The Fandom Awakens

A teenager asked me the other day if I liked Star Wars. She wanted to show me this book of Star Wars sheet music she had just purchased.

“Of course,” I said.

I was more surprised, though also heartened, that this youngster counted herself a fan. Star Wars is one of the biggest properties on the planet, obviously, but I was not certain how truly cross-generational its popularity was today.

I am too young to have experienced the original trilogy in theaters, but I watched those movies dozens of times on home video as a child. Growing up in the ‘80s, I didn’t have as many options as kids these days. There was no Internet (my family didn’t even own a computer), not nearly as much TV (certainly not as much current-run television), and not nearly as many movies (neither in theaters nor in my family’s limited VHS collection). So I would end up watching the same couple of shows and movies over and over again, most of which were older than myself. Regardless, I loved Star Wars—the epic space battles and lightsaber duels, the operatic drama, the heroism and hopefulness, the R2-D2 and, of course, those adorable Ewoks.

Later, I would try to share my love of Star Wars with my younger sister, a child of the ‘90s, but, although she found some of the mascot characters cute, somehow the sci-fi medievalism and dashes of Eastern philosophy never quite captivated her imagination the way they did mine. I resigned myself to supposing that it was a generational thing. Although Star Wars seemed to be growing more lucrative all the time, the average age of its fans was also skewing older. Maybe the fans were really just the ones who had been there all along. They were simply older now and thus had more disposable income through which to exert their influence on the market, as well as a broader forum, the Internet, on which to geek out together. Younger generations, meanwhile, had different interests.

Another twenty years later, the kids and teenagers of today seem far more interested in things like Minecraft, Snapchat, joke memes stolen from Black Twitter, and, the flavor of the month, Minions (that spin-off from Despicable Me). They’ll watch the Marvel movies, but only the very young will have anything to say about them. The prevailing attitude toward Star Wars seems much the same; everyone is going to watch the new movie, but only because everyone is going to watch it. At the individual level, hardly anyone under the age of eighteen seems to feel much one way or the other about it. Or so I thought.

“It’s my favorite movie of all time,” said this teenager.

“Which one?” I asked.

“Clone Wars.”

Well, that was a new one on me. I don’t usually even remember that the 2008 Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated film is one of the choices.

“That was the first movie I ever saw in theaters,” she said.

Ah, that explained it, I thought. Doing the math in my head, I calculated that she must have been about four years old at the time Revenge of the Sith came out. Although I, along with most critics, regarded Clone Wars as the "seventh-best" Star Wars film to date, what was that against this child’s nostalgia?

She said that she had seen and enjoyed all the other movies, but she preferred the art style of Clone Wars, as well as its characters. For her, when she thought of Obi-Wan Kenobi, she did not picture Alec Guinness or Ewan McGregor. This was her Obi-Wan:



She said she really loved the Clone Wars TV show too, and it occurred to me then that, indeed, there must have been another entire generation of Star Wars fans that was raised on Clone Wars, a series that I myself mostly skipped. I had considered myself a huge Star Wars fan, and I had thought that the kids today had arrived too late to “get” Star Wars. But maybe I was the one who was born too early, because, actually, this teenager had seen more Star Wars than I had.

Clone Wars was axed so abruptly after the Disney acquisition that it’s easy to forget now that the show was massively popular with kids, even up until the end, its demise having nothing to do with its level of success. I think back and can remember now that, for a good while there, the animated incarnations of Anakin and Obi-Wan were basically the lead versions being pushed by Lucasfilm. I would see that art all the time in the toy aisles, on lunch boxes and backpacks, and in video game tie-ins. And how many years did we have full of short clone troopers going door-to-door at Halloween?

That merchandise is all gone now, but the Clone Wars show did what it was supposed to. It cultivated a generation of new Star Wars fans, who, when they take over this world in about ten or twenty years, may prove as vocal and obnoxiously precious about their Star Wars as today’s thirty- and forty-somethings are about the original trilogy.

“Are you looking forward to Episode VII?” I asked her.

“I guess,” she said. “I just know that Disney bought it, and I hope they don’t ruin everything.”

Yikes. I wasn’t sure if this was her “too cool for Disney” phase, a more specific anti-imperialist sentiment toward the Disneyfication of their acquired brands, or just the cynicism that accompanies young adulthood. For the record, in addition to being a Star Wars fan, I also love Disney’s worlds, and I generally approve of what they’ve done with Marvel. And I’ve never had much use for pessimism, so I remain guardedly optimistic about The Force Awakens.

“Well, have you seen Rebels?” I asked, referring to the current Star Wars animated series, which I enjoy and consider a positive indicator of where Disney is taking Star Wars.

“Yeah, that’s why I’m worried,” she said. “It’s too kiddie and Disney-like for me.”

Christ. I guess the Clone Wars animation style was decidedly not “Disney-like,” but it was still a children’s cartoon. To scorn Rebels for being “too kiddie” compared to Clone Wars is simply not rational. It’s like someone my age accusing The Phantom Menace of being too kiddie compared to the original trilogy, apparently forgetting that these movies were always meant to be kid-friendly, and that we probably loved the old movies largely because we were kids when we watched them. (Don’t even get me started on the old dudes who hate Return of the Jedi because it has Ewoks. Yes, to each generation its own image of Star Wars, but please shut up, old dude.)

“And they got Ahsoka all wrong,” she added.

And so continues the cycle of hating the new version of whatever thing you liked when you were a kid….

The Walking Dead (TV) (Season 5, Part 2) (2015)

In recent years, The Walking Dead has primarily used the back halves of its seasons to decompress and transition to the next arc, with the more dramatic movements and climactic showdowns to follow in the subsequent fall season. Thus, after the explosive midseason finale, the remainder of Season 5 sees the group finally leaving miserable Atlanta behind them, making new friends(?), and settling into a new environment, while the new big bad lurks in the background. That said, the second half of Season 5 does contain a few major moments for the series.

Episode 10, “Them,” sees the main characters at a low point, starving and withdrawn from one another, as they trek on foot toward Washington, D.C., recent losses to their party having taken a heavy toll on the group’s morale. There’s a telling shot where we see the survivors trudging onward, listless to the likewise oddly apathetic zombies in the background merely keeping pace with them. This all culminates in a speech where Rick finally name-checks the title of the show: “We do what we need to do, and then we get to live. No matter what we find in D.C., I know we’ll be okay. This is how we survive: We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead.”

Of course, anybody who has really been paying attention surely figured out a long time ago that the title was referring, not to the zombies, but to the hollowed-out survivors. Still, it feels a momentous milestone for the series. One also gets the impression that, with the characters just now figuring out who they are, the show might still only be getting started, with no end in sight nor any clear destination.

This is then followed by one of the strongest moments in the season, as the group, having taken refuge in a barn, has to mass together to brace the barn door against a horde of zombies, all while a storm rages around them. It might even be the most powerful image in the entire series. So far, I’d say it’s between this and that time Rick ate a guy in Season 4—two moments that strike very different notes emotionally, but which both serve to prove just how fearsome is their will to survive.

The rest of the season focuses on the group trying to integrate into the Alexandria Safe Zone, and here we get the tantalizing twist that, after all the times the main characters have been the hunted, they might now be entering this peaceful community as the predators, the danger, maybe even the straight-up bad guys. When Rick suggests to his team that they might have to take the town by force, because it is going to waste in the hands of its weakling citizenry, it’s an unsettling callback to the debates Rick himself had with Shane back on Hershel’s farm in Season 2, only now Rick seems to have come around to Shane’s way of thinking.

The other great moment of this half-season comes when, Rick, the newly appointed sheriff of the Alexandria community, after having to be pulled off the wife-beating scumbag he was pummeling in a public spectacle, responds by drawing his gun on the unarmed civilian leadership, and delivering his most deranged speech yet:

“You still don’t get it. None of you do! We know what needs to be done, and we do it. We’re the ones who live. You!—you just sit and plan and hesitate. You pretend like you know, when you don’t! You wish things weren’t what they are. Well, you wanna live? You want this place to stay standing? Your way of doing things is done! Things don’t get better because you want them to. Starting right now, we have to live in the real world.”

Yep. If they’re not already on CafePress, I hope someone will get to designing some “Shane was right” T-shirts.

In fact, it’s basically a variation on the “we are the walking dead” speech that Rick gave to the group in the barn. But, whereas the barn episode, which rallied the group’s will to survive, was, I think, meant to be inspiring, this incident casts a lot of doubt on the soundness of Rick’s leadership. On that note, I should say, it feels like Rick has been crazy more often than not through these first five seasons, so I don’t know why the Alexandrians were so eager to invite him into their community to begin with.

But things follow a predictable course, when Alexandria quickly begins to unravel internally, just as Rick called it. If Rick (and, by extension, Shane) is not wholly vindicated, nevertheless the demurring Alexandrians are proven to be totally wrong and complete idiots, who, like every other non-predatory survivors on this show, were only surviving by dumb luck. And so it falls to Rick to browbeat them into submission, in order to prepare them for the real threat we know to be coming—the mysterious “Wolves,” who, so far, seem like every other predatory gang the group has crossed paths with.

Will the arrival of the Wolves help to remind Rick and the viewers alike what separates our protagonists from the depraved evils the group has faced, or have our “heroes” merely become another gang?

Rick seems to appreciate the distinction between living and merely surviving—hence how he is able to survive while being “dead.” But Rick and the rest will die someday, as shall we all. As they die, will they, as Tyreese did, contemplate how they lived, and wonder if they went about it the right way? Perhaps such philosophy is a luxury left to the dying. While they survive, such thoughts are quickly set aside.

What else happened in Season 5? Well, even with Tyreese’s death in the midseason opener, the show was apparently still over its self-imposed “black guy quota,” so naturally recent addition Noah had to come to a brutal and senseless death, which also rendered Beth’s death the previous half-season all the more senseless. On the bright side, Morgan is back, and it looks like he will be joining Rick’s group. Personally, I thought this character had run his proper course ending with his reappearance in Season 3, but I guess the show wasn’t done with him. And I know it’s an awful thing to say, but I hope the addition of Morgan as a regular means that the preacher man is next up on the chopping block, because, brother or no, that dude is seriously the worst.

(Euro) White Girls Can Dance (Street)

Last week on Season 12 of So You Think You Can Dance, the judges finally whittled down this year’s crop of contestants to select their top 20 who will be performing in the live rounds. The final selection came down to a decision between Czech krumper/animator Jana “Jaja” Vankova and French popper Marie Bonnevay (stage name “Marie Poppins”), both of whom should have been quite familiar to avid followers of the street dance subculture.

Jaja was previously a winner on America’s Best Dance Crew in 2011, where she teamed with renowned popper Phillip “Pacman” Chbeeb (whose Season 3 audition for So You Think You Can Dance still rates as my favorite in the show’s history). Marie Poppins is a commercial dancer who has appeared in advertisements and music videos with Justin Bieber and Tiesto, among others.

So You Think You Can Dance viewers likely remembered both women from their auditions the previous year. At the time, I thought they were far and away the two best female street dancers the show had ever seen. Neither of them was able to assimilate the other styles of dance well enough to make the final cut, although Jaja came very close.

Jaja Vankova - So You Think You Can Dance Season 11 Audition

https://youtu.be/KbdgAo-e7YY

(Video uploaded by CDplayABDC6)

Marie Poppins - So You Think You Can Dance Season 11 Audition

https://youtu.be/MN6b21EI528

(Video uploaded by Terry Byrd II)

This season introduced a new format, however, splitting the top 20 equally into stage and street teams, opening the door for a greater number of street contestants than any previous season (apparently at the expense of standard ballroom representation, hence why judge Mary Murphy is absent this year).

Jaja and Marie both returned this year to try for a spot on the street team. In her audition, Jaja looked, in my opinion, considerably sharper than even just a year ago, having trimmed any lapses of inspiration from her choreography, as she melded mesmerizing animation poses with fierce whiplike krumping motions. Marie’s audition, meanwhile, was relegated to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip within a montage of judge-pleasing routines. With these early episodes being taped and edited well in advance of broadcast, usually when a known contestant gets montaged, it’s because they auditioned to music that Fox didn’t get the license to. At any rate, it’s disappointing that we didn’t get to see Marie’s Season 12 audition, but she was still named and briefly spotlighted in subsequent rounds, where her fluidity and rhythmicality remained superlative.

Unfortunately, although the new format meant the show could accommodate a larger number of street contestants, it also meant that auditions drew more (ladies especially) than ever before, and so there was simply too much competition for both of them to make the cut. Personally, I might still have taken both of them over some of the other dancers who made it onto the street team, but that’s probably just because I love to watch that robot-like style of dance. Perhaps, with both of them also being white Euro females (and the street team, as a whole, being already 60 percent female with the addition of just one of them), they were too similar stylistically and demographically for them both to be on the show at the same time.

Interestingly, although the show never mentions this (even though it probably would have made for more dramatic TV), Jaja and Marie were actually well-acquainted with one another before they ever appeared on So You Think You Can Dance. In fact, by the later cuts, many of the contestants are people who have crossed paths before in the world of street dancing. Another contestant this season, Mexico’s Lily Frias, as far as I know the first waacker ever to make it to the live rounds, has collaborated with both Jaja and Marie before. It makes sense. The dancers who audition for this show are, after all, often masters already in their chosen disciplines. You don’t rise to that level without others in your field noticing.

There are several videos online of Jaja and Marie Poppins performing together, perhaps most notably the “White Girls Can’t Dance” video they made together.

https://youtu.be/eUlGfCd9ZKk

And, of course, as both ladies came up through the world of dance battling, it’s inevitable that they would have battled one another at some point. Earlier this year, they appeared together to put on an exhibition at Urban Street Jam 2015. Not a serious battle, as there were no judges nor any real winner or loser, but still both women brought out some sick moves.

https://youtu.be/-IN23QDsr5Y

Ultimately, for Season 12 of So You Think You Can Dance, it was Jaja that got the nod for the top 20, where hopefully she'll go far. Who knows whether there will be a Season 13, whether Marie Poppins will get another chance, but I’m sure she’ll continue to have a successful career in dance regardless.

How well did Taylor Hicks really perform at Evo 2013?

The competitive Super Smash Bros. community was abuzz last week with the report that Internet-famous Bill Trinen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Nintendo of America (and also Shigeru Miyamoto’s interpreter), would be at Evo 2015 next month competing in the 2,000-player Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournament.

Trinen will be the most notable quasi-celeb to compete at Evo since American Idol Season 5 winner Taylor Hicks placed 257th in Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evo 2013. Speaking of which, although it’s uncertain whether Hicks has any idea who Bill Trinen is, he was nevertheless moved to respond on Twitter at the suggestion that Trinen might perform better than Hicks did two years ago.

https://twitter.com/TaylorHicks/status/617025620967448576

Evo 2013’s Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament reportedly drew approximately 700 entrants, so many news outlets that picked up the story saw Hicks’s 257th-place finish as quite respectable. As GameSpot observed at the time, “Hicks finished better than most.”

But did he really?

Many reports seemed to misunderstand Hicks’s placing to mean that he outperformed 443 out of 700 competitors, which would, indeed, be impressive for a non-pro player at the world’s biggest fighting game tournament. But that’s not what the results actually mean.

In an elimination-format tournament, every competitor does not play against every other competitor. Rather, they are paired off, so that, for example, 32 players are distributed into 16 one-on-one matchups occurring simultaneously (maybe not literally at the same time, but in the same round, at any rate). The winners move on to the next round, while the losers are eliminated, effectively halving the field after each round, until the final two are left to compete for the championship. For any fan of professional tennis or anyone who follows team sports playoffs, this should all be very familiar.

The key point here is that all of the players eliminated in the same round finish with the same result. In other words, there will be ties—not for 1st or 2nd place, no, but for the lower ranks, and more and more the further down you go. Most fighting game tournaments utilize a double-elimination format, as opposed to the single-elimination format common among professional sports. The relevant difference is that double-elimination tournaments produce fewer ties, but there are ties even so. Two players will tie for 5th place, four for 9th place, eight for 17th place, sixteen for 33rd, and so on.

Do you begin to see what this means for Taylor Hicks’s 257th-place finish? It means he tied with a crapload of other players. But let’s actually do the math and get more specific. Below are the number of players that tie for each place in a double-elimination tournament:



As you can see above, I also noted the total number of players accounted for, top-to-bottom, at each placing. Thus, with his 257th-place finish (tied with 127 other people), Taylor Hicks finished in the top 384 out of 700, behind 256 players and ahead of 316. So it’s not exactly accurate to say that Hicks finished “better than most.” That would be like someone placing 4,097th in a 6,000-person tournament and pretending that meant they finished ahead of some 2,000 people, when the reality is that they tied with those 2,000 for dead last. But you also can’t say Hicks finished in the bottom half either. He was in a broad middle range, which is unfortunately as precise as we can get with the double-elimination format.

That’s still pretty respectable, right? Well, in the rightmost column above, I also included an “adjusted rank” that I feel more intelligibly conveys each placing’s relative position in the overall order. In a 700-person tournament, there are 19 possible placings. Out of those 19, Hicks’s 257th-place finish was 17th best, or third-to-last. That’s pretty close to the bottom, but, again in fairness, the lower ranks are considerably fuller than the higher, so he was in plentiful company.

Or maybe the most sensible way to put it is to say that, in order to have placed 257th, Hicks needed to have progressed through two rounds. That is, he must have won two matches. And, since this was a double-elimination tournament, he must have lost twice. So his final record would have been 2-2. For a tournament the caliber of Evo, I’d say going 2-2 is definitely respectable for any amateur participant, let alone an easy-to-ridicule middle-aged full-time musician with no documented history as a gamer.

Except that, even after Evo 2013, there exists virtually no record of him ever having played Super Smash Bros. Melee!

You won’t find his name on any list of final tournament results. Partly, that’s because ordinarily nobody would ever bother to report results beyond 49th place (because who the hell cares?!). (I mean, in the real world of professional sports, nobody even cares who finishes 3rd, which is maybe why the "tied for 17th" concept may seem a bit foreign even to avid followers of sports playoffs.)

Hicks’s name is also not listed anywhere in the official tournament bracket. It’s known that the online bracket is not 100 percent complete; the posted bracket initially did not include day-of on-site registrants (which is why we don’t have an exact count for the number of entrants), so maybe some names in the first round were never posted. Some of those “Byes” listed in the brackets were definitely filled in with actual players by the time the tournament began. Maybe Hicks, who was working a residency at Paris Las Vegas at the time, just stumbled into the Evo ballroom at the same venue, and decided, on a lark, to request a last-minute entry into the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. If it was that spontaneous, that would also explain why there was zero buzz before the event about an American Idol winner registering to compete at Evo.

But if Hicks really did go 2-2, that should have been enough progress to have been reflected in the brackets somewhere. Yet there is no unnamed player anywhere in the bracket who ended up going 2-2. The only “Byes” who made progress through the tournament were in pools B60 and E62, but those unidentified players both went 3-2. Every other entrant with two wins or more was named and accounted for. If Hicks was somewhere in there, it would have had to have been under an alias, which admittedly is not outside the realm of believability.

But then there’s also the matter of there not being any footage anywhere of Hicks competing, no photos, no anecdotes whatsoever from anybody who played against him or even just saw him play. It is possible that Hicks’s demographic is simply too far removed from the sorts of people who would go to Evo to play Super Smash Bros. Melee, so maybe nobody there had any idea that he was anybody famous. Still, in this day and age of everybody having a smartphone to take pictures or live-tweet their experiences, this total lack of any record is just strange. The only proof anywhere that Hicks was there is this tweet by Seth Killian, which every other report on the topic can be sourced back to:

https://twitter.com/sethkillian/status/356565201589526528

Sure enough, that’s Taylor Hicks with an Evo badge around his neck. So why didn’t anybody else spot him during the tournament?

Keep in mind, Seth Killian is someone with ties to the production side of the video game industry (he was a lead designer at Sony Santa Monica at the time, and had worked on Street Fighter IV before that) and even deeper ties to Evo (on his LinkedIn page, he lists himself as a founder, and, to this day, he still does commentary for the Street Fighter tournaments). My only point is that publicity would actually be a consideration for Killian; this wasn’t just a "Soul Patrol" member randomly running into Taylor Hicks at Evo (although Killian might have been that too). Maybe Killian caught Hicks after a show and was able to convince him to wear the Evo badge and pose for a picture, then afterward made up (maybe as a joke) the story that Hicks entered the tournament.

Finally, even supposing Taylor Hicks really did enter the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament, we have no idea the quality of the players he beat. Remember that Evo is an open-entry tournament. It attracts the strongest players from around the world, yes, but also any rando can put up the entry fee and register. I don’t follow the Super Smash Bros. competitive scene that closely, and I didn’t watch any of the tournament in 2013, but I’ll just guess that the top 128 players were probably all very strong. At Evo 2013, the round of 128 was when the quarterfinals began; everything before that was qualifying pools (and, at least in Street Fighter, which I’m more familiar with, there aren’t ever more than two pro-level players in the same Evo pool). I’ll go ahead and guess also that players 129-256 were good journeymen Smashers—non-pros who nevertheless understand high-level mechanics and would dominate the vast majority of people casually playing Super Smash Bros. at home. Below that, though, I’d guess that the skill levels vary widely. When I watch the Evo pools for Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, I always see at least a few people who clearly had no idea what they signed up for. Maybe Taylor Hicks got lucky and was matched up against toddlers, and that’s where his two wins came from. Of course, it’s also possible that he beat two really good players, and is himself really good, and he only lost because his pool was stacked. There’s no way to know for sure, so, while the luck of the draw is a factor, I'll maintain that, on average, going 2-2 at Evo is pretty good.

It’s also possible that, even if he was technically entered into the tournament, he never actually had to play anyone. Doubtless, some registrants failed to show up to their early-round matches and became byes for their scheduled opponents. Maybe Taylor Hicks’s two wins were actually two byes. Of course, it’s also possible that Taylor Hicks, a grown-ass man who was in Vegas for work, never actually lost to anyone, but rather himself became a bye when he had to leave the tournament early. Hick’s calendar for that weekend indicates he was performing during the first two days of Evo 2013, and was free on the last day (but, going by his placing, he would already have been knocked out of the tournament by that third day). (Bill Trinen, by the way, is scheduled to get a first-round bye, according to the not-yet-finalized Evo 2015 bracket, so he'd only have to beat one other player to match Hicks's alleged 2-2 record.)

If Taylor Hicks really did compete in Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evo 2013, he went 2-2 for 257th place. That’s a mere two rungs up from last place (out of 19 places). Still, I’d say two wins is pretty respectable. Unfortunately, other than the one photo, there’s no evidence that Taylor Hicks really competed at Evo 2013. To my knowledge, even Hicks himself hasn’t ever acknowledged these reports… until this recent tweet at Bill Trinen, which is the only reason I’m inclined to believe that he really did enter Evo 2013! If nothing else, it suggests that Hicks at least knows what Super Smash Bros. is, knows what Evo is, and cares enough to respond to a random tweet that did not specifically name either of those things and gave hardly any context besides (and, no, Taylor Hicks does not just respond to every tweet that mentions him).

I've dug and conjectured as far as I can, and I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions based on the evidence or lack thereof. Me, I'm going to believe that Taylor Hicks beat two people in Super Smash Bros. Melee at Evo 2013, finishing 2-2 and ahead of 316 other competitors. Again, for an amateur player, that's very respectable.

Still, he'll never be my Season 5 American Idol! Nor my preferred American Idol contestant-turned-Smash star! #McPheever

https://youtu.be/yQ0YzMGOIk8

What Game of Thrones could learn from anime (but probably shouldn't)

Hard to believe that we are now into the fifth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Which also means that we are approaching ever closer to that point, dreaded by many fans, when the TV series will overtake its source material. With George R. R. Martin’s sixth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series not due for release until next year at the earliest, it is certain that the TV adaptation will conclude before the books—likely well before, as Martin’s current projections include at least a seventh novel further down the line, which, at the rate at which he writes, won’t see release until the 2020s. Varying reports have it that the show will catch up to the books next season, or possibly even during this fifth season.

This dilemma of an adaptation outpacing its source material is rather unique to Game of Thrones among American TV shows. AMC’s The Walking Dead is still a few seasons away from catching up to the ongoing Robert Kirkman comic, but it has already diverged significantly from the original story in many places, so, at any rate, its direction does not seem terribly dependent upon that of the source material. The CW began adapting The 100 before the first book in Kass Morgan’s trilogy was even released, yet the show is so far from the original young adult novels in tone and content that it is arguably not an “adaptation” at all, but merely “based on” some of Morgan’s ideas. In these rather more typical cases, the shows have established their own lives (and audiences) apart from their source material.

Game of Thrones is different. Even if most of the show’s viewers never read any of Martin’s books, still there has thus far been this understanding that showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have been striving to produce a faithful adaptation of one of the more respected and literary works of modern pop culture. They have made some not insignificant alterations to certain plot points, yes, but none of them pivotal (at least until George R. R. Martin reveals otherwise….). This is not a bold new interpretation that takes liberties for the sake of being different, but one that, for the most part, accurately and respectfully represents the original story to a new audience of non-book-reading geeks. You could enjoy the show purely on its own merits, but, beyond that, fans introduced to Martin’s fantasy universe through the TV series could also have a degree of confidence that they were still getting the real Game of Thrones experience, and could, up to a point, hold conversation with book readers about plot points and characters, in the same way that one could consider themselves reasonably conversant in Harry Potter while only having seen the movies. One way or another, that understanding will soon be tossed out the window. What’s going to happen when the show catches up to the books?

Well, unusual as this case may be, it’s not entirely unprecedented. If you venture into the realm of Japanese anime, you’ll find that this sort of thing happens all the time.

***

In highly consumerist Japan, it’s crucial to milk an intellectual property as much as possible while it’s still at the peak of its popularity, which means that TV anime adaptations of manga (comics) very often come out while the manga is still ongoing with no end in sight. And, as an anime tends to run on a faster schedule than a manga, almost invariably the anime runs into this problem of catching up to the source material. Different shows have dealt with this in a few different ways, which may give insight into the options available to the Game of Thrones TV writers.

1. Filler Arcs

Any time an anime includes a story not taken from the manga from which it is adapted, that is what is known among fans as a “filler” episode. Longer series, such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach have entire filler arcs, sometimes lasting as long as twenty straight episodes or more—roughly the length of a full season on US network television, and about twice as many episodes as any season of Game of Thrones.

Whenever an anime threatens to close in on its source material, these filler arcs serve, as you might guess, to fill in time. While waiting for the manga author to get back ahead and provide the next part of the story for them to adapt, the anime writers make up their own tangential episodes. They do plan far enough ahead, so that it doesn’t usually come down to them literally waiting on the author to write the next arc. But, point is, filler arcs serve to slow things down, so that they never catch up.

I should mention, these filler arcs are almost universally despised, usually justifiably so. Anime adaptations tend to hew very close to the original manga, so any time the television writers deviate and insert their own original stories, the results really stick out, and not in a good way. I can’t think of any filler arc that is well-regarded. I’ve even come across cases where a viewer never knew that an anime was adapted from a manga, yet still they could identify a filler arc as noticeably weaker, to the extent of seeming of dubious authorship. “Stall for time” is not exactly the highest of artistic ambitions, after all. Filler episodes have to be written so as to leave nothing out of place for when the real story—the manga story—resumes, which means, in other words, that nothing of any consequence or permanence can occur during these filler arcs; the events will likely never even be referenced again, except perhaps in another filler arc down the road. Someone even created a website designed just to list which episodes of various series are filler, so that viewers can know to skip them. In the worst case, a filler arc can drag on for so long and be so poorly received that the show actually gets canceled before it can get back to adapting the manga. That’s what happened to Rurouni Kenshin, whose back 33 episodes (out of 95 total) were all filler.

The nearest equivalent in American television that I can think of is the hospital arc on The Walking Dead, which had no basis in the comics and arguably could have been excised without any significant effect on the show’s overall trajectory. Another possible example is the Spartacus: Gods of the Arena prequel miniseries, which did end up very much essential to the Spartacus storyline, but originally came about because the producers needed to stall for time while waiting for their lead actor to recover from cancer treatment (which, unfortunately, he never did). Neither of these comparisons is quite apt, because The Walking Dead was only ever a loose adaptation, and Spartacus was never an adaptation at all (well, maybe a loose adaptation of history….). Furthermore, whereas anime adaptations tend to be fairly workmanlike in faithfully translating the manga author’s vision to screen (hence why the writers seem completely lost whenever they stop following that vision), successful showrunners in the US tend to be rock star storytellers in their own right, so perhaps we could trust Benioff and Weiss not to sink the Game of Thrones show even in the absence of George R. R. Martin to hold their hands.

If Game of Thrones were to go this route—filling time with story arcs not directly adapted from the books—the difficulty is that there is no telling how long the filler arcs might have to drag out. Manga chapters are usually released on a weekly schedule, so new material would be continuously pumped out for the anime to adapt. New Game of Thrones books come out on a far less regular schedule, so the show’s writers might potentially have to hold down the fort for years before Martin gives them more material to adapt. Indeed, if the seventh book were, as projected, not to come out until the 2020s, the TV series would by then have to be into or approaching its own teen years, which would be too ridiculous even to consider. It is far more likely that, if the TV show were to truly run out of book material to adapt, then a “filler arc” would carry it the rest of the way to its conclusion (which would come before the end of the book series). That’s something that happens in anime also—TV writers having to come up with their own alternate ending, because the anime wraps before the manga finishes.

2. The Alternate Ending

The behemoth epics of the manga world—Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto—get anime adaptations spanning multiple hundreds of episodes (a good quarter or more of which are filler), but that is not exactly the norm. Titles with less massive readerships are only commissioned for specific finite episode orders (usually a couple dozen, or even a mere dozen), with no possibility of an extension, regardless of how long the manga is expected to run. In these cases, stalling for time is not an option. Catching up to the source material might not even be the issue, but, all the same, they run into the problem of “what to do when you know your initially faithful adaptation isn’t going to be able to follow the source material to its end.” It would seem the anime writers have no choice but to come up with their own ending… or not (more on that later).

In the best case, the TV writers can craft their own ending that still leaves viewers satisfied that they got a complete and self-contained story. Take the 2003-2004 Fullmetal Alchemist anime, the entire back half of which was technically “filler” (in the sense that it was not based on the manga), including the ending. The writers for that show were prudent enough and ambitious enough to plan ahead for taking the story in their own direction, so that that back half felt 1) consistent, both in content and in quality, with the earlier parts that were adapted from the manga, and 2) finished and final, even though the source material at the time was far from it.

3. The Non-Ending

It doesn’t always come together that neatly. More commonly we end up with shows closing on that “or not” note. Given, say, twenty or so episodes to adapt a manga that is still running strong with no end in sight, often they will just faithfully adapt twenty episodes’ worth of story, then abruptly end, leaving threads hanging wherever they were when the episodes ran out. Berserk, Claymore, and Fruits Basket are examples of anime that ended their runs in the middle of telling their stories. Sometimes they’ll tack on a half-assed final scene that amounts to a “and life goes on” note to semi-formally sign off on, just to let the viewers know that, yes, the show is over, even if the story isn’t. But nothing can really soften how blatantly and frustratingly unfinished these shows feel (except maybe picking up the manga to get the rest of the story).

When an anime ends like this, the feeling is certainly comparable to when an American TV show gets canceled, with the difference being that usually the anime staff knew all along that they were only ever getting so many episodes to work with, that the story they were telling was always going to be incomplete. So why would they ever script a show to end by design on a cliffhanger? Well, remember that, if a manga is getting an anime adaptation at all, it means that the manga is hot right now. So these intentionally incomplete anime are sometimes meant, to some extent, to promote the manga, not to be complete works unto themselves.

I can’t see any reason why the Game of Thrones TV series would ever go this route—production closing down mid-story just because they decided they’d hit a good round number. There’s a greater likelihood that the show would be actually canceled, although I don’t seriously see that happening either.

4. Going On Hiatus

It’s rare, but sometimes anime that end in the middle of adapting a manga can resume later—years later even—to cover the rest of the story. Inuyasha and Attack on Titan are two examples.

This isn’t something that is generally planned out in advance. In the case of Inuyasha—another one of those epics, whose original run lasted 167 episodes—they went with filler arcs for a long time to extend the life of the show, while the manga author took her time with the source material. After catching up to the manga, the anime eventually became so plodding and repetitive that they decided it was best just to halt production, even though the manga was still running and selling. It ended up taking a full five years—longer than the entire span of the original anime’s run—for the sequel series to arrive. There’s no way they could have planned (and had all cast and crew contractually obligated) that far ahead. Rather, after the manga finally concluded, they gauged that interest was still high enough to justify producing a second anime (much shorter this time, thanks to its being filler-free) to adapt the rest of the story.

As for Attack on Titan, the manga was already very popular when the anime began, yet still a long way from peaking, so the producers could plan things out a little differently. The first season of the anime adapted 25 episodes’ worth of manga, then, instead of degrading it with filler stories, they simply decided to take a three-year hiatus mid-story, confident that the audience would still be there when the anime resumed. In fact, the second season still hasn’t arrived at the time of this writing (it’s due to begin next year), so even now we have no guarantees that everything will go as planned.

Take the case of Nana. The producers of the Nana anime were explicit in their intention not to have any filler episodes, such was their respect for manga author Ai Yazawa and for the integrity of the source material. The anime stopped at 47 episodes, right as it caught up to the manga, but, unusually, both the manga publisher and anime producer not only left the door open for a second series, but openly affirmed that they were just waiting for Yazawa to finish the manga and provide the rest of the story to adapt. But then the manga itself went on hiatus, and remains so six years on. It is now eight years since the Nana anime ended unresolved, and all but the most optimistic fans have now accepted that, rather than a hiatus, this has become simply another example of “the non-ending.”

Extended breaks on American television are uncommon but not unprecedented. Series that have taken more than a year off between seasons for creative reasons include The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Louie. During the recent writers’ strike of 2007-08, many shows also went off-air longer than usual, with some, such as 24, effectively forced to miss an entire season. And then there are the shows that have seemingly ended, only to be resurrected years later, such as Arrested Development, and now apparently The X-Files and maybe even Twin Peaks. That last one, if it comes to pass, would be picking up the story 25 years after the original series was left unfinished.

None of these are exactly comparable to Game of Thrones, since none of them are adaptations. Furthermore, while I imagine many more hardcore fans could bear to go more than a year between seasons, if it meant preserving the integrity of the adaptation, there is no way that the show could go off-air for the multiple years that would be required to allow George R. R. Martin to get back ahead of it.

5. The Do-Over

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is the only example I can think of of “the do-over.” Five years after the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, and with the end of the manga then in sight, a second anime series was commissioned. This was vaguely similar to a hiatus situation, with the intention being to finally adapt the rest of the story. Except that the Brotherhood series was not picking up where the first series left off (which was basically impossible, given how it ended, as discussed earlier), but instead was newly adapting the manga all over again from the beginning and with a different staff.

The early episodes of Brotherhood felt painfully redundant for returning viewers, since the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime had already fairly faithfully adapted those same chapters of the manga. But that would not be an issue for new fans experiencing the story for the first time through Brotherhood. I think the do-over worked out ideally for those viewers, who will get to experience Fullmetal Alchemist the preferred way in its preferred form, Brotherhood, and for whom the first anime should be merely a curious footnote that they need never look into. Although I said earlier that that first series left viewers satisfied at the time with its alternate ending, the fact is, I have already met people who only watched Brotherhood, and when I start to describe to them the differences in the first anime (“So, there was no Pride, but Wrath was Pride and not Wrath. And their Wrath was this evil androgynous boy—kind of like a shorter Envy—who was running around with Ed’s missing arm and leg.”), it all just seems so stupid in hindsight and totally typical of filler.

This is something that I could actually see happening with Game of Thrones—a second adaptation, with a different cast and crew, after the book series has concluded. I’m not saying it’s likely, but it’s conceivable. Of course, if it ever were to happen, it would probably be decades from now, and irrelevant to the discussion of what to do about this current series.

***

So it doesn’t look like most of these outcomes would be desirable for Game of Thrones. It’s debatable to what extent they’ve ever worked for anime. The takeaway, going by these anime precedents, seems to be that there is no good, practical way to handle this sort of situation, and fans will almost always end up disappointed. My prediction is that the Game of Thrones TV series will go the alternate ending route, which is the only avenue that could satisfy at least some segment of the fans—viewers who don't care about and will never read the books. Maybe there could also be some filler arcs thrown in here and there, to buy some time to give them the opportunity to at least adapt the sixth book, though the seventh is clearly out of the question. I really don't see there being any other way this can go.

The one thing that Benioff and Weiss do have, with Game of Thrones, which almost no anime has ever had, is back-and-forth access to an author who claims to have some idea how his story will end. So it’s possible that the source material will be there for them to adapt; it just won’t be available to the public in book form until after they’ve already adapted it for the TV series. This is where some book-first fans are getting into a panic, since they’re afraid that the show will spoil the books for them. But that’s supposing that 1) Benioff and Weiss really are working that closely with Martin, 2) Martin really has plot points planned out that far ahead, and 3) Martin won’t later change his mind about any of these plot points for his books—none of which, in my opinion, are safe assumptions.

The nearest comparison in anime may be Trigun. If you put the anime and manga side by side, this would, at first glance and many years removed from the show’s production, appear to be just a case of an anime alternate ending. But the history of Trigun is more complicated than that. It was actually the manga that was canceled mid-story, before the anime even began airing. The manga did get picked back up later, but, for a while there, author Yasuhiro Nightow didn't know if his manga would ever have an ending. Meanwhile, production on the anime was underway, and, without a complete story to adapt, the show had to find its own way down the final stretch. The anime ending was climactic and moderately conclusive, and included the death of a major character who was, at that time, still alive and well in the manga. Indeed, that character lived on in the manga for several more years... and then died there too.

Although the precise details of the two death scenes differed, the broad circumstances and emotional beats were remarkably similar, and, when all was said and done, this was the only major character death in either version of the story. So, was this character's death something that Nightow planned all along and communicated to the anime writers early on, and did the adaptation thus end up spoiling the manga? Or was Nightow perhaps influenced by the anime, after it got ahead of him—a case of the adaptation taking the lead and guiding the source material (which could happen with Game of Thrones)? Or was it all just a coincidence, which fans should try not to worry about, as they simply enjoy the story in whichever form they prefer (or each story on its own terms)?

What's the matter with Star Wars canon?

From IGN, the new paperback edition of last year’s Star Wars Rebels prequel novel, A New Dawn, apparently includes a timeline listing the movies, TV shows, books, and video games presently acknowledged in Disney’s revised Star Wars canon. Compared to the full Expanded Universe of old, which contained hundreds of works, the revised canon is a pretty short list, including only sixteen items so far: the six George Lucas films, the Dave Filoni The Clone Wars animated series (which, I assume, includes the movie), the current Star Wars Rebels TV series, the upcoming Episode VII: The Force Awakens movie, six new novels (most of them not yet released), and one in-development video game.



When Disney announced last year that it was wiping the slate clean, officially removing the entirety of the Expanded Universe from continuity, many longtime Star Wars fanatics bemoaned the loss of so many years of beloved storylines. Now, personally, I never read any of the Expanded Universe books, I didn’t care about them, and I never regarded them as canon. Even so, Disney’s position on the revised canon stung for me too. But, in my case, what the new initiative meant was, not that the slate was being wiped clean, but rather that the canon was going to get a lot messier.

Taking all of the books, comics, toys, and video games into account, the old canon could admittedly be complicated and difficult to sort out, because of the somewhat noncommittal “levels of canon” system, wherein some Star Wars-branded works were officially more canon than others, and there were even some licensed products that were definitely not canon. Any time an intriguing new Star Wars story came out, you would have to consider, “Is this canon?” And the answer wasn’t always clear or constant. The marketing for the 2008 Star Wars: The Force Unleashed video game even explicitly called the story canon as a selling point, understanding that, for many fans, that distinction could determine whether they invested their time and money on the game. But, really, the better question, which they weren’t answering, was “How canon is this?” In the case of The Force Unleashed, it was “C-canon,” the same as all those many Expanded Universe novels, and two levels of legitimacy below “G-canon,” the highest level of canon that included only the stories directly from George Lucas himself (i.e. just the six movies).

The “levels of canon” could be a headache for anyone interested in figuring out how the larger Star Wars fiction fit together, but it was also shrewdly defined, once you familiarized yourself with the system, and it kept things simple and elegant for fans like myself, who followed the movies and absolutely did not care about the other stuff. I didn’t need to worry about anything other than G-canon, the system assured me, because George Lucas himself didn’t worry about the rest of it, and none of that stuff would ever be relevant to his films. At most, if Lucas liked a name or an idea from an Expanded Universe work, he might adopt it for use in a movie (e.g. the double-bladed lightsaber that was originally conceived by Tales of the Jedi comic artist Christian Gossett), but the films would never go so far as to reference Expanded Universe stories. The closest Lucas ever got to the Expanded Universe was probably the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars series, which, while definitely not part of film continuity, was allowed to premiere some of Lucas’s original ideas (e.g. General Grievous) in advance of their film debuts. The point is, for me (and, I’d wager, for the vast majority of Star Wars fans), the “true” canon was just the six movies, and everything else could safely be ignored.

That has changed now under Disney’s watch. When Disney released its statement scratching all of those Expanded Universe novels, games, etc., it also announced that “all aspects of Star Wars storytelling moving forward will be connected,” meaning, in other words, that any stories released from then on would be part of a single revised continuity. The original and prequel trilogies, along with the CG The Clone Wars series, remained as “the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.” But the Disney XD cartoon, Star Wars Rebels, and all novels, beginning with A New Dawn, would also be canon, period. There would be no more “levels of canon” (well, other than canon vs. non-canon).

This is a pain for me, because I still have no interest in reading any of these new novels. I’m still a huge Star Wars fan, however, and I expect I will continue to see any new movies. But it will be really annoying to me, if future films start referencing books that I haven’t read. Before, everything relevant to the movies was contained within the movies. Now, I have to worry that I might miss out on part of a film’s story because I didn’t read the tie-in novel or whatever—something that was never a concern under the old system.

I suppose, for fans of the Dave Filoni The Clone Wars TV series, the silver lining of this new dictate is that that show is now considered canon, period. Before, it was “T-canon,” a level of uncertain validity between G-canon and C-canon. It was not as canon as the films, but I don’t think it was ever referred to as part of the Expanded Universe either. Most Expanded Universe works were basically glorified fan fiction that Lucas signed off on (because fans were going to write their own Star Wars stories anyway, and he might as well cash in when they do) but otherwise kept a safe distance from creatively. The Clone Wars was different. By most accounts, Lucas was regularly involved with the show, attending meetings, leading story conferences, and approving scripts up to the very end of its run. If the show was not relevant to Lucas’s films, it might only have been because he didn’t make any more Star Wars movies after The Clone Wars began.

Personally, I thought The Clone Wars had some fun arcs (most notably, the episodes involving Savage Opress and his brother), but some of the liberties it took with the Star Wars mythology were a little too zany, and I also found the characterization of Anakin on the show to be wildly inconsistent with his portrayal in the prequel trilogy. (On the show, he’s an effective general, respected peer to members of the Jedi Council, and even a master to his own Padawan. The Anakin of Revenge of the Sith, meanwhile, is scorned by Mace Windu, and probably not someone you would ever want commanding men on the field of battle.) So I never took The Clone Wars as canon (G-canon being the only real canon to me).

Disney evidently feels otherwise, however, and its revised continuity, I suppose, opens the door for future films to mine The Clone Wars for story material, perhaps even bringing to the big screen characters that were created specifically for the show, potentially giving them greater relevance in the new canon than the series as a whole ever had in the old. I know The Clone Wars has many fans still who might be happy at that prospect.

Me, I think I’m just going to have to develop my own internal system, dividing Star Wars into levels of canon, according to how relevant they are to me personally.

The Walking Dead (TV) (Season 5, Part 1) (2014)

On a show that can be fairly routinely criticized for tedious plot twists that hinge on characters’ lack of common sense, The Walking Dead may have outdone itself with its Season 5 mid-season finale that many viewers found… perplexing, to put it lightly. Read critics’ reviews from around the web, and you’ll see the climactic death scene more harshly described variously as “nonsensical,” “inexplicable,” “random,” “manipulative,” and “hollow.” Discussion forums immediately following the episode’s original airing were awash with comments expressing not so much frustration as plain bewilderment at what viewers had just witnessed and why. Why did Beth stab Dawn? What was she thinking? Is it that she wasn’t thinking? Was there any point to her death? Was the whole moment purely for cheap shock value and nothing more? Were people supposed to be more angry or sad at how it all went down? Because they mostly seemed confused. For sure, The Walking Dead TV series has had some major logic issues over its four-and-a-half seasons so far, but, actually, I’m not sure this is one of them. Personally, I kind of get it.

First, before I go on, I should say that, on reason, I do not think it reasonable to evaluate the events of a scripted and finite genre show strictly literally. It does not do to judge the logic of a TV character’s decisions the same way that we would criticize, say, a sports team’s questionable play in the big game. That doesn’t mean it’s excusable for characters to act like idiots; it means that a character’s arc need not abide by the practical realities that rule our own lives, so long as it consistently observes a valid thematic truth. Beth’s death on The Walking Dead was, in my opinion, the fitting fulfillment of the theme to that half-season, and also true to her character as it had developed up to that point.

Second, I should also add that I think The Walking Dead is a series whose arcs are ideally consumed fully in marathon form, even though the show is not broadcast that way. The middle episodes of each half-season tend to be slow and uneventful. For as popular as this show has become, very rarely does a single episode live up to the preceding week of anticipation. As a result, it becomes very easy for viewers to drift and lose sight of the larger thematic whole across eight weeks.

The tagline for the first half of The Walking Dead Season 5 is “Hunt or be hunted,” ostensibly referring to the group’s conflict with the Terminus cannibals. The cannibals are out of the picture after three episodes, but their foundational ethos, as voiced by their society’s matriarch, Mary—”You’re the butcher or you’re the cattle”—haunts the protagonists throughout the remainder of the arc. Again and again, they are brutally shown that altruism, or even trust, toward others only endangers their own group, and, more and more, Rick especially, as their leader, begins to adopt a policy of basing decisions less on “the right thing to do” and more on “us first,” which is exactly how the Terminans operated.

The season opens with a flashback revealing that the cannibals were not always so. Once upon a time, their signs promising sanctuary were sincere. They were trying to do something good, until the signposts drew a group of marauders, who then proceeded to rape and kill the people of Terminus. Mary and her son, Gareth, eventually led their people to take back control, but not before learning the hard way the price for trying to be human beings in the new post-zombocalypse world. Thus, they decided thereafter that they would be the butchers and not the cattle.

The Terminans’ own treachery then impresses upon Rick’s group the same lesson, which is further driven home by subsequent experiences. After they are taken captive by the revealed cannibals, Rick and a few others break free first and go looking for their friends still held captive in some traincar. They pass other cars along the way, and Glenn suggests that those cars must also be full of prisoners in need of their help, which elicits an incredulous glare from Rick. “It’s still who we are,” Glenn insists. “It’s gotta be.” And so Rick relents, unlocking one of the cars, only to be met with the raving madman inside—one of the marauders who tormented Gareth’s people, we later find out via flashback.

Next, after the group successfully escapes Terminus, which is at that point burning down and under zombie siege, Rick tells the others to take up sniping posts along the fence, so that they can pick off any surviving cannibals. “They don’t get to live,” he says. The others, appalled at the idea, dissuade him of it, reasoning that any cannibals the zombies might fail to finish off will be put to flight and no longer pose any threat. But they’re wrong. A small band of cannibals led by Gareth survives to stalk them, and Bob Stookey ends up paying the price with his leg for the group’s mercy. This time, nobody stops Rick, as he slaughters the last of the cannibals.

Not everyone in the group is entirely easy with the idea that they must be ruthless to survive, but Carol later seems to affirm Rick’s sentiments: “I don’t think we get to save people anymore.” Of course, she was the one who, last season, murdered two of the group's own simply because they might have been contagious with a deadly flu, and then also put down a little girl because apparently she was too crazy to take along but they also couldn’t leave her behind.

Meanwhile, this whole time, Beth is stuck in the city in a hospital run by a group of former police officers led by the clearly deranged and delusional Dawn. Although they are not literally eating people, the hospital operates, under Dawn, as a “cannibalistic” society, where, as Beth observes, “Everyone uses people to get what they want.” Dawn’s officers bring wounded into the hospital and give them treatment and shelter, but this is no altruism. No service is rendered without expectation of payment, which, for Beth and the other civilians in the hospital, basically means being slaves to the officers. Even the one doctor, who appears at first compassionate, is an adherent to the system in place, as the friendship he extends to Beth turns out to be only a ploy to manipulate her to his personal advantage within the hospital. Like everyone else, he’s looking out only for himself, and helping others only when it helps him.

This sort of manipulative ploy in the interest of self-preservation was exercised even within the main group by Eugene, who used the false hope of a cure to string along people to protect him, including many who died believing in him prior to his first appearance on the show. Again, the message seems to be that “right or wrong” is no longer meaningful in the new world, and surviving is all that matters.

As the mid-season finale begins, Rick’s group has captured a trio of Dawn’s officers, whom they plan to exchange for Beth and Carol, both being held at the hospital. (The prisoner exchange, by the way, was Tyreese’s idea. Rick’s original plan was to go in guns blazing and massacre the hospital gang.) When one of the officers escapes, after having feigned cooperation, Rick responds by running down the unarmed, fleeing man with a police car—a new level of cold-bloodedness for our hero. It’s clear that he is done suffering fools. In a chillingly ironic bit of symmetry, Rick’s words to the mangled officer even echo exactly those of Gareth to the captive group near the beginning of the season premiere: “Can’t go back, Bob.” In the premiere, it was Bob Stookey pleading that the group had a plan to set the world back the way it was. In the finale, it was Officer Bob begging to be taken back to the hospital. If the context was not precisely the same, nevertheless the point was made. Rick understood now, as Gareth did, that the old world was gone, its values obsolete.

Which brings us finally to the close of this arc and that fateful prisoner exchange. The two officers are returned to Dawn in trade for Beth and Carol, and everything seems okay, until Dawn asks that Rick’s group give up Noah, her former “ward” (i.e. slave), who had earlier escaped and provided the group with intel on the hospital. Rick and Daryl object, but only until Noah surrenders himself to avert a shootout. At that point, with the safety of their group of utmost concern, they’re probably relieved not to have to fight for Noah, since he was never really part of the group. But Beth is not okay with that.

Beth alone flatly rejects this new insane way of living. Like her father, Hershel, who ultimately remained an upright man in a fallen world (even when he had only one leg and was then forced to his knees to boot), she doesn’t just react to circumstance and fall in line, but rather has her own moral compass that isn’t open to compromise. She recognizes that it actually isn’t okay but is totally broken—this “us first” attitude of only looking out for your own, this nonsense of “butchers” and “cattle” and of subsisting by feeding off one’s fellow human, whether literally or figuratively. Where all those around her, concerned only with surviving, even at the expense of their humanity, have become “the walking dead,” she alone understands that there are things worth more than one’s own life. And so she gives up that life in a shockingly selfless act, sacrificing herself to remove the monster, Dawn—not just to save Noah, but to flip the script for everyone watching, to reach those that can still be reached, and show them that there is another way. Thus, in dying, Beth becomes the girl who lived.

Sure enough, her sacrifice at last shatters the binary “hunt or be hunted” paradigm that has defined the season up to this point. Where, a moment prior, we had essentially two armed gangs eyeing each other warily from opposite ends of the hallway, each hoping just to hold on to what was theirs, now suddenly each group, cleansed in the wake of Beth’s unthinkable sacrifice, is offering to take in the other.

Now, the natural question is, did she really have to let Dawn kill her, in order to get across this message? If Dawn had to go, couldn’t Rick or Daryl just have taken her out easily without Beth having to die first? Maybe. But everybody was already leery and on edge, anticipating that something might go wrong with the exchange. Even though Dawn’s own people hated her, they might, on reflex, have retaliated to such a direct attack in cold blood, and then all hell would have broken loose with both sides opening up on one another. No, Beth had to do it in such a way as to 1) stun everybody, Dawn included, and 2) set it up so that Daryl executing Dawn would have appeared, in that moment, completely justified even to the other side.

So I don’t think Beth’s actions were random or inexplicable. On the contrary, I think they were calculated. She understood that there would be a price to be paid for being a human being. That lesson was not lost on her. But where everybody else only made it that far, she alone graduated in choosing to pay the price fully herself, giving everything that she had or could ever have to give, knowing that she would never personally benefit. That’s when everybody else finally got it too—the real point of the lesson, which Beth wouldn't allow them to walk out without confronting. The paradigm was binary, but Beth’s sacrifice reframed it back to what it originally was: "right or wrong," the distinction still immutable even in the new world.

In summary, I do believe that there was a point to the way Beth died. Now, if this were real life, then what Beth did would be quite stupid, in my opinion, because I don’t generally believe, in the real world in this day and age, that the power of a gesture ever endures long enough to justify a life in exchange. In a more finite work of fiction, however, where every character is just an embodiment of the artists’ words and ideas, there is no higher pursuit for any character than to make a statement that can actually affect those of us in the real world. Because a fictional character doesn't truly have a life to lose, but, in saying something real, they can attain a life beyond what is fiction.

Alas, even within the fiction of The Walking Dead, Beth's sacrifice will likely be rendered hollow, probably quite soon, as future arcs will no doubt see the show going in circles (as it already has been) to contradict this arc's message and regress the group back to a "humanity is a liability" way of thinking. Although, as I argued, it’s preferable to marathon an arc in its entirety, I also think the show surely falls apart if you try to consume more than that at once.

A Long-Term Fictional Enmity

Following up on last week's "Montreal Screwjob" post discussing the blurred lines between reality and fiction—how the characters that pro wrestlers play are really just versions of themselves—I am reminded of a 2008 Fresh Air interview with Jenna Fischer, known for playing Pam on the The Office—a show that, not altogether unlike pro wrestling, was entirely scripted but presented in the guise of real life caught on camera. Regarding this tricky verisimilitude, I remember, there was something that just really struck me about the way Fischer put it, which I will now present out of context:

It is the strangest thing—to have a long-term fictional love interest. It's a type of relationship that is very intimate, and it's very powerful, but it's fictional. There is a part of me that is Pam, and there's a part of him that is Jim. And that part of me is in love with that part of him.

My immediate reaction at the time: Whoa. Then does this mean that there is a part of The Undertaker that really IS that character? If so, then... oh no. Oh no! Somebody needs to tell the cops to get to Hulk Hogan's place right away, because his life is in great peril!

Revisiting the Montreal Screwjob

Sports Illustrated published an interesting piece the other day that had Bret “The Hitman” Hart revisiting one of the most controversial events in pro wrestling history, the “Montreal Screwjob.” This was a pivotal moment in the history of the industry, which integrally shaped the five years that followed, and, arguably, even dictated the course of professional wrestling all the way to its present decline. I’ve always thought that this particular story could be the basis for a great film, on account of how much it reveals about the sickening truth of pro wrestling (such as there is to be had). Indeed, when Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler released in 2008, garnering widespread critical acclaim and accolades for Mickey Rourke’s performance, all I could think was that a more honest and more relevant pro wrestling picture should instead have focused on the Montreal Screwjob. It should have delved into what a truly dirty business pro wrestling is, defined over the last four decades by a behind-the-curtain megalomania that has always dwarfed any of the on-screen personalities.

To summarize, in 1997, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), Bret Hart’s employer of more than a decade, was not able financially to fulfill the remainder of his long-term contract, and so he was preparing to pack up and take his talents to World Championship Wrestling (WCW), WWF’s longstanding arch-rival, which had finally overtaken it over the preceding year of competition. There was one problem, however: within the scripted universe of pro wrestling storylines, Bret Hart was the reigning WWF Champion.

With the “Monday Night Wars” between WWF and WCW growing increasingly spiteful and cutthroat, WWF owner Vince McMahon did not want Hart “taking the belt with him” to WCW. Wishing to part amicably, Hart agreed to vacate the title during a farewell show for WWF. But that wasn’t good enough for McMahon, who knew that WCW would jump at any chance to boast that they had gotten the reigning WWF Champion to defect. McMahon needed Hart to lose the title in a match to another WWF wrestler.

From McMahon’s perspective, the obvious venue was Survivor Series, as it was the only remaining pay-per-view event that Hart was contracted for. Hart had two problems with this: 1) Survivor Series was taking place in Montreal in Hart’s home nation of Canada, and 2) Hart’s scheduled opponent was Shawn Michaels, with whom he was in the midst of a scripted (but truly ugly) “U.S. vs. Canada” feud. Hart did not want to lose in Canada to a guy who had spent the preceding weeks and months dissing Canada. Thus, in order for McMahon to get his way, he conspired with a select handful of his employees to go behind Hart’s back and plot a “screwjob.”

Heading into the Survivor Series match against Michaels, Hart received one script, which was supposed to end in his victory. Meanwhile, the other key actors in the ring—Michaels and referee Earl Hebner—would secretly be working from a different script. At one point in the match, Michaels would catch Hart in Hart’s own signature submission hold, the Sharpshooter. Hart understood that he would then reverse the hold, but, before he could get the chance, Hebner immediately rang the bell to signify that Hart had “tapped out” to the Sharpshooter, even though Hart had given no such indication of surrender.

An irate Hart stood up and spat in Vince McMahon’s face at ringside. Shawn Michaels grabbed the belt and was quickly ushered out of the arena, foregoing the traditional in-ring victory celebration. The pay-per-view broadcast cut off right there, and anybody watching could tell that something peculiar had happened, but the result was in the books now.

http://youtu.be/TnjqgiWgSsA

(Video uploaded by illusive255)

I wonder if Vince McMahon ever considered the possible negative repercussions of the Montreal Screwjob. Yes, he had prevented Bret Hart from taking the WWF Championship to WCW, but the manner in which he had handled it actually created more fodder for his rival and other critics to paint the WWF as a disgrace. I suppose the scheme was only as ridiculous as one would expect coming from people who made their living plotting pro wrestling storylines.

In any case, the biggest story in pro wrestling became, in the immediate aftermath and for months following, not any of the scripted feuds at all, but the controversy over the Montreal Screwjob. Discussion among fans was far less concerned with who held which belts in either WWF or WCW, and far more interested in whatever real-life animus might exist between the involved parties. And, in an industry that has never known what it is to sink too low, both WWF and WCW were eager to capitalize by integrating this real-life dirty laundry into their scripts.

WCW responded by getting “Ravishing” Rick Rude to directly reference the incident and call out both Shawn Michaels and Vince McMahon on an episode of WCW Monday Nitro. This sort of explicit trash-talking across competing programs was unprecedented (not to mention risky, since WCW may have been inadvertently encouraging its viewers to watch WWF in order to catch the other side of an unintended “crossover”), but the moment was especially memorable because Rick Rude also appeared on WWF Raw Is War that same night.

In the WWF storyline, Rude was a member of Shawn Michaels’s gang. But, in real life, Rude was a personal friend of Bret Hart. So, when the Montreal Screwjob happened, Rude hatched a scheme of his own together with WCW. With his contract with WWF coincidentally due to expire right after the Montreal Screwjob, Rude made a verbal agreement to extend his stay, only to then go behind Vince McMahon’s back to sign with WCW instead. He then taped his final episode of WWF Raw Is War, where he appeared with a full beard. Then, on the very night that the episode was to premiere, Rude also appeared on live television on WCW Monday Nitro, but with his beard shaved! On the West Coast, WCW Monday Nitro aired hours before WWF Raw Is War, so Rude’s appearances completely exposed that WWF’s program, although always advertised as live, was actually taped days in advance.

http://youtu.be/ChfWHf2w95o

(Video uploaded by WWE)

In the moment, this must have seemed quite the coup for WCW. Of course, nobody could have known it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end for WCW, and it was really WWF that would come out far ahead.

WCW tried to run with its own this-time-totally-scripted “sequel” to the Montreal Screwjob, in which a different corrupt referee was supposed to screw over a good guy wrestler, only to have Bret Hart intervene on the side of justice. Unfortunately, the intervention was so unconvincingly executed that it became a fiasco unto itself, which, naturally, also became integrated into the ongoing plot. Afterward, Hart had no other memorable storylines in WCW, where he effectively ended his career with a whimper due to health issues. Rick Rude’s tenure there was even less remarkable; he never was able to get into ring-ready condition before dying suddenly of heart failure.

Meanwhile, Vince McMahon recognized that the best move he could make was to fully embrace the image that the fans now had of him as the corrupt owner of the WWF. Originally, “Vince McMahon” the character had been only a ringside announcer. Most viewers who only followed the action on TV and nothing behind the scenes wouldn’t even have known that McMahon was actually the head honcho, which was how McMahon had preferred it. But now that he had been fully “outed” by the Montreal Screwjob spotlighting him as this tyrannical mastermind, and finding that the vitriol that fans felt for him was the biggest reaction of any kind that the WWF had gotten in a long time, McMahon shrewdly recast himself as his promotion’s chief antagonist, whom fans loved to hate. McMahon’s scripted feuds with his wrestlers proved wildly successful, as well as increasingly ridiculous, as McMahon began to wrestle himself, and also brought in his real-life wife and children as characters, who, yes, also wrestled.

WWF (later WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)) was also, no doubt, helped financially by being able to jettison Bret Hart’s massive contract. With the departure of Hart, nearly all of the “old guard” superstars were now gone, which actually freed up WWF to cultivate and thrive off a new generation of edgier characters, while WCW began to flounder off the diminishing returns of the many aging has-been egos still headlining its shows. Less than four years after the Montreal Screwjob, McMahon was able to purchase his ailing competitor, effectively achieving a monopoly, which, in the long term, has been a victory for nobody, as pro wrestling’s cultural currency has continually declined under his absolute control. That's not a subjective qualitative assessment; WWE's stock has also been tanking over the past half-year.

Reading Hart’s thoughts on the Montreal Screwjob now, one of the weirder things, at least for anyone not immersed in the fiction of professional wrestling, might be whom he accuses of having been behind the plot. McMahon was obviously in charge of everything, but Hart believes that the other two key conspirators were Shawn Michaels and Paul Michael Levesque (AKA “Triple H”). This is surreal because Michaels and Triple H were, at the time, not executives or creative directors in charge of storylines, but were, like Hart, mere performers (in other words, actors), so why would they have been calling shots alongside McMahon? Moreover, not only were Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels bitter rivals in the fiction, but the two did not like one another in real life. As for Triple H, he was Michaels’s friend, both in the story and in real life, and, again, someone Hart did not get along with in either. So the lines between reality and pro wrestling fiction get very blurred, and you almost wonder if Bret Hart was the one having a hard time keeping things straight. Maybe he started out only being pretend enemies with Michaels and Triple H, but then he got so method into his performance that he came to despise them off camera as well. Then, when he got screwed in real life (and also in the story, I suppose), he named his pretend nemeses as the culprits only on account of their fictional enmity.

In fact, all parties’ accounts, Michaels’s included, have corroborated Hart’s suspicions, so evidently he’s not paranoid. But isn’t that even crazier? That the heel characters always scheming against him in the storyline turned out to be scheming against him in real life also? And in precisely such an underhanded manner and for precisely the same reasons (i.e. to take his belt) as in nearly all pro wrestling storylines?

Actually, I have always had a suspicion that the Montreal Screwjob was a total fiction—that is, a multi-level angle—and that all the actors, including Bret Hart and maybe even those running things in WCW, were in on it (and still are). There’s almost no way to ever know for sure, but, frankly, every aspect of it strikes me as ridiculous. But maybe that’s the point. If the Montreal Screwjob did not begin as an angle, both WWF and WCW certainly turned it into one. So maybe “real or fake” has never been the proper question when it comes to pro wrestling, and everything instead just exists in this bizarre gray area in between, where every character is but a version of the actor playing them—heightened or fictionalized, perhaps, but still that person at core. And the really insane, disturbing, and frequently tragic part is that the actors themselves cannot clearly separate fiction from reality. That includes all the wrestlers, who are sincerely competitive, even if none of the fighting is real. And it includes Vince McMahon, the principal man behind the curtain, who got swept up in his own stories and onto the stage, where his real-life business decisions, working relationships, and even family members bled into the scripted delusions.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Season 1) (2013-2014)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the biggest deal in movies right now and, perhaps, of all time, if going by the average gross over such a large quantity of releases. In discussions speculating on the future of the franchise, I often hear people wonder aloud, how long can this last? In other words, how long before the winning streak ends and the brand fades, either because a) viable source material, creative enthusiasm, or audiences’ appetites have been exhausted, or b) Marvel simply misfires and puts out a dud? I hear people ask also, with the Cinematic Universe effectively the “prime” Marvel universe now (in terms of investment, profit, and mindshare), when might Marvel Studios assume prime creative proprietorship of Marvel storylines and take the lead in putting out original works not based on any existing comics? In fact, the answer to both questions may already have arrived in the form of the, so far, extremely disappointing Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the first television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I had high hopes for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., not only because I enjoyed Marvel’s movies and would have been all for visiting that world more frequently through a weekly series, but also because I was a big fan of creator Joss Whedon’s previous works in television, both Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Angel (1999-2004) ranking highly on my all-time list of TV shows. Unfortunately, the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has very little to do with any of the movies, and it also has almost nothing of what made Buffy and Angel good.

Even with Marvel raking it in on the movie side, I knew better than to expect Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to receive a budget sufficient to deliver blockbuster production values on a weekly basis. They surely couldn’t afford the effects to have Iron Man guesting (and Robert Downey, Jr. would likely have been even more expensive). And, yeah, if you can’t have Thor and the Hulk on the show, then it’s probably better not to mention them at all, rather than constantly talk about what they’re up to without ever being able to show it.

But what I was hoping for was maybe a “street-level hero/villain-of-the-week” show, featuring a different C-list comics character every episode, with the regular cast members serving as point-of-view characters—the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents through whom we would follow the superhuman cases they handle every day. I would even have settled for superheroes created specifically for the show, so long as they had compelling stories and showcased a good variety of impressive superpowers (e.g. flight, invulnerability, super speed, energy projection, etc.—all stuff that NBC’s Heroes (2006-2010) had already shown could be done on live-action TV).

The first half of Season 1 does follow a case-of-the-week format, but almost none of the cases could even accurately be classified as within the superhero genre. Most episodes deal with some device or artifact, which may not ever even be put into action, and even when there are superpowers involved, the execution is woefully sub-Heroes. The only remotely memorable case involves a guy with flame powers (Episode 5 “Girl in the Flower Dress”), and even that’s not a good episode. The ability is intuitive (though not impressively depicted), but the character is weak, and, as on most episodes, there never seems anything truly at stake. The show plays out more like a non-scary, G-rated version of The X-Files, after all the personality has been stripped out.

I was hoping for a show with interesting cases and cool guest characters, because I never really had much hope for the titular team. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agency has, of course, had a long history in the comics, but the main characters on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are all original creations not drawn from the comics. And it had been made clear from the outset that the team on this show was going to be markedly different in operation and personality from how the agency and its members are typically depicted in the comics. The most well-known S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the comics tend to be more frosty, cynical types, as you might expect to find working in espionage (which is what the “E” originally stood for). On the show, the nearest example might be the recurring guest character Victoria Hand (played by Saffron Burrows), who is from the comics. But the main characters on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are mostly not spy types, but rather misfits and outcasts played by generically young and good-looking unknowns. I have no problem with that on principle; if Whedon and his crew want to go their own way, that’s fine. But these particular characters are not very original, interesting, or well-acted.

The leader of the team, Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), not so young or good-looking, is the main thread connecting the show to the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Originally created for a small role in Iron Man (2008), he became a fan favorite for his appearances in that movie and also Iron Man 2 (2010) and The Avengers (2012) (and maybe, to a lesser extent, Thor (2011), where he’s kind of a prick), although, as it happened, among the people I saw those movies with in theaters, a whopping two-thirds majority actually loathed the character, making him an unusually controversial figure in my world. I personally enjoyed his familiar presence as the films progressed, although I’ll grant that any attachment to Agent Coulson was not because he was in any way an objectively compelling figure, but simply because he was one of the main recurring elements across movies—an opportunity to point out during Thor, to my friends who hadn’t seen Iron Man, that, hey, this dude had been in that other movie (not that that ever actually happened, because who the hell watched only Thor but not Iron Man?).

In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Coulson has been elevated to a lead role, which is wholly inappropriate, because the character still isn’t objectively compelling, and it’s also no longer fun catching up with him, now that he’s around every week with nothing interesting to say. He might have worked okay as some dry commanding officer who would only brief and debrief his team members from behind his desk, but the plot of the show actually centers around him, as entirely too much time is devoted to the mystery of how he’s still alive after the events of The Avengers. He might still be the best character on the show, but that is mostly a testament to how poor the rest of the cast is.

The other veteran actor in the cast is Ming-Na Wen, who plays Agent Melinda May, a legendary field agent. Even with Wen having previously played Chun-Li, “the strongest woman in the world,” in Street Fighter (1994), this role as some sort of stoic killing machine is quite the departure from any of her previous work. Her last major role before this was as a regular on Stargate Universe (2009-2011), where she played a conniving and ambitious lesbian bureaucrat. It’s hard to buy her as an action star here, especially with the show’s limited budget. More importantly, she also has zero chemistry with the rest of the actors, and, any time she’s not actually in the scene, I forget she’s even part of the team, because she just doesn’t seem to fit.

The remaining regulars are all terrible. As actors, they’re quite limited, but, really, the material doesn’t give them much to work with either. For some reason, this show has two flighty British scientist types, when I’m not sure it needed even one. Skye (Chloe Bennet), the main female lead, who is recruited into the team on the first episode, I think is supposed to be one of those ironic Whedon heroines, but the actress just never gets the comic timing right. (And the dialogue often sounds to my ear like a cheap imitation of the Whedon we know from Buffy, which may indeed be the case.) Agent Ward (Brett Dalton) is just bland.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does start to turn things around in the second half of its first season. Episode 15 “Yes Men” is nothing Emmy-worthy, but it’s the first time I found myself thinking, “Yes, this is what this show should be every week.” It’s a mostly standalone episode focusing on the character of the seductress Lorelei, a major recurring foe of Thor from the comics. This is a character that would be difficult to do in a Thor movie, because she’s not quite threatening enough to be the main antagonist, but she also wouldn’t work as a henchwoman. She’s not going to get in a fistfight with Thor, so it would be hard to give the character her own moment within a two-hour movie without taking things down an overlong sidetrack. The television series format is ideally suited for bringing this character to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Mirroring her comics appearances, it’s a shorter story, but one devoted entirely to her. The episode is also notable for featuring a special guest appearance by Jaimie Alexander, reprising her role as Lady Sif from the Thor movies. Without all the post-processing of the films, her armor looks really tacky on TV, but still these cameos help to legitimize Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This is then followed up by the high point of the season, when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has its first true crossover with the movies. By Episode 16 “End of the Beginning,” the show had become more serialized, focusing on the team’s conflicts with an unknown big bad, who had taken a special interest in them. The episode ends on a cliffhanger, with the characters determining that the villain must be someone within S.H.I.E.L.D., right before their plane is hijacked. Then, on that weekend between episodes, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) opened in theaters, and, of course, the fate of S.H.I.E.L.D. proved a huge part of that story.

It was about midway into Captain America: The Winter Soldier that I realized that the incident within S.H.I.E.L.D. in that movie was actually the very same as the one on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and, moreover, something that the show had been building to all season long. Episode 17 “Turn, Turn, Turn” confirmed it, along the way sparing no spoilers for the movie for anyone who had passed on opening weekend. It seemed to me a grand and brilliantly executed maneuver, as, once again, just as they had in creating a shared cinematic universe in the first place, Marvel had done something that had never been done before, crossing over a movie with a TV show, and timing the sequence of events perfectly for those who were following both. Indeed, for those who were able to experience it “in the moment,” it was very cool.

But then the season continued on, and I began to doubt that the show had been planned that closely together with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. After the initial reveal, the Hydra agents on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. never again refer to Hydra’s larger goals, and they don’t seem to report to Hydra command. Aside from being enemies of S.H.I.E.L.D., they basically don’t behave anything like the members of Hydra depicted in the movie, and eventually they themselves acknowledge that they are “not true believers.” I’m guessing that the show writers planned out their own betrayal twist independent of the movie, and only modified it mid-season to halfway harmonize with the story of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

It’s disappointing that the crossover was not truly more well-thought-out. Watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ultimately adds almost nothing to one’s appreciation of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Nevertheless, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does benefit from the new direction forced upon it by the events of the movie. The show becomes legitimately watchable during the final few episodes of the season, having finally attained a sense of urgency (though it is still hamstrung somewhat by the directive to keep it family-friendly and accessible to the mass audiences of the films).

The best twist is really—SPOILER—the revelation that Agent Ward has been a Hydra double agent all along. What makes it great and ballsy is how the show repeatedly teases that it might back down from making Ward evil—providing backstory to try to get us to “understand” how he got here, staging seemingly pivotal moments where the character might recognize his mistake and redeem himself—only to then double down on presenting him as a total bastard.

The finale is a bit of a letdown, as it centers largely around a much-hyped “substantial” guest appearance by Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. A significant character in both the comics and the movies, this is what I said I wanted to see more of on this show. But when Jackson arrives, he does so looking like he couldn’t even be bothered to go through makeup and wardrobe before filming his scenes and getting out of there. He has one conversation with Bill Paxton, who plays S.H.I.E.L.D agent John Garrett (another character from the comics), but it’s embarrassingly clear that the two movie stars were never on set at the same time.

As of the end of Season 1, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. still needs a lot of work. I was disappointed that it didn’t feel more relevant as a piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that it didn’t seem to have very much to do with Marvel Comics at all. I began to consider that maybe the writers’ hands were tied, that maybe any interesting characters from the comics were already internally reserved for the movies, even if they had yet to appear in any. By the midpoint of the season, I began almost to hope that that was the case, because I had no confidence that the show could ever do justice to any of the comics characters I wanted to see.

Marvel has since revealed plans for several Netflix series based on exactly the sorts of street-level C-listers I might once have expected to guest on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which essentially confirms that they have no intention of wasting any promising comics characters on this show, killing much of its original draw for me.  With only one Marvel movie scheduled to come out during the course of Season 2 (Avengers: Age of Ultron, which might overlap with the very end of the season), there also won't be as many chances to pull viewers via stunt tie-in episodes.

The writers of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are going to be pretty much on their own then. If they're going to fix this show, they'll have to do it with good original stories, which seems almost impossible now, because the biggest problem remains the cast of original characters, who are just charmless and boring, such that, even when the action eventually ramps up, I don’t feel invested in what happens to anyone. But, on the other hand, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 1 is, among Whedon shows, at least better than the wretched first season of Dollhouse (2009-2010), but worse than Dollhouse Season 2, which actually turned out not bad. So maybe Season 2 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will also be a huge improvement.