TV Thursdays: Life on Mars

As always, SPOILERS follow.

It’s taken as read that endings are crucial to fiction, but is it possible that, in the medium of television, they might not be as important? I can see arguments both ways. I believe the ending of “Lost” is a genuine disappointment, one that completely fumbles the balls the series had been keeping in the air up until that point, but large swathes of the show are still well worth watching, and aren’t significantly diminished by where the story ended up. I think the ending of Battlestar Galactica is good—not great, but good—but it doesn’t change the fact that the show went off the rails in its final season. The finales of Star Trek: The Next Generation (good), The X-Files (bad), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (mediocre) don’t change the respective quality of the series as a whole.

But then, I have to admit, one of the reasons I can blow off The X-Files and Lost in particular is that I became convinced pretty early on that they weren’t going to stick the landing, that the “big reveals” they’d been implicitly promising throughout the show weren’t going to come together dramatically, even if we technically learned everything by the end. X-Files tripped over its own continuity and narrative coherence one too many times by around the third season to convince me the writers had a plan, and if there’s a more obvious example of TV writers stringing their audience along ad nauseum than Lost’s first two seasons, I can’t think of it. Again, I like both these shows, but I decided not to put my trust in a logical meta-narrative and just enjoy it on an episode-by-episode basis early on.

Conversely, when Life on Mars set up an intriguing meta-story in its pilot, I figured it was going somewhere cool. Not an unreasonable assumption—the show was smartly written from the start, it was well-reviewed, and given that it was British, there was a comparatively short run of episodes, so it wasn’t unreasonable to think that they might have told a tight, 16-part story with a satisfying payoff. So the fact that said payoff completely failed to arrive may have coloured my outlook on the whole series more harshly than it otherwise might have.

The show concerns Sam Tyler (John Simm), a cop in Machester, 2006, who’s in pursuit of a serial killer. When his girlfriend and partner (which…I don’t know much about how the police operate in Britain, but that seems like a bit of a stretch, that you would be allowed to have an open romantic relationship with your partner) pursues a hunch and apparently gets snagged by the killer, Sam races frantically to catch her and is hit by a car. To his befuddlement, he wakes up in what seems to be Manchester, 1973, an exaggerated Starsky-and-Hutch-style TV cop show reality where everyone is a slightly (or heavily) corrupt chain-smoker and heavy drinker, women are only there to be harassed, and police methods involve slapping suspects around until they talk. This brave new world is embodied by Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, played by the magnetic Philip Glenister as a perpetually pissed-off man’s man’s man who takes a blunt-force approach to police work. While questioning the reality around him, Sam also finds himself bringing his modern, logical, and liberal sensibilities to bear on reforming the system, confiding in WPC Annie Cartwright about his former life and providing the voice of conscience for Hunt and his fellow officers.

As with Mad Men, the show focuses on the culture clash between the past and present, more literally in this case, with episodes about the racist and sexist atmosphere of the police station and England in general, the more sexually freewheeling era (masking a heavy level of male privilege), and the corrupt and slapdash nature of police work, compared with Sam’s more meticulous, logical, and by-the-book methods. 1973 tends to come off rather badly in these comparisons, though there is one heartfelt episode decrying the state of soccer/football, and how it’s become a haven for thuggery and pointless tribalism when it’s supposed to just be a fun game.

The real “hook” of the show, though, is discovering exactly what’s going on with Sam and his altered reality. The show suggests very strongly that Sam’s in a coma and imagining everything—he occasionally hears voices from the present on the radio and television discussing his medical condition, and there’s also a series of dreams and hallucinations, including a creepy little girl who occasionally crawls out of his TV set to further muddy the water—but early on Annie points out that the world he’s inhabiting seems far too tactile and detailed to be a hallucination. This sets up just enough doubt that I spent the series expecting Sam’s coma to be an elaborate fakeout…leading to some serious disappointment when the show does, indeed, seem to confirm that Sam was in a coma the entire time and that 1973 was all a hallucination.

This isn’t the only way in which the show seemed like it was leading me on, only to drop the ball at the end. Remember the serial killer business I mentioned above? While the pilot episode focuses on Sam trying to catch, apparently, the same killer back in the 70s, the actual killer—you know, the one who abducted his girlfriend, who he was racing to catch, sending him back in time in the first place?—is apparently apprehended and his girlfriend saved offscreen, while Sam’s in his coma. While I expected this to simply be a temporary resolution that would lead to a more elaborate storyline down the road, it turns out that, no, that’s all the writers cared to do with the concept; the serial killer stuff is completely abandoned after the first episode, lending everything an aura of perfunctoriness. Likewise, the girlfriend that he was so desperate to save is basically abandoned in the second series—while it’s understandable on her part (Sam’s been in a coma for something like a year at this point, and she feels the need to move on with her life), it undermines the earlier relationship more than a little.

Individually, these kinds of issues are nitpicks, but the show is built, at least at first, around Sam’s struggle to escape the world of 1973 and get home, yet the show slowly removes all of Sam’s reasons to want to do so. Thematically, this makes sense; the show ends (somewhat predictably) with Sam abandoning his grey and dreary world of 2006 by jumping off a building and returning to 1973 to save his friends in the middle of a shootout, which wouldn’t make sense unless 1973 had become his real home. But dramatically speaking, undermining the things that drove the plot forward in the early going makes the show more than a little disappointing, in much the same way that Lost’s half-assed focus on weird metaphysics while basically ignoring or only halfheartedly tying up the central mysteries that grabbed us in the first place felt like a copout on the writer’s part. I’m not adverse to a show attempting this kind of sleight of hand, but not at the expense of the drama, and the ending’s ambiguity, again like Lost’s, feels more like the show simply couldn’t commit.

Of course, all the above comes with a caveat: I haven’t watched the “sequel show”, Ashes to Ashes, which I’m told does develop the time travel/coma/afterlife mystery somewhat further (though whether it resolves things in any satisfactory fashion, I couldn’t tell you). I guess this is the problem with British TV: I expect it to be self-contained in a way that North American TV isn’t. Maybe that’s not fair of me? I suppose I’ll have to come back and do a follow-up review if I ever get around to watching Ashes to Ashes…though I have to admit the ending of this show didn’t really compel me to do so. I'm being kind of harsh here, as this can be a very entertaining series on an episode-by-episode basis, but I think it's unfair of this show to dangle an interesting long-form plot and then yank it away by the end.

TV Thursday: Dollhouse

(Hey, when I called this feature “TV Thursdays”, I never said it would run EVERY Thursday, now did I?)



Is it too soon to start banging the drum for a series that ended last year as one of the greatest genre shows of the decade?

It’s hard not to feel that SF television has fallen somewhat from glorious heights. In my rant last time, I called the last decade of TV probably the best in the history of the medium, in America at least, and while I still feel that to be true, things look substantially shabbier if we turn our eyes specifically to genre TV. Things started strong, but Firefly and Carnivale only produced a relative handful of episodes, and BSG and Lost took a depressing downward turn in quality as they went on. Other than some animated series, most of which were either superhero-based or comedic in nature (like The Venture Brothers and Futurama), SF TV proceeded to take a rapid downhill slide in the last five years. Only Doctor Who really carried the standard, and as I said before, I had some pretty big problems with that show for much of its run.

Let’s not even talk about Heroes.

I’m not sure what’s caused television SF to dry up the way it has. Maybe people feel that the future has already arrived in a supremely disappointing fashion, and no longer feel the promise of tomorrow? That would certainly explain the distinctively dystopian tone adopted by more recent SF series. Firefly had a somewhat grim backstory, BSG was exponentially more apocalyptic, and Dollhouse actually manages to top it in the “humanity is doomed, DOOMED I say” sweepstakes.

You may have looked at that last statement and blinked, if you’ve only watched a little bit of Dollhouse. Certainly, based on the initial handful of episodes—which is what the casual viewer is likely to have seen—that statement probably seems pretty bizarre. Dollhouse, at its inception, seemed like the most superficial, conventional, network TV-ish thing Joss Whedon had ever done to that point. The show revolves around the adventures of Echo (Eliza Dushku), an “active” working for the secret and ominous Dollhouse, operating somewhere beneath LA. This is a privately operated facility that possesses the technology to implant people with new memories and personalities, as required by their clients; essentially, it’s a build-a-person service. The Dollhouse makes a point of performing public services by letting out its actives to do social work, help out at hospitals, and the like, but there’s no getting around the fact that the two most obvious uses for a person who can be programmed to order and then wiped clean of memory afterwards are “love slave” and “assassin”, with various other forms of criminal behaviour filling up the slate. And indeed, these are precisely the kinds of jobs for which various spectacularly wealthy clients tend to engage Echo. But Echo is beginning to show signs of glitching, not just remembering the personalities she’s been implanted with after they’ve supposedly been wiped, but actually incorporating aspects of these personalities into the supposedly blank, unthinking “doll-state” in which she’s held between engagements. She seems to be quite literally developing a mind of her own…which wouldn’t be a problem, except that the last time that happened, to an active named Alpha, the result was a supergenius serial killer who, by the way, is still at large.

Dollhouse had two big issues which are frequently cited, even by the show’s fans, as crippling flaws…but I tend to see them as features, rather than bugs. Admittedly they presented a pretty major challenge to the audience, which seemed to clash with the rather dopey, superficial, Charlie’s Angels tone that the show adopted early in its run, such that the show gave the impression that it really didn’t know what it was doing. With the benefit of hindsight, though, these two supposed “problems” were actually fundamental to the ideas the show was exploring.

One of them was the moral ambiguity of the Dollhouse. If you hadn’t seen the show, reading the above description probably makes you picture a series in which Echo slowly attempted to use the tools at her disposal to fight back against the villainous Dollhouse, possibly with the covert aid of someone outside the organization, or a sympathetic type on the inside. The show does feature both of these in the form of Agent Paul Ballard, played by BSG’s Tahmoh Pennikett, a federal agent who’s been obsessively searching for the Dollhouse with the goal of rescuing Echo in particular, and Boyd Langdon, Echo’s handler, played by the amusingly stone-faced Harry Lennix. But, rather disorientingly, the other Dollhouse operatives are all relatively sympathetic as well, even the seemingly amoral mad-scientist programmer Topher Brink (Fran Kranz) and the steely-eyed manager Adele DeWitt (Olivia Williams), who’s not coincidentally written and performed as a cold-hearted brothel madam but claims repeatedly to see the dolls as innocents under her protection. The initial impression one gets is of a show that was desperately trying to excuse or ignore the fundamental loathsomeness of the characters, who are, after all, high-tech slavers. Actually there are a number of mitigating factors here, though they bafflingly aren’t made clear until a little further down the line. The main one is that the dolls are all, at least in theory, volunteers, though we know from the start that Echo, in her original personality of Caroline, was seemingly pressured or duped into service; it is later revealed that the other main dolls on the show are all suffering from some degree of psychological ailment. Sierra (Dichen Lachman) was supposedly a paranoid schizophrenic, Victor (the astounding Enver Gjokaj) is a solider suffering from severe PSTD, and November (Miracle Laurie) is recovering from the loss of a child. Apparently, serving a five-year term as a doll functions as a highly effective form of therapy; we never get the details, but the basic idea is that taking a vacation from your own brain can have a highly beneficial effect. And once you come out on the other side, you’re paid enough money to set you up for life. The problem is that this is immediately made to ring hollow, not just because of the dubious legality of the operation, but the fact that the abuse of dolls quickly becomes a recurring theme on the show.

And the writers are clearly aware of this. By the end of the first season, it’s made pretty clear that the real theme being explored is the degree to which otherwise well-meaning people will excuse and then even make use of harmful technology and a system that exploits others. Characters who react with revulsion to the idea of the Dollhouse are gradually seduced by it, and time after time, when the pressure is applied, no one seems able to avoid taking advantage of the Dollhouse tech. The show makes the case that the inevitability of technological progress is powered by a fundamental weakness in humanity, the same one that leads us to turn every new invention into a weapon, and that people would rather adapt to horrifying perversions of humanity in the name of progress than give up the benefits that come with it. As Echo says in the final episode: “I don’t think it’s good or bad. It’s just…what’s next.” This is pretty bleak stuff even before the show raises the specter of the complete collapse of human civilization—but more on that in a minute.

The show’s other big area of controversy is the fact that the lead character is, at least at first, a complete and literal nonentity. Or, depending on how you look at it, she’s a different person every week. This admittedly makes it a little difficult to relate to the character, but her core persona isn’t drastically far removed from, say, Data in Star Trek, and the basic idea of a “trapped woman” inherently makes you sympathize with her. I think a much larger issue is the fundamental strain put on the lead actress, someone who has to balance, for all intense and purposes, playing multiple roles that are somehow united by an overarching, collective intelligence. It’s a role that requires a masterful actress. It was a role played by Eliza Dushku.

So…yeah. But the show was actually able to work around Dushku’s limited talents (even putting aside the fact that her acting improved quite a bit as the show continued) in a number of ways. It actually helps that she spends a lot of her screentime as the blank, childlike Echo, a role that’s almost impossible to screw up from an acting perspective. Too, like most of Whedon’s shows, it makes great use of its ensemble, particularly in putting the onus on Ballard to be the pro-active hero for the first season, and then later having the cast form a cohesive team with a clear goal of preventing the apocalypse.

Oh yeah, that. When Dollhouse finished out its first season with crummy ratings, it was naturally assumed they wouldn’t be returning (and indeed, if “Omega”, technically the first season finale, had been the last episode, I doubt I’d be writing about it in such depth right now). However, due to a convoluted issue with the network, the writers owed them another episode for the DVD, and they used this excuse to craft an “epilogue” for the show, “Epitaph One”. In this episode, the action moves to ten years in the future, when the Dollhouse technology has evolved into a horrific weapon that can transform whole populations into 28 Days Later-style mindless killing machines via a remote broadcast—and that’s just the start of the ways in which it’s been abused. A band of scavengers, rummaging through the wreckage of Los Angeles, stumble across the abandoned Dollhouse, and find a message of hope.

“Epitaph One” is kind of fascinating because of its ephemeral nature. Because a lot of people hadn’t seen it, it wasn’t clear—when the show did, in fact, return for a second season—whether it was supposed to be a firmly established point to which the show was heading, or rather a “what-if” worst-case scenario. The second season rather masterfully exploits that uncertainty, hinting at inevitable dark things to come one moment and then introducing ideas that undermine it the next. I’d personally recommend watching “Epitaph One” a little further along in Season Two—after the episode “The Left Hand” would be my personal choice—but you’ll get a different experience out of S2 depending on when you watch it.

One way or another, though, this is a dark, dark show with a bitterly cynical take on both human nature and technological progress. It’s also one of the few SF shows in recent years that’s actually tried to be about ideas. It’s kind of amazing that it lasted as long as it did, but it left behind a surprisingly satisfying, if wildly uneven, serialized story with a beginning, middle, and end. The cult for this show will likely remain tiny compared to those for Whedon’s other work, but I predict it’ll last for a long time. Barring the end of the world.

TV Thursday: Carnivale

Cultural snobs are usually known for decrying the degree to which arts and entertainment have deteriorated in the modern era, with varying degrees of fairness; as usual, one has to look back at past triumphs with the understanding that most of the crap has been filtered out over the years, leaving us with the best of film, novels, or what have you, whereas the present remains mired in Sturgeon’s Law. But seemingly everyone agrees that television is one medium that’s shown an undeniable improvement in the last 20 years. With a very small handful of exceptions, much of what was broadcast before 1990 was pretty much disposable crap, or at best, ephemerally entertaining. Even the “great” sitcoms of the era are now marred by laugh tracks, the “great” dramas by staginess and the limitations of network television, the “great” genre shows by repetitive plots and a lack of narrative development. At least, that’s my take on it—some people can get past this stuff more easily. But I love old movies, and I’m usually able to get past their staginess or cheapness without much difficulty; I feel like much of what limits old TV has to do with the need to talk down to the audience, or at the very least, the persistent fear that following an ongoing narrative will require more brainpower than the average couch potato was believed to possess.

(I guess I should qualify this by pointing out that the British were way ahead of us North Americans in the TV department; when I think back on TV shows from before 1990 that I genuinely like, the top slots are immediately occupied by Monty Python and The Prisoner, and of course there are dozens of other great British televisual achievements like I, Claudius, dating from the era in which Charlie’s Angels was ruling the airwaves. As for other country’s TV, I obviously don’t know enough to weigh in. And as for Canadian TV from before I was born, well, I don’t know much about that either. This above rant applies pretty specifically to American television.)

But then came 1990, the year in which Twin Peaks hit, and suddenly it became clear that TV could handle the weird, the obtuse, and the narratively complex—and that something this wild could go beyond barely surviving and become genuine water cooler television. Round about the same time, the Simpsons began to hit its stride, and Seinfeld made its quiet debut, two shows that would finally, mercifully raise the bar for TV comedy. The floodgates opened, and the next few years saw a staggering improvement in the quality of television that continues to this day. Most cultural critics would point to the last decade as perhaps the best ten years for quality programming in television history, and I tend to agree.

Which makes it weird that I’ve watched so little TV in the last ten years. A lot of it has to do with the rise of DVD collections and streaming TV online (and being pretty hard up for cash, thereby putting cable as a low priority), but still, I’ve completely skipped a lot of the most buzzed-about shows of the last few years and before. I have to admit, I usually have a bad track record with getting in on the ground floor of a show; either they end up disappointing or get abruptly cancelled, so I like to wait until something’s established itself a little before catching up.

So…this is that. A series of posts on TV shows. There’ll be two categories here: shows that I only discovered in the last year or so despite passionate fanbases, and shows that I enjoyed in the past but want to revisit to see how my opinions have changed. Despite my rant at the beginning, I *will* be going back to shows that aired before 1990, but as I’m unlikely to want to delve into old episodes of Mary Tyler Moore while I still have so many great modern shows awaiting perusal, the focus is more likely to be on shows from the past few years. (Consider my Doctor Who post to be kind of a warm up. Though I’m likely to post about that show when it returns, too.)

So, to start: the rather warped, lavish Twin Peaks-inspired HBO series CARNIVALE.



Set in the midst of the Great Depression, the story concerns an Okalahoma rube and runaway from a chain gang, Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl), falling in with the titular traveling carnival. Ben’s farmboy façade conceals a secret; he has the Christ-like ability to heal with his hands, but at the cost of taking some other creature’s life, be it an acre of wheat, a pond full of fish, or another human being, depending on the seriousness of the healing being performed. (Yes, it’s essentially the same ability possessed by Ned, the lead character of Pushing Daisies, though needless to say this is a very different show.)

Ben’s understandably rattled by the implications that his power carries with it, and the responsibility of choosing who lives and who dies, leading him to conceal his powers whenever possible. But the Carnivale may be a more suitable venue for him than he might have expected, as several of the other carny folk display hints of supernatural knowledge as well. Then there’s the mysterious owner of the Carnivale, referred to only as Management, who never comes out of his caravan, but who may be manipulating Ben’s destiny from afar. Everything seems to be heading for a collision with a parallel subplot involving a priest in California, Justin Crowe (geek favourite Clancy Brown), who’s beginning to manifest supernatural powers of his own.

While Carnivale remains a favourite of mine, there’s no denying that the show has some serious flaws, and chief among them is the dramatic structure. Aside from the glacial pacing of the first season (things pick up substantially in S2), there’s the problem that the whole season is built around characters going through the traditional Joseph Campbellian “refusal of the call to adventure”, particularly Ben; after setting up a character with superpowers and an epic destiny, it seems pretty askew to spend 12 episodes having the character refusing to have anything to do with them. Even into the second season, Ben remains one of the most passive, dim, whiny protagonists this side of Anakin Skywalker; it says something about Nick Stahl’s acting ability that the character is likeable at all.

Until shit finally gets real partway into the second season, much of the narrative heavy lifting is left to be carried by the various mysteries and intrigues of life at the Carnivale; even here, though, there’s a problem, as the show’s writers spend an inordinate level of time on the Dreyfuss family, considering of barker Stumpy (Toby Huss) and his wife (Cynthia Ettinger) and daughter (Carla Gallo), “coochy girls” (which basically translates to 30s-era strippers and prostitutes). Stumpy’s role essentially requires him to pimp them out, which provides an initial kick but quickly devolves into annoying melodrama that only tangentally relates to the main storyline. Again, the actors do their jobs and keep us from getting completely frustrated with these characters, but this is still a subplot shoehorned in for the sake of adding sex appeal to a story that’s supposed to be about slightly more important concerns.

Still, for all that, it’s impossible not to be taken in by everything else going on. Using a traveling carnival as a setting for a genre show is, really, a bit of a masterstroke; it’s an interesting, delightfully weird setting in and of itself, and its wanderings from place to place bring it into contact with all kinds of potentally interesting stories. The show also reveals a clear love and understanding of horror and fantasy on the part of the creators; Ray Bradbury is an undeniable influence (Stumpy actually gives a speech at one point that steals directly from Something Wicked This Way Comes, another story about a supernatural traveling carnival), and in its contrast between down-home Americana and the weird, dark corners of the world, it captures the tone of Stephen King’s best writing in a way I don’t think anyone else has ever done on film. And of course there’s the Twin Peaks influence; casting Michael Anderson as Sampson, the carnival’s general manager, is one obvious nod, but the show provides a deeper homage to that earlier show in Management, a mostly-unseen force who hides behind a red curtain and has a voice like something out of your worst nightmares. No matter how thoroughly and pedantically Management’s backstory is eventually explained in the second season, the essential creepiness remains.

Which is good, because it’s remarkable to me, looking back on it, how little flat-out horror there is in this horror series. Atmosphere isn’t nothing, of course, but as I mentioned above, the show set up a terrific premise that would allow for a great number of standalone horror story episodes, and yet in the first season it rarely took advantage of this. When it did, the results were pretty great; the one truly “standalone” story in S1, the two part “Babylon”/“Pick a Number”, ends on a satisfyingly terrifying note, and there are some excellently skin-crawling bits in S2 (the best involving a porcelain baby’s mask…you’ll know it when you see it, believe me). But strangely, the show’s writers were pretty reticent to go all-out with fully-formed horror plots. I’d make less of this if there weren’t several episodes in S1 where almost nothing seems to be happening, with “Insomnia” being a particular offender. A good dose of flat-out horror—not mystery and Lynchian atmosphere, actual horror--would have improved S1 immensely.

Speaking Joseph Campbell, the show also suffers more than somewhat from its reliance on now-familiar genre tropes. Here, the problem doesn’t really manifest itself until a second viewing; on the first go round, you’re so consumed with the mysteries and atmosphere of the show, and there are more than a few red herrings that suggest a far more interesting moral conflict. After watching the first season, I was utterly convinced that the twist the show was heading towards was the revelation was that Ben was the one “born into evil” and Brother Justin was the scion of good. After all, Ben’s initially benign-seeming power actually comes with a cost, and it’s one that could very easily lead one into temptation; meanwhile, Justin’s initially creepy-seeming power (he can bring to life people’s sins in tangible form, forcing them to confront them) is, when you think about it, a pretty useful power for a priest who’s angling to put people on a righteous path! This is confused even further by Ben’s less-than-heroic nature and Brother Justin’s attempts to do good in S1, and more crucially, the fact that the two characters’ parents—gradually revealed over the course of the first season—more or less line up with this interpretation; Justin’s the son of an avatar of light, and Ben’s dad is slowly revealed to be one bad dude.

And as it turns out, I was far from the only one coming to this conclusion. As I quickly discovered in poking around the internet, this was pretty much the default interpretation of the show going into S2. Which must have made it all the more surprising when the truth turns out to be far simpler than it appears; Ben really IS the good guy, Justin really is a demon in human form, and both slot quickly into their allotted two-dimensional roles in S2. At the same time, even as the show gains narrative momentum, much of the mystery, ambiguity and potential moral conflict of the first season falls quickly by the wayside, reverting to a fairly bog-standard hero’s journey, good-vs-evil, fate-of-the-world-at-stake conflict. Similar to Lost, the show concealed its ultimate predictability behind technical proficiency and alluring, original trappings.

Fans of the show predictably bemoan its abrupt cancellation at the end of S2, when the creators supposedly had 4 more years of storylines waiting to unfold. But honestly, for all the dangling plot threads left after the final episode, the show does come to an indisputable climax, resolving much of the tension that had been building, and feels “finished” the way that, say, the first Star Wars movie does—there’s the promise of more, but at least the main story is complete.

Of course, if the show had handled things a little more intelligently, either moving the story along at a faster pace or favoring horror over melodramatics, maybe it wouldn’t have had to worry about getting renewed anyway. All in all, Carnivale is a weird, uneasy collision of ideas, many of them very well-done, but failing to cohere properly. It’s maybe better to see this show less as a narrative journey and more as a destination in and of itself—a wonderfully bizarre sideshow set up off the main trail, a tactile and atmospheric world that packs up its tent under the cover of night and is gone before you know it.