Category Archives: Television

The Power of Mystery

When an audience or reader has a deficit of information one of two possibilities is likely. They may become frustrated and confused, disengaging with the piece or they may become intrigued and start filling in the missing bits from their own imagination.

In 1975’s Jaws, the mechanical shark worked rarely, and the filmmakers were forced to scrap plans that would have shown the beast on screen much more than the final film. With clever tension building techniques they crafted a taunt masterpiece around not seeing the shark until the final act.

In the television series Babylon 5 the Vorlons and Shadows were powerful mysterious being playing at some struggle that stretched over eons. They captivated the imagination and speculation. Then, once their background was explained, these master races were reduced to disappointed children of a cosmic divorce.

Hannibal Lector, pulled from a supporting role in the novel The Silence of the Lambs to a central thematic element in the film adaptation sparked endless fascination now neutered by endless backstory excavations and explanations.

This brings me to Boba Fett.

Fett, ignoring the animated sequence in the Holiday Special, first appeared in Star Wars: The Empires Strikes Back as the laconic bounty hunter that outwitted Han Solo and captured him for Darth Bader and the Empire. Other than showing a cleverness equal to or greater than Solo’s and successfully backtalking to Darth Vader the character did very little and never revealed his face. A perfect combination to create mystery and fascination with exploded almost immediately. The characters casual end in the next film ignited outrage as already a myth had grown up around him.

Now we are treated to a limited series The Book of Boba Fett centered on the character and as he is seen and heard more and more, he has lost nearly all of his mythic standing.

Having watched 3 of seven episodes I can’t say that anything about the character is worthy of his legendary status. As a guest character in The Mandalorian he was able to maintain that air of mystery that supported him as a mythic character. Front and center of his own series, his own story, he cannot remain an unexplained mystery and like Hannibal Lecter he shrinks in stature.

Mystery is a delicate element in storytelling. Use too much and your story if befuddled and confused, reveal too much as is happening here and there is little to entice.

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4 Things That Annoy Me About Firearms in Media

 

In lieu of writing about the Republican insurrection one year ago today I am instead going to write about several repeating aspects of guns in popular media that always irritate me when they appear.

1) Throwing People: Over and over again guns are depicted as violating Newton’s Law of Motion. A target hit by a round is lifting into the air and flung backwards. Targets weighting hundreds of pounds. If such forced was being delivered to the target an equal force in the opposite direct would be applied to the shooter. In the case of handguns to their wrists. People are not thrown by bullets and very often don’t even collapse or fall down when hit.

2) Inhuman Accuracy: The greatest offenders here are the John Woo films and his imitators and Zombie movies where people firing with a piston in each hand, moving from speeding vehicles, and leaping through the air, sometimes all three at the same time, hits distant or difficult targets. Accuracy with a firearm is much easier to obtain than with a bow but such shooting is beyond the realm of possibility.

3) Lasers on Sniper Rifles: The point of mounting a laser on a gun is to assist in accuracy. The concept being that where the ‘dot’ appears is where the bullet will impact. This is true over relatively short distances, but it is not true over scores or hundreds of yards with a sniper rifle. A bullet the instant it leaves the barrel falls toward the ground with an acceleration of 32 feet per second/per second. If a round travels at 2700 feet per second, after 100 yards it has traveled 1/9 of a second and will be 3 feet 10 inches below when that little red dot. Mounting a laser on a rifle is purely there so the ‘hero’ can spot the tell-tale dot and avoid getting shot.

4) Steady Scope Images: Related to the laser but preceding it in history is the moment in TV and film where an assassin is holding a scoped rifle to their shoulder and we get a shot of what they see through the scope, a perfectly still telescopic image of the target. No wobble or shake because the camera is mounted on a tripod but take out your smartphone and zoom to a distant object and see how steady that image appears. Through a high-powered with a tripod or bracing the image will bounced and shake unless the assassin is an android.

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My Sweetie-Wife’s Latest UK Discovery

My sweetie-wife is a real Anglophile and always finding interesting UK films and programs to introduce me to and the latest is the long running panel game/comedy show Would I Lie to You?(WILTY)

Two teams of three celebrities, with consistent team captains David Mitchell and Lee Mack, participants recount brief statements about themselves and the opposing team through often hilarious questioning must determine if the statement is true or a lie. Mid-Game a guest is brought out and each member of one team, alternating between the teams on a weekly basis, claims the guest has a special connection with them, such as being a member of the same Morris dancing troupe or having produced a song version of Hamlet’s ‘To be or Not to Be’ speech they recorded, or gave them a ride in a steam locomotive. The program is hosted by actor/impressionist/comedian Rob Brydon.

There are no prizes for winning further stressing that this is a show about comedy, and I must admit that there have been episodes where it was difficult to stop laughing. The participants are generally quick-witted, and landing a joke always takes precedence over discovering a truth.

The program has an official YouTube page where previous seasons episodes can be watched without angering the gods of copyright.

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A Lackluster Opening: The Book of Boba Fett

 

A common piece of advice given to writers starting out in their craft is to avoid prologs. Far too often am inexperienced writer will use a prolog, particularly with fantasy and science-fiction stories to dump onto the poor unsuspecting reader pages and pages of backstory and world building rather then give the reader character and conflict. That is not to say that a prolog is never to be used, there are brilliant prologs out there including the one that opens The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Book of Boba Fett, like The Mandalorian before it, refers to episodes as ‘Chapters’ within a larger story but episode one, Stranger in a Strange Land (And deduct marks for using the title of one of SF’s most famous books even if both are biblical references), stank of a poor prolog.

The episode depicts two plot threads, one set nine years earlier following Fett’s survival after Return of the Jedi and the troubles he faced in the harsh Tatooine desert, while the other shows his current situation as the new crime lord of Mos Espa. The flashback storyline has little dramatic tension since it is a flashback and we are well aware of the character’s survival and thriving, and the current storyline has very little story content. Elements are established for future use, that is to say world-building, and a bit of combat is thrown in the to give the illusion of stakes, but ultimately the only thing this chapter does is set-up coming payoffs.

I have hopes for a decent series and story but Chapter one failed to pull me in, make me care, or do anything more than lay out the world to come.

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Scary Season #6: Squid Game (Concluded)

 

Spoilers Ahead

 

 

 

 

 

I have now finished all nine episode of the Korean import Squid Game a fictional setting financially that depicts financially desperate people playing children’s games with the stakes being great riches or death upon losing.

The central character is Seong Gi-hun (Surname first as is traditional in Korean culture.) Gi-hun is a reprobate who whines and gambles and stealing money from his elderly mother’s bank account. In episode one I found Gi-hun thoroughly unlikeable and as other characters whose dire straight were not so directly a product of their own selfish choices entered the game my sympathies for Gi-hun diminished even further.

But though the writing displaying Gi-hun compassion for less fortunate players more likely to be eliminated and his willingness to take risks to save them along with actor Lee Jung-jae’s incredible charisma the character won me over as Gi-hun grew exponentially. Even as my sympathies for Gi-hun grew I also rooted for the tragically doomed Ali, a foreign worker abused by his employer, and Sae-byeok a young woman who had escaped from North Korea and now needed cash to save her brother from a South Korean orphanage and her mother still in the North. The most seemingly lost and tragic character was Oh Il-nam, an elderly man suffering from a brain tumor and seeming dementia and to whom Gi-hun develops a friendship and sense of protectiveness that is betrayed when in the final episode it is reveals Il-nam was one of the super wealthy hosting the game with its violence and death to alleviate the wealth created boredom.

While the violence of the series has attracted much attention as well as its commentary on social inequality to me the show’s greatest impact is in the inter-personal dynamics. The personal costs each character accumulates as the dangers and deaths grows, the dependency and betrayals are the emotional heart of the story. When Gi-hun wins but prefers an impoverished life to tainted wealth the show makes its most compelling study of both character and theme.

Squid Game also has a sub-plot as Police Detective Hwang Jun-ho infiltrates the game searching for a brother who has gone missing. The conclusion is somewhat underwhelming but thematically fitting for the show’s dark and cynical view of humanity.

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Odds and Ends

 

It’s mind numbingly stupid that in all likelihood more Americans are going to die of COVID 19 after a safe and effective vaccine is available than before there was such an option.

 

The Internet has performed an artistic trick that a hundred years of cinema could not pull off, making foreign language television and movies popular with Americans.

 

I wonder if any marginal Republican districts are going to change hands because the GOP has successfully convinced their base that death is the way to ‘own the libs?’

 

Colin Powell screwed up supporting the invasion of Iraq, but he was magnitudes less evil and less dangerous that all of those in close orbit with Trump.

 

 

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Scary Season #2: Squid Game (2 episodes in)

 

The new Netflix sensation, from South Korea, is Squid Game a television series where desperate people play games from childhood with failure meaning their deaths and a promise of great financial reward.

There certainly are a lot of varied and interesting film and tv projects coming out of South Korea from the Academy Award winning film Parasite to perhaps the best zombie movie ever produced Train to Busan the creative cloud from that peninsula has been fruitful. Squid Game promises tension, suspense, and graphic violence with the right amount of social commentary blended into the story.

Two Episodes into the 9 we seem to have settled on to five principal characters:

Seong Gi-hun: A gambling addict and petty thief whose irresponsibility has cost him his daughter and threatens his mother’s health.

Cho Sang-woo: Primary schoolmate of Gi-hun. His family and the neighborhood believe that Sang-woo escape the poverty of their neighborhood by a college education and business success, but embezzlement and fraud has placed him deeply in debt.

Kang sae-byeok: A young woman who escape North Korea with her younger brother and is now desperate for fund to smuggle her parent into South Korea.

Abdul Ali: A Pakistani worker who has been exploited by an unscrupulous employer and has a wife and child to support.

Jang Deok-su: A mid-level gangster on the run from his criminal gang because of stolen funds to feed to gambling debts to foreign casinos.

Of these five characters I have the most sympathy for Sae-Byeok and Ali who seem to have the least responsibility for their dire plights. Gi-hun was the character we met first but his constant whining, refusal to take responsibility, and stealing from his mother’s bank account made the character wholly unlikeable.

That said Squid Game is a series centered on character and though the violence perpetrated is graphic and on-screen the central question is how far will these people go for cash and how much responsibility does the system bear for their plights? The production values are high with the series displaying talent in front and behind the camera. If graphic violence is not a dealbreaker for you then Squid Game on Netflix is worth a shot.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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Another Reason What the GOT Ending Doesn’t Work

 

When HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones ended after 8 seasons many fans were disappointed. After leaving the source material behind because they had simply run out of novel to adapt the series changed in tone and pacing with the vast distances now seemingly crossed quickly with ease, the complex social/political dynamic reduced to dispatched plot points, and a final resolution so rushed it failed to build to the emotional punch required and instead felt to many as a disrespect of one of the story’s most beloved characters. (How’s that for summing it up without spoiling?)

I would argue an additional trouble came from the sequencing of the plotlines. Two massing concurrently running plots were, How to Deal with the Army of the Dead and Who is going to take the Iron Throne and rule the Seven Kingdoms?

The Army of the Dead seek to extinguish all life. The Iron Throne while consequential is a lesser issue. If everyone is dead no one is going to sit on that throne and whoever sits on that throne is only going to be there for a few decades and can be removed by revolt if needed. A bad person sitting on the throne is a resolvable issue being dead cannot be fixed. No matter how you slice it the Army of the Dead is the much more important issue. It is the issue the series resolved first.

Once the Army of the Dead is defeated and life preserved in the world the issue of the throne just doesn’t carry the same weight. Mind you they didn’t treat the Throne Issue as a denouement, something to resolve as the story ended but rather of the final six episodes of season eight half are after the more serious issue has been solved. Hours and Hours dealing with badly with a lesser problem. It just one more reason why the series left the rail and crashed.

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Foundation

 

Last Friday Apple TV+ premiered David S. Goyer’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic SF series of novel starting with Foundation.

Confession: I have never read the novels upon which this series is based. I have read a few novels and more short fiction from Asimov’s, but I always found his fiction too dry, the character to flat to be fully engaging. Asimov’s fiction tended towards Ideas and Puzzles with his characters there to push plot points forward to solve the puzzle or give voice to the idea. Only on Asimov story stands out in my memory with any sort of emotional weight and that is the short story Liar from the collection I, Robot. With his love of logic problems and flat characters to me it is not surprising that Asimov is best known for robot stories of artificial intelligences.

Foundation is the story of a collapse of a Galactic Empire ushering in a barbarous dark age of endless war and strife as civilization vanishes from the galaxy. One man, Hari Seldon, through the development of his science Psychohistory, which reduced human history and civilization to data and equations and can prediction with unerring accuracy the movement and actions of population but is utterly blind on the individual level, sees the coming fall and strives to shorten it by establishing The Foundation that will help rebuild civilization after the collapse.

The Series opens with a young brilliant mathematician, Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), who comes from a world of religious zealotry, arriving to work with Seldon (Jared Harris). She is perhaps the only other mathematician in the galaxy that is skilled and talented enough to fully understand the complex equations of Psychohistory. The emperor, a trio of clones of different ages, (played by Terrance Mann, Lee Pace, and Cassian Bilton is descending order of age) sees Seldon and his following as a threat to the stability of the Empire. Even as the social fabric unravels and the empire faces unprecedented threats its focus is on enemies and not the coming darkness.

Showrunner Goyer has stated that to tell the full story of Foundation and the thousands of years it will encompass he hopes to have the series run for eight seasons. Only time and audience numbers will tell if he can avoid the collapse of his how personal empire before the story is complete.

Foundation streams on Apple TV+.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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A Heretical Opinion on The Babylon 5 Re-Boot

 

From 1993 thru its conclusion in 1998 I watched J. Michael Straczynski’s (JMS) sci-fi saga Babylon 5. The series followed the events on the last of the Babylon stations conceived and constructed in the aftermath of a devastating stellar war as various races tried to form a lasting peace amid a struggle between light and dark, order and chaos, that had lasted eons. For many American the series was their introduction into serious long form television where the entire run of the show was meant to tell one large grand story, something that in today’s era of prestige television is not only common but expected.

With the flowering of prestige television is perhaps no surprise that the studio with the rights to Babylon 5, Warner Brothers, and who has a streaming service needing content, HBO Max, has announced its intent to reboot the franchise sitting in its vaults, even bring back the show’s original creator and writer JMS, to helm it once more.

Full disclosure I was fan, as I stated I watched the entire run of the series, cosplayed as a character at WorldCon, and even conceived of a dark episode with a writing partner but I think it would be prudent, wise, and in the show’s best interest if JMS this time refrained from writing nearly the entire series, nearly every script, himself, and turned that duty over to others.

JMS created a grand and fascinating setting, his characters have deep and conflicted inner lives, he possesses a rare talent, the ability to fully realize characters that are diametrically opposed to his own thinking without turning them into strawman arguments. He should show-run any reboot.

However, JMS has some glaring weaknesses as a writer. His dialog can be blunt and lacking subtly. Perhaps more importantly his handling of exposition is clumsy. During the series’ run I often referred to his ‘Exposition truck’ because of how often and blatantly the unfolding story would stop while characters ran us over with terrible, truly awful, exposition. Then once we had been left dead in the road from this writing hit-and-run, the script would gamely try to get momentum back into the story.

Because of mistreatment and disrespect by the people making feature films talented writers with tremendous gifts have been moving to television and we are so rich for it. JMS should seize this talent for his series and relinquish any scripting crafting duties himself.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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