Andor

As you’ll have noticed if you’ve read the last few entries, I’ve been struggling sometimes to come up with stuff to write about on here. That is not the case this week, because we’ve gotten to the end of the first series of Star Wars: Andor, and I feel like I could talk or write about it all day. I was a little sceptical about this show when it was first announced because I wasn’t exactly dying for more prequel-y stuff, but then: it was fantastic. To me it’s the best Star Wars TV they’ve done, and it isn’t close. It’s the best Star Wars we’ve had in a very very long time, and even outside of that context: it’s just a superb piece of story crafting.

I think it demonstrates that a premise, for a show or a book really only gets you started, or doesn’t. ‘The story of Cassian Andor joining the Rebellion’ could be a pretty pedestrian thing with a lot of the same problems that Kenobi had, where the stakes are wrecked because we know so much of the story to come from other places. But if you do it right, and with care, almost any premise can be spectacular. They put a lot of care into Andor, and it absolutely shows.

The writing is great. The writers almost always have the exact right balance of how much they need to show you so that you can understand what’s happening without needing it to be explained. The performances are amazing. Stellen Skarsgård’s spymaster, Luthen Rael, is one of the most fully realized characters we’ve seen in Star Wars. Genevive O’Reilly’s performance as Mon Mothma is spectacular in its understatement – she has to communicate so many emotions without any lines and from behind the idea that this is a character that maintains their reserve. You can absolutely tell what’s going on inside, though, and it’s something to watch. The whole thing is wonderful.

There’s spy action. There’s a heist. There’s a prison break. There’s politicking. It’s all wonderful.

Another of the things I like about Andor is that this is the first time we’ve really seen the Rebellion look like an insurgency, as opposed to the ‘smaller army vs. bigger army’ way the conflict has typically been portrayed. The scrambling for resources. The need to work with less than ideal associates, because they can help accomplish your goal. The moral compromises. The fragility of the network of resistance that is being constructed. The balance between idealism and pragmatism. It’s all wonderful.

From my non-expert perspective, the tradecraft of the Rebel operatives is all very convincing. The partitioning of information, the procedures of distrustful trust and the performed identities. The little moment where we first see Luthen arrive at his antique shop, put on that identity as the dealer in antiquities, and practice the big empty smile, is perfection. I absolutely believed that these were people whose lives depended on hiding what they were doing. It reminds me very much on John le Carré does Star Wars, which I obviously love. It’s all wonderful.

It also speaks to many issues of obvious relevance to our current moment (I said that was the best part about Kenobi, but this blew it out of the water). Andor touches on overpolicing and an unjust justice system. It touches on the prison-industrial complex. It speaks about authoritarianism and fascism (because the showrunners are very direct that that’s what they’re talking about) in an unapologetic way and, to me anyway, in inspirational fashion. I want a poster of that extract from Nemmik’s manifesto. It’s all wonderful.

Andor also shows the cost of resistance. In the last episode, the uprising on Ferrix is a tremendous emotional event that makes you want to go out and smash a fascist. It’s also a bloodbath, and another little understated moment, of Luthen looking at the brutal violence engulfing the town with a stricken expression, says so much. It was one thing for him to say that people suffering was ‘part of the plan’ and to pull all the threads that led to this. It’s quite another to be there and see the people getting mowed down by blaster fire. Andor doesn’t flinch away from the fact that the fight against oppression is a FIGHT, and that’s wonderful too.

There’s plenty of considered dissections of every episode of series one out there if you look, so I’m not going down that road. Suffice it to say that I loved every single bit of this series. It was one of those things where once it was done, I just thought ‘this is exactly the kind of thing I’d love to write’. I have an idea for the Star Wars story I’d like to tell, if I could pull it off. Maybe I’ll get into that one day.

Thanks for reading.

Kenobi and the Moment

I am currently enjoying some vacation, so I’ve been watching stuff on TV. There have been a couple of reasonably hype-laden series on this summer, so I have checked them out. Kenobi has been interesting, and I have some thoughts on it this week. Next week I’ll get into Stranger Things. (Originally I was going to do them both in one entry, but that’d be a long ‘un.) Spoilers ahoy, of course.

As I said, Kenobi has been interesting; it is another beautifully made and very well acted piece of Star Wars entertainment. I liked the new villain, and a character who feels so let down by the Jedi that she becomes a Jedi hunter packs some punch. In fact, it’s really the new characters that have most of the appeal of this show.

Despite my usual antipathy for ‘the spunky kid’ characters, Tiny Incorrigible Leia is a delight and to me, what we’re seeing with her is far more interesting than a bunch of Kenobi/Vader stuff that can’t possibly go anywhere. Leia finding her cause, though, and becoming who she’s going to be: that’s something. At the same time, though, that gets to the root of Kenobi’s biggest flaw.

The biggest problem with it is that as a story being wedged in between some other stories whose outcome we know, it’s harder than usual to suspend our expectations and buy into the drama the show is selling. More than usual, we know Leia isn’t going to die. We know Obi-Wan isn’t going to get killed, and we know that Luke Skywalker will remain a sulky kid on his uncle’s farm and not be put up against the wall by stormtroopers or hauled off to an Imperial gulag. The final episode has this huge swirling lightsaber duel/Force battle between Kenobi and Vader and despite the action and the visuals it is absolutely DOA because there are no stakes. We know neither character can have any lasting consequences, so on some level it feels like wasting time, time that could have gone to a story they could actually tell.*

Even the ‘climax’ of Reva arriving on the Skywalker ranch with a heart full of pain doesn’t really work because we know where we have to get to: Owen and Beru looking after Luke in that same place, Obi-Wan off in the desert. It’s somewhat like watching a hockey or baseball game where you already know the final score. Things that happen along the way to that destination can still be interesting, but ultimately you know it ends up Habs 3, Bruins 2.

So overall I had fun watching Kenobi, but didn’t feel like it had a lot of impact, until this one line from late in that last episode. Obi-Wan has come to see Leia on Alderaan, back safe with her family, and he says: ‘I fear for her future. The Empire grows stronger, and bolder.’ They couldn’t have known it when they wrote that scene, but man there could scarcely have been a more appropriate sentiment for late June/early July of 2022, when we can so clearly see forces at work, growing stronger and bolder, that make it hard not to fear for the future.

I was saying to a friend on Twitter today that I don’t think I had realized, growing up, how much I internalized the idea of progress, that society was improving, things were getting consistently better, and that such problems that weren’t currently fixed would get fixed later. I watched (without really understanding what was going on, at the time) the Morgentaler cases in Canada, I have seen gay couples win the right to marry, during the time I have taught there, the college where I work has added gender-neutral bathrooms. Lots has changed – not enough, but lots – and I had never really questioned the assumption that society would continue, at whatever rate, to move in that direction.

The last few years, and the last months in particular, have upended that, and it hurts. In Star Wars terms, I think I grew up assuming I was living at the end of Return of the Jedi, but perhaps we’re really in that awkward space where Disney is still trying to make more content: after the prequels, but before A New Hope.

It’s sobering to think that way, but I think it’s important to look at where we are, assess it honestly, and confront it. There are people in society who want to push things backwards, take away things that were fought for and hard-won. Womens’ rights. LGBTQ rights. Progress towards racial justice and religious freedom. It’s tempting to go live in the desert, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, but unfortunately I don’t think that’s what the moment requires.

There’s another nice moment from that last episode, with another of those new characters, where Kenobi tells insurgent leader Roken not to give up and stop what he’s doing. ‘I’m just getting started,’ Roken replies.

That’s where we need to be, too. Our fight is just getting started.

Moon Knight

What’s this, back so soon?

Well, there’s a good reason, as between blog posts I finished watching the Moon Knight TV series.

I have thoughts.

I was a bit surprised when they announced that they were doing a Moon Knight series, since while I was growing up he was very much a C or maybe even D list character and certainly not who you would have been likely to pick as one of Marvel’s main draws. I guess he’s had a bit of a higher profile in more recent years, though, and I think that’s good because Moon Knight is pretty unique, as far as superheroes go.

As I understand it, Moon Knight started out very much as a Batman-with-the-numbers-filed-off kind of deal, but whether it was originally the plan or not, veered off fairly quickly into its own reasonably unplowed furrow of a superhero with mental illness. (We’ll pass by, for the moment, the thesis that all superheroes, by definition, have some kind of mental illness.) Moon Knight’s various cover identities were in conflict, eventually becoming entirely separate personalities that didn’t always get along. Eventually things got more complicated, with other identities emerging over time. The question of whether or not Moon Knight actually had any relationship with a real-on-some-level Egyptian god of the Moon or was just delusional about the whole thing has also been puttered around.

So I was very interested to see what would happen with an (in source material, anyway) unquestionably mentally disturbed superhero when Moon Knight was announced. Overall, I think they did the right thing and really embraced the character’s strangeness and made what was going on in the main character’s head about three quarters of what the show is about.

There is, of course, a Nefarious Plot underway that needs thwarting (suitably rooted in Egyptian mythos) but it’s unquestionably secondary to figuring out exactly what is going on with the show’s protagonist. I’ve seen some people express frustration at not getting more of Moon Knight in action, but ultimately I think going all-in on what makes the character something we haven’t seen before, even at the expense of some punchy-kicky stuff, was the right call.

To me, they also struck about the right balance of having the show keep you off balance and wondering exactly what was going on at different moments without ever being completely impenetrable. I’ve grown a bit frustrated with ‘puzzle box’ style shows in recent years, mostly because they make me feel thick and I get enough of that in my regular life already. I thought Moon Knight always left you enough of a thread to follow that you had a least a general idea of what was happening, even while there was a lot of uncertainty.

I also really enjoyed the character of Layla, who as far as I can tell was a new creation for the show. She’s a little similar to Marlene from the comics, but reimagined to be Egyptian and (without spoiling things) elevated beyond sidekick/love interest status. She ends up in a very cool place in the series’ last (for now?) episode and I hope we’ll see more of her somewhere.

I’m not really sure how well Moon Knight would mesh with the rest of the MCU – which is often a problem for the character in the comics, as well. I think it was a cool idea to bring one of Marvel’s more unusual creations to the screen in this way, and I’d definitely be in if they decided to do more Moon Knight.

Lovecraft Country

So we’re only one episode in but I already want to write something about this new series Lovecraft Country, primarily because I almost didn’t watch it. I saw plenty of people mention it and lots of ads, but I confess I dismissed it almost entirely because, to be blunt, I am really very tired of H.P. Lovecraft. I find him a figure that looms entirely too largely over SFFH fiction today, especially when so many writers are doing what he did so very much better, these days. ‘Lovecraft’ is one of those names that I think we could mention a lot less (you can probably guess some others) and I think we would lose very little thereby. (Among other things, I think renaming the genre ‘cosmic horror’ rather than ‘Lovecraftian’ would be a positive move)

But, of course, this reveals mostly my own ignorance, for I had not heard of the book Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, upon which the series is based, and the concept of both – a young black man navigating both the racism of the Jim Crow United States and horrifying monsters – is a better one than I expected just from the title.

One problem we often wrestle with, dealing with writers like Lovecraft, is what to do about the abhorrent ideas about race and culture that underly the stories that can still be enjoyable to read. Lovecraft Country spends a brief moment having its main character (Atticus Freeman) discuss the problem, more or less right off the jump. And it is a problem. Do we ignore the racism in the work of a writer like Lovecraft? It’s so integral to it that I’m not certain that you really can, but obviously you don’t want to build on that foundation either.

Lovecraft Country chose what I think is a fairly bold and elegant solution by making racism central to the story it tells. At least to judge from the first episode, the racism of 1950s America is at least as big of a threat as whatever horrible things live in the woods. Lovecraft’s stories, the parts of them that work well anyway, are about human beings struggling to cope with forces far more powerful than them, that they cannot really hope to defeat, only to perhaps survive. Although the writer himself would probably not have appreciated the parallel, it’s not a bad analogy for racism, when you think about it.

But because people are (again, based on ep 1 anyway) the real danger in Lovecraft Country, so far I would say that although I enjoyed the show very much and am looking forward to more, I didn’t really get that ‘cosmic horror’ vibe from it, not yet*. In Lovecraft people and their doings are the next thing to insignificant beside the immense malevolent forces that are out there. In this story, so far, people and what they do are the problem.

Now, that tends to be the kind of fiction I like (as you will know if you read much of this blog), so I’m happy to see them go down this road. I think recentering some of the things Lovecraft imagined on people is ultimately the right decision, although ‘make the story about people’ is kind of what I always think writers should do.

Anyway, all of which to say that if you were like me and dismissed Lovecraft Country, you should consider checking it out. If the rest of the series is like the first episode, it’s going to be very good indeed. And now I need to track that book down.

Thanks for reading.

*-The <<<SPOILER ALERT>>> opening scene with flying saucers and Jackie Robinson exploding Cthulhu was definitely into over-the-top territory, and if more of the series was like that I’d be delighted, but to me that still wasn’t ‘cosmic horror’ the way it is usually defined.

Perry Mason

I’ve been watching the new Perry Mason miniseries recently, which is a bit of an odd choice for me because it was reputed to be very dark, and (as noted many times herein) I tend not to enjoy super grim stories these days. I have also never watched any of the earlier iterations of the Perry Mason character, or read the books. But on the other hand, it has two actors I admire a great deal (Matthew Rhys and Tatiana Maslany) in it, and so why the hell not.

The first episode, I have to say, did not fill me with optimism. It was indeed extremely bleak, almost to the point of becoming self-parody. But, I am not one of those who needs a book to win me over in the first line, nor a show in the first scene or even the first episode, so I gave it a go. And boy, am I glad I did. It has stayed a dark story, but it’s one that I’m enjoying very much now.

Partly I think it’s just (well, ‘just’) the quality of the writing and the performances, which are nearly uniformly excellent. <SPOILERS AHOY> The unravelling of the E.B. Jonathan character from this dapper, confident, successful lawyer we are first presented with to the rather sad mess we learn he really is was carried of really well. And in the just-aired episode, the scene where Perry Mason starts transforming into a lawyer in Della Street’s kitchen was remarkable. <SPOILERS END> So the writing and acting is very good, and of course that helps with a great many things.

But there’s more to it than that, for me anyway. Because, although this is a very dark and bleak tale, it isn’t entirely so. Perry Mason, as we meet him, is a drunken mess of a human being who isn’t doing well at all with basically any aspect of his life – but we also come to learn that underneath the car crash exterior he is a person who basically wants to do the right thing, or stop the wrong thing from happening. So we (or at least I) can unapologetically root for him, flaws and all.

To me this is where some grim takes on stories (or ‘realistic’, as they are sometimes billed) get it wrong. If every character you’ve got for me is some variety of awful, then my problem is that I don’t really want to follow any of them around long enough to hear your story. I get enough stories of awful people doing terrible things already by turning on the news, for one thing, but even so I don’t believe that if you want a story grounded in realism you do it by making everyone awful. There are people who want to do good things in this world, imperfectly though it almost always is. Anyway, for me you’ve gotta give me a character whose corner I want to be in.

Perry Mason has done that, even in their gritty, corrupt, bleak vision of 1930s Los Angeles. Perry Mason is basically trying to do something good. So is Della Street, and so (it appears) is Paul Drake. Flawed characters, all of them. But the writers have given me enough that I am hoping they do well, and I’m enjoying this grim story they’re telling me.

Thank you for reading.

Arrow

Last week was the final show of Arrow, the TV adaptation (kind of) of DC’s Green Arrow character. I will miss it a lot, and I admire a lot of what it did.

To be sure, Arrow was not ‘prestige’ television, and even a fan like me would concede that over its 7 and a half season run, the quality of the writing was a bit uneven. Allowing for that, it was unapologetically a comic book show (which to me explained a lot about the level it was written at) and the frankly astonishing amount of superhero stuff on TV (and streaming, and and) in the past few years is a direct result of Arrow demonstrating that it was doable and that people would watch a series just the same as they go to the movies.

There was a great deal to admire about Arrow, taken on its own merits. The cast was great and obviously loved making the show. The writers pushed the limits of what DC would allow them to do and were ambitious about the kind of story they wanted to tell. They rolled with a lot of punches admirably – having DC take the Suicide Squad away from them, go back and forth on the character of Deathstroke, never letting them use Ted Kord – and damn it, if every episode wasn’t legendary prose, they put out entertaining television nonetheless.

A friend of mine wondered on Twitter not too long ago (paraphrasing here) if it wasn’t enough to have a movie about ladies in bright costumes doing cool things, for a little while. And sure, there are TV shows that I would say had better, more sophisticated, and impactful writing of the course of their runs than Arrow did. But Arrow had a lead who loved playing the part (even if this Green Arrow was more like Batman with the serial numbers filed off) and who was a great ambassador for his show and the superhero genre in general, and it had people in bright costumes doing cool things, for an impressively long time.

I keep qualifying my praise of the show here and I shouldn’t. Sometimes you sit down to read a comic book to watch superhumans throw each other through buildings and fight for Good over Evil with those capital letters splattered everywhere. Arrow delivered that experience with apparent joy from beginning to end, spawned a whole universe of related shows, and ultimately led to ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ ending up on my television screen.

Which I would not have believed was ever a thing that was possible.

It was unquestionably an entertaining thrill ride that brought a lot of things from the comics page onto the screen that probably would never have gotten there otherwise. I got a lot of hours of pleasure out of the work of those writers and artists and actors. I will miss it now that it’s gone.

They gave Arrow a very comic-book appropriate happy ending, and I’m glad. The show, and its characters, deserved it.

Thanks for reading.

What Just Happened on ‘Doctor Who’?!?

I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to write about tonight, until I watched the latest episode of Doctor Who. (‘Fugitive of the Judoon’, incidentally) I had kind of kicked around the idea of writing about the return of Doctor Who after BBC shenanigans gave us another extra-long break, but I didn’t have too too much to say.

(There are about to be some spoilers, if you’re not caught up on Doctor Who)

I had mixed feelings about the return of the Master – Sacha Dhawan gave us a fun take on the character and seemed to be having a great deal of fun, but (as I went through in a previous entry) I really enjoyed the wobbly path towards redemption – and being the Doctor’s friend again – that we saw Michelle Gomez’ Missy take, and loved the poignant end to her incarnation. Dhawan’s Master at least seems to undo all of that (it’s at least possible that his Master comes in between the previous incarnations we saw and Missy, due to time travel nonsense, but then having his TARDIS appear as a flying house did seem to be a shot at Missy), which I regret a bit.

At the same time, this is what almost always happens with villains who ‘turn good’ – they’re so much more useful to the plot of an ongoing story as baddies than ancillary heroes that it’s very hard to resist flipping the switch back over. The Master is nearly always a fun foil for the Doctor, Dhawan did a great job as a particularly expressive version of the character, and he wore Patrick Troughton pants. It was pretty awesome.

After that the episodes were just pretty ok, and I lost much sense that I had anything to write about here, until ‘Fugitive of the Judoon’. Holy boats, the series abruptly made a hard turn into some delightfully puzzling territory. Captain Jack was back, that was cool. We have another incarnation of the Doctor, who we’ve never heard of before, and who doesn’t seem to fit into either the character’s past or present as we’ve known it. Maybe Gallifrey is gone and maybe it isn’t. Something truly, gloriously weird is afoot.

If I stop and think about it, I don’t love every aspect of this storyline. I especially think they’ve gone to the ‘fate of Gallifrey’ well a few too many times now. Either destroy the place or leave it be, but there’s not a lot of impact to yet another change in status for the home planet the Doctor basically never visits. The puzzle-box plotline is likewise a frequently used tool in the box for the writers of the revived series, and it hasn’t always paid off.

However.

This is a truly intriguing mess they’ve thrown in our lap (and, incidentally, how cool did Jo Martin’s TARDIS interior look?) and I really can’t wait to see where the ship is going, now that it’s veered onto this unexpected course. If nothing else, I’m glad to see the writers doing something truly bold in terms of direction with this series – even if they don’t end up quite sticking the landing, they certainly haven’t played it safe this time, and that, I enjoy.

Thanks for reading.

The Americans

A little while ago I did a list of my favourite TV series of all time, which was clearly a project of mammoth significance. And now it needs to be revised. The reason is that one of the rules I set for myself was that I needed to have seen the whole run of the series, because there are all too many shows that started out great and then Lost-ified themselves.

Last week, The Americans aired its last episode, I will miss it greatly, and it probably deserves a spot in that top 5. I’m going to write about it a little more today. Obviously there are spoilers below, and if that bothers you, I would suggest not reading further, because you should really give The Americans a shot. You’ll be in for a treat.

The concept of the show was a reasonably interesting one – deep-cover KGB agents in 1980s America – and that was what got me to originally give it a go. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, probably hoping for something that would at least be a decent action-y drama. That’s not what I got. What I got is what I think is one of the best written TV shows I have ever watched.

One of the great strengths of the show was that the writers were pretty good at doing things you didn’t expect. They would foreshadow things that never happened, and refused to follow what people will say are basic storytelling conventions. This past season, Elizabeth was issued a cyanide suicide pill to prevent her being captured alive. I read a lot of speculation of whether she would take it, or someone else would, or it would be used to kill someone, or as evidence of her KGB work – there had to be something, because ‘Chekov’s Gun’, after all. The cyanide pill ended up getting dumped in a hole in the woods, unused, as the Jennings’ fled America. It’s just one example of how you could never really know for sure where the show was going to take you. That was a lot of fun.

The thing that impressed me the most, though, was that where a lot of stories these days present an array of characters who are all basically unlikeable, The Americans did the reverse. Philip and Elizabeth do lots of horrific things in service of the KGB, and yet they’re still very easy to like. It would also have been very easy to make the FBI agents chasing them (essentially, the show’s antagonists) into some kind of vile caricatures of government agents, but that’s not the case. Stan Beeman is another genuinely easy to like character who, despite some of the fairly awful things he does at times as well, we also want to see end up all right.

Watching the finale was suspenseful in a bunch of ways, but the largest way for me was that the Jennings’ subterfuge is finally collapsing, Stan is closing in, and I wanted, somehow for both the Jennings and Stan to be ok when it all shook out, some kind of obviously impossible quantum state where the Jennings both were and were not captured, I guess. As it turns out, instead of getting both those things, the audience more or less gets neither. Every beat of the final hits super hard because you care, very much about all the imaginary people you’re watching it happen to. That’s what this show did really well.

The story of Philip Jennings was amazing to watch. From Season 1, he was clearly far less ideologically-committed to the espionage work he and his wife were asked to do, but keeps doing it because she is his wife and he needs to support her. It all grinds him down as the seasons wind on, through one of my favourite scenes (mentioned earlier in this blog) where he tells an asset simply “I feel like shit all the time”, because this is one of the very few people in the world he can afford to be somewhat genuine with. He goes on with it, still primarily because the idea of not supporting his wife is unbearable, until he simply can’t any longer. Philip tries to quit. Finally, he is drawn back in one more time, again because he knows Elizabeth is probably dead if he doesn’t, and it crushes him. The end of their mission in America would surely have been some kind of relief, if it wasn’t that it also meant the end of the pleasant life he had wanted so badly for himself and his family. In the end, everything Philip was trying to accomplish, and all the horrible shit he did trying to do it, ends up being for nothing at all. It was brutal to watch. It was great. That was just one character. We could run down the whole cast and get basically the same impact for nearly all of them.

I think the fact that the characters were so well done is the main reason why I liked the whole arc of the show, and its really very bleak ending, despite my preference for a positive ending, these days. Look, a happy ending wouldn’t have fit very well with the overall themes of the show, which often painted the Cold War in great swathes of grey, but I have haven’t enjoyed many a bleak story, even though the darkness may have made sense. The difference is that in this one, I was interested enough in the people to want to see where their dark paths led them.

In terms of authenticity, the writers and showrunners for The Americans got a lot right. They reproduced 1980s places with fantastic detail; the final episode gave us an entire McDonalds set that reminded me of car trips as a kid. They got Russian-speakers to do the Russian dialogue, leaving scenes between Russian characters subtitled rather than doing them in cheesy accents. I have also read commentary from more than one intelligence professional saying that The Americans got much of the tradecraft for their spies more or less correct. That was fun to know, but these details aren’t really why I loved the show. Ultimately, the show was great because of the characters, and how well and believably they were all rendered, and how very much the show made you want to follow them around and see what happened to them.

I continue to believe that this is what will always separate a good story from a truly great one. They’re all about people in the end, just as The Americans was, when you boiled it right down to the core, just really about people. I loved every bit of the journey as a fan, I think I learned a lot as a writer, and I will miss the show very much.

Thanks for reading.

So, About that Top 5

The other day my friend and fellow writer Brandon Crilly and I were hanging out and, perhaps inevitably, got to talking about writing we’ve enjoyed, and that got us to talking about TV shows we’ve both enjoyed, and we both mentioned shows that ‘would be in our Top 5’. That of course got me thinking about what my actual Top 5 would be, and I didn’t have a topic for the blog this week, so here we go.

My main criteria for picking anything here was that I couldn’t pick and choose parts of a series. So, for example, much as I love the first few seasons of X-Files, it was never going to make this list because it really dies hard in the later seasons.

Bear in mind that I haven’t actually seen every show ever, so if your favourite isn’t here, that may well be why.

Bear in mind that you can also just fight me.

I think these are in order? Maybe. I guess there may be spoilers.

Battlestar Galactica (2004 Series)

Right out of the gate we’re probably in trouble. I know a lot of people didn’t like where this series ended up, but I thought it was perfect. Yes, even the last episode. I can’t really think of another series that gave me so many characters that I genuinely cared about, did character development as believably and well as this did, and went to some dark and difficult places without ever quite turning the light out entirely. None of the characters were two-dimensional. Starbuck is still my favourite.

Person of Interest

I wrote about this series once before, so I’ll just briefly reiterate – this seemed as though it was going to be the most procedural procedural that ever procedured. It wasn’t. Person of Interest turned out to be really thoughtful SF about AI and a surveillance society, and the ethics of both. It also had really, really good characters, and really, really good performances again. Michael Emerson is good in everything I see him in.

Fringe

I came into this show thinking, as I think a lot of people did, that it was basically going to be an X-Files knockoff. For a couple episodes it kind of was an X-Files knockoff. Then it took a huuuuge left turn and never looked back. It ended up being nothing like any other show on TV. It was hilarious, it was disgusting, it was genuinely disturbing, and like BSG, it made you care. It had tremendous sustained performances from Anna Torv and John Noble. Even crunching the timeline of the series down by several seasons, it told its story well and ended it on just the right note. Absent everything else, ‘White Tulip’ is a fantastic SFF story. Fringe did not get nearly the attention it deserved, and it was some of the best SFF television we’ve had.

Orphan Black

I didn’t even really know what this show was going to be about, I just kept hearing ‘man you’ve gotta watch Orphan Black‘. I finally did. Holy crap this show was good. So much of it hinged on the amazing performances of Tatiana Maslany in pulling off portraying all of the various Leda clones, but the story being told was genuinely original and genuinely very well done. Again, they gave us amazing characters that you couldn’t help but get invested in. The transformation of Helena from an almost Michael Myers like threat into a beloved ally was beautifully done. The writers introduced a cold, manipulative villainess in Rachel, got you to care about her, and then got you to buy her as a villain again. Orphan Black wobbled just a little in its last season, but it was still so so good.

Doctor Who

Ok this one was a little tricky to leave on the list, because honestly, if you look at the whole immense size of the series, you’ve gotta say that the quality is more than a little uneven. There are, I will admit, some truly awful episodes in there. I’ve talked before about how sometimes the special effects, well, they reflect the budget the show had at the time. ‘Continuity’ is a very vague sort of concept for the show at all, by this point.

And yet. When I think about the TV show that probably has more to do with me being a fan of SFF today, and someone who writes fantastic stories, it’s Doctor Who and it isn’t close. I was never that into Star Trek (sorry), and my Star Wars fandom came a little bit later. I started out watching shows from before I was born on PBS Sunday afternoons, and just got terribly, terribly hooked. Tom Baker will always be ‘my’ Doctor, but I truly like them all and I like all the various eras the show has gone through. It wins huge points for longevity and for continuing to find new stories to tell about an itinerant busybody alien and the people who wander around time and space with them. I forgive it its misses because among the hits are things like ‘the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alters their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views’, which is really very good. And also ‘You know, I don’t think these cows know anything about the time scanner”.

Doctor Who is good.

Missed the Cut:

The Americans: This was very, very, very close. I love this show and I love the writing on this show. Partly I cut it because this is otherwise an SFF list and I like that, because ‘genre TV’ tends not to get the same critical respect as other shows do. Also though, as much as I adore the main storyline, in the last couple seasons there have been some plotlines I am not spellbound by. Watch The Americans, though.

Stranger Things: You know I love this show. It didn’t quite make it because I feel like I need to see more of the story the Duffers are creating to really evaluate it yet. Season 1 was damn near perfect, but now they’re working on a bigger vision that we haven’t had fully revealed yet. Maybe this one gets shuffled up in a few years.

Both Jericho and Deadwood were series that I thought had very nearly perfect first seasons, but didn’t maintain that quality throughout. Lost was a series I thought was awesome out of the gate and then by the end was watching out of spite. I’m still kind of bitter. I thought the writers of Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles were trying to do some genuinely bold and interesting stuff, but they had some really heavy misses and then the show got cancelled. One day I’d like to pick the writers’ brains about what they would have done. Before you ask, I haven’t had a chance to see Westworld yet. I hear it’s very good. I also haven’t seen The Wire.

Brandon tells me these blog entries are too long. I’m stopping. Thanks for reading. Come fight me in the comments if you want.

More importantly, go check out Brandon’s blog and work here.

Thoughts for a Cooling November

This past weekend I was sick and so I spent a lot of time lying down and thinking, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. One of the comforts whenever I’m sick is that one or both of my cats usually spends most of the day with me. It’s always good to have a warm presence when I’m not feeling well.

For whatever reason this time it really came across very clearly that one of them is getting old. He can make the jump up onto the bed if he must, but it’s also clearly not something he wants to do. Usually he’ll wait around for me to give him a lift. I remember a leap he used to make, from the floor up to the arm of my oversized armchair, that he doesn’t attempt at all any longer. He’s getting on in years.

So am I. I get sick in ways I didn’t use to when I was younger, I get injured more easily and it takes longer for me to heal. I trained this spring for a 10k and honestly thought that I hit a new PB, but then when I pulled up my race history (because of course there’s a website that tracks all these things), in fact there was this other, faster time from 8 years ago that I’m not sure I can imagine getting back to now. Father Time, as they say, is undefeated.

So, in recent weeks I have, for whatever reason, really had the understanding that I am, on the balance of probability, closer to the day of my death than the day of my birth, sloshing around among the Mind Gears and lubricating them in unusual directions.  It’s a touch sobering, if also more than a bit of a cliché, I guess.

The cat, I hasten to point out, is far from finished being a cat. He still wrassles with his brother and explores the yard and savages his corduroy mouse. He still has most of his usual cat duties to attend to, he just attends to them a little more sedately than he used to, and with rather more naps. I suppose I try to be similar – I know I’m getting older but I don’t especially mind (which is probably just as well), it’s just a thing that I have increasing amounts of evidence is happening. I still have things to do and things I want to do, my writing foremost among those, now.

I’ve worked hard in academia and on being a teacher, and in a lot of ways I’ve done rather well. I’ve studied overseas and delved in centuries-old archives. I’ve taught at universities and helped some students start their own scholarly careers. I’ve enjoyed it all, and still do. I also think (as I consider the passing years) that I may have gone about as far with it as I’m likely to, which is its own kind of somewhat-sobering realization. Again it’s not bad, I enjoy teaching and interacting with my students, but it is another increasingly apparent Thing.

Writing, on the other hand, is something where I feel I can really stretch myself and I’ve been excited with how much I have been able to learn and grow in that field over the past 4 years or so. I have a lot of work to do, but I feel like if academia turned out to be a leap that was slightly out of my reach, this might perhaps be one that I can eventually make successfully. I’m certainly enjoying trying.

It’s November, and here in Ottawa it has finally really started to get cold. We’ve had several frosts and I should probably think about using my winter coat instead of my jacket. Without realizing it at the time, I’ve almost certainly taken my last outdoor run of the season, and I need to get the winter tires on the car. Time rolls on. That’s going to be my excuse for the perhaps gloomy rambly tone of all the above. I think I’ll put a stop to it here.

I should do some writing, and pet the cat.

——

On a completely different tack, I see that Amazon has just decided to throw a bunch of money at a new series based on Lord of the Rings. In a lot of ways providers like Netflix and Amazon have been great for SFF ‘television’ (if that’s really what to call it at this point). I’m don’t know enough about the industry to completely understand why, but it’s clear that amazing new programming like Stranger Things and American Gods is increasingly finding a home in these types of places rather than on conventional TV. If nothing else, it’s wonderful for both fans and creators of fantastic stories to have another potential home for their work.

I really can’t say I understand the decision to do another LOTR thing though. There’s so many excellent fantasy (and SF, and horror) stories that have never been adapted at all that would be really fresh material for audiences to enjoy. I get that anything based on Tolkien is (theoretically) an easy sell, but I also wonder how much his fans are really dying for more when his most popular stuff has had still-pretty-recent and highly acclaimed movies done of it. There’s also the point that Tolkien’s work isn’t exactly starved for exposure, while there’s a lot of excellent writers out there who could both use and deserve a boost.

I mean I know there’s a lot of meat on the bone with Tolkien, and I do understand the marketing thing, and I’m sure it’s way way easier to get a million-dollar budget for a fantasy epic when you can throw that name on it rather than someone the execs have never heard of. I’m sure that in the end I’ll check it out and I hope it’s really good. We can always use more good fantasy. I guess I just think that Amazon might have been able to look a little farther afield and still produced an awesome epic fantasy series, if that’s what they wanted to do.

November. Melancholy and grumpy. I’ll have something in the way of tonal shift for you next week. Thanks for reading.