Category Archives: Television

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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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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