This Is Where They Lost Me

Oh Fringe… how I’ve grown to enjoy thee. When you first came around, everyone said “It’s X-Files for a new generation!” but it’s so much more character-centric and less mystery-centric than X-Files, and it took me a while to warm up to the cast. Which is kind of important when it’s all about them.

Now that it’s grown on me and I enjoy most episodes (they’re not all gems, but most are good), they finally get lazy enough to warrant a TIWTLM post.

The suspense leading up to Peter finding out he’s from the other side has been cool. Couple close calls, near misses on accidentally finding out, but when Peter ‘figures it out’, the logic behind his conclusion and his reaction just don’t lay well with me. The character isn’t always the most objective and rational, BUT he loves the man he believes is his father and it seems odd that he’d reject him so quickly after being his son for decades. So being a lifelong adopted father and being genetically identical to his real father, it seems like it would take a LOT for him to reject Walter so thoroughly, even standing on the highest moral grounds.

And how did he come to the conclusion that he was from the other side? Because someone he saw, obviously from the other universe, wasn’t torn apart and HE wasn’t torn apart. Seems like ‘luck’ on his part and ‘planning’ on the part of the guy who was doing it intentionally might have more to do with it than being from the other universe. I mean, Walter traveled to the other universe to get Peter. If Peter was under the assumption that Walter hadn’t gone over, just opened a window, then suddenly decided he HAD gone over and snatched Peter (maybe he thinks Walter used a long pair of tongs or something), then the premise that only people from the other universe can pass safely, is erroneous.

And with what looks like 2 episodes left in season two, it looks like next week is a complete punt. I don’t mind non-standard episodes from time to time, they can be fun. X-Files had plenty of them over the years, but not as a way of either avoiding or artificially drawing out the drama. All that does is make fans go “But..but.. what about Peter? You’re just going to ignore that???”

So for the last episode, we have Peter’s hissy fit and Spock’s arrival in their universe to deal with. My prediction is a bunch of Peter drama, a light peppering of side drama, then a closing shot of Spock setting up a dramatic cliffhanger for next season.

Oh Fringe.. you still satisfy my need for federal agent oriented sci-fi, but you either need to give your writers more vacation.. or less. You have so many odds and ends dangling that it’s too easy to just fall completely to tatters story-wise and that’s when you really start losing viewers.

There’s no doubting that BSG became a phenomena.  It seems as popular and has as many rabid fans as anything Joss Whedon ever created.  That’s great.  I’m happy when things do well, especially in genres I enjoy and if it makes people happy, more power to everyone.

I got into BSG late and really only watched maybe four episodes, all said, but it never really hooked me.  The space fights looked cool, but despite liking some of the actors cast in the show, I really disliked all the characters, the constant shaky cam (MTV or first season ST:TNG anyone?) and I couldn’t quite figure out why.

So the two hour pilot for Caprica was on recently and I thought “hey, here’s a chance to get in on the ground floor and get invested in what’s going to be the next big step in the BSG franchise.”  What I ended up seeing was confirmation that I really dislike BSG and I’m going to dislike Caprica as well.

I would say that this isn’t necessarily a “this is where they lost me” qualifier because usually I’d say that would be reserved for otherwise great shows (or shows I enjoy, at least) that pulled a WTF or two.. or were just about to jump the shark.  But since this is all subjective and it’s all about ME ME ME! and where *I* got lost, I figured this qualifies.  So don’t count this so much as a wakeup call to the TV producers that they could be losing audience to bad writing/directing as a general statement about what doesn’t work.. for me.. in these two series.  They’re obviously popular, so Caprica/BSG fans need not read any further.  People who have watched these shows and can’t quite pin down what’s wrong with them, or people who may think about watching these shows who want a glimpse into what they’re getting, please continue.

So with BSG, I wasn’t sure what I didn’t like, but I figured I just didn’t know the characters well enough and didn’t get into the intrigue of it all because I had no investment that would have made the situations make any sense or give any dramatic weight to them.  After watching Caprica, a prequal and supposedly “accessible to non-BSG fans with plenty of easter eggs that fans will squee over”, I see what it is that I dislike about both series.

The common element in both is the complete unrelatability the characters have.  The main, human, characters are as fake and unhuman as the cylons.  The reason I loved BSG growing up is because the cylons were ROBOTS.  Not human-looking robots like a scifi series that doesn’t have a costume or CGI budget!  Would Knight Rider (burlesque or not?) have been as good if KITT had been a guy sitting in the passenger seat and NOT a talking car?  It’s like watching events unfold through an inch thick frosted glass.  You can see what’s going on, but it’s distant and unreachable.  And since this is uniform in both series and through all the actors in the series (not just a handful of bad actors who you just can’t “buy into”), I think this effect falls completely on the director and maybe a little on the writing.

Now, admittedly, I’m not a big fan of deep hardcore drama.  I watch “House“, which has won numerous awards in various drama related categories, but I wouldn’t call it a drama.  I think it has many dramatic elements that drive the story and people who are prone to irrational super-empathy, may get drawn in by these dramatic elements, but I wouldn’t count it as a drama.  Anyway, that’s probably the closest I get to liking a ‘drama’.  Caprica/BSG are pure drama driven.  If you took away the special effects and changed the story just a little, it could easily be another “As the World Turns“, just with slightly better story lines (and a finite television run.. none of that 30 years of rehashing the same tired plot twists).

With Caprica, specifically, I found it almost distracting and forced how often they threw “bleeding-edge-technology++” in our faces.  That is, the tech they were showing off and the discussions of technology they were having were all things we’re currently working on (but still a few years out), just taken one step further, to enhance that near-future feel for us techies who are aware of how close some of what they’re talking about are.  It was like they were trying to prove how young and connected they were to be aware of all this stuff.  I love future concept stuff and love seeing people’s ideas for where technology is heading, but this wasn’t that.  There was nothing original or inspiring about what they were showing.  It just looks like concepts from someone who reads too much Wired and Boing Boing and cobbled together concepts from their RSS feed.  Those are great periodicals and websites, but reading their stories and twisting the ideas a little is a far cry from original thought and extrapolating what a realistic future tech is going to be like.  I was almost a little embarrassed for it like when you go back and read those predictions for the future written decades ago and see how wrong they are.

Another thing that drove me crazy with BSG (at least in what little I saw and played a big part in advertising the show and some of the specials) was the gratuitous substitution of fake words for swear words.   I could go my entire life without hearing the word “frak” again.  It was cute/amusing and added a little bit to the show when “Farscape” did it YEARS ago, but it wasn’t overused.  Even the little I saw of BSG and, like I said, the promos for the show and the specials, the word “frak” was used SO MUCH it was frelling retarded.  I’d rather see decent writing be executed with other words, TV safe words, or even censor beeps, than substitute nonsense words and have to listen to fans repeating it.   Even Oxhorn, in his “Inventing Swear Words” series, understands it’s retarded and rediculous and does it BECAUSE it’s retarded and rediculous.  It has no place in a hardcore drama.

Anyway, once again the casting is great, but like with BSG, the heavy drama, unrelatable characters and inaccessibility of the world in general keeps me at a distance and I can’t find any way to enjoy it.  This is dumb scifi trying to pretend it’s smart.  It’s soap opera for teenagers with fancy window dressing to masquerade as science fiction.  Which, honestly, is what Joss Whedon did with Buffy and Firefly (except Buffy was horror, not scifi), but he did it with humor and style and you were actually allowed to LIKE the characters.  They seem to be human, not as fake as a cylon.  Wasn’t the point in Caprica/BSG that the cylons were made to be like humans, not the other way around?

Bonus: Remember when I mentioned KITT as a human passenger and not the car?  Here’s a little taste.  William Daniels, who did the voice for KITT, actually appeared in an episode of Galactica 80 (where the original BSG meets 1980′s earth).  ‘KITT’ is the guy dressed as a clown.  You get a great taste of the ‘KITT’ voice around 2:45.  Thanks to TheWilliamDanielsFan for posting this.  It blew my mind when I stumbled across it on Syfy (then, ‘Sci-Fi’) one day:

Sookie can’t follow simple instructions.

Bill used to seem powerful, but now he’s just some nerd everyone picks on.  Even the queen talks ‘contemporary’ while Bill is stuck in the past.  Vampire nerd FTW.

Jason watches too much TV/bad movies and couldn’t fake his way through Christianity 101.

Things ‘will themselves’ into existence.  Whatever they believe hard enough, happens.  This opens the floodgates for just about any retarded delusion.  Next season, expect to see Steve and Sarah Newlin become real angels and start blowing Gabriel’s horn to bring God’s wrath down upon the vampires.

Sam needs to watch more ‘Teen Titans’ and learn to transform into a rhino or a T-Rex or something f’in useful.  And horns apparently turn into arms when he shifts back.

And the biggest lesson of all..  what caught our attention as an intriguing, uncensored (thanks HBO!) gothic fantasy drama is really nothing than an overbudgeted, overly complex soap opera that’s trying too hard to be ‘legit’.   Nothing worse than a porno that attempts to have a story line.

My prediction is that this is about as good as it gets.  Season 2 has started a downward slide where whatever talent made season 1 so good probably has enough sense to have moved on to more reputable projects… rats know when a ship is going down.  I think Season 3 is going to be tamer (at least not with one giant, town engulfing, story line) but is going to try to throw every hokey supernatural gimmick at the viewer in the hopes that, as quoted about supporters and detractors of the Howard Stern show, “we just want to see what’s going to happen next”, without any regard to whether it has any substance or value to add to this fantasy universe.

I watch a lot of TV shows and movies and while I let a lot of things go, I also enjoy when things make some kind of logical sense and flow nicely within the canon the creators laid out for us. But as shows get older or sequels roll out, sometimes things just start falling apart.

One term for this is “jumping the shark”, named after the now-infamous episode of Happy Days where Fonzie jumps a pool full of sharks on his motorcycle. This is the pivotal point in a TV show’s run where it has turned a bad corner and there’s no going back.

But sometimes good shows just have bad episodes. They don’t necessarily “jump the shark”, but just serve up a nugget that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of real fans. Maybe one of the stars decides to try their hand at writing and/or directing, maybe there’s a writer’s strike, who knows… it can happen for many reason. Hell, maybe the geniuses just had a bad day or got behind on their work and pull some tired ass premise out of their ass and basically ‘punted’ that week.

Whatever the reason, it happens to almost every show that’s not a sitcom. Sitcoms are nearly immune to this situation, since it can usually be dismissed as just a new, hilarious, situation.

I’m not going back over everything I’ve seen recently, but just a few that come to mind:

Heroes, season 4

When Peter borrows the Haitian’s powers to fight Sylar. He gets Nathan to re-emerge, but how the hell does he negate all of Sylar’s powers EXCEPT the polymorphism that allows Nathan to show through? Is that just supposed to be metaphorical? Like he still looked like Sylar, but was talking as Nathan? Then why did they do that shimmering face thing? And then Nathan jumps off the building.. and Peter lets him… knowing full well that as soon as he’s outside of Peter’s power’s range, he turns back into Sylar, with healing ability and all? Totally weak.

True Blood, season 2

When the Stackhouse’s return to Bon Temps and everything’s a mess and Jason says he’s going into town to deal with it all, like a one-man army, it’s like a scene from from Red Dawn. I expect a little more from True Blood after season 1.

Bill has become a lot weaker too. I know there are more powerful vampires, but pretty much everyone has bitch slapped Bill into submission at some point or another.

And Sukie’s Sookie’s “cute country girl” thing is turning into “holy crap she’s dump as a stick and is more trouble than she’s worth”.

My last gripe about True Blood, and maybe this was different in the books (but we’re not talking books here), is that season 2 seems to be more intent on pulling out all the stops and just throwing every gimmick at the viewers as possible.  Why not go at least two seasons just focusing on the humans, vampires, maybe a little shapeshifter action.  Why bring in multiple shapeshifters (with multiple forms), a ‘maenad’ taking over the whole town, another mind reader, The Fellowship of the Sun, vampire politics, etc.   It’s like they don’t think they’re getting a third season, so they’re just going over the top in a desperate bid to get people’s attention.   What do they plan for season 3?  Seizure inducing plot switches?  The whole pantheon of mythological creatures all at once?   You can’t really go full bore then go back to plain old vampire stuff.   Season 2 should have been more character development, history, maybe the Fellowship of the Sun as an antagonist.  In this case, I think jumping the shark may be an appropriate call.

I may not post a lot… with any luck, the stupidity won’t be too thick, but there’s bound to be plenty to rant about in the future.