we get both!

But that’s all macro-level sort of stuff, on a micro-level, Amy and Rory were my favorites for simply being well written individually, together, and with the Doctor, an overload of chemistry, character, and interplay to toy with. There was the aforementioned car door interrogation, and the broom fight, but there was also Amy’s simple standard for what constitutes reality, and Rory being slapped for being a little too imaginative regarding time travel’s potential, and their joint plea that if their room is going to be redecorated, could it please get rid of the bunk beds?

If Series 6 is the end of Rory and Amy’s journey, they will have suffered some pretty deep losses, but will have also proven themselves ready and able to handle the rest of their lives together. As great as they were, I’d like it if they could stay there. Doctor Who survived cancellation and a decade and a half of non-existence, it can survive moving on from my favorite companions, too. Who knows, maybe even more favorites are yet to come.

But if we checked in with the Pond-Williamses every so often, I wouldn’t complain.

Case for Revision: Breaking Bad

2011-09-23T19:49:00.003-06:00

Some months back, right as I was finishing up Weeds, another tale of middle-class sensibilities colliding with the drug world came across my path: Breaking Bad, which I found so superior to Weeds, I instantly made it the counter-case with only a little more than a season under my belt. Now, with season 4 coming to a head, and a key role Breaking Bad will play in another piece I am preparing, it seemed right to revisit the nausea of Walter White, and give it the full treatment.

Breaking Bad gets called a Drama—and for sure, it looks like one most of the time—but its true core is black comedy. The blackest, in fact, in the tradition of those great comic minds Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, and the source of its comedy is the most primal human experience: the fact that we are going to die. Walter White, brilliant chemist, high school teacher, and late-middle-aged sad sack, learns that he has lung cancer, a death sentence that shocks him out of the stupor of his existence and prompts him to take bold action to cope with this realization. But as Sartre warned, he takes action too recklessly, too extreme, and the whole time, the joke is on Walter. His death sentence was being born.
Desperate to provide for his family before he dies, Walter turns his genius towards cooking the greatest meth the world has ever seen, a course that, in true existentialist fashion, pushes him to the extremes of morality and action, putting him in perpetual danger (but then, when aren’t we in danger?), bringing former-student and innocuous scumbag Jesse Pinkman in tow. At the same time, it emboldens Walt, gives him a sense of power, and animates him with the will and courage to survive. He could pull away, but doesn’t, and unlike many of his TV criminal peers, he isn’t drawn back by peer pressure, inability to cope with the straight life, or even truly greed. Cooking meth gives Walt satisfaction his deadening career and wheel-spinning home maintenance don’t. It’s just too bad that it took cancer to get him to find it in such a repugnant avenue.

That may not sound very comic, but the jokes, as I said, black jokes at the expense of the absurdity of existence, particularly the one Walt and Jesse have built for themselves, tinged with darkness and desperation. The show laughs, rather than crying—and, of course, sometimes, crying is the only choice.

Much of this sense of humor gets carried on the back of the shows sense of playfulness. Breaking Bad is, perhaps, the most stylistically interesting show still around—whether it’s having bleak fun with a well composed montage set to an inappropriate tune, investing a minute into watching the methodical crafting of the saddest PB&J ever, creating an inexplicable and alien sense of dread with an eerie cold open, lashing the camera to a shovel, or making an authentic looking narcocorrido video to signal the cartels’ growing awareness of Walt.

The show is equally adept at exploiting its Albuquerque setting in ways that feel authentic—meth is a big problem out here in the West, after all. With high-desert vistas, a Wild West heritage, border concerns, and suburban strip mall housing boom inauthenticity (how ironic), the city lets the show create a universe where a drug kingpin owns a string of fast food chicken joints, but the best deals are done outside The Gap.

All of which I say to bring the artfulness of Breaking Bad into focus. It’s not simply well-shot, well-acted, and thematically rich, but well-written in a very classical sense, and in a way shows rarely are, giving objects, images, characters, and moments the weight of symbol and metaphor. Early, Jesse is beaten to near death with a bag of money—the American experience rendered so simply, it’s stunning it took someone this long to use it. And where other shows might inflict a physical punishment on a protagonist for their hubris, the cosmos sends a fiery cataclysmic indictment that the entire city can see, but only Walt can recognize, and it’s a punishment far more terrible than the foreshadowing leads you to expect.

Or consider the motif of shorn heads. Late in the first season, ravaged by chemo, Walt shaves his head, an act that seems united to his grappling with death and moral ambiguity. Slowly but surely, a succession of bald (or close cropped) characters appear in Walt’s world, until he seems surrounded by shadow forms. Self-annihilation, macho bluster, gruesome nihilism, impotent rage, implacable drive to destruction, ice-cold mastery, each of these baldies reflect and comment on Walt’s own confrontation with mortality—but can he take the right insights from them? Certainly, he could stand to listen more closely to the example imparted by Mike: clarity of action.

Willy-nilly murder? Well, that’s not the best advice, but Mike is right. Life is too short to half-ass—it has to be grabbed, but grabbed wisely. You’re not in danger when you are in a shoot out, or at the mercy of a lethal drug lord, or even when you’re diagnosed with cancer, you’re in danger the moment you’re born. That’s what’s so funny! Get it?

Two Lamentations

2011-09-10T03:38:00.007-06:00

Though the pushback is fierce every time you say so, misogyny in one form or another is deeply ingrained in the culture of nerds, and has been for a long, long time, particularly when it comes to fantasy. This is, of course, rooted deeply in the genre’s origins—not so much the seminal theme-establishing works of Wells, or the refining intricate world-building of Tolkien and Azimov (though certainly you can see forms of misogyny there to). No, I’m talking about the very obvious shapes that came more from the proto-genre’s dark, adolescent id—pulp magazine stories, the best of which survives in the stories of Robert E. Howard, and the art which his creation, Conan the Barbarian, inspired, particularly the dynamic and lurid work of Frank Frazetta. Frazetta’s work is as undeniably great and influential as it is problematic, and as nerds become bigger tent, there’s more and more of a push to get past his diaphanous slave rags and chainmail bikinis, and into things a woman on a battlefield is more likely to wear, found ‘round the internets in places like the Flickr, “Women in Reasonable Armor”. It’s also an undeniably good push, but I wish it felt, to me, an untarnished one, instead of one tinged with different misogynistic undercurrents.

Let’s, for a moment, consider the work of Mr. Frazetta, whose paperback cover illustrations set not only the image and aesthetics of Conan, Tarzan, and John Carter, but the image and aesthetics of fantasy art. His work was perfectly suited to the pulp stories he was selling—wild, unrestrained, over the top, imaginative, dynamic, alien, and loaded with claws, fangs, steel, muscles and flesh, like Mako they tell of the days of high adventure. As a result, Frazetta has loomed over every D&D game played since the 70s, more so than even Tolkien, for with those dice in hand, what is best in life isn’t an intricate exploration of language and myth, but to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Yes, Frazetta’s work is, to put it generously, macho. Consider the Conan cover here:

Whether in repose at Conan’s feet, being shielded from a slavering beast, or stabbing the beast themselves, this is pretty standard attire for women in Frazetta’s work, and as forceful and magnetic as that work is, it had an influence on the way women in fantasy art were portrayed in general—scantily clad, an aesthetic best exemplified by Red Sonja, originally a side character in Conan comics, and her infamous scale bikini.

As an aside, I bet someone thinks here is when I play what, for many, is the trump card in this sort of study: “Conan, in the work above, wears as little as the girl.” I won’t, though. It’s the most obvious counter to criticisms levied against portrayals of women, so it comes up often. But it’s (how ironic) a very superficial counter—one that bleaches away context, intent, subtext, and audience. Conan, ripped and chiseled, evokes the Charles Atlas ads that no doubt accompanied many of his stories back in the day. He’s a figure of aspiration and escape—he is, to the awkward, skinny adolescent boys picking up that copy of Weird Tales, an idealized proxy. None dare wedgie Conan the Destroyer! The girl (for, indeed, that is her identity here), however, is clearly an object in two senses, there for those same boys to lust after, but also there as a component of Conan’s identity—Conan, invincible slayer of foes, and possessor of women.

Back to the chain bikinis. Though still very male-dominated, nerd culture’s tent has grown since the 70’s heyday of Frazetta. Increasingly, both genders want to crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their life-partners. Women want their proxy representations to be tasteful, men bristle at the arrested development image of the culture, and both delight in the most sacrosanct of nerd traditions—being an expert on things we have no expertise in. Here, we’re experts in the combat of ancient days, for which we’d all agree Red Sonja’s attire is ill-suited, defensively. Thus, we have great repositories like “Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor”:

This particular Tumblr got linked out into the morass of the internet at large recently. And it was in the ensuing comment sections and reaction posts that my ambivalence started. Everyone was positive. Everyone understood the need for such a Tumblr. But for my tastes, far too many reactions boiled down to this cartoon (found on the Tumblr, and drawn by a woman, but frequently reposted to much acclaim):

Now, for all the talk about the expanding demographics of nerd culture, as I said, it remains very male-dominated, particularly following on the internet. And I’m not particularly comfortable with a bunch of dudes cheering the notion of punishing a woman for dressing inappropriately—at best, it’s awkward, worst is speaks to a harsh Puritanical streak. How Puritanical? A few proclaimed something like this is ridiculous:

Why? Boobs. The breastplate is weak, having two booby pockets rather than a single boob pouch, and is therefore unrealistic (we can leave aside the irony of demanding realism in our portraits of elf women butchering goblins, because that’s a different can of worms). While the text of the comment says “To be realistic, the breastplate should be one solid flat piece, for structural soundness” the subtext seems to be saying “To be realistic, no female traits should be apparent.” Women, the subtext says, are weak, and to be taken seriously should hide their gender as much as they can. This is, luckily, is not the attitude of Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor (which does have many works of women in “realistic breastplates”), but it does seem to be the attitude of an alarming number of guys out there who think themselves progressive. Women characters who don't appear to be women rather defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

I could be totally off there, but I’m not off with this: The similar brouhaha over Commander Shepard’s hair was stupid.

Commander Shepard, seen above in dude form, if you aren’t aware, is the customizable protagonist of Bioware’s Mass Effect series. In a few months, Shepard will be seen in Mass Effect 3, defending the entire galaxy against utter destruction, heralded by an invading horde of relentless, ageless, super-intelligent sentient ships, who emerge from the dead space beyond the Milky Way to enact their genocidal prerogative every few million years. Yes, Shepard is a bad-ass supreme. Players, in taking control of this titan, can set Shepard’s appearance, including gender. Either way, the result is the same—Shepard, a gun-toting force as unrelenting as gravity, intent on saving our asses whether we want it or not.

Players love Shepard, and the character’s mutability plays a key role in that love—often, players refer to “my Shepard”. In the game’s marketing, however, the default dude Shepard (based on a Dutch model, apparently) has been dominant, but, again, with Mass Effect 3 on the horizon, the marketeers elected to use lady Shepard more. Lady Shepard had no model to be based upon—her red-haired default was made with the game’s character creator—so no doubt just to market more, an election of Facebook determined what form lady Shep would take in that marketing:

Shepard 5 won. Cue outrage.

I understand parts of the outrage. Like I said, many speak of Shepard as “theirs”, and for many, none of the options were theirs (they were apparently all based on designs from ME’s sizable mod community). “The masses,” it was said “made the superficial choice their reptile brains compelled them to make, and they chose the sorority girl, the Barbie, the vacuous bimbo.”

I don’t think I need to point out the irony here, but I will all the same. All of these Shepards, and many, many more, will be saving the same galaxy, shouting the same orders, leading the same charges, and kicking the same mercenary sleaze balls out of the same windows. Shepard 5 is a Barbie, a sorority girl, a vacuous bimbo by simple virtue of her blonde hair. They’re all action-heroine pretty. They all have the same taut and athletic body-type. They all have count them one, two, three weapons. They all are encased in armor forged of future-alloys and raw death. They all bear the same grimly resolved countenance, unfazed by the burning continent in the background. In some eyes, Shepard 5 loses credibility depending on her hair color.

The cruelest irony is that the attitude seems rooted in outmoded assumptions about modern culture’s standard of beauty, and clichés that nerd culture has played no small part in subverting. Maybe it’s just my perception of things, but we still have our unreasonable beauty ideals, and hair color hardly seems on the chart anymore. Simultaneously, it disregards figures that have played no small part in shaping modern nerd culture, and thus played no small part in making it more inclusive. What do Buffy, Veronica Mars, Sarah Walker, and (less so for me, but for plenty) Starbuck have in common? I wouldn’t dare call any of them vacuous.

Well, the advertising version of Lady Shepard doesn’t have to worry about being counted among that number. Bioware had another vote, this time to determine hair color, and red won. Bullet, dodged. No longer vacuousness, the message is clear: “I just finished shooting my way through Hell, gutting you will not be a big deal.”

Hey, wait a second. Are there two breasts in that armor?

A Serious Resolution

2011-07-14T11:47:00.001-06:00

The latest book club reading was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—a challenging and unconventional novel to say the least. It had no chapters, little punctuation, and much of the backstory left to intimation and impression, it’s stylistically daring, and fertile for discussion. How does it factor into the survivalist post-apocalypse genre? What is the effect of the spare punctuation? What happened to put the world in its state (for the record, we had three options: nuclear bomb, meteor, and sudden, violent climate change)? It was a robust and lively chat.

It occurred to me that anyone presuming to write a serious critical essay detailing how The Road didn’t work because it wasn’t punctuated properly and wasn’t divided into chapters would be roundly laughed off any legit publication. And rightly so—high level criticism isn’t about finding fault, and everyone knows it. Things are different for game people, though. Obviously, most could care less to see any sort of in depth analysis of a game, but there are some who yearn for “serious writing” about games, and I’m one of them. I worry, though, because while these peers demand serious criticism, they don’t seem to know what that actually is.

Here’s how I’ve seen it go down. A game is released, and press and players alike adore it. Players are enthusiastic, and review scores are through the roof. “Universal Acclaim” says Metacritic. But it isn’t universal, for somewhere there is a malcontent, and where everyone sees genius, they see error. “It’s simply not as good as everyone says,” they insist, but who is reflecting that view, when the game rests comfortably with a score of 96 averaged from 105 reviews, and the lowest is an 80? Sometimes, this prompts them to ask “Where is the serious writing about games?” You know, the kind that’s willing to dig deep and tell it like it is! The kind that doesn’t buy into the hype, the kind that’s objective and not biased, the kind that will perceive, as I have, that this thing everyone loves is overrated! The kind that will tell The Truth!

It’s along these exaggerated (some only slightly) thoughts that the demand for serious game criticism turns. There are two types of writing, so the demand seems to say—reviews, and then later reviews with bigger words that tell you why this game you thought was so great is actually shitty. Increasingly, I think these people are getting what they’ve been asking for—with Dragon Age II having slipped from the primo mindshare, it’s LA Noire’s turn to get lengthy blog posts taking it to task for its blemishes. Finally, serious criticism!

But I don’t see it. I don’t see how interesting discussion and forward momentum can come from thus “Nuh-uh! Is not!” style. It seems predicated on this idea that there is a Platonic Ideal, one perfect game against which all others are deemed lacking. And for sure, they are lacking. Perfection is impossible, we all know that. So how interesting is it to point that out? For me, it’s not. It feels like hammering on a game for not conforming to the author’s expectations. It’s boring to read.

So here is my resolution. For each game I play to completion for the rest of the year, no matter how stupid or dire or broken, I’m going to find something worthwhile to observe about it, and expound on that as best I can. More and more, people seem to be realizing that serious criticism does not equate flogging at flaws, and I’d rather be part of that movement in my own small way. Let’s see how it goes.

Special Case: Friday Night Lights

2011-06-27T15:46:00.001-06:00

Yes. This. Really.

No one recommended Friday Night Lights to me. And I don’t see why they would. I have little love for football, and none for the state of Texas—well, except for Six Flags. Every time a Super Bowl rolls around, I’m clueless who’s in it until the last possible second. My tastes fall in line with the more dynamic soccer. The joy of football has remained a mystery, and it’s certainly not a culture I needed to engage in. My state has no pro team, and my time at my alma mater was an era of basketball acclaim.

I’ve spent time in the periphery, and not just watching on TV or the like. I’ve been to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the Crimson Tide, I stood in the shadow of the Bryant-Denny Stadium, walked its Gallery of Heroes, and dined and drank under the ever-watchful glower of Paul the Bear. It was a fascinating sojourn. A few years back, I relished my school beating the Tide in a bowl game (which I did not watch), because, hell Pride does go before the Fall, right? At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a little bad. For many, football is big because it’s the only thing they have.

I approached critical darling Friday Night Lights as an anthropological study (and so I could eventually find out where Wallace at), and I came out stunned by how much I adored it. Friday Night Lights is the purest proof of the power of artistry. Much like my precious The Wire, FNL deals with people who have lashed themselves to an institution that is coldly indifferent to their hopes and dreams. And like my precious Deadwood, it deals in how a community is forged. Over its five seasons, with a few missteps, it deals with both with a grace and delicacy few shows aspire to reach.

I’m sure fellow FNL watchers wouldn’t consider this a huge surprise. Oh, wow, Kelly likes the meditative social drama shot in a cinema verite style with the diffuse plotlines spread across dozens of characters, one of whom is a smart-mouthed leggy blonde Amazon, huh? He liked the portrait of a town in decline and felt for the teens desperate to escape, you say? Perhaps he also noted and delighted in the many details in the setting, huh? Did he appreciate the extended silences, the reluctance to over-exposit, and the many studies of dreams lost, deferred, altered, thrown away unwanted, and perhaps even realized? Shocker! However, my adoration does touch deeper veins.

While High School football is central to the show, it is not High School football as I experienced it, an affluent suburb program, loaded with white kids who will play for a few years before moving on to investment banking and various other tool careers. For the players of Dillon, Texas, the game is their way out, or their chance at personal glory, no matter how fleeting it may be. It’s a way out to some of the women, too, assuming they’re willing to cast their lot with a star player, and for those unwilling to do that, it’s an unspoken symbol of the town’s injustice, and their lack of agency—the boys can aspire to be Panthers, while the girls have only the strip club. And for the community at large, a town of absentee fathers, a crumbling oil industry, and an Applebees, football is the one thing that can make them proud. Silly as they seem to outsiders, the stakes are both real and high.

Football, however, is really a secondary theme, because FNL is ultimately about teaching. As important as the struggles of teenagers Street, Saracen, Riggins, Vince, Tyra, Julie, and Smash may be, the central figures are Coach Eric and Tami Taylor, TV’s most credible couple, perfectly played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. Coach is a taciturn man with boldness and pragmatism of real old-school masculinity—exuding the honor, character, and restraint that should mean instead of the cartoonish insensitive thuggery glorified these days. His inspirational speeches and statements and gestures are simple, but delivered with such gravitas and authority how could they not be true? Tami is no less formidable, though she’s less intimidating, a blend of Southern charm and unyielding tenacity, providing an aspirational female counterpart to Eric’s inspirational male—proof to Dillon’s girls that they don’t need to be strippers tied down to a succession of alcoholic dirtballs, but can be powerful in their own right. While we may check in with the students, even after they’ve left the High School stage, the Taylors and their struggles balancing political pressures with the revolving student needs is always at the center.

But most impressive was how the show made me a believer in the game. I’m still not a fan in the real world, but as a sport of cinema, football is first rate, the perfect vehicle to play out the characters struggles, failures, and victories. Coach gives the order, QB1 calls the play, the team sees it through, and armed with understanding of the characters and what they’ve been through, what the stakes are beyond a W, it pulled me in like few things have. It’s still a mystery to me how football came to be popular before someone could make a film out of it. But in my apartment on a Wednesday afternoon, I still found myself leaping to my feet, fists pumping the air, shouting “Yes!” at each long-bomb pass, each desperate rush, each strained reach across the goal line. One thing I do understand is a good story.

Varric and the Concieted

2011-06-08T23:17:00.004-06:00

Is the time right for talk about Dragon Age II to begin in earnest? The logical conclusion of the past few years of internet chattery seem to have been reached in this game, which has the rare distinction of having a full blown backlash movement well underway before it had even been released—perhaps the first of its kind. I’m sure someone will point out some earlier case, just like how citing The Ramones as the first punk group invariably draws some wag who will pontificate on the antecedents found in The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, or The Stooges. But I dub those proto, as I will dub any cases of pre-backlash proto. Yes, Dragon Age II was a lightning rod, for reasons too legion, exhausting, and often stupid to enumerate. For me, I may not have liked DA2 as much as Bioware’s Mass Effect 2, and, hell, I might not have liked it as much as the original Dragon Age: Origins, but I did like it, and found it a worthy sequel. There are some criticisms I can’t argue with, or don’t particularly care to, but there are other’s I’m more than happy to push back on. Surprise, they mostly center around the story, where DA2 made some controversial choices, and, to my mind, found some fruitful ground. I have often said “If game players want better stories, they need to make themselves better readers.” Nowhere is that more apparent than in Dragon Age II.

The plot of Dragon Age II is, notably, not the classic stuff of fantasy, good and bad. There is no omnipotent force of evil looming on the horizon, and while the hero of our tale, Hawke, has a destiny, it wasn’t foretold in a prophecy written in the distant past (at least not directly), but a destiny that is a fact of history. Hawke, we quickly learn, is the focal point of an event that has turned the world on its ear, and the story we are about to experience through the game we are about to play are not, as is usual, experienced in the moment. It is, in fact, told second hand years after the fact by Varric, a companion of Hawke’s who quickly makes it clear he is not above the odd exaggeration for the sake of keeping the tale peppy, or tweaking the nose of his interrogators.

I’d hope by now, you’re thinking to yourself “So what?” And you should. The unreliable narrator is old as dirt. Yet, this device, common enough in literature, film, and television, seems to have thrown vast swaths of gamedom for a loop. I guess they all decided Realism was a good enough form, thank you, considering the vigor so many have pushed back against such basic experimentalism.

To start off on a less reactionary note, let’s consider a few of the things the Varric conceit accomplishes. As with many narratives of this sort, it lets Varric play with Hawke’s myth, but it lets the game do so as well, giving us control over ridiculously overpowered characters for a while, letting us play Varric’s tall tales before bringing us back to what passes for reality. It presents some handy foreshadowing, and creates a bit of a mystery around Hawke’s role in events (which are, of course, not determined until the end, when the player decides what that role is to be). Varric’s demeanor in his telling will change based on how he’s treated in the past, giving players a unique and fresh sort of control over the story—on a playthrough of mine, Varric’s interrogator, Cassandra seemed to be charmed and a little turned on by the story. And while that little beat stands out, it’s an aspect of one of the two major effects of the conceit. It shows, quite clearly, the events the player is guiding have a long-rippling effect on the future—the sort of thing that usually is relegated to a brief line or two in an epilogue. Here, given the fury and desperation we see in Cassandra, we see that whatever Hawke did was a big deal.

But the primary accomplishment of the Varric conceit is that it eliminates the time compression. The events encompassed and distances spanned in the typical RPG are massive, and most are very vague about the time that passes. Many time telling techniques from other media don’t exist in games. One might make the case that the loading screen is a rough analogue to the cut, but it’s very rough indeed. With the characters almost perpetually under the player’s control, the characters in an RPG can seem to have a very busy 20 to 60 hours, resolving their tormented histories, raising armies, fulfilling quests, falling madly in love, and saving the world in that very limited amount of time. DA2, however, spreads its story across a decade, acts broken up by Varric explaining the new status quo.

The benefit isn’t simply to account for the passage of time. In addition to quickly establishing new status quos, Bioware sprinkles character beats through each shift, snips of dialogue to the unseen events that occurred during the jump—fruitless hunts, frustrated waits, ill-advised heists. They give the characters something very few get in games: life while we aren’t watching. This is important, because it gives the relationships between Hawke, the NPCs, and the setting a history, which in turns gives them a depth and a credibility. It gave, for example, the relationship between my Hawke and saucy pirate Isabella a weight. Their joking and ribbing over an unseen night spent hiding in a ditch from angry smugglers speaks through implication to a deeper bond than the usual rush job. They become a couple with history.

I’d say that little aspect is significant, and worth developing deeper. Unfortunately, it seems like everything noteworthy about the conceit is being lost under the cries of detractors, often with cries that simply seem silly and more than a little misguided. The cudgel most often employed against DA2 is that classic old saw of high school writing instruction, “Show don’t tell.” This is usually presented as though the detractor believes it to be a lost stanza of the I Ching (“I can’t help but feel that DA2 has forgotten the first rule of writing: show don’t tell.”). But what I can’t help but feel is that Show Don’t Tell is often getting egregiously misapplied.

For some, the matter comes in the jumps in time. We are told, for example, that Hawke spent a year under indentured servitude. Likewise, in another jump, we learn that he bought a house. Shouldn’t we have played these events, the “interesting parts”, and been Shown them? A valid criticism very often, but here it seems far less so—I’m not sure how buying a house qualifies as “interesting” in this context.

Nowhere is the dubious standard of what is interesting more dubious than in the game’s controversial opening, which finds Hawke and family as recently displaced refugees, fleeing from the destruction of their hometown—a noteworthy event from the previous game. Many are those who felt this a missed opportunity, one the game never properly recovers from. Wouldn’t it have been helpful to spend time with Hawke and his family in his hometown of Lothering, and learn what sort of person he was before disaster struck? Yes, time spent in a bucolic, pristine village, chatting with the bumpkin residents who remain unaware of the disaster on the horizon. Fantasy’s most familiar setup. I hope I’m not out of line in saying there is little this scenario can teach that isn’t already known. Ironically, players did get to see Hawke’s hometown in slightly less terrible times, in the original Dragon Age. It lived up to the reputation of such places throughout time and tale—it would be a boring place to live.

Detractors assert that opening in the peaceful-but-not-for-long Lothering would have given some backstory, not present by opening with the Hawkes in flight. What did (for simplicity’s sake, male) Hawke think of his hometown? Brother and sister? Mother? (One particularly absurd critic said of the opening “I assume this is my family.” Yes, that would be the implication behind everyone calling Leandra “Mother”.)

That strikes me as laziness, pure and simple. The joy of these sorts of games is in character creation—we’re expected to take a hand in that. I don’t need a moment where I pick my character’s feelings about home from a checklist, and neither do I need his inner monologue outwardly declared. Filling in blanks, determining often complex motives, these should be basic skills on par with finding the attack button. What does Hawke think about brother Carver? It’s never said, and it shouldn’t have to be. I guide Hawke’s dealings with Carver, and accordingly the things I guide Hawke to say, even in the midst of fighting and running, are the reflection of his or her unspoken thoughts.

In truth, we are learning about life in Lothering for the Hawkes even as they flee from it. We never seen the patriarch of the family, and yet from their behavior it is clear his loss is not fresh. Given a moment to rest, Bethany and Carver take to sniping at each other, and Hawke cuts them off. “Please,” Mother pleads with a different sort of exhaustion, “listen to your brother.” A quick exchange rich with family detail for those willing to spend a few seconds putting the pieces together.

It seems to be a common problem, thinking there is a schism between a character moment and an action scene. But a character remains that character whether in crisis, at rest, getting drunk, buying new gear, or pitching woo. When, minutes into the game, Mother stops to bemoan all they lost, Hawke can be prodding but supportive, flippant, or demand they push ahead regardless. Is Hawke prodding but supportive because Mother is delicate? Flippant because he gets that way when he’s scared? Pushy because he saw what the darkspawn were doing to the unlucky back in Lothering? These are little grace details we should be ready and able to provide at an instant. These are our characters, and the game is a called a role-playing game for a reason.We shouldn't need validation from the game that they are canon.

In the three months since the game was released into the wild, and I’ve read many, many suggestions for how it might have been fixed. And to be sure, there is room for improvement—there’s always room for improvement. However, the alleged fixes proposed by many of the most vocal do not seem like any sort of fix, rather they seem regressions. They want a game that is more obvious, more cliché, less interesting, less unique, more common, more of the same. Instead, Dragon Age II told an unconventional story for the genre in an unconventional style for the medium. Next time, I’d like to see them go further.

Two Studies in Alignment

2011-03-29T15:11:00.005-06:00

Some people hate the standard D&D system of alignment—the morality rubric you assign your character. I’m not among them. As a shorthand for the attitude of a character in an epic fantasy game, that nine point grid is pretty effective, giving a general idea of your character’s attitude, and letting you fly from there. It’s not realistic, they say, but whatever, it’s a fictional construct applied to a fictional construct, helping me express how that construct feels about stabbing ogres. They say it’s not nuanced, but we’re talking Epic Fantasy here, with capital letters. Once we start talking about raising armies of the dead and whatnot, doesn’t the grey area go away? It’s a worthy system to quantify a character’s attitude and as such, it’s become its own sort of meme, with people assigning the Lawfuls and Chaotics to beloved casts. Just this past week, I came across two beloved by me, one pretty good, the other problematic, one for Community, and one for The Wire. So why not take a look at both?

For any out there unacquainted, alignment is a grid of 9, created by pairing traits. On the y-axis is the moral component: good, neutral, or evil—those, I’d hope, are self-explanatory. The x-axis is trickier, expressing attitudes toward law, order, and government, broken down into Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. A Lawful person holds themselves to some sort of order outside themselves—a government, usually, but it can also be a code of honor—while a Chaotic person actively rankles against such things, with Neutral, as always, holding no strong opinions one way or the other. Put those two traits together, and you have your alignment, the two halves coloring each other, and giving you a handy way to consider your character’s role in the world.

A Lawful Good character, for example, endeavors to help people, but does so within the rules—a just government they serve, or a code of honor to which they’ve sworn, for example. They’re the good cops, enforcers of and believers in just law, and thus LG is a good alignment for knights and kindly kings.

Neutral Good characters are just plain good, without giving too much thought for political concerns. It’s a very path-of-least resistance alignment for a hero—they’re not good for a code or cause, they’re just good.

Chaotic Good characters are the do-gooder rebels, the guys fighting against tyranny for the sake of the little guy—they’re the Robin Hoods, not willing to work within a system to fix it. As such, this is a monumentally popular alignment.

Lawful Neutral characters aren’t usually for players, seeing as they’re supporters of the status quo. Order’s goodness or evilness is irrelevant to LN characters, they’re just devoted to keeping the machine running, thus, it’s a good alignment for sycophants, though it can be used for stern, letter-of-the-law sorts too.

True Neutral (better term than Neutral Neutral, I guess) has always been strange. When I first read about it, it was defined as a desire to maintain the balance of the universe, which, even at 10, struck me as stupid for anyone who wasn’t a god from beyond the furthest reaches of existence. It’s since been modified, and now is more for those who just hold themselves apart from the struggles between the poles, for whatever reason, which is a bit more workable. It’s become the alignment for monks removing themselves from the material world, space-cadets, and impractical theorists.

Chaotic Neutral, also popular and frequently abused, is the classic choice of thieves. Actively opposed to rules, but without the noble or nefarious aspirations of CG and CE, CN characters tend to be selfish and self-centered, but not actively malicious, but the alignment can also be used to justify a character who just does shit, because, whatever.

Lawful Evil characters are the bad cops—tyrants, those who exploit government and position for their own gain, or even those who actively enforce unjust law without question. Just about any portrayal of Roman nobility from, well, ever is LE.

Neutral Evil characters are, well, basically just evil. They’re selfish about their evil because they’re independent—no affectations of being part of something like the LE guys, but not nihilists we’ll get to in a minute. Bad guys with schemes are good NE sorts.

Lastly is Chaotic Evil, the worst of the worst. They’re unrepentant wreckers of shit, nihilists as I said earlier. A CE character does whatever their cruel appetites demand, and love nothing more than destroying things.

Obviously, alignments on the opposite ends of the grid reflect opposite world views, and will be most strongly opposed to each other. Also obviously, alignments can change, too, usually one step at a time, but drastic events can cause drastic shifts. Likewise obviously, this is an imperfect expression of the breadth and depth of human behavior, but again, as a fictionalized abstraction, it works. Sometimes it gets abused—players all choose CN so they can act at random, or a DM harshly penalizes playing outside the lines. But again, I think it works fine as a general guide to general behavior and attitude, as long as a few things are kept in mind.

First: actions matter. Second: intentions matter. The alignment system is ripe ground for the sort of moral philosophizing you’d expect from precocious 5^th grade geeks, but discussion seems to get stuck there. Some can’t get past “The villain thinks he’s the hero” to “The villain can think he’s the hero and still be a villain.” Likewise “What if the baby saved grows up to be Hitler?” Anyway, with those provisos in mind, let’s begin this painfully contorted endeavor with some fan’s assignment of Community characters.

I have to say, this looks pretty good to me, and from what I’ve seen, looks pretty good to just about everyone. Indeed, what strikes me is how neatly the characters fall into place, even though they’re some of the most richly drawn and performed out there. Shirley has her flaws, but I think few would argue isn’t Lawful Good, by virtue of her devout faith and desire to share it all too imperfectly. Likewise, despite his charm and sympathy, a man who faked a law degree and rode it to platinum faucets like Jeff is pretty perfectly Lawful Evil. Annie’s a bit of a grey area, but she’s fundamentally decent, and seems to value rules more as a matter of personal integrity, so Neutral Good fits fine. Pierce’s methodical, malicious selfishness match well with Neutral Evil, and Chang, the Destroyer, is as Chaotic Evil as they come.

The point of contention for some is in Britta’s Chaotic Good. There are a few reasons for this—though her anti-authoritarian attitude speaks strongly Chaotic, her frequent hangovers, pettiness, and the way she acquires concert tickets don’t seem traditionally Good. She herself has doubts, saying at least once that she does good things because she’s afraid she’s not a good person. Furthermore, she’s a buzzkill, where the stereotypical CG is fun. So the reasoning goes she’s a better Chaotic Neutral, and Troy, good-natured and fun, ought be CG.

I can’t agree with either. Troy is fun, good-natured, and harmless, but the picture used is the perfect illustration of CN—ruled by his id, there is a giant cookie, he wants it, he will eat the whole thing. For her part, Britta’s inability to live up to the standards she’s constructed for herself has no bearing on her behavior, which is consistently supportive of individual liberty, egalitarianism, the downtrodden, and her friends, even when she doesn’t agree with their choices. When the group played D&D, Britta alone cared for the plight of the gnome waiters. Also, remember that opposite alignments represent the strongest conflicts? Note her opposite.

So like I said, that one I thought was pretty good. The next one, though, might be a bit more tricky. So let’s go spot by spot.

Is Cedric Daniels Lawful Good? Absolutely. I may have put Beadie or Kima in there, but Cedric’s a great choice.

Is Bubs Neutral Good? At the point pictured, recovering from his addictions and struggling to make a life as Reginald Cousins, undoubtedly yes (and my quote of choice would have been “Time going to make it right by them too, I guess.”). But in his addict days, scheming, scamming, and hustling for his fix at the cost of all other concerns, he was definitely Chaotic Neutral. Bunk, and eventually Cutty and Prez are other strong candidates.

Characters on The Wire don’t come much more Chaotic Good than Jimmy McNulty, drunk, asshole, flouter of authority in his single-minded war against the system’s injustices. What I like most about figures like Britta and Jimmy in this spot, is they’re smug, sanctimonious, and pretty annoying, where the perception is that CG characters are fun. Yet CG they are—both characters who look at the world as it works, find it lacking, and elect to do something about it, whether people appreciate it or not. Chaotic, good, and smug. Other good options include Lester and Bunny Colvin.

Here, we start having problems, this chart and I. Lawful Neutrals maintain the status quo, good or ill, Hell or high water, because any order is better than none. Grasping, venal, selfish, power-hungry Thomas Carcetti does not fit that bill. If The Wire has an ultimate villain, it is Carcetti, the one character who regularly had the power to do the right thing, and decided to grab more power instead. He maintains nothing but his own ambition—promises only good until he’s won the next election, choices only set to win the next one, when his policies threaten to rip the city apart, he is all too happy to angrily lay blame on his subordinates. He’s Lawful Evil to the core. Who, then, fits better as Lawful Neutral? For my money, the best choice here must be Jay Landsman, the character not the real guy, a man who has learned to keep his head down. “Now, I didn’t like it when they came to me and told me to dump Norris, but dump him I did,” he tells Kima, instructing her on the delicate political balance that Homicide requires. “And it’s not like I’m happy to carry their water now that they pretend they told me no such thing, but carry the water I will. And in the end, when everyone else in this unit is buried and beshitted, this Detective Sergeant will still be standing. So get the story straight.” Words to live by.

Omar’s richly deserved love blinds us to one fact of his character: he’s not nice. Bunk has his number stone cold, calling out Omar as every bit the parasite as the dealers he preys upon. He doesn’t put his gun on no citizen, because a man must have a code, but he’s also vicious and violent and terrible in his wrath in a self-centered way that speaks to, I’m sorry to say, Evil. True Neutral is a hard fit, but I think the character that mostly closely fits is Frank Sobotka, driven to save his Union at the cost of everything else.

We miss an important fact about Avon, too. Avon has built a massive empire on people’s weaknesses and the will to kill, but he, as a man must, has a code. There is a way to play the Game, whether the game is slinging or basketball, and there are rules to be followed. No hits on Sunday. The ref is king of the court, and must act as such. Yes, Avon is a Lawful Evil guy, not Chaotic Neutral. As I said earlier, Bubs in the throes of his addiction is Chaotic Neutral, but a good and far more dangerous example is Ziggy.

The Wire offers LEs aplenty, in all sorts of shapes and flavors. Carcetti and Avon we’ve mentioned already, but there are abusers of position like Valchek, overzealous enforcers like Herc, loyal soldiers serving a rotten cause like Bodie, and lawyer scum like Levy. Stringer, though, I’m not convinced is among them. His apathy for the code of the street that Avon cherishes (and obviously he doesn’t hold regular law in very high regard either) makes me want to say he’s Neutral Evil. Carcetti, though, is the ultimate emblem of the alignment.

Clay Davis abuses his position of legitimate power too much to be Neutral Evil, I feel. He’s a corrupt politician, where LE hangs its hat. NE is better applied to characters who are more independent in their evil, someone like the aforementioned String, or Prop Joe (“Foo’. If it weren’t for Sergei you and your cousin would be cadaverous motherfuckers.”), or The Greek (“Business…always business.”).

Is Marlo Chaotic Evil? Absolutely. Snoop, too, for that matter.

In the latest version of D&D, the alignment system has been stripped down to irrelevance. Shame. As I hope I’ve illustrated here, the old and clunky system may not be the greatest reflection of human behavior, but it’s a decent enough filing system, and sometimes fun.

Earnt that Bump: Felicia Pearson as Snoop

2011-03-16T21:46:00.016-06:00

    I ended my post on The Wire noting that among its legacies is proving that mainstream media lacks for quality roles for African-American actors. Too many talented, memorable actors who portrayed vivid, beloved characters have gone on to far, far lesser roles, struggling to make their way in the acting game. Felicia Pearson, I noted, seemed to have found her way by turning her hustler skills to building a cottage industry around her own story. It seems, however, I may have spoken too soon.
    I envisioned this series some time ago, after writing a separate piece on The Wire, where I felt I was unable to fully pay tribute to the actors, a cadre of artists who never failed to entertain me, move me, or provoke thought. My first choice was Andre Royo as Bubbles, but events compel me to focus on Felicia Pearson, who brought a distinctive and singular presence playing a character based upon herself. Whatever happens next for Miss Pearson, her work as Felicia “Snoop” Pearson will remain. Spoilers for seasons 3 through 5 follow.
   Snoop first appears partway through season 3, a key player under the insurgent Marlo Stanfield. The typical Barksdale is Bodie—young, male, head shaved, fastidiously dressed in a hip hop style, he is a drug dealer who is easy to imagine. Comparatively, the Stanfield crew is a stranger breed. Chris, Marlo’s chief enforcer, is unadorned, dressed with military severity, with a shock of jagged hair, and at his side is Snoop—small and asexual and shapeless with tightly braided cornrows and boyish clothes, she could be a boy of 13 or a woman of 20, or anything between. She’s a chameleon. In her first major scene, disguised in civilian girl clothes, she fires on a Barksdale corner from point blank range, and nearly kills Poot, who has been around since episode 1. Later, her unassuming stature makes her the perfect spotter to uncover a Barksdale ambush. Embodied in Chris and Snoop, the Barksdales find themselves at war with an alien force—the crack baby’s babies Herc warned Poot about a few episodes earlier, a generation raised in the wreckage the Barksdales helped create.
    Season 4 opens with one of The Wire’s most iconic scenes, no less iconic for being Ms. Pearson’s first major scene, establishing Snoop as a full character. While looking for a new nail gun, Snoop is aided by a hardware store clerk. The clerk is helpful and casual, and seems to make no assumptions, while Snoop is forthcoming, and seems quite grateful for the assistance. Here, however, we learn that Snoop is very naive. Snoop drops stories of murders, much to the horror of the clerk, before handing him a stack of cash for the nail gun rather than paying up front—that’s simply how she’s used to doing business. Ms. Pearson invests Snoop with a lack of self-consciousness and a casual bearing throughout this scene—for lack of a better term, she is thoughtless, a stark contrast to a character like D’Angelo, who was always keenly aware of how he didn’t fit into legitimate society. She is, however, not malicious, indeed, she is grateful for the help, and even patient with the clerk, not challenging him on his unhip standards for quality automobiles.
    Soon Snoop will become an ominous herald of death—when she arrives, Chris is not far behind, and the neighborhood and viewer both rightly regard with terror—and over the two seasons that remain, she will commit many murders, but for me, her naivety is her defining trait, and it’s a very sad naivety. For Snoop, it seems the Game is all there is, and while many characters might claim that is the case, for Snoop it seems to be true. We only ever see her on the job. She doesn’t shoot hoops, takes classes, keep fish, play poker—she doesn’t even play checkers or chase tail. The Game is all there is for her, because she seems to have nothing else, quite literally. Chris decides they can flush out dealers from New York by asking about the local music scene, but Snoop is equally ignorant, and nearly kills a native who unfortunately identifies his favorite DJ as “that New York girl”. Later, it appears she hasn’t seen Boyz N the Hood. The entirety of her focus is on her job, her role. While I find that sad, Ms. Pearson chooses not to put any sort of wistfulness or melancholy into these moments—unlike D’Angelo, she doesn’t know what she doesn’t have, which just makes the character sadder.
    Every character on The Wire, however, retains something human, no matter how compromised it may be. Snoop kills without a second thought—she and Chris may have the most bodies on them of all the show’s characters. She eulogizes her New York victims with “Where your Yankee pride now, you fucking bitches?” Despite her size and gender she becomes a feared figure in the drug trade, a credit to her savvy, her tossed-off viciousness, and the confidence with which she navigates her world. She is central in training the next generation in the ways of doing business. But she can still be shaken. When she witnesses Chris beat Michael’s step-father to death, she recoils, both horrified and confused. It’s not a murder committed with their ruthless efficiency, not enacted as a business transaction, and Ms. Pearson makes it apparent that Snoop doesn’t properly grasp what is happening. That moment is brief, though—Ms. Pearson doesn’t let Snoop linger there long. By the time Chris storms away, Snoops tough street veneer has been raised again.
    Snoop is quite literally a role only Ms. Pearson could play. The character was, indeed, written for her. Beyond that, it’s one that trades on her rhythms, instincts, presence, and her trademark squawk, creating one of the most memorable characters of the decade. Ms. Pearson balances Snoop’s terror with her charm. And she is charming—easy-going, confident, lively, funny, and sociable, she seems the only one able to make Chris laugh. At the same time, Ms. Pearson is able to invest the character with the necessary hardness and callousness. As charming as she can be, we never forget who she is.
As season 5 and the show itself comes to a close, so does Snoop. Tasked with killing Mike, she finds herself outwitted by her former student, and while she readily praises his skill, she is disgusted. She is not angry, or afraid, rather, she’s quite resigned. What bothers her is Mike’s bad faith in the Game—questioning, challenging, not following blindly, doing things Snoop would never dream of doing. She knows her place, and does not fight her fate. With a final little touch of vanity, she checks her hair, and is removed from the system that controls her entire identity. The Wire is built on circles, and inevitably the crack baby’s baby’s babies must rise.

Reassessing Killzone 2

2011-02-13T23:20:00.003-07:00

Killzone 2 was a game that never really got a fair shake. It was initially overhyped by Playstation people, accordingly scorned and derided by Xbox people, and the ensuing war between the two spilled over until it was scorned by everyone. And that was before it was even released. Once it was, things got even weirder. Fans attacked negative reviews, and were in turn attacked, making this bizarre pile-up of backlash against backlash against backlash—practically a backlash singularity. The game itself never had a chance to be taken on its own terms.

But I quite liked it on its own terms. While no great masterpiece, there are some aspects of KZ2 that do strike me as genius, and with the sequel due out this very month, it seemed like I should go over them. Perhaps I'm over-intellectualizing, but that's my prerogative, isn't it?

Killzone fiddles in two playgrounds at once—the outlandish sci-fi shooting people game, and the gritty military shooting people game. As Sev, soldier of the vaguely UN-ish, vaguely NATO Interplanetary Strategic Alliance, you are deployed to Helghan, home of the Helghast, descendents of human colonists hardened and shaped by their harsh world, and united under the banner of Emperor Visari, who led his people on a violent invasion of nearby Vekta, and the ISA has come to remove him from power. A bit of stunning art direction and design, the Helghast are inspired by the Nazis. The end result: WWII by way of Aliens, with a little Iraq War thrown in for good measure.

While Killzone 2 is the only game I know of to address Regime Change so directly, there are games a-plenty that use WWII as a backdrop. They do so, however, from a very American perspective, as they are largely made by Americans, a culture a pond away from the build-up, and the mindset of the time, for whom that war is largely a parable, and they understand the war on those terms. Developed by Dutch company Guerilla Games, Killzone brings a markedly European perspective.

Killzone 2 is striking in its visual sense—practically Futurist in its aesthetic. The urban hellscapes of Helghan (hey!), sharp angles, squat buildings, harshly geometrical, long horizontals, towers of unadorned concrete and steel, it is a Futurist playground, loaded with the beauty of industry and machines, as the Helghast arrive in sleek dropships whose engine whine vaguely evokes hawk cries, or squat APCs like battering rams with saw blades to cut through the city, and deploy the fearsome ATAC, a flying robot with a tank’s weight and a dragonfly’s grace, built by humans but animated with an alien artificial intelligence—one just smart enough to kill.

Of course, the Futurists, far sighted blokes it turns out, were the original action movies junkies. Lovers of movement, a machine at rest was not as beautiful as on fulfilling its purpose, and the greatest beauty to them was in war, for these lovers of violence. Truffaut said a true anti-war movie was impossible, but it seems the Futurists knew it first. The FPS genre strikes me as Futurist—I think they’d blow their minds, an entire form devoted to recreating explosions, reload actions, and the implements of battle, then subsuming the audience in this simulacrum of raw combat. I think they’d look at Killzone 2, combining a style influenced by their design in thunderous volume and relentless intensity, and see a masterpiece of a type many didn’t. Of course, interesting visuals are a dime a dozen in games—I wouldn’t think as highly of the game as I do if it just offered the same ugly-is-pretty look most FPSes trade in. Likewise, the Futurists weren’t just artists with odd notions of violence. They were also fascists, and Killzone 2 offers a unique perspective on that too.

Most modern FPSes traffic in fighting against some variant of fascist, while simultaneously being the sort of soft Michael Bay fascism that’s in vogue these days—very American (perfectly fine in the former, rather obnoxious in the latter). Killzone 2, however, is a game made by a culture that has had a far more profound struggle with fascism than we. Trekking through the levels, it’s clear the game understands not only what fascism can compel people to do, but understands how it appeals as well. Sustained Helghast iconography at every turn helps build this atmosphere, whether through harsh and angular recruitment posters, or the occasional maxim (“Violence has its own economy, be thoughtful and precise with your investment.”), but it is the person of Emperor Visari that makes the strongest case. Visari (played by Brian Cox), though only seen in person at the very end, is a pervasive antagonist, a magnetic voice calling out from Stalinist radio boxes at every turn, staggering masterworks of fascist rhetoric. He’s terrifying—no cartoon dictator, there is no question why his people follow him. From the original game:

And here, from the second:

It’s not just boilerplate war-speak, all the brainwashing touchstones are there—the fear, the unity, the scapegoating, the ego-building, the destiny. “You are oppressed, and that oppression has made you special. We are beset by inhuman enemies who do not understand us and seek to destroy us—they are responsible for your hardship. You are part of a whole vastly greater than yourself, and I am that whole. You are strong, and I am your strength, and I have used your strength to build more. You are not you, your are Us, and Us is Me. History is with Us. We have a Destiny, and I am the expression of Our Destiny.” By the time he promises to “drench our ancestors’ graves with their blood”, who would not be ready to kill and kill and die for this man? By comparison, the ISA (in my favorite joke, staple multiplayer modes as Control Point and Capture the Flag revolve around propaganda speakers) seem callow, and in far, far over their heads.

This builds a cold, intellectual sympathy towards the Helghast—we have understanding but the game never clears them of wrongdoing. They are not likable, or piteous, they remain frighteningly destructive, vicious monsters, but they were human, and we understand what made them monsters. Killzone 2 may have rendered war in loving detail, but it is markedly ambivalent about the practice. As the game progresses, Helghast resistance gets more and more desperate (and audacious), while ISA losses mount and their attitudes calcify, until everything comes to a head in the final scene.

It seems to me that, while undeniably setting up a sequel, Killzone 2 is grappling with its ambivalence in that last scene, and trying to make us to do the same. It’s wise enough to know that a shooting game featuring a lightning gun shouldn’t be offering answers, but it does raise some intriguing questions. Portrayals of war will always seem exciting, so why not embrace that? War in actuality makes people do awful things, so why not embrace that too? War is the perpetual motion machine, it seems to be saying, that feeds itself at the cost of lives destroyed and values compromised. A new fight is on the horizon, but Sev doesn’t charge again unto the breach. Exhausted by the futility, he seems ready to just wait for the inevitable. I can understand why.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll do a few rounds of multiplayer.

Ultimate Case: The Wire

2011-01-28T13:58:00.002-07:00

Browsing Instant Watch, I’ve found that I have effectively strip-mined the notable works available. I don’t think I could muster much to say about, say, Prison Break, no matter how much Netflix insists, yes, insists it is along the parameters of my test preference paradigm. Along the way of this project, some of my favorites came up. But three shows, three peerless shows, remained unmentioned. Before putting the project behind me, I’d like to discuss these three, shows which, to me, represent the height of the medium, the three to which I aspire in my own writing. The last, the definitive statement on living in urban America in the early days of the 21^st century. David Simon and Ed Burns’ The Wire.

Yes, yes, if you’ve spent any sort of time with me at all, you know my opinions on The Wire—it is nothing less than the greatest show ever made, and everyone should watch it. But it’s true. A relentless study of systemic failure, and multi-faceted contemplation on our attitudes toward work in the modern day, The Wire is a perfect distillation of many talents under the guiding voices of Baltimore police reported David Simon, and Baltimore Homicide detective Ed Burns. Together with veteran TV directors, renowned crime novelists, and a veritable army of gifted actors, they created a true epic of modern America that touches the highest and lowest corners of our society, treating each humanely, and more importantly creating understanding.

The Wire has effectively killed the cop show for me. They’re just so trite and inconsequential in comparison. Why don’t they build five intricately woven seasons, each adding a new layer, a new system of failings adding to our urban problems? Why don’t they deal with the issues they claim to address with the gravity and seriousness they deserve? Why is their morality so black and white and unchallenging? Obviously, because it’s easier. But it seems in poor taste to take the easy path when dealing with the destruction of the inner city, likewise with their portrayal of cop and criminal as forces at war. When you start talking war, soon everyone is acting like warriors.

The Wire never forgets that its characters are people first, slingers, muscle, cops, kingpins, thieves, junkies, working men, politicians, teachers, or reporters fourth or fifth. This is, I think, a theme of The Wire as important as its examination of systemic breakdown—though these characters, all of them, are at the mercy of whatever system they have bound themselves to, they still have an unmistakable human stain that cannot be touched, no matter how broken they are, and these stains can sometimes threaten to bring the systems, no matter how shambling and monolithic, crashing down. For some, it’s integrity, decency, or dedication, likable virtues, but for others it’s a terrifying rage, boundless frustration, or a rapacious will to be on top, failings no less important, for they are still human, and the show respects that.

As much as The Wire is powered by rage at the failings of America, it is also powered by this respect. It respects the men and women who wear the badge too much to reduce them to virtuous cartoons ready for propaganda posters, so it gives time to their ego, their obstinacy, their frustration, and reveals the complicated culture of political expediency, insufficient training, and institutional laziness that are greater challenges than any criminal. It respects the men and women driven by desperation to the drug trade too much to reduce them to easy caricatures of scheming goons, so it gives time to their cracked codes, their awareness, and the actual genius required to run a drug enterprise, and while the show never approves of their actions and never shies from the havoc they wreak, it keenly understands why they do what they do. That the police cannot do their jobs without manipulations and compromise, and that the drug dealers could be brilliant business leaders given the chance are treated with equal sadness on the show.

As ugly as it can get, though, The Wire is still remarkably funny and uplifting. Not all the character find grace, but they all have the potential. As intractable as our problems are, they cannot keep us from cracking wise and finding some peace.

I’ve often been tempted to simply write at length about these individual characters and their performers, and now that I’m done with this project, I just may. Of the many indictments The Wire offers, its final one only became apparent after it ended—the dearth of quality roles for black actors. The Wire brought many singular, unknown talents to the fore (with some actual Baltimore figures—Homicide Detective Jay Landsman, former Commissioner Ed Norris, the Real Life Avon Barksdale Melvin Williams), and was a rarity on TV—a show with the racial profile that matched the city it was portraying. As with Deadwood, I have eagerly followed The Wire’s cast, but doing so has often been rough going, watching actors capable of such heights only used as bit-player thugs. Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters rejoined David Simon on Treme, Lance Reddick is a joy on Fringe, and Michael K. Williams recently moved to Boardwalk Empire. Idris Elba is rapidly becoming a B-movie icon, so at least he’s working. Felicia Pearson has been justly turning her remarkable life into a cottage industry. In a just world, however, Andre Royo would not be wasted on a wordless Terminator cameo, and Seth Gilliam wouldn’t play a simple type his Carver was decidedly not on Law and Order. Sonja Sohn, J.D. Williams, Wood Harris, Larry Gilliard Jr., Chad Coleman, Robert Wisdom, Robert F. Chew, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Jamie Hector, Maestro Hall, Jermaine Crawford, they all deserve deeper roles than they have been given—and when they find them, I will be there to sing their praises. Until then, they’ll have to settle for being key players in the greatest TV show known yet to man.

Ultimate Case: The Prisoner

2011-01-26T15:33:00.001-07:00

Browsing Instant Watch, I’ve found that I have effectively strip-mined the notable works available. I don’t think I could muster much to say about, say, The Catherine Tate Show, no matter how much Netflix insists, yes, insists it is along the parameters of my test preference paradigm. Along the way of this project, some of my favorites came up. But three shows, three peerless shows, remained unmentioned. Before putting the project behind me, I’d like to discuss these three, shows which, to me, represent the height of the medium, the three to which I aspire in my own writing. The second, a furious, skeptical tale of Cold War paranoia’s end result that speaks with terrible strength to our modern times. Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner.

A brief list of shows off the top of my head (many found here, in this very blog!) that can trace their influences back to The Prisoner, first broadcast in 1967: Lost, Fringe, Alias, 24, Battlestar Galactica, The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Futurama, Chuck, Farscape, Pinky and the Brain. Whenever sci-fi delves into the mind and madness, whenever paranoia and mistrust rule the day, whenever spies grapple with the consequences of a life of secrecy and question their loyalties, you can see the crushing glower of McGoohan’s No. 6 right behind.

The story is recapped with minimum dialogue in the opening credits. A nameless spy resigns in a fury, and returns home to pack a suitcase when he is gassed by mysterious men. He awakes in The Village, a repository for dangerous secret holders. The Village’s cherry, nefarious masters—embodied by a constantly replaced string of authoritarians all known as Number 2—only wish to know why he resigned. They do not get an answer, and the spy is dubbed Number 6. “I am not a number, I am a free man!” he roars. Laughter from his captors is the reply. From there, the series unfolds as the No. 2s array the full might of The Village to break No. 6, and No.6 arrays his full might to resist their efforts and fuck with their world. In 2009, AMC remade the series “for today’s audiences”, a remake that took far more cues from Lost than from the original, with a central mystery to be answered by a broad recurring cast with individual storylines. They shouldn’t have bothered—the original The Prisoner is perhaps more relevant to the post-9/11 internet age than to the Cold War age.

Which side runs the Village? It combines Soviet surveillance with British politeness and whimsy into a Kafka-eqsue stew, but its masters remain a mystery, if they exist at all. One No. 2 explains (in that chummy, British way) that “sides” are immaterial and illusory, only existing to buttress themselves and their power over people—a chilling enough notion at the height of tensions between the Communist and Capitalist worlds, but one that the Patriot Act makes all the more terrifying. The No. 2’s mount assaults against No. 6 on all fronts. They attempt to fool him with elaborate ploys, drug him, infect his dreams, manipulate his loyalties, reinforce his powerlessness, study his every move to anticipate his reactions, and make him question is identity—real fears for individuals in modern societies no matter the era. Is there really much difference between the uncontrollable radio boxes throughout No. 6’s apartment, and Kinect being able to send images of our homes back to Microsoft? Yes: the latter expects us to pay for the privilege.

No. 6 certainly wouldn’t. He remains throughout an iconoclast, and an angry one. The Village makes it clear escape is impossible, which only serves to turn his incredible intelligence toward gumming up their works, which he does with zeal and pleasure. Put in a place when he can trust no one, he doubles down on trusting himself and lets no one else past his defenses too far, no matter how meek and small and harmless they seem. Shouting down a trembling British woman, he can be a tough character to like, but his cunning, perceptiveness, wit, resourcefulness, and his strength of will make him easy to admire. He’s a man with a secret—a simple, pointless secret that he could express in a sentence, and if he shared it, his life could be so much easier. But he doesn’t. Why? Because he shouldn’t have to. Every time Facebook offers to target ads for me, I think of that. Maybe it laughs when I say I am a free man, but as long as I keep clicking No, that laughter is hollow.

Ultimate Case: Deadwood

2011-01-24T15:20:00.001-07:00

Browsing Instant Watch, I’ve found that I have effectively strip-mined the notable works available. I don’t think I could muster much to say about, say, Bones, no matter how much Netflix insists, yes, insists it is along the parameters of my test preference paradigm. Along the way, some of my favorites came up. But three shows, three peerless shows, remained unmentioned. Before putting the project behind me, I’d like to discuss these three, shows which, to me, represent the height of the medium, the three to which I aspire in my own writing. The first, a Western so Revisionist the genre needs no more revising. David Milch’s Deadwood.

Of course, the first thing people notice, and accordingly mention about Deadwood is its profanity, and indeed, the language used on the show can be quite shocking. At the same time, characters lace their curses together with lyricism and eloquence in weighty, Victorian-flavored monologues that emulate nothing less than Shakespeare. The extremes of the language serve to both create a sense of place (whether fortune-seekers in 1876 did, in fact, use “fuck” with such abandon, or Milch simply uses it in place of words that have lost their capacity to shock is immaterial), but also highlight the show’s most persistent theme—the dialectic forces and impulses that animate history and build a community.

The synthesis of conflicts or opposites, and the compromises required, is a central concern of Deadwood, mostly keenly expressed and studied in the tense antagonism and alliance of Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock (each based on historical figures). Both were drawn to the Deadwood camp in the hope of making their fortunes unburdened by law, but find themselves building a new law in spite of themselves. Al, a pimp, thief, schemer, and dope-dealer, finds that as many riches as the wild, anarchic camp offers, a stable town offers even more. Bullock hopes to contain his rage by leaving Marshal service behind and simply run a business, but finds that if a just man isn’t meting out justice, and unjust man will fill his place. They hate each other instantly. Their antipathy boils over into a brutal melee that sets the entire town on edge—everyone seems to realize how important the two men are. But in the end, they forge an alliance, knowing they are stronger together than apart.

But Al and Bullock and just two threads in a delicately woven social history, multifaceted and deep, loaded with great characters plucked from history or crafted from scratch. Each is written with poignancy and wit—clever, dark, ribald, or even stupid wit—and performed with the same as they further expand the show’s study of compromise, concession, cunning, community, and self-reliance. Alma Garrett arrives in town in the tow of a pampered stooge husband (a trade in exchange for the clearing of her father’s debts), but soon after his death must decide if she should run away with a new, profound love, or stay and develop the camp’s richest claim. Wild Bill Hickok rolls through looking to stake his own claim, but finds his self-destructive impulses too strong to deny, and though he hears death coming, he does little to avoid it. He leaves behind Calamity Jane, and Charlie Utter, one rapidly descending into depression and booze from the loss, the other unable to slow the fall, both keenly feeling the void their friend’s passing has left. Doc Cochran must continually reconcile a multitude of factors—his desire to treat patients, his ability, their willingness, their expectations, his own psychological trauma. The cast of known character actors and newer faces—Ian McShane, Tim Olyphant, Molly Parker, John Hawkes, Brad Dourif, Powers Boothe, Anna Gunn, Paula Malcomson, William Sanderson, Dayton Callie, Jeffrey Jones, Titus Welliver among many, many more—are of course key. In the years since Deadwood’s end, appearances by these actors in other shows always get me excited—it’s one thing to say this about Lost, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, or Justified, but quite another to say it about Harper’s Island, Swingtown, Damages, or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Always at the forefront, though, are the precarious balances the individuals of Deadwood must walk—to keep what they’ve earned, to maintain their honor and dignity, to meet their obligations, to mitigate the horrors they’ve seen, to simply live as the sort of people they can live with being. They do so together, united by their sorrows and joys in the South Dakota wilderness. The town was brought together by tragic deaths and shocking murders, but also by weddings, the town’s first bicycle, and a talent show, events as joyous as the others are sad. Fighting to lucidity, Reverend Smith puts it plainly: “It is good to be among friends.”

Compliment Case 10: Breaking Bad

2011-01-20T10:33:00.001-07:00

Originally, I’d conceived of two Complimentary Cases for Weeds, to reflect its difficulty in balancing its moods—anything-goes hilarity, and cutting satire. My choices were It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for the former, and The Riches for the latter. But that was before a show rocketed out of the sky like a meteor riding a lightning bolt and struck me dead between the eyes, despite having only watched the first, truncated season and the beginning of the second. It may be obvious, but the reply to Nancy Botwin is Walter White, and the compliment to Weeds can only be Breaking Bad.

Breaking Bad and Weeds may play with similar toys, but they couldn’t feel more different in execution or ambition. Both feature suburban dregs forced by desperation into the drug trade, but while Weeds takes its cues from, well, just how simply zany its set-up is, Breaking Bad mines a deeper vein, leading back to classic Existential literature—The Plague, “The Wall”, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Weeds is a comedy with some dark edges about, as I noted, how a rich cunt remained such. Breaking Bad is a pitch-black comedy about a man’s confrontation with his mortality, and the extremes he is driven to.

Walter White, meek and mild-mannered, diagnosed with lung cancer (despite, in one of many insults the universe sends him, having never smoked), decides to turn his genius with chemistry toward cooking meth, in the hopes he can make enough money to ensure his family is cared for during his treatment and after his death. Meth is a much harder, more destructive drug than pot, and Breaking Bad does not shy away from its ugliness, from the toxic green clouds that herald its birth, to the twitchy, bedraggled, snaggletoothed junkies who kill themselves with it. The show is never intent on clearing him of blame or culpability, but is far more interested in his metamorphosis as he faces his death sentence. Hank’s true precariousness, both as he delves further into the drug world and as his health fades, keep him sympathetic and understandable, even as he undeniably perpetuates what we see as evil. Like a true Existentialist, though, Walt is beyond evil. He wrangles his chemo-ravaged scalp into a mighty new persona, turns the tables on violent men, and returns to his car to scream and cry, holding more money than he has touched in his entire life. Nietzsche did always say our most dangerous enemy would be ourselves.

Also like a proper Existential work, Breaking Bad finds absurd humor in the struggle, and dark wit and cleverness it deploys with abandon. Walt adopts the name Heisenberg, just when we can say with some certainty his direction and velocity (down, and fast). Of a suspected rat, he says “That is a disappointment.” He and his partner Jesse perform a brilliant break-in, blasting through six inches of steel, but don’t think to grab a handcart to move the 50 gallon barrel containing their prize. When Jesse fails to sling up to Walt’s needs, Walt dresses him down with a classic high-school teacher lecture (“This is a lack of initiative!”). The Talking Pillow.

Beyond Walt and his struggles is an intensely focused pocket of humanity. His wife, Skylar bravely clings to threads of hope even as she quietly resigns her husband to death, while his son angrily grapples with his impending loss and his Cerebral Palsy (his response to Walt electing to not be treated: “Then why don’t you just fucking die already?”). DEA Agent and brother-in-law Hank is a boisterous meathead who goes to surprising lengths for Walt, not yet realizing what is truly going on. Marie, Skylar’s hyper-dramatic bitchy sister sides with Walt in surprising ways. Jesse seems to continually pose a question: is he a scum bag, or is he simply living up to the perception that he is.

Weeds, in the end, didn’t speak in such strong universalities. It didn’t try, of course, that was never its intent. But it remains a hurdle. Breaking Bad, however, is keenly aware of what inevitably awaits at the end of the human journey. We all will find ourselves clad in our Jockeys in the desert, pointing a gun at the sirens in the distance, just not all of us realize it.

Case 10: Weeds

2011-01-19T10:15:00.001-07:00

Wacky comedy? Parental angst dramedy? Suburban satire? Crime fable? How much mileage there in a yuppie widow slinging pot?

Behind the Assumption: It’s off-beat, character driven, and has some edge to it, and Kevin Nealon’s pretty funny.

Previous Experience: Nothing but banner ads, to be honest.

Results: There’s a danger in telling a modern-day story—events could occur that cast a new light on your story. For Weeds, well, I’m sure at the time, the idea of their flighty, vapid upper class heroine in a relationship with a ruthless Mexican politician/drug lord seemed both hilarious and logical. Nancy Botwin had thus far used her femininity and the typical ploys of a bored rich woman to navigate the drug trade, and the show had gotten some laughs from the contrast—this relationship was the next logical step. Real Housewives of Orange County meets Clear and Present Danger! Ha ha! In the now, when I’m watching, the drug lords rule northern Mexico, murdering with impunity and turning the country into a warzone. It’s hard to find the humor.

That is just the most reality-pushing expression of the troubles with Weeds—the way Nancy blithely wreaks havoc with no consequences, which the show treats with a wacky, light hand. It seems we’re supposed to regard her as daffy, plucky, and desperate, who gets herself into and out of zany, but dangerous situations. Attempts to imply a darker, more damaging side to her wheelings and dealings remain that—implications.

And I’m willing to bet that worked in 2005, when Weeds premiered—a truly desperate housewife no doubt resonated, and the suburban satire may have seemed ripe. Pot smoking may have seemed transgressive, Nancy, while she was growing, seemed harmless, and the show certainly handled the rise of boutique medical marijuana shops better than Entourage. But why is Nancy’s last resort dealing weed? Ostensibly, it’s to maintain her lifestyle, but this motive gets more and more dubious the more the little world of Agrestic gets fleshed out. Her sons, who she claims to be doing the dealing for, don’t exactly flower there. Kevin Nealon’s Doug makes me laugh, but causes her nothing but trouble, and her best friend Celia is quite simply a fucking bitch. Sitting on the far side of the burst economy bubble, Nancy’s dilemmas seems both needless and insulting.

I did my best to keep highlights in mind. Doug dancing in front of a fountain of sewage. A gaudy megachurch’s cross reappropriated as a grow light. Andy’s well-intentioned but misguided stint as a coyote. Nancy riding the 21^st century’s go-to joke prop, the Segway, or the first time she used her femininity to get out of a typical drug-dealer problem. But time had revealed a show about how a rich cunt debased herself so she could remain one. I hear the latest season is heavier on consequences, but it may be too little, too late. It’s not a funny joke anymore.

Least Sexy Moment: There are many. Nancy loves her some ugly hate sex.

All-Stars Shoe Sighting: None! Andy wears what are clearly knock-offs. Nice try.

Compliment Case 9: Farscape

2011-01-13T12:43:00.002-07:00

It’s sad that Doctor Who feels to special and fresh by doing exactly what sci-fi is supposed to—show us something amazing. But it’s true—space-travelling shows, when they do come around, try to be cool these days. Rip off Starcraft, but only the human backstory. Don’t do anything outlandish, just put the pretty young cast in flight gear for the promo shot. Sends the signal that we’re for grown-ups. But, you know what, I’m a grown-up, and I still want my alien freaks, dammit. I want crazy aliens with blue skin and 8 foot long tongues, but maybe they can be reformed terrorists, or have unreasonable expectations for their estranged, mixed heritage sons. And maybe they can have freaky alien sex. Thank God for Farscape.

Like Doctor Who, Farscape never met a crazed idea it didn’t like. It’s a show of living spaceships that give birth, doctor aliens who speak in a trill and smell diseases, and oceans of oil set ablaze. At the same time, it’s a more adult venture, so it’s also a show of plant women who orgasm in solar flares, body-switches where the temptation to grope new organs can only be resisted for so long, and dear friends killed by bad decisions.

Farscape is a relative rarity in sci-fi, in that it’s deeply skeptical of human extraordinariness. John Crichton, the lone human flung across the galaxy and surrounded by space Nazis, warrior farmers, revolutionary priestesses, and space skanks, may be brave, smart, and tenacious, but he’s lost in a new land, often mocked or condescended to for his deficiencies, and is unable to remain above the cruel brutality of the universe. He becomes unhinged, reckless, and sometimes cruel himself—a requirement if he is to survive.

But as dark, grim, and bleak as Farscape can be, it never forgets that it takes place in space. And as much as traversing the stars may be a mechanical chore for a galaxy-spanning empire, it’s a marvelous for we simple oomans of planet Earp, and Crichton, as physically and mentally beaten as he gets, still finds wonder in things, and fun in his travels. This is something it feels like many other shows forget, so wrapped up they are in appearing serious. They seem to forget that adults can feel awe, too.

Case 9: Doctor Who

2011-01-11T12:13:00.002-07:00

One of the United Kingdom’s great contributions to pop culture, The Doctor is nothing less than a modern icon. Can this geek ur-text with a 40 year history win me over, or will I be compelled to ex-ter-minate ex-ter-minate EX-TER-MINATE!

Behind the Assumption: As I said, this is a ur-text. Geek Beowulf. The fact that I have a blog about old shows attest to my status as such.

Previous Experience: Beyond an adoration for Who alum Douglas Adams? Doctor Who was in perpetual repeat late on PBS throughout my youth. Unfortunately, any time I caught on it was something akin to “The Robots of Death: Part 8”. Not a good launching point.

Results: I alluded, way back in the Lost post, to the inherent risk of being sci-fi, the risk of looking silly. No one wants to look silly, they want to look cool. But the problem with cool is right there in the very definition of the word—it’s cold and lifeless. This is exactly what killed Heroes, a show about superpowers that was terrified of using them, because they might look silly. Pretty girls won’t laugh at a superhero dressed like an American Eagle model who never flies, right?

Of course they will. A superhero by any other name is still as stupid.

Doctor Who doesn’t have such fears. It’s a show that’s unafraid to look silly. It’s a show that will happily put its leading man in pajamas and have him sword fight an Skeletor-looking alien warlord atop an asteroid floating a few hundred feet over London. And what’s to be said to that? It’s fucking cool. Who dares wins.

Doctor Who is a show that’s constantly gambling. How convoluted can we make our time-travel? Can we make a tentacle-faced red-eyed alien sympathetic? Can we make an immobile angel statue scary? How many designs from the 60s can we re-appropriate? Huge risks, that have huge payoffs. The average episode is practically bursting with ideas, with a child-like glee. The results are episodes where simply reading the description makes you not just interested, but actively excited. They blend child-like (but not childish) fun with heady ideas and sure-handed execution, usually with some heart. It commits to its premises and does not flinch, and as a result, it accomplishes remarkable things.

The center, which holds everything in place, is The Doctor, the British pop culture counter-weight to James Bond, a character so great, it’s taken 11 actors to officially play him. An immortal alien (of a race quite awesomely dubbed “Time Lord”), a relentless wanderer, anti-authoritarian, preservationist, and humanist, devoted to the virtues of exploration, understanding and détente, the ultimate nerd and ultimate bad-ass, ready, willing, and able to fight injustice and protect the innocent, armed only with his giant, info-filled brain, boundless problem-solving skills, and his ability to inspire mere mortals to transcend their fears and weaknesses, but also (in different incarnations) an angry, traumatized survivor who bitterly mocks opponents with his past destructions, a frightful demi-god who flees from enemies not for his sake, but for theirs, or a powerful outsider who is barely able to keep his frustrations in check. He is a hero who continually flings himself into certain death, and emerges unscathed, but knows that a hero sometimes makes the difficult choices with the heavy costs. He offers his companions the wonders of the cosmos, but inevitably offers them death as well. He abhors the taking of a life because he can so easily take them.

Obviously, only the most epic of adventures will do for such a character—and with nearly 40 years behind him, he’s had plenty. That history gives the character a weight the show can, and does lean on, and The Doctor’s rising tide raises all the other boats. The Daleks and the Cybermen are pretty ludicrous, but they are lent gravity by The Doctor and the show itself. They become scary, and because of their silliness, it’s a much more unconventional sort of scary, and much more fun.

The show spins a grandiose web that trapped me, and filled me with wonder at its potentials. No other show on this list has the freedom of Doctor Who. They can’t tell a story of husband and wife who lose each other on parallel worlds and are reunited again, or of a nation built on the back of an enormous, empathetic beast, or of time-traveler lovers who meet, one before their relationship began, one after it ended. They don’t have the unrestrained, youthful imagination required to create an immortal nemesis who summons his army from beyond the heat-death of the universe through a gargantuan tear in the sky. For the Doctor, it’s a tool he manipulates as handily as his sonic screwdriver.

Least Sexy Moment: Doctor Who is pretty chaste in a very classic British sort of way, but as a result when it does get saucy, it’s remarkably effective.

All-Stars Shoe Sighting: No less a figure than The Doctor himself (in his 10^th form) has at least three pairs—black, red, and a sort of cream, to match his various suits. Now that is style.

An Addendum: I’d be remiss not to mention the Doctor Who theme, an awesome piece of music that captures the strange, eerie, off-beat adventurousness of the show, but is historically significant as one of the earliest works of electronic music. The latest two variations of the theme, I don’t think, can be separated from the way the show utterly propels you through the episode and onto the next, making it nearly impossible to stop. I do marathons of other shows to see what happens next, but I did marathons of Doctor Who simply for the experience, the one the theme promises. Below is a great mix of the various themes from various eras, sadly, sans the latest.

Committing, Anticipating Media, and 2011

2011-01-10T11:55:00.010-07:00

A theme has been emerging in preparing this week’s posts of my further descent into bizarre, over-examined geekdom—commitment to an idea. A failure of half-assery is the worst failure of all, and if this page is to be a monument to the hyper-analytical self-aware journey through the pop components of my life, I’d better commit. So, in honor of the hero of this week’s YLT study, I will now pierce the veil of time, gaze back at two weeks ago predict the future. Games are easiest to anticipate--the only movies you hear about a year in advance are giant summer atrocities, TV is mid-season, and there's simply too much literature to worry about what's new or not. What games will I be thinking of when all the big guys are making their lists next year? Maybe I’m still in a list-making mood.

The Dark Horses—There are all sorts of cool looking experiences being offered this year, and I expect to like a lot of them. These here are unproven games from proven makers that seem intriguing.

L.A. Noire—

Those who have been following along will notice that I seem to really love a good crime story. Rockstar, the gents behind Grand Theft Auto, and Red Dead Redemption, are bringing along L.A. Noire—how am I supposed to resist that? Apparently investigating will be a big part of the game, what with finding clues and interrogating suspects and the like. This is the most Heavy Rainish game I’m aware of this year.

Journey—

I really liked Flower, the super-hippie game from thatgamecompany. Two years after its release, I still play it to unwind, and make visitors in my abode do the same. Journey doesn’t seem as easily understandable as Flower, but that just intrigues me more.

Child of Eden—

Another weird creation from a developer whose work I know, this time maker of the rail-shooter beatbox Rez. Child of Eden looks like the sort of thing that could make me see the value of using something that isn’t a regular controller.

Sequel Madness—Unlike with movies, I find numbers at the end of a game title to be reassuring. The numbers suggest refinement after a proof-of-concept, and building on a foundation, rather than straining. Of the many sequels on the way, these here are those I most look forward to.

Killzone 3—

Before it had even come out, Killzone 2 became an easy punch-line, and for many, there it remained. I liked it a lot, though. It had a distinctly European flavor in its mood and atmosphere (which, ironically, many an “atmosphere and mood only” game hipster seemed to have missed), a deeply ambivalent ending, and looked great. In fact, expect some grossly misdirected pretention to come its way soon. Hopefully, I’m not alone singing the praises of #3. And, Malcolm McDowell.

Infamous 2—

Super-hero sandbox. Oh yes. Infamous was great fun, jumping up buildings, jumping off of them, slamming bad guys and saving the city. And the zipping along power-lines or train tracks may have been the most exhilarating form of travel games have yet concocted. If the follow-up has some better facial animations, that’d be nice icing on the cake.

Dragon Age 2—

Even back in the days of yore, when I was 10 playing Zelda, I really wanted to be playing things like Dragon Age. Epic fantasy has always had a pretty strong pull on me—I think because it’s like pretend camping, but with swords—and Dragon Age is a pretty damn good one. This may not be a direct continuation of my Warden’s story, but it should be fun all the same.

The Ultimate Showdown—Already, there are two front-runners for what I expect will be my favorite game of 2011, and they are...

Mass Effect 3 or Uncharted 3—

Here is where the fireworks lie. As things stand now, one of these will be my favorite game in 2011, as they’re both from series I adore, and it doesn’t seem likely that anything will change. So the massive RPG, or the finely tuned action thing? Star Wars of Indiana Jones? I can’t wait to find out.

Compliment Case 8: Cowboy Bebop

2011-01-06T11:45:00.001-07:00

Aeon Flux was one of the earliest American animated shows to wear its anime influence on its sleeve—fluidity, sexuality, mature themes, cyber-punk, bargain-basement philosophizing. Culture, though, is a two-way street. What does it look like when the Japanese take from us?

Cowboy Bebop is the sort of multi-cultural stew that I think might one day typify pop culture of the late 20^th/early 21^st century—it’s a cyberpunk space opera Western Hong Kong gangster anime, indebted to American-style action movies in general, and directly referencing James Cameron, John Woo (yes, a Hong Kong film-maker, but one inspired by Sam Peckinpah) and Robert Rodriguez, and jazz. It eschews the traditional anime continuity-heavy exposition and melodrama dump if favor of the breezy Western episodic form. Pretty bold move for a medium infamous for stretching a single fight over a hundred episodes.

So what does it look like? Well by virtue of some extremely high production values and the seemingly boundless creativity of composer Yoko Kanno, it looks and sounds pretty awesome. It’s hard to turn away from the slick opening credits, which promise hard-bitten noir men, curvy dames, guns, spaceships, and a little Bruce Lee topped with a brassy jazz riff. The show itself is similarly slick, trading anime’s angst and daddy issues for some tough guy stoicism and femme fatale backstabbing and Triad honor, delivered with the kineticism and experimentation that makes the best anime so fun and endearing.

Somehow, the stew of influences that went into Cowboy Bebop gave it a trait almost unheard of in anime—awareness and a capacity for self-parody. In one infamous episode, the lead encounters an actual cowboy, horse, lasso, the whole affair, which results in the loss of groceries. Says one character: “I believe you, but you lose credibility with this ‘cowboy’ character. He’s lame,” jabbing at the show’s central premise. “Maybe if he were a samurai,” he brainstorms, and another character enthuses “Now that I wouldn’t question!” jabbing at (what I assume were) skeptical Japanese audiences. I love that exchange. And the episode climaxes, as it must, with a showdown at sunset, red tinged, wind blowing across the roof of a ruined skyscraper. There’s a quickdraw, and ammo expended, the dueling cowboys go to their traditional cowboy holdout—kung fu.

Sometimes, global culture is beautiful.

Case 8: Aeon Flux

2011-01-04T10:23:00.002-07:00

Back on my journey of the lamest self-discovery ever, we come to a herald of the American animation for grown-ups that I and so many dorm-dwellers have been ravenously devouring since the late 90's, Aeon Flux has some big hurdles between us, though. Did I clear them?

Behind the Assumption: Historical status, mostly, as one of the first American cartoons to take anime’s lessons to heart.

Previous Experience: Reputation, and some experience with maestro Peter Chung’s other work. I found it remarkably ugly and pretentious.

Results: The design of Aeon Flux is horrendous—excessively pointy, emaciated, and even by the rock bottom standards of anime, her clothes are ridiculous, and her hair is stupid. I think that’s deliberate, but still. Anyway, it turned out not to matter, because I really enjoyed Aeon Flux, which surprised me based on my previous experience.

Aeon Flux, though, is practically two separate entities. Its first incarnation is its best, a series of shorts, 3 to 7 minutes, notable for their sci-fi surrealism, fluid animation, and challenging structure. They’re silent (no doubt influencing Samurai Jack), strange, tense, clean, and shocking, telling simple, darkly comic tales of the many deaths of Aeon Flux, clearly the distant future’s unluckiest super-agent, usually involving antagonist/lover Trevor Goodchild. Her deaths come inevitably, yet remain a surprise, as we’re never sure when or how they will come—in one, she’s casually offed within the first minute or so of a 7 minute piece. They’re fun and unsettling, with undeniable flair, and seemingly indebted to Roland Topor’s work on Fantastic Planet, which I appreciate.

The next incarnation of Aeon Flux stretches the length and aims for more story (and ditches the crisp brevity of titles like “Gravity” and “Leisure” in favor of “Utopia or Deuteranopia?” and “Reraizure”). Less daring (Aeon doesn’t die as often), less special, the show remains effective. With a broader story canvas, and voices, Aeon and Trevor more clearly delineate their schism in episodes like “The Demiurge”, where Trevor wants to use a powerful alien entity to ensure lasting peace for humankind, and Aeon doesn’t want to risk losing humankind’s freedom. The breach between them in interesting, though, because it feels more like a philosophical spat between a couple than the mortal enemy rigmarole. Both seem to be hoping the other will come to their senses, Trevor especially, and the series ends with them together, journeying thousands of years into the future (after accidentally and jointly destroying the human race, natch). What happened to split them? What were they like before? We never see. There’s a lot we don’t see about the Aeon Flux universe—the show has much more concern for the action of the moment that for continuity or canon.

Audaciously, each episode begins virtually in media res, tossing out what for other series might have been a 5 episode arc in a short paragraph of text at the beginning. What really keeps things going along, though, is Chung’s visual sense. Like I said, I think most of his humans are exceedingly ugly, but he often comes up with fascinating beasties, like the aforementioned Demiurge, or tiny mole-lizard things with exposed spines, or the oddly singing bird-men. I have to admit that, ugly though I find it, the visual style of Aeon Flux is central to its effectiveness. It allowed Chung to tell evocative mood pieces that appealed to adults—an idea he took from anime, and I’m glad he did.

Least Sexy Moment: Gross tongues.

All-Stars Shoe Sighting: None.

My Five Best 2010 Games: Red Dead Redemption

2010-12-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

Lists. I don’t know why, but I love them. And if everyone else can do them, I asked myself, why not me? So, prompted by being asked to name my three favorites this year, I’ve elected to take a break from the TV stuff, go two better, and do a top five. Now that the last day has come, it's time for Red Dead Redemption.

I didn’t put numbers on any of these. There’s a sort of implied ranking based on chronological order, but I chose not to set anything in stone because I’m fickle and moody and easily distracted, meaning depending on the day, something could be higher or lower or whathaveyou. Red Dead Redemption is the exception. The only spot for RDR is #1.

Over the years, I’ve gradually moved away from RPGs as my most adored of formats, and toward the open-world sandboxes, and the best of these come from Rockstar. I won’t go so far as to say RDR is better than standard-bearer Grand Theft Auto—it’s too cliché a superlative—but it is a masterful expression of the form. It covers an expansive but detailed world, diverse in landscape and wildlife, that my brain tells me is based off Texas, but my heart says was pulled from my backyard. It tells a unique but classic Western, a story that feels fresh, but winks at its inspirations—The Dollars Trilogy, Deadwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Wild Bunch, works of which I am a big fan, incidentally. Its soundtrack twangs in a style I dubbed “acid Morricone”. It features a cast of such size and diversity, four trailers were released dedicated to their archetypes, a memorable assortment of snakes and stalwarts. It uses them to mine a rich thematic vein, a tale of the men and women who made an era and were ground to dust by the next. It’s melancholy, something games don’t often attempt to be, and it features a true rarity—a denouement. A damn fine denouement, too. And it features a well-written protagonist to hold everything together.

RDR gives me the same sort of hope Heavy Rain does. All of the mechanics and systems and thingies you can do in RDR don’t just exist for their own sake. Hunting animals or bounties, gambling well or poorly, encountering all sorts of insanity out in the wilderness, it all makes a picture of John Marston as a consummate frontiersman—a man perfectly suited to a time that, by 1911, wasn’t simply fading (as it is in the 1890’s time-frame most revisionist Westerns prefer), but was well and truly lost. The game inexorably draws Marston and us into the modern age, starting him off with a revolver and lasso, gradually filling out his inventory with un-cowboy gear like magazine pistols and a semi-automatic shotgun, and forcing him to be driven around by car. By the end of the game, World War I, the moment the 20^th century slaughtered and gutted the 19^th for good, is on the horizon, John’s place in history is revealed in an off-handed way. It’s not happy, but most of the good Westerns aren’t either.

I played Red Dead Redemption to death and beyond, and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. The West may have been won, but there’s no reason for me not to keep dropping into a time when it was lost.

Oh, and the music is pretty sweet, too. But I may have mentioned that.

Quasi-Celebrity Appearance: None, Rockstar doesn't seem to use them much anymore, and when they get such quality performances, it's hard to say they're wrong.

Purest Moment: When the title card splashes across the screen, some 40 hours in.

My Five Best 2010 Games: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

2010-12-30T09:58:00.001-07:00

There are game series I like more than Assassin’s Creed, but I don’t think there are any I value more. It’s the kind of thing that I wouldn’t have imagined I could be playing five years ago. Open world sandbox centered around a predator/prey dynamic and climbing some of the world’s greatest architectural feats, telling two connected stories at once, with off-the-beaten-path real-world historical setting teeming with detail, and a thinly veiled parody of our modern times, built on a timeless theme of determinism and the tyrants, and free will and the rebels, expressed in a centuries-long secret war between the Templars and the Assassins. To top it all off, the series has a set of motifs and iconography making everything both more compelling and cohesive—Animus distortions, the striking design of the Assassin uniform, the eagle cries, they give the games their rich flavor. Without Assassin’s Creed, games would be a much poorer place.

But what of Brotherhood itself? I was shocked to find that what was billed as an expansion that added multiplayer had so much single player to offer. It ties off the story and setting of AC2 (I hope—I value the changing settings and lead), allows more time with some side characters, expands the modern setting, lets you tangle with one of history’s great monsters, features Rome, sadly left out of AC2, rendered in a shocking size and depth, refines the arsenal available, and adds a whole new system that makes you not just a bad-ass, but the lead bad-ass. Recruiting and training a deadly aerie to be deployed across Europe, or kept in pocket to be unleashed upon guards (their strikes, naturally, punctuated with an eagle cry), allowing you to enter the role of the Master Assassin is a new dimension I hope gets more fully fleshed out as the series continues.

But what I have most praised AC for is its bravery—a trait far too lacking in games, which are often all too willing to go for some shocking blast of violence, but otherwise as inoffensive as possible in the same sort of bland, low-level conservatism most blockbuster movies use. AC has a very specific political opinion, and it isn’t afraid to share it. In the midst of the worst days of the Iraq War, the first game immersed us in the Third Crusade, and put the player in the role of an insurgent native, a member of the Hashishin, pioneers of suicide bombing. The series features artifacts credited with causing the Biblical miracles, and aligns Thomas Edison and Henry Ford with the domineering Templars. At the end of AC2, you fistfight Pope Alexander VI in the Sistine Chapel. These are not games unwilling to address the uses and abuses of faith. Brotherhood, however, directly indicts the John Roberts court and the Citizens United ruling—a bold statement alongside the usual “War Sucks But Ooo-Rah Military!” pabulum we’re usually served.
Oh, and the music is pretty sweet, too.
Quasi-Celebrity Appearance: AC stalwart Kristen Bell, who I hope is back for #3...
Purest Moment: Deploying my lethal aerie on a mass of guards.

My Five Best 2010 Games: Heavy Rain

2010-12-29T13:25:00.002-07:00

So far, I’ve raved over a game where you ride a Cyclops while fighting a living mountain, and one where you can take a break from fighting space wasps to get it on with an alien babe. I have no illusions, they are not subtle affairs. Games tend not to traffic in subtle. There’s a school of thought that says they can’t, and are best served as a detached assemblage of mechanics with no narrative pretensions. “The princess is in another castle” should be enough, shouldn’t it? I hope that school of thought doesn’t win in the end, and Heavy Rain gives me hope it won’t.

Heavy Rain is a challenging, daring affair that defies easy classification so strongly, the question “Is this a real game, you know?” became an obnoxious cliché. There weren’t systems in the conventional sense to learn, instead there are scripted sequences with prompts to use every capacity the controller has to vaguely replicate whatever action is happening on screen—sometimes including such feats as brushing teeth and setting a table. It splits narrative between 4 controllable characters, each investigating the case of a serial killer from a different perspective—personal, professional, mercenary, and inquisitive. Should any of those characters die, the game goes on without them.

As a result, Heavy Rain was the most intense experience I had all year. By keeping the story grounded, the characters mundane sorts, the atmosphere visceral, the game sold tension and fear better than any other I’ve yet played. Heavy Rain asked me to do ugly, harrowing things in pursuit of the Origami Killer, and each one drew me further into its bleak world. The small details and moments demand attention and thought, which is another aspect of the game I adored—it’s a game for readers. The story is, yes, above-average thriller stuff, but the way the pieces can tumble into place reveal a vast range of thematic possibilities. In my playthrough, authority was empty and inept, leaving the civilians to overcome their weaknesses to save the day, which they did. Someone else might have played the opposite, where the police are the only ones capable of preventing the unspeakable. Maybe someone else had everyone working perfectly in concert, maybe someone else suffered total defeat by a cruel universe that gives the worst beasts of man’s nature free reign. To see that requires attention to details, to see how small actions in the previous scene inform the present scene. What sort of father do you make Ethan be, and how does that reflect on his actions later? These aren’t the sorts of things game people expect to have to deal with. That Heavy Rain expects them to gives me hope.
Oh, and the music is pretty sweet, too.
Quasi-Celebrity Appearance: I can't say, most of the actors are very obscure and French.
Purest Moment: When the controller flew out of my hand as I tried to steer an out-of-control car, forcing me to scramble to retrieve it from my floor, shouting "Shit! Shit! SHIT!", before I died.

My Five Best 2010 Games: Mass Effect 2

2010-12-28T23:24:00.001-07:00

RPGs are traditionally deliberate, meditative affairs, so it feels a little odd to claim that Mass Effect 2 had some of the most truly exciting moments I played this year. But it’s true. ME2 is almost perfectly on my wave-length—it’s exciting, tactical, customizable, open, sprawling, diverse, and lets me immerse myself in a vivid universe, explore its seamy underbelly, gather a gang of colorful slimeballs, interact with them, and ultimately lead them to victory as we outrun an explosion.

The first Mass Effect was a fine game. I liked it a lot, but outside some transcendent moments and characters, I didn’t love it. Tech issues played a part, but ultimately it was too Star Trek. Fun, rich, and deep, but a little too clean. Shepard visited distant colonies and unexplored ruins under color of authority granted him in the halls of power. ME2 feels much closer to Farscape, which I like a lot more, as I wandered through the galaxy’s wretched hives of scum and villainy, assembling a crew of killers, mercenaries, and terrorists that marketing rightly connected to the Dirty Dozen. Now Shepard doesn’t invoke his Specter status, but lets his fearsome rep do the talking. A villainous presence in the first game becomes his savior and benefactor, but remains duplicitous and untrustworthy. There’s a moral uncertainty that adds a lot of tension to the experience.

Key, though, was the cast, the motley band of murderers, mercs, sociopaths, and soldiers-of-fortune who would eventually follow me. I loved stopping by their stations and seeing what they had to say—this game could have easily been higher on the list if there had been more. The warrior space lizard who punctuates his violent puns with air quotes made with his talons. The genetically-engineered perfect woman and her strange self-esteem issues. My favorite, the alien super scientist/super spy, at once a cold pragmatist and haunted by his cold pragmatism, who, when asked, will sing Sondheim. Mordin’s the best, but also typical, a perfect symbol of the ME universe—full of contrasts that make him fully-fleshed, if you’re willing to engage him.
Oh, and the music is pretty sweet, too.
Quasi-Celebrity Appearance: An embarrassment of riches for a voicehound such as myself! Keith David, Seth Green, Hottie Cylon and One-Eyed Tigh of BSG fame, Trinity, Animal Mother, Giles' nemesis, Shohreh Aghdashloo, sweet, sweet Claudia Black, and magnificent Martin Sheen. Oh, and you can pitch woo at Yvonne Strahovski's character.
Purest Moment: The thrill of entering the endgame, unaware if you've fully prepared, matched by the thrill of leaving it, seeing that you did.

My Five Best 2010 Games: God of War III

2010-12-27T20:16:00.010-07:00

Kratos. What a great character. The rampaging, wrathful id personified, he’s so delightfully dark and pure. So nihilistically true. It’d be miserable to be him, but it’s great, dark fun to pop in and control him for a while. He’s clearly inspired by the same ancient Greeks that illustrated Master morality to Nietzsche. A deplorable person, he is a “hero” in that Greek sense—not a good man in any way, but a powerful one, whose power puts him beyond our reproach. I’ll get to subtle, emotional underpinnings and narratives that push the medium in a bit, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that sometimes a raw power fantasy is fun, especially when they’re executed this well. It’s a great help and service to the character that the game around him aspires to such grandiose and epic heights. The world shakes, the music thunders, the camera swoops, the settings stretch into the infinite, and his enemies equal his rage. Poseidon swells into the frame (a stunning battle that occurs within the game’s first 15 minutes, I should note), rumbling “You dare challenge me, mortal? A god of Olympus?” How can I not say “Fucken A Right, I do!”?

Other games have tried to do what God of War does, but somehow, they always get the alchemy wrong. The protagonist is too silly, the sets insufficiently epic, the setting inappropriate, the combat somehow lacking, something is off. That Kratos walks this delicate balance is remarkable, but even then, not everyone appreciated what he does—he’s sufficiently awful that it can be easy to write him off his games as dumb. They’re certainly not what I’d call smart, but I do appreciate the touches that seem critical of Kratos’ behavior. He may feel aggrieved by his antagonists, but they are no less aggrieved by him. His victims rightly call him out on past slaughterings, inequities, and the overall emptiness of his pursuit of revenge. His actions of the first game lead directly to the conflicts of this one, creating the classic sort of catch-22 chicken/egg dilemma that typifies the Olympians—Kratos is the cause, but the Gods demanded he do what he did. It’s an effort that adds a little depth to the bombast.

Only a little, though. Kratos isn’t given a demigod given to self-reflection. That's much of the fun.
Oh, and the music is pretty sweet, too.
Quasi-Celebrity Appearance: Pretty Brilliant. Kevin Sorbo shows up as Hercules, and Linda Hunt give some awesome over-the-top narration, and Rip Torn make a rare appeal to Kratos' pity.
Purest Moment: The entire Poseidon boss fight.

Compliment Case 7: The X-Files

2010-12-17T10:46:00.001-07:00

I was a pretty precocious kid, but I don’t think in 1990, at the age of 11, I would have really appreciated a soap opera/50’s teen movie parody about an unconventional FBI agent investigating the murder of a prom queen/teen prostitute, and becoming increasingly enmeshed in her town’s gothic mythos. I’m sure I’d have said I liked it, and would have believed I did, but I don’t think I would have gotten it. Three years later, though, at 14, when a sci-fi show about an unconventional FBI agent and his smart, capable, super hot red-head partner investigating strange events covered up by shadowy government men connected to the highest levels of power, well, I got that immediately.

In my view, The X-Files is an easier watch today than Twin Peaks, and much of that is by virtue of coming after Twin Peaks. Part of it is that The X-Files feels like a fully modern TV show (hell, it may be the first), with, you know, cinematography, something Twin Peaks deployed in its strongest moments. The two, however, are inextricably linked, and not just because of Duchovny. You can see Special Agent Fox Mulder being born as Agent Dale Cooper gives rocks the names of suspects then throws them at empty bottles, though Coop never had a great partner like Special Agent Dr. Dana Scully to call him on his BS (as great as Sheriff Harry is, he’s a bit of a push-over). You can see the bizarre crimes Scully and Mulder would go on to investigate deep into America’s back corners in Leo’s return to awareness (serious, it wouldn’t have been too out of line for Scully and Mulder to be poking at the birthday cake in the next scene). I remember the two often being mentioned in the same sentence early on, and it doesn’t take a great intuitive leap to see why, even before the outright shout-out in “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”.

While they both had their elements of camp, The X-Files chose two elements to take utterly seriously—its lead characters. Mulder and Scully had a serious core to their existence, no matter how many fluke men or garbage golems they ran into. Their wackiest behaviors are second-hand exaggerations told from the perspective of others. The residents of Twin Peaks are all memorable and vivid, but they tend to keep me at arm’s length. It’s funny when Cooper insists on having a hundred donuts laid out and placed in intricate stacks on a table in the woods, but it’s also hard to forget that people don’t really act that way. Mulder loves porn, and Scully ribs him about his stash. It’s funny too, but doesn’t draw attention to itself. That’s just how people act.

I’d be remiss to not mention one important fact about my relationship with The X-Files. While it’s my go-to sick day show, I’ve never seen every episode. And will never. Among all the contributions The X-Files has made—weirdness, paranoia, horror influence, the supremacy of brain power, Scully—it’s greatest contribution has been its last 3 seasons. Empty, wheel-spinning exercises in pointlessness, stretching story, character, menace, and fun well past their breaking point, I only caught a few of these post-Mulder episodes, and they remain a lesson shows like Lost learned well—“Quit while you’re ahead.” Twin Peaks didn’t get the chance to teach that, which is too bad. I’d have liked to see how it did it.

Case 7: Twin Peaks

2010-12-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

Twin Peaks turned 20 earlier this year. What does it have to offer me today?

Behind the Assumption: David Lynch, crime, darkness, challenge, intellect, serialization, absurdity, significance, it’s all there. Only The Prisoner casts a larger shadow across the TVscape.

Previous Experience: By reputation and Simpsons jokes. I also know what I’m in for when Lynch is involved.

Results: Ambivalence typifies my relationship with the works of David Lynch (though he didn’t direct everything, his fingers are all over the show). I love how strange he is, but at the same time, his strangeness can get very frustrating. The strangeness often doesn’t connect as much as I’d like. His films usually take place in a highly subjective dream-state, and that usually remains the sole reason weird things happen. It’s stupid to expect rational justifications for his bizarre phantasmagorias, but I’d usually like something deeper than “Because it’s a dream”. They’re puzzles, but instead of putting it together, you’re just supposed to admire the pieces. It’s hard to roll like that.

That is where I come from as I approached Twin Peaks. Let me say, I don’t adore it. But let me also say I admire and respect the hell out of it, and my issues are not my usual Lynch issues. The issues that keep me at arm’s length from Twin Peaks have nothing to do with execution, but simply matters of time—its and mine. Twin Peaks landed in 1990, twenty years ago, in a very different world, and as much as it was ahead of its time, there is a lot of it still has a foot planted in the past and is unwilling to move. The first season isn’t particularly cinematic in the way it flows, the acting and writing are often (deliberately) hammy, and at times it’s clearly parodying soap operas, which isn’t a genre I care much about. It’s often filmed in the formalized old TV mode, with an unmoving medium shot of two characters talking—and unforgiving style that sometimes makes everything look cheap. Whatever film stock or early video the show was filmed with doesn’t help, it just looks old.

Despite that, I find Twin Peaks compelling, admirable, and I’m glad to have watched it. The particulars of Laura Palmer’s murder may not shock anymore—hell, the show was infamously unplanned, and the killer’s identity is still hilariously obvious—but there’s still power in the Baroque tableaux it spawns. Laura’s murder isn’t the story, as much as her murder’s effects are, a study in how a dark act exposes and ripples through a community. I prefer to not take the talk of demons and spirits literally (though one could, and apparently many have), but rather as manifestations of the town’s psychological undercurrents. They are not “explainable”, but they work for me, the haunting phantasmagorias and their execution in the show—the show wrings a lot of sense of heightened reality by just changing the lighting. A demonic visage in a Canadian tuxedo crawling across the furniture. A red and black room where connections to the dead are made. A room of celebrants dance to the tune set by a man’s emotional devastation. A line of investigators, coffee in hand, all in a row. Callow men of power surrounded by northwest cabin kitsch. Stacks of donuts spread in a perfectly arranged grid. The Tibetan Method. The haunting refrain “Fire, walk with me.” They don’t make sense, but their power as pieces of mood is undeniable.

So yeah, there are issues. So maybe the show’s a bit soapy, and the honky-tonk theme is grating. Maybe Nadine, and most of the 50’s stuff, is a bit pointless and silly in a bad way. Perhaps Grace Zabriskie had to wail for too long. It could be argued that the back-half of season 2 is aimless. So James starts to flounder a bit, and Catherine’s plot against Ben Horne is stupid and a little racist. It still had Agent Cooper, broken and haunted Leland Palmer, Shelly and Bobby and Leo’s good silliness, and the specter of Laura, the sadness from which all else flows. It had David Duchovny, whose arrival caused me to do a spit take (more on him in a minute). It was a show that desperately wanted to break fully out of its time, but couldn’t quite do it. Twin Peaks isn’t perfect, but it’s profoundly influential. This list would be much different without it.

Least Sexy Moment: Nadine. She’s gross.

All-Stars Shoe Sighting: None. Twin Peaks is almost perfectly too late and too early for them.

Counter Cases to #6: Chuck/24

2010-12-10T08:59:00.004-07:00

A case of epic failure on the scale of Heroes demands not a compliment, but an alternative. In this case, two of them. The scenario is this: You have a story to tell, and you tell it, and tell it well. Your show isn’t done, however. So what do you do?

Let’s say instead of a story about some extraordinary people finding themselves at the center of events that could reduce the globe to ash, unraveling events as they learn about their capabilities, your story is about a rather sad, ordinary slacker geek, thrust into the world of his dreams. There’s excitement, there’s adventure, he’s important, and best of all, there’s a girl. Turns out, just like she’s part of his dream world, he’s part of hers—stability, peace, a Thanksgiving dinner. All of it, though, remains just out of reach. Neither can be fully part of their dream world, and at the same time, the dream world keeps them apart from their ordinary one. Chuck got 2 seasons out of that dynamic, and while it wasn’t deep, it was great fun, and the creators were clearly on a path they knew well, and wrung some great moments out of their setup. And just when they’d squeezed the last drops from that setup, they blew the status quo to hell, and made the eponymous Chuck a super-spy. Consequences be damned, the story needed to move forward. Evolve or die.

There’s no denying that Chuck’s finest season was its second (currently of 4)—where season 2 was nigh onto perfect, 3 and 4 have had some missteps and rough patches. Chuck and Sarah are a couple (as of halfway through 3), and it sometimes feels like the creators were more confident with their characters feeling operatic longing than the nuts and bolts of relationship concerns. It doesn’t matter, though. Another season of pining would have killed the show, rehashing “Chuck meets a nice girl, Sarah looks sad” or “Sarah meets a super stud, Chuck struggles with inadequacy” again was simply not a fruitful path (even under the new dynamic, they went back to these wells. Things were different enough that I felt it worked, but many fans did not). Despite shaking things up, Chuck remains what Heroes failed to be—watchable. You can shake up the center, and the beloved side bits—Morgan, Jeffster, Awesome, and the majesty of John Casey—can be enough to keep things together until everything locks back into place.

Or, they could have done what 24 did, and count on the awesomeness of Jack Bauer to carry the day. Misappropriated by stupid people to justify ugly things, not even the crushing idiocy and evil of Antonin Scalia, the suckitude of Starbuck, not even Freddie Prinz Jr. himself could diminish my enjoyment of Jack, ferociously played by Kiefer (note how both have transcended the need for last names), taking down baddies from the lowliest terrorist, to the highest captains of industry, and their political stooges. He was something no character on Heroes even attempted to be—a bona fide superhero. His power was he always saves the day. His weakness was he could never save himself. Jack was cool enough to remain compelling even when his show sucked, which it often did. No one on Heroes came close to that compelling.

Case 6: Heroes

2010-12-07T13:14:00.001-07:00

The first show to try for Lost's crown, and fail. Did it fail for just or unjust reasons?

Behind the Assumption: It’s Lost meets the X-Men!

Previous Experience: Mostly, reputation. I knew it was very well received initially, and a joke by the end. But how bad could it possibly be?

Results: How bad indeed. Oh, how I regret those thoughts.

Where to even begin? Heroes is terrible. Staggeringly terrible. But that hardly makes it special. There are many, many, many terrible shows out there, stupid shows, with lame plot developments, and flat dialogue, and aimless characters. No, what makes Heroes special is that its terribleness makes me angry. And it makes me angry because it wasted so much potential, and worse, it wasn’t fun.

Heroes starts off OK—there’s some novelty to a big network drama about superheroes, and some legitimately cool ideas and decent characters. Nate, Bennett, Matt, and obviously Sylar were interesting enough to cover the rest of the crew’s failings. The prophecy paintings made for a neat visual, taking healing factor seriously was fun is a gross way, and who doesn’t love “Days of Future Past”? If you’re going to steal from X-Men, that’s the story to steal. Mysteries got resolved, promised confrontations actually happened, there was a fun dystopian post-9/11 future, and it was, well, varying levels of satisfying and exciting, and at the very least it didn’t waste my time.

I knew it wasn’t to last. I thought I was tough enough to handle it. “To the bitter end!” I told myself, a little eager for something terrible for a change of pace. But I underestimated it. Nothing could prepare me for how awful it would become at the speed it did. As a result, Heroes defeated me. I only made it half-way through season 3.

Such a monument to failure is Heroes, I struggle with where to begin. Diminishing returns? How about returning to dystopian alternate futures three times! Yes, three times. In three seasons. Apparently “Days of Future Past” was the only X-Men story the creators had read. Same with the painting prophecies—three times, the plot revolves around deciphering paintings. Heroes so thoroughly beats its few good ideas into the ground so forcefully, I suspect the writers wanted to see in they’d pop up on the other side.

That’d be more tolerable if the show were populated with characters I enjoyed. But first off, Heroes is ceaselessly dour—you’d think having a superpower might be a little fun, but Heroes feels otherwise—and the modest charms of the handful of good characters cannot combat the wheel-spinning, misguided behemoth the likes of Hiro, Ando, Claire, Peter, Nikki, Daphne, Mr. and Mrs. Petrelli, and likely a dozen others I’ve forgotten. Rather than elevating these problem spots (or, for God’s sake killing one, or two, or all), it appears the mandate was to batter the others down, until everyone was the same grey goop. Bennett and Nate go through the same tensions ad nauseum. Matt chases jailbait because he sees it in one of those fucking paintings. Sylar…God. As squeamish as the show was about killing off dull-ass main characters played by dull-ass actors, it chewed through fun side-characters played by great actors without pity, remorse, or fear, and it never failed to do so in a very unsatisfying way.

Yes, Heroes never met a good idea it couldn’t do in a shitty, shitty way. It had Zachary Quinto as Sylar, a vicious monster with a need to kill, a God complex to match, and an array of powers to back it up. It had Kristen Bell as Elle, a sadistic, sociopathic, lightning-fueled lab rat wrapped in the shell of a perky, immature pixie. It teamed them up. It should have been awesome—evil, super-powered Sid and Nancy, unleashed and cutting a swath of havoc across the nation. Instead, they hooked up, whined about their natures, switched who had a conscience from scene to scene, and finally he off-handedly killed her three episodes later.

“Fuck this,” I said, and removed it from my queue.

Least Sexy Moment: The courtship of Elle and Sylar. It’s seriously idiotic.

All-Stars Shoe Sighting: None I remember, and I sure as shit am not going back to check.

Compliment Case 5: Terriers

2010-12-02T13:10:00.001-07:00

A whip-smart, cleverly written SoCal noir about plucky low-rent PIs, that has struggled with low ratings. Yeah, obvious.

The points at which Veronica Mars and Terriers meet are so numerous, I’ve actually struggled expressing myself—it’s just so self-evident. Clever, self-deprecating, low-rent, unlikely but brilliant PIs. Skewed, twisty cases often playing out in delightfully unexpected ways. A strong, compelling central relationship of a sort not usually central on TV—Daughter-Father in one case, Buddy-Buddy in the other. Sunny southern California, where the two margins of American live side-by-side—I’ve even heard that VM’s Neptune is based on Terriers’ real life setting of Ocean Beach. They’re certainly about the same distance from the Mexican border. One show’s young and female, the other’s middle-aged and male, and they reflect those respective concerns. One is uncertainty, confusion, and the angst of growing up, the other is loss, regret, and the way past actions and mistakes linger, but they could rest comfortably in the same universe.

I think it might surprise some that the two finest modern noirs I’ve seen on TV both take place south of San Diego—the images of the genre’s classic expression are rain-slicked, shadow-filled, canyons of alleys. Feels like a New York, doesn’t it? People forget that Sam Spade lived in San Francisco. In the midst of the post-WWII anxieties, shifting gender roles, and German Expressionism, the genre is a place where the Wild West met Industrialization, where the lawmen remained rugged individualists, but the bandits invested in real estate. Sounds a lot closer to California. And it’s still ground zero for many of our modern worries—a place where our country’s most powerful and affluent live alongside our most desperate. Sam’s dark streets aren’t as far away as they seem.

I guess somewhere between the murders of Hollis Mulwray and Lilly Kane, the powerful decided they didn’t need shadows to hide their nefarious dealings anymore—they were rich and powerful enough to hide in the sun, taking in the surf, working on their tans. We still need bad-asses to find their murders, sex crimes, embezzlements, blackmails, real estate frauds, and drug deals, and then throw them out on the beach for all to see, though. The hard-boiled detectives may look like a tiny pep-squad castoff, a schlubby 12-stepper, and a slacker dirt bag, but make no mistake, Veronica Mars, Hank Dolworth and Britt Pollack are first rate bad-asses. In fact, they’re the best kind—bad ass with nothing more than giant brains, tenacity, and a smart quip.

Case 5: Veronica Mars

2010-11-30T14:39:00.003-07:00

When teen soap meets crime drama, which side carries the day? Or does it matter?

Behind the Assumption: A whip-smart, clever detective noir with a twist, and a monster appealing lead, beleaguered by low ratings.

Previous Experience: I often read the name, the concept, knew it was acclaimed, low-rated, and starred Kristen Bell, and knew the loose structure—teenage PI Veronica Mars, daughter of her town’s disgraced former Sheriff, investigates the murder of her BFF, Lily Kane.

Results: Kristen Bell has made her desire to return to the role of Veronica no secret, and I not only see why, I’m a fervent supporter—Veronica Mars is a rich, awesome character in a vivid world. She is, quite possibly, the baddest ass to appear in these musings, a foiler of baddies many times her size and stature, who relies on little more than her tenacity and vast intelligence, equipped with seemingly untouchable emotional fortitude, always there at the end to greet her utterly outmatched adversary with a cute, smug smile. Her bad-assness is so boundless, it apparently transcended her reality and came to effect ours, improbably earning her show 3 seasons. Though the first is obviously the best, I loved them all, and would have kept on watching.

The world she occupies is one that’s worthy of her powers. Neptune, California has some dark undercurrents, used to make some tough points about young adulthood at the dawn of the 21^st century. Nancy Drew jokes may pop up, but very little in Veronica’s world is cute like a fake ghost or a secret passage behind a grandfather clock. She regularly locks horns with fraud, the class divide, drugs and their dealers, serial rape, and murder. As with Avatar, this dark streak of maturity shocked and impressed me. All too often shows set in high-school feel like they were written by people who attended John Hughes High. The schools created in Veronica Mars, and the problems rampant within them, feel legitimate and modern. Neptune High is awash in privileged excess, impoverished resentment, casual misogyny, cruel pranks, catty rumor, humiliation, alienation, and fear. This show understands that the problems of modern youth aren’t the bitch gang snapping on last season’s clothes to your face, but spreading sexual rumors behind your back.

I previously mentioned that Lost fans made Lost fun. I wish the same were true of Veronica Mars, but sadly it’s not. Maybe the smaller fan-base lends strength to more shippery sorts, but they’re all over VM and for such devoted folks, they seem to have missed the point badly. In some circles, Veronica becomes “a bitch” near the end—suspiciously right around the time she (justly) dumps her immensely popular boyfriend. Leaving aside the fact that her bitchiness is a large percentage of her coolness, it’s my view that if your favorite character isn’t Veronica, and your second favorite isn’t her also bad-ass dad Keith, you are watching the show wrong. Third is arguable—I tend to vacillate between Weevil and Wallace.

Not that she’d much care. Sometimes young heroines get fetishized in their sufferings—we’re supposed to pity them and want to protect them from the big bad world, no matter how many superpowers they might have. Pity and protection are utterly useless to Veronica, she has no need for them. She gets hurt, to be sure, she gets upset, she is vulnerable, but she is never weak. When she gets wounded, she gets pissed. She gets awesome.

Least Sexy Moment: “A Trip to the Dentist”.

All-Stars Shoe Sighting: Frequently worn by Veronica herself.

Compliment Case 4: The Venture Bros.

2010-11-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

The current crown of the adult swim line-up, the world of Hank and Dean Venture, and their father, Dr. Thaddeus S. Venture, provides a stark warning to Avatar Aang.

Avatar is the perfect Saturday morning cartoon, and The Venture Bros is its perfect mature deconstruction. It roots adult humor and concerns in the adventure cartoon framework, questioning and critiquing and celebrating those tropes all at once. Based around one brilliant question—“What happens when Johnny Quest grows up?”—the Venture family lives in a world of fading glory, where childhood adventures lead to adult traumas, satisfaction remains elusive, and both hero and villain find themselves questioning their priorities as they crash into middle age. It takes these issues, and their characters, seriously, even as it makes jokes at their expense, or asks us to laugh at bloody carnage inflicted on low-rent villains with goofy names and goofier powers. The Venture Bros provides an honest, and often cynical, but always hilarious, adult perspective to the cartoons of our childhood. There are sick, but hearty laughs in the idea of melding Shaggy and Scooby with the Son of Sam, and a fresh perspective on what could happen to a childhood icon.

Early on, Billy Quizboy says of Dr. Venture “he peaked too early, like at 16.” Aang saved the world at 13. Maybe he should think about that.

Case 4: Avatar: The Last Airbender

2010-11-21T17:59:00.000-07:00

I love my cartoons, but I hate the current crop—all trading cards, no love. It would take something pretty special to impress me.

Behind the Assumption: As I said, I really love my cartoons.

Previous Experience: Though I’d been told by many much-respected friends it was great, I didn’t buy it. Nickelodeon hardly seemed respectable, and neither did the idea of “Ameri-me”, which I associated with Pokemon rip-offs.

Results: So I was wrong. Avatar: The Last Airbender is certainly not on the Pokemon continuum. It is, and ready your eye-rolls, The Wire for pre-teens. If that’s too much of a leap, call it the greatest animated series ever—childlike, but not childish, funny, vivid, exciting, challenging, and fully realized morally, in a way that no cartoon show I can think of matches.

Avatar made me envious of the current crop of children who get to grow up with it. My Saturday mornings were cheap and simplistic, fueled by recycled animation sequences, stock characters, and facile homilies. Voltron won the day after Pidge learned that teamwork was important, and joined the same (if awesome and iconic) transformation sequence that was the staple of a Voltron climax. The blazing sword was formed, and the ro-beast exploded. An Avatar would have blasted my story-starved brains out the back of my head.

Avatar won my respect by treating its audience as sophisticated. It never forgets to be fun—there are jokes, bad puns, wacky shenanigans, crazy outfits, and much slapstickery—and there is the standard moralistic boilerplate about self-esteem, bullies, and the handicapped, yet the show isn’t afraid to be challenging, behaving more maturely than many series made for adults I could name. A crisis introduced in season 1 isn’t resolved until the series finale. One character’s behavior leads to his death, but also has consequences on the important action 10 episodes later. Villains do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and heroes can screw up their own plans by letting their emotions get the better of them. In one of my favorite moments, we’re expected to revel in the bad guys being bad guys and doing bad things. Why? Because there’s no greater Saturday morning truism than “Bad guys are the coolest”. In another, the most moral hero ends the episode horrifically morally compromised, tainted in a cycle of ethnic strife, abuse, and knowledge that enables revenge. Why? Because justice and vengeance is a tricky dance, and ethnic hatreds are passed down from generation to generation, and not even the fictional ones can be solved by a cartoon.

Yes, Avatar impressed me in ways no children’s show ever has. Its sweeping quest and witty goofiness reconnected with me, Saturday morning acolyte, at the same time its savvy, honesty, and maturity shocked and pleased, unforgiving dissector of tales. Avatar: The Last Airbender is the cartoon all kids deserve.

Shame the movie sucked so badly.

Least Sexy Moment: Though well documented by intrepid internet pervs, I couldn’t buy the Aang and Katara relationship—he’s, like, 13, she’s, like, 15, it won’t last.

All-Stars Shoe Sighting: None. Though teeming with majestic, Asian-flavored landscapes, vistas, and architectures, the world of Avatar has not yet developed the Converse All-Star.