Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2013 Edition, Part 2

By most yardsticks, I suppose, this year's fall pilot season isn't much worse than previous years.  But it is much more boring.  For every show I've written about this year, there are two or three about which I had nothing to say that I haven't said a million times before--unoriginal plots, underdeveloped characters, blandly beautiful leads, indifferent procedural stories, poorly defined antagonists.  In short, boring shows hardly worth talking about.  The below are the few exceptions--though hardly innocent, the lot of them, of the sin of unoriginality.  (Progress report on previously-discussed shows: Brooklyn Nine-Nine remains funny, SHIELD remains a show that I wouldn't be watching if it weren't for its pedigree, I gave up on Hostages after the second episode, and Peaky Blinders is a lot of fun even as its story becomes more predictable.)

• Sleepy Hollow - Every year, it seems, there's a new cheesy genre show for fandom to get bemusedly enthusiastic over, often in a so-bad-it's-good sort of way, while I stand on the sidelines and feel completely left out of the fun (see Once Upon a Time, Grimm, Arrow).  This year it's Sleepy Hollow, a show that my twitter stream seems utterly enchanted by--despite, or possibly because, of its silliness--and which I find occasionally amusing but nowhere near zany or well-made enough to get me to overlook its many problems.  The premise--which owes far more to Tim Burton's 1999 film than it does to Washington Irving's short story--sees Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), here a British loyalist turned colonial patriot in the Revolutionary War, brought back to life in 2013 when his nemesis, the Headless Horseman, is similarly awakened.  Ichabod teams up with Sleepy Hollow police lieutenant Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) to fight off first the horseman, and then a host of demonic creatures.  Together, they discover a secret history in which the key figures of the American revolution (and Ichabod's wife Katrina (Katia Winter), a witch who has been trapped between realities for centuries) are part of a grand struggle between good and evil, a battle in which Ichabod and Abbie are destined to play key roles.
  
  To its credit, Sleepy Hollow commits to the inherent ridiculousness of its story.  The show is serious about the ludicrous things it throws on screen (and doesn't throttle back on them in an ill-advised and futile grasp at respectability), but it isn't po-faced, and will on occasion allow the characters or the story to come up for air and notice how absurd what's going on is.  But to make a silly story work, a show needs to be either very well-written (which can mean doing interesting, intelligent things with shlocky ideas, as in Farscape, or simply barreling through tons of plot every episode so that the audience doesn't notice how threadbare it all is, as in Heroes), or have extremely well-drawn characters (Farscape is a good example here too, but see also The Middleman).  Sleepy Hollow performs adequately on all these fronts, but not nearly well enough, to my mind, to justify the enthusiasm with which it's been received.  The episode plots are generic monsters of the week only slightly enlivened by the show's fondness for inventive gore (though there's a slight uptick on the plot front in episodes three and four, when Abbie's estranged sister Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood), who has been aware of the supernatural nature of Sleepy Hollow for years and resents Abbie for denying it, is drawn into the story), and the characters, though pleasant enough, are too bland to register amidst the show's general ridiculousness.  With a co-star who is a time-traveling Revolutionary soldier, it's perhaps understandable that Beharie has been tasked with playing the straight man (and her character is anyway just starting to come out of the self-protective shell she formed when she and her sister first encountered the supernatural as girls), but Ichabod, too, is depressingly mundane.  For all the debts that the series owes Burton's film, it jettisons what was arguably that version's most endearing trait, the weird, over the top personality it gave Johnny Depp's Ichabod Crane, who was geeky, neurotic, and a little bit nuts.  Mison's Ichabod is blandly heroic, only moderately convincing as a warrior for good or a star-crossed lover desperate to be reunited with his wife, and though the show makes a little hay out of the fact that he is a man out of time, for the most part he comes off as a generic procedural hero who just happens to wear knee-high boots and frilly shirts and say "leftenent" a lot.
  
  Given that it shares a pedigree with Fringe (and much more besides: with an emotionally reserved heroine, a damaged family relationship, and a romantic couple seemingly parted forever featuring prominently in its early episodes, Sleepy Hollow quickly comes to feel like a very slightly reshuffled version of Fringe's first season), it's likely that Sleepy Hollow will eventually develop a complex mythology and world that might be worth watching for.  But if I were into that sort of show, I'd watch the similarly smartly-constructed, indifferently-written Once Upon a Time, which has the advantage of prioritizing female characters and relationships (though it is worth noting that Sleepy Hollow's cast is remarkably diverse--Abbie and Jenny are black women, Orlando Jones plays Abbie and Ichabod's superior at the Sleepy Hollow police department, and John Cho has had a recurring role), and of not being the product of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman's brains.  Adding to my dubiousness about the show is the prominence of the Book of Revelation (or rather, the pop culture conception of the Book of Revelation, which consists of only a few passages, mostly about horsemen) in its story, as well as its take on the Revolutionary war as a front in a battle between good and evil.  In a world in which religious, apocalyptic thinking, and a perception of the US as being at the forefront of a two-hundred-year-old Manichean battle, has infected actual public policy and is causing untold suffering even as I write this post, it's hard to take Sleepy Hollow's unquestioning take on this mythology as just good fun.  Much like Fringe's anti-science slant, this feels like a rotten core at the heart of a seemingly frivolous concoction.
  
  
• The Blacklist - Completing the triptych of high-concept, high-octane series of dubious quality along with Hostages and Sleepy Hollow, The Blacklist at least has the presence of mind to do one thing well, or perhaps just very loudly.  That thing is casting James Spader and letting him loose to ham magnificently while everyone else on set throws occasional lines at him.  Spader plays Raymond "Red" Reddington, a former intelligence operative who defected to become the Moriarty of international espionage, selling US secrets and facilitating enemy operations.  After decades on the FBI's most wanted list, Red turns himself in and agrees to help the Bureau hunt down the titular list of bad guys, but only on the completely unexaplained condition that his handler be rookie agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone).  The Blacklist, in other words, is what you'd get if you based a whole show on those plot arcs on Alias when a bad guy would turn himself in for some unspecified but obviously nefarious reason, forcing Sydney to work and possibly bond with them until they tipped their hand.  The problem is that while Spader makes a passable Arvin Sloane--he plays Red with a smarmy charm and jovial good humor that almost obscure the fact that what the show presents as his chessmaster-level intelligence is actually everyone around him behaving like utter morons--the reactive, permanently befuddled Elizabeth is no Sydney Bristow.  She can't hold her own against a character who, by design, holds all the plot's cards, and isn't terribly interesting in her own right.  The show tries to furnish her with a side quest in the form of the revelation that her seemingly mild-mannered husband has fake passports and guns hidden in their house, but this is merely piling bland on bland, and the heavily hinted-at possibility that Red is her father is poorly handled, with none of the characters raising the question even as it grows more obvious.  The Blacklist repeatedly offers up nothing more than Red running circles around people who are neither clever nor interesting, while asking us to wait around to discover who he is and what he wants.  So far, I'm not terribly motivated.
  
  
• Masters of Sex- Well made and well acted as it is, it's tempting to assume that Masters of Sex is yet another attempt to recapture the Mad Men lightning, with the added bonus of a built-it excuse for copious amounts of nudity and sex--like its main characters, pioneering sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), the show can argue that it's all for science!  And certainly, in its early episodes, Masters of Sex often falls into the Look How Bad Things Were Back Then trap that marred Mad Men's first season--the people (mostly women) who openly call Johnson, a divorcée with two children, a bad mother for having a job and academic aspirations, or the young bride-to-be who comes to Masters for advice about family planning but can't get the words "birth control" out of her mouth.  Neither of these scenes are unrealistic for the show's late 50s setting, of course, but especially given that the main conflict in the series's early episodes is between Masters's determination to conduct the first scientific study into the physiology of sex, and his university's unwillingness to countenance his work--which includes observing and recording the vitals of volunteers as they masturbate or have sex--it's hard not to take them as an unsubtle argument for the importance of the Masters and Johnson study.  This is a particular problem when it comes to Masters's wife Libby (Caitlin FitzGerald), a soft-spoken blur in poodle skirts who calls her husband "daddy" in anticipation of the child they're trying to conceive and is emotionally destroyed by her inability to get pregnant, not knowing that it's actually her husband's low sperm count that is at fault.  Though FitzGerald does her best, one can almost imagine the show's writers sitting down to write her character and not getting any farther than Betty Draper without the thorns.
  
  Where the show shines, however, and where it seems to promise to be more than a Mad Men clone, is in its recognition, despite Masters's repeated claims to the contrary, that it is impossible to be scientifically detached when it comes to sex.  Or perhaps simply that it is impossible for William Masters, for all the he clearly believes otherwise, to be so detached.  Masters's argument is that sex must be studied in order to liberate people from the ignorance that causes so much suffering and abuse, but he is incapable--or unwilling--to see that the study of sex isn't just the study of physiology, but of psychology, sociology, and even economics, and that the repression he rails against reaches into all these fields, and affects him as well.  When a prostitute participating in his study reports that her first sexual experiences were of being abused by her uncle, it's clear that Masters, though moved, doesn't know how to fit this information into his scientific schema.  More aware of these facts, but not yet able to articulate them (or to be heard) is Johnson, who more or less worms her way into the study from her position as Masters's secretary and quickly comes to think of it as her own.  Caplan brilliantly expresses Johnson's stifled intellect, her desire to be part of something bigger than herself, and her frustration at the way that her gender prevents her from doing so.  She brings the show, and the rest of the cast, to life (though her chemistry with Sheen is uncomfortable given how Masters and Johnson's relationship played out in reality, and how borderline exploitative his behavior towards her is in the show's early episodes).  It's still not clear to me what kind of story Masters of Sex wants to tell--and I worry that the show is going to end up essentially arguing that sex was invented by a man in a lab coat--but in Caplan's vivid performance, and in the way that Johnson draws attention to Masters's limitations and perhaps challenges them, it has a spark of life that's going to keep me watching.
  
  
• The Wrong Mans - On his way to work one drearily ordinary morning, directionless loser Sam (Mathew Baynton) witnesses a car accident and then picks up a ringing phone from the scene.  When he answers the phone, a voice on the other end tells him to deliver a ransom or "his" wife will die.  Sam is flabbergasted, but his sort-of friend Phil (James Corden), a fantasist who works in the mail-room and lives with his mother, is delighted--this, he insists, is his and Sam's opportunity to slip into a new, more exciting life story, with adventure and beautiful women as their reward.  The Wrong Mans, a new comedy series from the BBC, is clearly aware of its antecedents, the fact that its plot has fueled a million Chevy Chase comedies, and it works to find a new spin on this story less through the genre-savvy Phil (who is anyway less savvy than befuddled--he's perfectly convinced that his life is about to turn into the sort of movie in which the chubby sad-sack saves the day and gets the girl, and never mind how bumbling he is or how frustratingly unaccommodating the kidnappers and gangsters he and Sam encounter are), than by throwing the plots of seemingly a dozen such films into the blender, so that Sam and Phil move rapidly from one in-over-their-heads story to the next.  So far the show has fielded a kidnapping, a femme fatale, several varieties of gangsters, government agents, moles selling state secrets, and stolen art.  In one delightful sequence, Sam and Phil are rescued by a super-agent played by Dougray Scott who promises to save the day, but in the very next scene he wanders into his own conspiracy thriller and is immediately dispatched, leaving Sam and Phil to muddle their way through yet another crisis.
  
  The Wrong Mans has a strong cast and a surprisingly deep bench--big name British actors like David Harewood and Dawn French turn up in bit parts--but the focus, unsurprisingly, is on Baynton and Corden (who also created and wrote the series).  Either out of choice or because their story doesn't leave them much scope for originality on the character front, Sam and Phil are familiar types already perfectly drawn by Shaun of the Dead and its ilk--Sam is well-meaning but immature, unsure how to be an adult and happy to float through life without making any decisions or striving for anything; Phil is quite certain that he doesn't want any of that vaunted maturity but still expects the world to hand him an adventure.  Baynton and Corden embody these roles with enough personality to make them their own (though the same can't be said for the supporting cast--it is particularly disappointing that Sarah Solemani, as Sam's boss and ex-girlfriend, is given so little to work with as she plays the standard disappointed, hectoring female part), but still the reason that The Wrong Mans works is less its originality and more how well-made it is, not just by its writers and cast but by its directors and cinematographers.  The hyper-realistic, alienating style, and the tense soundtrack, put me strongly in mind of Utopia (as well as, again, Shaun of the Dead, as the show replicates that film's trick of suggesting genre tropes--the opening shot sees Sam sprawled out in his bed looking dead--only to reveal that they are merely the horror of mundane suburban life--Sam turns out to be merely very badly hung over).  Like Utopia, The Wrong Mans draws a lot of its tension--and humor--from the Wes Anderson-ish trope of fixing the camera in a way that suggests normalcy, then showing us something shocking--a car accident, a murder--within that fixed frame, violating the scene's normalcy in a way that the audience doesn't know how to deal with any more than Sam does.  It's a deceptively simple trick that highlights what a slick production the show is, and makes it a pleasure to watch even though its story is unoriginal.  The Wrong Mans may be too familiar to transcend its inspirations, but its strong cast and style--not to mention some very funny moments--make this iteration worth watching.

A Sense of an Ending: Thoughts on Breaking Bad and Dexter

The most shocking moment in Breaking Bad's final episode, "Felina," happens in its teaser.  Having spent months holed up in rural New Hampshire as his body finally succumbs to cancer, fed only by scraps of news about his family's (mostly ill) fortune in the wake of his exposure as the meth manufacturer Heisenberg, Walter White is headed back to Albequerque.  Slipping into an unlocked car, he frantically and ineffectually scrapes at the ignition with a screwdriver.  As the lights of an approaching police car begin to illuminate the car's interior, Walt--sick, tired, and cold--leans back in despair, and then speaks.  "Just get me home," he rasps.  "Just get me home.  I'll do the rest."  With less than an hour left in his show (and only a few days left in his life), Walter White is praying.

At the most basic level, this is shocking because Walt has never been presented as a person who thinks about spiritual matters, much less the existence of god.  If anything, we might describe Walt as a hyper-materialist, a person who sees the world purely in terms of the building blocks it offers him in his relentless problem-solving, a Heinleinian Competent Man taken to terrifying extremes.  What few moments of spiritual contemplation we've seen him engage in over the course of the show's five seasons have mostly been bound up in something, or someone, concrete--his family, his children, most of all his infant daughter Holly.  For Walter White to ask anyone for help is a big deal--almost the only person in the series who has enjoyed that dubious privilege is his assistant Jesse, and Walt only tolerated that necessity because of his feelings of utter superiority and control over Jesse, which he went to murderous extremes to maintain.  Appealing to a higher power, even if it's just undirected flailing (which, just to be clear, is most likely what's happening here; when I say that Walt is praying I don't mean that he believes in a higher power), seems so foreign to who Walt is that it drives home just how far he's fallen and how desperate he is.

That's not what I thought about, though, in the moment.  When I first watched this scene, what shocked me about it--appalled me, even--was Walt's audacity, not just in praying for help in his quest to cause more violence, pain, and death--he has left his hiding place in order to make one last stab at getting his ill-gotten gains to a family that wants nothing to do with them or him, and to take revenge on the neo-Nazi gang that has taken over his meth business and killed his brother-in-law Hank--but in assuming that he and god are on the same side.  "I'll do the rest," Walt says, as if his plan was actually god's plan, and Walt just needs a little help to carry it out.

The thing is, though, Walt is right.  Up until this episode, if you were to look for evidence of some sort of providence operating within the Breaking Bad universe, you would have to conclude that it was--quite reasonably and naturally--opposed to Walt's choice to become a meth manufacturer and murderer, and constantly offering him chances to get off the bad path he'd chosen.  From the first season episode in which Walt's former friends and business partners Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz offer to pay for his cancer treatments (allegedly the reason he gets into the lucrative meth business) to moments before the opening of "Felina," when Walt's son (who has abandoned, probably forever, his given name of Walter Jr., and now goes by Flynn) angrily rejects his father's latest attempt to justify his crimes by giving drug money to his family, there have been countless signs and signals sent to Walt that what he's doing is wrong, destructive, and ultimately self-defeating.  In "Felina," however, the message is reversed.  When Walt, after his short prayer, checks under the car's sunguard, he does it gingerly, as if he realizes that what he finds there will be a final statement on whether the universe is on his side.  When the keys that are hidden there fall, literally, into his lap, they are shot from above, like a gift from heaven.  Whatever their differences in the preceding 61 hours of television, in "Felina," god is on Walter White's side.

It's an impression more than borne out by the rest of the episode, in which Walt's actions seem blessed.  Despite being one of the most notorious and wanted men in Albequerque (and despite being spotted on one of his early forays into town) Walt doesn't even come close to the clutches of the police (he evades them even in the episode's closing moments, when he succumbs to a bullet wound before they can arrest him).  He flits from one location to another as if by magic, seeing but unseen even when he's in public, as when he watches his son in the street, or confronts his former associates Todd and Lydia in a crowded restaurant (Matt Zoller Seitz has written an excellent post about Walt as a ghost, appearing in rooms--Gretchen and Elliot's house, Skyler's kitchen--as if out of nowhere, but another way of describing it might be divine intervention).  And he accomplishes impossible feats--somehow inserting ricin into a sealed packet of sweetener which Lydia empties into her tea, mowing down the neo-Nazi gang with a remote-activated machine gun mounted on a swivel arm that emerges from the trunk of his car.  Someone certainly seems to be looking out for Walt when his plan seems on the verge of collapse--the Nazis are going to kill him before he can spring his trap.  Suddenly their leader, Todd's uncle Jack, is overcome by outrage at Walt calling him a welcher, and pauses Walt's execution in order to produce Jesse, imprisoned and tortured these last few months as he cooks meth for Jack, in order to prove that he isn't Jack's partner (even in a show that has been rather fond of such characters, Jack's convenient, over the top wickedness is a little hard to take).  Jesse's presence also gives Walt one last chance to do something decent, as he knocks his former protegé to the ground before the hail of bullets can get him and shields him with his body (in the process suffering the wound that will kill him shortly after).

The result is that "Felina" feels as if it has been told, if not from Walt's point of view, than from his view of the world.  In sharp contrast to "Ozymandias," the episode in which Walt's downfall occurred, "Felina" repeatedly accepts Walt's interpretation of his actions as brave and heroic, not Pyrrhic and self-aggrandizing.  Even when the episode hammers the final nail into the coffin of Walt's repeated claims to have gotten into the drug business for the sake of his family, it does so on Walt's terms.  "I did it for me," he finally admits to Skyler.  "I liked it.  I was good at it.  And I was... really... I was alive."

There are in the episode faint hints of an alternate perspective on Walt's actions.  "The whole thing felt kind of shady, like, morality-wise," Jesse's stoner friend Skinny Pete observes after he and his equally dim-witted friend Badger help Walt fool Gretchen and Elliot into believing that they will be murdered by assassins if they don't launder Walt's money and pass it to Flynn as a supposed act of charity from benevolent former friends of his father (though his qualms are immediately alleviated by Walt's gift of a wad of cash).  And in what is perhaps the episode's most subtle note, after five seasons in which the ups and downs and changing configuration of the White family have been reflected in their answering machine message (an antiquated device even in the series's setting of 2008-9, but an incredibly effective one nonetheless), when the episode reintroduces Skyler in her reduced circumstances as the suspected wife of a notorious drug dealer, her answering machine message is the default, mechanical voice the phone came with, indicating that the family hasn't bounced back from the damage Walt caused, and that no amount of money can heal its wounds.  But for the most part, "Felina" refuses to acknowledge that there is another way of looking at Walt's actions in it--that tricking Skyler and Flynn into taking money that they have repeatedly, emphatically refused is one last violation from a man who never accepted that they were out of his control, that giving Skyler the location of Hank and Steve Gomez's burial site so she can cut a deal with the DA is forcing her to use her brother-in-law's body as a bargaining chip, that freeing Jesse still leaves him broke, emotionally shattered by months of torture and trauma, and prey to a drug addiction he never had much control over.

It's no wonder, then, that though most reviews have praised "Felina" for the good episode that it undeniably is, many reviewers have also wondered if it isn't too neat.  Emily Nussbaum described it as what she'd expect from Walt's dying fantasy.  Willa Paskin suggested that the episode represents the victory of team Walt.  Even creator Vince Gilligan (who wrote and directed the finale) has come out and said that even though Walt dies at the end of the series, it was important to the writers that he do it on his own terms.  Perhaps the most succinct and accurate summary of the reservations expressed about "Felina" comes from Linda Holmes, who notes that "a balanced ending would be one that denied [Walt] some measure of control."  But by doing something as foreign to his nature as giving up control to a higher power, as he does in the episode teaser, Walt somehow gains total control.  Being on god's side means that not only are his plans successful, but that, for the first time in the series's five-season run, he can control their consequences, and even the emotions that people feel because of them.

***

Of course, when we talk about god in the context of a TV show, what we're really talking about is the writer.  The reason that "Felina" feels as if some higher power is guiding and protecting Walt is that, for once, the story he wants to happen to him, and the story the writer wants to tell, are largely the same.  This is true of all stories, but the writer's role as god--and the way that "Felina" brings god into a story that previously had no declared space set aside for the concept--feels particularly important when discussing anti-hero shows.  In series like Breaking Bad, the writer is expected to do more than just determine the characters' fates; his role is to counteract their depravity by acting as the voice of absolute morality, the arbiter of right and wrong, the dispenser of reward and punishment.  It's a role that, in the past, Breaking Bad's writers have embraced with gusto--this is the show, after all, that at the end of its second season literally rained hellfire on Walt's head as punishment for his greed and cruelty.  So it is more than a little jarring for it to wag its finger at Walt's transgressions, and then give him exactly what he wants.

To be clear, when I talk about "Felina" being too neat and told from Walt's side, I'm doing so as an act of description, not passing judgment.  I'm not trying to argue that letting the show end on Walt's terms is a "bad" ending.  Rather, I'm trying to work out what we mean when we talk about a "good" ending, particularly when it comes to an anti-hero show like Breaking Bad.  I've seen some people who didn't like the finale's pro-Walt slant suggest that the series might have done better to end with the brutal "Ozymandias," and I agree that that could have worked.  (To be sure, if your interest going into the finale is in the innocents and semi-innocents who have been hurt by Walt's actions--Skyler, Jesse, Marie, the kids--then "Felina," for all its deliberate ignorance of the complicated situation in which it leaves these characters, is a more satisfying ending than "Ozymandias," which leaves them in dire straits.  But it certainly can't be said that getting them to this "happy" ending is the purpose of the later episode; like everything else in it, it is a consequence of "Felina"'s focus on Walt--he wants his family, and eventually also Jesse, to be safe, and therefore they are.)  But I'm not sure I see that it would have been a better ending.  It would change the show's story, but does it therefore follow that a story about Walt's double life exploding and catching his entire family in the crossfire is better than one about Walt snatching some small measure of victory out of the ashes of that defeat?

Talking about "good" and "bad" endings feels like another way of addressing the whole host of questions raised by the anti-hero show concept, and the way that that conversation often seems to shade into self-justification.  If we want a happy ending for Walt, then we're Bad Fans too blinded by his coolness to see the horrible things he's done.  But if we want him to get his comeuppance, aren't we being both bloodthirsty and hypocritical?  I never watched The Shield, but I remember, when it ended a few years ago, hearing fans praise its ending--in which main character Shane killed his family and then himself rather than go to jail for his crimes, and crooked cop protagonist Vic Mackey lost his family and was consigned to the living hell of a mundane desk job--and feeling just a little bit put off.  How do you spend seven seasons following the ups and downs of a character's life, I wondered, and then cheer at their downfall, as if the hope of it was the only reason you'd tuned in?  I've gone on here about the role of god in "Felina," and the way that the writers of anti-hero shows stand in for god, because it seems to me that there is, in the conversation about such shows, the expectation that their ending function as a sort of moral setting to rights, with god (or the writer) stepping in to distinguish good from evil and give to each character their just desserts.

It's not a burden that any writer could shoulder comfortably.  The Sopranos probably dealt with it best when it simply refused to acknowledge it.  Though I am, for the most part, persuaded by the detailed arguments that the sudden cut to black at the series's end represents Tony's death, they seem to me to be missing the point, which is that it's not what happens to Tony that matters, but how it's shown to us (or rather, not shown).  We don't get to see Tony's brains splattered over his screaming wife and children, and to rejoice in his comeuppance; neither do we get to see him peacefully finish his dinner and go on to live a long life of violence and dominance marred only by the existential burden of being Tony Soprano.  If we've come into the episode looking for some final, authoritative statement about Tony, life, and morality that will somehow make it alright for us to have been watching his story for eight years, the cut to black denies it to us.  But of course, having found this perfect ending once, The Sopranos has denied it to all other TV shows (and not just anti-hero stories) for probably decades to come.  And anyway, Breaking Bad is not the kind of show that could shoulder this kind of philosophical ending.  It's a show with a brilliant story and complex characters, but not much thematic depth, and it ran out of whatever it had to say about the world or its subject matter (mainly, the parallel it drew between the drug trade and legal commerce) some time in its third season.  Its ending needed to be story-driven as well, and Gilligan and his writers therefore needed to choose one of two inherently problematic options--victory or comeuppance.  (Meanwhile, Mad Men's recent sixth season finale quietly promises to revolutionize the genre by offering its anti-hero a chance to change for the better.  It has thus been extraordinarily frustrating to see reactions to "Felina" that refer to it as the capstone on the anti-hero craze, especially since to my mind Mad Men is clearly the better show.)

What it really comes down to, of course, is the question of how anti-hero shows justify their existence.  Why are we watching stories about terrible men doing terrible things?  Why are the people lucky enough to be granted a voice and a platform in our super-saturated culture choosing to tell these stories?  All too often, it seems to me, we try to justify our fondness for these shows by treating them like moral fables--"I watch Breaking Bad to see Walt get his comeuppance," as if it takes 62 hours of television to make the point that producing and selling addictive poison is bad.  Which is not to say that anyone who came to "Felina" expecting the kind of quasi-religious handing down of judgment I've described here is Watching it Wrong (Todd VanDerWerff, for example, makes an argument for a religious reading of Breaking Bad that is much broader than mine).  Rather, my point is that I'm not sure that there's a way of watching a show like Breaking Bad right, without falling into either the trap of rooting for Walt, or the one of wishing for his downfall.  When it comes to a character who is, ultimately, evil, it may be fun and thought-provoking to watch them in the middle of their story, rooting for them to be smarter and stronger than the other bad guys, cringing at their loss of moral direction.  But I'm not sure that either of the endings on tap for such a character--triumph or death--can ever be truly satisfying.

***

Going from talking about Breaking Bad to talking about late-era Dexter is a bit like contemplating a stirring poem, and then an illiterate scrawl.  It's not so much that the latter is bad as that it is incoherent and meaningless.  I could go on for hours about Walter White as a character, but I wouldn't even know where to begin talking about what Dexter Morgan has become in the last three, or even four, seasons of the show that bears his name, not even to describe how it's all gone wrong.  Even in the midst of its seventh season--the closest the show came to a return to form after losing its way in its second half--Dexter kept changing its mind about who and what its title character was, sometimes from one week to the next, making both the character and the show impossible to get a grip on.  Coming closest to managing that task this summer was AV Club reviewer Joshua Alston (whose canny reviews have been the main, if not only, reason to watch the show's eighth and final season), who identified the underlying flaw of later Dexter as an unwillingness to call the title character on his flaws and failings that bordered on hero-worship.  As Alston incisively points out in his review of the season's ninth episode:

Dexter's writers go to unbelievable lengths to keep Dexter suspended above everything else because they see him as a superhero, a man who has bravely taken responsibility for vanquishing evil in the world and whose only real flaw is his need for human connection. Essentially, they think of Dexter as a low-tech, plain-clothed version of Christopher Nolan's Batman, charged with a vital duty he's too heroic to abandon, and forced to carry the weight of the chaos it causes around him.

Dexter, in other words, has become the sort of show you'd get if Breaking Bad were run by Team Walt.  As self-evident as the comparisons to Breaking Bad seemed this year, however, with both shows spending the summer barreling towards their end in such different ways, it's worth remembering that Dexter wasn't always a natural fit in the anti-hero show genre.  True, there are some superficial points of similarity--Dexter is a white, middle class man with a harmless exterior and a dangerous hobby, and his girlfriend (later wife) Rita was Skyler White back before anyone felt like coming to Skyler White's defense.  But I think that if you'd told the show's creators, back when it premiered in 2006, that one day you'd be able to draw a circle around their show that would also encompass The Sopranos, they would have been very surprised.

The truth is that to begin with, Dexter was not an anti-hero as we've come to define the character type.  The crux of shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or The Shield is watching a human being turn into a monster.  In its first four seasons, Dexter was a show about a monster slowly figuring out that it might be possible for him to be human.  The fact that people--and not just killers, but innocent people as well--died at his hands or because of him wasn't a reflection on the kind of person was, because he wasn't a person at all.  It was merely an expression of his nature.  In these seasons, the show very rarely got bogged down in inane questions like "murder--right or wrong?" (and when it did, it was in intriguing ways, such as Dexter's dismay that his supposedly normal friends would consider it a kindness to kill a woman dying of a painful cancer).  It took it as a given that what Dexter was doing was, at best, a necessary release valve for his inherently monstrous nature, and focused instead on the question of whether he could ever learn to overcome that nature (and the tragic suggestion that, no matter how much Dexter might desire such a transformation, it might always be beyond him).

If you had to pick a single reason for why Dexter became such an incoherent, morally muddled show, you might do worse than to point an accusing finger at Breaking Bad.  Perhaps not literally, but there is an undeniable shift towards an anti-hero show mentality in Dexter's back half.  Where before the show focused on what Dexter was--an uncontrollable killer only barely held in check by a "code"--in its later seasons the focus shifted to what he did--his various murders and the people who died because of him--and how these acts could be justified or swept under the rug.  It's as though the show's writers, who had previously assumed that the only way to have an unrepentant killer as your protagonist was to make him less than human, looked around and, seeing so many other fully human characters getting away with depravity that Dexter never even dreamed of, got jealous and decided to do the same.  And then promptly forgot about the moral condemnation that goes hand-in-hand--however hypocritically, on occasion--with this kind of character.  Dexter, after all, is the hero of his story, not someone the audience should be rooting against.

One odd consequence of this is that in its final season Dexter ends up highlighting, far more clearly than other, better shows, the inherent problem of trying to find a satisfying ending to an anti-hero story.  Should the show end with Dexter exposed, or dead, or in any way punished?  We've spent four seasons being told that Dexter is a good guy, someone who is performing a necessary public service, whom the audience should be rooting for.  It would be the height of hypocrisy to turn around at the final episode at claim that he deserves punishment.  Should Dexter reform, completing his transformation into a real boy?  For four seasons the show has depicted Dexter as a thoroughly normal human being who just happens to occasionally kidnap people, strip them naked, tie them to a table, and stab them to death.  There's no humanity left for him to grow into.  Should Dexter, then, get away with everything, live happily ever after as Miami's resident serial killer?  But then what about all the hurt he's caused to innocent people, including his family, in the best tradition of anti-heroes?

By the time it came to write its end, Dexter had no way of escaping the obvious questions that any choice of ending would raise, and its writers therefore chose to gesture at every one of them and settle on none.  Dexter realizes that he doesn't need to kill anymore, and kills the season's hiss-worthy villain, and is repeatedly told by his friends and family (including people, like his sister Deb, whose lives he has repeatedly trashed) that he deserves to be happy, and discovers his humanity through murder when he disconnects a brain-dead Deb from life-support, and tries to commit suicide so that his monstrousness won't destroy his son's life, and survives that attempt but leaves his life behind to become a lumberjack (possibly a serial killing lumberjack).  The show's final image, in which Dexter stares blankly at the camera, feels like a perfect encapsulation of the writers' total inability to find some final statement about their show and character.  It's a failure that absolutely should be laid at the feet of the show and its writers, but I wonder if the root of their failure wasn't in writing badly, but in choosing the wrong genre for their story.

***

There's no conclusion that I'm building up to with this essay, no satisfying answer.  Merely the question: is the anti-hero story inherently unfinishable unless, like The Sopranos, you choose not to finish it?  I'm tempted to say something like: the problem is in the whole notion of a satisfying ending, where "satisfying" means satisfying some moral code of reward and punishment.  What we should be looking at when we evaluate an ending isn't the genre of a show, or even our own embarrassment at rooting for its character, but the story.  Does the ending stay true to it, and the characters, and the world they move in?  But this feels glib, and more than a little like letting the creators of anti-hero shows--and their audience--off the hook.  It's impossible to divorce this genre from its moral component, from the thrill of watching someone do evil and not knowing whether you want them to be punished or get away with it.  It's that frisson--"I'm bad, I root for Walt!"  "No, I'm good, I want Walt to be punished!"--that is at the heart of these shows.  And it's by dismantling it, and committing to one of those endings, that these shows, excellent though they sometimes are, become inherently unsatisfying.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2013 Edition

Well, here we are again.  With almost no time to grow accustomed to the glut, the new fall shows are here, and even omitting a huge number of them simply because there's really nothing to say, I've had to split the discussion of already-aired shows into two parts, with more to come.  I wish I could say that in the midst of all that quantity there are also signs of quality, but most of these shows run the gamut from promising to not-so-promising, with almost none genuinely good out of the gate.  Still, at least there's a lot to talk about.

• Brooklyn Nine-Nine - I often skip new comedies in these write-ups, because far more than dramas, comedies take time to find their voice.  It can be hard, judging from one or two episodes, to say whether a new sit-com will be appointment viewing, or amusing but not worth getting attached to, or just terrible (for a frame of reference, in past pilot season reviews I've been underwhelmed by the Community pilot, and thought 2 Broke Girls might be worth a shot).  Brooklyn Nine-Nine is, honestly, no exception.  The show has a cute premise--a comedy set in the titular police precinct and centering on the conflict between the goofball star detective (Andy Samberg) and his uptight new captain (Andre Braugher).  This results in some very funny moments in the two episodes I watched, and the interplay between Samberg and Braugher (whose stern demeanor, usually found in intense dramas like the legendary Homicide: Life on the Streets or last year's po-faced Last Resort, makes him a killer straight man) powers the show quite nicely.  But despite this potential, it's fairly clear that the show's writers are still putting its scaffolding together.  The supporting cast has mostly not been sketched in yet: Terry Crews is winning as a precinct sergeant suffering from anxiety issues, but Joe Lo Truglio is a bit of a chore as a physically and romantically inept detective, and with the exception of Chelsea Peretti as the precinct's loopy civilian administrator, the women on the cast are fairly forgettable.  And despite the pilot finding a good gag in Braugher's character's stiffness--he's such a good straight man because he's gay, and has spent his career doing things perfectly by the book so as not to give his superiors an excuse to get rid of him--neither it nor the second episode manage to find his personality, either as an extension of his gayness or in any other trait.  He exists mainly as a foil for Samberg's manchild antics, which, though less aggravating than this kind of behavior often is, probably can't carry the show on their own.
  
  So the truth is, there's really no way of knowing yet whether Brooklyn Nine-Nine will be worth watching, and the reason that I'm interested in the show, and hoping that it does prove to be a winning comedy, is its subject matter.  The show is clearly aware that it is a rare comedic voice in a genre characterized by intense, violent drama--the first scene in the pilot sees Samberg monologuing to the screen about the soul-killing nature of his job, only to reveal that he's performing a dramatic reading from Donnie Brasco while his partner exasperatedly processes a robbery.  In a television landscape that not only takes such speeches with deadly seriousness, but uses them to justify an increasingly fascistic attitude towards violence and the abuse of police power (in this pilot season alone, we have Ironside, an inspirational story about a man who won't let disability stop him from dangling suspects off rooftops, and By Any Means, a British series predicated on the assumption that the confidence games and feats of entrapment that were so charming on Leverage will be equally appealing when committed by officers of the law) it feels valuable, and even necessary, to have a series that recognizes them for the self-aggrandizing, faintly ridiculous posturing that they are.  In its first two episodes, Brooklyn Nine-Nine treats police work as a job that can often be aggravating and thankless, but which the characters on the show nevertheless genuinely enjoy and want to do well--which also means obeying the law and trying to minimize violence.  With a little luck, it could end up doing for police work what Parks and Recreation (with which it shares some producers and writers) has done for civil service--act as a necessary antidote to the cynicism that has permeated other, dramatic depictions of the job, not by ignoring the aspects of it that are frustrating and Sisyphean, but by acknowledging that these can often be inherently comedic.
  
  
• Hostages - It's been amusing, these last few years, to watch as Israeli shows became the go-to source for inspiration for American TV--first a trickle following the respectable critical reception of In Treatment, and now a deluge as producers frantically try to find the next Homeland (most of these shows don't make it past the pilot stage, but thanks to the somewhat insular state of the Israeli news apparatus I hear about every project at its most preliminary stages).  Even if it weren't for their shared national heritage, it would be clear that Hostages (based on an Israeli series of the same name which hasn't aired yet) is an attempt to replicate Homeland's success--it has the same action-movie-with-a-cerebral-twist vibe, the same use of a unique angle to approach a story about politics and espionage, and the same game of wits between male and female lead characters.  The story, however, is quite different: on the eve of performing an operation on the President of the United States, hotshot surgeon Ellen Sanders (Toni Collette) and her family are taken hostage by an FBI agent (Dylan McDermott) who wants her to kill her patient.  The obvious question the pilot needs to answer is how the show plans to stretch this story--which at first glance feels like it could, at best, power a feature-length movie--into even a single season.  Which makes it doubly unfortunate that in its first hour Hostages seems to feel so little urgency about justifying its own existence.  Like a lot of high concept shows, it seems to be working under the assumption that said concept is intriguing enough to keep people watching--even though hostage situations are one the most hoary tropes out there.  And so the pilot, instead of barreling through the familiar early stages of the hostage story--the introduction to the hostages on an ordinary day, the hostage-takers' violent entrance and their demands, the hostages' early attempts to get away--proceeds through them almost languorously, as if it genuinely believes that the audience has never seen a story like this one before.  It's only in its final seconds that the pilot does something unexpected--and sets the tone for the type of the story that the rest of the series will tell--but by that point I was pretty much running out the clock.
  
  In its handling of its characters, the Hostages pilot also demonstrates a dispiriting tone-deafness.  Instead of putting any sort of power into their plotting, the pilot's writers seem to believe that they can capture the audience's interest by piling personal issues on the Sanders family.  Which is wrongheaded going both ways: first, it assumes that people who have been taken hostage as part of a plot to kill the president need something else to make them interesting, and second, it assumes that the things we learn about Ellen's family--her husband is having an affair, her daughter is pregnant, her son is dealing pot and in hock to his supplier--are interesting, rather than a bunch of overwrought, predictable clichés.  There's some potential for interesting character development in McDermott's character--"we're not here to solve their problems," he tells one of his men who has performed an act of kindness for Ellen's son (showing him that the family dog wasn't killed but only drugged, because while pointing guns at children in their own home is something an audience can forgive, killing a dog is beyond the pale).  The sheer cluelessness of the line suggests that McDermott still sees himself as a good guy who can keep the situation he's created under control--and non-violent--and is genuinely surprised when Ellen and her family don't accept his assurances that he won't hurt them so long as they play along.  But instead of challenging this assumption, the pilot seems to be trying to bolster it by showing us that McDermott has a sick wife and a young daughter.  This leaves Ellen alone as the only source of character drama on the show, and although she gets some powerful moments--chiefly, after realizing that her family is in danger because of her unique access to the president, she takes advantage of her first moment alone to try to maim herself, but can't go through with it.  Even this, however, is undermined by the show's plot--we know that the entire premise of the series isn't going to be cancelled out halfway into the pilot--and only Collette's performance gives Ellen's dilemma even a little bite.  Carrie and Brody these are not, and despite the slight hint of intelligence at the end of Hostages's pilot, it's hard to believe that this show will ever come close to matching Homeland's twisty intensity and complex characters.
  
  
• Agents of SHIELD - Bar none, the most hotly anticipated pilot of the fall, and now that I've seen it I can join in the general chorus of cautiously optimistic, perhaps overly-indulgent "meh"s that has greeted it.  A fairly standard "let's get the team together" hour only slightly enlivened by the presence of Clark Gregg's Agent Coulson (last seen biting it at the hand of Loki in The Avengers, and brought back by to life here through darkly-hinted means that are one of the pilot's few compelling mysteries), the SHIELD pilot is so nondescript that if I didn't know better, I would have assumed that Joss Whedon's role in it began and ended with a producer's input.  According to the credits, however, Whedon wrote and directed this hour, and once you know that it becomes easier to see (or maybe to imagine) a certain watered down Firefly quality to the show--the flying base that Coulson requisitions for his new team looks like Serenity reenvisioned by someone with little imagination and no fondness for texture, and the team, which comprises hackers, scientists, and fighters, is what someone fairly straight-laced and afraid of controversy might imagine as a motley crew (the only standout character is Ming Na as fearsome fighter Melinda May, though even she is characterized by a reserve that conceals some unspoken trauma that has left her reluctant to return to the field).  Still, the show that SHIELD most closely resembles isn't in the Whedon-verse, it's Torchwood.  Like that series, the show's central question is examining how a (fairly) ordinary organization of non-superpowered humans deals with a world in which superheroes, and the menaces they face up against, are a reality.
  
  With that new frame of reference, SHIELD looks very good indeed (though given the pilot's unrelenting blandness even Torchwood's over the top awfulness starts to look enticing by comparison), not least in actually finding some interesting questions to ask about such a setting.  The pilot's story revolves around an ordinary, down-on-his-luck man (J. August Richards, who will hopefully recur later on) granted superpowers by scientists experimenting with alien artifacts left over from the battle at the end of The Avengers, who is driven insane not just by the little-understood alien technology altering his body, but by the comic book expectations of heroism created, in the show's universe, by the existence of actual superheroes.  When Coulson corners him, Richards raves about a world that taught him to aspire to an ordinary sort of heroism--hold down a job, support your family--then made him feel inadequate in the face of beings who are more than human.  At the same time that it raises these questions, however, SHIELD also seems, quite often, to be plumping for easy answers--Richards can blame the Avengers for making him feel like a failure, not an economic and political system that has taken away his job and prospects and called him a failure for it, and the second issue raised by the pilot, SHIELD's right to hide the existence of aliens and superheroes from the rest of the world, is rather neatly resolved when the character who raises it, a hacker named Skye (Chloe Bennet), joins the SHIELD team and seemingly accepts their mission to perpetuate this deceit.  At the end of the pilot, it's hard to know which way the show will fall--there's room for Skye to reveal her own agenda, for example, and for Coulson's certainty about his mission to be punctured by the things about himself and his resurrection that he doesn't know; but the show could also function as little more than an adjunct to Phase Two, drumming up interest without really challenging any of the assumptions that underpin the movies' rather cartoonish universe.  Whether it comes from Whedon or someone else, one can only hope that someone involved with SHIELD will try to make it into its own, worthwhile story.
  
  
• Peaky Blinders - If The Hour was the BBC's answer to Mad Men, Peaky Blinders is its response to Boardwalk Empire.  Like the Prohibition-set HBO show, it takes place in the 1920s, and focuses on borderline gangsters and the obsessive, amoral policemen who hunt them.  The setting, to me, is far more enticing than Boardwalk's Atlantic City, however.  The Peaky Blinders are the ruling gang in the working class neighborhoods of Birmingham (so named because of their habit of sewing razor blades into the brim of their peaked caps, which they swing at opponents' eyes in a fight; I'm sure that this is a historical detail since no one could make something like this up, but it doesn't make the name or the fighting tactic any less silly).  Run by the Shelby family and headed up by son Tommy (Cillian Murphy), they run crooked books and collect protection, but also keep the peace and make sure to spread at least some of their ill-gotten gains around.  When what should have been a simple robbery of motorcycles nets Tommy a crate full of automatic guns and ammunition bound for Libya, he calls down on Birmingham the wrath of Sam Neill's Inspector Campbell (backed by then Secretary of State Winston Churchill, played with a refreshing callousness by Andy Nyman) who suspects either the IRA or the communists, both rising forces in the city, of taking the guns.  The result is a tangled web of allegiances, with the law pitting gangsters against Irish nationalists and labor organizers without seeing much difference between them, and the three groups vying for each other's support on the grounds of their shared disdain for government, fueled by the carnage of WWI.
  
  The result can feel more than a little overstuffed (especially when the show adds to the story of the missing guns Tommy's plans to advance the family's position by involving himself in a war with gypsy gangs and scheming to undermine the city's leading bookmaker), and as a result some subplots come off feeling rather perfunctory.  This is particularly true of the romance plots--the star-crossed love between Tommy's sister and the lead communist, his boyhood friend and comrade in war (Iddo Goldberg), and Tommy's own flirtation with an Irish barmaid (Annabelle Wallis) who turns out to be Campbell's plant.  Even at its most expansive moments, however, it can be hard to tell if Peaky Blinders is more than just an exciting, twisty story, and whether it has anything to say about its era, or about the changing, sometimes ugly face of policing in times of economic and political instability.  The show is extremely well-made, beautifully shot and directed (and makes some amusing, if perhaps too-clever, choices in its soundtrack, using modern music like Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand," which opens each episode).  But what makes it work is Murphy's performance, which imbues the series with some much-needed gravitas.  His Tommy has been driven to nihilism (and opium) by the trauma of his wartime experiences, and whenever he makes a move in his war with the police and the city's other criminals it's left to us (and the other characters) to wonder if he's being a cunning chessmaster, or imploding spectacularly.  Murphy, however, finds the humanity behind Tommy's poker face, a sense of humor and some occasional moments of compassion (when his former friend is incensed at his accusation that he only wants Tommy's sister for the advantages that a connection with the Shelbys would offer the communists, you can see a flicker of shame cross Murphy's face before it once again goes hard).  It's not quite a person, but Murphy's performance is magnetic enough to make the guesswork that surrounds Tommy compelling, and with him, the entire show.

Review: Mortal Fire by Elizabeth Knox + Strange Horizons Fund Drive

My review of Elizabeth Knox's YA novel Mortal Fire appears today at Strange Horizons.  As I write in the opening of the review, I was introduced to Knox by Nina Allan's Short Fiction Snapshot about Knox's short story "A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill."  Mortal Fire turns out to be less focused and not nearly as weird as the story, but it is nevertheless an intriguing, richly detailed, sharp novel that marks Knox out as a writer to become better acquainted with.

This is also a good opportunity to mention that Strange Horizons is running its annual fund drive this month--see the arrow below tracking the drive's progress.  The money raised during this period will be used to pay our contributors and to help Strange Horizons remain (she said, with some admitted partiality) one of the best sources online for speculative fiction and non-fiction.  The main fund drive with details about how to donate and publicize the drive can be found here.  Anyone who donates will be entered in a prize drawing whose prizes are listed here (prizes are updated regularly so check back).  And as donation levels are reached, we'll be releasing bonus content (which already includes several reviews) which is collected here.

Where the Cool Kids Are: The New Breed of TV Anti-Heroes

"We had a name for people like you in prison.  We called you the mean clique."

Community, "Competitive Ecology"

The era of the anti-hero is over, so says everyone.  In TV reviews and discussion boards, there is a growing consensus that shows about white middle class men behaving badly (and often illegally) and taunting the audience with how outrageous, destructive, and toxic their behavior is have become passé, and that when Breaking Bad wraps up its story in less than a week, it'll be time for TV to come up with a new shtick (never mind that Mad Men, to my mind the most innovative twist on the anti-hero concept, still has two seasons left to run).  You could see this most clearly this summer, in the genuine contempt that seemed to waft off reviews of latter-day anti-hero wannabes like Ray Donovan or Low Winter Sun.  These shows, reviewers agreed, desperately wanted to snag the coolness points of departing series like Breaking Bad (or, hell, even Dexter, which surrendered what little coolness it still had left years ago and ended its run earlier this week with one of the most dispiriting whimpers ever heard).  With no idea how to replicate that kind of achievement, these shows plumped for tone-deaf mimicry, and so their sad-sack protagonists commit murder, beat people, abuse their families, and in general behave like awful human beings without giving the audience any reason not to change the channel in disgust.  After a whole summer of this, everyone seems to agree that it's time to move on.

In general, that everyone includes me (though as I've written in the past, before the death knell is rung on this genre I would have liked at least one of its canonical iterations to have featured an anti-hero who was not a man, or not white, or--heavens forfend!--not either one).  But at the end of a summer in which so many TV reviewers have found themselves losing their last shred of patience with anti-hero shows, I've started to notice their tropes infecting shows that should seemingly want nothing to do with Sopranos-style moral murkiness.  It's not that anti-heroes are going anywhere, but that they've evolved into something new, and along the way injected a welcome cynicism into some of the most cherished, valorized tropes of American TV.

Somewhat to my surprise, the trailblazer here is Breaking Bad.  Excellent though it is, Breaking Bad is, on the whole, a show that perfects the anti-hero concept, rather than one that innovates within it.  It's a fantastic story, extremely well told and performed, but it doesn't usually tell us anything new (for a more critical restatement of this observation, see this excellent post, which quite correctly points out how little Breaking Bad has to say on the subject of the drug trade).  The one exception is the increasingly toxic mentoring relationships between Walter White and his assistant, Jesse Pinkman.  Other anti-heroes have had mentees--Tony had Christopher, and Don has Peggy--but the relationship between Walt and Jesse is unique for being so all-consuming, in ways that are both good and bad.  Walt is, at one and the same time, the only truly nurturing presence in Jesse's life, and the worst thing that has ever happened to him.  When the two first meet, Jesse is a dropout and layabout, estranged from his parents, cooking bad meth for small-time crooks, with some combination of prison, serious drug addiction, and an early death in his future.  Walt gives him a purpose and boundaries, teaches him discipline, and trains him in the same problem-solving techniques that have made Walt so respected, in his legitimate and illegal activities.  Through knowing Walt, Jesse becomes more confident and better able to use his intelligence.

But of course, what Walt is teaching Jesse to be is a more effective purveyor of addictive poison, and as the two climb the ranks of the Albequerque drug trade Jesse becomes involved in a level of criminality that he never would have aspired to, much less reached, on his own, finally culminating in his murder of Walt's one-time assistant Gale.  At the same time, Walt systematically isolates Jesse from anyone who might represent an alternative influence--most notably, when he stands by and watches as Jesse's girlfriend Jane, who had encouraged Jesse to rebel against Walt, chokes to death on her own vomit.  Walt also undermines Jesse's faith in his own judgment and perceptions, breaking down his identity and encouraging a dependence that leaves Jesse a psychological wreck, wracked with guilt over what he and Walt have done but incapable of making a break with his mentor--until he discovers a sufficiently great violation of their trust which finally cuts through Walt's conditioning.

Where I see the influence of the anti-hero shows on television as a whole is in the increasing depiction of toxic mentor-mentee relationships that have more than a little bit of Walt and Jesse in them.  American TV, it has been said many times, is obsessed with the workplace.  It has a tendency to treat workplace relationships, and the loyalty between colleagues (and especially between superiors and underlings), as somehow sacrosanct--more worthy than the bonds of family or love, more important than laws or ideals.  This is a TV landscape, after all, which has given us The West Wing, a show in which, as I've written, the characters evince a loyalty to their workplace and their superiors that is almost feudal, and in which the courtly love between a president and his advisers trumps any personal relationship (or indeed the desire for personal relationships).

Up until a few years ago, perhaps the most trenchant deconstruction of this attitude was the American version of The Office.  Steve Carell's inept manager Michael Scott clearly thought of himself as a sort of Jed Bartlett, inspiring undying loyalty in his "troops."  As the show repeatedly pointed out, he believed that being someone's boss was a good way to become their friend (or rather, to make them your friend), but in the reality the show presented, Michael's employees were working for the same reason that most of us do, and eager to end the workday so that they could leave to be the with the people they really liked and do the things they really cared about.  In the last few months, however, I've watched three different shows that seem to be doing something even more revolutionary.  They present a character who is Jed Bartlett-ish in their charisma and in the loyalty they command in the workplace, and then slowly suggest that this character is actually a sort of Walter White, and that the loyalty they inspire in their underlings is actually the result of manipulation and gaslighting.

The first of these shows is Scandal, which is in many ways a sort of dark, perverted mirror of The West Wing.  As I wrote in my post about the show last month, Scandal initially presents its heroine, Olivia Pope, as a champion of the downtrodden (she is repeatedly referred to, with an increasing degree of irony, as a "white hat").  Her employees' fanatical loyalty to her is rooted, as we discover, in the fact that she has saved each of them, from prison, abuse, or simply from their own self-loathing.  It is also, however, rooted in the fact that they derive much of their self-worth from working for Olivia, which makes them, as one of them memorably announces in the series pilot and then wastes no opportunity to remind us thereafter, "gladiators in suits."  As the series draws on, and as we discover more details about Olivia's past that make her claim on the white hat increasingly tenuous, that confusion of workplace and personal identity comes to seem less and less healthy--and more like something that Olivia has encouraged in order to keep her people in line.  Like Walter White, she isolates her people--sometimes inadvertently, and sometimes deliberately--from any outside influence that might cast her behavior in a different, less positive light, and encourages them to view anyone who comes at her as a communal enemy.  She creates a bunker mentality that leaves her people incapable of questioning her choices, even as they puff themselves up at the thought of the power that being associated with Olivia Pope has conferred upon them.

A less imaginative spin on this story comes from USA's summer series Graceland, which was inspired by the suggestive true story of a group of undercover agents living together in a repossessed beach house in Southern California.  The series begins with newly-minted FBI agent Mike Warren (Aaron Tveit) being assigned to the titular mansion, where he finds a motley crew of FBI, DEA, and customs agents, presided over by the charismatic but secretive Paul Briggs (Daniel Sunjata).  Mike is soon informed that his real assignment is to spy on Briggs, who is suspected of stealing seized drugs, even as the older, more seasoned agent trains him and teaches him the skills that Mike will use against him.  It's a premise that sets the stage for some interesting questions about trust and false identity, especially when it's revealed that while Briggs is indeed stealing drugs, he's doing so as part of an unsanctioned undercover operation.  Posing as a new drug supplier (whom the other agents at Graceland repeatedly try to capture), Briggs hopes to flush out the cartel assassin who kidnapped him, forced him to become addicted to drugs, and then pumped him for information that led to the deaths of Briggs's own training agent and his girlfriend.

Unfortunately, after a few promising and well-paced early episodes, Graceland devolves into a dull slog.  Mike and Briggs never develop much in the way of personalities, and the bond between them, which should have given the show its backbone and its themes of trust and deception their bite, is never palpable.  Nevertheless, it is possible to perceive an echo of the way that Scandal makes Olivia Pope simultaneously cool and pathetic in the show's construction of Briggs and his relationships with Mike and the other agents at Graceland.  Throughout the first (and, in all likelihood, only) season, Briggs acts as a father figure to the other agents, settling their disputes with clear authority and a dose of sardonic wit, and protecting the community they've formed, a safe haven of sanity from a life spent among criminals and thugs.  His belief in his own authority clearly extends to his criminal activities--he behaves as if he has an airtight master plan, and as if his desire for revenge justifies lying to his friends (not to mention flooding the streets with drugs that would otherwise have been destroyed).  But in reality, Briggs spends much of the season flying by the seat of his pants, and his crimes reverberate on his friends and on the house in ways that he can neither predict nor control.  By the end of the season, even the purity of Briggs's motives is in doubt--his quest for revenge seems less righteous than like a way of avoiding his own guilt.  What makes Briggs a Walter White-ish, Olivia Pope-ish figure is that neither he, nor the agents he's mentored and trained to look up to him, see this.  In the season's final episode, the agent who has suffered the most because of Briggs's scheme--she has lost a friend, was forced to use drugs in order to maintain her cover, and came close to being viciously murdered--breaks down in tears and apologizes for ever doubting him, and when a completely unrepentant Briggs calls Mike to ask for his help in another harebrained scheme, all Mike can think of is how much he enjoyed being Briggs's sidekick.  Despite its lackluster execution, Graceland is intriguing as a portrait of a man who has gotten everyone around him, including himself, to buy into the myth of his own awesomeness.

A much better variation on this character type can be found in another USA show, Suits.  Now on break from its third season, this lawyer show has been slowly gaining momentum among TV critics, who have pronounced it more than just "good for USA" (see Carrie Reisler at the AV Club, and Matt Zoller Seitz at The Vulture).  Personally, I think the praise is exaggerated--almost everything that Suits does well is done better by The Good Wife, which also doesn't suffer from the show's flaws of soporific, barely comprehensible legal plots and a dearth of interesting female characters (not to mention ones whose lives don't revolve around men--though 50% of Suits's main cast are women, the show seldom passes the Bechdel test).  Nevertheless, Suits is a sharp, well-made and acted, often quite funny show, and if it outdoes The Good Wife in any respect it is in the viciousness with which it skewers the world of corporate law.  The pilot sees Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams), a genius whose academic career was derailed when he sold a test and who now makes a living taking law school entrance exams for other people, crossing the path of superstar attorney Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht).  Bored, and impressed despite himself with Mike's ability to absorb and comprehend any information laid before him, Harvey agrees to hire Mike as his new associate and to help him pretend to be a lawyer in the corridors of his cutthroat law firm, Pearson Hardman.

It is, quite frankly, a ridiculous premise, and one that the show seems less and less invested in (even as it remains essentially inescapable, unless Mike himself leaves the series).  Though season finales and premieres frequently revolve around someone at the firm discovering or almost discovering Mike's secret, for the most part what drives Suits is the politics at Pearson Hardman, the frequent back-stabbings and shady deals through which the various associates, partners, and senior partners at the firm buck for power (which, among other things, has led to the firm's name having changed several times already).  At the top of this pyramid stands managing partner Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), who plucked Harvey out of the firm's mail room and groomed him into the James Bond-ish shark he currently is.  Though the relationship between Harvey and Mike--in which Harvey mentors Mike in everything from practicing the law to dressing sharply, and Mike challenges Harvey's callous detachment from the cases he argues and his no strings attached lifestyle--is how Suits sells itself, the real power in the show comes from the mentorship relationship between Jessica and Harvey, and the permutations it goes through, from Harvey acting as Jessica's white knight, to her blackmailing him with Mike's secret, to him scheming to unseat her as managing partner.

It is through the relationship between Harvey and Jessica that we initially glimpse the questions that make Suits more interesting than the sharply made legal procedural it mostly is.  When we first meet Harvey, he is casually but cruelly belittling a colleague in front of Jessica.  Well, OK, we might think.  Supremely talented assholes are in right now, and maybe the show will be about the character learning to behave with some basic civility.  What the show reveals as we continue to watch it, however, is that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the less the characters we encounter feel bound by any norms of human decency.  Pearson Hardman is literally the sort of workplace where, if you're not a big enough deal, people will gather in corners to snigger over how upset you are at your cat's death.  In a second season episode, Jessica is discriminated against by a judge who bears a grudge over a prank Jessica played on her when they were in law school together, in which Jessica got the other woman drunk and then left her to be found naked by their professor.  For a while, it seems that the episode is expecting us to accept a little too much youthful indiscretion on Jessica's part (not least in continuing to describe as a prank something that sounds a lot more like sexual assault).  But the final scene between the women reveals a much more shocking truth--Jessica assaulted the judge not out of mean-girl-ish exuberance, but in order to scuttle her chances of getting a recommendation for a job they both wanted.  Jessica blithely admits this to the judge, and even announces that she has no regrets over what she did.  It's an episode that most clearly establishes what at other points in the series is only hinted at--that these people, who are funny and attractive and well-dressed, and whom the show expects us to root for and admire, are all terrible, terrible human beings. 

The character whom Harvey insults in the series pilot (who is also the person whose cat dies) is Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman), the most frequent lightning rod for Jessica and Harvey's mean-spirited disdain.  In fairness to the show, Louis is far from an innocent victim.  He's a bullying martinet who harangues and harasses the firm's junior associates and will stoop to spying on his colleagues to get ahead.  But he's also the only person at Pearson Hardman who suffers from the Michael Scott-like delusion that your work colleagues are your friends, and he has a loyalty to the firm and his superiors that is rarely reciprocated.  Though the show too often uses Louis as broad comic relief (a scene in the late third season has him blowing a crucial negotiation because the opposing counsel baits him with, yet again, his cat), it also repeatedly stresses that he is an excellent lawyer (this also goes some way towards justifying his treatment of the junior associates, since his brutal training gets results and holds them to a standard that he more than meets).  And yet Jessica and Harvey feel free to treat Louis with open contempt.  From the beginning of the series, Louis makes it clear that he wants to be a senior partner, and they agree that he has the skill, and brings in enough money, to justify that promotion.  But nevertheless they refuse it to him for no apparent reason.  In a second season arc that is the best story the show has done, ousted name partner Daniel Hardman (David Costabile) offers Louis a senior partnership in exchange for his vote stripping Jessica of power.  When Louis accepts, Jessica and Harvey have the gall to behave as if he has betrayed them, instead of simply acting to further a career that they seemingly had no interest in advancing.  What's even worse, though, is that Louis eventually comes around to their way of seeing things, feeling terrible guilt for turning his back on a woman who has never shown any loyalty to him.

What I finally realized, after one too many scenes in which Jessica and Harvey behave horribly to Louis for no discernible reason and he tolerates such treatment with even less cause, is that the principle governing professional behavior at Pearson Hardman is essentially the same as the one you'd find at a high school--the cool kids can do whatever they like, and the nerds take what they can get and feel grateful.  Harvey and Jessica are suave, well-dressed, and confident, whereas Louis is bumbling, insecure, and not very attractive, and this justifies their treating him like crap, with the occasional scrap thrown in.  There's a little more to it than that--a lot could be said about Jessica's seesaw of trust and paranoia, the way she constantly gives people around her power so that they can support her position, and then immediately undermines them out of fear that they will use that power against her (which, in fairness, is often what they do, though at least some of the time it's Jessica's distrustful behavior that drives them to it)--but what it ultimately comes down to, on Scandal and Graceland as well as Suits, is coolness.  Olivia Pope, Paul Briggs, Harvey Specter, they're all the cool kids, and characters like Quinn Perkins, the new employee who joins Pope & Associates in Scandal's pilot, or the two Mikes, Warren and Ross, are the new kid in school who has been taken under the cool kid's wing.  That in itself isn't new--American TV is workplace TV, as we've said, and the guy in charge is, by definition, the coolest guy (Jed Bartlett may not have been cool in the strict sense of the word, but within the world of the show he redefined what coolness meant, and then embodied it).  But what I see as an influx of anti-hero show attitudes into all walks of TV is the fact that that coolness is being questioned--that it is frequently exposed, as it is on Suits, as assholish behavior.  Our mentee protagonists, then, find themselves playing the Lindsay Lohan role in Mean Girls--with the crucial difference that unlike Cady Heron, they may not come to their senses before they become just as shallow and immoral as their mentors.

What's not clear to me is whether this shift is deliberate.  As I wrote in my post about Scandal, I couldn't entirely swear to the fact that the show means for me to see Olivia's relationship with her team as abusive and manipulative, and it's equally unclear to me whether Suits intends for me to see Harvey and Jessica as off-putting and self-satisfied rather than cool (on the latter show, it doesn't help that Mike and Harvey often seem to be in different stories, so that while an important theme of the show is how working for Harvey is making Mike more ruthless, for the most part when the show wants to discuss how working at Pearson Hardman wears away at norms of human decency, it centers that story on Harvey and Jessica's relationship and their increasingly fraught power struggles).  It's possible that something else entirely is going on--that writers have become so emboldened by the popularity of anti-hero shows that they inject that kind of behavior into characters whom the audience is nevertheless expected to root for wholeheartedly.  In which case, I agree with the critics I quoted at the beginning of this article--it's time for the anti-hero story to go.  But I'd like to believe that I'm right, and that what anti-hero shows have taught television is to be more willing to puncture the myth of unquestioning loyalty to your boss and workplace, and to look more closely at what it means to be the coolest guy in the room.

Four Comments on Upstream Color

It's been a week since I watched Shane Carruth's second film Upstream Color, and since then I've been trying to work out not what I want to say about it, but whether I wanted to say anything at all.  Which is not to say that I didn't like the film--I found it rich and moving, and incredibly exciting for the growth it shows in Carruth's abilities and interests as a filmmaker, and an SF filmmaker in particular.  But Upstream Color is also a film that seems to demand not a review, but a dissection.  To write about it, I would have to explain what the film means.  There have been some great reviews along these lines--in particular, I found much to think about in Caleb Crain's review in the New Yorker, and Nicholas Rombe's review in the Los Angeles Review of Books--but I don't really want to try to add to them (and I'm not sure that I could if I wanted to).  The meaning of Upstream Color feels bound up in the lovely and sometimes disquieting experience of watching it.  Perhaps if I were a better reviewer I could capture that experience in words, but instead I think I'll just recommend that you watch the film.  The following, then, is not a review so much as a collection of thoughts, in no particular order and with nor particular theme.

• Perhaps the first coherent thought I formed about the film when the credits rolled was "why, that was practically self-explanatory!" so it was a bit of a shock to look up its reviews when I got home and find so many of them calling Upstream Color opaque in the same vein as Primer.  While it's true that there are huge, lingering questions left behind by the film, these are of such a completely different nature than the ones raised by Primer that the two films feel almost like opposites.  Carruth's first film leaves you wondering what happened (and having to resort to complicated timelines in order to make sense of it).  His second film is, on the whole, rather clear on this point--barring a few fuzzy points and what I suspect are probably plot holes, its story is fairly linear and not very difficult to follow--and what it leaves you wondering is what it all means.  This is reflected in the different types of stories Carruth tells with the two films.  Primer is, when it comes down to it, a character sketch of two money- and status-obsessed, emotionally deadened technology workers who don't really know what they want from their lives except that it's not what they've got.  Upstream Color is a philosophical treatise, one that even Carruth himself has struggled to explain but which touches on the alienation of modern life and the (possibly dangerous and dehumanizing) allure of a return to nature.
  
  What I find interesting about all of this is how the two films use--or don't use--dialogue to achieve their different affects in a way that is the precise opposite of what we might expect.  The reason that Upstream Color might appear, at first, to be as opaque as Primer is that it doesn't employ many of the devices with which most films explain their plot to the audience.  The connective tissue between many scenes is missing, and there is never the kind of dialogue we're used to in movies (science fiction movies in particular) in which the plot is explained to us through the characters.  In fact, dialogue of all sorts is in short supply in Upstream Color, so much so that its characters stop speaking entirely twenty minutes before it ends, while its affect is achieved through its overpowering score and sound effects (the importance of sound in the film reaffirms my belief that we're in desperate need of popular criticism that speaks about the technical aspects of filmmaking more than about plot and character; I don't think it's possible to say anything meaningful about Upstream Color without discussing its soundtrack).  This is, of course, in stark contrast to Primer, a film that is almost overburdened with language, whose characters frantically, obsessively explain their world to themselves and each other, interrupting one another in their impatient need to be the one to speak (since first watching the film, I've gone to work in the technology industry, and I can now confirm that that is actually how engineers talk).
  
  But of course, it's Primer that is difficult to follow, which is at least in part because that glut of dialogue, with its technical terms and missing logical leaps (in my review of the film I quoted John Clute, in a review of a different work, who describes this kind of dialogue as "a deincentivizing fug of unverb"), overwhelms the audience, who have to puzzle out meaning from that deluge of information.  In Upstream Color, on the other hand, dialogue is beside the point, which the film drives home through the fact that nearly every time that a character seeks to explain the world to themselves or each other, they're either lying or mistaken.  When the Thief tries to get hold of the enthralled Kris's money, he doesn't issue commands, but tells her things about the world that aren't true, but which she, in her suggestible state, believes--that his face is as bright as the sun, that her mother has been kidnapped, that the water he's given her is delicious and sustaining.  Kris and Jeff tell each other stories about why their lives are in shambles--she's mentally ill, he's a drug addict--that the audience knows aren't true.  When Kris goes to the hospital, her doctors patiently explain to her that she's survived a cancer that we know never existed.  The only time the characters gain insight through speech is when what they're saying isn't rational--when Kris and Jeff quote Walden to one another, and finally prove the connection they've both sensed but have been unable to articulate--because it is so far outside the realm of rationality, where a story like Primer takes place.
  
  
• It's impossible not to say something about the fact that Upstream Color is a film that begins with a rape.  I can't be the only person who watched the film's first act, in which the Thief gains control of Kris, holds her in her own house, and compels her to give him all her money, with extreme discomfort, anticipating with dread the moment when he would make her have sex with him.  Even though that doesn't happen, the completeness of Kris's violation, the thoroughness with which she is unmade, is brutal to watch (I was stunned, the second time I watched the film, by how short this sequence turned out to be; I was so uncomfortable watching it the first time around that it seemed endless).  Carruth himself seems to deliberately be evoking rape in this scene--the Thief finds and drugs Kris in a club, where women are often warned to be on the lookout for date-rape drugs; when Kris returns to herself after the worm is removed from her body her first act is to examine herself physically for signs of rape; her obsessive cleaning, of her house and her body, after her ordeal is a frequently described reaction to rape.  But of course, Kris isn't the only character in the film to be victimized by the Thief, and the difference in the way that the film depicts her violation and its aftermath, and Jeff's, is heavily gendered.
  
  Even after she's regained (some diminished form of) control of her life, Kris continues to be acted upon.  Her relationship with Jeff consists almost entirely of him acting and her reacting--or rather, resisting and then being won over.  He calls her, and then chastises her for not taking his calls.  He initiates their first sexual encounter, overcoming her initial reticence.  Most blatantly, after Kris has a health scare, Jeff proposes marriage, and then immediately announces "I'm married to you right now ... I'm marrying you, do you understand?" as if marriage were something that can be done to someone.  The depth of Jeff and Kris's feelings for one another is never in doubt (though given other aspects of the story there is some doubt over where those feelings come from), and despite her passivity during the process of getting their relationship off the ground Kris is an active participant in the relationship once it happens.  But whereas the person Kris was before the Thief attacked her was self-contained and in control of herself, after her ordeal she becomes someone with seemingly no protective boundaries, and that, combined with the shape of the story and relationship she's in, forces her into some heavily gendered roles.  She is the mad wife.  She is emotional and irrational.  She is someone for Jeff to take care of, to humor in her flights of fancy, and to enable.  She is a woman who has to be told--despite her objections to the contrary, which are not heeded--what's going on inside her own body. 
  
  Of course, all of this is a lie.  Jeff is just as damaged, just as undone, by his ordeal as Kris is, and the only difference between them is that he hides his damage beneath a mask of normalcy that also reaffirms his masculinity.  Kris tells people that she is, as she believes, mentally ill, and wears her dysfunction on her sleeve.  Jeff admits to the more socially acceptable (and certainly less emasculating) flaw of drug addiction, but lies about other things--he lets Kris believe that he has a respectable, high-powered profession when really he's a disgraced lackey--and conceals the same compulsive behavior that she engages in openly, staying up late at night to weave chains from straw wrappers.  Even when Kris and Jeff experience the same irrational, inexplicable things--the trauma of losing "their" piglets--they react in different ways that correspond to stereotypes of gendered behavior; Kris lashes out at herself, slamming her fist into a pane of glass, while Jeff turns his violence outwards, attacking his coworkers and chopping down a tree.  Aside from that moment, all of Jeff's behavior is geared towards playing the accommodating, caretaking, sane husband, but he can only maintain that facade by refusing to acknowledge what's happened to him--even when it becomes undeniable, as when he uses his connection with Kris to compel her to call him and direct her to him.  Eventually, that pretense becomes untenable.  When Kris hears a noise coming from under the house (really the result of her lingering psychic bond with the worm that grew in her and the pig it now resides in), Jeff initially tries to play the reasonable, accommodating husband humoring his wife's increasingly hysterical delusions.  But finally, he's forced to admit that he hears the noise too.
  
  Ultimately, Kris's willingness to openly acknowledge how her experience has changed her makes her stronger than Jeff.  When Jeff announces that he's married her, you can see that he thinks this will make everything better, but all Kris can think about is finding out what's been done to her.  She keeps insisting that she wants to go somewhere, and finally Jeff pauses, realizing what marriage to Kris actually means, and then goes along with it.  For the rest of the film it's Kris who directs their journey, even if Jeff pretends that it isn't one, and for that reason it is Kris who is able to find the Sampler and his farm.  But then, something unexpected happens.  After Kris and Jeff find the farm and contact the other Sampled, Jeff disappears.  He isn't seen again after the scene in which Kris is reunited with "her" pig.  Her joy at learning that the pig is pregnant, and the final scene in which she holds the baby piglet, feature Kris alone.  In its middle segments Upstream Color feels like a romance, and the love story between Kris and Jeff is what powers its plot.  But the final scenes suggest that perhaps the love story was never what this film was about.
  
  
• Something else that surprised me during my post-viewing reading was Carruth's statements that he views the Sampler, who retrieves the worms from Kris and Jeff after they're released by the Thief, as an ambiguous figure, and his murder at Kris's hand as an unfortunate case of mistaken identity.  Carruth's argument is that the Sampler isn't responsible for what happens to Kris and Jeff since he isn't in league with the Thief (I'm not sure this makes sense--it would require the Sampler to have just happened to set up his lure for worm-infested individuals somewhere close enough to Kris's house that no one would have noticed a half-naked, bleeding woman wandering the streets; but then, as several reviewers have noted, Upstream Color takes place in a strangely empty world, in which many of the bonds of human connection have fallen away, or otherwise the Thief probably would not have been able to hold his victims for so long and take their money without anyone noticing).  Even if I accept this argument, however, it still seems to me that the Sampler is guilty of a terrible indifference.  He makes no effort to explain to the Thief's victims what has happened to them, and leaves them to the agony of not knowing, and the stigma of mental illness or drug addiction.  And then, despite the fact that these people have already been violated in almost every way imaginable, he invades their privacy and uses what he sees as fodder for his art.   Even the word for what he does--sampling--implies that the Sampler isn't aware of these people's humanity.  That to him they are just livestock.
  
  Whether or not you think this indifference justifies the Sampler's death, it is what ends up killing him.  If the Sampler had thought of Kris and Jeff as human beings, capable of reason and independent action, he probably would have lived.  If he had explained to Kris his role in what happened to her, she wouldn't have jumped to the--entirely reasonable--conclusion that he and the Thief were the same person when she found him.  And if he'd ever considered the possibility that there might be feedback from the pigs back to the Sampled, and that as a result the human beings at the other end might be able to figure out who and where he is (and might experience distress as a result of his treatment of the pigs), he wouldn't have been caught off guard by Kris doing just that.  What's interesting about this is that the Sampler represents the highest ideal of Thoreauvian return to nature and isolation from human society (he also, as several reviews have noted, represents the filmmaker, with his work as a soundman mirroring the film's reliance on sound).  And yet it is precisely that detachment that gets him killed, and allows his "livestock" to take over his operation.  In a film that, at points, seems to treat Walden like a blueprint for living, this is perhaps the most profound note of ambivalence towards that philosophy, suggesting that the only way to get in touch with nature is to lose your humanity, and that to do so leaves you vulnerable to other humans.
  
  
• Trying to find a way to sum up the unique, remarkable flavor that Carruth brings to his SF filmmaking, the word I keep landing on is "novelistic," which may require a bit of unpacking.  Most SF films, whether they're action movies with an SFnal gloss or a more thoughtful effort, approach SFnal tropes as a metaphor--in this summer's Elysium, for example, the separation between the 22nd century poor living on Earth and the super-rich living on the titular space station reflects real-world divisions between the rich and the poor.  The few films that treat their SFnal worldbuilding as something real in its own right tend not to do much with it--Moon, for example, excellent as it is, has a thin story that does little with its SFnal premise except use it as a jumping-off point.  They're the equivalent of short stories.  The reason for this thinness is that most SF films keep one foot firmly planted in the familiar, for fear of alienating their audiences.  They're capable of imagining the future as bad--and usually end by restoring the status quo familiar to the viewing audience--but they can't imagine an SFnal world that is simply different.  When I call Carruth's films novelistic what I mean is that he develops his SFnal ideas, and uses those ideas to fuel his stories and develop his characters, with a depth that I'm more accustomed to seeing in novels.  He does so by not being afraid of imagining a world transformed, irrevocably but not necessarily for the worst, by the SFnal novum he's introduced into it.
  
  Both Primer and Upstream Color start off from a fairly simple, metaphorical concept.  The time travel in Primer, which the heroes use to make a killing in day-trading, can be seen as a metaphor for the bland sameness of their everyday lives.  The bond that forms between Kris and Jeff could be a thoroughly mundane one, an obsessive, not entirely healthy romance between two troubled people, who both support each other and enable each other's delusions.  But the hallmark of a good SF novel, to me, is that it can't be contained by this metaphorical reading, and neither can Carruth's films.  As ridiculous as the basic concept of a psychic bond with pigs is, Upstream Color takes it seriously and develops its implications.  More importantly, it isn't driven, as most SF films with such a concept would be, by Kris and Jeff's investigation of what's happened to them.  Instead, the film is perfectly happy to posit that its characters are somehow no longer entirely human, and to end without resolving (or rather, without solving) that situation--just as Primer ends with the suggestion that one of its duplicate time travelers is about to let the dangerous, unpredictable technology discovered by the film's protagonists out into the world.  The result is a rich fantasy world that feels satisfying and compelling even if you can't work out what it all means.  Of all the many things that make Carruth special as a creator, this is the one that should make him important and vital to fans of science fiction, and to those who hope to see the genre's full complexity and potential on screen.