Category Archives: 24

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Worst New Characters of the Year

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As I said yesterday, there were very few good roles for actresses this year, but even more annoyingly, there were plenty of bad ones. It’s the usual thing; most shows need a shrewish nagging wife to make things hard for the male lead, or some sexy bikini-clad hottie to titillate (poor Grace Park in Hawaii Five-O, spending even more time in her smalls than Daniel Dae Kim), or they have little to do and are only there as a signifier of gender issues — e.g. Boardwalk Empire‘s Margaret Shroeder wasn’t terribly written, but she did seem to ping-pong between two differing emotional states, all the while standing in for oppressed women everywhere. As the year wore on this list looked like it was going to be all women; that really scared me. I’m not a misogynist!

Thankfully a lot of the shows I watched in the last couple of months provided some truly terrible male characters, but nevertheless, it’s troubling that this was the case. A momentary blip? Or a consequence of Jeff Robinov’s infamous statement that Warner Bros. wasn’t going to make movies with female leads any more? Probably not the latter, but I like to bring that up as often as possible, that a moneyman in charge of a studio thinks there’s no audience for movies with a female lead. It’s not the quality of the movies; come on, it’s gotta be the broads putting people off, man. SMFH.

So yeah, here’s some more hate. Apologies for complaining about the number one choice here again, but honestly, that character is one of the worst errors of judgement ever made in TV drama. That it happened on Jane Espenson’s watch seriously depresses me. I don’t blame her for any of it; partisan of me, yes, but I just cannot believe she wasn’t overruled a lot on that misbegotten project.

10. John Pope – Falling Skies

There’s a case to be made that Pope is actually the best character on Falling Skies. He’s certainly the only character played with any sense of fun; kudos to Colin Cunningham for avoiding the mogadon gas that seems to have been pumped into the set. Nevertheless, he’s just there to fill the gruff badass slot that shows seem to have these days; the same as Gawain in Camelot and Kyle Hobbes in V. It’s a thankless role, because no matter how long his hair, how broad his performance, how “dangerous” he might seem at first, you know the cowardly alien invasion show will do all it can to soften the character for primetime viewing. And so, after just a single episode, the vicious bastard who killed one of the 2nd Massachusetts’ numerous African-American redshirts (seriously, the black actors on this show needn’t bother clocking in at the start of the day; they’re little more than cannon fodder), and who led a band of bastards so bastardly it’s made pretty clear they repeatedly raped the only woman in their ranks, is quickly given the task of being camp cook. He’s not so bad after all, you see, because he knows about herbs and stuff. Not long after that he’s bonding with Noah Wyle’s youngest kid. Falling Skies‘ central, enormous disconnect is most transparent here; the idea of the show is meant to be bleak, and its treatment uncompromising, but instead what we get is a sanitised slice of cowardice that satisfies no one. Pope could have been a modern day Ham Tyler. Instead he’s a declawed Wolverine. I dread the inevitable crying fits he will have in season two.

9. Lumen Pierce – Dexter

SoC wants to be very clear here; any dislikings here are not aimed at Julia Stiles, who does superb work as the vengeful rape victim who teams up with Dexter to hunt down and kill a group of extremely nasty scumbags. Her work elevates the show in much the same way as John Lithgow did as season four’s Trinity Killer, with the bonus that her naturalistic take on the character provides an interesting contrast to the cartoonish performances around her. It’s Lumen herself who is the problem. For all of the interesting character moments throughout the season — her initial disastrous impulsiveness, the conflict between her urge for revenge and her fear of it — she still ends up leaving in the finale as much for franchise-supporting convenience as anything else, which once more shows up the programme’s mechanical nature. Once the season is done, the guest star leaves. Knowing this is how the show operates, much of the season feels like a waste of time; she won’t be around soon, so why invest in her? She’s just yet another character drafted in to give Dexter something to bounce off, one more twisted mirror to reflect an aspect of Dexter’s “complex” persona which amounts to nothing in the way of change or growth. Add to that her damsel-in-distress function for hero Dexter, and you have the most frustratingly almost-awesome character of the year.

8. Sophia – The Event

Though the second half of NBC’s Sci-Fi Frustration Engine was tighter than the first, the radical reboot that got us to that point had some negative repercussions as well. The afore-mentioned resemblance to 24 was the most egregious, but worst of all was making Sophia the Wussy Alien into Sophia the Unbelievably Cruel and Evil Alien in the space of an episode. In the first half of the season the “leader” of the aliens was an ineffectual loser whose words carried zero force; the regularity with which her subjects disregarded her orders or basically just fronted on her became a running joke. The showrunners were obviously aware that they had created someone with all of the moral authority of an oven glove and killed off her son in one of the most interesting episodes of the season. This was enough to turn her into a badass hell-bent on killing millions of humans. That’s inconsistent at worst, promising at best, but sadly the showrunners had cast soft-spoken Laura Innes as Sophia. When playing a compassionate alien she was fine. As a potentially genocidal vengeance-crazed villain? Not so much. The disconnect between the initial conception of Sophia and her eventual turn was the killing blow for the show.

7. Ilsa Pucci – Human Target

In the first season of Fox’s generic action series, Chi McBride was cast as Winston, the witheringly sarcastic but level-headed partner of protagonist Christopher Chance, fretting about the legality of their operations but always coming through in the end. By the final episode of that season, their friendship was well-established, and that perpetual panic was rendered obsolete. Come the second season, and for some reason he was still being dismissive of his partner’s abilities, but this time he plays second-fiddle in the chide stakes to new benefactor Ilsa Pucci. While Winston has concerns based on his understanding of what his colleague is involved in, Pucci is an outsider who perpetually stresses out about the legality of their actions, and spends most of the episode being a McKee obstacle; fine if the show didn’t already have someone in that position, but untenable here. Indira Varma is – as ever – utterly charming as the innocent caught up in the shady goings-on, but the character is a terrible drain on the show’s energy. Even more frustrating, a mid-season attempt to deepen her character is squandered almost immediately, before we get into the usual sub-Maddie-and-David romance bollocks in the last few episodes. Of all of the ideas behind the show’s unsuccessful revamp, Pucci’s redundant introduction was the worst.

6. Odin Sinclair – Caprica

Admittedly there’s only a bit of screentime given to lecherous monotheist Odin Sinclair, what with Caprica being ripped from our hearts by Syfy as they attempt to purge their schedule of, you know, sci-fi. Which is fine by me; he represents the only upleasant spot in the final run of this magnificent show. He’s a great representation of Caprica‘s unorthodox characterisation. There’s barely a single character in this show that doesn’t defy categorisation; they all feel like recognisable humans, filled with contradictions and weaknesses and flaws. And so Odin is a slimy little opportunist who uses a Lacy Rand avatar for porn purposes, smokes space weed like an intergalactic beatnik, and then somehow manages to actually seduce the real Lacy Rand as some kind of awful bonus. Horrible that the writers would do that, but I guess his tiny rebellions and doofus-cool are realistic. He’s the show’s bad boy, and at least does better than the similarly-creepy but far-more-dead Philomon from the first half of the show. So if he’s such a cleverly-drawn character what is he doing on this list? Well, I reckon I’m allowed to stick at least one character on here just because I just can’t stand them, even if that character is intentionally awful and given some compelling qualities. Oh Lacy Rand, you can do a lot better than this sleazy little hipster schmuck.

5. Stephanie Powell – No Ordinary Family

Rowan Kaiser of the AV Club wrote a great piece about No Ordinary Family‘s conservatism, a right-wing viewpoint perfectly encapsulated in the character of Stephanie Powell. Her power is superspeed, a gift that Barry Allen and Wally West would use to travel through time or pass through solid matter. Hell, even Heroes‘ Daphne used it to steal things. In No Ordinary Family, for the most part, Stephanie’s superspeed gives her the ability to get all of her chores done quickly. This is a character written to be smarter than almost everyone else in the show, a scientist researching the mysterious plant that gave them all superpowers. And yet this is merely a “Strong Female Character” get-out clause, her intelligence practically added by default as there needed to be a scientist in the main cast and her husband Jim is written to be an emasculated child whose arc from dope to hero is more important than her actualisation. And so, instead, Stephanie just races around, hoovering and making dinner and lunch for her navel-gazing, lazy family of odious self-regarding jerks, just like a good housewifey should. That’s when she’s not a relentless Claire-Dunphy-esque buzzkill, nagging her nigh-invulnerable super-strong husband to stay home so he doesn’t get hurt, because the presence of whiny behaviour from women in bad TV shows supersedes logic. Man, fuck this show.

4. King Arthur – Camelot

Okay look, in the long game for this show I’m sure Arthur was meant to become a kingly king, a man who leads men, the ruler who unites the lands of Albion, searches for the Grail of Christ and fights the forces of the evil Morgana le Fay, and how better to begin this monumental arc than by casting the guy who looked like he was suffering from tuberculosis in Tim Burton’s magical screen version of Sweeney Todd. SoC has nothing against Jamie Campbell Bower; his rendition of Johanna in Todd is quite lovely. Nevertheless, it’s hard going watching this wispy-bearded incarnation of Arthur, who seems completely out of his depth at every step. It’s a version of the myth that sees him improbably capture the hearts of his followers despite looking like he’s going to burst into tears throughout, but no amount of swords pulled from waterfalls are going to convince the audience that he’s worthy. If they really were planning to toughen him up over the course of the show, they would have needed about 20 seasons to realistically get to that point. The show’s insistence on making Merlin the guiding hand means the central character is little more than a puppet. He does have some agency, at least, but unfortunately his act of rebellion against his mother and medieval consigliere is to stalk and pester Guinevere, all the while whining at her about how much he loves her and why don’t you love me back I’m totally the king cuz Mr. Merlin says so waaaaaahhhhh. Basically, he’s me when I was fifteen. No one followed me into battle when I was a teenager, so why the hell should I believe that anyone would pledge allegiance to this fey twerp?

3. Nelson Hidalgo – Treme

Last year SoC gave its prestigious Worst Character of the Year award to Treme‘s Sonny. Who could argue with us that the barely-talented, energy-sucking, self-pitying creep didn’t deserve his place at the top of the list? Well, David Simon for one. Okay, he didn’t respond to us specifically. Such was the furore about Sonny that Simon mentioned it in one of his customary defensive and self-aggrandizing interviews, bitching out fans for not waiting to see what character magic he weaved with Sonny in the future. And, to a certain extent, he was right. Sonny has struggled towards respectability this year. I’m sure that this year’s addition of opportunistic braggart Nelson Hidalgo will yield some interesting narrative further down the line, but as with Sonny, the main problem, above and beyond his obnoxious personality and forced bonhomie, was that he was painted as such a broad villain, an almost comically corrupt individual whose worst crime is almost his patronising cultural tourism, that all the audience can do is stare in disbelief as the air curdles around them. Treme can be very subtle, and it can clang like a struck anvil. This year, the sound of that anvil was a wheedling cry of, “Cuz, cuz, cuz!” Don’t let the rusted storm door hit you on the ass on the way out, Nelson.

2. Maggie Young – Rubicon

Perhaps it was Rubicon‘s mid-season change in direction that left Maggie the pouting PA so lost and aimless. Certainly the early episodes hinted that Maggie would be interesting even if only as the woman who betrays our hero in a femme fatale style, a possibility hinted at by her vampish demeanour and heavily-stressed sexiness. In that case we can blame the second showrunning team for not finding anything for Maggie to do for the majority of the season. Rubicon‘s biggest novelty — and arguably its greatest weakness — was its insistence on depicting workplace drama at such length. When the usual flirtations and power plays were enacted against the sinister espionage backdrop, the contrast was entertaining. Maggie’s problems – feckless husband, unrequited love, guilt over her early betrayal of Will – were played against nothing compelling, which meant they were just bog-standard plots lifted from other stories. With nothing to do Maggie just hovered in the background, mouth slightly open in a perpetual expression of cluelessness. Was she meant to be the show’s Joan, sultrily swishing through the American Policy Institute corridors like a sexy panther? Or was she just a loose end that no one could tie up? Whatever her initial purpose was, by the fifth episode she was a drag on proceedings, and merely got more useless. Rubicon ground to a halt whenever she appeared; a problem on any show, and deadly on something as slow-paced as this.

1. Oswald Danes – Torchwood: Miracle Day

In this terribly angry post, SoC expressed its opinion about paedophile Oswald Danes at great length, stressing our disbelief that anyone in any writers’ room on the planet would think that adding a convicted child rapist and murderer to your show was a bonus. This wasn’t a Todd Solondz, Happiness moment where that nice Dylan Baker plays a paedophile as a thwarted, lovestruck criminal and plays with your expectations. That was truly provocative storytelling. Adding a child rapist to a dim-witted sci-fi action show can only be worthwhile if something is said, or some idea is explored.

I think the idea here is that humanity will embrace someone awful if they are the beneficiary of a miracle, thus showing how easily gulled we stupid humans are in the face of the impossible, or that the media can manipulate our opinion about absolutely anything becase we’re such sheep, even though the media doesn’t seem to be any better at this than the paedophile himself as the show goes on. Whatever the point meant to be made here, Oswald Danes was meant to die in the first scene, at the very moment the polarity of the… thingy (this is as technical as the explanation in the show) is reversed using Jack’s blood, and he didn’t. So he is the new messiah. But no one thinks this about any one of the hundreds of thousands of other survivors that should have died at that exact moment. Eh?

And so Oswald just hangs around for a few hours, making some speeches and doing this weird leering thing with his distorted face as if someone keeps shoving invisible turds under his nose, getting into fights because he disgusts people, or being treated like a compassionate visionary because he knows how to manipulate people into liking him, depending on whatever garbled point is being put across that week. Of course this means he joins the long line of Torchwood characters with no coherently thought-out personality, who are merely introduced into the story to get the narrative from point A to point X through sheer bloody-mindedness, and not through the traditional storytelling method of depicting recognisable human beings acting with consistency and agency and propelling the plot through actions that reveal something about themselves.

If I were to be generous (which I’m in no mood to be, to be honest; it’s been a crap day thus far), Torchwood exists as a counterweight to Doctor Who‘s relentless positivity about the potential and wonder of humanity. This show is all about making a very strong point about how terrible and venal and mundanely evil we are, though it has yet to even once dramatise this point in a convincing way. And before anyone cites Children of Earth, please don’t. The characters in that series bore so little resemblance to humans that it might have well been set in the Tubbytronic Superdome. Any potential connection between their behaviour and ours was stretched to breaking point by their improbable and hysterical evil.

In that sense Oswald Danes is consistent with previous Torchwood characterisations, but if you take a step back and try to look at him objectively, you see that he was an experiment gone horribly wrong, a story device added without properly considering what he was meant to do. As such, he wastes the viewer’s time. That’s bad enough, but he’s also a paedophile. You put a child rapist in your show, RTD, and he served no purpose. There was no story told here, no allegory or examination of morality or even plot mechanics. His presence in the show is like an enormous stinky shitstain wiped across the franchise. In all the time I’ve been writing about TV, I’ve never seen any decision as wrongheaded and ill-intentioned as this one. It’s an idea whose time will never come.

Okay, one last post. I feel like I’ve given birth to a litter of extremely large and angry babies. This blog should have asked for an epidural.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (20-11)

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2011 has been a bit of a crap one for movies so far. There’s very little I’ve outright loved — only Attack The Block, Rango, and Fast Five have really fired my imagination, and even the current London Film Festival has left me cold so far. It’s made me worry that there’s something wrong in my head. Have I experienced too many stories? Have I become immune? Will I never again enjoy a story without thinking the final act needed an extra level (The Skin I Live In) or thinking someone else did it better (Rampart = A trailer for The Shield)?

Perhaps it’s good, then, that I’m doing this list now. Ordering these shows has been a nightmare. They’re all truly great hours (or half-hours) of TV, with barely a micron of difference in quality between them. Even the top spot (in my next post) was hard to decide on, as there were three episodes that were eligible candidates. I’m happy with my final choice, but it took some pondering. I think I’m good with this part of the list as well, though I’m sure I’ll regret something once I’ve hit Publish.

20. Big Love – The Noose Tightens

The final season of HBO’s underrated polygamy drama had a lot to do before it came to a close. The first few episodes appeared to be concerned with dealing with the fallout from the previous, much-derided season’s worst excesses, as well as setting up the biggest plotquakes to come. The result was a dispiriting lack of urgency for several episodes, but a forgiveable one when this barnstorming hour is taken into account. Everything that had been set up thus far kicked off here: Margene’s guilt over her underage marriage to Bill leading to her hysterical reaction to Cara Lynn’s affair with her tutor; Bill’s desperate anger and bullying of Barb as she prepares to spread her wings and leave his church; Alby’s plot to finally free himself of his arch-enemy Bill with the help of Verlan; the wives facing up to the fact that they are likely to lose their husband as Bill pleads with Senator Dwyer to drop the procurement prosecution aimed at Barb. It’s a packed episode; fireworks go off in every scene, leading to a heart-stopping finale with Alby’s mania finally finding a victim. Chloe Sevigny, who has always been the best thing about Big Love, reaches new heights here, her performance ranging from blazing defiance to mortal terror. The show – and the masterful creation that was Nicolette Grant-Henriksen – will be greatly missed.

19. Terriers – Fustercluck

Viewers who caught the first three episodes of FX’s almost uncategorisable slum-noir P.I. show were likely confused as to what they were getting. The tone seemed at odds with expectations; neither as funny as Ted Griffin’s work on Ocean’s Eleven, nor as gritty as Shaun Ryan’s Shield, it seemed to straddle a number of genres. There were also quibbles about the overall structure; was it going to be serialised or episodic? The fourth episode was where Griffin’s masterplan came into focus, and also made it clear that the first three episodes were actually tonally consistent, not to mention intentionally unpredictable. Hank and Britt – two well-drawn characters unlike pretty much anyone else on TV – come into focus as two street-smart chancers making it up as they go along, and getting themselves into more trouble than they bargained for when they become accidentally responsible for the death of the shady real estate developer who hired them in the first episode, whose body they are then forced to hide. With that act the show suddenly made a weird kind of sense; these were not the normal TV heroes, and this was not a normal TV show. Most shows have a format for you to hold onto, but at this point Terriers leapt into the unknown, and became essential viewing.

18. The Vampire Diaries - The Descent

No matter what your feelings about the capabilities of handsome Ian Somerhalder as an actor, his Vampire Diaries character Damon was always one of the best things about this oft-po-faced supernatural teen drama. It’s only fitting that the best episode of the massively improved second season should be Damon’s finest hour. Our anti-hero takes on the responsibility of looking after his sexual partner Rose as she slowly succumbs to the mortal wound inflicted by a werewolf. Other momentous events happen in this episode, all courtesy of SoC writing heroes Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, but the episode makes the list thanks to the final ten minutes, beginning with a surprisingly moving fantasy scene with Damon easing Rose’s pain with a manipulated dream that allows her some dignity and comfort before he euthanises her. Our new awareness of his compassion is then blown away in a horrifying final scene, as a clearly mentally unstable Damon finds a lone woman driving through Mystic Falls, and regretfully but violently kills her. The final shot of the episode, showing Damon’s vampire eyes, bloodshot and almost glowing with confusion and malevolence in the darkness, is the most chilling of the entire 2010-2011 TV season. It’s not the only time The Vampire Diaries outdoes its prestige TV rivals by messing with the audience’s expectations, but it’s the most memorable.

17. Boardwalk Empire – Paris Green

For SoC there was no greater frustration this year than that experienced while watching Boardwalk Empire. The setting, cast, and production values were all well within our wheelhouse, but the show never took off the way we had hoped. Time will tell if this is just a stumble before a sprint, but until then we can at least be grateful for this memorable late-season belter. For the most part Paris Green appears to be a quiet meditation on the imminent death of the Commodore, which leads to a series of revelations for Jimmy Darmody. Once more Michael Pitt excels as the bitter, thoughtful heavy, burning with frustration at his lot in life and torn between two emotions as his father nears death. Of course, in the final surprising act it isn’t his father who dies, but a man with a secret allegiance to Nucky Thompson – the man who acted as a guardian to Jimmy. Poor Agent Sebso, who finally proves to be as foolish as his cover persona seemed, is coerced into his own death at the hands of his unhinged boss. Michael Shannon shakes the screen as the evangelically-powered Nelson Van Alden, blasphemously baptising his Jewish lackey in a final scene of terrifying power that goes disastrously wrong. If only the rest of the series had scenes as riveting as that, or the beautifully shot moment when the two prohibition agents initially find the baptism site. Hopefully season two will harness the potential of this delirious insanity.

16. Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – The Bitter End

Most, if not all, Spartacus fans would have been fine with the show taking a year-long break while star Andy Whitfield recovered from cancer, but the showrunners cleverly and graciously gave him time to rest by creating this prequel mini-series while keeping him on staff in order to support him, in the hope he would return. Sadly, this was not to be. With only six episodes in the series it was possible that Gods of the Arena wouldn’t achieve the same narrative momentum that the first season did which, if you don’t recall, was moving as fast as a bullet train by the time the final episode arrived. The worries were for naught; with many of the familiar characters in place, Gods of the Arena had a head start. Even with so much of the story already told, GOTA still managed to throw in a few surprises, especially the insight into just how cunning Lucretia truly is. The last episode of the season was a balls-out shocker with an amazing final setpiece; a huge ruck in the new arena which features the immensely satisfying resolution of numerous arcs, including the developing animus between Batiatus and Solonius, the reason for loathsome Ashur’s hatred of Crixus, and the surprising reason why Gannicus isn’t present in the House of Batiatus in Blood and Sand. It’s thrilling, shocking, gorgeous and gaudy and as addictive as smoking, just as we had hoped.

15. The Walking Dead – Days Gone By


I’ll have more to say on this in a forthcoming post. I’ll link back once it’s published. For now, just look at that awesome picture and try to remember how promising that pilot was, how excited everyone got when it aired. So long ago…

14. Parks and Recreation – Fancy Party

There were funnier episodes in the third season of Parks & Recreation (also known as The Show That Shades Of Caruso Once Foolishly Said Was Terrible But Actually Turned Out To Be One Of The Great Sitcoms Of Our Time, for short), and there were more ambitious ones, but no other episode this year encapsulated the life-affirming fantasy elements of this show so completely. The city of Pawnee transforms all who live under its umbrella of optimism, and all who have committed themselves to following this remarkable show are similarly affected by its cheer-inducing rays. This episode saw April and Andy get married after being together for a little while (“My Brita filter is older than their relationship,” says Ben, adding, “Wait a second, should I change my Brita filter?”). The sensible characters object, the foolish characters rejoice, and for once common sense is utterly wrong. Only in Pawnee can an obviously disastrous life-decision be the only right thing to do, and not just because their young love finally motivates Leslie to begin her courtship of Ben. It’s also encapsulates the beauty of Parks and Recreation; a sentimental show that makes that oft-derided philosophy acceptable, a sitcom that offers the audience a chance to embrace light in a dark world, without shame. Long may it run without being tampered with by NBC executives.

13. Caprica – Apotheosis

If SoC had its way, Caprica would still be with us. Its cancellation was inevitable, seeing as only about fifteen people watched it, but at least the show went out in style. Last year saw the similarly regrettable cancellation of Dollhouse; another cerebral sci-fi show that had more on its mind than episodic threats or tedious alien invasion plots. That final season almost fell apart under the weight of completing its story. The last few episodes were a mad dash through several seasons of plotting, and I’m grateful for that, but it did mean the finale was compromised. Caprica comes up with a solution that is simultaneously more satisfying and yet still upsetting; the show ends with a montage of what would have come if Caprica had run for ten years like it should have. The tease is fascinating, forming a link between this Battlestar Galactica prequel and the rest of the franchise. The main body of the episode is magnificent too: we see the Graystone family find peace as they reconcile with the avatar of Zoe; we see the failure of Clarice Willow’s dastardly plan, as Daniel and Amanda Graystone thwart the Soldiers of the One in their quest to promote the Monotheistic Heaven; and we see the Adamas take their revenge on the Guatrau following the death of the first Bill Adama. It’s a great season finale, and the only thing that stops it from being a great series finale is that it shouldn’t have been a series finale. ::wears black gloves in mourning, as is the Tauron way::

12. Rubicon – A Good Day’s Work

Rubicon travelled a short distance from 70s-style conspiracy drama to cerebral 24-style topical thriller with some peculiar baggage including the spate of uninvolving office romances and a malfunctioning sub-plot featuring Miranda Richardson as a woman being sad in some rooms. It was the eleventh episode that fulfilled the promise of both versions of the show, with our paranoid hero Will Travers finally revealing to Catherine Rhumer the results of his research; shadowy corporation Atlas-McDowell is in the Shock Doctrine business, wrecking the world and profiting from the chaos. The show suddenly comes into focus, and writer Zack Whedon and director Brad Anderson crank up the suspense with a nerve-wracking fight scene between Will and smug assassin Donald Bloom. It’s the build-up and pay-off that seals the deal; Truxton’s anguish when he realises what he must do to protect his evil cabal, and Kale’s efficient disposal of the dead body of his former lover. This immensely exciting hour of TV ends with Will slowly falling apart, as he realises just how much danger he is in. Plus we get to hear Rocket from the Crypt’s On A Rope over the sound of a body being dismembered. How often does that happen on TV?

11. The Shadow Line – Episode Six

Addicts of Hugo Blick’s dread-soaked drama, shunned by those who proved immune to the almost other-worldly oddness of it all, could well have felt vindicated in their obsession by the rush of shocking moments that occur in the middle of this episode. The first half of it seems like an elaborate set-up for an imminent disaster, which comes during a typically lengthy set-piece that sees Jonah Gabriel face off against his would-be assassin Gatehouse in the home of his mistress and secret son. The audience, of course, knows that they are not alone, and the traps set by both Gatehouse and Glickman end up going horribly wrong. This ten minute centrepiece, in an already exciting episode, is one of the crowning achievements of the TV year, a sequence of bombshells layered so expertly over each other, occasionally in contravention of usual dramatic logic, that any quibbles about the plausibility of it fade away. It’s deliberately played straight at the audience, who can only react with numb horror. Which is not to say that’s the only good thing about the episode. Gatehouse’s final scene, rising like Lazarus to face his would-be assassin, is memorably chilling and, as with the rest of this remarkable show, commendably precise in execution.

Top ten tomorrow. If I can stop shuffling the order around.

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Fourth

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Longtime readers will know that I’ve dedicated much of the last few years obsessively watching Cuse and Lindelof’s sci-fi masterpiece Lost, and that I liked the finale. Many didn’t, and with great and terrifying vehemence. I half-expect friend-of-the-blog @MhairiMcF to throw a sharpened copy of season 6 at my throat for suggesting it was a success right to the final, beautiful shot. I appreciate this is not the general consensus, but I’m a MAVERICK who’s not afraid to say what he thinks, except for when I write huge caveat-posts attempting to explain away my horrible cowardice.

Anyway, I’ve spent a long time boring my loyal readers about that Ben Linus and the very significant shot of an Avalon (not Apollo) chocolate bar in the finale (the key to it all), and I’m about to do it again even though it is no longer with us. No, come back! Please don’t run away; I’m trying to work out some thoughts on the nature of mystery in narrative, and how to set up small plot bombs on the way to the big stuff. This is even more on my mind after watching the masterful Breaking Bad season 4 finale, which paid off stuff I didn’t even realise needed to be paid off. Truly Breaking Bad is a thing of great wonderment. If you care about TV or storytelling, it has much to teach you. (Spoilers for Lost and Doctor Who follow.)

There’s a way to create mystery without also creating frustration and boredom

As a die-hard fan of Lost, in a world in which such an opinion makes a person some form of awful pop-culture pariah, I’m aware that my thoughts on long-arc mystery stories may be dismissed by you, the reader, especially by the time you have finished the next part of this sentence; I think Lost, a show now widely considered to have completely arsed up the landing, is one of the best examples of generating mystery in a long-run show. The finale transformed many former fans into board members of Pitchforks and Torches Inc., and I understand that, even while I pledge my allegiance to it. The final answers couldn’t satisfy everybody, though sadly they seemed to piss off almost all of the fans.

Nevertheless, it must have been doing something right to keep as many people invested for so long, and my super-scientific study of the show has identified two important elements in the way the mystery developed; the greater mystery of the Island was supplemented by smaller mysteries that were resolved in the meantime, and the larger mysteries were supported by numerous hints and clues that allowed audiences to create their own theories about what the ultimate meaning of the show might have been (and I still maintain that the genius of the show is that many unresolved elements have kept these debates going among my brothers-in-arms, who hide from view for fear of being murdered by haters).

Examples of the former are numerous. Though the new consensus on Lost is that many mysteries were dragged out for a long time, it took less than a (short) season to find out What Lies In The Shadow Of The Statue. The hatch is a mystery for about half of the first season, and then we found out what was inside at the start of the second. Even the reason for polar bears being on the island is revealed very early on, if you were willing to expend a bit of energy reading up about the Dharma Initiative online. Etc. etc. etc. The resolutions may have disappointed some, but the timescales were often shorter than critics maintain.

It’s easier to keep viewers invested if you’re throwing bones to them at regular intervals. Even better, giving the audience room to create their own theories helps too, and Lost was very good at introducing plot elements that serviced alternate interpretations throughout its run. Almost every revelation was ambiguous enough to strengthen all giant theories. The best example might be the run-up to season five’s finale. There was a chance that detonating a nuclear bomb at the site of the Swan Station could save the heroes or trigger the events that doom them; the summer after that incredible final whiteout aired was a great time to be a committed Lost fan, as debate raged over which possible interpretation was the right one.

And so to this year’s shows. Three examples of disappointing-to-disastrous long-arc planning come to mind; Doctor Who, The Event and The Killing, all of which fail in different ways and to different degrees. Who ended strongly with The Wedding of River Song, paying off the events of the season opener in a reasonably satisfying way, though it also repeated one of the show’s long-standing mistakes; not giving the audience a sense of when the end game will arrive. Lost had the benefit of having an end date, as well as a goal for the characters (getting off the island for good), that made sense to all viewers. An essential element of successful element of long-arc storytelling is giving clues as to the shape of the final story, which can be done without giving away any plot elements or surprises. That’s where Steven Moffat’s show falls down. How, and when, will Who end?

Of course Who isn’t going anywhere — it has become very lucrative and ridiculously popular, no matter how the press likes to spin the viewing figures by pretending timeshifting doesn’t exist — but it seems obvious now that what had seemed to be one season arc in Moffat’s first year was actually the beginning of a multi-season arc of head-melting complexity. Massive kudos to him for doing that, but the feeling that answers and resolutions are on the way is constantly being stymied. Having a better idea of when this long story will finish would help shape our expectations, but as the final scene of The Wedding of River Song came around, only then did it become apparent that we weren’t going to find out everything just yet.

And that’s fine, even if some of the answers we’ve had along the way (River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter, and she “killed” the Doctor) are not really surprises at all. Nevertheless, the big arc is not paying off quickly enough, or establishing a recognisable shape, to allow the casual viewer to get a grip on it. Moffat has rejected criticisms that the show is too complicated to understand, and I’m willing to agree with him on that, but it is very complex, and the millions of ideas being thrown out are not allowing the viewer to paint a picture in their own head of what the final story will look like, even if they’re completely wrong because there are still some tricks up Moffat’s sleeve.

What are The Silence? What is their plan? Did I miss this? I must admit the gabbled dialogue distracts me so much I miss a lot of the detail. They’re a religious order? Like the Order of the Headless and the future militant arm of the Anglican Church? At times like this I enjoy Moffat’s ambition, and I look forward to his resolution, but I feel like I do when I read some of Grant Morrison’s craziest comics; like I’ve come in halfway through the story and have missed a lot of important plotpoints, and I can’t prioritise which loose ends and currently redundant events will end up being relevant to the big arc, and so have forgotten many of the key moments and characters whenever they pop up again. Even if I get comments explaining this stuff to me, I can’t make it make sense in my head. As a result, despite sporadic bursts of great enjoyment, the show has become less interesting to me.

I’m not sure how this can be fixed, though it would be nice if we wasted less time on standalone episodes and actually spent more time fleshing out these concepts instead of leaving them as tantalising hints of a greater universe. Perhaps that would make the show more comprehensible, and allow us to interact with it more (though I can see from a quick search that Who theories are almost as widespread as Lost ones). I’m aware that feeling like an outsider here is how many felt with Lost, and basically I’m getting a taste of what it was like to casually watch Lost in a state of frustration. Maybe Who‘s ultimate failing is to not be “my kind of thing” the way Lost was, which is no fault of the show.

The Event‘s long-arc failed mostly because the mysteries posed early on were thrown out as the show tried to find a form that was appealing to anyone. The aliens were pretty sympathetic in earlier episodes, which meant the show’s bad guys were often humans. Obviously this was too confusing for viewers, who abandoned the show after its spectacular pilot, and so the show contorted itself into knots trying to move the aliens into a villain role, though it commendably made their motives justified on some levels. The Event was at its best when it explored this moral quandary, which sadly wasn’t often enough.

It also didn’t help that the show spent a long time dramatising the mysterious actions of James Dempsey (Hal Holbrook), a shady conspiracy archetype injecting himself with YouthJuice and conspiring with various characters from his gloomy Office of Mysterious Conspiracy. What could he be doing? Was he a threat to humans or aliens? Before the end of the season, perhaps sensing that the show was going in the wrong direction, we find out he’s one of a race of Sentinels who protect the Earth from alien invasion. And then, moments after revealing this, he kills himself so the show can become a 24 clone. He’s never mentioned again. Any investment in this plot was a waste of time, and that’s a deep wound to a show based on resolving a mystery.

Even a scene as ridiculous as Hal Holbrook shooting himself in the head after telling the protagonist to stop wasting time chasing him instead of looking for aliens (hell of a nod and a wink to the audience there) is preferable to the tricks played by the team behind The Killing, which dragged a relatively simple story out to absurd length by introducing suspects, making them seem as guilty as it’s possible to be, and then excusing them three episodes later in the most contrived manner possible and never speaking of them again. The show isn’t about people, or life, or even about the murder of Rosie Larsen and how that affects her community. It’s a shell game.

The Killing does just about everything wrong in making a long-form show about a single case. Though it’s been a long time since I saw the first season of Murder One, I remember it did a number of things right that The Killing didn’t even try to do. It supplemented the main mystery (Did Neil Avedon kill Jessica Costello?) with other plots, not least the tension between lawyer and professional BADASS Teddy Hoffman and his nemesis Richard Cross. There was always something else going on, and payoffs littered the first season. There’s no comparison between those plots and The Killing‘s secondary stories. A delayed wedding? A search for a mole in a political campaign (yes, a subplot similarly plagued by red herrings) dramatised by literally THOUSANDS of scenes involving William Campbell and his minions arguing about emails? Who cares?

Murder One also promised a resolution by the end of the season, and we got one. I remember thinking it was pretty satisfying, especially the final fate of Cross, which was poignant and brilliantly performed by Stanley “Ol’ Dependable” Tucci. The Killing hinted at something similar and then went out of its way to render the majority of the season completely superfluous. As with all of those shows that plot for the finale (see previous posts), it made the viewer conscious that they had wasted a lot of time. It wasn’t just the lack of resolution; it was realising that the build-up had been empty entertainment calories. That was the show’s great betrayal. A disappointing ending is one thing, but to regularly piss on us on the way there is unforgivable.

Pandering to an inappropriate audience doesn’t work

No Ordinary Family was not much fun to watch, despite the entertaining interplay between Michael Chiklis and Romany Malco, but then it was aimed at a very specific demographic. To a family with young teenage children, the show might have been a lot of fun, like an undemanding Incredibles rip-off with some bland banter and a couple of poorly shot action scenes in a car park every week (seriously, the majority of the show’s “action” takes place in the same car park, and usually involved someone being punched into the side of a van). That audience never really materialised, but instead of trying harder to win that audience over, it became more interested in chasing a nerd audience that would never accept it.

Throwing in references to specific comic tropes, or casting actors from Battlestar Galactica (a show aimed squarely at adults, let’s not forget), was not going to bring in an audience that would not be served by anything else in the show. Most comic fans were rightly wary of the low-level superheroics on display. It was not a show for them, and no matter how hard Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim tried (the guys who co-wrote the execrable Green Lantern, FFS), superhero fans were more likely to enjoy Alphas, a show that was smarter, funnier, and more gratifying than this. Guest appearances by Brent Spiner, Rebecca Mader (who also showed up in No Ordinary Family, playing a similar character) and Caprica‘s John Pyper-Ferguson made much more sense; they played internally-consistent villains, and were gratefully received by fans who appreciated that they were being catered for by showrunners who understood their interests.

More to come. I’ll keep the Lost chatter to a minimum. (SMILEYFACE)

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Second

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Normally I’d add a big opening paragraph to this, but it’s been a busy day (i.e. I’ve been on Twitter AND Facebook), so I’ll just get to the next three lessons I learned by watching bad TV over the past 13 months.

An agenda can be a bonus, but a lot of the time your show will be better if it’s not about anything

What was the point of Camelot? As far as SoC could tell, it was yet another unnecessary retelling of a tale already well-covered elsewhere. However it was apparently a metaphor for a new way of politics; I can imagine Arthur was meant to be an Obama-type, even though I’d say the last image I’d come up with if asked to picture an iconic leader is a pasty white boy who looks like he’d cry if he had to pick up a spork, let alone Excalibur. That said, I love the thought that Joe Fiennes was playing Merlin as a cross between lovable Obi-Wan and loathsome Donald Rumsfeld, and not a bald Goth with a bad case of dysentery. Maybe I should go back and finish it after all.

SoC has nothing against using a story to relate a political idea or as a metaphor for contemporary times; historical drama and sci-fi are littered with examples of such thought-provoking tales (example right off the top of my illness-addled head; everyone go read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War immediately). One of our all-time favourite shows – Buffy the Vampire Slayer – is rich with metaphorical intent. But sometimes less is more (or, in the case of Seinfeld, nothing is more).

There are mild examples of this. Boardwalk Empire is as vulnerable to the temptation to bang us over the head with “How Things Have Changed And Yet Stayed The Same” story elements as the first season of Mad Men; hopefully that will settle down soon. Connected to that, the worst moments of the otherwise exceptional Treme come when characters spout on-the-nose info-dumps about the state of post-Katrina New Orleans. That’s more forgivable; Treme exists in part to draw attention to a subject that far too many people know nothing about. Still, on a narrative level, David Simon’s preachifying can take you out of the show.

Then there are the more noticeable examples. It’s an odd coincidence that many of SoC’s least favourite shows of the year had a metaphorical agenda. Falling Skies was created by Robert Rodat, the charming fellow who ignored the existence of the non-US Allies in Saving Private Ryan, and equated the British Redcoats in the American Revolutionary War with the Nazis in his monstrous alternative history fantasy The Patriot. This alien invasion show works as a simple survival tale like The Walking Dead or Jericho, with our heroes bravely fighting back against an evil occupation force using guerrilla tactics. It also works as a pro-NRA wank fantasy for anti-government conspiracy theorists who think we’d be better off in a world which had no electricity, but conveniently still had antibiotics.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that protagonist Professor Tom Mason is an expert on military history whose dialogue is peppered with anecdotes about military campaigns, or that the show is set in Boston not far from Lexington and Concord, or that Will Patton — the head of the 2nd Massachusetts – has a teeny-tiny ponytail as if he’s wearing an Eighteenth Century Queue. Fine, so Rodat had some left-over research from The Patriot that he wanted to use, and wasn’t afraid to draw a parallel between the arrogant invading forces of the British and a disgusting race of spider-like monsters that abducts children. But the show hints at other metaphorical meanings, most notably the nostalgic yearning for a time when your mettle was tested in the fire of battle for freedom.

The show is obsessed with two things; children and ammo. The majority of the dialogue in the pilot consists of characters discussing what ammo they need, what ammo they wish they had, ammo supplies, gun comparisons, etc. It’s not just the macho guys; women and children join in though hey, they’re not in charge or anything (let’s not go too crazy here). These survivors are so committed to the cause that they exhibit no other interests. Rodat seems to pine for a life like this, and certainly it calls back to The Patriot and Mel Gibson teaching his children how to kill dastardly Redcoats. Rather that than play video games; one facetious exchange has SoC favourite Moon Bloodgood express gratitude for the EMP blackout that has removed those AWFUL video games from the equation. (SMH)

The children occupy the rest of the show’s attention. They are abducted by the evil Skitters and forced to wear Harnesses which control their minds, turning them into slaves for the mysterious Grey overlords that control these drone forces. Falling Skies spends all ten episodes agonising about this fact, which drives almost all of the action. (It also reminds me of Tom Clancy’s books; it seems that 67% of conversations between militaristic right-wingers are about how great kids are and by the way, how’s the wife? Weird.)

On an emotional level that’s valid, but it also smacks of anti-government paranoia; the idea that our children are being brainwashed by the dark forces who control our country, and therefore we have to fight against this oppression and save our children from indoctrination. The idea of a militia to protect against invasion from outside is one thing, but Falling Skies reeks of Tea-Party anti-government fears. Steven Spielberg was involved in this? And Graham Yost, Mark Verheiden and Melinda Hsu Taylor? It’s a right-wing wet-dream hiding behind a listless sci-fi actioner, like something Newt Gingrich would cook up. It’s even more disheartening than Dexter‘s explicitly pro-capital-punishment bullshit.

As a left-winger I’m bound to find this unsavoury, but it’s not like I think these things shouldn’t be said. Dollhouse was a show that put the viewer in a very uncomfortable position, rooting (to a certain extent) for one section of a company that enslaved people and turned them into mind-wiped prostitutes. Joss Whedon, infamous male feminist, caught a lot of flak for doing that, but the show asked a lot of difficult questions and challenged the viewer. Falling Skies isn’t asking questions; it’s fapping over a copy of Jane’s Defence Weekly and adding poorly written comments about Big Government to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. And don’t get me started on Dexter. The only question it asks, “Which execution turned you on the most, you voyeurs?”

No, my problem with making a show that’s about something is that the message can swamp the drama. It’s impossible to watch Falling Skies without thinking the showrunners are trying to push a philosophy, and no amount of heated conversations between militaristic Will Patton or kindly, non-military-but-equally-as-bloodthirsty Noah Wyle will fix that. See also alien-invasion conspiracy theory hodge-podge The Event, a show so bound up in War on Terror symbolism that its mid-season revamp turned it into a sci-fi version of 24, not to mention one that so slavishly copied the original template that episode 20 (One Will Live, One Will Die) blatantly rips off the eighth episode of 24‘s fifth day, with an attack on a shopping mall.

Compare that to Alphas which, as this review points out, is informed by the War on Terror but survives as a lively and likeable action show without being crushed under an avalanche of obnoxious meaning. Or compare it to Game of Thrones (based on the War of the Roses but not about it), orJustified, or The Vampire Diaries, or any number of shows that have a theme but no intention of banging a message into our heads; they flourish without that burden. I guess the rule is, the less general your point, the better.

Make sure you’re making the right show

Thank you to ace writers/pop-culture thinkers @AmeliaMangan and @Ruby_Stevens for their recent Twitter conversation about NBC’s swiftly-cancelled superhero show The Cape. During the discussion one of them (I think it was Amelia but please correct me if I’m wrong) noted that a show about a cop framed for supervillainy who is taught how to be a boring superhero by the head of a nefarious circus filled with petty thieves should really have been a show about a nefarious circus filled with petty thieves especially when the head of the nefarious circus filled with petty thieves is played by KEITH DAVID COME ON! [/GOB Bluth].

It’s a very good point that I hadn’t even noticed until then. Yes, I can imagine the thought of making a show like that would be pooh-poohed after the cancellation of Carnivale and the tedium of the last season of Heroes, but the alternative — focusing on a guy with a SUPERPONCHO who mopes in an attic because he misses his annoying kid — is just perverse when you’ve managed to hire Keith David and all of his vast reserves of charisma to appear in your show.

But then I guess you can never win in these matters. A lot of folks hated Lost when it gave Ben Linus more to do, but seriously, if you cast Michael Emerson and he creates such a memorable character in such a short space of time, you’d be an idiot not to capitalise on that, and fuck the haters. As it stands, The Cape is a perverse, frustrating near-miss. As a weird Darkman-homage it has some perverse charm, but it was always more of a curio than a viable series. In years to come it may only be remembered as the punchline of a joke in Community; I hope the season 2 DVD of that great show has a feature that explains what Abed thought deserved “six seasons and a movie!”

Mind you, changing direction in mid-show has mixed results. The Event was not a great show, but it had some good ideas, and the potential to explore some interesting themes. Sadly it jumped so violently from one format (sci-fi conspiracy theory show) to another (humdrum 24-esque War-on-Terror analogue) that it only succeeded in shaking off viewers. It’s a more dramatic version of the course-correction shown by Rubicon — another show that started as a conspiracy thriller and then became a cerebral version of i in later episodes — but while AMC’s cancelled show made its transition relatively easily, The Event was drenched in the flop-sweat of a dozen panicky high-level meetings. Every show undergoes a process of discovery as it progresses, but it’s rare that a show can survive such a radical overhaul at that late stage.

Whenever you can, do more drafts

Camelot was a show so poorly conceived, written and acted that even I, a man who has watched numerous seasons of shows he hates (Dexter, Heroes) couldn’t even make it through ten episodes. Much of that was down to the realisation that there wasn’t going to be enough event to keep watching, though the promise of more superscowling from SoC acting hero Joe Fiennes and occasional Mirrenesque stripping scenes from the not-unattractive Eva Green did tempt us. But no, it was too painful to see them trying so hard to make being stuck in that morass seem worthwhile. They both deserve better.

The killing blow came early in the season, with Arthur (here imagined as a wet rag with a snivel painted on it) and Guinevere (a medieval version of the most popular girl in school) bonding and flirting on a parapet in Camelot itself. Maybe it was a result of co-creator Chris Chibnall having to find an extra 10 minutes of drama compared to the 50 minute-long episodes of Torchwood that he worked on before, but in a show already heavy with padding, this scene was murderously boring to watch. The banter was stilted and contained no pertinent information about character or plot. It was just two people chatting, charmlessly.

It was as if the concept of subtext didn’t exist in Ye Olde Britaineenneee, and the result was dead air. It wasn’t the only scene to stumble like that. An earlier moment with Arthur trudging out of his family home like a less-butch D.J. Qualls visiting a Renaissance Faire was similarly devoid of oomph. His father says goodbye to him, and that’s it. There’s no drama. It could easily have been written out, or something could have been added; some ambivalence, some mystery, a set-up for a future event. Anything. But no. The show needed, for some reason, to show that Sean Pertwee would miss his seemingly consumptive child. So he says goodbye and looks sad.

There’s just one layer there. Unfortunately for Starz and the Camelot team, viewers are becoming more sophisticated, and demand something more from their drama. They need more than just a surface that iterates something that can easily be assumed. There has to be some way to bring this alive, even if it’s just a liberal dose of “Conflict” sprinkled over the top. Of course, in lesser storytelling “Conflict” becomes nothing more than yelling, and we could have ended up with little more than Sean Pertwee telling the little scrote to go back to his room, but when done right, that scene could have come alive.

It could well be that the showrunners had no time to go back and rewrite. Certainly it seems most shows are written at such a gallop that there is no time to go back and revise the work. Plus, writing sure isn’t as easy as it seems. Nevertheless, we still get complex, layered episodes of TV every week from many other sources, where each scene works on multiple layers, calling back and forth through individual hours or full seasons, as part of a larger whole or just as a single bright moment. If some showrunners can polish their scripts, then it’s possible for anyone to give it a try. Doubtless there are a million reasons why it’s difficult to do it, but if you’re not the kind of screenwriting miracle worker who knows how to add a ton of audience-satisfying subtext and complexity in the first pass, at least one more draft should be a priority.

Part the third tomorrow, as long as I don’t decide to go on LinkedIn and Google+ as well. #SocialMediaTimeSuck

Now That’s Some Good Drama

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You should look pleased with yourself, Don Draper. Not only are you the archetypal Alpha Male, but the show you appear in just got good. Really really good.


Just as Six Feet Under and Big Love really hit their stride in their second seasons, Mad Men just kicked off the last scraps of its metamorphonic cocoon and properly fluttered its wings for the first time. I’ve had issues with it in the past, but most of them are resolved now. The season premiere disappointed me, losing some of the goodwill the end of the first season had generated, but the last two episodes have pushed us past “like” and into “love”.

Things that pleased me greatly include:

  • Don’s showdown with the obnoxiously confident Bobbie Barrett, played with singular odiousness by Melinda McGraw, last seen being almost as odious on Journeyman as Dan Vassar’s sister-in-law. It was shocking, graphic, erotically confusing (I thought he had stubbed his cigarette out on her leg or ladyparts or something equally awful), and amazing. He sure has got his mojo back at last.
  • The weak link in the show for us remains Betty Draper, an interesting character played by an indifferent actress (January Jones), who is either underplaying horribly or overplaying someone who is meant to be dead in the soul. While she looks the part (Grace Kelly-esque is insufficient to describe her perfect 60s blonde ice queen aura), she murmurs her dialogue in the most unconvincing way. To make things worse, her scenes are often almost parodic in their silliness. Last season she was almost having an affair with a young boy (well, not rally, but she did seem awfully drawn to him). Her confrontation with Arthur, the supposedly handsome horse-riding student who looks more like Judge Reinhold’s consumptive kid brother to me, was overbaked, with the words “profoundly sad” bandied about way too often (though her response, that it was down to her people being Nordic, was a gem). Maybe the scene was meant to run as a parody of seduction speak, especially with a previous scene featuring Don and Bobbie being so slick as a consequence of their experience with extramarital dalliances, but no matter. It ended with the return of Betty’s Shaky Hands! They’ve been missing since the second episode of the first season, but they’re back, and shakier than ever!
  • The reveal that art is becoming Don’s kryptonite. After his experiences with Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain last season, and Frank O’Meara poetry collections in the second season premiere, he’s now sneaking out to catch La Notte in the afternoon. Next time he goes after Bobbie, she should throw a copy of Catch-22 at him. He’ll shriek, fall to his knees, and then start reading it, oblivious to the world.

  • Actually, there is a bit of a back and forth on The AV Club Mad Men talkback about whether it is La Notte or La Jetee that Don is secretly watching on company time. It’s probably the former, but Chris Marker’s sci-fi slideshow is a good fit too, as the movie Don is watching looks like a series of static shots. If so, is this linked to Don’s seemingly growing realisation that he is lying to himself if he thinks he is an out-of-time 50s businessman and not a 60s hippy? Or a psychopath, which is also possible. Even more shocking, perhaps he is a time-traveller! Only those pesky season one flashbacks with him hanging around with Ryan Chappelle from 24 disguised as a hobo renders that theory invalid.
  • The reaction of Harry after realising Kenneth was being paid far more than him was almost as good as his hesitant slapstick attempts to open his payslip and then reseal it. And then, to put a cherry on top, Harry makes the error of going to see Salvatore, whose withering sarcasm was beautifully judged. Though I had enjoyed the second episode, this scene in the third episode was the one that pushed me over the edge. It was spot on.
  • Don’s awful demotion of his secretary in an act of sublimated rage and shame after Roger Sterling criticises him for sneaking off to watch a movie. Lois’ responses, a mixture of fear and grudging acceptance, were superbly played by Crista Flanagan, whose demotion hopefully won’t cut her out of the show altogether. What was most pleasing about the scene was that Don’s monstrous behaviour was borne not just of his inherent 60s-era sexism (which has always seemed to be in conflict with his attraction to powerful women), but because of a character moment; his weakness for art (or the promise of some foreign erotica, if indeed La Notte contains any) is something he is truly ashamed of. His other vices of infidelity and drinking, are accepting as normal behaviour by his colleagues, whereas this could be seen as a sign of weakness or, more probably, evidence that he no longer fits in with the boys (several of whom seem to be evolving as the decade progresses without him being aware of it). And so he takes it out on Lois. It was horrible and hilarious at the same time.

  • The jawdropping scene from Flight 1 featuring Joan’s racism and cutting criticism of faux-boho Paul made my head spin, and sat in stark contrast with the thoughtless racism of previous episodes. Joan isn’t someone who takes African-Americans for granted; she is actively hateful. Plus, she still doesn’t look quite the same as she did on Firefly and I can’t put my finger on why. Good to see that the show has given us an unrepentant bitch to root against. Moral haziness is one thing, but right now she’s just a horrible person, who is either unforgivably dreadful or entertainingly catty depending on the context. Paul’s revenge (posting a photocopy of her driving licence on a bulletin board with her birthday highlighted) was fun too.

    • For the first time ever, despite Canyon’s continued aesthetic annoyance over Don’s flat butt, we’re looking forward to next week’s episode, which features Don and Betty taking the kids away for a weekend of awkward silences, chain-smoking, and maybe even some tears from Betty due to her Bottomless Nordic Sadness. Let’s hope this newfound enthusiasm of ours isn’t thwarted.

    End Of Season Review – Battlestar Galactica

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    Is it fair to say that sci fi fans are split into two factions over the best genre shows on TV right now? In my time reading talkbacks and comment sections online, Lost talkbacks are often invaded by hardcore Battlestar Galactica fans dissing the island-based dissertation on free will for “making it up as it goes along”, and Battlestar Galactica talkbacks feature, well, less attacks, but perhaps that’s because Lost fans are more polite. Yes, I am firmly in the former category, and so my perception is distorted by that fandom. Lost pushes all of my buttons, whereas BSG makes me angry almost as often as it makes me happy. This picture expresses the chasm between the two fanbases (at least as far as I see it).


    It was not always this way. The opening mini and the first season were as good as TV gets. It was relevant, it was exciting, it was cleverly referential with regards to the original series, and it featured the most incredible effects yet shown on TV. It’s shallow of me to love the show for that, but Zoic’s effects work was simply staggering. That was merely the cherry on top of a lot of really terrific drama. I was absolutely thrilled that SciFi was making something so challenging and clever.


    Over time, my opinion changed. By the end of season two we had had way too many placeholder episodes, which meant the finale crammed in several episodes’ worth of drama into an hour of TV. It was good drama, but rushed through in an unsatisfying blur of action and revelation and unconvincing fatsuits. The other sin of that season (and the subsequent season) was the amount of time spent focusing on possibly the least interesting couple on TV at the expense of a lot of other exciting avenues. Yes, no Apobuck ‘shipper am I. Or Starders, or Apoulla, or any combination.


    Apollo and Starbuck bore me to tears, and we have spent way too much time watching them come up with reasons not to just start spacehumping. My least favourite Apobuck moment came when Starbuck used religion as a reason to not just bang Apollo’s grumpy brains out. We have no idea what the provisions of her religion are, as none of these details have been explained convincingly (more on that bugbear later), so this just smacked of contrivance. The main reason for their inability to just get it on (other than that they are boring, badly written teenagers who love the drama of their relationship) is that Starbuck was involved with the now “dead” Zack Adama, Lee’s brother, who looms over them and Apollo’s dad, the flat-out AWESOME Bill Adama, from “beyond the grave”.


    The amount of time spent agonising over a character who is not actually on the show is dead air, and as such seems odd. Unless, of course, Zack is the final Cylon. The fact that the prequel series Caprica seems to revolve around the Adama family’s connections with the scientist who created the Cylons suggest it might be. The arrival of Zack will justify all of the attention on two boring-ass flyers at the expense of so many other more interesting relationships. How the son of a human could be a Cylon has yet to be explained, but we’re convinced it will be him (kudos to the AV Club commenter, whose name escapes me, who suggested it a few months ago). If not, why the hell are we devoting this much time to these guys? Now that they’ve reached earth together will they become Adam and Eve? Surely a show as smart as this one won’t be so stupid as to do that.


    If I had problems with season two, season three tested our patience to the limit. After a very very strong opening featuring some of the most astonishing drama on any show last year, the show got into a funk, with Baltar doing something something on the Cylon Basestar, Tyrol staring at a carving for two episodes, Apollo and Starbuck getting pissed at each other, and lots of other truly dreary nonsense that I’m blotting out because those empty scenes are taking up space in my head I could use to get excited about the Watchmen trailer (shut up over-sensitive fanboys, it looks great). By then, even some top quality space explosions couldn’t keep me interested. An attempt to watch the Razor TV movie faltered in the middle of a huge battle sequence due to lack of interest (and I’ve yet to finish it). How is this possible? Usually I live for this stuff.


    I thought it would take a miracle to make me give a damn about Battlestar Galactica again, but in the end something less dramatic but equally as wonderful happened; Jane Espenson wrote two episodes of the show and introduced some quality writing, something the show was sorely in need of. That’s not to say that the fourth season of BSG was instantly made flawless, because there were plenty of annoyances, longueurs, and poor performances. That’s also not to say the rest of the BSG writing team are uniformly dreadful; Ronald D. Moore, Bradley Thomson and David Weddle (and Mark Verheiden, occasionally) still do sterling work, but we still get some horrendous dialogue, cringe-making dramatic devices, and confusing expansion of the BSG mythos. If you don’t believe me about the terrible devices, consider Gaeta and his lost leg. A strangely dramatic plot-thread for a minor character, but made almost unwatchable by the conceit that, in his post-op delirium, he keeps warbling tuneless, pretentious songs reflecting that episode’s moral dilemmas. Even more improbably, anyone walking into the recovery room was obligated to comment on how lovely it was. Gah! I know you’ve been living without music for a while, but it didn’t used to sound like that. Oh well, at least it wasn’t a Dylan song.


    However, even at its best (and its best is very very good), the show has lacked a spark in its writing, possibly due to budget and network pressures, or, as I sometimes suspect, the mythology of the show has been insufficiently worked out in advance. I once started a huge post about my frustration with the show, and perhaps I’ll get back to that soon. Right now, I want to go apeshit over Espenson’s expanded role on the show, which saw her get solo credit on two episodes, a step up from co-writing a season three episode with former 24 producer Anne Cofell Saunders (who has left BSG to work on Chuck). Her first episode was dismissed by some talkbackers as a placeholder, and though it didn’t feature space battles or mythos-defining weirdness, it did have words coming out of people’s mouths that didn’t sound like they were written by a robot. Or an infinite number of Grace Parks working away on an infinite number of archaic typewriters.


    If I never warmed to BSG the way I warmed to Lost or Deadwood or Friday Night Lights or anything from the Mutant Enemy Factory of Awesomeness, it’s because the dialogue never came alive. Even when I was really enthusiastic about it (from the opening mini-series to about the halfway mark in season two), I wished the dialogue had some sass, or spunk, or surprise. When spoken by the show’s best actors (I’m thinking Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonell, James Callis, or Tricia Helfer) that dialogue sounded just fine, but then talented performers can transcend something flat. However, when handled by some of the less polished performers (it gives me no pleasure to aim my stinkeye at Grace Park, Katee Sackhoff, Michael Trucco, and some of the other random actors playing minor characters littering the screen), the shortcomings of the writing becomes all too apparent.


    With Espenson on board, even that placeholder episode felt fresh and entertaining and relevant. Even better, her second episode, the penultimate one of this mini-season, had all of the visual wow and big drama that the talkbackers thought was lacking before, and even though she was lumbered with the kind of poorly explained dream sequence stuff that so often irks me on this show (by which I mean Laura Roslin’s visions of her death), she imbued them with humour and humanity, and avoided the purple melodrama that can often seep into these moments. I just wanted to ambush the rest of the writers with a screening of it, all the while yelling, “This is how you do it!”


    Even better, the finale, written by Weddle and Thompson, was infinitely better than the dire season three finale, and though it flirted with the same Dylan nonsense that blighted that previous episode, mainly it was concerned with getting on with telling the story and blowing our minds. Which it did, with five minutes of exultation, heightened emotion, and finally a total loss of hope. As shocked as I was by the final shot of Jeremy Bentham in Lost, BSG‘s bravura pan across the leaders of the human/Cylon coalition and the desolate surface of a ruined earth might have been even more astonishing. In that moment I was relieved that I had stuck with the show even when the third season had annoyed me so much.


    Of course, the ten episode mini-season wasn’t exclusively Espenson-level writing and mind-blowing reveals. The quality level still rose and fell rapidly, often within the same episode. Though I was grateful that the focus on Apollo/Starbuck, the plot that had derailed the previous season, had been dialled back, we still had her and Anders acting out their risible and dreary psycho-drama. Even knowing that she is unwittingly the number one Cylon pin-up (with both Leoben and Anders obsessed with getting into her unflattering space-pants) didn’t make it any more interesting. Having the two of them stuck on a garbage scow with the cream of the fleet (a plot device that made absolutely zero sense) was televisual torture, made worse by the histrionic performances from the entire crew.


    Back with the fleet, things were sporadically interesting with patches of blurg. The Tyrol/Cally plot was resolved with Cally getting blasted out of an airlock, a turn of events that pleased us greatly. Aaron Douglas and Nicki Clyne had been lumbered with the worst kind of kitchen-sink drama, with Tyrol hiding from his shrill wife and horrible kid, a domestic situation complicated further with the revelation that he was a Cylon and their child was a human/Cylon hybrid. That fact alone created immensely important drama that changed the whole direction of the show, and…


    Oh, that’s right. Their hybrid baby is seemingly nowhere near as important as Athena and Helo’s kid. Ron Moore pretty much admitted that at last year’s Comic-Con, but has yet to explain why one is important and the other is not. You’d think that the decision to make Tyrol a Cylon was a spur of the moment thing, but BSG would never just make it up as they go along, would they? That’s Lost I’m thinking of. [/bitter] That said, Tyrol’s reaction to Cally’s death was terrific, and brilliantly written by Espenson. His breakdown in the Galactica bar was a season highlight. As Tyrol was also well-served by Espenson (and Cofell Saunders) last season, it’s fair to say I only like him when she writes him. Fingers crossed we get more of that in the last ten episodes.


    Baltar’s transformation into opportunistic messiah was also welcome, after he was reduced to a wibbling loser last season. Seeing him stumbling into his destiny as ineffectual self-help guru with his customary mixture of bluster and self-loathing was great fun, as was his growing influence within the fleet, as his monotheistic religion becomes more appealing to the increasingly desperate refugees. One of the aspects of BSG that has interested me the least is the slowly building focus on religion. The show has always had a religious aspect, but I tended not to pay much attention to the details of the conflicting religions of the humans and Cylons, thinking them little more than signifiers of the shows comment on contemporary tensions, but as the fourth season wore on I had the horrible feeling that I should have been paying attention all along, and we were going to get to the final stretch of the show without a proper working knowledge of the significance of all of that guff about the twelve Gods and what have you. Was I going to have to go back and rewatch the whole show to catch all of this stuff?


    By the time the finale had rolled around, I felt almost certain that the Cylons and the humans are all worshipping the wrong thing, that there is a force shaping their destinies but it is not the God we think of, but some force of physics or space/time or multi-dimensional space (Roslin’s visions during FTL jumps makes me wonder about that) that is beyond comprehension, and certainly beyond the superstitious teachings of the twelve tribes and the Cylons. At least, I hope so. I find the religious plotline far more interesting as a tool to dramatise tensions between the characters than as a complex but ultimately uninteresting mythology running through the show. That way lies The Sacred Scrolls of Borzon and The Temple of Astroculite and much other silliness that doesn’t fit into this plot, though regrettably it has wandered in that direction from time to time. Thankfully the show appears to be using God as a source of conflict, which is believable and way more interesting.


    Plus, as an added bonus, James Callis has been fantastic as a reluctant messiah winging it in front of an adoring following and coming up with a philosophy even more vapid than Oprah’s latest pet belief system The Secret, if that’s possible. At the end of last season he was walking around in robes looking like Future Space Jesus, which was amusing but sledgehammer subtle. At least now he just looks like a cult leader, which is pretty much what he is.


    I’ve been bitching about a large proportion of the plotlines, but there were stories within the mini-season that I really liked. While I was irked by Ron Moore’s admission that Roslin’s cancer remission was another spur of the moment writing choice (a choice that AICN BSG talkbackers were in denial over, having spent three years making snotty cracks about Lost being made up on the fly), it’s given Mary McDonnell yet more chances to show off her considerable acting skills. Confession time: before BSG I couldn’t stand McDonnell at all, finding her rictus grin performances in Donnie Darko and Grand Canyon unwatchable. I could just about get over my antipathy in Sneakers, but that’s because Sneakers is the awesomest. Setec Astronomy! Yeah, that’s right, bitches.


    In BSG, however, she has been uniformly magnificent. This season has provided her with some of her best acting opportunities, as Roslin’s humanity and morality get tested by the ever-worsening situation within the fleet, the continuing fallout from the occupation on New Caprica, the urge to overrule the council as they vacillate and bicker, and her wavering faith, which has caused her to misinterpret signs and omens, as well as damage her empathic connection with those around her. Best of all, she almost killed Baltar after he finally confessed to accidentally betraying humanity, before a vision of her own death showed her the error of her ways. It was an acting tour de force that made the regular PointyShouty moments look even more feeble by comparison.


    If that scene amazed me, a few minutes later I blubbed like a perspective-free fanboy as Roslin was reunited with Bill Adama, and finally told him she loved him. His response, “About time”, is only beaten by Ben Linus’ emotionless, “So?” from the Lost finale. Edward James Olmos has been my favourite actor on BSG from very early on, and his stoic decision to wait for Roslin in a Raptor with only her favourite book for company was a season highlight. Of course, in the finale the breakdown he has probably been fending of for years finally happened upon finding out that his best friend, Saul Tigh, was (improbably) a Cylon all along. Olmos performed the shit out of the moment, meaning poor Jamie Bamber was forced to brace himself against the acting maelstrom next to him.


    The Cylons finally achieved their full potential, having previously been mysterious monoliths of force with only hints at their inner turmoil. Slowly we’ve seen cracks emerge; Leoben’s obsession with Starbuck, D’Anna’s breakdown, the rebellions of the Six’s and Athena’s. Sadly those moments were often sidelined in order to return to yet more Apollo/Starbuck angstifying, a narrative choice that drove me to distraction. This season flirted with the same lack of focus, as a Cylon civil war broke out for thirty seconds in the middle of an episode and then went unmentioned for a couple of weeks while we got to watch Tigh hallucinate at a Six instead. It was a tad frustrating.


    The other thing that has bothered me over the last couple of seasons is how the show spends less time focusing on the mechanics of the fleet, how the humans are attempting to retain their connection to their history by creating a system of government and law, and how that system is unable to cope with the demands of life on the run. As we approach the finale we’re dealing more with more “sci fi” elements, such as time looping and the possible intervention of a god-like force. Last year I was bummed out by the increased focus on prophecy (a bit of a bug-bear of mine, as it can lead to some lazy plotting in all kinds of fiction), but this season has been promising, especially as potential messiah Baltar is still pretty much the same horndog as ever, except now he has new ways to justify his sleazy behaviour.


    Prophecy, when used to do little more than foreshadow future events, is a crutch for lazy writers. This half-season has hinted that there is more to the religious plot than we thought. Prophecy is still a key factor, but that wonderful final shot hints that the rails that our protagonists are running on might not be heading in the direction they expected. That’s what I’ve been waiting for since the mini-series “prequel”, so many of the reservations I’ve had over these ten episodes faded. I will still hold onto my coveted memory of the less glamorous aspects of the show, the politicking, the debates, the worrying about water or food or power. I loved that stuff almost as much as the explosions.


    Funnily enough, it was that stuff that made Lost a trial to watch sometimes. I didn’t mind it all in the first season, but Robinson Crusoe-esque food gathering and water collection drama has been done before, and for the first season there was a lot of that. It was perhaps a lighter and more fun show as a result, but I only really started loving it once Desmond appeared with tales of the Dharma Initiative. BSG, on the other hand, has followed a similar arc, but my interest has dwindled the further we’ve moved from the nuts-and-bolts tales. I guess it’s because it’s more interesting to me to see how the human race would struggle to survive following mass extinction and exile on spluttering spaceships than it is to see people chasing boars through a jungle.


    That increasingly dense mythology isn’t the only similarity BSG shares with Lost. We also have the exploration of the concept of fate via the sci fi trope of distorted time (if the “This has happened before, and will happen again,” line is as important as it seems), reluctant leadership (Jack and Apollo), suspicion, and, most importantly, a refusal to reduce conflict to a Manichean battle, preferring instead to show good and bad and all the infinite gradations between through a distorted lens. By now we have multiple factions within both human and Cylon camps, and now both races are having to join forces, just as the Losties and the Others are moving closer together. Of course, they’re not the only shows to explore what it’s like to live on the hazy line between right and wrong. The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, and Dexter all do it too to varying degrees of success, but it’s good to see genre TV do it while remaining genuine sci fi and not some watered down amalgam of genres or another bratty child of the late-70s space opera movies that fathered the original version of this show. Plus, we get all of that moral ambiguity and ethical curiosity while retaining the large explosions. When has Dexter ever offered a spectacle as exciting as this? When has Mad Men? And no, I’m not talking about the insanity taking hold of Don Draper’s brain.


    The long and short of it is, the fourth season of BSG featured many of the annoying things that have made the trip so far such a slog, but the new focus that has come with the definite end-date has re-ignited my interest in it. When I’m feeling uncharitable, I’ll bitch about it even now. Most of the sub-plots still hold no interest for me. Anders, Gaeta, at least one version of Boomer, Starbuck, Helo and Dualla could be written out (Dualla pretty much has) and I wouldn’t even notice, unless it meant more screentime for the sorely under-used Doc Cottle or the magnificently oily Zarek, in which case I would rejoice. It can often look so dark as to be almost impossible to comprehend, though I will grant that sometimes that choice pays off. The peculiar pixellated imagery on the Cylon Rebel Baseship was a lovely touch. (This picture also features Tricia Helfer being awesome, as usual.)


    The biggest variable on the show is Michael Hogan. Will he be amazing this week? Or will he make my head hurt with the growly line-readings and scenery-chomping? I think his acting ability is determined by some astrological event or something. In this season he let his inner crazy out a bit too often; the scenes featuring him and the Six he keeps hallucinating at were simultaneously creepy, incomprehensible, and moving. Still, he gets a Shades of Caruso Free Pass for his superb work during Tigh’s Al-Zawahiri period. I’ll just choose to forget subtlety-free moments like the one below in honour of those fine performances in the past.


    All of that remains, and yet my interest in the show has been totally reawakened. I’m even considering rewatching it from the start in prep for the finale. That’s a lot of watching to pack in on top of The Shield and Wonderfalls and maybe Buffy and all of the other shows we were going to watch during Summer hiatus that we didn’t get around to. Not that I consider it a hardship. Roll on the final ten episodes, the spin-off show, and the follow-up movie, which is written by Jane Espenson and therefore will be awesome. You have my word on that.

    Insert Predictable DC Crisis Joke Here

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    If I had to make a choice of which comics company I liked the most, I’d probably, after much agonising (as I love them both), pick DC over Marvel (sorry Fantagraphics, Dark Horse, Oni Press, etc.), simply because I seemed to have more luck finding original DC comics and nifty paperback size reprints of Justice League comics when I was young than I did Marvel stuff. Yeah, Marvel did this thing where they would reprint their US comics in UK formats, such as Rampage or Star Wars Weekly, but those reprints would manage to drag the 22 pages of a normal comic out over two to four normal issues, mixed in with other stuff. With Rampage it took about two years to get from Giant Size X-Men #1 to Phoenix’s birth, which wasn’t good enough. With DC, I seemed to get a better idea of what was going on there. Plus, I was crazy about Green Lantern, and even perennial childhood favourite Spider-Man couldn’t compete with someone flying around with a wish-fulfilling ring. Truth.

    So it is with great sadness that I see DC getting its ass handed to it by Marvel, according to these comic sales figures. What’s worse, the big DC event, Final Crisis #1, seems to have been outsold by the second issue of Secret Invasion, Marvel’s summer “blockbuster”, by about 41,000 issues. Much has been made of Final Crisis writer Grant Morrison’s interview with Newsarama where he confirms that his grand plan for the title was partially ruined by other writers not seeding his plans properly, which has been seen to be a failure of nerve on the part of Dan DiDio, current DC editor-in-chief, but then Morrison has had this problem before, coming up with a revolutionary set of plot-threads for the troubled X-Men line when he was at Marvel, only for Joe Quesada to stick Chuck Austen on his titles and clumsily retcon a lot of it. I mean, what the hell was Xorn still doing around? Didn’t he turn out to be the brother of a character that had never existed? Or was he a figment of the Scarlet Witch’s imagination? Sorry, when Morrison left the title I kinda lost track of it all, because zzzzzzzzzzz.

    So is the failure of Final Crisis attributable to what seems to be a weak editorial line from the top, which might have put readers off? Certainly Marvel’s editors (and star writer Brian Michael Bendis) have been strongly pushing controversial storylines and sticking to their guns, which pissed a lot of people off, what with Iron Man became a fascist, Peter Parker signed a deal with the devil that saved his aunt and retconned his marriage, and Tigra got beaten up a lot while wearing very little or nothing at all. Even when J. Michael Straczynski spoke out about the One More Day/Brand New Day changes in Spider-Man, the editors didn’t seem to care. Of course, this now seems to have been more about keeping the Marvel Universe going long enough to bring about Secret Invasion, which has already dealt with some of the recent poor choices (the return of Captain Marvel, who is actually a Skrull who has Mar-Vell’s memories and heroism) and amusingly clouded others (is Tony Stark an asshole or not?!?!?). So perhaps the last couple of years of reader baiting was just Marvel plotting something all along and keeping readers in the dark with glib statements designed to provoke. Or Marvel is run by obnoxious bullies and this was seen as a way to retcon both the Marvel Universe and the actual universe all at the same time. “See? When we were being rude to you all, it was because we were planning a big story for ages! Now please stop calling us misogynist idiots.”

    That might be one of the reasons why Secret Invasion is a big hit, the other reason being that it is filled with fightypunchboom from the get-go. I’ve not yet had a chance to read Final Crisis yet, but knowing Morrison’s need to tell a million stories at once, and considering how complicated DC continuity has become, it’s bound to be a lot less appealing a prospect to the casual reader. Hell, I’m a DC fan, but even so I still read the odd issue of DC comics and get to the final page reveal of a bad guy, and go, “Who’s this jerk in a hoodie?” To someone who is soaked in DC trivia, it’s a big deal, but I often feel lost. To anyone else, and certainly to some of the DC haters I know, Final Crisis is just not a priority. In contrast, Secret Invasion is all splash pages of characters hitting Skrulls. There is a universal appeal in that, along with the mystery of who is a shape-changing alien and who is just now an asshole, according to Marvel editorial (please not Reed Richards! His encrappening really annoyed me).

    Of course the irony of this is that I love complex continuity, but even so we’re talking about decades of it, and even I have limits. That’s not to say I won’t read it. I love Grant Morrison (or perhaps the right word is “worship”) and am looking forward to it. I’m just saying it was never going to be a big success. It’s kind like the Bhagavad Gita, while Secret Invasion is more like an episode of 24. Both are great, but only one is going to have mass appeal. So even though Morrison’s plans seem to have been tainted by loss of nerve and/or jealous tinkering from other writers (who have previously been annoyed with his plans, such as when he came up with the DC One Million event), it’s good that DiDio still gave it the go-ahead long ago. And yet, even though this could just be a bad week for DC that will change over time, following John Nee’s resignation from Wildstorm, rumours of DiDio’s imminent resignation (perhaps really imminent) still abound. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

    (Apologies for inaccuracies; I’m in a hurry and will go over this again later. Oh, the pressures of blogging!)

    Things That Have Occurred To Us While Watching Season Five of 24 (5-7)

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    We’ve finished the season (a bit of a drop in tension by the end, but it was still a terrific run), and there are many more things that caught my attention in the middle of all the craziness.

    5. A lot of the tension created on this show is awfully mechanical.

    I know, this is hardly news. There are lots of examples of it, but the most common one is the satellite retasking conversation that keeps happening. Pretty much every episode, Jack loses whichever lower-level terroristic person he has been chasing (usually someone he found out about at the end of the previous hour), and after leaping into whichever Hummer he has at his disposal, will phone Chloe and bellow at her for a while. As Canyon pointed out midway through the season, the format for these conversations is always the same.

    Jack: [out of breath even though he is driving and not running] Chloe! ::pant:: I lost DuPrez! ::pant:: He got into a car and headed south on I95. ::pant:: I need you to task a satellite to track him and download it to my PDA/supercomputer! ::pant::

    Chloe: [rolls eyes] I can’t do that, Jack. Miles Papazian is sitting opposite me, watching my every move. And Karen Hayes has got a spybot installed on my hard drive and if I do anything that she hasn’t authorised my computer will shut down automatically. And Bill and Audrey have been locked in barrels and rolled out of the building. And an armoured robotic sentinel is guarding the server room. And I’m chained to my chair and can’t move. And my arms have been amputated. And there are mines embedded in the floor around my chair. And I’m in a glass case. [pouts]

    Jack: Dammit Chloe! ::pant:: If I don’t find DuPrez in the next twenty minutes he’ll rendezvous with Farquharson and my cover will be blown! ::pant:: And if that happens I’ll never find the disc with the locations of the fifty nuclear bombs hidden in each of our United States! ::pants again::

    Chloe: [rolls eyes] Okay fine, Jack, you don’t need to shout. [begins sewing arms back on using teeth]

    Ten minutes later, the satellite is retasked and Jack gets to stare at his PDA while driving, and doesn’t even veer out of his lane once. Of course, this reliance on false conflict is the worst kind of lazy McKee-esque contrivance, but in season five it was a lot more entertaining than usual. In previous seasons there have been dreadful sub-plots used to keep characters occupied. I’m thinking of the famous cougar in season two and the baby-minding in season three (which was far worse and infinitely stupider). Season five had no boring plot threads (even the dead ends like actually-not-evil Vice President Hal Gardner were fun), and if that meant Chloe spent the entire season evading her bosses and retasking satellites (at least fifteen episodes featured her doing that impossible thing) instead of looking after a baby, then that’s fine by me.

    Oh, and what happens with DuPrez? Jack catches him, tortures him using an ironing board, a bottle of Diet Coke, and a roll of wallpaper, and in agony and terror the weaselly DuPrez gives up his contact, Dash MacKenzie, the aerospace engineer who mysteriously spent four years living in Chechnya. Upon finding him, Jack is frustrated in his efforts when he is arrested by over-zealous police officers sent to his location by whichever short-sighted neckless pencil pushing loser is in charge of CTU at that time.


    Dash speeds away as the clock ticks down, forcing Jack to make his angry face. Next episode, Jack is released without charge, and he calls Chloe about tasking a satellite to chase Dash. Jack Bauer, breathless Sisyphus for the 21st Century!

    NB: The use of the words “Tasking” and “Retasking” drives Shades of Caruso into incandescent rage, just so you know. My repeated use of those words do not qualify as endorsement. We’re not crazy.

    6. Why is no one weeping for Carl Mossman?

    The body count in 24 is incredibly high for a TV show, but then our hero Jack is perfectly willing to kill and maim and torture any number of people in order to save, “hundreds! ::pant:: Of thousands! ::pant:: Of lives!”. This list of dead characters is filled with names I don’t recall, though I think they’re padding the list out a bit. Some of the names are from the 24: Declassified series of novels, but even taking that into account, there are a lot of redshirts and Terrorist Lackey #4′s in that list. I didn’t really care when they died, and I don’t care now. However, I do care about poor, noble Carl Mossman, the bank manager kidnapped by Jack and Wayne Palmer at gun point, dragged to his workplace to open a vault, and then killed by Christopher Henderson’s men during their escape.


    During that time he put up with a bunch of shit, watched as his wife was pushed around by Jack, dragged across town in the middle of the night, bonded with Wayne Palmer, found out President Logan arranged to have David Palmer whacked, announced he was all Team Bauer and stuff, gained their trust, and then got killed with bullets until dead. Time elapsed between being kidnapped from his wife’s side to being iced: 40 minutes.


    Normally the gratuitous death of a minor character wouldn’t bother me at all, but this time the guy was at home, probably watching Letterman, chillaxing after another day having to deal with grumpy Californians bitching about yet more armageddon being visited upon them, and then all of a sudden some out-of-breath dude storms in with the former President’s brother in tow, and even before Letterman got around to doing that night’s silly stunt (playing baseball with Johnny Damon), he’s been shot by goons who manage to completely miss the two large guys standing on either side of him. That’s some crappy luck.


    For the first time ever, the death of a minor character really pissed me off. Oh sure, I was furious when Tony “died”, and hated to see George Mason go out (even though he was both heroic and radioactive), but usually the chumps who get momentarily involved in Jack’s life die and I don’t care. This time, I got actively upset. In the next episode Wayne tells Jack of Carl’s death, which, if I recall correctly, isn’t even greeted with a “Dammit”, let alone a “Son-of-a-bitch”. They carry on driving, with a corpse in the back seat not caring about the increasingly ripe smell. By the end of the episode they have ditched the car and are running around trying to capture evil Christopher Henderson, and after that Wayne disappears into the night, not to be heard of again (at least until he improbably becomes President in season six). Meanwhile, Jack is too busy getting his on-off girlfriend almost killed and sneaking onto planes to care about anything as trivial as a dead guy. I hope that while that was happening Wayne at least made his way back to Carl’s house to hand the corpse over to his wife, because otherwise there’s just some dead guy stuck in a car on some industrial wasteland in LA. Man, this show can be cold sometimes.

    7. Someone working in 24‘s casting department is a big fan of Robocop.

    And so they should be, as that is a wonderfully sweet film, delightfully ribald, romantic, reminiscent of the classic MGM musicals of the early 50s with its innocent charm and endearing sentimentality. The casting for this season featured some surprises for fans of Paul Verhoeven’s satirical classic, including Peter Weller, Ray Wise, and Paul McCrane.


    Weller played one of this season’s many bad guys, the monotone and eternally duplicitous Christopher Henderson (which is a disappointingly mundane moniker in the same vein as former antagonists Peter Kingsley and Stephen Saunders), and Ray Wise and his barely present grin played the red herring is-he-good-or-bad Vice President Hal Gardner (a name that makes me suspect there are also some Green Lantern fans working on the show). McCrane barely ever gets to play good guys, and here continues this trend by playing the vile and oddly spelled Graem Bauer (yes, I read a spoiler).


    At the end of the season Henderson gets blasted to death by the righteous weaponry and rage of Jack Bauer, who has spent most of the day killing everyone responsible for the deaths of David Palmer, Michelle Dessler, and lovely Tony. Fair enough, but it amused me that every time he shoots one of the big bads he acts like they were the only ones involved, which I thought meant he would just keep on killing people with even a tangential involvement in the plan, all the time glowering at them and ominously reciting the list of friends he has lost, until he’s the only person left on the planet, at which point he will realise that actually he is a shit magnet who gets everyone who knows him into terrible trouble, at which point he would shoot himself with enormous solemnity and humourless vengeance. Because that is the way of The Bauer (a Bauer being the Western equivalent of a Samurai, obviously).

    As for Gardner and Graem, they live to fight another day, which is interestingly the opposite of Robocop, where Weller, as Robocop, lives on, Leon (Wise) gets blown to smithereens by Nancy Allen, and Emil (McCrane) gets melted by toxic waste and run over, in a scene which no one who has seen it will ever forget.


    The only thing that could improve 24 (other than a musical episode) is to get Verhoeven on as a guest director. Imagine the carnage! Time to start a new futile internet campaign, methinks.

    Things That Have Occurred To Us While Watching Season Five Of 24 (2 – 4)

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    Our headlong rush through the fifth season of 24 has been partially curtailed now shows are returning to air (CSI, The Office, 30 Rock, and Battlestar Galactica are all back), but we’re still watching it and still loving it. More observations follow thusly…

    2. Curtis is the black David Puddy.

    With Tony out of action and Jack having to deal with the usual bureaucratic nonsense, the role of second-stringer grunt goes to Curtis Manning, played by Roger R. Cross. As far as we’ve seen in season five he hasn’t had much to do other than run around with a nerve gas canister and arrest jerkoff hobbit/bureaucrat Lynn McGill. However, it was at the moment that he was asked to do that by Audrey Raines that we realised that his peculiar stilted line readings and intense facial expressions reminded us of David Puddy from Seinfeld. He has the same build, the same monolithic presence; he even talks in monosyllables!



    You got a question…you ask the 8-ball!

    3. I dread the non-existent tolling of the silent clock.

    I couldn’t care less about Edgar. We already have Chloe, who is one of the ten best characters on TV right now, so why have someone else as socially inept as Chloe, except not as good at his job as she is, not to mention far less entertaining? It was a total waste of a spot on the regular cast, and I couldn’t understand why he was such a popular character.

    In season five Edgar is killed in the middle of a nerve gas attack on CTU headquarters (which is possibly the most vulnerable place on earth, having been breached numerous times by now, not to mention employing more moles and terrorists than the International College of Terroristics and Molery at the height of its popularity). This plot development was no surprise. I knew about Edgar’s death on the day after it originally aired in the US as Yahoo! News had a big feature on their front page about it. I couldn’t believe there was such an outcry over a character that had never seemed that important or popular, but apparently people were really shocked by it.

    Of course, when I saw it, my cynicism evaporated. His death was horrible, and I was a bit peeved about it, but the silent clock at the end got to me anyway. It did when Teri Bauer died, and when Ryan Chappelle died, and it happened again here. I totally didn’t cry, though! I just got all choked up and sad, that’s all. It’s totally different!

    That said, if Miles Papazian, backboneless hyper-bureaucrat, weaselly tattle-tale, and pencil-pushing world champion were to die heroically and get the silent clock treatment (doubtful, as he is to heroism what Jack Bauer is to risk-averse middle-management), I would use those few seconds to dance a jig in honour of his long-delayed demise. Die, you feeble unpopular geek, die!!!

    4. Was the existence of Tony’s soul patch a directive from former producer Joel Surnow?

    One of the many many reasons for Canyon’s apathy toward the magnificent he-man known as the Tonytron 5000 Heroismbot is the existence of the soul patch, which appeared on and off over the past few seasons. But why is it there at all? What was the inspiration? Maybe show creator Joel Surnow knows.

    Surnow is, of course, the man responsible for creating the polar opposite of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in that it was right-wing, unfunny, mean-spirited, lifeless, desperate, and a blatant propaganda tool borne of the paranoid, ossified, humanity-hating, addled mindset of the extremist conservative anti-democratic media machine that is Fox News, whereas The Daily Show has Rob Riggle, John Hodgman and Samantha Bea and therefore wins booyah! That show, The ½ Hour News Hour, failed. Badly. Any Conservatives or Republicans who stumble across this blog will be incensed by this, and might insult us in comments and then obsessively come back over and over and over to check to see if we’ve taken the bait, but humour is subjective, and subjectively (in other words, in my humble opinion) this show sucked. Actually, if I’m being honest, it sucked objectively as well. There’s an equation that proves it. The ½ Hour News Hour is the Platonic ideal of suckage that casts the shadow onto the wall of the cave that we recognise as the watered-down version of suckage that we use to describe things like Rob Cohen movies or Judd Winick comics.

    What has this bitchery to do with 24 and the soul patch? Nothing. I just like remembering that Fox News tried to be funny and didn’t even understand the concept. Don’t believe me? Watch this, if you can get past the opening crawl, which screams, “IMMINENT, CATACLYSMIC ÜBER-FAIL FOR THE AGES!” so powerfully it throbs like an absess under a wisdom tooth.

    Anyway, enough of the schadenfreude. I will add that Surnow has left 24 in the hands of Howard Gordon (and probably David Fury), so we don’t have to think about him anymore, unless he creates another compelling action show (that features a lot less torture, please). Bye Surnow. Don’t let the nerve gas canister hit you in the ass on the way out.

    So, we’re still making our way through, and there are more things occurring to me as we go along. This will predictably involve Robocop references. Prepare yourselves.