Of Foxes, Whedons, and agents on the inside

I have been watching Dollhouse at a remarkable pace. Halfway into the second season (or 3/4 through what would have been a regular season of another show) I come to a question that has been asked many times before.

Why would Fox keep cancelling Joss Whedon's series?* I have heard the theories. The suits at Fox are idiots, the common theory runs. With Firefly, and then Dollhouse, their increasingly atrophied senses of taste responded to masterful storytelling as the deepest of cave fungi respond to the light of the sun. It was terrible and incomprehensible to them, so they sought to extinguish it.

Well, that theodicy satisfies some geeks, but in my paranoid ramblings I've come to a theory of my own. And I'm going to lay it on you after the jump.

Warning: This is probably going to contain vague spoilers for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Serenity, and the first season of Dollhouse. But then, if I'm right, it could contain spoilers for everything.

Cyborg zombies are still the best cyborgs, and the best zombies

I feel like I should apologize for last week's weaksauce post. I've actually felt a little guilty about every non-robot pageview I've gotten this week; I'm sad because I disappointed all the humans and wasted their time. Not that I should get into the habit of apologizing to the internet.

As I said before, I've gotten back to watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven't been exercising the kind of arc discipline that I would have used watching Buffy or The Walking Dead, but ST:TNG doesn't enforce that kind of linearity the same way, either. It's actually kind of weird going back to an older show like this, after watching so many more recent dramas driven by season-long plot arcs, and find it of little consequence what order I watch the episodes in. The show's cozy status quo is as quaint as its 4:3 aspect ratio.

We skipped to Season 2, and skipped some of the lamer episodes there (though we blundered headlong into The Child, perhaps the lamest episode of them all!), and then on a whim jumped a season from the Borg's first appearance to "Best of Both Worlds."

It was interesting to watch the show face down futility, in light of the bleak, modern fare I've been watching. The relentless pressure of the apocalypse makes for good television, but not varied television. When TNG put the human race in danger, or seriously threatened a main character's life, it was special. (Though it occurred to me that if Joss Whedon had been at the helm, he would have had Jonathan Frakes re-record "Space... the final frontier" for Part 2.) TNG may only have visited the place where Battlestar Galactica lived, but I appropriately get the sense of the Enterprise actually flying around the galaxy from one kind of adventure to another.

I loved the Borg as a villain when I was young, and the way they were on TNG will always be the way they "really" are to me--before the Borg Queen deflated the ominous hivemind, before they got demystified and played out and tenderized. Looking back, it's actually interesting to see how much of what defined them wasn't there in their first appearance in "Q Who?" The words "Resistance is futile" were yet to be uttered. Assimilation was not mentioned or hinted at--I didn't even realize until Girlfriend pointed it out, but when [spoilers], that's actually the first indication that they have that ability. It makes me wonder if the writers knew what they had back in Season 2, or if they even had it, or if they only came up with the most important elements later.

The contrast between "Q Who?" and "Best of Both Worlds" is informative. Perhaps most importantly, the former spends about half its time telling us how scared we should be of the Borg. The latter spends its time better by having them do progressively scarier things, and giving the characters some time to be scared. It's a lesson I hope I can remember if I ever have as good an idea to work with.

A deed without a name?

I have the vague feeling I may have blogged about this before.

I'm plowing ahead through Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, getting into the late-series arcs that I expected to have a hard time taking seriously--and not having a hard time taking them seriously. I suppose I don't actually need to get into spoilers to make this point. Suffice it to say that the things that happen in later seasons sound pretty implausible based on what you know about the characters in the early seasons. They make sense because characters change over time.

Characters have to change if you want the story to be taken seriously, not least because people actually do change. (Of course if you want your story not to be taken seriously, characters who never evolve are a good way to do it. Take, for example, the legendary intransigents of Seinfeld.)

What strikes me about Buffy is that in later seasons the writers seem to be aware of the things that keep happening to the characters, and the characters internalize them. (If not all of the character change in Buffy is gradual or realistic, that's a separate issue.) In real life, if a person you knew kept having vampire-related relationship problems, you might realize over time that that person had issues with vampires and/or intimacy. Contrast with George Costanza of Seinfeld, who goes through 43 girlfriends in nine years yet is always understood to be bad at getting--not just keeping, but getting--women.

Of course the change isn't entirely organic, nor should it be. Plot demands that certain things happen, or else there is no plot. I've tried "letting the characters write the story" before, but when I started with realistic characters they did what real people usually do: try to write themselves boring stories. The truth I discovered, and that I'm observing now in a well-written TV show, is that if you want a story you need to make characters who will get into trouble--that is, get into stories. Of course you could take characters who know how to keep out of trouble and contrive to get them into trouble, and that will furnish you with a story. To get a second story out of characters with reasonable self-preservation instincts and life skills, you'll have to contrive to get them into trouble again, which can end up getting... contrived.

So, really, if you want to tell a lot of stories about the same characters getting into different kinds of trouble, you need them to be people who seek out trouble, or draw trouble to them.

Over a long enough timeline, to keep stories going, type A trouble-finders have to evolve into type B trouble-seekers. This would seem to be why long-running dramas seem to be about such severely screwed-up people. The people have to be, or the story runs dry as the sensible cast manages to get itself out of trouble and stays out.

It does make me feel sorry for the characters, though. I guess that's the idea.

I wonder if there is a term for this sort of directed character drift.

Netflix, stars, treks, observations thereon

Since Netflix came into my house I've become keenly aware that I had been living the life of a savage, eking media one serving at a time out of solid-form magnetic storage devices.  I get the feeling that the next generation is going to think of bandwidth like we think of running water: so essential, pervasive, and reliable that it’s easy to forget how recently it became normal.  (Not that my bandwidth is that reliable.  I’m writing this post in Word while I wait for my webotubes to unclog.  But I suspect that I will live to see the datastream made continuous.)  Now, I hope never to live in a house without a bookshelf, and probably a DVD collection as well, but I wonder if the first generation to see indoor plumbing didn’t also have its holdouts who never learned to trust pipes enough to move somewhere without a well.

Thanks to Netflix, I have joined some of my friends in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I remember watching ST:TNG with my dad when it was on television originally, and never took to another Trek like I did that one.  But being the tender age I was, I missed the first few seasons.  The opportunity to go back and watch from “Encounter at Farpoint” has been… fascinating.

The episodes of the first season I’ve seen have not been the Trek I remember.  Certainly if I didn’t know what it would become, I wouldn’t seek out more episodes.  There’s a lot of bad.  But, as with Q vis a vis the human race, the pilot shows just enough potential that we’re willing to withhold judgment for a season or two.

The geneses are there of what would become really cool by the end of the series.  It lays out the cast of characters that, with a little tweaking (sorry, Tasha) provide a rich range of characters to play with, without resorting to the sort of incompetence and destructive behavior that fueled the drama in, say, Battlestar Galactica.  (In some regards, ST:TNG is a procedural, like Law and Order or The West Wing; we come to it to see the crew of the Enterprise do their jobs well.)

All in all, it’s a sort of homo erectus to the original series’ Australopithecus.  In time we’ll see the show develop intellectually, and learn to knap Worf’s head into a more functional shape.

But I must say, one thing that really struck me is that in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humans have apparently evolved into a race of insufferable space twits.  Couldn’t we have learned anything about diplomacy?  Tolerance?  Instead, say, when an alien ambassador wants to show Commander William “Babyface” Riker his scrapbook, he just smiles and says, “Oh, scrapbooking.  We humans gave up that barbaric practice long ago.”

One thing it really makes me want to do is read Wil Wheaton’s book, Memories of the Future, because looking back on this show can be so darn fun, and I’ve seen him do it with merciless, good-natured verve.

I come back to my newly frustrating internet connection, which has been spotty ever since I moved into Girlfriend's old room.  As consequence, I’m not sure when this post will actually go up, but it’s too late for me to keep waiting for it tonight.