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COSMOS and Star Trek

I was reading COSMOS this morning and musing on Carl Sagan's excitement for the advancement of science in the future, and I started thinking about how this makes me increasingly grateful for STAR TREK.

For so long, I think, or at least specifically in the waning days of the 20th century and the early ones of the 21st, apocalyptic storytelling took on an air of wish fulfillment. Our world was stale and banal, the creators posited, and wouldn't it be fun to inject primal excitement back into the way of things? People loved it.

Now that the inevitable end of our current human civilization is close at hand, I imagine we'll see more and more misanthropic stories. Is it any wonder that STAR TREK DISCOVERY and STAR TREK PICARD have little in common with Star Trek outside of the name? They are of the time they are created in. These are not science-based missions of discovery and exploration, they are deeply personal and deeply emotional journeys that, in varying capacities, take place at the End of All Things (in Disco, the end of the Federation, on Picard, the end of his life).

I look to the older Treks, certainly not bereft of emotion (is not the dichotomy of logic and emotion what make Kirk and Spock such a compelling team?), and how they exemplify human ambition, the strive to learn and see more. They show the importance of unity in the face of an unfeeling cosmos. We're all we have.

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Once, Twice, Three Times a Bad Finale

Episode 6 of Marvel's LOKI series is so discordant from it's predecessors that it might as well have been made by an entirely different creative team, one who maybe heard a snippet of cliff notes about the rest of the show at one time. What it does have a remarkably large amount in common with are the finales of both it's Disney+ MCU sister shows, Wandavision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Both series also ended with wet, unsatisfying thumps, opting for easy answers or tidy solutions, or, worse still, when presented with no tidy solutions, shoving one through anyway. Through it all there is a stench of wrongness, like we took a left turn into one of the timelines that has branched off. 'For All Time. Always.' both looks and feels cheap, to start, which is strange for a series with the best-yet production design and value out of all three shows. Every camera angle and shot seems designed to simply exist rather than be a part of the storytelling. Loki and Sylvie walk through a dusty, crumbling manor, but it's all so CGI'd and barely there that it leaves no impact whatsoever. Compared to the thought-out and lived-in TVA HQ, this place feels basically tacked on. Simultaneously over-and-under produced. Or we can take how Jonathan Majors is introduced, for instance, in almost certainly what is supposedly a moment of high drama. It might as well include a long, loud fart FX for all the impact it has. And Majors himself, a rather capable actor, here seems like he came in off the street to casually read lines with only the notes "He's evil" given to him. It's reminiscent of the great Kathryn Hahn's turn from intriguing and mysterious nosy neighbor into incredibly boring, evil laugh-having Agatha Harkness on Wandavision. It's so clearly the wrong choice, and would have to have seemed so to the people working on set, except for the fact that it made it through production unscathed.

Then there's the writing of the scene, which gives nothing for our two hero Lokis to do or play off. Indeed, the two keep their mouths shut for almost this entire sequence (which is most of the episode). They sometimes repeat again and again what their motivations or histories are, for the cheap seats in the back, but for the most part any and all development for these characters is over and done with. If anything, they regress, frightfully fast and with a little more than a lazy handwave. It's telling that even the kiss, though a feint by Sylvie, doesn't feel earned, despite having had a good amount of build up since episode three.

A friend of mine and I were discussing why the Marvel movies always feel like they are missing an essential ingredient, despite all the money and time put into them. He put it succinctly: "They are maximum expenditure for minimal effort." The season finale of Loki really feels like the people involved just decided to call a mulligan and 'finish early for the day, thanks'. You could even describe the entire forty five minutes as one long, distended mid-credits teaser, which is the worse sort of consequence to the attachment and potency those teasers have achieved. This episode doesn't even feel edited well, so haphazardly is it structured.

There's no effort put in to tell stories that satisfy or even come close. Just an on-going "Next time, we'll really getcha!" There must have been so many ways to close off the story of Loki and Sylvie and still achieve this supposedly universe-altering change by the end, but instead we get some truly unbelievably long scenes of exposition (all in a row!), a perfunctory fight, and an almost shocking disdain for what I really did think was pretty solid writing (and certainly performances) from everyone involved in the first five episodes.

Here, we see the way that Marvel self-sabotages better than any production house on the planet. No matter the quality or intentions of the work, like the TVA, it all serves a higher purpose. And that purpose is to keep the machine churning without breaking any of the toys.

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WandaVision Closes with a Heavy Sigh and Little Payoff

WandaVision turned into the worst kind of disappointing, for me, which is when a piece starts feeling lazy, or as if the creators gave up after a while. The equivalent of constructing a lovely diorama and then throwing it all onto the floor.

Except that's not quite right, because that would at least be an engaging and potent choice, rather than the staid beats and half-hearted reveals we get. The other element that makes it disappointing, of course, is that there's so much operating at a high level in the program. A wonderful cast, a brilliant design aesthetic that leaves room for an enormous amount of play. They had a great hook and kept balanced on the cusp of something really engaging, only to fall back on old tricks that just don't do the job.

It's difficult to get past, to start, how half of the characters have incoherent motivations or no motivations at all. Is Hayward really going to be arrested...for doing his job? How about what's going to happen to Monica and Jimmy for assaulting some of their peers? Darcy nearly kills Hayward, so that seems like it should levy some pretty serious consequences. But nope! It's dream logic, predicated on both the creators not caring enough nor thinking the audience is capable of thinking beyond any given moment of what is happening (Note: this is a terrible idea anyway, but particularly in a regards to something constructed for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which people love to pick apart). There's an enormous amount of assumed empathy on the part of the script. The creators want the audience to root for Darcy, Jimmy, and Monica because they are the supporting cast, not because their characters have done (or even end up doing!) anything to earn that support.

The construction and execution of the storylines for everyone outside of the Hex were some of the most shockingly shoddy writing in the MCU to date. So much so that despite the entire show feeling, to it's detriment, like a backdoor pilot for Monica, her storyline feels begrudgingly tacked on. The show continually insists that Monica is right and righteous about everything going on, and that Hayward is somehow nefarious and up to no good, except very little happens that reinforces this. Monica is wrong about everything, basically. She's wrong that Wanda isn't to blame for the Hex, and she's even wrong that the children are real. And when she finally gets back into the Hex under her own power to try and stop/help Wanda, she fails at that, too. If she were entirely excised from the show then the events would hardly be different whatsoever, which is about the most damning thing you can say about a character and storyline that takes up the amount of screentime she does.

One of the biggest issues for MCU films to date has been their predilection for telling instead of showing us character moments and stories. In WandaVision, we're told a handful of times that Monica is grieving her mother, which gives her insight to the grieving Wanda, but this is so rarely backed up by the actual filmmaking on display that it's easy to forget it's even supposed to be the essential ingredient for her character and for her purpose in the story.

Meanwhile, Agatha Harkness (the wonderful Kathryn Hahn, who gets wasted in these last few episodes with some unfortunately typical MCU villain business) being revealed as a movie-of-the-week villain who wants more power is about the most boring interpretation of the character I can think of. And it's hard to even parse what the purpose of the Ralph/Fake Pietro reveal is (and then two entire scenes of him interacting pointlessly with Monica), since it's equally unsatisfying and incoherent. The casting of Evan Peters is a delightful red herring, so much so that it's real-world insinuations undercut whatever it could possibly have been revealed to be on the show. Agatha used a charm, I suppose, to give him powers and also used the somehow public knowledge of the Sokovia event to give him passing knowledge of Pietro's life? But what was in it for him? And was he the person in Witness Protection that Jimmy mentioned way back in Episode 4? It probably doesn't matter, which is fine, of course, except that the show sprinkles nuggets like this throughout production that never amount to anything. Another example: Who was the aerospace engineer who helped Monica out, and was given several eyebrow raising mentions? Guess it doesn't matter all that much! Which means all that emphasis and build-up was wasted time.

To the larger endgame plot, that Agatha is not manipulating Wanda for some further end, like to help corral her abilities with some tough love, or that she's working for a sinister master like Nightmare or Mephisto, is shocking. The show is clearly invested in setting up further stories and tying into the larger MCU in other ways, but it's trepidation about committing to a larger story within itself an immense let-down. We're told that WandaVision was supposed to lead directly into Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and yet the good Doctor doesn't show up. He's not even mentioned!*

A lot of these criticisms fall into the realm of nit-picking for me, but they are indicative of the overwhelming problem I mentioned at the beginning: there's an air of laziness to the whole affair. It's as if they came up with the beginning and trusted it would all sort itself out, or went with the first idea that popped into their heads.

It's not all bad, I should say. The Vision on Vision combat is some of the best in the MCU to date, and that Vision ends up out-smarting himself with logic puzzles and empathy rather than violence is the kind of cleverness I root for in comics. Paul Bettany, the cheeky bugger, told press that he had a scene with someone he's been "waiting to work with his whole life" who ended up being, of course, himself. Wonderful stuff.

I felt very cool about the MCU after finishing Endgame, honestly. It felt like the whole affair had reached it's point of diminishing returns, where anything going forward wasn't going to satisfy or delight me the way so many of the Phase 1-3 films had. Then the first episode of WandaVision knocked me over. It was surprising, precise, tightly done and with a very particular and specific notion of what it was about. The intimate setting, clever application of powers, and low-stakes were just what the doctor ordered after the universe-shattering events of the last several movies.

But the beast must be fed, it appears. The beast here being what filmmakers seem to think general audiences want and only want from their stories: The same thing, time and again. I said this after Episode 4:

[...]if there was one thing I was looking forward to with it's new horizons on D+ with it's TV shows, it was that the creators would have more freedom to remove themselves from the trappings of contemporary blockbuster writing. This episode is an indication that rather than removing themselves from those trappings, they're actually just exacerbating them to an egregious degree.

Unfortunately, Episode 4 turned out to be a tone-setter even moreso than the pilot, as the rest of the series slowly trudged towards the finish line and into the same failings that made that episode feel so slapdash and unsatisfying. WandaVision ends up being a disappointing finish to Marvel Studio's TV beginnings.

*The Sorcerer Supreme gets a mention, but that was just in reference to the position, not Strange in particular

[makersclark]

WANDAVISION Episode 4 is a Return to the Worst Proclivities of the MCU

I was doing some musing on why Episode 4 of WANDAVISION was so bad. I should first say I don't normally like to be overtly negative or down on things on social media if I can help it because it's rarely constructive, but the episode's failings are actually a great example of something I think about a lot, which is what makes something "work" or not.

To start, we have the breaking of the rhythm of the show and how it's been teaching us to watch and learn it's story. We go from tight sitcom plots tinged with an undercurrent of creepy mystery to thirty minutes of information dump. Now the show attempts to alleviate this by having that dump delivered by able and charismatic actors like Teyonah Parris, Randall Park, and Kat Dennings. But regardless of their ability, they're basically like an artist being asked to put together a masterpiece with a half-stub of a crayon. It's possible, maybe, but unlikely.

One of the specific foibles of the MCU is that it sometimes feels like it's creating moments of indulgence rather than cohesive film experiences or stories. This episode was predicated almost entirely on little moments like this; "Oh there's Photon from Captain Marvel!" "Ah, it's the Blip!". Now let's go back to what the show had been so far: built around sitcom rhythms and story beats. Okay, yeah, maybe leaving Westview would predicate that the structure of the show should change (although I think it would have been exceptionally clever of them to maintain it subtly even outside the hexagon, because even though the characters aren't on the show, WE are still watching the "show"). But it's like suddenly the show has gone from a dedicated structure to a five minute scene of exposition in the middle of a film. It's reminiscent of those information dump moments that are sprinkled throughout the MCU. Except instead of one or two scenes, setting up the rising action, it's an entire episode dedicated to those moments.

In essence, it's all wasted time. Stretched out beats and moments and even, quite literally, entire scenes we've already seen that aren't even recontextualized enough to justify the recurrence. It's like an EW Recap happening in real time, where Darcy explains moments we've already watched on the show aloud to us. "Oh wow the helicopter changed! Pretty interesting, huh?"

Or even when the episode's final moments take us back to the final moments of the previous episode (again, all wasted time), and Monica declares "It's Wanda", it's one more character saying aloud what was implicit in the storytelling of the show. We know it's Wanda! She gave you a terrifying look and then her powers threw you out of the town!

Something that really gets me down in a lot of writing (criticism or fiction) is when the writers don't trust the audience. This latest episode feels less even like hand-holding than it is rubbing the audiences faces so hard in the plot that it removes the ability to appreciate anything else going on. It also feels like a lack of faith in their own work, that if they don't explain it, then the entire affair won't work. By attempting to overly explain everything, they've managed to make the most inert episode yet of an otherwise engaging and fun show.

I mostly enjoy the MCU, but if there was one thing I was looking forward to with it's new horizons on D+ with it's TV shows, it was that the creators would have more freedom to remove themselves from the trappings of contemporary blockbuster writing. This episode is an indication that rather than removing themselves from those trappings, they're actually just exacerbating them to an egregious degree.

[makersclark]

Sometimes, your “Baby Yoda eating unborn sentient young” joke isn’t going to land

I felt compelled to write a follow-up on the "Baby Yoda devouring a frog woman's eggs" thing since I joked about it before, and the discourse has continued into this week.

If the episode-length gag was actually as funny, or even darkly funny, as the writers and director thought it was, then I don't think people (including me!) would be as uncomfortable or disturbed by it as they have been. As ever, it's not down to the What is happening so much as the How. Basically anything can be implemented or used in a story and as long as it's done in an effective way, it's given a pass. But in this case, the bit didn't work! That's totally fine. It’s just a silly story.

What's less fine is the place we so often end up finding ourselves culturally in situations like this, and why it feels worth commenting on specifically. Contempt and derision seem to define most online interaction, so now we're in the place where instead of acknowledging that a joke wasn't funny and it bothered plenty of folks, there is a delineation being drawn between the people who found it ineffective and the people who are sneering at those people, telling them they're taking it too seriously.

This past week I saw creators I follow and friends I know to be smart, engaged humans taking time to comment on or laugh about all this. There’s a discrepancy here, though, since that lofty opinion instills the notion that they are above the conversation, when, by the very nature of offering up an opinion on the subject at all, they are not. These people weren’t just taking the time to insult other people, though, they were also doing it to assuage their own egos. “I got the joke, why didn’t these other people?” it says. The implication being that anyone who feels differently is too dumb to get it properly.

As someone who’s been an enormous asshole in my life, I know there is a perverse pleasure in looking down on someone for having empathy or an irrational opinion. What I’ve gratefully learned over the years is how much more rewarding it is to be generous, kind, and above all else, knowing when it’s okay to keep my mouth shut. Mindfulness is good practice in the most trying of times, but so often it can be even more challenging to make use of it in situations that are as low stakes as talking about Star Wars.

Post Script:

To be clear: the creators of Mandalorian don’t owe the people responding to the show anything. In a more sensible world Lucasfilm’s creative art manager never would have or should have bothered coming on social media to say what they meant to do. But the proof of the bit not working is implicitly ties into that compulsion the art manager felt: if it worked, he never would have felt like he had to come online and explain his thought process to people.

[makersclark]

My Favorite Things

I’d like to start putting together and maintaining lists of my “favorites” and figured tumblr might be a decent enough place to try it out. This post is the committment to do that more in the future when I feel a dash of inspiration strike to write about something I hold in high esteem. Will probably start with things like music and comic books. Movies are really really hard to pin down as favorites, not to mention how thoughts and opinions develop and change over time. We’ll see how it goes!