Irrelevance Glorified

Before I continue on this rant, I want to warn that it contains spoilers for the current show “Heroes” as well as, sadly, some fantasy novels.

This rant is a long time coming, but I feel I need to put it out there. Since we know that this blog is widely read by people “in charge”, I feel it couldn’t hurt to dispense some wisdom, Jeet-style.

Since I re-joined Netflix, I’ve been rocking the Watch Instantly feature to watch stuff online, and one of the first things I did was catch up on Heroes, the popular NBC scif-fi-ish show. It resonates with my desire to have superpowers. Although I would definitely be better than all the losers on that show. It really is a pretty good show, so far, although there have been some glaring annoyances. But towards the end of the first season, they introduced a shape-shifter, to which I thought….”Uh-oh.” Putting in shaper-shifters is a bad idea. Now, they used this to fantastic effect a few episodes later, when they went five years in the future and an awesome plot twist revealed that someone was not who they seemed. But in general, I groan whenever shape-shifters come up, because they allow writers to do ridiculous things and then blame it on shape-shifters. This first came to my attention when watching the Mission: Impossible movies, where they have the technology to doppelgang people with lifelike mask and voice modulators. You never know who is who, and who is going to rip their face off. Tedious. If I was in one of these worlds and knew that shapeshifters were about, I would have to take a page of the Harry Potter series, and start verifying identities with pre-arranged passphrases (although Harry Potter was dealing with people under the Imperious Curse, not shapeshifters. God I’m such a dork). Seriously, if you know this technology exists, there is no good reason to trust anyone.

My second gripe has developed as I’ve finished watching the truncated second season of Heroes. One of the superpowers that certain people have developed on the show is super-regeneration, or quick healing. These people will recover from any wound, short of major head trauma. And even then, if the source of the trauma is removed (i.e. remove the knife in someone’s head) they will come back to life. Okay, fine, regenerate. One other person has the power to absorb other people’s powers. So he can regenerate too. Fine. Next, they made is so that if you are hurt or sick, if you get a transfusion from one of these super-healers’ blood, you will be near-instantly healed. Uh…okay. A little bit worse, but okay. And now, finally, even if you are dead (say by gunshot to the head), if you get injected with this blood, you will miraculously come back to life. Now that’s where I draw the line.

I believe that (good) television shows maintain a good relationship with their viewers. There is a certain amount of trust in this relationship — viewers agree to suspend some disbelief, and the writers promise to entertain and put together a storyline that in the end, can make some sense. They might not spell it all out, but viewers can at least piece together some narrative that will at least not be self-contradictory. Stuff should at least be canonical, and most importantly, what you see directly should be what you get. If we see an external shot of a character going into a burning building, and then 10 seconds later, it explodes, I’m willing to accept it if that character appears later on in the series — there could be a host of explanations for their survival, any number of possibilities for what happened in those ten seconds. But when you see a person shot, in the head — through the eye!! — and you see that person fall down, and take their final breath, and then you revive them a day later with some super-blood, some magic juice, you open up a can of worms. From now on, no death is final, no character arc can be safely tied up, because if needed, the writers can revive the character with a enchanted elixir. Plot holes are covered up with an area rug.

Since I’m rambling now, I’ll just take another step and talk about a series of fantasy novels called the Wheel of Time series. I started reading them a number of years ago; I’m a sucker for multi-volume epics. It had a standard fantasy archetype; a long time ago, a great evil was entombed — it is now awakening. There is a singular hero, described in prophecy, who starts out a simple farmboy and then discovers that he’s actually royalty-like, he can do magic, etc. etc. yada yada yada. It had lots of characters and lots of character development. The ultimate evil power had 12 or so disciplines that it unleashes on the world to do it’s bidding, and they try and stop the hero. And it was great! Every book, he would manage to knock off one or two of these guys, and no doubt by the end it would just be him and that ultimate evil. Awesome. But somewhere along the way, the author seemed to figure out that by ending this series, it would stop the flow of money in his pocket. So all of a sudden, the main characters split up and followed their own story arc — no joke, about 7 intertwining ones. Since a new book would come out every 2-3 years, about a fifth of each book was taken up by a recap of what everyone was doing, since it was impossible to keep track of it all. But the straw that burst my literary dam — wait, I think I screwed that metaphor up, oh whatever — was when he started resurrecting evil disciples that had died. Sometimes he resurrected them, and placed them into different bodies. Different genders, even. So now, instead of a nice orderly progression, all chaos. All new characters introduced could actually be an evil minion, one that had died 5 books ago. Originally, the series was targeted for 12 books. Recently, however, the author (Robert Jordan) passed away, after writing 11 books. Some other author is going to take up the mantle, and they will have quite a task — finish the series, close up umpteen story arcs, kill (I assume) all those evil minions and make sure they stay dead. I probably won’t bother to read it.

What’s the moral of my stupid long-winded post? Bringing back dead characters and letting shape shifters run amok violate the trust that you, the author has with your fans. You tell a story, either through the visual medium of film or by writing a book. The reader/watcher puts trust in you. Tell me a story. You don’t have to tell me it all at once. Things may not be what they seem — characters can have secret pasts, secret alliances, secret motives, secret secrets. There is a world of opportunity for what you don’t tell us. But if you tell us something, if you show us something, we should be able to take those things at face value. Otherwise, you’re just dicking me with.

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