The Good: Steve really comes into his own here as a leader, even when little is to be gained by it. If there’s something I love about this series, it is its unflagging insistence that no one is disposable. Every bit of struggle against the common enemy is necessary. Every bit of betrayal is wrong. I just about applauded when one of the scientists suggests — from a very sound strategic basis — that they have to burn the infection out, and if it kills Will Byers, then he has to die. And Paul Reiser’s character just fixes him with a stare and says “Say that again.” I was almost expecting the Dr. to show his true, evil colors here. That he did not made me love the series even more.
The only reason anyone in this series is disposable is because they choose to be: to take the side of the evil for their own selfish reasons. Dustin comes perilously close to that, far closer than I think he realizes, by placing Dart’s welfare and his wish to impress Max at a higher level than the welfare of his friends. And Max, I think, sees this, and is quite understandably more attracted to Lucas, who took the chance to tell her the truth, regardless of how stupid it sounded. That Dustin tried to make these two violations of “Law” equivalent, shows that he really doesn’t understand at all.
Also, we finally see Will’s fear realized. Yes, the Thing inside him can spy through him and can compel him, although I really like that it can’t just access his memories, and it doesn’t really seem to have a handle on human behavior.
The Bad: While on some level the Thing would be able to spy through Will, it was awfully predictable that this would happen, and the betrayal is incredibly reminiscent of the fight on C-level in Aliens when most of the Colonial Marines get their faces eaten. If this was intended as homage, it really came off as unimaginative. It’s maddeningly unclear how vulnerable the Demodogs are to gunfire, and it feels very much like they are killed only at the speed of Plot.
Further Questions: Are they all going to die? And where is El??
Criticism
Words: Stranger Things 2, Episode 4 Microblog (Much Spoilers, Etc.)
The Good: From the beginning of this episode, what worried me was that Will was going to come back from his (well-meant but) ill-advised attempt to confront the Thing In The Upside Down as completely possessed. The fact that he did not was a great relief. Such a thing, making Will a possessed victim, would have been a bad choice for two reasons: firstly, it would have been far too easy. The possessed child trope has been overdone in horror because it’s a gut-wrenching paradox: the evil that is at the same time innocent. It’s sort of the opposite of the zombie trope: rather than the enemy you get to kill with no moral qualms, it’s an enemy you have to kill despite the moral horror of it. It’s a spiritual hostage crisis.
Secondly, Will’s role in the series up until now has been almost exclusively that of the victim, despite his attempts to survive. Giving “Will the Wise” the agency of spying on this “thing” is a way to make him truly a member of the party rather than its quest, and makes him a better character.
I’m also amazed at the way they handled Nancy and Jonathan’s plan to reveal the truth behind Hawkins Lab’s cover-up of Barb’s death. It’s becoming plainer that Paul Reiser’s character is not a reprise of Burke from Aliens, but rather a sensible man who is being as honest and kind as he can while at the same time being as deceptive and hard-nosed as he needs to be. Most series would portray anyone in government service as being evil by default, but once again, the writers refuse to take the easy way out. I love it.
The Bad: I have to admit that I found it really weird that, given the way Will is talking, his friends and family did not come to the conclusion that heating Will up, with or without his cooperation, would have been a good idea.
Also, Hopper not telling El the whole story about her Mother seemed to me rather gratuitously clueless.
But the worst part of the series is also showing up here because I find Dustin to be uncharacteristically dishonest and clueless about Dart for no real reason other than to build up tension. It’s the sort of cliché the series has done well to avoid: The Protagonist Keeps A Secret He Shouldn’t.
Further Questions: What will El find when she goes to see her mother? What will Nancy and Jonathan do with their knowledge. And most importantly, what is up with Max and her weird brother and why does he think it’s her fault that they are stuck here rather than in CA?
Words: Stranger Things 2, Episode 3 Microblog (Much Spoilers, Etc.)
The Good: Sigh. This episode, I thought, was about the weakest we’ve seen yet. The only good thing I can find to say about it is that it’s cool that Mom’s Boyfriend, Bob (played by Sean Astin) is actually an okay guy trying to do his best to be something resembling a father figure to his girlfriend’s obviously troubled son. Generally, this is what I like best about the series: I’ve always been a sucker for the ‘Okay, but what would it REALLY be like to be an ordinary person living through this bizarre plot’ stories.
The Bad: Except. Oh, except. This episode is pretty much a classic Idiot Plot. “Look, I found this mysterious thing in the trash like no other creature I’ve ever seen! A year after we did battle with a mysterious creature from The Dimension Of Eeeevils! I’m sure it’s just an undiscovered, COMPLETELY NORMAL species! Which I will now protect and lie to my friends about!” Aaargh. I mean, yes part of this is understandable because Dustin is about 12 and stupid (but I repeat myself) but really?
Further Questions: The only one is when (not if) keeping Dart will turn out to be a Big Mistake. Oh, and of course what has really happened to Will Byers when the Thing In The Visions grabs him?
Words: Stranger Things 2, Episode 2 Microblog (Much Spoilers, Etc.)
The Good: I think the thing I really loved about this episode was the humanity of the relationship between Steve and Nancy. It’s a classic case of people being truly out of their depth, and taking it out on one another. The guilt Nancy feels about her role in Barb’s death, having essentially shoved her lonely friend outside to be eaten by the Demogorgon is understandably significant, if misplaced. It’s not, after all, as though she knew (or could have known) that there was a Barb-eating monster around. Barb herself could have saved her life by just getting in her car and going home. But that’s the way people think. It’s tearing her up, and she wants to tell Barb’s parents (who are still looking for their daughter and spending their life savings doing so) the truth.
When she confronts Steve about this, he quite reasonably points out that talking about what they know is likely to a) get them in a lot of trouble with the government and b) not really help, because after all, what are they going to tell Barb’s parents? “We know your daughter’s dead because she was taken into a parallel dimension by a monster we both fought and our psychic friend who disappeared told us she died?” No parent with any sense would believe such a thing.
Factually, Steve is right. Emotionally, he’s completely wrong, but it’s expecting a lot of an 18 year-old to successfully navigate the right response to his traumatized 17 year-old girlfriend, just as it would be asking a lot of Nancy not to blame Steve for his unhelpfulness. Neither of them are bad people, but they are acting in a very human way, which destroys them as a couple when Nancy finally lets the blame out all over herself and Steve.
Also, it was good to get the backstory on how El ended up with Hopper.
The Bad: There wasn’t much bad about this, except for Hopper’s real lack of understanding what he’s doing to El by keeping her in a state of permanent cabin fever. But again, he’s dealing with his own shit, obsessed with saving a girl that he can to make up for the daughter he couldn’t.
Further Questions: Not many in this episode except for what is that thing Will keeps seeing that looks like Great Cthulhu?
The Cloverfield Paradox: A Fisking
So, I was actually optimistic when I saw the ad during the Super Bowl that Netflix had come out with another Cloverfield sequel. I personally regard the original Cloverfield as the best kaiju movie ever made, and although it was at best tenuously related, liked 10 Cloverfield Lane as well, because it was creepy as hell and John Goodman was the lead, so what’s not to like? The best part was that it left us with the extremely haunting question: what if being trapped by a paranoid survivalist homicidal rapist was only the second-worst thing that could happen to you?
Having been pleasantly surprised by the first two movies, I was hoping to be once again pleasantly surprised. Then I started watching. Five minutes in I wondered how they were going to save it. Five minutes after that, I came to the conclusion they weren’t going to. Five minutes after that, I knew I had to write about this. SO, this is my first ever fisking of a movie as I watch it. If I had the skills and time, I’d do a MST3K send-up, but I can’t, so here goes: a stream-of-consciousness series of my impressions of various “plot” points of the movie.
Premise: “The Earth will run out of “energy” in 5 years.”
Really? The water will all dry up? The wind will stop blowing? The sun will go out? ALL our energy will be gone? What’s that even mean? I suspect they mean oil, which would be bad, because we use that for so much more than energy. But seriously, the world will go back to dirty nuclear fission wholesale before we “run out of” some all-embracing “energy.”
Problem: “The only hope is the Shepard Particle Accelerator, which will solve All The Energy Problems Forevers if it works. But it doesn’t, and the Earth is fighting twenty minor oil wars, and are on the brink of WWIII over power sources.”
Dude, particle accelerators take power to run. They don’t ever give it back. They use up power and they give you data. But we’re doing this experiment up here in space because it’s dangerous. How do we know it’s dangerous?
Foreshadowing: “I’m an author who sounds exactly like L. Ron Hubbard if his cause had been ecologism instead of making up religions and I’m telling you that the Shepard will rip the Space Membrane, fuse dimensions and summon demons.”
Oh, no, they’ll rip the SPACE MEMBRANE!! And summon demons. And it will be horrifying. So… MORE than WWIII over energy between the world’s superpowers? Because, I think I’d honestly take my chances with the demons.
So, of course, we all know that this is exactly what will happen, because book-huckster paranoiac tells us so. That’s as creepy as if old L. Ron really were the Second Coming.
Communications Officer Hamilton (Main Character): “I am so depressed that this isn’t working and miss my husband and child that I am watching videos of that I shall lean against the side of my rotating habitat ring.”
Oh, well that’s… wait. You’re leaning against the side of a rotating deck? That would make it the floor! And, holy shit what is with this station? It’s three habitat rings, all of which spin, and which, themselves, are spinning about a central axis. So, your gravity is going to be varying wildly, all the time.
However, the real problem is, that this is the setup and we’re 30 minutes into the film, and all we’ve had is a montage of failed Shepard Accelerator tests, with all the characters looking more and more emo about it.
“We have a stable beam! It’s working! It’s working! It’s–”
BANG!
(glass shatters, things creak ominously, lights go down and come back up)
“They’re gone!”
“Mission Control?”
“The Earth!”
Crisis: Earth is indeed gone. And just to make sure that is in fact the case, Hamilton, our comm-officer hero decides to call her husband on her cell phone just in case, you know, that works when everything else does not.
At this point, I’m actually glad I’ve got the captions on, because as a bunch of crew are wandering about the station, there is:
<<Shrieking.>>
Well, if you say so. Sounds like the soundtrack was playing creepy riffs to me.
<<Shrieking Continues.>>
Dude, shrieking never started. The protagonists are literally hearing the soundtrack.
Plot Twist: They rip a panel off the wall and discover a Pale Mystery Woman impaled by a bunch of wires and things. They cut her loose and stabilize her.
In the middle of all this:
Random POV Shift!! We’re now back on Earth with The Husband. Who is a doctor or nurse or EMT or something. Scary Undefined Noises are Happening. That’s it.
Back up in Space
A Startling Discovery Is Made: The gyroscope for the station, which is inexplicably both a) detachable and b) handheld is missing. As are a bunch of worms, which were on the station for no definable reason. This prompts the following line:
“Without the gyro we’re lost.”
WITH the gyro you were lost. The planet you were in low orbit about just vanished.
Bonus point from me, however, for the following exchange:
“We’re not in Kentucky anymore.”
“Kansas.”
“Who gives a shit?”
“People from Kansas.”
General Creepiness: Now we are treated to what are supposed to be establishing shots of foosball players (of course they have foosball in space!) suggesting they are impaled victims, and which then start spinning as if possessed. Also, the Russian crewman is feeling inexplicable pains, and we see a long, eerie shot on a Russian matryoshka nesting doll: symbolism!!
The Plot Thickens: Now creepy possibly-possessed Russian dude has printed himself a gun. All in one piece. Including the magazine. And I guess the bullets, too. That’s amazing: he’s printing propellant AS WELL. But hey, they were 3D printing bagels earlier, maybe we just assume he can print molecules of whatever.
So, the Chinese and German Particle Accelerator specialists are hooked up. She speaks only Chinese. And she calls her boyfriend Schmidt?
Crisis: The Russian dude snaps. Holds gun on the German because he doesn’t like Germans. Then collapses due to Eerie Pain Syndrome.
American Commander’s reaction: “There’s a GUN?! How is there a GUN?!”
It was that easy to print one and you didn’t KNOW? The universe is falling apart around you, but oh, noes, a GUN! What will we DO!
Crisis: Aaaaaand 38 minutes in and they’ve resorted to recreating the chestburster sequence from Alien with the missing worms spraying from Russian dude’s mouth. That is officially the sign that you have created this film without a single original thought in your head. The only way this could be worse is if someone draws a lightsaber.
Plot Twist: Oh, Gods, Schmidt left a message in German saying he’s been sabotaging the whole mission. Said message is unlocked by the commander’s override in about 5 seconds. And then Schmidt claims he’s innocent.
Of course, given the dimension-bending that is happening, I’m sure he’s telling the truth. Which only means that there’s some dimension in which a professional agent is dumb enough to leave messages to his HQ on a server that the mission commander can spy on. I can only presume the same dimension produced the writer of this script.
Plot Twist/Crisis: The wall swallows crew member Mundy’s arm. They pull him out, but his arm is gone. Mysteriously, he feels no pain.
“It’s like he was born this way,” says the doctor, after examining him, as we can all clearly see the cut bone and muscle at the severed end, like an anatomical diagram.
Um, I’m married to a congenital amputee. I can assure you that if I can ever see her severed bone and muscle at the end of her shorter arm, we will both be concerned.
Creepy Plot Twist. They find the arm. Crawling on the deck by its fingers. They rush it to the infirmary. It starts making writing motions. They give it a pen. It tells them to cut the Russian’s body open.
So, there’s another dimension in which Mundy knows everything going on in this dimension and is sending messages to it via his arm that is trapped in this dimension to save the people here because they’ve figured out everything? Including where their dude’s arm went?
And I just noticed that the Chinese officer is wearing Starfleet insignia.
So they cut open the Russian and find… the missing gyro! They can find where they are, now! “It’s Cassiopeia! It’s upside-down! WE’RE upside-down!”
Oh. Gods. Someone who works in SPACE just in all seriousness uttered the line “We’re upside down!” And further USED this to conclude that the station has been moved to 180 degrees around the Earth’s orbit from the Sun. Because THAT logically follows. That makes about as much sense as my wife and I having the following conversation*:
My wife: “My keys aren’t where I left them.”
Me: “CHECK THE REFRIGERATOR!”
*Not an actual conversation in my house
Plot Twist: There’s the Earth, all right! Apparently the Sun has been there the whole time. Not ONE person on the station realized this or has been trained to shoot the stars? Find the plane of the ecliptic? Basic celestial navigation?
Oh, and it’s Earth in Pale Crewmember’s dimension. Where the station broke up and was destroyed.
Wait, then who was controlling that arm? <Drinks>
Back on Earth (the real one):
These interludes seem to serve literally no purpose other than to get a kid in here with the husband, who assures the kid he’s rescued that “good people will get us out of this.”
“We’re gonna need a lot of good people,” says the kid.
And a bigger boat. <Drinks.>
And where the hell did this guy find a fully-stocked bomb shelter? That has cell reception?
The Protagonists’ Plan: They will fire the Accelerator AGAIN. To get them home. Which will obviously work because that’s what got them here!
Sure, because I always say, if you’ve blown yourself up once playing with chemicals you don’t understand, the best thing you can do is re-mix them up and blow yourself up again!
Jensen, the Pale Mysterious Woman who is The Crew From The Other Dimension learns of this and says: “If you succeed, I’ll be trapped in your dimension.”
Um, why? We’ve already taken it on faith that because it got us and you here, it will get us home. Shouldn’t it magically put you back, too? Granted, it took you from a corridor, and embedded you in a wall, so to be safe, we’d better embed you in a wall before we fire this sucker up.
Crisis: The Chinese crewmember is drowning in an airlock! In SPACE! Because moisture ventilation or something! The airlock is jammed and they can’t get her out. The pressure is forcing the outer door open and…
Oh, gods. The water flash-freezes in the airlock because someone thinks SPACE IS COLD!
Commander: “We need to fix the Shepard and get home!”
Thanks, Captain Obvious! That’s been your plan for an hour now.
Here, Pale Crewmember from Other Dimension: have some clothes.
Sorry, they were for plot-relevant characters only.
Plot Twist: Pale Crewmember reveals that Hamilton’s dead children (wait, WHAT??) are still alive in her dimension. Tragic Backstory Plot Coupon!
And before we try to flip ourselves back into our proper dimension, we’re gonna use escape pods to get to a planet that is now 180+ million miles away from a station that all the people in this dimension believe is dead. Good luck with that!
Oh, I can’t take it any more. The station is falling apart. Another crewmember is strangled by possessed pipe-sealing putty (I swear I am not making this plot up!), and they have to jump between parts of the space station to detach the damaged parts in what is obviously a full gee of gravity.
Oh, no. Jensen has the gun. Literally, how does Jensen know about the gun? She was in the infirmary getting wires cut out of her.
The severed arm is bored. It’s drumming its fingers in its cage.
Yay! We get the station home and the POWER SUPPLY WORKS! On the last possible try! It’s working! HU-MANATEE IS SAVEDED!!!
So we’re gonna leave the accelerator unmanned and come home.
Where everyone is dying of kaiju. Because continuity.
The End
<Drinks>
Finding Your Religion: Some Thoughts On Creating Spec-Fiction Religions
I’ve been a follower of Christ and a science-fiction and fantasy writer for roughly the same amount of time, although I hope I’ve been a better Christian than I have been a writer (after all, I still haven’t sold a whole book!) A long time ago at Wiscon, I introduced, while on a panel on religion in fantasy, the ideas of Demand and Consequence. Roughly, I said that a religion’s Demand was measured by what actions a person must take to please the Divine, while the Consequence is what happens as a result of pleasing or angering the Divine. So, for example, Orthodox Judaism would be a fairly high-Demand religion. You follow all the laws. You observe the Sabbaths. You minimize your associations with outsiders. My own religion, Christianity, would be high-Consequence, possibly the highest: eternal paradise or eternal damnation, and you only get one shot at it.
(Of course it would go without saying that individual followers might perceive this spectrum very differently. I do know those who claim to be Christian who deny the existence of Hell, despite scriptural statements to the contrary, and would expect to find similar differences of theology in all major, and probably most minor, faiths.)
But it has recently occurred to me that the concept of Demand needs some work. After all, is Christianity high, or low-Demand? Jesus says that “if any man come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” That’s about the hardest thing that can be demanded, but most of us do not get martyred for Christ. Even many of the Catholic saints didn’t. On the other hand, Jesus also says that God will forgive any sin, for the asking. So it occurs to me that we need another quality to measure, between Demand and Consequence. What is the cost to a person to make up for failing the demand? I will call this quality Penance. Christianity, so far, would be a High-Demand, Low-Penance, High-Consequence religion.
But the different religions might also be considered in terms of what consequence simply not following the religion. I shall call this quality Allegiance. Christianity and Islam would be high-Allegiance religions. Not belonging to them is interpreted as a rejection of God. Buddhism, however, would be low-allegiance. Your actions are what make you enlightened or not, regardless of whether you’re actually “believing in” the Buddha or his theology.
On the Consequence side of things, there are also difficulties to work out. For one thing, Consequence may be perceived radically differently by those in different cultures or simply by different individuals. To me, Hinduism appears to be a fairly low-consequence religion. After all, if you believe in reincarnation, and you fail the demands of your religion in this life, you can always try again. However, given that fundamentalist Hindus are even now engaged in persecuting Muslims and Christians in India, I am going to have to assume that I am missing some vital piece of this religion, at least to some of its followers.
More crucially, though, the idea of Hinduism raises another point: does the religion teach that souls have multiple earthly lives, or one? That matters greatly to Consequence, enough so that perhaps a religion should be classed as a Repeating or Non-Repeating religion.
Another thing that considering Hinduism brings up is its habit of syncretism, or adopting the practices and prophets of other faiths. Hinduism, the ancient Greek faith, and Baha’i would be examples of faiths that tend toward syncretism, while the Abrahamic faiths specifically forbid it.
Finally, another quality that should be included is what I might call Zeal. How much pressure do followers of the religion find themselves under to spread the faith, and make others abide by its tenets?
So far, I have kept my examples restricted to real-world religions, and have only done so in a limited fashion. While you could use these scales to quantify and compare real-world religions, I don’t think that’s very useful, and would likely lead to a whole lot of acrimonious debate around the details that the devil is in.
But I think that as we examine SF-nal and Fantasy faiths that it’s interesting to look at some of the contrasts that show up.
One of my favorite Fantasy religions is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Quinatarianism (along with its Quadrene heresy). Quintarianism is Low-demand and low-consequence. It’s possible to offend the gods, but you really have to work at it. Damnation isn’t so much Hell as being condemned to fade into nothingness as a ghost. Low-penance and low-allegiance follow from the low-demand, here. It’s a non-repeating religion that is non-syncretistic. It’s zeal is fairly moderate. The Quadrenes are about the same but with much higher zeal, but this is understandable, since the major point of contention is whether the “fifth god” of the Quintarians is in fact a god or a demon lord. The Quadrenes believe that the Quintarians are devil worshipers, and since demons CAN be proven to exist in this world, their fear is somewhat justified. Quintarianism and Quadrenism feel like fully thought-out religions, with developed theologies, that assume their followers are more or less ordinarily reasonable people.
By contrast, we have Robert Jordan’s Children of the Light. This religion is Low-demand (there don’t seem to be any commandments of the Light) seemingly Low-consequence and Low-Allegiance, or at least no spiritual penalty is ever described for violating or ignoring the Light. It’s a repeating religion, but non-syncretistic. However, it’s incredibly high Zeal, as the Children of the Light have been for centuries trying to spread their faith and subdue their enemies (and have apparently succeeded only in taking over a nation about the size of Belgium). And so we are left with the question of why the zeal is so high. The Children are portrayed as essentially religious bigots who merely think themselves morally superior to everyone. And thus it feels as though this is merely the author’s own dislike of the overtly religious. Heinlein’s approach to the Martian language felt very similar in A Stranger In A Strange Land, when Michael Valentine Smith overturns all human religion by introducing the Martian language as the ultimate spiritual principle: (Low-demand, high-consequence, low-zeal, syncretistic and low-allegiance) Heinlein disliked existing religions, and invented one he, and many readers of the time, liked, which as a bonus, was absolutely provable.
My only conclusion from all this is that to create a real-feeling religion, the elements must be balanced coherently. Why, for example, have a high-zeal religion when there is low demand, consequence, and allegiance? But it raises some interesting questions for me as a writer. Like Heinlein, most authors today prefer to cast their religions as low-demand, low-consequence, low-zeal, and low-allegiance, to avoid the charge of religious bigotry. But if the religion is worth following, like Heinlein’s, the consequence HAS to be at least PERCEIVED as high at some point, or why does it succeed? Hinduism and Buddhism may be low-consequence in comparison with, say, Islam, but only in comparison, otherwise, why would people devote their lives to them? Also, is it possible to create a high-consequence, high-zeal religion that doesn’t feel like bigotry? Bujold portrays the Quadrenes as bigots and inquisitors, and yet, if they are right, their Quintarian foes are actively helping demons eat souls in the guise of piety. If true, that would be monstrous, and the Quadrenes would be the heroes. Could this be done in earnest, or is it impossible? It is a question that interests me, and I look forward to authors capable of taking up the challenge, even as I seek to do so myself.
Words: Stranger Things 2, Episode 1 Microblog (Much Spoilers, Many Wow)
So, I’m going to take some time to talk about each Episode of Stranger Things Season 2 as I remember watching it, discussing some of the techniques from a writer’s and a viewer’s point-of-view.
The Good Stuff: In the last season’s finale, the fate of El was left very open-ended. We are unsure if she has died killing the Demogorgon or not. As an aside, I hated that El appeared to die. I reserved judgment on it, but it was one of the very few times I felt like this series dived into cliché really hard: young lovers admit their love for one another just in time for her (and it is always her) to die.
That said, I really appreciate that the series showed us El’s survival from the first, and didn’t try to extend the cliffhanger. Extended cliffhangers have become a form of literary torture in genre-fiction for the last twenty years (I’m looking at you, ghost of Robert Jordan) and I am sick to death of it.
Another thing that was left up in the air was Will Byers’ fate. Was he really unaware of his flashes into the upside down? Was that really Will Byers in that body? The answer to both of these questions was clearly revealed (No, and yes) with Hopper and Will’s mom, and Will acting like rational, but terribly confused human beings. As they should be. The series brilliantly continues to straddle the line between whether Will’s visions are flashbacks or real. Bringing up the horribly enticing question: how would you know?
The Bad Stuff: The new Lab Director seems very reluctant to even reassure Hopper that he takes his suspicions of leakage seriously. This just comes off as obtuse.
Further Questions Introduced: Is the new Lab Director really any improvement on Brenner? Or is he just more subtly evil? What is the story behind Max and her brother the new Keg King? Are they as much of a part of what’s going on at Hawkins as the mysterious “8” we see in the prelude?
Words: Stranger Things (Lots Of Spoilers), Part II
So, yesterday, I talked a lot about why I liked Stranger Things. Now we come to some of my criticisms of the show. None of these spoiled my enjoyment of the show as such, but here we go:
Minor Idiot Plots: So I have to modify what I said earlier. There are a few minor instances of the Idiot Plot. The subvariant, in this case, is People Don’t Tell Each Other They Know Things: Jonathan doesn’t tell Mom he’s figured out that she’s seeing and hearing real things, and when Nancy very reasonably asks if they shouldn’t tell her, says something like, “No, she’s been through enough.” Well, yes, and a very large part of all she’s been through is nobody believing her. It should be obvious to anyone that telling Joyce she’s not crazy is the best thing you could do for the poor woman.
Toxic Atmosphere: This is one of those writing moments that truly baffles me, because there was absolutely no reason for it. When Hopper and Joyce are prepared for their trip into the Upside Down, Evil Dr. Brenner tells them the atmosphere is toxic. Um, no. Will has survived there for something like three or four days. I’m assuming he found water somewhere, because he’d be in a lot of trouble if he didn’t. He probably didn’t find food, but he wouldn’t die in four days. Hypothermia would be a bigger problem, but there’s probably a temperature cold enough to be uncomfortable but not cold enough to kill. But breathing a toxic atmosphere? For four DAYS? Or even three? Really dumb. I can only assume that the writers did this so they had a reason to show everyone getting dressed up in those scary, scary HAZMAT suits. Which frankly, was pants-on-head idiotic, as the risk of catching a disease from an entirely alien biosphere would have been enough to justify that.
The Creature: I think, for me, the development of the Creature (Demogorgon) was one of the most irritating things, because it was an example of a) a mistake I typically see from new writers, not professionals, and b) it would have been very easy to solve. Here was the basic problem: The writers wanted to give Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve a victory over the Creature. The writers also wanted to make the Creature something that only El could defeat. Something, to be exact, that El would have to apparently die to kill, because it would be immune to Human weapons. And the writers also wanted it to kill Brenner the Evil Scientist.
You can easily see what they did, and I used to make this mistake as a new writer, and I’ve seen new writers make that mistake many times: they wanted their Creature to have mutually contradictory qualities, and they tried to make that work. The result was that we have a Creature that is banished back to the Upside Down by kids armed with a spiked bat, a pistol, a bear trap, and some fire, but an episode later shrugs off hundreds of rounds of assault rifle fire at point-blank range like they were Super Soakers.
Now, the solution to this was pioneered as far back as Beowulf. All you needed was for Nancy, Jonathan and Steve to kill Grendel, and then have that draw the attention of bigger, badder Grendel’s Mom. This would have necessitated a bit of explanation, but certainly nothing too difficult.
Words: Stranger Things (Lots of Spoilers)
I’ve decided to take some time to write about Stranger Things, the second season of which I am currently in the middle of watching. Today, I’m going to take the time to talk about what hooked me into the series’ first season and made me love it. Later, I’ll be talking about the flaws I see in it, and if I have time, I may start examining the episodes as i watch them. This is by way of being an experiment, and who knows: it may spark a conversation.
I’m going to have to say first off that one of the things that really draws me to this series is the setting: for a geeky/nerdy kid who grew up in the eighties and was almost the same age as these kids (Actually, I’d have been about three or four grades behind them), this is a wonderful series. It reminds me of Stand By Me if that had been one of Stephen King’s supernatural thrillers, rather than a coming-of-age story of dealing with the mundane evils of the world. And I loved Stand By Me. Actually, Stranger Things feels to me like someone asked themselves what Stand By Me would be like if you mashed it up with IT. But it has an innocence that has never been part of King’s writing. However, I can’t really talk about the feel with any critical value. You either like it or you don’t. I will say that it fits with my memories of what the eighties were like exactly. So on to the things I feel are actually worthy of analysis:
The characters aren’t idiots. Everyone passably familiar with the horror/thriller genre knows about knows that the easiest way for the characters to get themselves in trouble is to do incredibly stupid things. “Let’s chant the ritual in Latin! What could go wrong?” “The monster is after us! Let’s hide in the basement of the deserted farmhouse! It will never look there!”
By contrast, the characters in Stranger Things are observant, and yes, they take a lot of time to catch up with what we know to be true, but that is part of the horror element. Joyce is experiencing things that are very similar to things a grief-crazed mother might experience. She has proof that Will is alive, but it’s not proof she can show to anyone. Gradually, the other characters acquire similar proofs that demand they trust one another and allow them to take action.
Even the Evil Scientist isn’t stupid. Sure, he’s cruel and unethical as hell. But when his experiment succeeds in a direction he never guessed, he does something that is eminently reasonable: he tries to make peaceful contact with the alien species he has discovered. He is of course horrifically wrong to do this, but that’s not something he could have reasonably known.
The characters are flawed. All the characters we get to know are victims of their emotional flaws. Joyce was already a bit crazed about her responsibilities before Will disappeared, which makes it difficult for people to trust her. El deceives her new friends because she wants to keep them safe, rather than honestly balking them. And Mike and Lucas are each strong-willed enough about their own desires to lead the party in their own ways that they end up breaking it, nearly fatally.
Even the most flawed characters are redeemable. Steve Harrington and Nancy are pretty much typically selfish teenagers driven by their own desires and peer pressure. Jonathan, Will’s brother, becomes a stalker in lieu of any productive social life. Yet Nancy and Jonathan rise above their extremely bad beginning to become allies, and even Steve, who starts out as a quintessential cowardly asshole, redeems himself with a fair amount of courage, which costs him both physically and socially.
Well, that’s all for now. Tomorrow I’ll nitpick some of the flaws.
Worlds: Stupid Sci-Fi Film Tricks, The Expanse Edition
SPOILER ALERT for Season 1 of The Expanse if it’s on your “to watch” list.
Are you effing kidding me, The Expanse? I mean, are you effing kidding me?
Here we have a show that most people I know in SF have been raving about, I mean, absolutely raving about for the last couple of years. So I finally decided to use my Amazon Free Prime trial and binge-watch a few episodes.
And it looks good. Man does it look good. Really, the only problem I have with it from a science perspective is I think that it VASTLY underestimates what happens to things and people when a hole is knocked into an Earth-pressure cabin in hard vacuum, but I’m pretty willing to let that slide, on the large scale of things. That’s like complaining about lasers being visible in space combat. Of course they wouldn’t be, but the Rule Of Cool, well, rules.
So, for the first six episodes, I just sat back and enjoyed the SFX, the dialogue, the action, and the whole ride. So, the Earth UN controls Ceres, capital of the Asteroid Belt, by rationing its air and water. Mars, an independent state, also hungers to control Ceres, and the Belters just want to breathe and drink and not die. There’s a Free the Belt movement, headed up by a freedom-fighter/terrorist organization called the OPA, and of course Earth Cops on Ceres try to keep these terrorists down.
As our story opens, one of our protagonists is an Earth Cop chasing an Earth heiress who sympathized with the OPA and who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. We find she has something to do with a freighter set up as bait to lure in an innocent rescue ship that is then attacked by parties unknown with evidence pointing to Mars, apparently with the goal of starting a war. Earth Cop finds more and more evidence tying missing heiress to a raid on a supersecret Martian research base.
And then, episode 7. Oh, gods….
So Earth Cop figures out that heiress was an agent of the OPA Maximum Leader, and assembles the evidence, bringing it straight to his boss… who promptly wipes his files, revokes his access codes and fires him. He figures out she’s in Maximum Leader’s pocket, and as he storms out, the camera focuses in on boss’s neck, where she is sporting an OPA tattoo.
Get that? The OPA’s paid agent, the chief of the Earth Cops in the Belt, is wearing a terrorist tattoo in plain sight, advertising her allegiance. Among detectives. And we’re supposed to believe that somehow, no one noticed this. I mean, this is like a U.S. Naval officer showing up for duty on his ballistic missile submarine in 1985 sporting a hammer-and-sickle tattoo on his wrist. You think someone might ask questions?
And the hell of it is, it’s completely unnecessary. I mean, I believed she could have been a mole. But no one in the solar system would be such a stupid mole and survive more than a month. It drives me nuts when filmmakers feel obligated to underline visually what’s happening for us as though we are too dumb to understand words and to imagine likely consequences of such actions. Stop it.
From Somewhere In Orbit
G. Scott Huggins 