Thought for the day: every story has to find its own level.
I've been mulling over how to write this blog for several hours now, and that's the best angle to approach it from. I don't want to turn it into an anger fest about Torchwood, Galactica and those episodes of Doctor Who I really disliked. Nor do I want to claim this is an article about how I want more realism in television. Which I plainly don't.
In brief, I want to talk about people crying and pointing guns at one another.
It's a cliche I first spotted in Torchwood, and I can't help but notice it all the time now because (with two huge exceptions) I can't stand it. It refers to a climactic moment in which all the principles stand around in a room together, collectively angsting, acting their little socks off while threatening one another with firearms. Drama! Tension! Violence!
Traditional story wisdom will tell you that plot's great and all that, but character development is also key. Modern, shoddy scriptwriting prioritises one over the other - it's a lot easier to do character sweeps than intricate plotting. Even in my own writing, I have hundreds of wannabie-characters sitting around with nothing to do. Worse, character "development" has the power to seem more forced than a plot - you know that villains will be killed or redeemed (because they are villains), and people who start a story either wrong or certain will have these views challenged and will be changed by the experience. This does not happen in real life, except on a huge scale and without handy signposts for the audience.
"Bob is alone. Bob finds a man. Bob is no longer alone" - of course these everyday dramas are what life is all about, which make life worth living and television worth watching. And that's fine for soap opera or pure drama. But in a lot of television, it's also substitute for good plotting. In an ideal world, character should coincide with plot. "Bob spends six episodes dodging lasers and fighting killer baby elephants - but ah, he also learns the meaning of true love."
The gun-pointing scenario is the anthesis of that. Screw the plot, we're just going to end the story by working out our trust/hate/vengeance issues, loudly. I'm sure the opposite exists, films which resolve their plots and forget about the characters. But these days (my impression is) emotional and moving are far more key buzz words than smart and challenging. OK, you've got a great detective series here. Can he be an alcoholic?
The approach isn't intrinsically flawed - you watch shows because you love the characters. Even The A-team, which I'll be the first to admit is high on character moments if low on actual development, I watch because I love the team. An ending should evolve naturally from what's gone before, and that means plot as well as character. What are my favourite Doctor Who moments of all time? That would be the emotional character scenes - but that doesn't mean they don't need to be supported by well defined, well thought out plots.
It's not this phenomenon is particular to Torchwood - although the intrinsically weak plotting on that show means they're pulled out on a very regular basis. Modern Doctor Who flunks out on proper endings all the time - count the number of episods which end with the Doctor going "oh I'll just pull this switch and reverse the polarity, and the villains go away! Now I can get back to worrying about the Time War/Rose/casualties" Or perhaps you've never heard me roar about Journey's End, which is a whole season of buildup to a three-episode mini-arc, all leading up to Donna pulling a switch and destroying every Dalek inexistance. Argue, if you like, that it was not so much about Davros as Donna - her arc, her transformation. To which I reply, precicely - that's exactly what I was just complaining about. You've got Davros and the Daleks! And all they're going to do is sit around taunting the Doctor for two hours, while he stands around miserably, waiting for the resolution to arrive? By my reckoning, not a single Season 4 episode had a complicated resolution. The Doctor rewired the Adipose computer. The Doctor chose to destroy Pompeii instead of the universe. The Doctor frees the Ood brain. The Doctor fires that missile thingie and destroys the gas. etc, etc.
Another irritating one is Galactica, which deliberately sets out to be challenging, also tends to prioritise obvious development regularly. Sample episode: 6 tells Gaius that he only needs to believe and everything will be OK. Gaius is cynical. Gaius believes. Everything is OK. Gaius sees the world anew. Now you could say it's just typical Todorov - all stories tend to run "balance -> imbalance -> new balance". The problem is, it happens so often that it soon becomes obvious. Especially when combined with my dislike of the way it handles moral issues. Sample episode: The Admiral thinks all blackmailers are evil, insensitive scum and denies food rations to a notorious hive. The President is more concerned about the way they are exploiting the common people, the XO thinks they should just execute them all - but the Admiral's son believes they are just victims of their enviroment and is committed to positive social change. They argue and angst for a whole episode, and if we're really lucky the Admiral's son will decide to do something stupid like lead a revolt or take someone hostage. But then the Admiral will become sensitive, the President will come to sympathise, the Admiral's son will be wonderfully vindicated - and the XO will be ignored because he needs to stay grumpy so he can be the irrational voice of insensitivity in next week's crisis. And what's the best way for one character to challenge another's ideas? That would be to speak passionately about it, while weeping and holding a laser rifle, sir! Again, like Torchwood, this isn't intrinsically bad - but it happens so, so so often it soon becomes obvious.
Obvious? You feel the hand of the author, and that is something which should never ever happen. You have to believe a show while watching it. As we've observed, people do not neatly arrange their lives into three act structures; and thus while it's acceptable for characters to do this, it shouldn't dance around in frilly underwear while waving the Sacred Hammer of Thematic Tidiness.
It's a lack of realism - just because the audience are suspending their disbelief to accept the planet Malcassairo in the year 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, it doesn't mean you're allowed to stretch it too far. On the contrary, it's the daft little human ironies which sells the far out setting. I like realism in plotting, not of scenario. Or vice versa, never both. A single mum on a council estate who works in a shop - who gets super powers after finding a baby elephant in her bathtub. An Evil from the Beginning of the Universe who intends to destroy All Creation is foiled beacause he forgot the six minute time delay between Earth and Mars.
It has to find its own level and stick to it. in Friends, they can all afford hundreds of coffies at Central Perk despite never holding jobs which appear to warrant it. It's part of the framework, and you accept it like you accept the TARDIS can be bigger within than without. Hell, you accept that Hannah Montana can be a world-famous rockstar yet no one ever recognises her. I'm going to quote Lance Parkin quoting Christopher Brookmyre. Again. It's just a damn fine quote, OK?:
You can argue that the above complaint is Galactica's level - it certainly sticks to it. Perhaps it just has the misfortune of finding a level which irritates me automatically. For me, the damp-gun resolution is as obvious as it's ugly cousins covered by the aforementioned Bullet Deadliness Quotient - extras will die instantly, heroes will be hit in the shoulder and soldier on. The author says "I'm here, and I am God. I have decreed that, even though the Torchwood team are surrounded by men with guns every single week and are never in any danger due to me preventing the baddies from shooting, this week Owen will die. Owen will die because Russel T. Davis sent me a series plan determining he should die. Therefore, this week in the "everyone pointing guns phase", I will allow someone to actually shoot Owen, and he will die from it. Instantly. Because it's in the synopsis."
At this point, the whole thing just becomes unrealistic. You're already asking the audience to accept that the team are in mortal danger every week without them actually being harmed. Suddenly killing someone breaks the illusion: the death doesn't work, just feels contrived, and any subsequent weeks where the team survives seem as unlikely as it always should have been. Furthermore, you need to test the audience's gullibility further after pulling a gun-pull-climax, to keep all the regulars in the show. I'm not sure about you, but if a close friend ever threatened me with a gun while weeping over whatever traumatic situation we were in, I might not be very quick to forgive him. Ever. Authors like all their characters. It's hard to remember that, sometimes, they don't like one another. Television gets frustrating oh-so quickly.
And it's not just Torchwood which wins the bad death award. You might have heard me rant about "The Doctor's Daughter" before, but it does exactly the same thing. "Oooops, we need to get rid of Jenny now so the Doctor can be without ties for the next episode, instead of organically letting her become part of the team. So even though the Doctor has spent 45 years not-being-shot when cornered by baddies, even though many of them were Daleks, Cybermen or otherwise without remorse - this week someone will shoot, once, and kill the person I decree to die. No one will react by, say, suddenly decending into a paniced accidental bloodbath when a gun goes off at a very nervy truce at the climax of a generations-old war, because they are only extras and therefore not real." Of course the simplest way to wrap up the whole "hello dad!" scenario would be not to write the episode in the first place. But it's too late now.
Peversely, LOST kills people quite well - there are deaths left, right and centre, and they are terrifying in their unpredictability. Yes, a lot of gunpointing goes on. But the characters who get killed are often attractive, often still interesting. There's a level of emotional manipulation, but there is also something quite admirably real that a central character could just die out of the blue, at any moment.
I said sometimes the gun point resolution works, and I offer three examples. I criticised it for prioritising characterisation, but sometimes plot should take a back seat, to give the show variety or if a character situation is genuinely the most interesting thing about the story.
In Last of the Timelords, you don't really want to watch the Doctor carefully planning his victory. We've all seen him save Earth, y'know, once or twice before now. You just want to get him back on screen with the Master as quickly as possible. It's a scenario where the guns'n'tears shortcut is acceptable, because by far the most interesting thing about that trilogy of episodes is the Master himself: what he means in regards to the Time War, and the way he makes the Doctor tick. The script highlights it for us too - it's a chilling plot point that the Doctor is willing to make his friends go through hell for an entire year, simply for a chance to redeem the Master and get another Timelord back. For the Doctor himself, the figure of the Master is also more important than saving the Earth. It makes a sort of sense that the true climax should be that story.
The second is going back to the Quotients mentioned above. Unsuprisingly perhaps, I regard Reservoir Dogs as an exception. That film has people crying and pointing guns at one another all the way through, so it's not so jarring when it happens at the end. It feels like a sensible extention of the in-world rules already established.
Finally, and this is a very dodgy point, it's OK if you do it very well, or in an interesting way. I recognise I'm on shaky ground, but the first classic Doctor Who I ever loved was Resurrection of the Daleks, and I can't exactly abandon it without attempt at defense. It's quiet and subdued, without the sweaty camerawork of the regular gun-point-resolution. It draws it's power from the lack of drama: the Doctor has mournfully left the TARDIS, and declared his intent to go and kill Davros. The scene that follows is a corker, and it's down to four facts. Davros knows the Doctor won't shoot. The audience knows the Doctor won't shoot. The Doctor, albeit subconsciously, has no intention to shoot - it's a ruse for a chance to try talking him out of it. And he doesn't shoot - but five or so people get killed while they're mulling it over. It removes the suspense from the scenario entirely.
But wouldn't it be best if we all forgot it entirely?
I've been mulling over how to write this blog for several hours now, and that's the best angle to approach it from. I don't want to turn it into an anger fest about Torchwood, Galactica and those episodes of Doctor Who I really disliked. Nor do I want to claim this is an article about how I want more realism in television. Which I plainly don't.
In brief, I want to talk about people crying and pointing guns at one another.
It's a cliche I first spotted in Torchwood, and I can't help but notice it all the time now because (with two huge exceptions) I can't stand it. It refers to a climactic moment in which all the principles stand around in a room together, collectively angsting, acting their little socks off while threatening one another with firearms. Drama! Tension! Violence!
Traditional story wisdom will tell you that plot's great and all that, but character development is also key. Modern, shoddy scriptwriting prioritises one over the other - it's a lot easier to do character sweeps than intricate plotting. Even in my own writing, I have hundreds of wannabie-characters sitting around with nothing to do. Worse, character "development" has the power to seem more forced than a plot - you know that villains will be killed or redeemed (because they are villains), and people who start a story either wrong or certain will have these views challenged and will be changed by the experience. This does not happen in real life, except on a huge scale and without handy signposts for the audience.
"Bob is alone. Bob finds a man. Bob is no longer alone" - of course these everyday dramas are what life is all about, which make life worth living and television worth watching. And that's fine for soap opera or pure drama. But in a lot of television, it's also substitute for good plotting. In an ideal world, character should coincide with plot. "Bob spends six episodes dodging lasers and fighting killer baby elephants - but ah, he also learns the meaning of true love."
The gun-pointing scenario is the anthesis of that. Screw the plot, we're just going to end the story by working out our trust/hate/vengeance issues, loudly. I'm sure the opposite exists, films which resolve their plots and forget about the characters. But these days (my impression is) emotional and moving are far more key buzz words than smart and challenging. OK, you've got a great detective series here. Can he be an alcoholic?
The approach isn't intrinsically flawed - you watch shows because you love the characters. Even The A-team, which I'll be the first to admit is high on character moments if low on actual development, I watch because I love the team. An ending should evolve naturally from what's gone before, and that means plot as well as character. What are my favourite Doctor Who moments of all time? That would be the emotional character scenes - but that doesn't mean they don't need to be supported by well defined, well thought out plots.
It's not this phenomenon is particular to Torchwood - although the intrinsically weak plotting on that show means they're pulled out on a very regular basis. Modern Doctor Who flunks out on proper endings all the time - count the number of episods which end with the Doctor going "oh I'll just pull this switch and reverse the polarity, and the villains go away! Now I can get back to worrying about the Time War/Rose/casualties" Or perhaps you've never heard me roar about Journey's End, which is a whole season of buildup to a three-episode mini-arc, all leading up to Donna pulling a switch and destroying every Dalek inexistance. Argue, if you like, that it was not so much about Davros as Donna - her arc, her transformation. To which I reply, precicely - that's exactly what I was just complaining about. You've got Davros and the Daleks! And all they're going to do is sit around taunting the Doctor for two hours, while he stands around miserably, waiting for the resolution to arrive? By my reckoning, not a single Season 4 episode had a complicated resolution. The Doctor rewired the Adipose computer. The Doctor chose to destroy Pompeii instead of the universe. The Doctor frees the Ood brain. The Doctor fires that missile thingie and destroys the gas. etc, etc.
Another irritating one is Galactica, which deliberately sets out to be challenging, also tends to prioritise obvious development regularly. Sample episode: 6 tells Gaius that he only needs to believe and everything will be OK. Gaius is cynical. Gaius believes. Everything is OK. Gaius sees the world anew. Now you could say it's just typical Todorov - all stories tend to run "balance -> imbalance -> new balance". The problem is, it happens so often that it soon becomes obvious. Especially when combined with my dislike of the way it handles moral issues. Sample episode: The Admiral thinks all blackmailers are evil, insensitive scum and denies food rations to a notorious hive. The President is more concerned about the way they are exploiting the common people, the XO thinks they should just execute them all - but the Admiral's son believes they are just victims of their enviroment and is committed to positive social change. They argue and angst for a whole episode, and if we're really lucky the Admiral's son will decide to do something stupid like lead a revolt or take someone hostage. But then the Admiral will become sensitive, the President will come to sympathise, the Admiral's son will be wonderfully vindicated - and the XO will be ignored because he needs to stay grumpy so he can be the irrational voice of insensitivity in next week's crisis. And what's the best way for one character to challenge another's ideas? That would be to speak passionately about it, while weeping and holding a laser rifle, sir! Again, like Torchwood, this isn't intrinsically bad - but it happens so, so so often it soon becomes obvious.
Obvious? You feel the hand of the author, and that is something which should never ever happen. You have to believe a show while watching it. As we've observed, people do not neatly arrange their lives into three act structures; and thus while it's acceptable for characters to do this, it shouldn't dance around in frilly underwear while waving the Sacred Hammer of Thematic Tidiness.
It's a lack of realism - just because the audience are suspending their disbelief to accept the planet Malcassairo in the year 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, it doesn't mean you're allowed to stretch it too far. On the contrary, it's the daft little human ironies which sells the far out setting. I like realism in plotting, not of scenario. Or vice versa, never both. A single mum on a council estate who works in a shop - who gets super powers after finding a baby elephant in her bathtub. An Evil from the Beginning of the Universe who intends to destroy All Creation is foiled beacause he forgot the six minute time delay between Earth and Mars.
It has to find its own level and stick to it. in Friends, they can all afford hundreds of coffies at Central Perk despite never holding jobs which appear to warrant it. It's part of the framework, and you accept it like you accept the TARDIS can be bigger within than without. Hell, you accept that Hannah Montana can be a world-famous rockstar yet no one ever recognises her. I'm going to quote Lance Parkin quoting Christopher Brookmyre. Again. It's just a damn fine quote, OK?:
"This ‘voice’ is all about the internal logic of the story. In One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, Christopher Brookmyre talks about the bullet-deadliness
quotient, he’s right and I think there are lots of equivalents in fiction.
Kissing someone is far more significant in Doctor Who than having sex with them
and their sister would be in Skins. Each story has its own level of meting out
justice, the relationship between what they do and the punishment they get.
There are Child Spunkiness Quotients, Adultery Forgiveness Quotients, Swearing
Quotients, Quip and Eloquence Quotients, Character Disposable Income And Free
Time Quotients, Recovery Time From Injury Quotients. You create a world, with
rules. The trick is, as Brookmyre says, to stay consistent within those rules."
You can argue that the above complaint is Galactica's level - it certainly sticks to it. Perhaps it just has the misfortune of finding a level which irritates me automatically. For me, the damp-gun resolution is as obvious as it's ugly cousins covered by the aforementioned Bullet Deadliness Quotient - extras will die instantly, heroes will be hit in the shoulder and soldier on. The author says "I'm here, and I am God. I have decreed that, even though the Torchwood team are surrounded by men with guns every single week and are never in any danger due to me preventing the baddies from shooting, this week Owen will die. Owen will die because Russel T. Davis sent me a series plan determining he should die. Therefore, this week in the "everyone pointing guns phase", I will allow someone to actually shoot Owen, and he will die from it. Instantly. Because it's in the synopsis."
At this point, the whole thing just becomes unrealistic. You're already asking the audience to accept that the team are in mortal danger every week without them actually being harmed. Suddenly killing someone breaks the illusion: the death doesn't work, just feels contrived, and any subsequent weeks where the team survives seem as unlikely as it always should have been. Furthermore, you need to test the audience's gullibility further after pulling a gun-pull-climax, to keep all the regulars in the show. I'm not sure about you, but if a close friend ever threatened me with a gun while weeping over whatever traumatic situation we were in, I might not be very quick to forgive him. Ever. Authors like all their characters. It's hard to remember that, sometimes, they don't like one another. Television gets frustrating oh-so quickly.
And it's not just Torchwood which wins the bad death award. You might have heard me rant about "The Doctor's Daughter" before, but it does exactly the same thing. "Oooops, we need to get rid of Jenny now so the Doctor can be without ties for the next episode, instead of organically letting her become part of the team. So even though the Doctor has spent 45 years not-being-shot when cornered by baddies, even though many of them were Daleks, Cybermen or otherwise without remorse - this week someone will shoot, once, and kill the person I decree to die. No one will react by, say, suddenly decending into a paniced accidental bloodbath when a gun goes off at a very nervy truce at the climax of a generations-old war, because they are only extras and therefore not real." Of course the simplest way to wrap up the whole "hello dad!" scenario would be not to write the episode in the first place. But it's too late now.
Peversely, LOST kills people quite well - there are deaths left, right and centre, and they are terrifying in their unpredictability. Yes, a lot of gunpointing goes on. But the characters who get killed are often attractive, often still interesting. There's a level of emotional manipulation, but there is also something quite admirably real that a central character could just die out of the blue, at any moment.
I said sometimes the gun point resolution works, and I offer three examples. I criticised it for prioritising characterisation, but sometimes plot should take a back seat, to give the show variety or if a character situation is genuinely the most interesting thing about the story.
In Last of the Timelords, you don't really want to watch the Doctor carefully planning his victory. We've all seen him save Earth, y'know, once or twice before now. You just want to get him back on screen with the Master as quickly as possible. It's a scenario where the guns'n'tears shortcut is acceptable, because by far the most interesting thing about that trilogy of episodes is the Master himself: what he means in regards to the Time War, and the way he makes the Doctor tick. The script highlights it for us too - it's a chilling plot point that the Doctor is willing to make his friends go through hell for an entire year, simply for a chance to redeem the Master and get another Timelord back. For the Doctor himself, the figure of the Master is also more important than saving the Earth. It makes a sort of sense that the true climax should be that story.
The second is going back to the Quotients mentioned above. Unsuprisingly perhaps, I regard Reservoir Dogs as an exception. That film has people crying and pointing guns at one another all the way through, so it's not so jarring when it happens at the end. It feels like a sensible extention of the in-world rules already established.
Finally, and this is a very dodgy point, it's OK if you do it very well, or in an interesting way. I recognise I'm on shaky ground, but the first classic Doctor Who I ever loved was Resurrection of the Daleks, and I can't exactly abandon it without attempt at defense. It's quiet and subdued, without the sweaty camerawork of the regular gun-point-resolution. It draws it's power from the lack of drama: the Doctor has mournfully left the TARDIS, and declared his intent to go and kill Davros. The scene that follows is a corker, and it's down to four facts. Davros knows the Doctor won't shoot. The audience knows the Doctor won't shoot. The Doctor, albeit subconsciously, has no intention to shoot - it's a ruse for a chance to try talking him out of it. And he doesn't shoot - but five or so people get killed while they're mulling it over. It removes the suspense from the scenario entirely.
But wouldn't it be best if we all forgot it entirely?
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