2012, A Year in (Not) Reading

Friends, I have a sad confession to make: in 2012, I read all of 31 books.  That's... pretty damn low, for me.  It's roughly half the books I read last year, or the year before.  It's probably the fewest books I've read in any year in the last decade, and certainly since I started keeping track.  There are any number of reasons for this sudden drop: early in the year, the stress of scrambling for mortgages and the other busywork of buying an apartment made mindless, or at least less demanding, entertainment like film and TV a lot more appealing than reading, and moving into my own place has meant that where last year I used public transport infrequently, now I hardly use it at all, which has cut into those dead parts of the day that are just perfect for disappearing into a good book.  But the truth is that reading, like anything else, is a habit, and that once broken--replaced with the kind of activities that take less out of you at the end of a long day, such as TV or just surfing the net--it is hard to get back into.  My project for next year, obviously, is to get back into that habit, but for the time being I'm glad, at least, to be able to report that what 2012 lacked in quantity it made up for in quality.  Those books that I did find it in me to sit down and finish were for the most part above average, with the ratio of remarkable reads to lackluster ones far outstripping years in which I've been a more assiduous reader.  It's also interesting to note that, as few books as I read this year, I read more books by women than men--16 out of 31, which puts me just over 50%.  Let's hope I can maintain that ratio (or improve on it) even as I try to return to a respectable reading list.

The best books I've read this year, by order of author's surname:

• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (review)
  
  Mantel's follow-up to the well-received Wolf Hall (which I placed on 2009's year's best list, though with some reservations) arguably has an easier job than its predecessor.  Charting the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and the role that Mantel's hero Thomas Cromwell played in it, it tells a more compressed, and more tense, story than Wolf Hall did.  But if the material was more congenial for dramatization, that doesn't make the end result any less enjoyable or riveting.  Bring Up the Bodies continues Wolf Hall's project of not only humanizing Cromwell but making him a standard-bearer for humanism, and perhaps even the modern way of thought, but in this volume of the trilogy there is less of a sense that Mantel is willing to let her hero get away, literally, with murder.  She opens up our understanding of Cromwell's thought process in such a way as not only to shed a new light on his supposedly virtuous, forgiving attitude in Wolf Hall, but to suggest a person so controlled that they can literally suppress their own vengeful, bloodthirsty thoughts--and then unleash them when, as Cromwell does in Bring Up the Bodies, they gain enough power to indulge them.  The figure that emerges from Bring Up the Bodies is very similar to Wolf Hall's mingled hero and villain--the champion of reform who thinks nothing of judicial murder--but in this second novel it's easier to see the seeds of Cromwell's downfall--both his moral dissolution and his eventual loss of favor and execution.  The third part of this trilogy can't come soon enough.
  
  
• The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers
  
  Rogers's Clarke-winning novel has a premise that could easily have gone very wrong: in the near future, a bioengineered virus renders pregnancy fatal in its early stages, and seems to herald the end of the human race.  The eponymous heroine is a teenager who decides to dedicate her life to what she believes is humanity's last hope for survival, a procedure that will cost her life.  What makes Testament work is how deftly and persuasively Rogers sketches Jessie, a teenager whose horror at what the adults who came before her have made of the world, and at her own lack of control even as she approaches adulthood, feels as principled and righteous to her as it is priggish and judgmental to us.  It's Jessie's misfortune to live in a moment of history where her self-righteousness can be perceived as nobility, and where her willingness to sacrifice herself is matched by society's willingness to discard her.  But Testament isn't a straight-up tragedy either.  As short-sighted and given to thinking in absolutes as Jessie is, the novel leaves us in no doubt that she makes the decision to sacrifice herself freely, willingly, and with a full understanding of what it means--even as it strongly suggests that her sacrifice is unnecessary, and that humanity's salvation does not rest in her hands.  The result is horrifying and masterful, the chronicle of a young woman coming to adulthood and self-awareness only to use her newfound freedom and responsibility to destroy herself.
  
  
• MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman
  
  At first glance, it's easy to suspect MetaMaus of being little more than a handsome coffee table book, a way for Art Spiegelman to rest of his laurels for having revolutionized, in one fell stroke, both graphic novels and Holocaust literature, producing the novelistic equivalent of DVD commentary.  But MetaMaus is a work in its own right, a book length interview with Spiegelman, clustered around the three central questions evoked by Maus--why comics?  Why the Holocaust?  Why mice?--but which through them gives readers an intimate, fascinating glimpse at the creative process that led to Maus's creation.  Even if you haven't read Maus, MetaMaus is engrossing as a narrative of creation, charting the conscious, deliberate way in which Spiegelman crafted his work, the choices he made and the circumstances that imposed upon him, together working to explode the all-too-prevalent romantic notion of art emerging, fully formed, from the artist's mind, and replacing it with a vision of art as work.  The artist himself, too, emerges from this narrative, and Spiegelman comes off as prickly, opinionated, and deeply protective of his work, a fascinating (if, at points, not terribly appealing) figure.  To top all that off, MetaMaus is also a handsome coffee table book, beautifully crafted and containing trial sketches, examples of Spiegelman's previous work, and documents from Vladek and Anja Spiegelman's life and experiences during WWII, all of which serve to expand on both Spiegelman's narrative and Maus itself.  If MetaMaus is DVD commentary, it is the kind that not only makes you appreciate the original art all the more, but turns out to be art in its own right, and it is essential to anyone who loves Maus, or who wants to know why it deserves to be loved.
  
  
• Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
  
  Spufford's strange, difficult to categorize book is either a very dry historical novel or a very creative work of nonfiction.  Stopping at various points along the history of Soviet Union, Spufford lays out the grand experiment of that nation along economic, rather than political or ideological, lines--the attempt to create an entirely planned economy, to achieve prosperity and economic growth without recourse to the free market, or indeed any market at all.  Alternating between overviews of how this goal was approached and narrative chapters in which Soviet citizens--scientists, economists, apparatchiks, fixers, party leaders--interact with that goal and its consequences, Spufford is both wistful about this experiment and clear-eyed about the reasons for its failure.  Red Plenty is at once a work of history, albeit a history that Western readers don't tend to know much about, especially when glimpsed through Spufford's economic perspective (as such it has inspired a fascinating, insightful roundtable at the group blog Crooked Timber, which expands on the book's discussion of history and economics from several points of view), and a work of fiction whose concerns seem particularly generic--its characters are involved in the process of worldbuilding, even if the tools, and the science, through which they build their world are economics.  As uncategorizable as it is, Red Plenty is nevertheless engrossing, and a must-read for anyone interested in either Soviet history or the outer limits of what the novel format can do.

Honorable mentions:

• A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge (review) - Yet more proof, if any were needed, that Hardinge is one of the finest writers currently working in YA.  A clever novel about tradition, class, and social conditioning, set in one of Hardinge's trademark elaborately realized fantasy worlds.
  
  
• Sea Hearts (The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan - Typically limpid prose, and a typically deft and idiosyncratic handling of a familiar fairy tale from Lanagan, who through alternating perspectives tells the story of a community whose women are superseded by transformed seal-wives.
  
  
• Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey - A cracking story, beautifully realized, sees an orphan pretending to the be long-lost son and heir of a wealthy English family, and beginning to suspect a darker truth about his counterpart's disappearance.  Tey makes a shlocky plot work through compelling characterization and effortless writing.
  

Dishonorable mentions:

• The End Specialist (The Postmortal) by Drew Magary - Perhaps the most baffling of this year's Clarke nominations, this indifferently written, lightweight novel about a world which discovers a cure for aging is the epitome of outsider SF--thoughtless, unimaginative, and prone to hysteria.  That the narrator is congenitally incapable of relating to women as people, and that his story revolves around his decades-long obsession with a woman who, naturally, turns out to be the answer to his prayers, is only icing on the rancid cake.
  
  
• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (review) - Eugenides's profoundly disappointing follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex is a smug, unconvincing treatise about its title form that claims to modernize the likes of Austen and Eliot while actually producing something a great deal more regressive than anything these 19th century authors created.  Complete with a bland, passive heroine, a wrong man whose wrongness stems from his crippling mental illness, and a right man whose all-consuming misogyny is matched only by Eugenides's fondness for him, The Marriage Plot falls far short of the many inventive, thought-provoking modernizations of its format that currently exist--not that Eugenides seems to be aware of this fact.
  
  
• Black Heart by Holly Black - After the first two volumes in her Curse Workers trilogy seemed to concentrate equally on the forces--criminal and legal--trying to control hero Cassel Sharpe, and on his own conviction that because of his criminal past he is unworthy of love and friendship, Black drops the ball on the latter point in her concluding volume.  Black Heart seems aimed primarily at Cassel's triumph, and thus ignores the question of whether he deserves that triumph (we never find out, for example, how his brothers persuaded him to kill repeatedly for them, and don't seem to be expected to be bothered by this lack of explanation), and whether that triumph is worth the effort--a great deal of the book is taken up with Cassel finally getting together with his childhood sweetheart Lila, and we're apparently not supposed to be bothered by the fact that Lila is planning to take over her father's criminal empire and, over the course of the book, kills two people in cold blood.  Black Heart is as engaging and well written as White Cat and Red Glove, but a great deal less brave in its handling of questions of morality.

It's Showtime! Thoughts on Dexter and Homeland

This time last year, it seemed like Homeland and Dexter couldn't have more different trajectories.  Dexter was coming off a plodding, padded sixth season that had devolved into the butt of a sad joke, full of nonsensical plot twists, increasingly boring subplots involving the show's perennially underserved secondary characters, and an growing sense that no one involved with the show knew what to do with its central character.  Homeland, on the other hand, had just concluded a triumphant, impossibly assured first season that not only established its two lead characters, bipolar CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and POW-turned-terrorist Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), as complex, nuanced avatars of mingled heroism and villainy, but delivered a fast-paced, pulse-pounding story about terror and anti-terror that nevertheless managed to remain rooted in mundane reality rather than flying off into 24-style action-adventure fantasy.  And yet, going into their second and sixth seasons, Homeland and Dexter seemed not only to be facing the same challenges--of showing that their story still had life and relevance in it, and could be taken to its next (in Dexter's case, final) level--they seem to have faced that challenge with the same mingled degree of success and failure.  Both shows start their seasons off strong, and then diffuse into a messy, seemingly aimless plot.  Both root the seasons in the relationship between the shows' male and female leads, which remains their truest and most compelling trait even when the rest of the season seems to have gone to pieces.  And both end with the definite sense that the season has been less about its own story and more in the service of setting the table for next year's chapter.

You could easily class both Homeland and Dexter as outliers to the sub-category of shows I discussed in a recent essay, which revolve around a single male anti-hero and his increasingly strained relationship with the concept of masculinity--shows that include critical darlings Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and which take as their urtext the last decade's most influential and revolutionary series, The Sopranos.  Both shows replicate the format of a seemingly virtuous and heroic suburban husband and father who is actually involved in shady, immoral dealings, and whose identity is hopelessly tangled, perhaps even trapped, by ideas of stalwart masculinity (as well as, in Homeland's case, the contrast between white, Christian America and quasi-Orientalist ideas of the Islamic Middle East), all the way down to the protagonist's nagging, uncomprehending wife and his adoring yet increasingly perceptive and suspicious children.  In Homeland's case, that format is complicated first by the fact that terrorism is less morally ambiguous than advertising cigarettes or cooking meth (in fact Homeland has to work hard to encourage an ambivalent attitude towards Brody's terrorism going in the other direction, by revealing that he is trying to avenge a drone strike on a school, sanctioned by the current vice president, which claimed the lives of 82 children), and even more powerfully by the existence of Carrie as a second--even primary--protagonist, whose half of the story is compelling in its own right, and for whom Brody is the villain.  Dexter, meanwhile, sidesteps the issue of masculinity that is at the heart of all these other shows by fielding a protagonist who may not even be human.  Simultaneously hyper-masculine--he rarely suffers from the kind of status anxiety that afflicts Tony Soprano or Walter White, simply because he knows that he could easily kill anyone who gets in his way--and completely emasculated--the image he projects is geeky and unthreatening, and he rarely cares, or even realizes, that he isn't performing masculinity correctly--Dexter (Michael C. Hall) is most frequently presented as a sort of monster living uneasily among humans, whose highest aspiration is the kind of mundane suburban existence that men like Walter White see as a trap.

Perhaps the most crucial difference between Dexter and the other shows I've mentioned here, however, is that Dexter doesn't want us to disapprove of its protagonist's extra-legal activities.  If Dexter, who kills only people who are themselves murderers, isn't quite presented as a hero--it is to the show's credit that it never allows its audience to forget that what compels Dexter to kill isn't a love of justice or outrage over his victims' actions, but his psychopathic nature--he is also rarely asked to stand within the confines of conventional morality.  Dexter kills not because he is a bad (or good) person, but simply because it's in his nature to do so, and his conflicts with seasonal antagonists aren't a battle between good and evil, but a simple struggle for survival between Dexter and another monster whom he had awakened.  As a result, the audience finds it easy root for Dexter.  Unlike in shows like The Sorpanos or Breaking Bad, there is in Dexter no counterweight of authorial disapproval to encourage the audience to hope for the protagonist's downfall (we'll ignore for the moment the fact that a significant portion of both The Sopranos's and Breaking Bad's audience finds it very easy to ignore that encouragement and views Tony Soprano and Walter White as uncomplicated heroes).  Where the show has faltered in its last two seasons, however, is that it's no longer clear what its creators want us to want for Dexter.  He's no longer reaching towards humanity, as he was in its first four seasons, and rooting for Dexter now seems to mean wanting him to get away with behavior that has caused untold damage and pain to his loved ones--most obviously, bringing about his wife Rita's death and orphaning his two stepchildren--so that he can continue to engage in just the same behavior, and presumably cause them even more harm.  By the end of the sixth season, it seems obvious that Dexter will never learn and never change, and the absence of any space in the show to dislike him for this fact is perhaps the core of what made that season so unsatisfying.

The seventh season therefore takes an vital step in the right direction when it has Dexter's adopted sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) discover that he is a serial killer.  Actually, this happens in the closing seconds of the sixth season, when Deb walks in on Dexter's latest kill, but the seventh season not only refuses to back away from this revelation but spends it first half essentially bringing Deb up to speed, with every episode finding her reevaluating another one of the show's major plotlines--Rita's death at the end of the fourth season, the Bay Harbor Butcher investigation in the second season--and learning to see them as the audience did.  Aside from Rita and her children, Deb is the character who has suffered the most as a result of Dexter's secret life, losing her father's attention, her innocence, and several of her relationships as a result of a dysfunction that she never knew about.  She's also the series's second protagonist, someone the audience has learned to care about and root for, which means that when she reacts to the discovery of Dexter's true nature and what it has cost her and her friends and family with outrage, disgust, and the unequivocal demand that Dexter stops killing, the audience can't dismiss her as a nagging shrew as easily as Rita (and so many of the uncomprehending wives who have followed her) was.  By allowing Deb to finally see her brother for what he is, Dexter finally allows its audience to do what the character had earned a long time ago--dislike him.  Through Deb's eyes, Dexter comes off as selfish and heedless.  He makes promises to Deb, and then turns around and breaks them without a moment's hesitation or remorse.  When she points out how much damage he does--for example by obstructing investigations that might have led to the arrest of his prospective victims--all he can do is offer weak excuses, which she explodes in turn.  What perhaps makes Dexter most unlikable during the show's seventh season, however, is the fact that for all the good points she lands against him, Deb's discovery of his killing not only does nothing to curb it, it begins the process of her own moral dissolution.

When Deb discovers Dexter at a murder scene at the beginning of the season, he convinces her that it was a momentary lapse, and she agrees to cover it up, but the deviation from Dexter's protocol leaves evidence behind that is discovered by Maria LaGuerta (Lauren Vélez), a police captain who has never believed that her friend Doakes was truly responsible for the Bay Harbor Butcher murders, actually committed by Dexter, and now connects the current scene with the Butcher (which means, among other things, that once again it's Dexter's pathological lying that sets the season's events in motion--if he'd admitted to being a serial killer to Deb to begin with, he might have spared her a great deal of anguish down the line).  Deb, who even after realizing what kind of killer Dexter is decides that she can't turn him in, therefore spends the season following and undermining LaGuerta's investigation, even as her opposition to Dexter's killing is worn away at by a case in which he kills a murderer who had been released after a bad arrest.  She becomes mired in lies and deceit, losing her grip on right and wrong--a grip that had defined and sustained her through terrible ordeals over the previous six seasons--until, at the season's end, it's Deb who kills LaGuerta to prevent her from exposing Dexter.  As many fans and reviewers have noted, this plot strand is lifted directly from Breaking Bad, which over the last season and a half has seen Walt's wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) transition from staunch disapproval and rejection of his actions to grudgingly enabling them, and finally to full-on acknowledgment of his most heinous crimes, which reduces her to an emotionally ravaged, self-loathing wreck.  Nevertheless, the choice to deepen and complicate its most fruitful, longest-lasting relationship is unimpeachable, and one that, in the first half of the season at least, gives Dexter a new lease on life, tightening its storylines and ramping up the tension as Dexter and Deb alternately square off against each other and join forces against LaGuera's investigation, with the audience left as uncertain as Deb as to what outcome they should be hoping for.

If Dexter revitalized itself by bucking tradition this season, Homeland hewed close to the tradition established in its first season--that of having no tradition at all.  Of the many impressive aspects of Homeland's debut season, none were perhaps as striking as the fearlessness with which the show raced through plotlines that might in another series have been stretched out to fill whole arcs--Carrie's illegal surveillance of Brody and his family, the mystery of whether Brody is truly a terrorist, Carrie and Brody's romantic entanglement--without ever seeming rushed or shortchanging its characters.  The second season kicks off in just the same fashion, opening several months after the first season finale, with Brody now a congressman in the inner circle of the vice president (the same man who ordered the drone strike on the school) and a disgraced Carrie struggling to put her life together after a psychiatric hospitalization and a course of ECT.  As quickly as that status quo is established, however, it's torn apart when a raid on a terrorist stronghold reveals the suicide tape Brody made before his abortive attempt to blow up the vice president in the previous season finale.  And no sooner is a vindicated Carrie reinstated and made a key figure of a sting operation intended to follow Brody to the master-terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), than she decides that Brody has caught wind of the operation (a conclusion that is never confirmed by Brody himself) and has him arrested.

This leads to the season's finest episode, "Q&A," in which Carrie interrogates Brody, eventually persuading him to turn on Abu Nazir and help the CIA capture him.  Aside from the fact that Danes and Lewis are both masterful, fearless actors, and that the episode has the wisdom to stand back and let them play off against other, what's remarkable about "Q&A" is the way it realigns the relationship between Carrie and Brody, turning what was adversarial into a deep but discomforting bond.  What I found remarkable about the writing for both Carrie and Brody in the first season was how nimbly it contained both characters' inherent contradictions.  Brody was, at one and the same time, a lost, broken soul, and a manipulative liar who thought nothing of exploiting the pain of those closest to him to achieve his sickening goal.  Carrie was a reckless agent who ignored the damage she caused in pursuit of what she believed was the truth, and a heroic one, who threw herself against the obstacles set before her and ended up saving the day at enormous cost to herself.  Though these contradictions are still present in both characters in season two, they are less prominently featured, and in their place the show focuses on the similarly disorienting contradictions of Carrie and Brody's relationship.  When Carrie interrogates Brody in "Q&A," the show clearly parallels her with Abu Nazir, by showing us that she uses to same methods as he did to, essentially, break Brody a second time.  Like Abu Nazir, she stands by as Brody is mistreated by her colleagues, then offers him not only kindness, but love and understanding (that she does this even as she explains that this was Abu Nazir's tactic only makes her resulting bond with Brody more uncomfortable).  At the end of the episode, Brody is literally shattered, curled up on the floor of the interrogation room (another physical echo of his indoctrination by Abu Nazir), and Carrie is the one who raises him up.

For the rest of the season, Carrie acts as Brody's protector and sole confidante, which eventually leads to the resumption of their romantic relationship, but once again it's hard to know where the line falls between genuine emotion, manipulation, and, as Abu Nazir tells Carrie when he captures her and discusses their similar relationships with Brody, emotional transference.  Carrie pursues a romantic relationship with Brody against her superiors' wishes and advice in a way that makes her seem--to them and to us--like a lovestruck girl, but there are points where she seems to regard him with remarkable coldness.  When Brody goes missing after being recaptured by Abu Nazir, the (male) analysts around Carrie say nothing and refuse to meet her eyes, as if sparing a grieving widow from the painful truth, but she's the one who flatly and emotionlessly announces that Brody must be dead.  When she and Brody resume their sexual relationship, they do so in a motel where Carrie has taken Brody after he breaks down and threatens to stop working for the CIA, but this turns out to be an agency safe house, and a night with Carrie does so much to restore Brody's equilibrium and persuade him to recommit to his assignment that it seems likely she seduced him with just that purpose in mind (something that Brody himself seems to have realized the next morning, when he ruefully tells Carrie that he will go back to his assignment).  At several points in the season Carrie's facade of trust and forgiveness towards Brody cracks, revealing a deep-seated distrust that none of his actions or assurances can budge (it's probably not a coincidence that these are the moments where Carrie seems most like herself, while the warm glow that bathes her when she and Brody are happy together feels alien and unconvincing), but by the end of the season she compromises herself severely for him, covering up for him when he helps Abu Nazir kill the vice president in order to save the captive Carrie's life, and helping him escape at the end of the season, when he is framed (as she comes to believe) for a terrorist bombing at Langley.

So long as Homeland strives to maintain that queasy ambiguity about Carrie and Brody's relationship, and where the line lies between love that overcomes all obstacles and a sick, codependent bond, the season maintains a strong emotional core, but by the season's end it feels as if Homeland wants us to take its second half as, as Brody says to Carrie in their last scene together, a love story, and this is hard to accept given how much of their relationship feels like a manipulation or a lie, and how much damage Carrie and Brody (but especially Brody) have done to each other.  Unfortunately, this implausibility is very much in line with the way the second season's plot progresses in its second half, once Brody has been recruited by the CIA.  Where the first season, even within the confines of its spy thriller conventions, told a relatively intimate, small-scale story, about a single terrorist planning a relatively straightforward attack (there were outlandish elements to Brody's original plan, most notably the role of his fellow captive and convert Tom Walker, but they were allowed to fade into the story's background), the second season involves Brody in an intricate, multi-tiered and -staged plot involving dozens of operatives at every level of society, as well as, in what is sadly far from the season's most implausible touch, the presence of Abu Nazir himself on US soil.

At points, the season returns to the low-key, emotionally driven storytelling that made last season such a revelation, especially among other terrorism thrillers--a lot of fans despised the storyline in which Brody's daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) is involved in a fatal hit and run with her boyfriend, the vice president's son, but I appreciated its focus on one of last season's most delicately drawn and compelling characters, and the way it complicated a figure who last season acted as Brody's moral compass (it's also a high-stakes story that is at least marginally plausible, certainly in contrast to events like a troupe of terrorists in full tactical gear shooting up a storefront in downtown Gettysburg and disappearing in broad daylight); similarly affecting was the final breakdown of Brody's marriage to Jessica (Morena Baccarin), which implodes under the weight of his lies and her growing realization that her returned husband is a stranger (sadly, there's no such meaty material for Mandy Patinkin's Saul, the show's moral center and Carrie's anchor, who in the second season is sidelined both professionally and by the writers).  But for the most part, the season's second half feels like 24, the show that Homeland seemed to be working so hard not to become, and indeed to undermine and ironize, last season.  The second season, in contrast, draws too much of its narrative momentum from plot twists that seem to call attention to the show's artificiality and undermine the realism of its characters and relationships.  One of the effects of this shift is that Homeland seems to have less and less to say about its putative subject matter, the war on terror and its effects on American soldiers and civilians.  Last season, I was concerned that Homeland's handling of this issue stopped with rejecting 24's ethos, but this season lacked even so straightforward a message--wrapped up in the chase for Abu Nazir, the show surrenders too much of its realism to be relevant.

A similar diffusion of plot occurs in the second half of Dexter's seventh season.  After several episodes that seem to be rooting into the core of Dexter and Deb's relationship, in which Dexter is seen at his most unwholesomely manipulative and Deb's moral compass increasingly loses its bearing (even as she loses her emotional equilibrium--a running theme in the season is her increasing reliance on anti-anxiety medication as the lies she tells, and the truths she discovers, eat away at her), the show for some reason stalls by introducing two new characters--gay Ukranian mobster Isaak Sirko (Ray Stevenson), whose lover Dexter kills in the season premiere, and Hannah McKay (Yvonne Strahovski), the former juvenile accomplice of a spree killer who, Dexter discovers, has been poisoning people who get in her way for years.  Stevenson and Strahovski both give good, nuanced performances, and their characters each have an interesting rapport with Dexter, but nevertheless it's hard to understand why either one was introduced, especially as their presence sidelines Deb into a reactive, one-note role--in Hannah's case in particular, after Dexter belays his plan to kill her and embarks on a romantic relationship with her instead.  There's a lot of work done to convince us that through Isaak's musings on the irrationality of love, and through Hannah's unromantic and plainspoken take on her and Dexter's propensity for murder, Dexter gains a deeper understanding of himself, but his insights are a combination of the obvious and the unpersuasive.

Dexter's belief that he has fallen in love with Hannah and that she represents a possibility of a future for him can't survive the audience's knowledge that he has felt this way before and been wrong each time--with Rita, Lila, and Lumen, and even with people who were not his romantic partners, like Rudy or Miguel--or, for that matter, the likelihood that Strahovski will not recur past this season.  There's some potential to use Hannah to illuminate Deb and her feelings for Dexter, as the previous season had ended with her realization that she is in love with her brother (the disturbing implications of which the sixth season seemed distressingly willing to ignore, while the seventh season has kept them mostly on the back-burner), and towards the end of the season there is the suggestion that Deb has framed Hannah for poisoning her in order to remove what she perceives as a bad and potentially dangerous influence on Dexter, which would have complicated not only her character but the nature of her manipulative relationship with Dexter and the balance of power between them.  But this possibility is soon dismissed, as is any chance of a meaningful discussion of Deb's feeling for Dexter and what they say about his effect on her life, leaving the impression that Dexter isn't willing to take the relationship between the siblings in as dark a direction as their circumstances would seem to dictate.

Similarly, in an episode titled "The Dark... Whatever" Dexter tells Hannah that he has a Dark Passenger who takes him over when he kills, so that Hannah can argue that this is merely self-justification and that Dexter has a choice whether or not to kill, which he ultimately concludes is true.  But Dexter has never treated its main character as this sort of bifurcated personality--on the contrary, the show has always argued that Dexter is a monster who might some day become human, not a human with a monster inside of him.  So Dexter's realization that this is what he is feels less like a moment of revelation and more like a retcon to justify his decision to kill without the restrictions of his adoptive father Harry's code, which ultimately leads to him setting up LaGuerta's murder and manipulating Deb, both consciously and inadvertently, into committing it.  Much more persuasive as an indictment of Dexter's self-justification is a conversation he has with one of his would-be victims in the season finale.  The man, one of the three who viciously murdered Dexter's mother in front of him and set him on the path towards psychopathy, argues that he had no choice but to commit the killing.  Dexter's mother, innocent and helpless as she was, was a snitch, and to leave her alive would put his own life in danger; it was either him or her.  This, of course, parallels Dexter's situation with LaGuerta exactly, and raises the question of whether Dexter is killing to satisfy uncontrollable urges, or simply to protect himself and Deb.  Alas, this questioning comes far too late in the season, and is dealt with too briefly, to undermine the messiness with which Dexter's nature has otherwise been handled.

It's only the season finale, with its game-changing, soul-destroying decision on Deb's part to not only cover up and enable Dexter's murders but participate in them, that returns her, and her increasingly sickened and damaging bond with Dexter, to the season's center, and perhaps sets the stage for the next (and, hopefully, final) season to place this relationship front and center, where it has always belonged.  This sense of table-setting also permeates Homeland's season finale, in which Brody, in a bit of dramatic irony that is especially satisfying to viewers who have wanted to see him punished for his crimes, is framed for the bombing he didn't commit using the evidence for the bombing he was going to commit and got away with, and in which his family learns the truth about him just as he makes concrete steps towards repairing his relationships with them (which, in Jessica's case, means giving her his blessing to be with Mike, the man she fell in love with during his absence).  As the season ends, Carrie helps Brody escape, and then returns to the CIA (now under Saul's management, as many of his superiors were killed in the blast), ready to both clear his name and pursue the terrorists who have taken over Abu Nazir's organization (once again, missing from this zeal is any consideration of the fact that, in a war on terror, one is never fighting a single master-terrorist).

Looking back at Homeland and Dexter's recently-concluded seasons, the similarities in both strengths and weaknesses are striking--both seasons start out strong and falter in their second halves, both have trouble keeping their plot reined in, both seem to be primarily concerned with setting up the next season's story, and both are underpinned and undermined by a central, crucial relationship between their male and female leads.  On Dexter, the problem is that this relationship isn't given enough space and is prevented from becoming the lynchpin of the show.  On Homeland, the problem is that it is allowed to be all these things even though the audience might not be entirely sold on them.  For all that, however, if Homeland's second season is ultimately more successful and more satisfying than Dexter's seventh, it is, I think, primarily because of Carrie and Brody--because despite the dubious prospect of selling them as a doomed romance, the twisted, damaging bond between these two characters is where the show is strongest (especially in a season that has sidelined other crucial bonds, such as the one between Carrie and Saul).  Dexter ignores that strength, shelving it in favor of flashy but unconvincing guest characters and allegedly high-octane storylines that are obviously nothing more than stalling for time.  Homeland has other advantages over Dexter--for all the complaints about Dana's hit and run subplot, nothing on Homeland has been as dire as the tedious storylines Dexter has been giving its minor characters for three or four seasons, such as Angel's looming retirement, or Quinn's doomed romance with a stripper--and if nothing else it did figure out how to end a lackluster season on a literal bang, delivering a breakneck, heartbreaking season finale that washes away many of the previous six episodes' sins.  But at its core, the reason I remain hopeful about this show, while Dexter has failed to win me back despite fielding a not significantly more flawed season, is that Dexter's writers seem to have lost their grip on both their character and their story, while I think Homeland's writers know where their strengths lie, and where their show's heart is--with Carrie, and Brody, and the queasy but undeniable bond between them.

On Molly Gloss and "The Grinnell Method"

Over at io9, I have a piece about Molly Gloss and her story "The Grinnell Method," published at Strange Horizons in September.  As I write there, Gloss is a writer whose style and preoccupations should make her a perfect fit for fans of, among other authors, Karen Joy Fowler, and "The Grinnell Method" in particular reminds me a great deal of Fowler's "What I Didn't See."  Which is to say that it's an excellent story, and that I hope to see it getting more attention as we move into award season.  Click over to io9 to see why.

Review: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Today's Strange Horizons review is a double look at that unlikely collaboration, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth.  Niall Harrison (as a Baxter fan and Pratchett skeptic) and I (as more or less the reverse) take a look at the novel, and both come away with mixed feelings.

The Week's Films

Here's how you know it's fall: the movie theaters are waking up.  In the last week there have been two--two!--films I wanted to see (and there's still The Master to go), and though neither of them were quite up to my hopes for them, it does raise hopes that after a disappointing summer blockbuster season, there might finally be more to buy a movie ticket for than big explosion and neat special effects.

• Skyfall (2012) - In a way, Skyfall is the film I thought Quantum of Solace would be, but it comes one movie too late.  I called Casino Royale, the revamped Bond origin story which is beginning to seem like a blip in the franchise, a serious film about the creation of a ridiculous person, and expected Quatum of Solace to take Bond further into that ridiculousness.  Instead, it carried Casino Royale's earnestness even further into Bourne territory, establishing a faceless, heartless entity known only as Quantum as Bond's nemesis.  Though a dour, overly convoluted and rather tedious film, the promise it seemed to offer of a final confrontation between Bond and Quantum went some way towards justifying Quantum of Solace's existence, but Skyfall belies that promise and gives us a fairly bog-standard Bond story whose ultimate purpose is, as I expected from its predecessor, to provide Bond with all the accouterments of his character--the gadgets, the secret headquarters, the cars--and position the stalwarts of the series around him--the film introduces a new Q and a new Moneypenny.
  
  Weirdly, where Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace drew inspiration from the Bourne films, Skyfall feels like the Bond equivalent of The Dark Knight Rises.  The arc of the film--and the character--is from obsolescence, as everyone from his colleagues to the dastardly bureaucrats who dare to hold MI6 and M accountable to the public question whether the age of the Bond-esque super-agent is over, to acceptance, as Bond proves his mettle.  This is problematic firstly on the simple level of plotting--we spend the first half of the film being told that Bond can't do certain things, and then he does them; neither the limitation nor his overcoming it feel persuasive--and secondly because it completely abandons the ironic questioning of the Bond-ian tropes and ethos that made Casino Royale and even Quantum of Solace worth watching.  This time around, the questioners are depicted as small-minded fools nipping at Bond and M's heels, and we're meant to root for Bond's completely unironic embrace of his persona--to the extent that that embrace counts as the film's triumphant ending, despite the fact that Bond actually fails to achieve any of his goals in the story.
  
  By its end, then, Skyfall has brought the Bond franchise full circle, back to the campness of the Brosnan era--or even further, since by the end of the film every one of its female characters has either been killed or relegated to the secretarial pool.  This might still have been enjoyable if the film itself were not so absurdly overlong and messily plotted, lurching from one set piece to another without any sense of an overarching story to bind them all together.  Javier Bardem is nicely magnetic as the villain du jour Silva--the first proper Bond villain since Daniel Craig took over the role--though it is profoundly unfortunate that the film should have chosen to play his character as a gay predator.  Judy Dench takes the Craig-era films' fleshing out of M to its logical conclusion--the film is nearly as much M's story as it is Bond's--but that character arc is hemmed in by the demands of casting, and by the film's newly hagiographic take on Bond, which forces her, in its most absurdly sentimental scene, to quote Tennyson's "Ulysses" in Bond's defense.  Craig himself has sunk back to the blankness that bothered me about his performance in Casino Royale, but which I was persuaded was actually a choice to perform Bond as borderline sociopathic in Quantum of Solace.  It doesn't make him unsuitable for the role, especially as Skyfall defines it, but it does make his moments of vulnerability or doubt ring entirely false.  He's better when he's being blankly, and sometimes aggressively, charming, or when he responds to Bardem's threatening overtures with bemused flirtation--perhaps the only moment in the film in which Skyfall seems as aware of Bond's inherent campness, and as eager to play with it, as its two predecessors were.  Still, it's a performance that belongs in a more ambivalent, more cynical film than Skyfall is, and given the setup at the film's end it seems unlikely that we will ever see Craig take Bond apart as he is clearly capable of doing.
  
  Finally, one point about the film's reception: though I've been a little puzzled by the effusive responses Skyfall has received from critics, what I've found utterly infuriating is how little attention has been paid to the deep problems with the film's handling of female characters.  Perhaps because of the increased role that the film gives M, some critics have even rushed to declare Skyfall "a less sexist Bond film," but this is to ignore how ugly, offensive, and vilely misogynistic--even by the standards of this franchise--Skyfall's handling of "bad" Bond girl Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe) is.  On the face of it, Sévérine fits a fairly standard template for her character type--she meets Bond, renders him some assistance on his path to finding Silva, sleeps with him, and is then killed--which might be why no reviewer has noticed the way Skyfall deviates from it--the fact that Sévérine is a rape victim, who is then raped again by Bond.  A victim of sex trafficking, Sévérine is terrified of Silva, her current owner, and begs Bond to kill him.  Their sex scene not only assumes that Sévérine--a terrified rape victim who believe that Bond represents her only chance of survival--is capable of giving meaningful consent, but involves Bond entering Sévérine's room without her knowledge, waiting until she's naked and in the shower, and walking up to her from behind while commenting on the fact that she's unarmed.  When Sévérine is killed, Bond stands by, stone-faced, makes no attempt to help or comfort her, and seems completely unaffected by her death for the rest of the film.  Obviously, misogyny is a major component of the Bond recipe, and for better or worse we've accepted that the Bond films use and discard their female characters, but Skyfall goes a step further by taking advantage of a real-world evil like sex trafficking.  It presents a story in which a wealthy, white, middle aged Westerner travels to Asia, meets a sex slave, promises to help her, has sex with her, and leaves her to the mercy of her captors (who kills her), and then expects us to root for him and forget about her.  While fannish and professional critics alike have rushed to praise Skyfall's handling of women, there's only one journalist I'm aware of who has pointed out how ugly it truly is, The Times's Giles Coren--but depressingly, he was forced to post his story on his wife's blog after the paper killed it.
  
  
• Fill the Void (2012) - Israel's entry for this year's best foreign language film Oscar race is set in the wealthy ultra-orthodox enclaves of Tel Aviv.  Eighteen year old Shira (Hadas Yaron, who won best actress at the Venice film festival, where Fill the Void premiered) in eagerly anticipating being matched with a husband when her beloved sister Esther dies in childbirth.  When the family of Esther's widower Yochay (Yiftach Klein) suggests that he marry a widow in Belgium, Shira's mother Rivka (Irit Sheleg) fears being separated from her grandson, and suggests that Yochay marry Shira, an idea that they both initially greet with dismay, and then with growing but uneasy interest.  The stage is thus set for a romantic melodrama, and Fill the Void does frequently follow in the groove of this type of story, especially in the scenes in which Shira and Yochay's powerful, unspoken chemistry seems to fill the air between them, or when the camera is trained on Yaron's transparent face and tortured expression, as Shira is torn between duty, guilt, and desire.  At the same time, however, the film also bucks the conventions of its form, most notably by depriving us of its final act--though Shira and Yochay are eventually persuaded to marry, we never find out whether love and happiness manage to blossom between them, or whether one or both of them end up regretting the decision--and through an undertone of discomfort that seems to belie the happy ending that the characters themselves think they have achieved.
  
  Fill the Void is the latest entry in a stream of works that seeks to satisfy secular Israeli audiences' sometimes prurient fascination with the lives of the ultra-orthodox, but it is one of only a few whose creator is a member of that community, and the only one I'm aware of whose creator is a woman--writer-director Rama Burshtein, who received an honorable mention for the film at Venice.  Unlike secular-produced representative of this trend, which often focus on characters who transgress the orthodox community's strict rules, usually the ones involving sex--homosexuality in Haim Tabakman's Eyes Wide Open (2009), lesbianism in Avi Nesher's The Secrets (2007), an illicit romance between an orthodox girl and a secular boy in Yossi Somer's Forbidden Love (1999), which combines Romeo and Juliet and The Dybbuk--Fill the Void does not set itself against the conventions and expectations that rule its characters' lives, and in fact works very hard to humanize a worldview that a secular audience could easily be horrified by.  No one in the film ever questions the core assumptions that drive it--that the highest calling for a woman is to be married, and that to fail to do so would be a heartbreaking tragedy; that Yochay can't raise his son without a wife; that it is perfectly natural for very young people to marry someone they don't know at all, and with whom they have never even shaken hands--but neither are these assumptions the only driving force in their lives.  The characters in Fill the Void never buck tradition, but they temper their adherence to it with normal human emotion--love, grief, compassion, and even desire, all of which are delicately and convincingly conveyed through a spare but affecting script and strong performances, particularly from Yaron, Klein, and Sheleg.  Shira's mother meets great resistance in her efforts to bring about the marriage, perhaps most strongly from the men in her community, and Shira is repeatedly assured that the final decision is her own, and that she must choose to marry out of affection, not duty--and it is indeed her actions, at the end of the film, that help bring the marriage about at a point where it seems unlikely.  What's more, Burshtein, who if nothing else constructs her film as a fascinating, and stunningly shot, anthropological window into the world of the ultra-orthodox, often makes that world, or rather the parts of it that Shira moves in, a world of women.  It is through their perspective that the decision whether or not to marry Yochay is discussed, with strong voices heard for and against it, not as a result of male fiat.
  
  And yet for all that, I found it impossible to watch Fill the Void without feeling a mounting sense of horror at what Shira was doing, and I can't help but wonder whether that horror wasn't at least partially intended by Burshtein.  Certain aspects of the film's depiction of the lives of women in the ultra-orthodox community--the subplot about the unmarried older sister of Shira's friend, who grows more unhappy and more despairing as the younger women around her achieve their life goal; the state of near-nervous collapse that Shira finds herself in as she prepares for her marriage ceremony; the ceremony itself, in which Yochay covers Shira's face not with a veil but with an opaque cloth, as if making her disappear; the film's sudden, ambiguous ending--sent a shudder down my spine.  On the other hand, even if Burshtein intended me to feel that horror, it is also clearly not the only lesson she wants her audience to take away from the film.  The final act of Fill the Void is concerned less with whether Shira and Yochay will marry but with whether Shira can convince others that she wants the marriage for the right reasons (when she first seeks permission from the community's rabbi and tells him that she is agreeing to the marriage out of a sense of duty, he refuses to sanction it).  As much as it seems likely that Shira chooses to marry Yochay because of pressure from her mother, a sense of duty towards her nephew, and fear of becoming unmarriageable, she also seems to feel a genuine attraction to, and desire for, Yochay, whom the film constructs as a sort shtreimel-wearing Heathcliff, all brooding intensity and barely-suppressed passion (the casting of heartthrob Klein in the role doesn't hurt the likelihood of this interpretation).  That Shira wants the marriage with Yochay, and that at least some of her reasons for wanting it are entirely her own, is, by the film's end, no longer in doubt, but this doesn't make the limited role that her community allows her, the all-consuming importance that it places on her marriage, and her innocence and inexperience as she takes this irrevocable plunge, any less terrifying.
  
  In a way, Fill the Void feels like the Israeli film industry coming full circle--it makes a fine bookend to Dover Kosashvilli's Late Marriage (2001), the film generally credited with jump-starting the industry's stunning revival over the last decade.  In that film, the hero, Zaza (Lior Ashkenazy, perhaps best known today for playing the populist academic Uriel Shkolnik in last year's Footnote), is an unmarried thirtysomething doctoral candidate whose traditional Georgian family are eager to marry him off to a young, wealthy virgin from within their own community, but who has been carrying on an affair with Judith (Ronit Elkabatz), an older divorced single mother.  Zaza is more ambivalent about the marriage he's being pressured into than Shira, and he has more options to refuse his family (who for all their adherence to tradition are significantly less bound by it than the ultra-orthodox in Fill the Void).  And yet their experiences are very similar (both films even feature scenes in which Zaza and Shira "interview" potential matches, sent off alone with great ceremony for a brief, no-touching conversation in which they're to decide the course of their lives), with both characters finding themselves incapable of disentangling themselves from their family and community.  Fill the Void and Late Marriage both end with a wedding that answers the demands of tradition, but neither film is willing to commit to an interpretation, and tell us whether that tradition is going to bolster and strengthen their main character and lead them to happiness, or whether it has just destroyed them.

Your Daily Dose of Rape Culture

I think that I need to take out a subscription to the London Review of Books.  I had a year's free subscription up until a few months ago, courtesy of Dan Hartland, but I neglected to renew it.  At the time it didn't feel as if the fact that 95% of the magazine's content is smart, erudite, and well written was quite enough to justify spending the money, especially when there's so much else to read for free, but today I'm reminded of the, perversely enough, more appealing fact that the other 5% of LRB articles are just as smart, just as erudite, and just as well-written, but also batshit insane.  Previous standouts include pieces like Judith Butler's "Who Owns Kafka?" (March 3rd, 2011), in which Butler piles one unconvincing, flawed argument over another for why Israel shouldn't take possession of the papers of Franz Kafka, instead of just coming out and saying that it's because of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Jenny Turner's "As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes" (December 15th, 2011), in which Turner claims to be dismantling modern British feminism and yet gives barely any concrete examples of the movement past the 1970s.  Andrew O'Hagan adds to that list today with "Light Entertainment," from the November 8th issue, in which he discusses the Jimmy Savile scandal.

Savile, in case you haven't heard of him, was a beloved and famously kooky children and teen's show presenter at the BBC for more than fifty years who died a year ago.  Last month an ITV exposé revealed to the public what many in the British entertainment world had known for decades--that Savile had used his fame and access to children to sleep with hundreds of teenage girls, and that the BBC was active in both enabling this behavior and quashing rumors of Savile's activities, including, in 2011, killing a Newsnight story about them.  O'Hagan's piece about this scandal is by no means without its merits.  He puts Savile, and the BBC culture that enabled him, in their historical context by discussing other, less well-known sexual predators who like Savile used their role as presenters of children's entertainment to prowl for victims, and gives a fascinating glimpse into the less savory aspects of the history of an institution that has had such a profound worldwide effect.  He also takes a somewhat jaundiced view of the hysteria that has followed in the wake of the Savile revelations, making what is to my mind the most important argument in his article when he points out that the same tabloid culture eager to excoriate Savile for exploiting children, and whose fanning of the public outcry over him is motivated for the most part by the desire to sell papers, is not above such exploitation itself--he gives the self-evident example of Milly Dowler, the murdered teen whose phone was hacked by News of the World journalists--fetishizing both innocence and its loss.

For all these well taken points, however, the further I read into "Light Entertainment," the creepier I found it, for reasons that it's taken me a while to articulate.  The best analogy I can make is the conversation you inevitably end up having with your male colleague about sexual harassment.  He objects to laws protecting against it because, he says, how will men ever be able to make a pass at women?  You stand there trying to swallow your bile while struggling to wrap your brain around a mindset that sees these two acts as existing on the same spectrum, much less being easily confused for one another.  There's a similarly perverse mindset at the core of "Light Entertainment," and it comes to infect the entire essay.  O'Hagan tries to make the point that it was not just the BBC brass, but British culture as a whole, that was complicit in enabling Savile's behavior and suppressing the news of it for so long.  Savile was loved, he argues, because he was weird and transgressive, and now that that weirdness has been revealed in all its true horror the public is turning on Savile rather than examining its own role in elevating him.

But it is our belief system. And now it is part of the same system to blame Savile. He's dead, anyway. Let's blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don't understand, such as how we love freaks and how we select and protect people who are 'eccentric' in order to feed our need for disorder. We'll blame him for that too and say we never knew there would be any victims, when, in fact, we depend on there being victims. Savile just wouldn't have been worth so much to us without his capacity to hurt. He was loved for being so rich and so generous and for loving his mother, the Duchess. And no one said, not out loud: 'What's wrong with that man? Why is he going on like that? What is he up to?' He was an entertainer and that's thought to be special. A more honest society brings its victims to the Colosseum and cheers. We agreed to find it OK when our most famous comedians were clearly not OK.

To me, this seems like a shaky argument that O'Hagan doesn't do nearly enough to support, but it's likely that I'm missing a lot of cultural context here, having grown up in the wrong place and the wrong time for Jimmy Savile's name to mean anything to me but the sexual predator he was revealed as a month ago.  O'Hagan's "we" doesn't include me, so it's possible that he's describing a national mood that is as self-evident to him as it will be to his British readers.  It's the conflation of weirdness and sexual predation, however, that is giving me pause.  It's one thing to say that a public figure--particularly one who was at the height of his popularity thirty or forty years ago--can more or less flaunt his fondness for having sex with young girls and have everyone around him dismiss it as "just Jimmy being Jimmy," until one day a critical mass builds up and suddenly everyone realizes that this is not, and has never been, OK.  It's quite another thing to suggest that because someone is weird and off the wall, we shouldn't be surprised when they turn out to have been raping kids.  And yet throughout "Light Entertainment," O'Hagan repeatedly suggests that the transgressive and the abusive are correlated, maybe even interchangeable.

O'Hagan's argument is that the BBC of the 50s, 60s, and 70s attracted and fostered people who deviated from the norm, and that the public loved these figures for that deviation--which could take forms that would today be considered either innocuous or criminal.  He makes much of the fact that in the culture surrounding the BBC, especially in the 60s and 70s, having sex with children as young as 14 was considered "perfectly natural," part and parcel of the cutlure of sexual permissiveness that emerged in these decades, and quotes Joan Bakewell, a BBC journalist and presenter, who says that "You just can't get into the culture of what it was like, transfer our sensibilities backwards from today.  It would be like asking Victorian factory owners to explain why they sent children up chimneys."  The implication, obviously, is that especially during the turbulent days of the sexual revolution, drawing the line between good transgression and bad transgression was difficult, maybe impossible, and, by inference, that our own standards of where that line runs are as arbitrary and socially constructed as they were then--"nowadays," O'Hagan writes, "there is an unmistakable lack of proportion in the way we talk about the threat posed to children by adults."  What's sad is that one can almost sense O'Hagan straining against the terms that he himself has chosen.  When he writes that the BBC's light entertainment department was "of interest to brilliant deviants," and then explains that by "deviant" he means "anybody who wasn't in a monogamous heterosexual marriage that produced children," he lumps together the promiscuous, the adulterous, the childless-by-choice, homosexuals, and pedophiles, and then hastens to draw distinctions between them that, under his own chosen scheme, can't exist.  His frame of reference leaves him in a bind.  He doesn't want to seem like he's minimizing sexual abuse--mainly, I truly believe, because he genuinely doesn't think it ought to be minimized--so near the end of the review he comes out with the almost pious statement that "People can like children in the wrong way. And there no doubt is a wrong way."  What he's eliding over is the fact that his own choice of terms has made distinguishing between the right and wrong way all but impossible.

What's missing from O'Hagan's scheme is, of course, consent.  Without it, his entire conception of how sexual power and politics work is completely fucked up.  Or, to put it another way, his entire conception of how sexual power and politics work is so completely rooted in rape culture that he can't even see the ocean he's swimming in.  Without consent, it's perfectly possible to do as O'Hagan has done, and treat rape and abuse as extreme cases of sex.  His notion of sex is hierarchical, something that one person does to another.  Even his definitions of good and bad sex are bound up in hierarchies--the sexual revolution, as he describes it, was "the strange dance of the permissive with the banned."  Permitted by who?  Banned by who?  Surely the germane question is what people have chosen to do, and how free and meaningful their choice was?  Once you add consent to the equation, once you stop treating sex as something that can be done to someone (and it should come as no surprise that the people doing the doing are male and powerful), and start treating it as something that people--people who are capable of giving meaningful consent--do together, all of the category errors that O'Hagan struggles with in "Light Entertainment" disappear.  The difference between liking children in the wrong and right way is the difference between treating them as receptacles for your lust, and treating them like human beings with their own rights and desires.  The monstrous sensibilities that Joan Bakewell insists we can neither understand nor judge are revealed for what they always were--the patriarchal assumption that there is a class of men, of which the BBC elite was definitely a part, who are permitted to have their way with women, children, and low status men.  That these latter groups exist, in fact, for the former's gratification.  What's changed between now and then isn't some ineffable shift in sexual mores.  It's our growing--though by no means complete--unwillingness to participate in this fucked up, exploitative, rape-friendly system.

But of course, O'Hagan can't bring consent into his discussion, because in order to do so, he would have to take his eyes off the perpetrators who are his main subjects, and talk about the victims--a word that he sneers at as a favorite of pedophile-happy tabloid culture.  The voices of the victims are almost entirely absent in "Light Entertainment," and this too is entirely in keeping with how rape culture frames the discussion of rape and abuse, making it about the rapists, and failing even to consider that the victims might have some light to shed on the issue.  And yet, on those rare occasions when O'Hagan lets the victims' voices come through, they not only become the most magnetic aspect of his essay, but put the lie to some of the assumptions he's made about the culture surrounding Savile's abuses.  Quoting from Dan Davies's unpublished biography of Savile about the complaints lodged against Savile by girls from an "approved school" (the British term for reform school), O'Hagan reveals that "Among the former Duncroft girls to have come forward, one has said she was put in the isolation unit for 'two or three days' after loudly protesting when Savile groped her in a caravan on the school grounds. 'For years we tried to report him,' another confided to me. 'We even had a mass breakout to Staines police station.'"  It's a heartbreaking passage, but surely it also suggests that the tolerance and complicity that O'Hagan identifies in a public charmed by Savile's transgressiveness were not without their limits.  People did see what he was doing for what it was.  They did scream bloody murder.  The problem--as it often is in a patriarchy--was that the people complaining were the powerless, and that no one in power was listening.

There is one point on which O'Hagan and I are in complete agreement, though unsurprisingly for very different reasons--we both think that pedophile hysteria, as expressed in British tabloids or in shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is out of proportion and dangerous.  For all his disdain for tabloids, O'Hagan mirrors their view on pedophiles, as sick individuals whose perverted desires are innate and uncontrollable, though for him this condition also elicits pity--"when you see Gilbert Harding crying about his impossible self, you may feel very sorry. You may feel, as many people who liked Lionel Gamlin felt, that these were talented people whose paedophilia constituted a difficulty for them as well as for others."  I'm wiling to believe that there are some individuals like this, who genuinely feel an unstoppable compulsion to rape children.  But I also live in a world in which it seems that every week another teacher is arrested for interfering with their students, or another parent or guardian is revealed to have been using the child in their care as a sex toy.  If all of these people are sick in the way that O'Hagan and British tabloids seem to believe, then their sickness is the new normal, and the word "deviant" loses all meaning.  It seems far more likely to me that in most cases, pedophilia isn't an individual disorder, but a social one, the product of a culture that teaches men to desire power and control, to fear women's ownership of their sexuality, and to fetishize innocence and weakness.  Most of all, it's the product of a culture that teaches men that they are entitled to other people's bodies.  Most pedophiles, I believe, rape children because children are easier to rape than adults.  The tabloid hysteria over pedophiles, which turns them into boogeymen, does nothing to combat this second, more pernicious form of pedophilia--in fact, it may reinforce it, since tabloids also perpetuate the victim-blaming, slut-shaming mentality in which so many pedophiles are steeped.  But neither do articles like O'Hagan's, which pretend to offer an even-tempered, rational alternative to this hysteria while echoing the same perception of sex as something divorced from consent, do anything to bring about a solution.  Both are products of rape culture, and both are part of the problem.

The Strange Horizons Fund Drive

For the last month, Strange Horizons has been running its annual fund drive, during which we raise money to keep the magazine running and its contributors paid.  Strange Horizons is run by a volunteer staff (including yours truly), and pays professional rates to its contributors.  With one week to go, the drive is now at just over $5,000 out of an $8,000 goal, though there are also "stretch goals" all the way to $11,000, which will allow us to increase the pay rates for poetry and reviews, and to add weekly podcasts of the magazine's fiction.  The fund drive page--with information about prizes being raffled off to donors, and Kickstarter-style rewards for various donation levels (including, for $100, the option to select a book to be reviewed by the reviews department)--can be found here, and at the Strange Horizons blog editor-in-chief Niall Harrison has been keeping a tally of testimonials about the magazine from authors and reviewers (including Genevieve Valentine's fantastic offer to review ten minutes out of any movie or TV show in exchange for a donation).

When the fund drive month comes along, the fiction department gets a lot of attention, and with good reason--online venues for free short fiction are common nowadays, but when Strange Horizons started out twelve years ago it was one of the first, and is, I think, the only one still standing after all that time.  But I came to Strange Horizons through the reviews department, first as a contributor and reader, and now as its editor--this month also marks two years since I've taken over the job from Niall.  There are a lot of things I enjoy about being reviews editor--getting to work with smart, incisive, talented reviewers, putting forward an editorial stance that prioritizes rigor, close reading, and political awareness in reviews, the occasional slapfight--but one of my favorites is the opportunity, every once in a while, to draw readers' awareness to a worthwhile work they might otherwise have overlooked.  Today's review does, I hope, just that.  It's also a review of a cartoon.  Lila Garrott looks at the Disney Channel's new animated series Gravity Falls, and does a great job of echoing my reasons for feeling that this is the best genre show of 2012 (it also highlights some themes and problematic areas in the series that I hadn't noticed, and is definitely worth a read even if you're already a fan of the show).  You should watch the show, but you should also read Lila's review (and the week's other two reviews--of The Constantine Affliction by T. Aaron Payton, reviewed by Liz Bourke, and of Jonathan Carroll's collection The Woman Who Married a Cloud, reviewed by Nina Allan--coming, respectively, on Wednesday and Friday), and if you're able to, please consider donating to Strange Horizons in order to help us keep publishing reviews (and fiction, poetry, columns and articles) for another year.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2012 Edition, Part 3

We're coming near to the end of what has been a singularly unimpressive pilot season.  Progress report on the shows I've stuck with: Revolution has so far failed to ignite and if it doesn't within the next few weeks I'll probably ditch it.  Vegas's second episode bored me, so it's been dropped.  Elementary, on the other hand, had a strong second episode that deepened the two main characters, but the show still doesn't feel much like Holmes.  Last Resort is maintaining the intensity of its pilot but still not giving the impression that it has an idea of where to take its premise.  There are still a few stragglers left, and they'll be trickling on screen over the next month, but right now I'm willing to pronounce the 2012 fall pilot season a bust.  Better luck next year.

• The Paradise - The BBC's prospective answer to Downton Abbey draws loosely from the novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise) by Émile Zola, moving its action from post-Napoleonic Paris to an unspecified English city some time in the 19th century, but maintaining its focus on the titular establishment, a department store specializing in ladieswear and accessories.  Our heroes are Moray (Emun Elliott), the store's owner, a consummate flatterer who is eager to expand and make his store the hub for fashionable women in the city, Kathrine (Elaine Cassidy), his not-quite fiancée who is both repulsed and intrigued by Moray's ambition and relentless striving, but who he may be taking advantage of in order to get at her father's money, and Denise (Joanna Vanderham), whose uncle's smaller store is being crowded out by The Paradise, and who takes a job there as a shop girl.  Despite being based on a novel, The Paradise's approach seems to be more open-ended--the better, presumably, to compete with a soap like Downton Abbey--with individual episodes centering around some self-contained plot while overarching plotlines proceed in the background.  Unfortunately, these overarching plotlines veer decidedly towards the soapy--the mystery surrounding the death of Moray's first wife, the mean girl-style disputes between Denise and her colleagues, the burgeoning love triangle between Moray, Katherine, and Denise.  And going by the second episode, in which a rich, unhappily married customer kisses a shop boy and then accuses him of assaulting her to protect her reputation, which gives everyone in the cast the excuse to trot out all the rape apology standbys--but why did she invite him to her house, he's such a nice guy, think of how this will destroy his life--and have them be entirely true, the self-contained plots aren't much to look forward to either.  Which is a shame, because at its core (and, from what I've read about it, in the original book) The Paradise has an interesting concept that I don't think period dramas have done much to address so far--the growth of capitalism, and the social changes that it spurred among both entrepreneurs and consumers.  The fact that the business in question here isn't something male-associated like industry or trains but women's retail, and that Denise discovers in herself a talent for salesmanship and a thirst for success that only Moray truly understands, might have made for an interesting angle on this topic, if only the show were more interested in it than in its more soapy elements.


• Hunted - A British-American co-production written by X-Files stalwart Frank Spotnitz, Hunted is a spy thriller about Sam (Melissa George), an operative for a private intelligence company who is betrayed and nearly killed by someone close to her, and who returns to her employers in order to discover who betrayed her and why.  The premise and setting are reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, as is the show's style--lots of atmospheric locations shots, overbearing camera filters (orange for the Middle East, almost colorless in London), offbeat soundtrack (though often low-key and environmental, which sharply contrasts with Haywire), very little dialogue, mainly because the distrustful Sam spends a lot of time on her own, her silent actions or flashbacks, rather than her words, working to fill in the plot (this might also be the show playing to its strengths--when characters do speak it's usually to utter trite clichés such as "Ask yourself this: why won't you trust me?  Is it because you don't love me anymore, or because you're afraid you still do?").  While it's nice to see a show about a woman that doesn't feel compelled to surround her with allies and helpmeets, Hunted doesn't really avoid many of the other clichés that dominate shows about vengeful female spies.  George isn't exactly Gina Carano as far as her body type or believability as an imposing fighter are concerned, and where most shows of this type motivate their heroine through the kind of emotional connections that women are supposed to care exclusively about--a failed relationship, a dead parent, a lost child--Sam is motivated by all three, and even finds herself, at the end of the first episode, embedded as a tutor in the home of a widower with a young son, which is no doubt intended to play on her emotions.  So far what Hunted has going for it is Sam's calculating, emotionless presence at its core, but though George is game the writing isn't quite there to make Sam a three-dimensional figure, or to overcome the clichés that permeate the show.


• Arrow - Pretty much everything I read about this show before watching the pilot compared to Smallville, which is perhaps understandable given that it's on the CW, that the main character was a recurring figure on the earlier show (though Arrow offers a new spin), and that Smallville was the last show based on a major comic book superhero to hit it big.  But Arrow lacks Smallville's central conceit--the fact that it was a prequel to the familiar Superman mythos.  It kicks off where the Green Arrow's traditional origin story does--having been shipwrecked on an island for years, billionaire Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) trains himself as a super-fighter and, for some reason, archer, and upon his rescue returns to his home town of Starling City to fight evildoers.  Far more than Smallville, Arrow reminds me of last year's disastrous attempt at crafting an original superhero show, The Cape--like that show, it suffers from a toxic combination of po-faced seriousness and cartoonish plot points and dialogue--and even more than that, of Batman Begins.  Some the similarities between Batman and the Green Arrow stem from the comics--both are billionaires who have secretly trained themselves into unbeatable fighters, augmented by gadgetry and unlimited financial reserves--but the Arrow pilot seems almost to be cribbing from Batman Begins's script--a former wastrel, Oliver is motivated by the death of his father, who believed that it was his responsibility to "save" Starling City, to do the same, choosing to do so as a vigilante, and he continues to wear the mask of a playboy while wishing that he could reveal the truth to his ex-girlfriend (Katie Cassidy), a crusading lawyer.  There are some interesting original notes here and there--Oliver's ex hates him not because of his playboy lifestyle but because he was on the fateful cruise with her sister, who died in the wreck, and unlike the Batman films the pilot doesn't shy away from the emotional toll that his years on the island have taken on him (though on the other hand it is entirely blasé about Oliver's willingness to kill, which he does quite often in the pilot).  The problem is that Amell is more Tom Welling than Christian Bale, and the best he can muster in scenes where he should be conveying intensity, grief, or shame, is a uniform woodenness (the show tries to compensate for this with voiceovers that tell us what Oliver is feeling, but these are not only overwrought but read by Amell, who fails to imbue them with emotion in the same way he fails to convey that emotion in his performance), which neither the writing nor the acting around him do anything to compensate for.  Arrow is clearly building up to a tangled mythology.  The pilot features Lost-like flashbacks to Oliver's time on the island, where he clearly wasn't alone, since he learned martial arts, languages, Eastern philosophy, and of course archery (thus completing the Batman Begins parallel), and he returns to Starling City with a very deliberate plan, and a list of enemies to get rid of.  What it doesn't give us is a reason to care about this mission--for all the crap it (rightfully) takes, Smallville had a freshness and levity to it, at least when it started out, that made it intriguing.  Arrow is too self-serious, but not nearly accomplished enough to justify that seriousness.


• Nashville -  So, should I be happy that the show touted as the great white hope of this miserable pilot season centers around two women, or sad that they spend its pilot--and look set to spend the rest of the series--fighting over fame, money, and men?  That's maybe being a little glib: the two women around which Nashville circles, middle aged country music diva Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton) and up-and-coming crossover sensation Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) are complex and well drawn, and their dispute--Rayna's latest album is struggling, and her label is trying to force her to tour with, and open for, Juliette in order to expose her to a younger audience, while Juliette is eager to gain respectability by poaching Rayna's professional crew, and particularly her band manager and former lover Deacon (Charlie Esten)--isn't a catfight so much as it is the struggle between two players in a system with only limited spots at the top, both of whom happen to be women and to suffer from the pitfalls of being a woman in the entertainment industry.  But the pilot also veers frequently into the realm of too-obvious soap, and most of the its subplots--a love triangle between Deacon's niece Scarlett (Clare Bowen) and two aspiring songwriters, a mayoral campaign thrown into disarray by Rayna's oily father (Powers Boothe in a performance so over the top that it will either become the show's greatest asset or its greatest weakness, it's too soon to tell which) backing her failed businessman husband (Eric Close) as a surprise candidate, whatever tangled history there is between Rayna and Deacon--are uninspiring, which makes it difficult to hope that its main plot strand will develop in intelligent ways.  Also, I'm saying this as someone who has been spoiled by Treme, but as a show about the world of music Nashville leaves much to be desired.  The glimpses we get of the process and craft of music-making lack the spontaneity, the messiness, and the obvious sense of effort that Treme captures so well--Scarlett, for example, is an obvious Jewel stand-in who writes "poems" to which she sometimes hears music in her head, and when one of her potential love interests finds her notebook he convinces her to work on them together; at the end of the episode, they perform, on the fly and with no preparation or rehearsals, a flawless, implausibly professional version of this song.  Even worse, the music itself is rather dull.  Rayna complains that Juliette's music is mindless, incomprehensible country-pop, but her songs aren't much better, and there's very little sense in the pilot of the richness of country music and its history (only Scarlett's song at the episode's end, and an earlier one performed by Deacon, are truly attention-grabbing).
  
  Still, comparing every new music-based show that comes along to Treme isn't fair--we should be grateful, I suppose, that Nashville isn't trying to be Glee, since that's clearly where the impetus for it comes from--and even without a genuinely revelatory look at Nashville's music industry, there are things to watch for here.  More precisely, two things, the two leads.  Britton brings warmth and intelligence to a role that could easily have devolved into a trite diva-ish stereotype.  She makes Rayna seem more human than her well-worn storyline has any right being, and convinces us that there's a real person under a plot borrowed from recent Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Country Strong and a million other country music sob stories.  Panettiere, amazingly, has to contend with an even bigger bag of clichés--the young sexpot with a tragic past and well-concealed vulnerabilities--and whether as a deliberate choice or simply as a result of a limited range, she defuses them by playing Juliette as inhumanly cold and calculating, creating the impression of a smart, ruthless young woman who knows that all the performances she's putting on--of innocence, of sexiness, of respect towards her country music forerunners--are but a means to an end.  It's a performance that could become wearying very quickly, but for now it's just brazen enough to be interesting.  By concentrating on Rayna and Juliette--and hopefully by putting them together more than the pilot does--Nashville could find a core of genuine drama amidst its soapy subplots that could make it worth watching.  After all, even if they're fighting each, shows about smart, ambitious women should be celebrated.


• Beauty and the Beast - This show has been taking a pummeling at the hands of reviewers, and though they're not wrong that it is terrible, I can't help but feel that the opprobrium is a little extreme, and motivated more by the obviously bone-headed decisions that drive this remake of the cheesy-but-romantic 80s original--retooling the show into an obvious Twilight ripoff in which Vincent is a soldier experimented on by the government who periodically turns into a rage monster, and calling him a "beast" because he has a small facial scar (because as we all know, a scar running down a man's cheek makes him look horrifying, not sexy and dangerous)--rather than their execution.  Which is, again, quite bad, but not significantly worse than, say, Arrow, which has been getting more favorable reviews, sometimes from the same sources that have panned Beauty and the Beast.  The two shows have similar flaws--wooden leads (though Kristin Kreuk tries so much harder than Arrow's Stpehen Amell to inhabit her character, here a tough police detective), lazy plots (the pilot centers around a murder investigation that not even Kreuk's Katherine seems very interested in--certainly not once Jay Ryan's Vincent turns up), trite character motivations (Vincent is oh-so-tortured by what's been done to him; Katherine, in a plot ripped straight from Castle, is trying to find out who killed her mother), and very little chemistry between the two leads (though this is less down to the actors and more the fault of a script that gives them little to do in their shared scenes but gaze longingly at each other).  There are, on the other hand, points about the show that I like--Katherine has a female, Hispanic partner, which might make them the only all-female cop duo on TV right now, and Katherine's mother is played by an Asian woman, which is more than Smallville ever did for Kreuk, as far as I can recall.  They're obviously not enough to make Beauty and the Beast watchable--especially since the mother, as I've mentioned, is quickly killed off, and the partner will no doubt be ditched for Vincent soon enough--but they are enough to make me a little upset at the disparity between the reactions to Beauty and the Beast and Arrow, which may very well be linked to the former's girly subject matter.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2012 Edition, Part 2

Well, that was a long week and a half of new TV, and with not much to show for it in the end.  These write-ups represent a small minority of the new shows to premiere this fall--I haven't said anything about the season's new comedies, which run the gamut from terrible (Partners), to underwhelming (Ben and Kate, The Mindy Project), to competent but uninspiring (Go On, Animal Practice), to bizarre Alf retreads (The Neighbors).  There are some more new shows premiering later this month, but so far I'm not very enthusiastic about this new crop of shows.

• Vegas - The premise of this show, which follows the (presumably fictionalized) exploits of legendary Las Vegas Sheriff Ralph Lamb (Dennis Quaid) in the early 60s, marks it as yet another attempt, after the failure of last year's Pan Am and The Playboy Club, to crack the Mad Men code for a network audience (only this time without pesky women running around all over the place--there is only one woman in the cast, a district attorney played by Carrie-Anne Moss who is clearly intended as a love interest for Lamb and, so far, not much else).  But the pilot doesn't recall Mad Men nearly as much as it does Hawaii Five-0--as in that show, you have an outsider, maverick cop (this time a literal cowboy) in an exotic (and beautifully shot) location, who is tasked by the powers that be to put together a posse (including, of course, a Native American tracker) to clean up town without all that guff of due process and civil rights (the 60s setting means that Lamb has a little more justification than Hawaii Five-0's Steve McGarrett for ignoring the rights of suspects, and yet somehow there is significantly less violence towards suspects in the Vegas pilot than in any of the Hawaii Five-0 episodes I watched).  The Vegas pilot is less thrilling than Hawaii Five-0's (still one of the best pilots I've ever seen), and the investigation at its core is predictable and not very engaging even to the characters (the show also loses a lot of points for making its inaugural case the murder of a young woman--I suppose because that's what women in big cities are for), but it is nevertheless an entertaining hour.  Quaid is good, and clearly having a lot of fun playing a cowboy cop, and though the rest of the cast is comparatively underserved no one seems noticeably bad in their role.  What's lacking is a sense of 60s Vegas as a unique place with its own personality and rules, and for long stretches it's easy to forget that the show is set in the past or in a city that has such a hold on the American imagination.  That is presumably about to change, as a major subplot in the pilot involves the arrival of New York mobster Vinnie Savino (Michael Chiklis, so far wasted) who has been brought in to clean house at one of the casinos and seems set on a collision course with Lamb--especially when he has Lamb's predecessor killed--but there's so little indication in the pilot of how that plot will shake out that it's hard to know whether it will be Vegas's saving grace or yet another by the numbers cliché-fest.  Several reviews I've read have expressed great hopes for Vegas's future, but so far I'm finding it hard to see anything in the show that might grow into excellent television.


• Elementary - Writing about the new American Sherlock Holmes series proved a bit of a challenge--I had to watch the pilot twice before I could work out how to approach the show with just the right amount of reference to Sherlock.  The problem isn't simply that Elementary was originally conceived as a reboot of Sherlock, and that when that deal fell through the show's creators found themselves scrambling to find a minimum, safe-from-lawsuits distance from the British show (thus leading to the recasting of Watson as a woman).  No, the main problem is that we already have a modernized Sherlock Holmes that is perfect in almost every respect and yet somehow manages to be terrible a sizable portion of the time, so it's almost impossible to approach Elementary--which after all lacks a lot of the problem points of Sherlock, most notably the unwieldy 90 minute timeslot and Steven Moffat's rampant misogyny--without expecting it to be just like Sherlock, except consistently good.  And the fact is, Elementary does avoid many of the problems that make Sherlock so frustrating.  Johnny Lee Miller may be the most hilariously unimaginative choice of casting for Holmes ever, having alternated the roles of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster with Benedict Cumberbatch in the National Theater's recent, blockbuster production of Frankenstein, but he is good at conveying Holmes's mingled brilliance and cluelessness, and his portrayal of Holmes as being deeply affronted by the crimes he investigates is not only more in line with Conan Doyle's original vision of the character but also a welcome reprieve from Moffat's sociopath Holmes, and from his fetishization, in both Sherlock and Doctor Who, of insensitive, self-absorbed men who are forgiven their bad behavior because of their brilliance.  Lucy Liu, meanwhile, while significantly less successful than Martin Freeman's Watson (Sherlock's greatest and most undervalued asset) defuses, just by her existence, the prevailing contempt for women that permeates Sherlock's every scene (which leaves just the background radiation misogyny of American network television--other than Watson, the only women in the pilot are a nameless prostitute with no lines, and the case of the week, yet another murdered woman).
  
  The problem is that while the show works as the anti-Sherlock, it isn't very convincing as Holmes.  It's not just that the show's world doesn't achieve the heady fusion between modernity and Victorian London that was one of Sherlock's chief accomplishments in its first season (though less prominent in its second), or that without Steven Moffat in the writing room there are less moments of awe-inspiring cleverness in the script (those moments are anyway a double-edged sword, as both Sherlock and Doctor Who tend to use them to obscure the sloppiness of their larger plots), but that the investigation at the pilot's core in no way feels like a Sherlock Holmes investigation.  Though there are Holmes-ian observations and deductions in the script, they take a back seat to the kind of police-work familiar from most TV procedurals, and Holmes even relies on police files, resources, and forensics.  He comes off as a clever detective, but one very much in line with the other damaged, cerebral sorts who have populated police procedurals for decades, cops who have a bit of Holmes in their DNA but have watered that influence down with constant repetition.  The whole show, in fact, feels like yet another iteration of a certain type of American procedural about a quirky, brilliant man and his long-suffering, damaged female partner--a more sombre Castle, or a less quirky Life--and especially when one considers that Watson, arguably the most crucial ingredient for a successful Holmes retelling, comes away from the pilot underexplored and looking rather generic--as if the show had taken the "shocking" approach of changing the character's gender solely in order to slot it into a familiar, caretaking type--it's hard to see how Elementary plans to stake its claim as a meaningful entry in the Holmes cannon.  I'm willing to give the show a few more episodes, mainly because I still hope for a modern Holmes that doesn't leave me as furious and frustrated as Sherlock does, but at the moment I'm not very hopeful.


• Last Resort - Hands down the best-made pilot of the fall season so far, but also the one whose competence and narrative sweep feel the least indicative of how the show itself will turn out.  The show has a silly premise--when the captain of a nuclear sub (Andre Braugher) questions dodgy orders to nuke Pakistan, he is fired upon by his own people, and retreats to a Pacific island while in DC, a shadowy coup appear to be taking place that also engulfs the families of the sub's crew, navy brass, NATO personnel, and a military contractor who has hardware on the rogue sub--and while the pilot moves fast enough and features enough thrilling events to distract from this fact that still leaves a show whose purpose is to untangle and work through the implications of that premise, which may not be possible in any satisfying way.  The pilot's approach is to constantly bombard the characters with crises that keep them from processing the bigger picture or articulating a response to it, which means that the show is spared, at least so far, from having to express meaningful ideas about global politics or the relationship between government and the military, but also results in an overstuffed pilot that hardly lets the characters breathe--aside from Braugher, we're introduced to Scott Speedman, an admiring XO with a cute wife at home, and Daisy Betts, the second officer who struggles with being a woman in the military and the daughter of an admiral, but though the actors are game the characters never emerge as anything beyond these familiar types, and the rest of the crew divides itself along the too-familiar law-and-order vs. independent morality, casual violence vs. alert pacifism lines so quickly that we might as well be watching an episode of Stargate: Universe.  This might change in later episodes, but what little handling there is of Last Resort's bigger questions in the pilot doesn't paint an encouraging picture of what's to come: though Betts's character is well-done and used to address the problems of women in the military, another scene in which Speedman mechanically questions female crewmembers about sexual harassment on the ship while they giggle at the implausibility of such a situation feels unjustifiably glib--given the terrifying prevalence of rape and sexual assault in the US military, I'm not sure attempts to curtail sexual harassment should the butt of jokes.  Similarly, though it's heartening that Braugher's sanity and choices are questioned throughout the pilot, including by Speedman and Betts, the fact that the pilot so casually justifies his takeover of a populated island--and does so mainly by painting the island's de facto leader as a small-time hustler who is more than capable of violence--while completely ignoring the fact that, de facto leader or no, the people on the island are the citizens of some sovereign nation, is worrying.  It's hard to know, judging by its pilot, where Last Resort will fall on these issues and how it plans to develop its story, but in this post-24, post-Battlestar Galactica TV landscape, it's hard to hope that this will be in particularly intelligent directions.


• 666 Park Avenue - To bring us back to the network vs. cable debate with which I opened this fall's pilot reviews, one of the traits that does seem ubiquitous to networks is a tendency to produce watered-down imitations of last year's big cable success--as in the case of Vegas above.  666 Park Avenue is an even more blatant--and significantly less successful--effort, clearly trying to coast off the success of the zany American Horror Story, but without all the potentially offputting zaniness.  The premise--which also borrows heavily from the 1997 film The Devil's Advocate--sees a young couple trying to make it in New York land in a seemingly too good to be true situation when they get a job as resident managers of a swanky Upper East Side apartment building, only to discover that it harbors dark secrets.  Terry O'Quinn plays the building's owner--and, presumably, the devil himself--with a woodenness that make me regret his Lost-driven elevation from ubiquitous character actor--at which he excelled--to star.  Slightly more interesting is Vanessa Williams as his wife, though this is mainly because the template that 666 Park Avenue is so blatantly drawing from doesn't have room for it for the antagonist's wife, and it's not clear yet whether Williams's character is a willing ally of O'Quinn's or a dupe, or even whether she's human.  But the character herself suffers from the same flaws as O'Quinn's, our leads, and all the other neighbors encountered in the pilot--she is a walking cliché, whose every line and facial expression feels predictable from a thousand previous stories.  It seems to have been lost on the show's creators that the reason for American Horror Story's success--despite the fact that by most objective yardsticks it is a terrible, shlocky, melodramatic show--is its outrageousness, the fact that there is no boundary of good taste, good manners, or decent behavior that the show will not cross in its attempts to get a rise out of its audience.  666 Park Avenue, on the other hand, is painfully bland.  O'Quinn's character traps his tenants' souls by offering them a wish, but these are predictably milquetoast--a widower asks for his wife back, but of course she Comes Back Wrong; a struggling playwright lusts after a neighbor he spies from his window, only for her to turn up in his life as his wife's new assistant; a mediocre violinist sells his soul for ten years of artistic perfection.  None of this is new, and the show doesn't even try to shade in these stories in a way that will set them apart from the crowd.  The pilot centers on the heroine's (Rachael Taylor) investigations of the building, which will no doubt lead to a tangled mythology down the line, but so far the building at the show's heart lack the character and the sense of bloody, tragic history that surrounded the house in which the first season of American Horror Story takes place--it feels as bland as the characters and their stories.