Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays: “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”

For a moment there, we had a real embarrassment of riches: three of the best genre shows of the year so far—Loki, Lower Decks, and Our Flag Means Death—were not only all on in October, but they all posted the same night: Thursdays. While none of the people making those three shows thought of themselves as part of a triple-feature, that’s where they ended up, and they contrasted and complimented each other in interesting ways. It’s been a week or two now, let’s get into the weeds.

Heavy Spoilers Ahoy for Loki S2, Lower Decks S4, and Our Flag Means Death S2

Loki season 2

The first season of Loki was a unexpected delight. Fun, exciting, and different, it took Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and put him, basically, in a minor league ball version of Doctor Who.

(The minor league Who comparison was exacerbated later when the press release announcing that Loki S1 director Kate Herron was writing an episode of Who had real “we were so impressed with their work we called them up to the majors” energy.)

Everything about the show worked. The production design was uniformly outstanding, from the TVA’s “fifties-punk” aesthetic , to the cyberpunk city and luxury train on the doomed planet of Lamentis-1, to Alabama of the near future, to casually tossing off Pompei at the moment the volcano exploded.

The core engine of the show was genius—stick Loki in what amounted to a buddy time cop show with Owen Wilson’s Mobius and let things cook. But it wasn’t content to stop there; it took all the character development Loki had picked up since the first Avengers, and worked outwards from “what would you do if you found out your whole life was a waste, and then got a second chance?” What does the norse god of chaos do when he gets a second chance, but also starts working with The Man? The answer is, he turned into Doctor Who.

And, like the Doctor, Loki himself had a catalytic effect on the world around him; not the god of “mischief”, necessarily, but certainly a force for chaos; every other character who interacted with him was changed by the encounter, learning things they’d have rather not learned and having to change in one way or another having learned it.

While not the showiest, or most publicized, the standout for me was Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15, who went from a true believer soldier to standing in the rain outside a futuristic Wal-Mart asking someone she’d been trying to kill (sorry, “prune”) to show her the truth of what had been done to her.

The first season also got as close as I ever want to get to a Doctor Who origin—not from Loki, but in the form of Mobius. He also starts as a dedicated company man, unorthodox maybe, but a true believer in the greater mission. The more he learns, the more he realizes that the TVA were the bad guys all along, and ends up in full revolt against his former colleagues; by the end I was half expecting him to steal a time machine and run off with his granddaughter.

But look, Loki as a Marvel character never would have shown up again after the first Thor and the Avengers if Tom Hiddleston hadn’t hit it out of the park as hard as he did. Here, he finally gets a chance to be the lead, and he makes the most of the opportunity. He should have had a starring vehicle long before this, and it manages to make killing Loki off in the opening scene of Infinity War even stupider in retrospect than it was at the time.

All in all, a huge success (I’m making a note here) and a full-throated endorsement of Marvel’s plan for Disney+ (Especially coming right after the nigh-unwatchable Falcon and the Winter Soldier).

Season 2, then, was a crushing disappointment.

So slow, so boring. All the actors who are not Tom Hiddleston are visibly checked out; thinking about what’s next. The characters, so vibrant in the first season , are hollowed-out shells of themselves.

As jwz quips, there isn’t anything left of this show other than the leftover production design.

As an example of the slide, I was obsessed with Loki’s season 1 look where he had, essentially, a Miami Vice under-shoulder holster for his sword under his FBI-agent style jacket, with that square tie. Just a great look, a perfect encapsulation of the shows mashup of influences and genres. And this year, they took that away and he wore a kinda boring Doctor Who cosplay coat. The same basic idea, but worse in every conceivable way.

And the whole season was like that, the same ideas but worse.

Such a smaller scope this year, nothing on the order of the first season’s “city on a doomed planet.” The show seemed trapped inside the TVA, sets we had seen time and time before. Even the excursion to the World’s Fair seemed claustrophobic. And wasted, those events could have happened anywhere. Whereas the first season was centered around what Loki would do with a second chance armed with the knowledge that his life came to nothing, here things just happened. Why were any of these people doing any of these things? Who knows? Motivations are non-existant, characters have been flattened out to, basically, the individual actor’s charisma and not much else. Every episode I wanted to sit the writer down and dare them to explain why any character did why they did.

The most painful was probably poor B-15 who was long way from heartbreaking revelations in the rain in front of futuristic WalMarts; this year the character has shrunk to a sub-Riker level of showing up once a week to bark exposition at the audience. She’s basically Sigourney Weaver’s character from Galaxy Quest, but meant seriously, repeating what we can already see on the computer screen.

And Ke Huy Quan, fresh from winning an Oscar for his stunning performance in Everything Everywhere all at Once, is maybe even more wasted, as he also has to recite plot-mechanic dialogue, but he doesn’t even have a well-written version of his character to remember.

And all the female characters were constantly in conflict with each other, mostly over men? What was that even about?

Actually, I take that back, the most disappointing was Tara Strong’s Miss Minutes, a whimsical and mysterious character who became steadily more menacing over the course of the first season, here reduced to less than nothing, practically absent from the show, suddenly pining for Johnathan Majors, and then casually murdered (?) by the main characters in an aside while the show’s attention was somewhere else.

There was a gesture towards an actually interesting idea in the form of “the god of chaos wants to re-fund the police”, but the show didn’t even seem to notice that it had that at hand.

The second to last episode was where I finally lost patience. The TVA has seemingly been destroyed, and Loki has snapped backwards in time. Meeting each of the other characters as who they were before they were absorbed into the TVA, Loki spends the episode trying to get them to remember him and to get back to the “present” to save the TVA. Slowly, painfully, the show arrived at a conclusion where Hiddleston looked the camera in the eye and delivered the punchline that “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”.

And, what? Stepping past the deeply banal moral, I flatly refuse to believe that these characters, whom Loki has known for, what, a couple of days? Are such great friends of his that he manages to learn how to time travel from sheer will to rescue them. These people? More so than his brother, more so than anyone else from Asgard? (This is where the shared universe fails the show, we know too much about the character to buy what this show is selling.)

The last episode was actually pretty good—this was the kind of streaming show that was really a movie idea with 4 hours of foreplay before getting to the real meat. Loki choosing to shoulder the responsibility for the multiverse and get his throne at the center of the world tree as the god of time (?) is a cool visual, but utterly squanders the potential of the show, Loki and Morbius having cool timecop adventures.

(That said, the Avengers finding out that Loki is sitting at the center of all realities is a hell of a potential scene, and I hope that happens. But even more, I really want a movie with Time Agent Loki and Single Dad Thor. But that seems to have been squandered with everything else.)

Lower Decks season 4

Loki probably wouldn’t have been quite so maddening if he hadn’t very slowly arrived at his cliché epiphany on the same night as the Lower Decks season finale, which started at “The real Star Fleet was the friends we made along the way” and then used that as a launching off point. LD managed to juggle storylines for nearly every recurring character, action that flowed entirely from character’s personalities, a few of the deepest lore cuts I’ve ever seen, and an entire series of space battle action sequences—and all in half the time!

I mean, they did Wrath of Khan in 30 minutes, except Khan was Nick Lorcarno. And it worked! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bigger flex.

Plus: “black market Ferengi Genesis Device” is my new band name.

Lower Decks was originally positioned as a kind of “PG-rated Rick & Morty but Star Trek,” which was clearly what they needed to say to get the show greenlit, but then immediately did something different and more interesting.

We’ve been living through a period of “legacy sequels”, reboots, and followups to long-running franchises, and the vast majority of them have trouble figuring out how keep the massive weight of the existing material from being an anchor.

But Lower Decks is one of the few shows that actually figured out how to use the history entirely as value-add. (The other winner in this category is Andor.) Its key advantage is that it’s very, very well written, but it does two brilliant moves: first, the characters are all the in-universe equivalent of Star Trek fans themselves, so they know as much as we do. Second, the show consistently takes a well-worn Star Trek trope and then asks, basically, how would a regular person react to this emotionally?

And, it does this while mining the whole run of the franchise, but especially TNG, for material to be revisited. Frequently the show will take a plot of a TNG episode that was originally played straight over 45 minutes, and then re-stage it as a comedy set-piece for the pre-credits teaser, and they’re all brilliant. It’s a show made by people who love Star Trek as much as anyone, but who are not about to pretend that it’s not mostly ridiculous.

Every Lower Decks episode has at least one joke/deep cut where I laugh like crazy and the kids have no idea what the deal is, and then I have to put on a seminar afterwards. The last two episodes of this season were both the hardest I laughed and the longest it took me to explain everything.

As an example: that Black Market Ferengi Genesis Device, which needs the operator to pay to shut it down. That’s the kind of joke that needs a lot of background to work, the kind of background you only get with decades of material, and the show just rips past it without trying to explain it, reasoning correctly that anyone who will laugh at that doesn’t need the help, and for everyone else there’s no amount of explanation they could fit in 30 minutes that would work. It’s the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 approach, applied to fiction.

They also titled an episode “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place,” which is such a multi-dimensional deep cut I don’t even know what to say about it besides applaud.

And that’s the thing! You don’t need to get any of these jokes for the show to make sense, and the deep cuts that you do need to understand—like the fact that the main villain is a one-off character from a single TNG episode 30 years ago—the show does stop and explain, and recontextualize in the milieu of Lower Decks. It’s finally a show that manages to use the half-century of “canon” as a sail, not an anchor, using it to deepen the show, rather than get into doctrinal arguments about, say, what the Klingons “really” look like.

But that’s all sauce, bonus points. The real joy of this show are the characters and their friendships. And this is where Lower Decks snapped Loki into sharp relief.

LD took its rule-breaking chaos-agent main character with a group of close friends she had a complex relationships with, and contrasted that with a different rule-breaking chaos-agent with a group of followers, but who broke rules for different reasons, and then made her choose which group to stay with, and she came out on top because she kept operating as a chaos agent, but now realizing why she was doing it, and for the right reasons. And all this while exploring and evolving her relationships with all the other main characters, and giving most of them a beat to change as characters as well.

And this is why it was such a contrast to Loki. Loki’s plotlines resolved by him giving up his chaotic ways and accepting responsibility for the multiverse; Mariner’s plot resolved by her continuing to be chaotic but pointed in the right direction. Lower Decks evolved its characters by making them more themselves instead of giving up their signature features for plot reasons; imagine what Loki would have looked like if the resolution had flowed from who the characters were instead of where the plot needed them to be.

And on top of all that, the ship Mariner steals from the Nova Fleet is my favorite minor starship design, which felt like it was written for me exclusively.

I have not felt this solidly in the center of the target audience for something since Taco Bell announced they were making a custom flavor of Mountain Dew. This is the Star Trek show I’ve always wanted.

Our Flag Means Death season 2

One of my favorite rare genres is the Stealth Movie. A movie that starts looking like something else entirely, a RomCom or period drama and then at about the 20 minute mark the ninjas show up and it turns into a different thing entirely. A movie that changes genres part way through, the bigger the change the better, especially if it can do it by surprise.

This of course, basically never happens in real life, and for good reason! Cranking from one genre to a different midway is a great way to frustrate your audience, especially if you’re trying to keep the shift a surprise. For every person that would leap up in delight when the gears change, there’d be another ten who’d feel ripped off they didn’t get to see the movie in the trailer.

For a long time, Wild Things was my go-to example of a movie that really did this, and it’s about as as good as you could do—the genres are compatible, the shift happens pretty organically, and it does a great job at both the “sleazy sex crimes like Basic Instinct” half and “double-doublecross caper like Usual Suspects” half.

And you know, that’s okay. The audience for media that jumps genre tracks is pretty small, and I understand my desire to be surprised in that manner is a niche, niche intersect.

And then, Our Flag Means Death came out.

Murry from Flight of the Conchords and the main vampire from the movie version of What we do in the Shadows? Doing a pirate comedy loosely based on the real life friendship of “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard? Sounds like their previous stuff mixed with a little Inspector Clouseau. I’m in!

And for the first couple of episodes, I wasn’t that into it. It was fine, but the comedy didn’t really work for me? I kept expecting it to be goofier, for Stede Bonnet to accidentally succeed more often. I mean, it was very well written, well made, well acted, a whole cast of fun characters in the crew of the Revenge, it just wasn’t working for me. And you know, okay, thats disappointing, but not everything is for everybody. A couple episodes in, I was accepting that this just wasn’t my jam afer all.

And then they pulled the switcheroo, and revealed it was actually a gay pirate rom com. And holy smokes, suddenly all the decisions I didn’t understand worked in this new context, and the whole show snapped into place. And it went from a show I was lukewarm on to one of my favorite shows of all time.

The first season ended one one of the great cliffhangers. The best cliffhangers are the not the ones where the characters are in danger—you know they’re going to escape whatever contrived danger they’re in—but ones where the characters and the audience learn a new fact that change your understanding about what show you’re watching, and what options the show has going forward.

Stede and Blackbeard had split up after escaping from prison. Stede had tried to go home to his old life and realized that he really had changed, and really did want to go be a pirate. Blackbeard, meanwhile, had taken back their old ship and marooned most of the worthless-to-him crew on a deserted island. This batch of characters who we’d come to care for very much were basically doomed, and were waiting for the inevitable. Then! A boat on the horizon. Through a spyglass, they spot—Stede! He’s immediately different then we’ve seen him before, different clothes, different body language. An air of confidence, and more importantly, competence. He raises a hand over his head in a single sign of greeting, like a reverse Grail Knight. Six episodes earlier, Stede arriving to rescue the crew would mean they were even more doomed than they already were, now the message is clear—they’re going to be okay. Roll Credits. See you in a year.

Whereas the first season had a slightly hesitant quality, not quite sure how how the show would be received, the second season was clearly made by people that knew they had a fanbase that was absolutely feral for the show, and was absolutely buying what they were selling. Recognizing that the relationship was the core of the show and not dragging things out, Stede and Blackbeard were back together by the end of the first night (the second episode, but they released two a week.)

Everything the first season did well, the second season did better. It’s a hard show to talk about, because it was just so good. Rather than formatting a list of things I love I’ll just mention my favorite revision from the first year: whereas the first season played Izzy Hands, Blackbeard, and Stede as a love triangle, the second played it as the “new girlfriend” and “old best friend” coming to terms with the fact that the other was never going to go away, and learning both get along and to see what their mutual saw in the other.

While a very different genre and style, Our Flag Means Death had a lot in common with Lower Decks: a crew of maybe not A-players doing their best doing action-comedy deeply rooted in characters, their relationships with each other, and their feeling about all of it. And throwing one last elbow Loki’s way, OFMD also demonstrated what a group of people becoming friends, having adventures, and growing into the best versions of themselves, and the central character shouldering responsibility for the others looks like when well done.

It’s unclear if OFMD is going to get a third season. This was clearly uncertain to the people making the show too, as the last episode works both as a conclusion, or to set up a final season.

Great, just great TV.

Found Family and Genre Fiction in the Twenties

Back in the mid-naughties, the pre-scandal Warren Ellis had a line that people in the future were going to look back at turn of the century genre fiction and wonder why everyone was crying all the time (looking at you both, BSG and Doctor Who,) and then he would note that they’d probably nod and say something like “well, they had a lot to cry about.”

I’ve been having a similar feeling the last few years about the current state of genre fiction and “found family.” That’s always been a theme in science fiction and fantasy literature, probably due to the fans of such fiction tending to be on the “social outcasts who find their people” end of the social spectrum, but there’s a different vibe lately. Loki realizing he’s actually working to get his friends back and therefore can time travel, or the Lower Deckers doing anything, or the crew of the Revenge’s Calypso Party, have a distinctly different feel from, say, the other Hobbits refusing to let Frodo sneak out of Hobbiton on his own, or Han realizing he isn’t going to leave his friend in the lurch and giving Luke the cover he needs to blow up the Death Star. This seems like the sort of social moment that’s impossible to really seem from inside, but years from now will be as obvious as the post 9/11-weirdness of BSG.

All three of these shows had a strong central theme of leaving your birth family or where you were “from”, shedding your metaphorical skin and built-up masks, and finding the people you want to spend time with, who make you the best version of the person you’re becoming. (And then, in Lower Deck’s case, because it’s the best of the three, using this growth to forge a new and better relationship with your mom.)

Here, thick into the Disaster of the Twenties, that’s probably a really good message to be sending. Your people: they’re out there. And if we stick together, we’re gonna be okay.