BEHOLD! The Return of...FOURTH WORLD FRIDAYS!!!

A couple of years ago, I began a little project called Fourth World Fridays, on an earlier (and, to my eternal shame, Livejournal) version of this blog. I wanted to review and analyze the entirety of Jack Kirby's Fourth World books, issue by issue, one a week. Why the Fourth World? Well, up until that point, I had been rather dubious about the supposed talents of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It's not that I didn't think they were talented, and I wasn't denying their massive influence on superhero comics, but as a guy who's always felt that superheroes sometimes get too much of the spotlight in analyses of comics history, I always thought that the monument to Lee and Kirby had been erected overtop of Eisner, Barks, and any number of deserving foreign comics artists and newspaper strip creators. It seemed like the main think L&K get credited with is bringing a new sophistication to superheroes, which they undeniably did, but considering that the other creators I just listed were all so much more sophisticated anyway (in my view), this wasn't the massive achievement that people made it out to be. It seemed like their elevation to godhood had come about due to their domination of a single genre, one which had been unfairly elevated above the others.

Wasn't I such an awesomely rebellious contrarian?

In all seriousness, I do still have some of these reservations about the superhero genre, but I realize I had a pretty superficial understanding of Kirby's work. (I'm still a little skeptical of Stan Lee, who never really produced anything of merit apart from Kirby or the other Marvel artists, but I wouldn't deny he had some good ideas, and was an extremely talented editor and promoter. Anyway, more on Stan in the entries to come.) The work that changed my mind about Kirby was, naturally, The Fourth World, which was indeed one of the most ambitious and visionary works produced in the medium of comics. At a time when superhero comics were beginning to struggle with being "serious" and "deep", and mostly doing a hilariously bad job of it, Kirby launched the first superhero series that had a real thematic depth to it. The characters, in particular, were refreshingly complex, while still being big, bombastic, larger-than-life types (as suited a series about literal gods), and the series had some surprisingly sophisticated things to say about power and authority, self-actualization, the creative process, and the then-current generation (of which Kirby was, obviously, not a part).

Also, it was completely bugfuck insane, in the most delightful way imaginable.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's far from flawless. Very, very far. The plotting is often haphazard, the dialogue is famously clunky--sometimes it seems to go out of its way to be as hilariously awkward as possible--and the whole enterprise is often utterly, majestically silly, from the ridiculous costumes to the general sense of unhipness that was inevitable in a work produced by a middle-aged comics artist attempting to pay tribute to the youth culture of the late 60s and early 70s. But the thing is, the things that often make it silly are the same things that make it great--the sense of complete earnestness, open-heartedness, and commitment to every premise, no matter how bizarre or ridiculous, coupled with the willingness to let imagination lead the way. The result is a series that's an acquired taste, to say the least, and requires a bit of work to really appreciate--but it's also instantly compelling. Even if your first impulse is to make fun of it (I have to admit, mine certainly was) you'll never be bored reading it.

Or, hopefully, reading about it.

I admit right up front, this is a pretty blatant attempt to recycle content for this blog. Fourth World Fridays originally had their own blog, which you can read right here if you're so inclined. I'm doing this again partly because I don't really see the point of having a separate blog and want to amalgamate everything, and partly because I'm quite proud of this series, but I think with a little editing it could be really, really good. Plus, my attitudes have changed--I feel I might have been a little too snarky in the original series, and I want to rewrite them to reflect my renewed respect for Kirby. Sure, you could just click on over there and read the whole thing in rough draft form, but...that...would be...uh...mean?

Anyhow. From now on, Fridays are FOURTH WORLD FRIDAYS here on Phantasmic Blog. GO! GO! GO!!!

Some Adjustment Required

MILD SPOILERS.

The Adjustment Bureau is a pretty darn good film that could have been a great one. It is, unapologetically, a romance, which is interesting in and of itself; a lot of genre movies have love stories, but they’re usually of the “Here’s where Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese fall in love to move the plot forward” style, a subplot used to provide motivation. Actually, even in The Terminator, the love story is both crucial and affecting, but it’s not what the story is about. The Adjustment Bureau is a love story first and foremost, and the supernatural trappings are secondary to that. It’s still an intelligent movie that addresses existential and religious issues, but it doesn’t do this in the context of an action-thriller, which is how we’ve been conditioned to expect all of our more thoughtful genre movies these days (and a lot of less thoughtful ones, as well).

Which seems to be bothering some critics, who complain about “lowered stakes” (despite the fact that the protagonist faces complete mental erasure) and the lack of a slam-bang action climax. But the movie chooses the structure and story beats of a romantic drama, and I don’t see any particular reason why this is a less valid way of addressing these ideas. In fact, I think that being able to frame Big Ideas in the context of a romance is one of the very best ways of grappling with them, cinematically, and even if the movie pulled this off intellectually it would be laudable. But it also manages to be a genuinely charming romance, thanks due to the terrific performances of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Again, this is the kind of story where more idea-focused screenwriters and directors might touch on “romance” as an abstract idea only inasmuch as it serves the story (the Wachowski brothers spring to mind) so kudos to writer-director George Nolfi for giving us a screen couple who are a joy to watch, thereby letting us believe that a real love affair is at stake.

So why does it fall short? Simply put, Nolfi bobbles the themes a bit, and he does it in a way that’s endemic to a lot of Hollywood movies right now. When Damon’s character finally gets the full purpose and M.O. of the Bureau spelled out for him, by Terrence Stamp as the very creepy Senior Adjuster “Thompson”, it turns out to revolve around changing not just random events but people’s minds as well. The Adjusters “can’t alter people’s personality or their emotions”, but they can “change the way you make decisions.” This is their primary tool in keeping human history in order and making sure events unfold in a way that will be broadly beneficial to the human race.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being: aren’t people’s emotions exactly the kind of thing that would be easiest to meddle with? Understand that the Adjusters don’t *just* tweak fate and probability, they actually get right inside people’s heads when they need to (in a creepy scene that, in retrospect, doesn’t really make sense). You’re telling me that these folks can physically alter people’s decision-making neurons, but can’t make them a little grouchier or more euphoric? There are humans who can do that with relative ease, for Pete’s sake, just by using the right phrasing or exposing people to certain imagery or smells. Also, pharmaceuticals.

Furthermore, we’re told that the Adjusters have been messing with Damon’s personality his whole life, by exposing him to traumas like the death of his family. And then there’s the central event that kicks off the story, Damon’s meeting with Blunt, which inspires him to give an off-the-cuff speech which in turn reignites his political career. We’re later told that Damon’s impulsiveness has been a continuing problem for the Adjuster’s Plan, but here we them using that impulsiveness to get him exactly where they want him.

The real issue, of course, is that Damon’s only meant to encounter Blunt once, then never see her again, but his love for her—combined with a screw-up on the part of the Adjuster assigned specifically to him (Anthony Mackie)—throws the Plan into disarray and puts Damon into conflict with the Bureau. So this is a Love Triumphs Over All story, and given the framework here, Nolfi clearly thought it was most logical to have the Adjusters represent the triumph of cold rationality and intellect, and for Damon’s struggle to represent the counteracting force of emotion.

But that doesn’t really work, thematically. Because Damon’s love for Blunt is just as clearly shown to be the product of chance, and to have been manipulated by the Adjusters. They even say, later on, that the reason the two of them feel so strongly about each other is that an earlier version of the Plan DID mean for the two of them to be together. So their love is just as inspired by the machinations of the Adjustors as anything else.

More than that, though, I don’t think Nolfi has defined “love” properly. I’m of the firm belief—in case it wasn’t obvious—that intellect runs deeper than emotion, and that, forced to choose, it would be better to make a decision based on rational judgment than on emotion. But I also think that’s kind of a false dichotomy, because emotion is a complex thing. Your moods and whims are ephemeral, transient, but there are other emotions, emotions that form the core of your being, and which arise out of your rational judgment (as well as other thought processes that are mysterious to most of us…which is probably a good thing). I may be in a bad mood today because it’s gloomy out or because I have a headache, but listening to some music or taking Aspirin will probably help with that. But when I think about, for instance, the Tea Party, I’m always going to get depressed and angry. When I think about the moon landing, I feel a sense of pride and inspiration. When I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I feel a sense of comfort and familiarity. These “emotions” are consistent, and go to the core of my being. As such, I don’t think you can describe them separately from my rational thought processes. And I like to think that the love I feel for the woman I saw this movie with is fundamental in exactly the same way.

I’m a little leery here, in that I come close to agreeing with a number of borderline sociopaths on this point (most notable the horrible, horrible Objectivists). My larger point is that you need this kind of “emotion” in your life, and it’s foolish to deny that they make up a core part of your being. If the Adjusters can meddle with your rational thought processes, they have the potential to violate your ability to love someone—it’s not about reason vs. emotion, it’s about how the external vagaries of chance affect your fundamental being—your soul, if you like. What would remain of you if everything in your life was different? If the people you’d learned from, the environment you’d grown up in, the events that had happened to you, were different? It’s a fascinating question, and one the movie doesn’t really address satisfactorily, opting ultimately to go for the comforting bromides we’re used to from Hollywood.

But it is sweet, and romantic, and it does raise these issues in the first place. So that’s something.

Winter Isn't Coming Fast Enough For Some People

I’ve been planning a big—you might even say epic—series of posts about fantasy books (rejected title: Suck on This, J. R. R.) and the “Song of Ice and Fire”/”Game of Thrones” books were and are going to be a central part of it, since that’s the one that rekindled my interest in the genre. But I’m realizing now I had some minor points relating to the ASoIaF fandom and the upcoming TV series that didn’t really fit. Fortunately, the news this week that George R. R. Martin (um, what’s with all the RR’s in fantasy authors’ names? I just noticed that) has finally finished the next book, A Dance With Dragons, provides an excellent pretense to make them apart from those.

If you’re not familiar with the flap around these books: basically, the series is a tremendously fun, compelling fantasy series, one that refreshingly relies on character over world-building, and features a plot that’s a lot more satisfying and twisty than “heroes walk from point a to point b to retrieve object”. In fact, this is one of the only “high fantasy” series I can think of that I would classify as a genuine page-turner, with a lot of wicked cliffhangers that guarantee you’ll be wanting to snatch up subsequent volumes once you’ve started. The last book, A Feast For Crows, ended that way, and here’s where the controversy begins. Each book is structured around a number of viewpoint characters, and this last book ended up running so long that Martin eventually declared that he was chopping it in two, putting off a lot of the most popular characters to the next book, the aforementioned “A Dance With Dragons”. Martin announced that ADwD was basically done and would be arriving shortly. That was over five years ago.

In that time, frustration has built up among the series’ fans, to the point where it’s curdled into…well…this kind of thing.

I don’t blame the readers for being frustrated. It was absolutely silly of Martin to claim that the book was done when there was so much work left—although any creative person, myself included, can vouch for exactly how hard it can be to judge exactly how long it’ll take to revise something. Martin HAS strung his fans along to an extent, though, announcing repeated release dates and then forfeiting on them. But I’m certainly not in a position to criticize there.

What I don’t get, and what bothers me, is the slavering hatred this has engendered in “fans” of the book. You can’t read that blog I linked to above without thinking, “Wait, if you love the books enough that you feel the delay is worth devoting an entire blog to, why are you spending every post putting down the books, their author, the upcoming show, and everyone Martin’s ever met?” (Especially ironic: they failed to blog for almost two months, during which they missed a lot of important news, causing their readers to turn on them. Reap what you sow, dude.) It’s more than a little reminiscent of Homer Simpson’s lament in the episode where he runs for sanitation commissioner: "My campaign is a disaster! I hate the voting public so much! Why won't they vote for me? I'd make 'em pay!"

The guy took six years to finish a 1000+ page book. That's neither unreasonable nor unheard of. Yes, Martin handled it badly, but the people obsessing about this seem to believe that he’d done all this specifically to hurt them somehow, because he feeds on the tears of fanboys, or something. The common lament is that Martin had made so much money that he no longer cared about the series and was simply rolling in hundred dollar bills when he should be writing. Now that this has pretty much been definitively proved wrong, the conspiracy theories are coming out (“he finished it years ago and waited for the show to come out to cash in”—seriously, that’s the argument some people are making) and the muttering has shifted to “Well, I’m sure it’ll suck.” (A Feast For Crows has some problems compared to the first three, so this of course makes it TEH WORST BOOK EVAR and PROOF THAT MARTIN HAS LOST IT)

Of course, the people screaming the loudest seem to care the least about getting, y’know, a good book. Neil Gaiman wrote this and John Scalzi wrote that, which both hit the nail on the head, but there’s another issue here that bugs me beyond defending Martin. I mean, I like the books, but they’re not classics of western literature that are beyond criticism, and as I hope I’ve made clear, Martin certainly isn’t for his handling of the situation. But the arguments employed by some of these faux-fans make it sound like they have no taste, no discrimination, no sense of how literature is supposed to work. It’s not a factory, churning out product to keep you fed or clothed. I thought most people understood that it’s worth waiting for a good story—all of which are different.

One of the constant complaints compares Martin to Steven Erickson, who writes about one of his “Malazan” books a year. “If Erickson, who’s a GILLION SPILLION TIMES BETTER THAN MARTIN, can do it, why can’t he?” I wasn’t hugely impressed with the one-and-a-half books in Erickson’s series I read, but even if it was the greatest fantasy series of all time, and Martin wasn’t in his 60s compared to the relatively young Erickson, it’s still apples and oranges. Different writers work differently. I’m a lifelong fan of Douglas Adams, who famously said, “I love deadlines. I love the whizzing sound they make as they fly past.” Some people work more slowly. And again—“Dance” is apparently longer than the entirety of Lord of the Rings. Which took Tolkien at least a decade to write. Objectively speaking, Martin’s still working at a pretty brisk pace here. I wonder how these people would handle being fans of Thomas Pynchon or Stanley Kubrick.

But, you protest, “Dance” is part of a series! It’s continuing an ongoing narrative! Martin’s entered into an unwritten contract with the reader by starting it! No, you, the reader, have entered into the same unwritten contract you enter into whenever you engage with an unfinished piece of serial fiction. If you’d picked up the first book as soon as it hit shelves, you’d have been taking a number of risks. The book could have been such a bomb that the publisher decided not to continue the series, just as a TV show or a comic book can be cancelled before it reaches a conclusion. Martin could have been in a plane crash. The common fear that Martin might have simply lost interest in the series isn’t entirely invalid—that would indeed have been shabby—but what’s dismaying about that assumption is the way people grabbed onto it as the obvious conclusion, when “writer’s block” seems like a more obvious, and charitable conclusion.

Speaking of Martin dying, this is a particularly noxious example of how self-absorbed and entitled these people are. As mentioned, Martin’s in his 60s, and not precisely a specimen of health. So the refrain has been, “Martin has to finish the series before he dies!” (And that’s the more mature phrasing. A common variation is “Hurry up and finish the book so you can die already, you fat fuck!”) The basis for comparison here is Robert Jordan, whose “Wheel of Time” books hadn’t concluded when he died. Putting aside the fact that I found the one Wheel of Time book I read to be insufferable, I’m fairly certain that Jordan didn’t die to personally inconvenience anyone, and that whining about a man’s death depriving you of entertainment is borderline-sociopathic behaviour. If I were George R. R. Martin, I don’t think I’d be particularly motivated to service a fanbase that’s ghoulishly speculating about my death, let alone one that seemed to wish it on me.

The long and the short of it is, this is an ideal example of just how obnoxiously entitled the world of genre fanboyism has become. It’d be nice if, now that the book has come into being, they had a moment of self-reflectiveness and realized how silly they look in retrospect. But somehow I doubt that’ll happen.

Everybody's Got a Right To Be Happy

I can understand why some people say they don’t like musicals. Honestly I can. Some of the earliest films I watched were classic musicals--West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Oliver! all spring to mind, plus of course the Disney animated flicks—but even back then, I remember having a bit of ambivalence towards the genre. When they worked, they were amazing, but there were lots of pitfalls into which they could fall for me, too. I never cared for the gee-golly-let’s-put-on-a-show style of musical, with people bursting into joyous song over nothing in particular, and it still makes me cringe when a number begins with a big, overdramatic flourish that brings the action to a halt. (Similar to this, it bothers me when a musical number is cranked up to a massive crescendo at the end, regardless of whether the music can support it or not. Prime offender: Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) The musical is perhaps the purest realization of fantasy in storytelling, far beyond asking us to believe in dragons or talking animals. The world of a musical is enough like ours that we expect it to play by our rules, but of course it requires people to act in a purely unrealistic, expressionistic way, one that relates to an emotional state. If we’re not on the same wavelength as the characters, we’re going to react similarly as we do to commercials in which the actors are professing undying admiration for floor wax, or whatever. We suspect we’re being sold a bill of goods, that we’re dragged along instead of swept up in the current. It’s a tough tightrope to walk.

And yet the end result can be so much more than entertaining fluff or mindless spectacle. Whenever people say they “don’t like musicals”, I can’t quite overcome the suspicion that they simply haven’t seen the right ones. It’s a situation similar to horror movies or comic books, actually. To someone who’s had only a superficial, mainstream exposure to the genre, it’s tempting to dismiss it as being a certain way, when the more intriguing, less heightened works that might appeal more directly to an open-minded audience are often perversely more obscure. Horror movies, at a glance, can seem like brain-dead shriekfests that revel in sleaze and base exploitation. Comics can seem like juvenile, impenetrable hackwork with a restrictive focus on the subgenre of superheroes. And musicals can seem like hollow, campy throwbacks. Yet, when done with wit and a modicum of ambition and imagination, all three of these can be among the smartest, most challenging, most resonant forms of storytelling pop culture has to offer.

Exhibit A in the argument for musicals as an intellectual artform: Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins.



I’ve now seen this show twice, and I’m pretty sure it’s up there with my very favourite musicals, precisely because of just how far it deviates from what we normally think of as a standard musical. It’s highly conceptual, plotless, avant-garde even. And yet I find it to be highly accessible, to the point where I’d heartily recommend it to people who think they hate musicals.

The show is done in a revue style, with a couple of linking ideas, most notably that of a shooting gallery on a midway; the show opens with “The Proprietor”, a carnival barker, exhorting the passers-by to try their luck at shooting the President of the United States. And sure enough, the people who take him up on his challenge are all people who attempted, successfully or otherwise, to assassinate various Presidents, all of whom co-exist, for the purposes of the show, in some impossible dreamspace outside of time. For the record, the full list of assassins for most of the show consists of John Wilkes Booth (who shot Lincoln, of course), Charles Guiteau (Garfield), Leon Czolgosz (McKinley), Guiseppe Zangara (FDR, attempted), Samuel Byck (Nixon, attempted), Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme (Ford, attempted), Sara Jane Moore (Ford, attempted, again), and John Hinckley (Reagan, attempted). They’re joined by various civilians and a figure called The Balladeer, who, by the end of the show, has transformed into Lee Harvey Oswald. (It’s certainly interesting that you don’t notice, at first, that Oswald isn’t among the group, despite being the most famous.)

What’s cool about this is that, even with no real plot, each character comes pre-packaged with a story arc, one that has an impact whether you know all the historical details or not. Every character gets their scene where they take a shot at the President, except Byck, who tried to hijack an airplane and crash it into the white house; his scenes consist of apparently real tape-recorded monologues that he mailed off to various celebrities, one of whom was Sondheim’s mentor Leonard Bernstein. (I have a suspicion that this is where Sondheim got the inspiration for the show in the first place.) Every character is fleshed out via a scene or two illustrating their various neuroses and obsessions, either one based on real history or one in which they interact with the other assassins. Guiteau has a showstopping number after he’s been caught and is on his way to the gallows; Fromme (a former member of the Manson family) and Hinckley (who, famously, claimed his love for Jody Foster as his motive) share a love song to their respective objects of obsession; Booth is seen trying to make his confession in the barn where he was cornered before being gunned down. Even with all these scattered glimpses, we learn everything we need to know about the characters and the historical context, while still being compelled to hit Wikipedia as soon as we get home to learn more. Simply based on the premise of the show, the omnipresent threat of death, chaos, and insanity hangs over everything, charging every scene with tension and dread, and like a lot of the darker musicals, the seemingly upbeat and sentimental numbers serve as a counterpoint to the rather horrific themes. The show is a triumph of what these guys call “the off-screen movie” (or in this case, the off-stage play).

My favourite number in the show is “The Ballad of Czolgolz” (which is pronounced “SHOW-gosh,” by the way), the crucial number that, I believe, serves as the Act One finale when the show is performed with an intermission (there wasn’t one this time). Czolgosz, a follower of anarchist Emma Goldman who toiled in a horrific bottle-making plant in the pre-Union days, shot McKinley at the World’s Fair in Buffalo after waiting patiently in line to “shake hands with the president”. His was probably the most overtly political assassination attempt (even Booth was acting more out of revenge and wounded pride) and he’s arguably the most sympathetic of the assassins. His killing of McKinley unifies the show in a number of ways—the fact that it took place at a literal fairground brings back the shooting gallery motif, and it’s a perfect metaphor for the promise of America from which Czolgosz feels he’s been exempted. When the balladeer sings “in the USA/you can make your way/to the head of the line” the show’s theme becomes explicit: killing the president is, in its own twisted way, a realization of democracy, egalitarianism, and the American dream.

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.

Dwayne MacDuffie--RIP

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.