Category Archives: Television

Landing That Plane

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Carrie, Flanagan’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel, and its fumbled final episode have me once again thinking about endings, how critically important it is to get them right, and the properties that have crashed and burned because of that failure. I am going to examine some endings that did not work and explain why they failed to give me the conclusion that they required. There are undoubtedly people out there for whom some of the endings are perfect, and that is the beauty of artistic works; it is not science or mathematics with objective provable answers. It is, in the vernacular of the time, vibes.

Spoilers ahead for the following films:
An American Werewolf in London
Resident Evil (2026)
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Carrie (2026)

An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’ film that, along with The Howling, changed forever how audiences experienced the transformation from human to wolf in cinema, has one of the most fumbled endings in film history. The movie is noted for its heavy mix of humor and horror and its score that features a number of pop songs with the word “moon” in their lyrics or titles. Despite the frequent jokes and gags, the story ends in a very traditional manner for werewolf movies, with poor, doomed David being gunned down by London’s special forces. Even ignoring the poor blocking of the scene (just how did all those men with rifles shoot David so many times when his love, Alex, stood directly between them and their target?), the lack of any time for a denouement, a breather to let the tragedy of the tale sit in the audience’s mind, coupled with a hard edit to black and a doo-wop version of Blue Moon, emotionally scrambles the ending. What the hell am I supposed to be feeling at that moment? Triumphant because the murderous beast is dead? Sorrow at David’s fate that was no fault of his own? Mirth because that song, that version, at that time is so out of place? While there is much to admire about that movie, that ending strips away and ruins everything that came before it.

Resident Evil (2026): I have already reviewed this movie and commented that the ending did not work for me, and for much the same reason that An American Werewolf in London failed: a disconnect between the tone of the movie and its conclusion. While an audience might walk into a werewolf movie expecting a tragic end (that has been the genre’s tradition since 1941’s The Wolf Man), walking in to see a movie adapted from a video game is entirely different. One expects, or at least hopes, to win a game. Like John Landis’ take on the werewolf tale, Resident Evil is stacked with humor, much of which comes from Austin Abrams’ performance. The movie is, for all practical purposes, a one-man show centered on Abrams, and without a compelling setup to ready the audience for his failure to save himself and his transformation into one of the monsters he has spent the entire evening combating, his fall comes off as unjustified. Some might argue that is “realistic,” for whatever that word might mean in a fictional context, but stories are not about realism save the emotional variety. It would have been realistic for Luke Skywalker to continue to rely on his targeting computer and not the apparent hallucination in his ears, miss the shot, and doom the rebellion. While “realistic,” it would have been entirely contradictory to Star Wars’ tone and a terrible ending.

Little Shop of Horrors (1986): The feature film adaptation of the stage musical that was adapted from a 1960 low-budget horror of the same name has the distinction of having bungled its ending twice, in both its theatrical release and its director’s cut.

The theatrical cut, after negative responses in test screenings, forced a victorious ending with a wholly unestablished, sheer-luck method for defeating the murderous plant. The film found only middling success at the box office, which I would partly attribute to the forced feeling of the reworked conclusion.

In the stage play and the director’s original cut, both of the principal characters end up eaten by the plant, followed by an extensive sequence without any characters for the audience to identify with as the plant and its offspring conquer the world. When this was rejected by test audiences, director Frank Oz and producer David Geffen attributed the rejection to the “power of the close-up,” which they felt created a powerful bond between the protagonist and the audience. I think this reading is incorrect. In the director’s cut, a vital song, Meek Shall Inherit, is edited down, cutting out the very moment that earns the protagonist his doomed ending. In the excised section of the song, Seymour recognizes the evil of feeding people to the plant, even though he himself did not kill them, and commits himself to destroying the plant, but, fearful that a life of poverty would cost him the love of Audrey, then reverses his decision and commits himself instead to a life of evil, feeding the plant corpses. It is at this moment that he and the story earn their tragic and doomed ending. With this critical moment removed, the ending that brings about his death is no longer morally justified.

Resident Evil (2026), Little Shop of Horrors, and Carrie (2026) all fail to land their stories cleanly by ignoring the moral vector of their plots. Resident Evil employs an ending fit for a tragedy but without a character that presented a tragic flaw that earned such a sad state. Little Shop of Horrors short-circuited its tragic ending, expecting the audience’s forgiveness for the character’s misdeeds. And in Carrie, her reward of safety and compassion is wholly inappropriate for a character who willfully murdered scores of innocents and gleefully danced afterwards. An American Werewolf in London, while morally consistent with the rest of the film, rushes it ending spoiling what may have worked.

An ending, like an aircraft coming in for a landing, requires that everything be lined up and on the right glide slope at the right speed to avoid disaster.

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Carrie (2026): A Final Report

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Last night I completed my viewing of Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie for Amazon Prime. Overall, I enjoyed the season and thought that Flanagan in many respects has elevated the novel’s story and plotting, but in the end, quite literally at the season’s close, it fell flat. I doubt that I will have much interest in the second season, and the manner in which Flanagan engineered a second season is much of the reason why this adaptation fails.

Amazon Studios

First, what I liked and what worked in Flanagan’s reinterpretation of King’s debut. Carrie, the novel, is a short book even by the standard of most novels, and by the standard of King’s later works it is practically a piece of flash fiction. When it was announced that there was going to be an eight-episode series adapted from the novel, I knew that much of what would end up on the screen would be invention not found in the source text. What remained to be seen was if this expanded material would enhance the story or be more like the trilogy of movies produced from The Hobbit, wandering so far afield as to lose connection to the story’s spine. I am happy to say that the expansion enriched the story and the focus remained on Carrie White as she navigated a world that was alien to her.

In the novel, Carrie has always attended public school along with her classmates, and this actually opens up an issue that I have no memory of King addressing. Since Carrie has attended physical education with her classmates into high school, even if Carrie’s mother, Margaret White, never discussed or explained menstruation to her, I find it beggars belief to accept that Carrie never witnessed it in any form among her peers. Flanagan’s choice to have Carrie homeschooled until her father’s death neatly avoids that fault in the backstory.

Flanagan also deepened and fleshed out the character of Margaret White, a vast improvement over King’s one-note crazed Christian caricature found in the novel. I have grown quite weary of King’s stock and stereotyped fundamentalist as an easy villain. While the Whites remained a deeply religious family and Margaret seriously socially conservative, Flanagan gave the character more understandable motivations and the sense of a person with contradictions and someone who struggled to find her own way in a world to which she was, in many ways, as alien as her daughter. As the story climbs the rungs of the ladder of escalation that ends with the “Black Prom,” Margaret is not simply a doomsayer and obstacle for Carrie but a voice that is sometimes one of reason as the school and the community hurtle towards disaster.

Continuing on the notes concerning characters and where Flanagan improved on the source text brings us to the story’s principal antagonist, Christine (Chris) Hargensen. It has been a number of decades since I read Carrie, so my memory may be a little faulty and colored more by the De Palma film than by the actual text, but, as I recall, King gave very little exploration of Chris’ character. Where the novel briefly touched on her father as lawyer who failed to save her from her exclusion from the prom, Flanagan crafts a more detailed home life and history of a father who is emotionally distant and a bully, behavior that Chris mirrors. I recall scenes where she and her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, plotted and carried out the hideous attack on Carrie but very little that explained, in any manner at all, why Chris was the way she was.

There is a fairly strong current over the last few decades, in film at least, of not only making the villains of a piece understandable but also a little bit right. Magneto’s experience as a European Jew who barely survived the Holocaust gives weight and authority to his argument that humanity and its racialized hatreds is the real villain of history. It is true that every villain is the hero of their own story, but that does not mean that every villain needs to have any sense of pursuing a worthy goal. With Chris Hargensen, Flanagan gives us enough of her life that we can understand without excusing her cruel and spiteful nature. She is a spoiled rich girl whose universe has always bent in her favor Now, as that world fractures and shatters and her entitlement goes unfulfilled. Instead of looking into herself and growing as a person, she lashes out, making others, particularly Carrie White, the recipients of her misplaced anger and frustration.

Another improvement is one I mentioned in passing earlier in this essay: the ladder of escalation. The novel opens with Carrie’s first menstruation and the cruel jeering she receives from her classmates, which leads almost immediately to Chris’ punishment and expulsion from the prom, which provokes the pig blood bath she and Billy carry out on poor Carrie. The reader is left to understand that there is a long history of Carrie being bullied and to accept this as justification for the rapidity with which the situation grew. Flanagan, having established that Carrie had never attended public school, crafted a series of incidents, each building upon the previous, that pushed the character of Chris further and further in her need to lash out and hurt someone for the shambles that her life had become.

Taking the story out of its mid-’70s setting and placing it into a contemporary environment with social media and school shootings and the vast web of conspiracy-addled subcultures proved one of the most challenging aspects of adapting the novel and one that Flanagan met quite handily. More than simply bringing cell phones and their cameras to the Black Prom, Flanagan integrated our current social issues and media into the story itself, making them essential rungs on that ladder of escalation that climbs to disaster.

With all these promising and praiseworthy elements, it makes the parts of the series that don’t work even more disappointing.

I found all of the teenage boys to be woefully underwritten.

Tommy Ross, Sue’s boyfriend, whom she convinces to take Carrie to the prom in her place, left no lasting impression in the novel, feeling more like a plot contrivance than a character, but he has even less to do in Flanagan’s adaptation. He spends six episodes either playing the devoted boyfriend or the sulking teenager when Sue, wrapped up in her own crisis, ignores him. It is only in episode seven that he takes any action of his own before briefly being cut down at the disastrous prom.

Billy Nolan, even more than Tommy Ross, is a device whose only function is to move the plot forward. My memory of Billy in the novel is of a sociopath who got sexual excitement from using his car to run down and kill dogs. In Flanagan’s version, he is a low-level drug dealer and not much more than that.

Moving beyond the thinly written teenage boys, I found it difficult to fully accept Flanagan’s opening up the world of Carrie to a constellation of enhanced and psychically empowered women beyond Carrie White. While King hinted at this when he closed the novel with a mother’s letter reporting that she watched her little girl move marbles without touching them, Flanagan introduces disciplined organizations of psychics, detecting each other psychic over vast distances, moving to recruit them. The series also introduces organizations that, seeing the psychics as an existential danger, hunt and murder them. Tonally, this moves the entire series from horror to nearly a superhero story. All this I might have been able to set aside had Flanagan not, with his radically altered ending, changed the very nature of Carrie.

Spoilers for the season finale follow.

Carrie at its core is a tragedy. The characters are trapped by their nature on a course that can only lead to their own destruction. The novel ends with Carrie White, racked with guilt at the death and destruction she has caused, bleeding out and dying. While some characters survived the hellish prom, there is no happy ending for anyone, and the end result of so much hatred and pettiness is fire and death.

Flanagan instead has Carrie White survive her night of retribution, saved by the psychic friends who have come to foil the hunter bent on Carrie’s murder and who spirit the young girl away for some undefined future.

This ending transforms a tragic conclusion into one that is disturbingly close to a victorious one. Let us be plainly clear here: in this story Carrie White murdered hundreds of people, the vast majority of whom not only had performed no act of cruelty towards her but in this very version had been in her corner, celebrating and honoring Carrie White. King was right in having her die at the end of the story: there is no redemption for her mass murder. Flanagan, setting up a season two, has in effect given a victory to what is for all practical purposes a school shooter. The ending as he crafted it is not one where a person who possesses both the ability and the temperament to murder on an unimaginable scale has frighteningly escaped but rather one where this person is given safety and support and is assured that she did nothing wrong. This ending inverts entirely the thematic nature of King’s novel. Perhaps Amazon/MGM pushed for something like this so they could have a franchise to profit from; perhaps Flanagan himself pitched this new take. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The ending makes its case clear: it justifies murdering those who torment you, and collateral damage is of no consequence. That is a conclusion that drives me away from having any interest in the already announced second season.

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Television Bits and Bobs

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So, just a few quick observations and comments about recent things I have watched on television.

Slow Horses (Season 5): This is the weekly-released British spy drama on Apple TV+ adapted from a series of novels by Mick Herron concerning a team of MI5 agents who have been disgraced and assigned to a dead-end office where, instead of waiting out retirement, they get tangled up with active threats, becoming heroes, but in the eyes of the agency, never redeemed. My sweetie-wife and I adore this show even as it continues to off some of my favorite characters. The writers never ever let the ironic humor remove the danger these characters face. I cannot say that season five is my favorite, but it is still top shelf television.

Mobland (Season 2): This is a Paramount+ series centered on the Irish mob family, the Harrigans, and their fixer Harry Da Souza. While the family survived, mostly, the crisis from season one, internal fissures are prompting a war for control, and the perception of weakness from without threatens to wrench them from their spot as the dominant organized crime family in London. This show is still great, bloody, and sexy, with a cast that is utterly stacked with the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, and Tom Hardy.

Carrie: I am now three episodes into Flanagan’s adaptation of King’s debut novel, and it is still working. One aspect of the production that I must salute is that, though the performers playing the girls are actually college-aged, they, for the most part, look like high schoolers. They are incredibly attractive high school girls because the industry is never not going to go for gorgeous, even with characters who are underage, but I am not for a moment pulled out of the story because you have adults trying, and often failing, to pretend to be children. This does not hold true for the actor playing Tommy, who is supposed to be a high school senior but looks very much like a college sophomore or better. In the first three episodes Tommy hasn’t had a lot to do, but since this is a very well-known story, we know that there is a lot more to come from poor doomed Tommy.

VisionQuest: The concluding entry in a trilogy started by WandaVision and continued with Agatha All Along, this series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe follows the artificial lifeform Vision and his quest to regain the humanity he had discovered within himself during his brief life. While Disney continued its tradition of releasing two episodes for the premiere before returning to a weekly model, we only watched the first this week. I thoroughly enjoy the mental illusionary space created where Vision confers and debates with the various artificial intelligences that he has incorporated. The writers did not delay the reveal that, at least in part, this series is going to be dealing with the other missing Maximoff twin, Tommy, eschewing the mystery approach they took with Billy in Agatha All Along. I found the initial episode set up the situation and the stakes quite well, but, of course, the real test is, does the whole story hang together, or does it crash and burn before the end?

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Carrie: Episode 1, First Period

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I first read Carrie, the debut novel of Stephen King, during my final year of high school in 1978. I quite liked the novel, and it sparked a King fandom that lasted about a decade before the author just sort of slipped off my reading pile. There was no break with King, no novel that so offended me in some manner, as has happened with other writers, that drove me away, but just a gradual drifting into different tastes. I have never been a hater nor a great fan of Brian de Palma’s feature film adaptation of the text. I am more partial to his other psychic-teenagers movie, The Fury, so there is no inherent need to defend de Palma’s version over others as this newest adaptation by Mike Flanagan arrives.

Flanagan has adapted the novel into a limited series show of eight episodes, each titled after an aspect of high school with the premiere episode having the punning title of First Period.

Amazon Studios

From the start of this first episode, it is clear that Flanagan is making significant changes to the text in his adaptation. Carrie White’s father (Tahmoh Penikett) is not an absent figure in Carrie’s life, but a doomsday conspiracist whose untimely death forces the home-schooled Carrie (Summer H. Howell) into the public education system and her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) into the workforce in order to maintain custody of her child. While Margaret is portrayed as hyper-religious, Flanagan pulls back from the gross caricature of both de Palma and King, crafting a character that is a little more credible than Piper Laurie’s inspired performance. Laurie breathes life into a role that is little more than a collection of tropes and exaggerations. While I myself have no religious convictions or beliefs, I find overly zealous Christians so common in King’s works and in so many others, to be a tiresome and unimaginative antagonist.

Updating the story to the current age, Flanagan gives us a high school with security guards and metal detectors at the entrances and a far more diverse student body than that lily-white set that populated both Maine in the 1970s and King’s novel.

Just like both previous adaptations, Carrie White is not an overweight, pimpled religious zealot, but a conventionally attractive young woman already testing the boundaries of her mother’s worldview and dogma. Soft-spoken but outgoing, Carrie, ignorant of the realities of the modern age, thrilled to the be engaging with school and what she imagined to be other people her own age as obsessed with reading as she is, enters the school happy and hopeful. Instead, the events of her first day in a public school traumatize her.

When the series showed Carrie navigating the metal detector and bag-search screening to enter the high school the thought passed through my mind that Flanagan was not going to take up valuable screentime to also show us an active shooter drill, a routine in many schools these days that traumatizes both staff and students.

I was wrong.

Ewen High does indeed have an active shooter drill on the very first day back after the holiday break. The students and staff are shown as bored with the routine, having followed the script for years, but Carrie, ignorant of even the existence of school shootings and the practice nature of a drill, is understandably terrified and, in her terror, ignites her telekinetic talent that will drive the story’s horrific conclusion.

It is the next day that brings one of the most recognized sequences to life, Carrie’s first menstruation. Kept ignorant of the realities of biology, Carrie, convinced that she is dying from this unprovoked and inexplicable bleeding, is taunted and torments by the other young women who hurl tampons and pads at her while chanting “Plug it up!” sparking another burst of terror-triggered telekinesis.

Flanagan’s most divergent change from the text takes place here, with an abrupt scene change to some unknown location, where another young woman psychically experiences Carrie’s terror and her telekinetic outburst before reporting it to some unseen authority.

This adaptation also spends some of its screentime exploring the home life of the story’s chief antagonist, the bully, Christine (Chris), who conceived of the horrific prank that ends in tragedy for the town. It has been decades since I read the novel, and I have no memory of any pages being devoted to Chris and her inner life. I have a vague memory of her brutal boyfriend and possibly of his enjoyment of running down dogs with his car, but it is possible that memory is tangled with the novel Christine and not Carrie. I do not believe that Flanagan is trying to generate sympathy for Chris, but only further episodes will reveal his intent. I can say that it is hard for me to have sympathy for the poor little rich girl who torments those lower down on the social ladder, no matter how horrid and idiotic her father may be.

I am intrigued enough that I will not only continue watching the series but I shall also continue avoiding the spoilers and discussions that are already roiling on social media. Since this was deployed with the binge-model of release, meaning that the entire series became available on Amazon Prime Video, instead of the more traditional model of releasing an episode a week, social media is already flooded with opinions and arguments from people who have devoured the entire show. I prefer the weekly release; not only does that avoid the issue of different discussions at different levels of knowledge about the show, and not only does that help build attention from week to week as people tell others about the program that they are watching, but for me personally it makes it more likely I will not watch the show at all. For some reason, when the entire thing is available at one time, I am disinclined to even start it. Even when I do, I rarely watch more than a single episode at a time. Sadly, while researching actors’ names and such for this post, I became exposed to some of the text-shattering twists that Flanagan has crafted for his version of Carrie, robbing me of the fun of speculating what might be happening at the unknown location.

Still, I expect that I will watch the rest of the series, possibly one or two episodes a week until I finish. I adored Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep but did not care for his adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, so we will have to see where his Carrie ends up.

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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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