TV Rewatch: The Good Place
spoilers ahoy
We’ve been rewatching The Good Place. (Or rather, I’ve been rewatching it—I watched it on and off while it was on—everyone else around here is watching it for the first time.)
It is, of course, an absolute jewel. Probably the last great network comedy prior to the streaming/covid era. It’s a masterclass. In joke construction, in structure, in hiding jokes in set-dressing signs. It hits that sweet spot of being both genuinely funny while also have recognizable human emotions, which tends to beyond the grasp of most network sitcoms.
It’s also a case study in why you hire people with experience; Kristen Bell and Ted Danson are just outstanding at the basic skill of “starring in a TV comedy”, but have never as good as they are here. Ted Danson especially is a revelation here, he’s has been on TV essentially my entire life, and he’s better than he’s ever been, but in a way that feels like this is because he finally has material good enough.
But on top of all that, It’s got a really interesting take on what being a “good person” means, and the implications thereof. It’s not just re-heated half-remembered psychology classes, this is a show made by people that have really thought about it. Philosophers get named-dropped, but in a way that indicates that the people writing the show have actually read the material and absorbed it, instead of just leaving a blank spot in the script that said TECH.
Continuing with that contrasting example, Star Trek: The Next Generation spent hours on hours talking about emotions and ethics and morality, but never had an actual take on the concept, beyond a sort of mealy-mouthed “emotions are probably good, unless they’re bad?” and never once managed to be as insightful as the average joke in TGP. It’s great.
I’m gonna put a horizontal line here and then do some medium spoilers, so if you never watched the show you should go do something about that instead of reading on.
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The Good Place has maybe my all-time favorite piece of narrative sleight of hand. (Other than the season of Doctor Who that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”)
In the very first episode, a character tells something to another character—and by extension the audience. That thing is, in fact, a lie, but neither the character nor the audience have any reason to doubt it. The show then spends the rest of the first season absolutely screaming at the audience that this was a lie, all while trusting that the audience won’t believe their lying eyes and ignore the mounting evidence.
So, when the shoe finally drops, it manages to be both a) a total surprise, but also b) obviously true. I can’t think of another example of a show that so clearly gives the audience everything they need to know, but trusts them not to put the pieces together until the characters do.
And then, it came back for another season knowing that the audience was in on “the secret” and managed to both be a totally new show and the same show it always was at the same time. It’s a remarkable piece of work.
Doctor Who and the Legend of Ruby Sunday
Here we are in 2024, and Bonnie Langford has been in what amounts to three season finales in a row. What a time to be alive.
Spoilers Ahoy
It’s hard to know quite what to say about this one. Back in his first run at the show, RTD established a very consistant pattern for the two-part finale they did every year: part one was 45 minutes of building problems that crescendo into a cliffhanger that seems unsolvable, and then a second part that started in a slightly different place and resolved whatever threat was threatening to destroy all life in the universe this week. The problem is, that of the five of those RTD did between 2005 and 2009, exactly none of them actually worked or were narratively satisfying in any way. Mostly, the first halves were good? But those first halves aren’t actually a story, they work more like a trailer for the finale than anything else. So, as much as I’ve genuinely enjoyed this season to date, I have to admit I spent most of this week thinking to myself, “yeah, looks like thats setting up some bullshit.”
This one was structurally a little strange, with the Doctor trying to solve both the mystery of the woman who keeps appearing and suddenly caring about solving where Ruby came from, not because of any hint they’re connected, but seemingly because he realized it was the finale and it was time to wrap both of those up?
The whole first act is strangely clunky, with the show recapping both mysteries, reintroducing the UNIT guest cast, plus Rose Noble, plus Mel, and going over the various red herrings, and seemingly just reviewing the chatter on the web from the last few weeks. It’s remarkable that fan discussions are predictable enough that RTD can summarize them a year before any of the episodes under discussion even aired. The thing it reminded me of the most was that episode of She-Hulk that stopped to check in on what the chuds were saying on twitter, and got it exactly right, despite being written and filmed ages before any of the show aired or any of those discussions happened. The other thing it kept making me think of was that episode of Sherlock where they review all the fan theories about how he could have survived the fall, before sheepishly revealing what they had in mind, and then waving a hand and saying, basically, but it doesn’t matter.
But things pick up once they open the time window and get Mel involved. The smeary visuals of the time window were probably the best use of that extra Disney money to date, Jemma Redgrave and Bonnie Langford were both excellent, and Gatwa and Gibson are always fun to watch. Actually, let me spend an extra sentence or two on that; both Kate’s scene with the Doctor reminiscing about who he used to be, and Mel’s scene telling him to get his act together were outstanding, both perfect examples of how this new incarnation of the show is supposed to work. RTD is incredibly good at those little emotional character beats, and thats the stuff that makes these slightly overwrought finales worth it.
It’s wild to me that they’re actually invoking Susan Foreman as a plot element rather than an easter egg for the first time, well, ever. It seems pretty obvious how that’s going to resolve next week—she’s gonna be Mrs. Flood, right? Mostly, I’m curious about where that goes now that we’ve broken the seal on it; there’s a reason why Susan got written out, and why the past 59 years the answer to “do you have family” has always been some version of “I don’t know” and a pained look.
I also have to admit I’ve really had my fill of Big Lore Reveals from the last couple of years; the last one I enjoyed was Capaldi gasping “I didn’t leave because I was bored!”; everything since then has been diminishing returns, to say the least. I’m slightly dreading the can of worms this seems likely to open.
On the other hand: wow, they really brought Sutek back! That rumor has been knocking around for a while, and I did not believe it one bit, but then 91-year old Gabriel Woolf’s voice boomed out of the speakers, and away we go. Incredible. “The Pyramids of Mars” is one of the all-time great Classic Who episodes, and Sutek stands as probably the best villain that never got a return engagement.
On a personal note, back in the days before Who came back, I once lifted Sutek wholesale for a tabletop RPG game I ran for a group that had never seen the show. I think, in 30+ years of DM-ing, that’s the only time I’ve ever lifted something from a movie or show wholesale without changing anything, because it was already perfect. I mention this to illustrate that I could not physically be closer to the center of the target audience crosshairs for bringing this particular character back.
It’s also a favorite of both my kids, and “I bring Sutek’s gift of death” is a line we quote all the time. You would not believe how hard everyone freaked out when the reveal landed.
In conclusion, a good time was had by all, and I’m bracing for next week’s impact.
Two last thoughts:
A character warning of imminent doom named “Harriet Arbinger” is absolute god tier, A+++.
A huge congrats to everyone out there who called “Sue Tech” a few weeks ago. I stand corrected.
Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: The Marvels
Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Some movies just don’t deserve the circumstances of their release. But things happen, and movies don’t always get released at the ideal time or place. Such is business! Such is life. Case in point, two things are true about The Marvels:
- This is a fun movie! It’s one of Marvel’s’ better efforts in recent years, it’s full of appealing leads, fun action. It’s pretty good, I liked it, and more importantly, my kids who are right in the center of Marvel’s target age demographic liked it. Solid B!
- This is absolutely the movie where the MCU ground out on a sandbar.
When long-running series in any medium finally grounds out, as they always do, there’s always a point where the audience just doesn’t show up, and something craters. And it’s always slightly unfair to whatever ends up in that crater, since the the quality if that particular thing doesn’t matter—by definition, no one saw it. Instead, it’s the built-up reactions to the last several things. As the joke goes, the current season of The Simpsons might be the best it’s ever been, but who would know? I’m certainly not going to waste my time finding out.
The MCU as a project had been sputtering since Avengers: Endgame gave everyone an offramp and then failed to find a way to get everyone back on board, but this was the point the built-up goodwill ran out. The MCU running out of gas was a big reason for 2023’s strange box office; “superhero fatigue” means a lot of different things based on whose saying it, but a lot of the time what it really means is “I’ve paid full price for enough mid-tier Marvel movies, thanks.”
And it’s really unfair that this innoffensive fun little movie had to be the one that became one of the biggest box office bombs in history, while far-worse misfires like that third Ant-Man or The Eternals, or that awful second Doctor Strange were “successful.” In retrospect, it’s clear whatever Marvel movie came out at the end of ’23 was going to be the bomb, and I, for one, am sorry it was this one.
It’s also a little weird since a lot of the strange blowback the original Captain Marvel got in certain quarters was due to being the one movie between the two halves of the Infinity War / Endgame pair; you ended on a crazy cliffhanger, but first you want us to watch a seemingly-unconnected semi-prequel with an unconvincing de-aged Nick Fury? What? As the the saying goes, if I had a nickle every time a Captain Marvel movie got screwed over by its place in the release order, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
But enough context, how was the movie?
The standout, of course, is Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan. She was outstanding in the criminally under-watched Ms. Marvel, and she’s the best part of this movie. And even better, the Khan family comes along from the show. The best parts of this movie is when it’s “Ms. Marvel: The Movie”, to an extent that they clearly should have had the courage to just do that.
But this is mostly a sequel to Captain Marvel, and that’s a little more mixed. The script seems to want Captain Marvel to be a loner wandering gunslinger-type, haunted by the past and avoiding everyone. The problem is that Brie Larson clearly wants to play the part as a sort of wisecracking Doctor Who with laser hands, bouncing around the universe with her cat getting into and out of scrapes. When the movie gets out of her way and lets her do that—flirting with Tessa Thompson, dropping in on planets where she might have married the prince that one time but don’t worry about it, deadpanning lines like “he’s bilingual,” the character works great. Whenever the action screeches to halt so that Carol Danvers can be sad about things that happened off camera since the last movie, or so she and Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau can be mad at each other for poorly justified reasons, the movie falls apart as the actors visibly struggle to make such undercooked gruel of a script work.
Meanwhile, that leaves Teyonah Parris kind of stuck playing “the third one”. Unlike in WandaVision, Monica Rambeau here doesn’t really congeal as a character. But she’s still fun, gets some good banter in, does the best she can with material.
On the other hand, Samuel L Jackson is having more fun playing Nick Fury than he has since, well, maybe ever. He’s always been a funnier actor than most people use him as, and he absolutely shines here bantering over the radio, or gawking at flerkin eggs.
The central conceit is that the powers of the three main leads become “entangled”, so whenever two of them use their powers at the same time they swap places. This turns out to be a great idea; both to get the three of them working together with a minimum of fuss, but also as a basic teamwork gimmick. The parts of the movie where they’re hanging out, listening to Beastie Boys learning how to use the swaps, or turning every fight into a tag team absolutely sing.
And this is really my core review: when it’s a movie about three charismatic women tag-team fighting space aliens, it’s a really fun adventure movie. It’s funny, it’s exciting, it all basically works. “Found Family” is overdone these days, but it’s hard to begrudge a cliché when it’s done this charmingly. It’s very “watchable.”
That said, it also has the now-standard Marvel FlawsTM: an antagonist who isn’t a villain so much as a hole where a villain should be, a third act that devolves into incoherent CGI punching, and a resolution that’s the sort of “whoops, out of time, better do some poorly-justified vaguely sci-fi bullshit” that usually only happens when the b-plot of that week’s TNG episode ran long.
And there’s a stack of unforced errors too: while the place-swapping is the core concept for most of the movie, it never really pays off. When they finally get to the point where they’re going to have the showdown with the villain, the swapping stops for reasons as poorly-explained as why it started, and instead the antagonist gets what she wanted the whole time and immediately blows herself up. It’s a staggeringly incompetent ending, why on earth wouldn’t you use the thing that’s the main spine of the movie to allow the good guys to win? It’s almost trivial to imagine an ending where the three Marvels use their place swap powers to outwit their opponent, it’s inconceivable that no one working on the movie thought of one.
Which seems like the right time to mention that this is also the movie that inspired Bob Iger’s infamous and tone-deaf comments about having needed more executive supervision. On the one hand, that’s absurd, but watching this, it’s hard not to see what he means. As another example: this movie stars three characters from different sources, one of whom—Captain Marvel—already had her own successful solo movie and then co-starred in the most successful movie ever made, the other two were from different streaming-only shows that, rounding to the nearest significant digit, no-one watched. So, the character that gets the extended “previously on” flashback clip reel is… Captain Marvel? Yeah, movie, I remember Carol Danvers, we’re good there. I could have used a reminder about where Monica Rambeau ended up after WandaVision, though.
There really needed to be someone to look at that and go, “uhhh, are you sure about that?” And the movie is full of weird little lumpy decions like that.
But look, a couple of years ago, none of that would have mattered. We know this is true because Dr. Strange did just fine, and it has all these flaws and then some. But this movie didn't come out then, it came out now.
One of the lynchpins of the whole Marvel Movie project has been that they quickly figured out how to raise the floor and to make 2-3 movies a year that were guaranteed to be a B-, and then if a particular creative team came along and shot the lights out you were in great shape. And when one particular movie didn’t for whatever reason, that was mostly okay. There’s no shame in being mid-tier. Except, it’s now been years of nothing but mid-tier, and that infrastructure B- seems to have decayed to a C. And in a world where taking four people to see a movie costs more than the new Zelda, I think a lot of us need a little more than. “mid-tier.”
How can I put this—I suspect I’m a lot softer on the MCU than most people who own the number of Criterion Collection releases that I do? I tend to view Marvel Movies as the movie equivalent of fast food—but good fast food, In-N-Out burger or the like. And look, as much as we all like to talk about the death of cinema or whatever, being able to buy a double-double on the weekend doesn't actually make that much of a difference to the good restaurants downtown, and I think the MCU has had less of an influence on the world around it than we give it credit for. That said, there is a point where you say “gosh, we’ve gotten In-N-Out too much lately, you wanna go somewhere good?”
Movies from This Year I Finally Saw: Dune Part 2
The desert is beautiful in exactly the way that means it’s something that can kill you. It’s vast, and terrifying, and gorgeous. The only thing that compares is the sea; but the sea is totally alien, and to survive there, we need to bring tiny islands of our world with us to survive. The desert allows no such vessels, it demands that we join it, live as it does.
My Dad grew up on the edge of the low desert, I spent a lot of time as a kid there. I mention all this so that I can tell this story: when we watched the 2001 Sci-Fi channel version of Dune, the first time the Fremen arrived on screen my Dad burst into laugher; “Look how fat they are!” he roared, “they’ve never been in the desert a day in their lives!”
He did not say that when we watched the new movies.
And so yes, I finally saw the second half of Dune. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I think this has to go down as the new definitive example of how to turn a great book into a great movie (the examples for how to turn “decent-but-not-great” and “bad” books into great movies remain Jurassic Park and Jaws, respectively.)
It’s vast, it’s grand, it looks great, the acting is phenomenal, it’s fun, it’s exciting. It’s the sort of movie where you can list ten things about it at random and someone is likely to say “oh yeah, that was my favorite part.”
Denis Villeneuve has two huge advantages, and wastes neither. First, this is the third attempt at filming Dune, and as such he has a whole array of examples of things that do and don’t work. Second, he even has an advantage over Frank Herbert, in that unlike the author of the book, Villeneuve knows what’s going to happen in the next one, and can steer into it.
It’s immediately obvious that splitting the book into two movies was an even better idea than it first looked. While stretching a book-to-movie adaptation into two movies has become something of a cliche, Dune is different, if for no other reason than when they announced that they were going to make two films, literally everyone who’d ever read the book correctly guessed where the break was going to be.
But in addition to giving the story enough room to stretch out and get comfortable, the break between movies itself also turns out to have been a boost, because everyone seems more relaxed. The actors, who were all phenomenal in the first part, are better here, the effects are better, the direction is more interesting. Everyone involved clearly spent the two years thinking about “what they’d do next time” and it shows.
It looks great. The desert is appropriately vast and terrible and beautiful. The worms are incredible, landing both as semi-supernatural forces of nature but also clearly real creatures. All the stuff looks great, every single item or costume or set looks like it was designed by someone in the that world for a reason. The movie takes the Star Wars/Alien lived-in-future aesthetic and runs with it; the Fremen gear looks battered and used, the Harkonnen stuff is a little too clean, the Imperial stuff is clean as a statement of power, the smooth mirrored globe of a ship hanging over the battered desert outpost.
The book casually mentions that Fremen stillsuits are the best but then doesn’t talk more about that; the movie revels in showing the different worse protective gear everyone else wears. The Fremen stillsuits looks functional, comfortable, the kind of thing you could easily wear all day. The various Harkonnen and Imperial and smuggler suits all look bulky and uncomfortable and impractical, more like space suits than clothes; the opening scene lingers on the cooling fans in the back of Harkonnen stillsuit’s helmets, a group of soldiers in over their heads trying to bring a bubble of their world with them, and failing. In the end, those fans are all food for Shai-halud.
Every adaptation like this has an editorial quality; even with the expanded runtime we’re playing with here, the filmmakers have to choose what stays and what to cut. Generally, we tend to focus on what got left out, and there’s plenty that’s not here (looking at you, The Spacing Guild.) But oftentimes, the more interesting subject is what they choose to leave in, what to focus on. One detail Villeneuve zooms in on here is that everyone in this movie is absolutely obsessed with something.
Silgar is obsessed that his religion might be coming true. Gurney is obsessed with revenge at any cost. The Baron is obsessed with retaking Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit are obsessed with regaining control of their schemes. Elvis is obsessed with proving his worth to his uncle.
Rebecca Ferguson plays Jessica as absolutely consumed with the twin desires for safety and for her son to reach his full potential, whatever the cost. She has a permanently crazed look in her eyes, and the movie keeps it ambiguous how much of that is really her, and how much is PTSD mixed with side-effects of that poison.
At first, Paul is a kid with no agency, and no particular obsessions. He’s upset, certainly, but he someone who’s adrift on other people’s manipulations, either overt or hidden. You get the sense that once they join up with the Fremen, he’d be happy to just do that forever. But one the spice starts to kick in, Timothée Chalamet plays him as a man desperately trying to avoid a future he can barely glimpse. When reality finally conspires to make that future inevitable, he decides the only way forward is to sieze agency from everything and everyone around him, and from that point plays the part as a man possessed, half-crazed and desparate to wrestle him and the people he cares about through the only path he can see that doesn’t lead to total disaster.
My favorite character was Zendaya’s Chani. Chani was, to put it mildly, a little undercooked in the book, and one of the movie’s most interesting and savvy changes is to make her the only character that isn’t obsessed with the future, but as the only character who can clearly see “now”, a sort of reverse-Cassandra. While everyone else is consumed with plots and goals and Big Obsessions, she’s the only one that can see what the cost is going to be, what it already is. The heart of the movie is Zendaya finding new ways to express “this isn’t going to work out” or “oh shit” or “you have got to be fuckin’ kidding me” with just her face, as things get steadily out of control around her. It’s an incredible performance.
Chani also sits at the center of the movie’s biggest change: the ending.
In the book, Chani and Jessica aren’t exactly friends, but they’re not opposed to each other. The story ends with Paul ascending to the Imperial throne, with the implicit assent of the Spacing Guild and a collective shrug from the other great houses, and the story’s point-of-view slides off him and onto the two woman, as they commiserate over the fact that the men in their lives are formally married to other people, but “history will call us wives.”
Then, Dune Messiah opens a decade later after a giant war where the Fremen invaded the universe, and killed some billions of people. It’s not a retcon in the modern sense of the word exactly, but the shift from the seeming peaceful transition of power and “jihad averted” ending of the first book to the post-war wreckage of the opening of the second is a little jarring. Of course, Dune Messiah isn’t a novel so much as it’s 200 pages of Frank Herbert making exasperated noises and saying “look, what I meant was…”
Villeneuve knows how the second book starts, and more important, knows he’s going to make that the third movie, so he can steer into it in a way Herbert didn’t. So here, rather than vague allies, Jessica and Chani stand as opposing views on Paul’s future. The end of the film skips the headfake of a peaceful transition, and starts the galactic jihad against the houses opposed to Paul’s rule, and then the movie does the same POV shift to Chani that the book does, except now it’s her walking off in horror, the only person convinced that this will all end in flames and ruin. (Spoiler: she’s right.)
It’s a fascinating structure, to adapt one long book and its shorter sequel into a trilogy, with the not-quite-as-triumphant-as-it-looks ending of the first book now operating as (if you’ll forgive the comparison) an Empire Strikes Back–style cliffhanger.
It’s also a change that both excuses and explains the absense of the Spacing Guild from the movie, it’s much easier to light off a galactic war in one scene if there isn’t a monopoly on space travel that has a vested interest in things staying calm.
Dune is a big, weird, overstuffed book. The prose is the kind that’s politely described as “functional” before you change the subject, it doesn’t really have a beginning, and the end kind of lurches to a halt mid-scene. (And it must be said that it is significantly better written than any of Herbert’s other works. Dune started life as fixup of serialized short stories; the novel’s text implies the influence of either a strong editor or someone who gave a lot of productive feedback. Whatever the source, that influence wouldn’t show up for any of the sequels.) It’s a dense, talky book, with scene after scene of people expositing at each other, including both their conversation and respective internal monologies.
Despite it’s flaws, It’s a great book, and a classic for a reason, mostly because whatever else you can say about it, Dune is a book absolutely fizzing with ideas.
This is a book with a culture where computers are outlawed because of a long-ago war against “Thinking Machines”, and a guild of humans trained from birth to replace computers. There are plenty of authors who would have milked that as a book on its own, here it gets treated as an aside, the name “Butlerian Jihad” only appearing in the appendix.
Taking that a step further, the guild of analytical thinking people are all men, and their counterpart guild—the Bene Gesserit—are the scheming concubine all-woman guild. And yeah, there’s some gender stereotypes there, but that’s also the point, it’s not hidden. They’re both “what if we took these stereotypes and just went all the way.”
The book is constantly throwing out new concepts and ideas, tripping over them as it runs to the next. Even the stock mid-century science fiction ideas get a twist, and we end up with things like what if Asimov’s Galactic Empire was a little less “Roman” and a little more “Holy Roman”. And that’s before we get to the amount of word-building heavy-lifting done by phrases like “zensunni wanderers.”
And on top of all that, Herbert was clearly a Weird Guy (complementary.) The whole book is positively bubbling over with The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish, and while that would swamp the later books, here the weird stuff about politics or sex or religion mostly just makes the book more interesting—with a big exception around the weird (derogatory) homophobia.
And this is where I start a paragraph with “however”—However most of those ideas don’t really pay off in a narratively compelling way. They’re mostly texture, which is fine in a sprawling talky novel like Dune, but harder to spare room for in a movie, or even in two long ones.
An an example: Personal shields are another fun piece of texture to the setting, as well as artfully lampshading why this futuristic space opera has mostly melee combat, but they don’t really influence the outcome in a meaningful way. You can’t use them on Arrakis because they arger the worms, which sort of explains part of the combat edge the Fremen have, but then in the book it just sorta doesn’t come up again. The book never gives the Fremen a fighting style or weapons that take advantage of the fact their opponents don’t have shields but are used to having them. Instead, the Fremen are just the best fighters in the universe, shields or no shields, and use the same sorts of knives as everyone else.
The movies try to split the difference; shields are there, and we get the exposition scene at the start to explain how they work, but the actual fights don’t put a lot of effort in showing “the slow blade penetrates”, just sometimes you can force a blade through a shield and sometimes you can’t.
Visually, this does get gestured in a few ways: those suspensor torpedoes that slow down and “tunnel” through the shields are a very cool deployment of the idea, and the second movie opens with a scene where a group of Harkonnens are picked apart by snipers but never think to take cover, because they usually don’t have to.
And this is how the movie—I think correctly—chooses to handle most of those kinds of world-building details. They’re there, but with the volume dialed way down. The various guilds and schools are treated the same way; Dr Yueh turning traitor is unthinkable because he’s a trusted loyal member of the house, the Suk School conditioning is never mentioned, because it’s a detail that really doesn’t matter.
As someone who loves the book, It’s hard not to do a little monday-morning quarterbacking on where the focus landed. I’d have traded the stuff at the Ecological Testing Station for the dinner with the various traders and local bigwings, Count Fenring is much missed, I’d have preferred the Spacing Guild was there. But it works. This isn’t a Tom Bombadil/Souring of the Shire “wait, what did you think the book was about?” moment, they’re all sane & reasonable choices.
It turns out letting someone adapt the book who doesn’t like dialoge is the right choice, because the solution turned out to be to cut basically all of it, and let the story play out without the constant talking.
And this leads into the other interesting stylistic changes, which is that while Dune the book is deliriously weird, Dune the movies are not. Instead, they treat everything with total sincerity, and anything they can’t figure out how to ground they leave out.
I think this is a pretty savvy call for making a Dune in the Twenties. Most of the stuff that made Dune weird in the 60s has been normalized over the last few decades of post-Star Wars blockbusters, such that we live in a world where Ditko’s psychedelic Dr. Strange has starred in six different big budget movies, and one of the highest grossing movies of last year co-starred a talking tree and a cyborg raccoon. There’s no out-weirding that, the correct answer is, ironically, to take a cue from George Lucas and shoot it like it’s a documentary about a place that doesn’t exist.
So most of the movie, the fights, the worms, gets shot with total seriousness, and then Paul’s powers get visually reduced to the point where the movie is ambiguous about if he can really see the future or not. Even something as out-there-bananas as Alia is stripped down to the minimum, with the story’s timeline being compressed from multiple years to a couple of months so that we don’t have to figure out how to make a toddler with the mind of an adult work on the screen.
Which brings me to the last topic I want to cover here, which is that David Lynch’s Dune hangs over this movie like a shadow. It’s clear that everyone making this movie has seen that one. This is almost always to this movie’s benefit, both in terms of what’s there and what isn’t.
To wit: if anyone could have made something as very-specifically weird as “toddler with the mind of an adult” work, it was Lynch, and he didn’t, so the new movie stays clear. The look of both the Atreides and the Harkonnens owes more to the Lynch film than it does to the book, and there are any number of other aspects that feel like a direct response to that movie—either copy it, or get as far away as possible.
I picture Villeneuve with an effects pedal labeled “Lynch”, and he’d occasionally press on it.
I really, really liked these two movies. They’re far better than the Lynch film both as an adaptation of the book and as movies in their own right. But I really hope that pedal gets a little more of a workout in Dune Messiah.
You know, I really, really, really wanted to hear Christopher Walken say “Bring in that floating fat man—the baron!” I can hear it!
This means that the music video for Weapon of Choice is a prequel, right?
A final thought. Lynch’s Dune opens with Princess Irulan looking the camera dead in the eye and explaining the premise of the film, a sort of sci-fi Chorus asking for a muse of fire, but clunkier. Denis Villeneuve’s first part—correctly—does away with all that and just starts the movie.
Before this second movie came out, I joked that the real power move would be to open the this film with Irulan narrating (“The beginning was a dangerous time”,) to act as the ‘previously on Dune’ recap.
Reader, you cannot possibly imagine my surprise and delight when that actually happened.
Fallout (2024)
I found myself with more free time than I was expecting last weekend, and as I was also lacking in appropriate supervision, I “accidentally” watched all eight episodes of the new Fallout tv show.
I liked it! I liked a lot. It was fun, exciting, funny, great cast, looked amazing. But I’ve been wrestling with this post a little, because this is one of those weird bits of art where I genuinely liked it, I enjoyed watching it, and yet find myself with mostly only critical things to say.
Let’s get my biggest surprise out of the way first: Ron Perlman wasn’t in it. It’s a weird omission, considering how closely his voice is associated with the source material. Without getting too heavy into the spoilers, there was a scene near the end where a character looks over at a shadowy figure, and I thought to myself, “this is perfect, Ron is going to lean into the light, look the camera right in the eye and say the line.” And instead the shadowy figure stayed there and that other character looked the camera in the eye and said the line. Maybe it was a scheduling thing, and he was too busy teaching people how many ways there are to lose a house?
But okay, what did I like?
I liked the three main characters very much. Lucy, the most main of the main three manages to hit the very tricky spot of being “naïve”, but not “stupid” or “incompetent.” She’s just got a different set of experiences and skills than everyone else, but she learns fast and she figures out how to apply those skills to the new situations she finds herself in. She also manages the equally tricky maneuver of being a genuinely good person who stays a genuinely good person as the world around her gets weirder and more complex. She pretty much consistently finds the right reasons to do the right things, no matter how morally gray the world around her gets. She also looks remarkably like the starting model for the player character in the first game.
Maximus, on the other hand, manages to covey a sense of always being morally ambiguous and compromised no matter what he’s doing. It’s also a tricky performance, a character whose always likable despite the audience never really knowing why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s always thinking, but you never know about what.
Rounding out the triptych of leads is The Ghoul, who is clearly designed to be everyone’s favorite character—the sort of hyper-competent amoral badass gunslinger thats always fun to watch. In addition, he’s played by Walton Goggins, who dials the goggins-o-meter all the way up to 11 and seems to be having an absolute blast. Goggins effectively plays two roles—the Ghoul in the post-apocalyptic present of the show, and Cooper Howard, the fading western actor-turned Vault-Tec spokesman in world before the bombs drop.
But the rest of the cast is outstanding as well. Everyone is great, they get the tone they’re supposed to be going for. And then, special mention for Kyle McLachlan—that’s right, hero to children Dale Cooper himself—who shows up for a tiny part right at the start and again at the end, and just absolutely owns the room. I’m not sure any actor has ever “understood the assignment” more than Kyle does in this.
My favorite parts of the show were those flashbacks to the world before the war—a world where there are robots and futuristic cars, but it’s been the 50s for a century. The production design here is outstanding; at first glance it’s the 50s, trilbies, poodle skirts, but with just enough high-tech stuff around the edges to produce a subtle dissonance. And then the show opens with every nightmare we had as kids growing up in the cold war.
Mostly, the show is those three out in the wasteland, paths intersecting, running into weird stuff. Their relative goals are less important—and frankly, underbaked—compared to them bouncing off each other and the various dangers of their world. The maguffin itself feels almost perfunctory, we have to have one for genre reasons, so this’ll do. The star attraction is the wasteland itself, a Mad Max meets spaghetti western desert full of monsters, mutants, skeletons. Whenever the show was about those three out having crazy sidequest adventures, following “the golden rule”, it sang.
But let’s step back and talk about Fallout as a whole for a sec. To recap: Fallout is a series of CRPG video games. The first kicked off the late 90s renaissance of “western-style” CRPGs. Fallout acts as kind of the “parent dojo” for a lot of the CRPG world; the leads for the first game would go on to form Troika Games, the team that made Fallout 2 would form the nucleus of Black Isle studios inside Interplay, which also worked with and helped launch Bioware with Baldur’s Gate. A Fallout 3 was in the early stages, but cancelled as Interplay finished going out of business.
After Interplay imploded, Bethesda picked up the rights to the series in the fire sale, and ten years later published Fallout 3. Meanwhile, many of the crew from Black Isle had reformed as Obsidian Entertainment, which would then work with Bethesda to make Fallout: New Vegas with a team composed of many of the people who worked on the original cancelled Fallout 3, and using some of the same designs. Finally, this was all capped off with Fallout 4 once again by Bethesda.
The point to all that is that the series is five games, each made by different people, at different companies, starring different characters, all with different tones and takes on the material, across nearly 20 years. I think it’s best thought of as an anthology series riffing on the same concepts rather than any sort of single vision or viewpoint. There’s a few core pieces—that mad max–meets–westerns wasteland, vaults full of elites waiting out the end of the world, mutant monsters, and a tone described as “satirical” by people who think that’s just a fancy synonym for “dark humor”—but otherwise, each game does its own thing.
How do you adapt all that in to 8 episodes on Amazon Prime? This adaptation makes a really interesting choice, in that rather than directly adapting any of the plots of the previous games, or mix-and-matching elements from them, it tells a new story with new characters in the same world. It’s effectively “Fallout 5”. This turns out to be a great idea, and it’s one I can’t believe more video game adaptations haven’t done.
It also, in a pleasant surprise in this age of prequels, is set after the other games, so those stories are vaguely treated as having “happened” and then here are some things that happened next.
As such, the show gives itself the flexibility to pick and choose various bits from the games to use or not, as well as threading new new inventions. It manages to hit a sort of “median-value” Fallout vibe, equidistant from all the games, which is a harder accomplishment than it makes it look.
Tone-wise the show settles on something best summed up as “Diet Westworld”. Because, of course, this is made by the same team that made the “stayed on too long” Westworld for HBO and the “killed too soon” The Peripheral for Amazon.
It has a lot in common with Westworld: multiple characters stories interweaving, a story that plays out in two time periods, The Ghoul is who Ed Harris’ Man in Black wanted to be when he grew up, a sort of jovial nihilism. It’s not simplified so much as streamlined, the time periods are obvious, the list of characters is shorter.
It definitely inherits Westworld’s desire to have everything be the result of one mystery of another, it’s a show that constantly wants to be opening locked boxes to find another locked box inside.
And this is too bad, because for me, Fallout is one of those settings that works much better when it’s operating a vibes-over-lore mode. You’re out in the wasteland, and it’s full of weird stuff that no one can explain, because anyone who could died before we were born, and we’ve got better things to do than speculate. Why are these vaults here? Grandma’s notes don’t say. Rad scorpions, huh? Yeah, they seem bad. Super-mutants? Yeah, don’t get near them.
Unfortunately, the games, and now the show, have trended more towards the “explain everything and fill in every detail” school of design, which… sure. It’s fine. I bring this up because the show leans hard into my single least favorite corner of the setting, namely that Vault-Tec, the company that built the vaults, was Up To Something, and Dark Secrets Abound. And this has always made me make a kind of exasperated sound and throw my hands up in the air because, really? “A third of a percent of the population decided to wait out the end of the world in luxury apartments while everyone else did the work to survive and the rebuild, so their grandchildren could emerge and take over” wasn’t enough satirical payload for you? You had to also make them Lex Luthor? And this is probably because this happened during Peak X-Files, and wheels-within-wheels conspiracies were cool and trendy in the late 90s, but now that just makes me tired.
The show even kisses up against the Thumb Thing. Let me explain. The mascot of both the franchise and Vault-Tec is the Vault Boy, a 50s-esque smiling cartoon character usually shown throwing a thumbs-up. No matter how bad things get, there’s the Vault-Boy, happy as can be.
There’s this urban rumor meets fan theory that the reason the Vault-Boy has his thumb up is that this is a way to gauge how close you are to an atomic bomb going off; if the mushroom cloud is smaller than your thumb, you have time to get to shelter. And, this is the most Lore Brain thing I’ve ever heard. Of course that’s not why he has his thumb up, he’s doing that because it’s funny to have a relentlessly optimistic cartoon character in the face of the terrible horrors of the aftermath of a nuclear war. But the people poisoned with Lore Brain need everything to Mean Something, so this rumor persists, until the show dances right up to the edge of endorsing it. And this drives me crazy, because not everything needs to have some complicated explanation you can read about in the wiki, stuff can just be thematic, you know?
The show also picked up Westworld’s (and The Peripheral’s) grim sense of humor. I preferred the Fallout games when they were on the funnier end of the spectrum, and I could have gone with a funnier show. It’s not not funny, but it’s also a show that cast Matt Berry in a fully serious part, which feels wasteful.
And a final thing Fallout inherited from Westworld is the “adult-ness” of the content. I promise I’m not one of those weirdoes that thinks movies shouldn’t have sex scenes, but my hottest take is that most movies would be better one rating lower than they are. And normally, this wouldn’t bug me, except I have a 12-year old at home who loves Fallout, and I can’t in good conscience show him the show.
Because I lied up at the top, I didn’t just happen to watch it over a weekend, I previewed the first part to see if I could watch it with the kids, realized that the answer was “…probably not?” and then jammed the rest of the show to see if I was right.
And what really grinds my gears about that is the content is only barely over the line into that TV-MA / R level, it wouldn’t have taken that much to knock it down to a stiff PG-13. And, like, if you’re going to go “adult”, go all the way, you know? I kept grumbling “pick a lane!” under my breath while watching it; it kept feeling like one of those 80s movies that threw one dramatic stabbing or topless scene in just to get their PG movie up into R so the teenagers wouldn’t think they’d gone soft. If you’re not going to let my kid watch it, go full Robocop, you know? Or, more to the point, full Westworld.
Because, unlike Westworld, none of that stuff mattered! Whereas Westworld was fundamentally The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish (In Color!), here it’s all basically frosting. You could have cut around it, or panned away, and really not lost anything. On the other hand, if I’m honest, it wasn’t the mild sexy stuff or the CG gore that tipped it over the line to “nope, wait til he’s older”, it’s that there’s a sequence halfway through the first episode that’s every nightmare he’s ever had about a school shooting. And in fairness, that part is key to the plot the way the sexytimes and cartoon gore is not, so this is where I throw my hands up and say Libya is a land of contrasts, and that I get it, I really do, but I would have really preferred watching this show with my kid than not.
And my final gripe I’m going to air out here is that the show ended up with a worse case of Surf Dracula syndrome than it originally looked like it was going to have. She gets out of the vault in the first episode, but then the last episode ends on a note that’s clearly supposed to tease the next season, but instead feels more like they’ve finally arrived at the premise of the show. There’s a much better version of this show that got to that set of plot beats at the end of the first hour and built up from there.
Or to put that a different way, it feels like the show ended at the end of the first act of the main quest-line, after mostly draining side quests.
TV is in a weird place right now, and Fallout reflects the current anxiety over the form. It’s certainly not a old-style traditional episodic show, but nor is it the “badly-paced 8-hour movie” so many streaming shows tend to be, nor does it manage “heavily serialized but every episode does it’s own thing” as well as Westworld did. Instead it lands somewhere in the middle of all of that, and ends up feeling like a show that’s both very busy but also killing time until the next season.
And I don’t think dropping the whole show at once did them any favors. Whereas Westworld dominated the conversation for weeks at a time, this show is almost impossible to talk about, because everyone has seen a different number of episodes, so instead of talking about anything interesting, the web swirls around Vault-Boy’s thumb and dates on chalkboards. There’s a lot to talk about, and I notice every website that might want to talk about them already have the quality of walking back into the room saying “…and another thing!” long after the conversation was over.
I’m getting dangerously close to saying “I wish they had made a different show,” but I wish they’d leaned a little harder into the 50s aesthetics and had each episode be standalone new wacky adventures every week with the premise explained by the words to the theme song.
And this is all the nature of the medium here in 2024, but I really wish that last “okey-dokey” felt earned, that it felt like a punch-the-air climax to what had come before, instead of feeling like Dracula was finally getting his surfboard out.
Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Wait a minute, they fucking fridged Rebecca Ferguson’s character? Absolutely not.
Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature
Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously.
I don’t think “realism” is a super-interesting aesthetic goal. It’s a legitimate goal, certainly, but far from the only option and rarely the most compelling. But Movies, especially since the 70s, have had an attitude that that “realistic” means “for grownups”, and anything fantastical or stylized means “for kids”, with certain carve-outs for “surrealism” that mostly only apply to David Lynch.
Which is one of the reasons I love Wes Anderson’s movies so much, as he’s one of the people who seem to be actively thinking about “what can we do other than make it look real, though?” There’s a running joke that every Wes Anderson movie is “the most Wes Andersony movie yet!” but that’s not quite right. He’s got a set of techniques, tools, and he keeps refining them, finding new ways to hone the point.
Anderson always gets kind of a strong reaction in certain corners of the web, which is funny for a lot of reasons, but most of all because the kind of people who don’t like his movies tend to also be the kind of people who are mad everything looks like a Marvel movie now, and it has a real quality of “we want something different! No, not like that!”1 That said, people mustering the energy to actually hate something is a pretty strong signal that you made Art instead of Content.2
It was a stacked year, with two releases, which I watched in completely the wrong order.
Asteroid City
It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.
Anderson has always leaned heavily into artifice as a storytelling technique, and here he pushes that about as far as possible. Even within the terms of it’s own fiction, it’s all fake: a fake performance of an unreal play, made for a TV broadcast which isn’t real either, and then proceeds into what is absolutely not a play. It’s a strong move to open with “none of this really happened”. That’s implicit in all fiction, but rarely is it foregrounded like this. The movie gets a couple of things out of this.
It results in maybe his all time best opening; black and white, a non-widescreen aspect ratio, and Bryan Cranston doing a Rod Serling impression as the host of the TV show from the 50s. He describes the play we’re about to see, and then introduces the writer (Ed Norton) who steps out onto the stage and introduces the plot outline, the characters, and then walks through the layout of the scenery, and the camera angle cuts around showing the “actors” in their street clothes, and then each piece of fake scenery. The camera pulls back, the lights turn off, and them—bam—we’re a color widescreen, following a train into Asteroid City, where the camera carefully shows us each of the pieces of the set around town, now both more and less real.
It’s Shakespearian, but not the way people usually mean it—instead it’s the opening of Henry V rendered in the language of TV.
And the movie proceeds in the multiple layers, moving back and forth between the Host and his TV show, the actors and writers of the “play” working on it, and then the “play” itself. This also means many of the actors are effectively playing more than one part, the “actor” and the “character”.
But we also get the layers bleeding into each other; the host accidentally entering the scene at the wrong time, actors leaving the play to talk to the director or to each other. Rushmore and Barbie meet up behind the stage and perform the scene that was “cut for time” roughly where it was supposed to go. Characters talk about ideas for how to stage scenes that are coming up. The structure of a play is maintained, with title cards popping in to remind us which act or scene this is.
The cast, as always, is stacked and excellent. Just about the entire Anderson rep company is in this, with actors who would normally get top billing showing up here to stand in the back of scenes with no lines, and then deliver one word or two. There is a Bill Murray–shaped hole that Steve Carell does about a good a job of fulling as anyone could. (Originally, I assumed the Bill Murray role was the one taken by Tom Hanks, but knowing that it was actually the hotel manager makes that character make a lot more sense.)
There’s a lot of thematic material churning around about loss and acceptance and moving on and human connections and art, but it’s also a movie where the characters openly talk about the fact that the don’t understand what it all means. Anderson likes to leave some blanks for the audience to fill in, and this might be his best deployment of that technique. I know what it all meant to me, but it feels like cheating to say.
Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.
But, now that we have all that out of the way, let’s focus on what’s really important: this is an incredibly funny movie, full of incredibly good actors, doing incredibly silly things with incredibly straight faces.3
It’s less of a movie and more a series of skits performed completely deadpan. All of Anderson’s movies are like this, but in some ways this as close as he’s ever gotten to the full Airplane!.
From the opening where Matt Dillon describes the two possible problems with the car and then discovers a third, followed by the three girls disagreeing with the waitress that they are princesses, the movie is continuously funny, and I pretty much laughed out loud the entire time.
Which, of course, is the secret to all the thematic and structural stuff I spent all those words on up front—it’s not that they don’t matter, but they’re there to set up a bunch of really funny jokes, and to do some slight of hand to keep you from noticing that the joke is coming, until, like the UFO, it’s right on top of you.
I loved it, by the way.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More
People love faces.
I could make an argument here invoking evolutionary biology, or some deeper philosophical point, but this isn’t that kind of review so I’m going to skip all that and say that most storytelling boils down to being fascinated by other people’s faces.
And so we come to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which centers on “what if we had some really good actors look the camera dead in the eye and tell the audience a story?”
In a lot of ways, this quartet of stories feels like the endpoint of the increasing artifice Anderson has been working in since at least French Dispatch. My take is that this is less about artificiality for its own sake than it is borrowing visual storytelling techniques from other mediums and deploying them in a movie, where they look more fake compared to the default “realist” style.
A very early example of this is the scene in Life Aquatic where camera pulls back to reveal a cutaway side view of the Belafonte as Steve Zissou narrates a tour of his boat. The boat isn’t literally a cut-away, but the scene plays as “here’s how we would do this if it was a comic.”
Here, it’s using using techniques and tricks from the theatre, but remixed in a way you could never do live on stage. So, we have stagehands handing props to actors on screen, actors sitting on prop boxes to simulate levitating, pieces of scenery sliding in and out of frame as scenes reorient. Except the scenery moves in ways it never could on stage and the stage hands come from places they couldn’t have come; this is the visual language of a play deployed in a way that could only work in a movie.
The first segment starts with Ralph Fiennes in character as Roald Dahl himself, looking very much like the real thing, settling into a fairly accurate recreation of Dahl’s real-life writing hut. he settles into his chair, fusses about with his pencils, the heater pops and hisses. Bright colors non-withstanding, it’s realistic—we’re in the real world, watching Roald Dahl getting ready to write a story. There’s a naturalism to it, a sense of authenticity; this is probably what it really looked like when a roughly 60-year old man sat down to write. He settles into place, pulls the the writing surface into his lap, puts pencil to paper, and then…
…the whole tone changes. Fiennes continues to talk, narrating the story, but his aspect shifts; he’s the narrator now, not an old man writing; he pushes the paper away, stands up, walks out of the hut with a completely changed demeanor as the scenery changes behind him. We’re not in the real world anymore, we’re explicitly in the Land of Story now. It’s one of the most marvelous transitions I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in essentially one shot.
The story plays out as a series of nested stories, Roald Dahl’s outermost narration, Henry Sugar’s discovery of the book, the book’s contents as narrated by the doctor, the story told by the old man of how he learned to see without his eyes, and then back out again until we unwind back to Roald Dahl in front of his shed again. The narration passes hands, and the actors narrating play a kind of double role, both as a character on screen and then turning towards the camera to deliver an aside to the camera.4
I found it compelling almost to the point of hypnosis.
As with Asteroid City, the artifice is the point. Did this really happen? Of course it didn’t, it’s a short movie on Netflix based on a Roald Dahl story made by the guy who did Royal Tenenbaums. Does it matter? The end hits the same either way.
Anderson has never come close to matching the emotional punch at the end of Royal Tenenbaums of “I’ve had a rough year, dad.” He’s spent a lot of time trying to recapture that hit, never successfully. While he’s moved on from trying, he does like to end his movies with a punchline. “And that’s what I have done” is one of his best.
This is exactly the sort of experiments that 1) short movies, and 2) streaming should be used for. It’s outstanding that this was what finally won Anderson his first “big boy” Oscar.
Some stray observations on the other three stories:
“The Rat Catcher” was always one of Dahl’s slice-of-weird-life stories, where things keep getting more uncomfortable without ever being overtly dangerous. Here, it turns into an acting clinic between Ralph Fiennes finding new ways to be menacing, and Moss from The IT Crowd finding new ways to look horrified.
“The Swan” always bothered me as a kid, Dahl always had mean streak, and this was one of his meaner stories, the sort of story where only bad things happen. It also had a strangely ambiguous ending, especially for Dahl—what really happened there? Did the boy escape? Is he dead? Is the thing that happens at the end metaphorical for dying? And it’s ambiguous in the sort of way you can get away with in prose, since the reader can only “see” what the author describes. I was very pleased that they found a way to keep the ambiguity intact despite the audience now being able to see everything that happened.
Also, it’s hilarious that Rupert Friend was absolutely mesmerizing in this at the same time he was phoning in being the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. What a weird year he had!
“Poison”, meanwhile, after almost being word-for-word with the source material, does change the end, to refuse to let the racism off the hook. Partly this is through some sharp editing, but mostly through the looks on Ben Kingsley’s face.
It’s worth noting, for the record, that while this set of stories has a remarkable variety of narrators, none of them are women, which while accurate to the source material, rankles somewhat here in the twenties.
I Guess I Should Put A Conclusion
Like I mentioned way back at the start, I watched these out of order, Henry Sugar first, then Asteroid City, so on first swing the movie felt like a step back from the shorts. On a rewatch in the right order, it was more obvious how they built on each other. But I enjoyed them both either way.
Where do you go from here, though? Henry Sugar really does feel like an endpoint for the approach Anderson has been developing since at least The French Dispatch, there’s a straight line from that movie, though Asteroid City to Henry Sugar. Or maybe not an endpoint but more that the technique has arrived at it’s final form.
I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next.5
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This is because these people don’t want “different”, they want everything to look like a Scorcese movie.
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Which pretty much sums up the whole of the current economy and the human condition in one sentence. I will not be taking questions at this time.
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It’s incredible.
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It’s a kind of extended riff on soliloquies, but that both makes it sound overly pretentious and undersells it at the same time, so I won’t make that comparison.
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I was expecting another stop-motion palette cleanser, but instead it sounds like it’s going to be a spy movie?
Doctor Who and the Giggle
An older man embraces his younger self. The younger man is filled with guilt, and rage, and dispair. The older man is calm, almost serene.
“It’s okay,” the older man says. “I got you.” He kisses his younger self on the forehead.
Sometimes the subtext gets to just be the text, you know? Or, to slightly misquote Garth Marenghi, sometimes writers who use subtext really are cowards.
It turns out we got a multi-Doctor story after all!
It’s maybe the most obvious idea that the show has never used—what if a Doctor’s last episode was also a teamup with the next Doctor? You can easily imagine how that might work—some time travel shenanigans, they team up, defeat the bad guy, then some more time travel shenanigans as the loop closes and the one regenerates into the other. Imagine if the Watcher in Logopolis had been played by Peter Davison!
On the other hand, it’s also perfectly obvious why no one has ever done it.
First, this is a hard character to play, and most Doctors have fairly rough starts. Having to share your first story with your predecessor is beyond having to hit the ground running, you have to be all the way there.
Second, it’s disrespectful to the last actor. A villain the current Doctor can’t beat, but that the next one can? Seems like a bad story beat to go out on. But more than that, making this show is an actual job—people come in, they go to work, they know each other. Imagine spending your last couple of days at work sharing your job with the next guy. That sucks. You don’t get a going-away party finale about you, instead you have to share with the new kid.
But this finds a solution to both of those.
There’s a long history in the show of easing the new lead in by keeping the old supporting cast and letting them do the heavy lifting while the new Doctor finds their feet. Look at “Robot”, Tom Baker’s first episode as an example—that’s essentially a baseline Jon Pertwee episode that just happens to have Tom in it instead. This story realizes that you can extend the concept to include the old Doctor as well, treating them as part of the existing cast to help get the new Doctor going.
But more critically, in this case, the old Doctor has already left once! Tennant got his big showpiece exit back in 2010. This is bonus time for him, and can’t diminish his big exit in any way.
Instead, after two and a half hours of a greatest hits reunion, he steps to the side and pours all his energy into getting the new guy off the ground. It’s hard to imagine any other actor who’s played the part being willing to put this much work in to making their replacement look this good.
And good he does look. Ncuti Gatwa bursts onto the screen and immediately shows why he got the part. He’s funny, he’s exciting, he’s apparently made out of raw, uncut charisma. Tennant is still there, but once Gatwa arrives, he’s the only one you’re watching.
The whole thing is just tremendously fun, an absolute delight from beginning to end. Presumably it’s title refers to what the author was doing the whole time they wrote it. It’s a big goofy, exciting, joyous, ridiculous adventure where the Doctors win by being brave, and clever, and charismatic, and kind, and what more could you possibly want from this show?
The Toymaker is an interesting choice of returning classic villain. For everyone not steeped in the Deep Lore, “The Celestial Toymaker” is a mostly-missing story from late in the original show’s 3rd season where the Doctor gets pulled into the realm of the Toymaker, a siniser, seemingly immortal being living in a domain of play. The Doctor has to defeat him at a very boring game while his companions have a whole set of largely filler encounters with evil clowns and whatnot.
Oh, and the Toymaker himself (played by Batman’s Best Butler, Michael Gogh) is a deeply racist Chinese caricature, a white man dressed in full Mandarin robes and all. “Celestial”, get it? He’s from space, and also Chinese! It’s a racist pun.
This is strangely controversial take in some corners of Who fandom, where the arguments that the Toymaker isn’t racist seems to boil down to the suggestion that the show correctly used a racial slur for their yellow peril character during an uncharacteristically racist period of the show to perfectly craft a racist pun… by accident?
That said, it’s easy to imagine that if you were ten in 1966 this was probably the coolest thing you’d ever seen—and then no one ever got to watch it again. For ages, that impression of the original viewers held sway in fan circles—the Discontinutity guide, formal record of mid-90s fan consensus, calls it an “unqualified success”.
Reader, it is not. It’s slow, the bad kind of talky, and feels like a show made entirely out of deleted scenes from another, better show.
Once we could watch reconstructions, the consensus started to shift a little.
Credit where credit is due, what it does have going for it is one of the show’s first swings at surrealism, and also one of the first versions of a powerful evil space entity; the adjective “lovecraftian” didn’t really exist in ’66, but this is one of the show’s first takes on “spooky elder god”. Also, it was strongly implied that the Toymaker and the Doctor already knew each other, and that was definitely the first time the show had hit that note.
So why bring him back?
Well, The Toymaker has the “mythic heft” to be the returning villain for the big anniversary show, while also not having anyone who would care that he got dispatched early, and in a way where he probably won’t be back again.
I thought the reworking of the character from a racist caricature to a character who likes to perform racist caricatures was very savvy, a solid way to rehab the character for a one-off return.
Plus, Neal Patrick Harris clearly understands the assignment, and absolutely delivers “evil camp” like no one else can. (More on that in a bit.)
Let’s talk about Mel for a second. Mel wasn’t anyone’s favorite companion, barely a sketch of a character during a weird time on the old show, despite Bonnie Langford being probably the highest profile actor to be cast as a regular on the original show’s run.
A much-told anecdote is that for the cliffhanger of her first episode, the producer asked if she could scream in the same key as the first note of the closing credits, so that the one would slide into the other.
The bit of that story everyone always leaves out is that 1) yes she could, and 2) she nailed it in one take. There was a whole lot of talent there that the show just left on the floor. She was there for a year and a half, and then got out of the way so Ace could anchor the final mini-renaissance of the show before it finally succumbed to its wounds. Consigned to that list of characters where you go, “oh right, them” when you remember.
But then a funny thing happened.
Classic Doctor Who has been embarrassingly well-supported on home video. The entire show was released on DVD, and they’re now about half-way through re-releasing the whole show on blu-ray as well. As result of their decision to release each story separately on DVD, every single story has a wealth of bonus material—interviews, archive clips, making-of documentaries. The bulk of the DVDs came out during the tail-end of the “wilderness years” before the show came back, and the special features tend to split their time between “settling old grudges” and “this wasn’t that bad, actually.” There’s a real quality that “this is for the permanent record”, and so everyone tries to put the best face forward, to explain why things were the way they were, and that it was better than you remembered.
The Blu-rays, on the other hand, have a very different tone. Released long after the new show has become a monster hit, the new sets repackage all the old material while adding new things to fill in the gaps. While the DVDs tended to focus on the nuts-and-bolts of the productions, the new material is much more about the people involved. And they are all much more relaxed. We’re long past the point where the shows needs apologizing or explaining, and everyone left just finally says what they really thought about that weird job they had for a year or two decades ago.
A consequence of all this material has been that several figures have had their reputations change quite a bit. And perhaps none more so than Bonnie Langford. Far from being “that lady that played Peter Pan who kept yelling about carrot juice”, in every interview she comes across as a formidably talented consummate professional who walked into an absurd situation, did the best job anyone could possibly do, and then walked back out again.
Faced with a character with no background, no personality other than “80s perky”, and not even a real first story, and in a situation where she got no direction on a show where the major creative figures were actively feuding with each other, she makes the decision to, basically, lean into “spunky”, hit her marks, and go home. From my American perspective, she basically settles on “Human on Sesame Street interacting with the Doctor as a muppet” as a character concept, which in retrospect, is a really solid approach to Doctor Who in 1986.
The character, as on screen from “Terror of the Vervoids” to “Dragonfire” still doesn’t, in any meaningful way, work, but the general consensus floated away from “terrible idea” to “actually fairly interesting idea executed terribly.”
So, here in 2023, Bonnie Langford can show up on BBC One and credibly represent the whole original show for the big 60th anniversary.
And, this version of the character basically does work, which it accomplishes by just giving her something to do. For example, she gets to deliver exposition through song, a mid-bogglingly obvious idea that the old show just never thought of.
And look, if Lis Sladen were still alive that probably would have been Sarah Jane, but that wasn’t an option, so RTD went for something interesting that hadn’t been tried yet.
What’s this story for?
Like we talked about before, it’s hard not to read these three specials as an artist in conversation with their previous work. If “The Star Beast” was about resolving Donna, and “The Wild Blue Yonder” was about turning out a great episode of Doctor Who, what’s “The Giggle” here to do?
On a purely mechanical basis, this is here to give Tennant a big send off and clear the decks for Gatwa and the new, new show can get a clean start.
But also, you get the feeling there were a couple things RTD wanted a do-over on before he relaunched the show for real.
One of the things thats so great about Doctor Who is that it’s camp, but not just any camp. Doctor Who is AAA, extra-virgin, weapons-grade camp, and most people can’t hit that.
A lot of the time, when someone complains about someone coming on Who and being “camp” what they really mean is that they weren’t camp enough.
For example: John Simm’s take on the Master back in 2007. Like most of Series 3, it almost worked. There’s a scene towards the end where he’s dancing around the helicarrier dancing to a Scissor Sisters song, and it’s supposed to be sinister and instead it’s just kind of goofy? Simm can’t quite throttle up the camp required to pull that off, and in all their scenes together you can see Tennant easing off on the throttle. None of it quote worked, it just never hit the “evil camp” that RTD was clearly looking for.
Harris dancing to the Spice Girls while the UNIT soliders fired rose petals at him was clearly what RTD had in mind a decade and a half ago, and it was glorious.
And the reprise of the Flash Gordon hand retrieving the Master is just delicious.
I think my favorite moment of the whole show was “But she was killed by a bird!”
The toymaker’s puppet show was glorious. It served (at least) two purposes.
First, this was clearly some gentle ribbing of one show runner to the other. While “The Star Beast” directly engaged with Moffat’s criticism of Donna’s mind-wipe, this was RTD responding in kind about Moffat’s fetish for killing-but-not-really his companions. And then, RTD locking in on The Flux as a source of more Doctor AngstTM.
Second, it grounded the whole point of the episode. The Doctor has been through a lot. Trauma has been a core feature of the show since the 2005 revival, but this was moment to pause and underscore, mostly for Donna’s benefit, how many terrible things have happened since she was on the show.
Like the Doctor casually mentioning that he was “a Billion years old”, things have happened, over the last fifteen years.
There’s been some suggestion that the puppet show was RTD throwing shade on in successors, and no. The shade was “I made a jigsaw of your history.”
This set of specials had a very relaxed attitude towards “the rules”, whatever those might be. The sharpest example of this is keeping the emotional reverberations of The Flux, but muddying all the water around The Timeless Child, and the general “aww screw it” anything-goes attitude towards regeneration.
One of the big, maybe the biggest, innovations of the 2005 re-imagining of Doctor Who was to expand the emotional palette. While the original show tended to operate in a very narrow band of—frankly—safe emotions, the revival opened the throttle wide open. Mostly this was used for angst, and doubt, and unrequited love.
Now, here at the start of the 2023 revival, we add healing to the show’s vocabulary.
These specials summon up all the unresolved trauma of the revival show to date, and exorcise it.
Who in 2005 was about pain, and loss, and grief, and living with trauma. Who in 2023 is about healing.
For once, both the Doctor and the companion get a happy ending, and dine off into the sunset.
The new Doctor is a man healed, finally free of the weight of the revival show.
It’s hard not to read that as at least partly autobiographical?
Having the Doctor talking about past challenges, and then list The Time War, The Pandorica, and Mavic Chen as equals is hilarious. It’s nice to remember RTD is one of us, you know?
Bringing back Trinity Wells, but she’s become an Alex Jones/Sean Hannity–type is even funner.
Formally, the upcoming season of the show is Series 1 of Doctor Who (2023). Much hay has been made in some quarters that “Disney has reset the show”, and there’s some gnashing teeth that it’s “really” Series 14 of Doctor Who (2005) (or even Season 40 of Doctor Who (1963)).
From a production standpoint, it clearly is a new show; it’s being made at a new facility under the auspices of a new co-production company. From the view of the BBC’s internal paperwork, the 2023 show is as different an entity from the 2005–2022 show as that was from the 1963–1989 one. There’s still some churn, but the community seems to be coalescing on “Original era”, “Revival era”, and “Disney+ era” as the names you use in lists to organize the three iterations.
And it’s clear that from a branding perspective, Disney+—which is distributing the show outside of the UK and putting up a chunk of the budget for the privilege—would rather have the show page start with “Season 1” instead of the inexplicable-to-newcomers “Season 14.” And the contracts that cover the three interactions are clearly different too, with BritBox, Max (formerly HBO Max), and now Disney+ each having the rights to one of them. At worst, this seems like one of those moments where Amazing Spider-Man will declare a “bold new beginning!” and reset the issue numbering to #1. Sooner or later the original numbering sneaks back in to the inside cover, and then eventually it resets and issue 27 is followed by issue five hundred-something. It’s silly, but a decent branding exercise, a way to signal to new people “hey, here’s a safe place to jump on!” And, with the old business mostly concluded here, the Christmas episode seems like it’ll be a solid place to on-board.
But again, the subtext pulls up into the text.
By all reasonable measure, David Tennant is the revival show. He was by far the most popular, and Series 4 with him and Catherine Tate was the all-time ratings high.
So here, the two of them stand in for the entire revival era of the show. Bonnie Langford gets to represent the Original. This episode ends with the revival show and the new embracing, while the original show watches and approves. The revival show hands the keys to the new show, and then the revival and original shows retire to country, while the new show heads off to new adventures.
Can’t wait to see what happens next.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Okay, I finally saw Dial of Destiny. It was… “fine”, I guess? But I don’t understand why you would go to all the trouble of making “one more” Indy movie in 2023 if the best you could muster was “fine”.
Let’s start with what works: The best part of the movie was its enthusiastic endorsement of punching Nazis. It’s strangely rare to see that stated so clearly and without hedging these days, so that almost makes up for everything else.
Also, the cast is uniformly excellent. This is the first Indiana Jones movie since Radiers where there’s no weak link, everyone does a great job with what they have to do, and frankly, everyone looks like they’re having a good time doing it. Even Harrison Ford looks awake and engaged, which isn’t always a given post-somewhere around Air Force One.
Other than that, it’s well made, looks good, solid production design, the punches all sound great. The plot cooks along at a steady clip, the action works. And the strange thing about this movie is that while it doesn’t really do anything badly, it just also doesn’t do anything particularly well. It’s fine.
So what doesn’t work so well?
The funniest thing is that Harrison Ford doesn’t even try to make his voice sound younger in the prologue. Just a fifty-year old face with an eighty-year old voice. What a legend!
But the first thing I noticed was how still the camera was. I appreciate not wanting to make a pastiche, but scene after scene of actors looking at something in a locked-off camera shot, I’d think to myself, “man, Spielburg would have put a really cool camera move here.”
It’s way too long. There’s a reason all the others are a tight 2 hours, there’s no excuse for a two-and-a-half hour Indy movie. Halfway through the WW2 prologue I caught myself thinking “wow, this is still going, huh?” Also, look, the third time you write “and then Indy is captured and bundled into the back of a van” in the script, your movie is too long. So it’s not just Spielburg that’s missed, but also Michael Kahn.
Similarly, there is no universe where you should spend 200+ million dollars on an Indiana Jones movie.
And then it works its way through the other greatest hits of all the bad habits that “legacy sequels” have picked up over the last decade or so:
- Overly enamored with mediocre computer de-aging
- The Hero has suffered terrible personal setbacks since we saw them last, and are now living in failure, all past successes forgotten
- Full of new, younger characters, but they’re not super like-able, and are there more than makes sense, but not enough to tee them up as the new leads, as if they wanted to set up a spin-off but then got cold feet halfway through the movie.
- Way, way too much greenscreen instead of practical effects
Strangely, it seems like they used Crystal Skull as their main source of inspiration, fixing the cosmetic mistakes but not the fundamental ones. For example, replacing Shia with Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a huge upgrade, but at no point did anyone seem to stop and ask why they needed a Junior Varsity Indy to begin with. I like Phoebe Waller-Bridge a lot so she was fun; but giving one the big big hero moments to… the new kid sidekick? Why? Personally, instead of another one-off sidekick I would have much preferred Indy & Marion on one last ride bickering the whole time. If you’re doing a one-last-ride nostalgia piece, why add so many new people?
And look, Crystal Skull was bad, but at least it had Cate Blanchett vamping it up as an evil Russian psychic? This one had… the guy from Casino Royale playing Great Value Brand Red Skull?
And why break up Indy and Marion only to get them back together again at the end?
Frustratingly, It’s not like this movie was short on ideas. There’s at least a dozen really good ideas for an Indiana Jones movie:
- What if Werner von Braun was still a Nazi?
- Related: Nazis are sneaking back, time to get punching!
- The Moon Landing!
- Closely related: Astronauts! (Imagine a fistfight between Indy and some NASA guys)
- The Antikythera mechanism as a macguffin. Great choice, brings in a whole set of Mediterranean iconography you can play with that the Indy movies haven’t done yet
- Bonus macguffin: the Spear of Destiny, as used in every single Indy spinoff in the 90s, and for good reason
- CIA agents working with neo-nazis but not being happy about it
- Indy as a retired “old guy”, living an a world that’s passed him by, yet is still historical for the audience. Credit where credit is due, the cut to old Indy being awoken by “Magical Mystery Tour” was absolutely worth whatever it cost to get that song. (Plus, Indy in an anti-Vietnam demonstration? YES PLEASE!)
- A plot that ties unfinished business from whatever he was doing during the war with what’s going on now
- And more broadly from the above, what does a retired action hero do with his day?
- Confronting the past choices of the other movies: hey, wait a sec, was he a grave robber? There’s a whole confronting the past angle that the movie dips it’s toes into and then cowards out from. Remarkably, this is the only Indiana Jones to contain the words “grave robber”, and the only movie where Indy actually destroys a historical artifact.
- But the absolute best idea this movie has is Indy trying to recover historical artifacts stolen by the Nazi as part of the end-of-war plunder. It’s inconceivable to me that they wasted this on just the opening: Just gonna throw this out there, but “Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Amber Room” set in the mid-70s would have been absolutely incredible.
And you can squint and make just about any of those work as a spine for a whole movie. Instead, this movie throws them all into the blender and they’re all just… there? They don’t line up in any sort of thematic way, the movie just flirts with one and then moves to the next. But also, there’s four credited screenwriters, so it really feels like they took every pitch from the last 15 years and jammed them all in there. Considering the director, it also feels like they started with “Logan, but Indy” and then kept rounding down.
As a point of comparison, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has just as many plates spinning: the Nazis, Donnovan’s ambitions, Indy’s dad, whatever Dr. Elsa Schneider is playing at, the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword. But, all of those characters are oriented around the Grail, their actions center around their motivations regarding it. Plus, that movie has maybe the best action scene Spielburg has ever put together with the tank chase. In Dial, none of these elements go together, and there are some car chases.
This is a movie that knows “emotions” are a thing other movies have, but isn’t sure where they go? So we get Indy being—correctly—very upset that his friend Armand the Vampire was murdered but only for about seven seconds. Or the scene where Indy talks about his son’s death, which Ford acts the hell out of, but then descends to pure bathos the second you realize that yes, they really did pull a Poochy on Shia’s character and that Mutt died on the way back to his home planet.
The defining moment of the movie for me came about half-way through. The good guys are in trouble, and Indy says “hang on, I have an old friend that’ll help us,” right after a long conversation about the kid that Fleabag has picked up, and then the movie cuts to… ANTIONO BANDERAS, of all people, playing his character from the SpongeBob Squarepants movie? Meanwhile, at the exact same time, Ke Huy Quan is turning in an oscar-winning performance in another movie. Short Round is never mentioned.
Actually, though, the worst part of the movie is that John Williams took one look at it and decided not to even try. Less than ten minutes into the prologue, and he’s recycling the music from the Last Crusade tank chase. Say what you will about Crystal Skull, but at least the Skulls got their own leitmotif.
Dial of Destiny cost a lot of money, and didn’t do very well at the box office. It’s once of the central exhibits in both 2023’s weird box office specifically and Disney’s post-2019 slump generally. This is the point where people on twitter start blaming it’s failure on someone “having an agenda” or “repackaging nostalgia”. And what’s funny is this is the movie that proves all those people wrong, because if that was the problem, fucking Short Round would be in the movie.
Instead, I think the problem is both deeper and simpler. This is a movie made by people with no taste, no ambition beyond “making another one”, “whose main creative vision is they love to have meetings.” People who are here to make “content”.
I’d love to ask the people behind this movie to describe, in their own words, to explain what makes Indiana Jones a unique character, and to do that without using the words “brand” or “franchise.” Because I’m not sure they could?
Indy is a character who is always in over his head, but gets through because he’s got more guts and never quits. And that’s just… not in this movie.
And that’s where it starts to get a little insulting: Radiers of the Lost Ark is as close to a perfect movie as anyone has ever made, Indiana Jones himself was a truly unique creation. Here, he’s been sandblasted down to just another superhero-adjacent character, the hat and jacket more of a signature costume than something someone would really wear than ever. On the most superficial level, he doesn’t even really use his whip, it’s just hanging from his belt because “Indiana Jones”. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be in some other action movie. More than anything, this movie feels like a late-period Roger Moore Bond movie: perfectly competent, but utterly lacking in any ambition beyond the release date. That and the fact that the lead moves like an 80-year old when you can see their face, and like 30-year old when their back is turned to the camera.
Critically, the other Indy movies all have a moment where Indy realizes that the macguffin isn’t what he cares about, and that he’s really here to save a person—Marion, the village, his father, his son. Artifacts, supernatural or otherwise, can take care of themselves, he’s here to protect something else. And that turn never comes here, instead Indy’s real mission is—what, exactly?
This movie is made by people who really think that Indy didn’t do anything in Raiders, and he really doesn’t get anything done here.
Everyone in tis movie had better things to be doing with their time, and I don’t understand why they bothered to go ahead if this was the best they could do.
It was fine.
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.
See you in a year, Gabriel Bell
It’s the first week of September, 2023, which as JWZ reminds us, means we’re a year away from from the Bell Riots.
For those of you not deeply immersed in Nerd Lore, the Bell Riots are a historical event from “Past Tense, a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
DS9 was by far the best of the Next Gen/Berman-era Star Treks, and it was always at its best when it both a) had a point to make, and b) was angry about it.
[Spoilers for a nearly 30 year-old Trek episode ahoy]
Thanks to some time travel shenanigans, Captain Sisko, Dr. Bashir, and Lt. Dax end up travelling to the then-futuristic year of 2024 and discover they’re trapped on the eve of the Bell Riots, “one of the most violent civil disturbances in American history“. You see, to solve the homeless problem, the major cities of north america have cordoned off sections of the city to seve as “Sanctuaries”, where the unhoused are sent, nominally to receive services and help, but really to be out of sight/out of mind. When the man whom the riots are named after is killed helping them, Sicko has to step in and masquerade as Gabriel Bell to preserve the timeline, and find a way out before the riots end with Bell’s death. Meanwhile, back in the future, the crew of the Defiant realize that the changes in the past have caused the Federation to never be formed—the Bell Riots were a key step from “now” to the fully automated luxury space-communism of the Star Trek future.
At the conclusion, Sisko and his crew find a way to avoid the fate destined for Bell himself, and get the word out about whats happening inside the Sanctuaries to the rest of the world, who demand change, ensuring the Federation comes into existence.
At the time it seemed like a terribly dark, dystopian near future—what might happen if things keep going! Of course now, looking back from the real Twenties, it looks almost charmingly naïve.
Trek in general, and DS9 in particular, is always at its best when angry, and “Past Tense” is positively simmering with rage. This was a show made by people with something to say. A key detail is that the three Starfleet crew members that get sent back in time are a Black man, a Middle-eastern man, and a white woman; the woman is given help and support, the two men of color are immediately thrown in the “sanctuary” without a second thought.
But.
There was a trope in 90s socially-conscious fiction that if “people only knew!” they’d demande change, and things would get better. That the only thing standing between the world as it was and the better future was sharing “The Truth”. This is a perfect example, but you can see if all over the place in 90s fiction. Transmetropolitan is probably the definitive example, X-Files, Fight Club; even the early excitement around the Internet and the World Wide Web was centered around the dream of everyone having access to all possible Knowledge.
Looking back, of course, the dark future Sisko and company find themselves in feels positively utopian. A whole area of town where the unhoused can go without being hassled? People with criminal records are prohibited? There are services? The government pays attention to who is there?
Meanwhile, in the real Twenties, local police departments are flush with military gear, they’re pulling benches out of parks so the homeless can’t sleep there, and no city on the planet would dream of cutting off commercial real estate from even a single block, much less a whole district.
We’ve essentially been running a 20-year social experiment to find out what would happen if everyone had access to everything that was happening, and come to find out, rounding to the nearest significant digit, no one cares.
There’s been this persistant belief amongst the liberal/leftist set that “people really knew the facts” that things would be better. Three decades on from Sisko picking up Gabriel Bell’s shotgun, this is a fantasy we can’t afford, a brain-rot at best, a kink at worst.
Time for a new approach. Gabriel Bell is waiting.
Wild Things at 25
Wild Things turns 25 this week! Let me tell you a story about the best time I ever had in a theatre.
My roommate really wanted to go see Wild Things. “It’s our generation’s Fatal Attraction!” she said. I did not want to go see this movie. Everything about it looked mediocre.
From all the advertising, it looked like it was going to be another piece of mid 90s Sleeze, Sex & Violence thriller bubble, where dangerous women lure unsuspecting men to their doom; the kind of movie you’d rent only if Blockbuster was already out of Fatal Attraction, The Crush, Disclosure, and Basic Instinct.
There was also kind of a mid 90s “we just found about about Carl Hiassen” bubble, which resulted in a bunch of vaguely noir-ish movies set in florida. (See also: Striptease.)
And, who was in it? Matt Dillon, who was mostly “no, not the guy from 90210, the guy from The Outsiders. No, the other one. No, the OTHER one,” four months out from Something About Mary. Neve Campbell, who was still mostly “the girl from Party of Five.” Denise Richards, who was still mostly “the girl from Starship Troopers.” Kevin Bacon? Not a great 90s track record, but sure. Bill Murray, who was still six months away from relighting his career with Rushmore, still in the “funny cameo in Ed Wood” phase.
A cast that looks way better in retrospect than at the time, but in context a sort of vaguely b-list talent in what looked like a vaguely b-list knockoff of a Verhoeven Movie. Everything about it had the quality of a movie everyone knocked out over the summer between “real” projects. Make a couple of bucks, take a nice vacation to Florida. Sure! No judgement! Everyone has bills to pay.
I made this argument. We went to go see the movie opening weekend.
[Spoilers ahoy, I guess?]
And the first 20-30 minutes of the movie play exactly like you expect. Two high school girls, one “rich/hot”, one “poor/goth”. Dorky guidance counselor. Maybe something happens? Maybe consensual, maybe not? Rape accusation. The movie is running the standard playbook. You could basically set your watch by the plot beats you were expecting.
Except.
The whole thing is just a little bit better than it ought to be. The camera work is intertesting. The music by George Clinton is way better than you’d expect, generating this haunting swamp-noir vibe. Bill Murray shows up and demonstrates why he’s months out from a whole second act of his career. All the actors are doing more careful nuanced work than it seems like they ought to be. The whole thing demonstrates a level of care that a schlocky knockoff shouldn’t have.
And then it turns into a totally different movie.
With absolute confidence, the movie trusts the audience has seen all the same movies that it’s seen, and then winks and swerves out into a whole different thing, turning into a twisty, intricately plotted web of quadruple crosses where everyone is up to three more things than you thought they were.
I remember this mounting sense of glee as the movie suddenly wasn’t what I expected, and then kept going, careening into more and more interesting places that I imagined.
This all continues right through the end, when the movie delivers what’s still the best set of post-credit stingers of any movie, putting the whole set of events into new light. It’s phenomenal.
Hands down, the most any movie has ever exceeded my expectations. So much fun to have a movie pretend to be something else in the marketing, and then turn into a different movie.
It doesn’t seem to come up that often; I suspect the marketing worked against it, and has slipped out of memory. An under-appreciated gem from the late 90s. Happy Birthday!