Category Archives: Television

Is it the Struggle That Compels Us?

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Recently I have watched the Twitter discourse rise up over the character of Syril Karn from the series Andor with a number of people debating if the show had been disrespectful of the character prompting strong feelings about the man.

Running alongside this discussion is the memory I have of a number of YouTube reactors being quite emotionally torn by both Syril and Dedra Meero, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) sector supervisor, as they navigate both enforcing the Empire’s authoritarian government and their own interesting romantic relationship. These were the bad guys, Dedra more clearly than Syril as she employed torture to get what she wanted while Syril remained essentially naive to the Imperial law and order that he strove to maintain. Pluck Syril out of Star Wars and insert his character in 70s New York desperate to catch the killers of two dirty cops and you have a classic anti-hero trapped in a corrupt and decaying culture even as he fights to maintain a ‘true’ sense of justice.

But he isn’t a 70s anti-hero. He is a cog in the fascist machine that is the evil Galactic Empire, and yet there is a pull to root for him as he tries ever so hard to clear his name and bring the hero of the story to ‘justice.’ Dedra is an equally compelling character. Her villainy is more evident, particularly her willingness to not only torture suspects but her disregard for their murder once their usefulness has passed. Yet, here we are again, feeling the pull to care about her. What is going on here?

Let’s look at some other characters from cinema and see if we can’t gain a better understanding in a manner that is more general.

Pulp Fiction gave us Vincent Vega, the street-level thug and murderer working for L.A. crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Our introduction to Vincent was his task of retrieving a briefcase for his boss and calmly murdering the boss’s former partners in the process. Vincent is a violent thug and drug user and yet over the course of his story within the film we are drawn to him and concerned as he falls deeper and deeper into trouble that may end with Marsellus Wallace having him killed as mercilessly as Vincent killed Wallace’s former partners.

Nightcrawler (2014), a neo-noir from Dan Gilroy, who also wrote on Andor, introduced the audience to Louis Bloom, a sociopathic man who rises from street-level thief to celebrated ‘journalist’ as he discovers his talent for finding and creating tragedies he can videotape and sell to local television news. Unlike the other characters mentioned here, I have heard of no one that held any sympathy for Louis, but while the audience kept him at an emotional distance, he remained an object of fascination and of deep interest even as he got his partner killed, murdered his rivals, and blackmailed a woman to satisfy his sexual urges. No one showed sympathy for such a cold, manipulative man, but he remained deeply interesting. Why?

There is a common thread running through all of these characters, criminals, cops, thugs, and bureaucrats; all of them have goals and all of them are fighting against forces that are keeping them from their objectives.

Syril wants justice and the killer of his men caught and punished, but a corrupt system would rather have good reports than truth.

Dedra, a novice ISB Supervisor, wants victory and enforcement of the Empire’s authority, but office infighting and backstabbing stymie her attempts to break a system that rewards staying within the line over creative imagination.

Vincent needs to show his boss’s wife a decent evening out, to make her happy, but their unmistakable chemistry and sensuality provide a temptation that is nearly irresistible to the couple and once she overdoses on his drugs, well then he has to save her life to save his own.

Louis desperately needs to prove to himself and the world that he is worthy, to find that success he is certain that he deserves as rivals and the police forces move in on him from every quarter, threatening to thwart his actions.

There is the key to why the characters are compelling. Each of them is facing off against forces larger than themselves and that struggle to overcome, to win, is that magic sauce that makes us sit forward and care.

Twenty years ago while at a Bay area SF convention and before the events of a convention had started, I caught a fragment of a World War II training video on television. An air crew of a fictional bomber had been captured by the Nazis. In captivity the Germans employed trick after trick, device after device to pry from the airmen the secrets that they kept in their heads. By the end of the video, I found myself on the side of the Germans, anxious to see if they were going to manage to get the information that they so desperately needed. This was a training film to teach our forces all of the many ways that the information might be gained, and yet there I was feeling for the enemy and not our boys.

The Germans were the characters with a clear, active goal. The airmen’s goal was a passive one, keep quiet and say nothing. It is the active character, fighting against the odds to claim some prize that hooks us as an audience and as readers. That is the lesson from the training film and all those movies, your characters need a goal and the odds against them getting it must be great. Syril and Dedra are both fighting to make something of their lives, to prove something to themselves and the doubters who surround them and that is why they become characters we can’t tear our attention away from.

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Further Discussion on The Griffin Incident

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A friend left a lengthy comment on my post about The Griffin Incident over on Twitter. Since over there I am restricted to 280 characters, I will respond here.

First off, I want to say it was not my intention, nor do I think I stated, that science fiction and horror are incompatible genres.  While most people, and I fell into that easy trap myself, call horror a ‘genre,’ it is more like a mood and an intention. Like a romance (lower case R), horror is about what the recipient of the art is intended to feel and experience over the mechanics or rules of the genre. Science fiction can be horror, with A Dance to Strange Music, the short story by renowned hard SF author Gregory Benford, as a perfect example. It is horror and in the author’s note afterwards, Benford explains all of the very detailed science behind the strange events of the tale.

@gunsandrockets wrote, I think what defines science fiction is not rationality, not an explicable story, but instead the presumption that the universe is a material universe, absent of the spiritual, absent of magic. I agree, but I would also point out that a material universe absent spirits and magics is a universe that is explicable and one that can be understood by reason.

So, is Alien science fiction or horror? It is clearly both, though with the somewhat dodgy science we have allowed cinema to get away with. Aliens is not horror; it is action/adventure. With the ‘rules’ of the creature understood by the audience, it is hard to return back to horror; the films following Aliensdid, but mainly by reducing the once terrifying beast into an outer space slasher.

Horror, as a style of cinema, has terribly fuzzy borders that encompass and exclude based almost entirely upon the viewer’s own internal definition. Is Jaws horror? Is The Silence of the Lambs? How about Seven or Manhunter or Mulholland Drive? What is or is not ‘horror’ is a very difficult thing to nail down and even the filmmaker’s intention doesn’t cleanly answer that question. Both the writer and the director of The Exorcist do not consider either the novel or the film to be ‘horror,’ but rather supernatural detective fiction.

I was also asked what about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, science fiction? horror? or both? Clearly both, but I do think many people confuse the nature of the horror at the center of his work, mistaking tentacles and monstrosities for the horror and not that humanity is not only insignificant in the vast universe but that the nature of that universe is beyond our ability to sanely comprehend. Consider the opening paragraph of his novella The Call of Cthulhu.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft is stating, rather plainly, that the nature of existence is, to the human mind, inexplicable. To try and understand it is to invite either madness or willful ignorance. It is why the recent film Backrooms strikes me as very Lovecraftian. In the end, the nature, the reason, of the backrooms lies beyond our ability to decipher. It simply is and that alone is enough to unship a person’s sanity.  To be fair, this is also a point raised by @gunsandrockets.

That the true nature of the universe is unknowable to lowly mankind. An ignorance which is a mercy, since even getting close to the truth either drives a person insane or turns them into a monster.

To my interpretation, this is saying that the universe is inexplicable. The universe is not rational in any manner that is comprehensible by humanity.

The Griffin Incident promises no explanation at all for the ship and its terrifying manifestations. That puts the story beyond the realm of science fiction. It is not a story that exists in a place without spirits or magic of some kind.

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The Griffin Incident is not Science Fiction

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds boldly left the confines of its genre of science fiction with the third episode of its fourth season, The Griffin Incident. While some have used the episode’s horror genre as a source of criticism, I instead want to praise the production for slipping free of constraints and having the courage to explore fascinating new realms for its characters.

Paramount+

The Griffin Incident has been, correctly, described as Star Trek meets Event Horizon, the 1997 horror movie that takes place aboard a haunted and terrifying derelict at the outer regions of the solar system. In the Star Trek episode, three characters, Spock, Jim Kirk, and La’An, discover the wreck of a lost Federation starship, the Griffin, and after becoming trapped aboard are visited, much like the characters from Event Horizon, by terrible specters and visions exploiting their unresolved emotional issues. In terms of graphic violence and explicit horror, particularly for television that is not produced for a premium channel, The Griffin Incident pulls no punches and is a quite satisfying bit of horror media, but is it science fiction?

No.

Science Fiction is, at its core, a rationalist genre and all the tales and stories within that genre exit within a rationalist, understandable, and explicable universe. This ranges from the ‘hardest’ of science fiction stories where absolutely no known understanding of the physical universe may be contradicted, no telepathy, no faster-than-light travel, and so on to the stories with the flimsiest of ‘scientific’ justification, often when the strangeness of quantum mechanics are used in place of just flat out magic. Star Trek, from its very inception and earliest pilots, has never resided in the hard science fiction territories and it’s never productive to force ‘real-world’ science on any episode of the series. (It does not bear to consider the thousands and thousands of nuclear bomb’s worth of energy that is released when the rest mass of an entire person to converted is energy for the mere act of transportation.) Even when it is employed as a form of magic to put the characters into an episode that obeys the rules of musicals, some ‘scientific’ explanation is used to justify the strange and wondrous events. That act of justification by way of warped and tortured science is what keeps a story within the pastures of science fiction.

Horror, on the other hand, works best when reason and rationality are lost and the characters, along with the audience, are suddenly thrust into a situation that is inexplicable and perhaps is even beyond comprehension. There is a style of horror where the supernatural is bent out of shape to conform to the universe as we understand it, a style where mass is conserved when werewolves transform from men into wolves and where blood for vampires is simply a nutrient, allowing them to substitute pig’s blood from a butcher for the essence of human life. That is a disservice to the genre, moving it from the uncanny to just a set of rules that can be followed and understood.

The Griffin Incident provides no explanation for why the ship is haunted, such as that the ship’s crew, driven insane by the very nature of space/time in the region, quantumly entangled with the material in the hull, imprinting psychic echoes that appeared as phantoms but were perfectly explicable.

Nope. It’s just a haunted ship and the characters survive but have no understanding of just what transpired in their lives, only that they survived. Science fiction demands that in the end every phenomenon has a cause-and-effect that is understood, but this episode, in the very best tradition of horror, abandoned such comforts leaving the characters and the audience in the terribly uncomfortable space where reason had no purchase.

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Why Was Andor So Good

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It’s been a year since the Star Wars franchise spin-off of a spin-off Andor completed its second and final season with the last episode flowing seamlessly into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and for many people Andor represented the best material since the original trilogy.

But why is that? What makes this limited series of just two dozen episodes so compelling and so vibrant compared to the rest of the vast and sprawling additions to that ‘galaxy far, far away’?

I think the answer lies in part in the cultural environment that the series was released into. Star Wars hit the box office in the late seventies, a period when the old Hollywood studio system was effectively dead before the mega-corporations took control, when the ‘young Turks’ and their Producer Unit system dictated the industry. These young, rebellious filmmakers explored themes of loss and cynicism with films that dominated the public’s attention. Even when the protagonists of these films claimed victories at the end of their struggles they proved to be Pyrrhic ones. Michael becomes everything he did not want to be at the conclusion of The Godfather, or their victories came at terrible prices such as the death of Father Karras in The Exorcist. These examples don’t even touch the cases where there was no victory, only soul-crushing defeat for the characters, such as at the end of The Stepford Wives.

Star Wars, a straightforward tale of good vs evil where it is unquestioned that evil will fall, exploded into the setting with an undeniable dynamism and optimism. In a nation that still reeled from political turmoil, senseless violence in its cities, and the unfathomable loss in a distant Asian country, this film, which at first blush appeared to have no cynical subtext, was received like a miracle cure for the ailment dogging the American spirit. In combination with Jaws two years earlier, it created the summer blockbuster and reshaped not only film production and distribution but the course of the culture for the next few decades. Studio after studio and production company after production company chased the enormous dollars that seemingly lay in simple adventures, clearly defined good and evil characters, and hopeful narratives leaving the darker, moodier, and more challenging stories from Blade Runner to The Thing to fail at the box office and only be recognized for their artistic merits many years later.

So how does Andor, a story where our protagonists commit murder as the easiest path out of their troubles, kill allies that they perceive to be a threat, willfully allow others to fly to their doom in order to protect their secret, and whose ‘villains’ gain our sympathies as they struggle against the same impersonal bureaucracy that enslaves the galaxy even as they viciously and ruthlessly hunt our ‘heroes,’ compel such admiration and love from its audience?

By the time Andor came to production, the American culture had changed quite dramatically, coming full circle from the 1970s back into a wary and tired cynicism, but after decades of hopeful, optimistic media the public taste for something that reflected the world they knew had grown quite intense, setting the table for something as ethically questionable as Andor to satisfy that hunger. Where audiences in the 70s needed escape from the bleak times, audiences of the 2020s wanted to see their times reflected back at them, but with the promise that victory, even if costly, remained a possible outcome. The enemy’s competence, once a source of derision such as with the marksmanship of the Imperial Stormtroopers, could be recognized even as their villainy remained patently obvious.

And that brings us to the second element that I think contributes greatly to Andor’s success in these times: the depth of the characters.

It is wrong and an injustice to both Andor and Star Wars to label their characters as either ‘complex’ or ‘simple.’ The truth of the matter is that these are very different genres of storytelling, and I do not mean science-fiction or fantasy, but something much more basic than that. Star Wars is a fairy tale, even opening with a revised version of ‘Once upon a time …’ with ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …’. Andor is a drama, not a fairy tale.

In a fairy tale characters are presented with far less depth, often representing archetypes instead of fully realized humans. The Princess, the Knight, the Thief with a heart of gold, The Mentor, the Dark Knight, and the villainous, corrupt King: all these are stock representations of character and not characters in and of themselves. These archetypes often lack depth but that does not make them bad characters, it makes them the right characters for the story that is being told.

Dramatic characters tell different stories: they do not tell fairy tales but stories of relatable characters facing relatable issues, even if the environment where they face those issues is fantastic. Andor’s Dedra Meero is a villain. She tortures prisoners, and is willing to murder entire populations, but she also is conflicted by some of her actions, she mourns the cost of her dedication, and weeps at the loss of a love she thought she had won. These elements of her life do not make her ‘superior’ to Star Wars’ Grand Moff Tarkin, who displays not a moment of doubt and slaughters entire planets as a mere display of power. Both characters serve their respective genres. Cassian Andor, when faced with the accidental death of a corporate police officer, does not hesitate to kill a survivor, an action that Luke Skywalker would never even consider, much less commit.

Andor is not better than Star Wars; to compare the two is like comparing a painting to a sculpture. The reason so many people took Andor to heart is because like Star Wars in the 70s it is what they hungered for, even if they did not know it.

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Widow’s Bay: Season Wrap-Up

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Almost two weeks ago I wrote about the horror/comedy series Widow’s Bay produced by and streaming on AppleTV, at that time I had just about caught up with the episodes in their weekly release schedule. Now the entire season has been released, and I can look upon the whole of its introduction and resolution.

AppleTVWidow’s Bay has been described as what if the mayor of Amity in Jaws was  our principal character and that is a fair point of comparison. Both deal with fictional New England seaside towns, one already a tourist destination but finding its summer bonanza threatened by a Great White shark that just won’t stop eating the swimmers, fishermen, and boaters, the other an isolated economically depressed community seeking to bring in those tourist dollars despite the supernatural curse laid upon the island hundreds of years prior.

Mixing comedy with horror is a tricky business, both styles depend upon the unexpected, the sudden reversal of an expected outcome, making them close siblings but when combined usually one flavor dominates over the other. Disgraced television and film creator Joss Whedon side stepped this trouble by frontloading the comedy in his pieces and draining it away almost entirely in the back half leaving horror to dominate the final acts of his works. This technique would not work for Widow’s Bayand would instead have come off like a switcheroo on the audience if the front half of episode had been mostly or entirely comedic and the back half horrific, Katie Dippold needed to find the balance in each of the 10 episodes. I think, for the most part, she did. While I found the final resolution to the season just a touch unsatisfying it was not so much of a stumble that I did not enjoy the entirety of the season and look forward to the next already ordered season.

Without a doubt my favorite character in the show is the long suffering, socially awkward, and nearly communally invisible aide to the mayor, Patricia, played to perfection by imported performer Kate O’Flynn. Perhaps I, also socially awkward, identify too closely with Patricia but I also think that the writers, who may also be socially awkward it is professional hazard, have a soft spot for her. The pair of episodes that center on her, 4 Beach Reads & 8 Your Baggage, are clearly my favorite. Beach Reads plays along the lines of one of my favorite sub-genres, Folk Horror, and Your Baggage makes my least loved subgenre, the Slasher, into something I actually enjoyed.

Episode 9, Emergency Shelter, in a crafty bit of writing, production design, and acting pulls off one of the most entertaining bits of pure exposition that I have ever witnessed on the screen. In The Terminator James Cameron buried exposition with action, having Reese explain the plot to Sarah Conner and the audience during a heart-pounding car chase, truly hiding your vegetables in your dessert, but Emergency Shelter stops the plot cold, laying on the brakes heavily and yet remains thoroughly fun and funny while it feeds you literally generations of genealogy and history, made possible by the acting talents of Dale Dickey as the town clerk.

The show’s central protagonist, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) has the thankless position of straight man in the comedic sequences and terrified normie in the horrific ones, I still found his character a bit too bland to fully and emotionally engage with. His relationship with his moody and disobedient teenage son failed to plow new ground and his central goal, bringing tourism and money to the island, with the side effect of hopefully freeing his son from the island’s curse, while understandable never felt more than a rote character motivation.  For too much of the season I think we were not fully privy to motivations and that kept the character at a distance, leaving him feeling more perfunctory than realized. Rhys does an admirable job with the character and keeps him from feeling too bland, giving weight to his terror as he realizes that the island’s curse is quite real. His seemingly impossible choice in the final episode is played quite well and does much to redeem the character’s portrayal from the rest of the series.

While I have noted some of the shortcomings in this series, I want to stress again that I enjoyed it and look forward to the next installment of the trials, tribulations, terrors, and tongue-in-cheek misadventure of this poor cursed community.

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Wakanda and Westeros

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Two of the great cultural fictional kingdoms of recent times, kingdoms that have been taken to heart and have occupied the minds of millions, are Westeros and Wakanda.

Westeros, from the mind of author George R.R. Martin, and thrust into the vast public consciousness by the impressive HBO show Game of Thrones, is the fantasy kingdom where treachery, murder, incest, dragons, and ancient magical powers vie for the throne that ruled over the island continent.

Wakanda, from the pages of Marvel Comics and the hit feature films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is home to the secretive tribes that discovered the rare and fantastical abilities of the fictional metal Vibranium and the super-science that it allowed.

Each fictional setting presented its kingdom in crisis and civil war: Westeros plunged into a long and bloody affair when the succession line became tangled and powerful lords arrayed against one another, while in Wakanda, unpleasant secrets surfaced, bringing a murderous thug to victory in the trial by combat that defined their succession. (Yes, I am aware that by some definitions the trial never finished and as such Killmonger’s ascension was never official, that is not the point here.)

In each case we, the audience, are supposed to believe that the matter has been resolved in a manner where we can rest easy and that the troubles lie in these lands’ pasts. In Westeros, Brandon Stark, gifted with sight beyond time and space and wisdom born of his magical gifts, sits upon the throne with benevolence and good will, to rule justly. While in Wakanda, with the would-be dictator and global threat dead, T’Challa, the Black Panther, sits on the throne undoing the centuries of isolation and bringing his nation and his people into the global community, ruling, presumably, as justly as the fictional king Brandon Stark.

But neither kingdom corrected the actual root cause of their terrible troubles.

In both cases the kingdoms are presided over by absolute monarchs whose powers are unconstrained, with their every whim and proclamation passing instantly into law and action. Brandon may be a good and supernaturally wise man. T’Challa is a good man with a good heart, but they are mere mortal men, doomed to die and pass on these unchecked powers to another. The warning is not that bad men should be kept from the thrones of kingdoms but that the powers of any ruler, king or president, must be checked or eventually they pass to those unworthy, untrustworthy, and whose appetites can never be satisfied.

It is a lesson that extends far beyond the borders of fantasies and comic books.

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Widow’s Bay

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More and more it is becoming apparent that Apple TV, the streaming service with an apparently non-existent promotional budget while boasting fantastic budgets for their films and television programs, is offering some of the best series for anyone streaming at home. The latest addition to their already impressive lineup is the horror comedy Widow’s Bay.

AppleTVThe titular location is a small and economically depressed fishing community on a scrap of an island off the New England coast. The mayor, Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), determined to bring tourist dollars to the town, ignores the pleas of local crank Wyck (Stephen Root) that the island is cursed, assuring Loftis that only Death and Horror can come from bringing in strangers; pleas that Loftis ignores and over the course of episodes comes to understand that Wyck is not a crank and that a curse lays upon them all.

Widow’s Bay is the creation of writer/showrunner Katie Dippold whose comedy chops include Parks and Recreation, but professionally this series represents her first foray into horror. The premier episode (people keep calling the first episode of a series the ‘pilot’ but a pilot is a very different beast, for an excellent definition see Pulp Fiction), is quite light on the horror elements relying on a single image that promises horrors to come but is principally concerned with the comedy of the eclectic and quirky set of characters. However, episode two sets both a tone of unease and building tension that releases with a fast and visceral bit of horror that then continues throughout the series. Where the series lands, I cannot say as Apple TV, wisely in my opinion, has stuck with the week-by-week release model that builds better word of mouth than Netflix’s binge method of releasing the entire slate of episodes at the same time.

So far, my favorite episode is number 4, Beach Reads, which gives us context for what I feel is the most relatable citizen of the community, Loftis’ assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn). A social outcast from her age cohort and someone desperate to be seen in her beige anonymity Patricia, after finding a mysterious self-help book, attempts to reinvent herself and how the people perceive her only to find that she has somehow stepped into a folk horror with echoes of The Wicker Man.

The comedic elements of Widow’s Bay are not over-the-top farce or outlandish absurdity though it would be difficult to call this purely character-based humor. Rather the humor is always just off from center, the characters are nearly realistic but never quite there, it might be best described as ‘uncanny valley’ comedy. A perfect example can be found in episode two, Lodgings and the board games found in the lobby of the island’s quaint hostel. No boardgame company is going to produce Daddy’s Home the game of avoiding the drunken and violent parent when they return home but it provides a perfect complement to the unease of the episode as Loftis, on a dare, stays in the hotel’s haunted suite.

While the first episode did not fully engage me I was intrigued enough to come back and then found the series to my taste. I look forward to completing the season and hopefully it lands well.

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The Most Reality-Defying Aspect of Obsession.

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The quite successful supernatural horror film Obsession turns on the protagonist Bear gaining a wish by way of a magical and apparently mass produced gag gift, the One Wish Willow but the wish-granting twig is not in my opinion that aspect of the film that is at odds the most with our objective reality and the element that fits that category is syptomatic of an issue across Hollywood.

Bear, the girl he has an unrequited crush on, Nikki, and their friends, Ian and Sarah, in addition to comprising a bar hopping trivia team, all work in the musical instrument and sheet music shop of Sarah’s father. They are young college-aged persons with their lives currently unmoored by deep responsibilities and serious careers, ideal characters that could have an affinity with horror’s prime demographic, the under-30 movie goer. And yet there is an element in the film that is utterly unrealistic — apparently not one of them is a roommate arrangement.

Nikki lives in a house, we see Bear drop her off there in the film’s first act, a small but nice standalone structure, with no mention of anyone expecting her home. Bear has a house that he apparently inherited from his grandmother. These four young adults, holding down minimum wage retail jobs, have credit cards, can afford to go bar hopping, and all live alone with the privacy and seclusion that works so well in a horror movie.

I have worked a number of dead end, low wage, retail jobs, and not one of them afforded me the ability to live alone. When I did live alone for a short while working that sort of minimum wage job it took two of them and even then, every penny mattered. I certainly did not have the resources for repeated nights out visiting multiple bars. (Even if I had been the sort of person for whom that would have been attractive.) The idea that three of them, discounting Sarah because her family owned the business, would even get full time employment and not something more realistic like a work week under 30 hours is stretching credulity to the breaking point.

This highlights a systemic issue in Hollywood, fewer and fewer of the creatives have had personal lived experience outside of upper-middleclass lives that afforded easy access to college, and all that opportunity affords. I recall in the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after her mother had passed away, Buffy needed to get a job at a fast-food burger joint in order to take care of her and her sister. Again, even if her mother had somehow managed to purchase a California house outright with no mortgage, it would be impossible for Buffy to support herself, maintain the home, and raise her sister on the meager wages afforded by such a menial job.

This extends beyond low wage jobs that are below the poverty line. The lack of military personnel also affects the quality of storytelling in the film and television industry. Sure, they bring in consultants and such when they are making a war movie but all too often the writers, producers, and directors work from a state of ignorance when they attempt to have military characters that are not specifically working in battlefield condition. It is that sort of blindness to how things really work that allows J.J. Abrams to have someone go to a military-style academy and graduate not as an ensign but as captain despite having no actual command experience.  or for Joss Whedon to have elite special forces that blindly accept a briefing with no questions asked about the particulars. Those sorts of unit are comprised of some of the smartest people in the military. Far from perfect, granted, and prey to any other human failing, but they are not dumb just accept what is presented types.

The stratification of the people and the limited backgrounds that they represent are a far more damaging force to film and television than any ‘nepo-baby’ troubles.

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And Now the End is Near (For My TV)

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March 2018, using the money I earned in overtime working the Annual Enrollment Period for Medicare from the previous 6 months, I purchased a 55″ 4K LED smart TV by Chinese manufacturer TCL.  I launched my new bigger video experience by hosting friends for a Cold War mini-Marathon of three films. (The Manchurian Candidate, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,and Dr. Strangelove.)

For the past 8 years this television has performed quite well, though for the last 12 months or so it has seemed that the app running through the Roku interface have become more sluggish often with a delay on some streamers that can be very annoying. When you hit ‘pause’ on a Netflix program you want it to pause right then, not a second and a half later. Honestly though, the lag in some responses is a minor inconvenience.

What is becoming evident is that the screen may now be showing premature signs of wear and age. I have noticed very faint but still visible lines running vertically on the far-left side of the monitor. During dark or even rapidly changing sequences they are so faint as to be nearly, but only nearly, imperceptible. The same cannot be said for brilliantly lit or lightly colored scenes which make the line stand out.

My research has indicated that there is the possibility that the board controlling the backlight for the set may be at fault and a period of absolutely no power, not merely switched off, may correct the issues by allowing the logic in the controller to reset.

However, should that fail, then I must begin preparing to replace the television. At the moment the lines, however annoying, are actually faint enough that for most of the time I can ignore them, letting them slip from my notice, but if it is the backlight, the problem will not diminish but grow until it forces me to replace the set with a newer model.

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Detective Hole Can’t Stop Digging So I Will

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Mentioned some weeks ago on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Netflix began streaming a new Nordic noir Detective Hole and, being fans of Nordic noir, my sweetie-wife and I gave the series a go. And, after four out of nine episodes, we have let the show do its merry way unconcerned with its resolution.

Working Title Television

Detective Harry Hole is a haunted alcoholic detective in Norway trying to live down killing his partner in a drunken car crash while in hot pursuit of a murderous bank robber. Now, with a new partner, a new significant other, and trying to stay on the wagon, Hole is presented with a fresh set of crises, his new partner is murdered while trying to locate a low-level drug dealer and a serial killer is stalking the streets of Oslo, pushing Hole back into the bottle and off the force.

That single paragraph synopsis could be for almost a countless number of second-rate, trope-filled, cliche-riddled police procedurals of which Detective Hole is merely a foreign language example.In addition to the stock characters, settings, and situations the series presents with a nearly comical lack of understanding of modern forensic work and evidence.

When Hole’s partner was killed, it was an on-screen scene so we the audience know that the murderer was in actuality fellow detective Waller who was the low-level drug dealer’s upper management. Waller shot the dealer in the stomach, then pursued the partner who had witnessed it, fought with her, put her in a sleeper chokehold, before arranging for the still dying dealer to be holding the pistol that killed the partner. Waller then presented himself as the heroic cop who came in just too late to save her fellow officer, shooting and killing the dealer.

None of the physical evidence supports such an outlandish lie. The dealer has a gunshot to the stomach which bled for several minutes into his abdominal cavity before being killed by a shot to the head. He also would present with no bruising, scratches, or any other signs of a life and death struggle which the dead partner does, or at least would, have.

I grumbled and, not happily, let them have that however that bit of silliness, but it got far, far worse.

Investigating the serial killer, Hole asks the forensic team if the same pistol was used to kill both women and he is told that it is ‘very difficult’ to determine if the same gun fired both rounds.

What the actual fork? Are the writers so ignorant of modern police procedures that they are unaware of rifling? That the grooves of a gun barrel are like a firearm’s fingerprints?

Unwilling to let their absurdity rest there the creatives, in addition to the serial killer sub-plot, the crooked cop sub-plot, and the cliched drunk cop plot, added yet another layer, a secret society of cops and politicians flooding the streets with weapons, provoking gangland warfare so that regulations would be changed allowing police to go about armed.

That was too much for me and my sweetie-wife, there are far better shows to watch.

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