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Audrey Niffeneggar (1963– )

Audrey Niffeneggar (1963– )

“I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of fed up with realism. After all, there’s enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women.”
Audrey Niffeneggar (1963– )

Audrey Niffenegger stands in front of the Harley Clarke Mansion on March 11. Earlier in the week, the Evanston City Council selected the proposal of Ms. Niffenegger’s group, the Artists Book House, for a book arts center at the mansion, 2603 Sheridan Road.

Douglas Adams (1952–2001)

“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
Douglas Adams (1952–2001)

Photo by Jill Furmanovsky.

Getting Lost in Babylon

This is where our story starts, in a book review published circa November 2005 in CS Weekly, the online companion to the bimonthly print periodical, Creative Screenwriting:

PAY ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
A Review of BABYLON 5: The Scripts of J. Michael Straczynski, Volume 1

Once described as holographic storytelling, where later episodes retroactively inform the understanding of earlier installments, Babylon 5 told the story of a diplomatic space station where four alien governments—hosted by the Earth Alliance—sought to maintain peace in the galaxy. Conceived as a five-year novel for television, the show used the space station for a microcosm presenting the rise and fall of empires through the fortunes and follies of Babylon 5’s ambassadors and crew. Now, a dozen years after the commencement of the show’s five-year run, creator J. Michael Straczynski unveils the documents that formed the foundation of his saga in a fifteen-part series publishing his 92 scripts alongside a few surprises.

Long an advocate of demystifying the production of television, Straczynski—a veteran of Murder, She Wrote and The Twilight Zone (1985–9)—maintained an open dialogue with his audience throughout the creation and broadcast of his sf opus. That spirit of education is readily apparent in the first volume of his scripts which presents an unfilmed, early draft of the pilot film, The Gathering, alongside five episodes from the first season.

Undoubtedly the centerpiece of the collection, the 1989 version of the pilot offers up a vision at once in sympathy and in conflict with the story’s eventual execution. All the characters and situations are akin to what would be filmed in 1992 for broadcast early in the next year, but alterations illustrate both Straczynski’s personal learning curve as a writer and the application of external interests upon the project. As with the other included episodes, an introductory essay explains the circumstances of each story’s origin with emphasis on the process of narrative development and the execution of the finished teleplay. As Straczynski explains in his introduction, certain elements, such as the shape-shifting assassin were lost in the interest of distancing the show from the Star Trek franchise’s latest entry, Deep Space Nine. Others, like the removal of the character Velana, illustrate a streamlining of the script by bequeathing the excised character’s narrative role to the then-underdeveloped commercial telepath, Lyta Alexander.

After the exotic allure of the alternate pilot, the remaining scripts take the reader into more familiar territory. Aside from a few deleted sequences and slight character course corrections, the season one episodes exhibit a close relation to their final broadcast incarnations. Along the way, Straczynski confesses the occasional misstep like the sf tv stand-by of man-in-a-suit-rampage seen in “Infection” or the lost version of “Soul Hunter” that was recalled the day after publication due to auctorial misgivings that its execution seemed too much like a Star Trek episode.

While the volume clearly presents a writer finding his way in a new world of his own creation, its difficult to appreciate fully outside the context of the entire series. Here, Stracyznski sets the stage for what is to come, not only within the story, but also in the style in which the story will be presented. As a chronicle of television creation, the book—replete with production memos and photographs from the author’s collection—continues his devotion to bringing the audience a better understanding of the process by which his art reaches them. Perhaps the volume’s only failing is in not presenting the alternate drafts of The Gathering and “Soul Hunter” side by side for easy comparison, but that is a minor quibble that will be addressed when both scripts appear in the fifteenth volume of the script-publishing project.

That review was how I first met Jaclyn Easton, the publisher of the book under consideration. She thanked me for the review, included my piece in her press packet, and that was that. End of story.

Over the next year, the script books continued to come out, I continued to buy them, and thought no more on the matter. I should note that the last few script books broke from their steady one-a-month release schedule due to an unexpected development in J. Michael Straczynski’s writing career—the sale of his spec screenplay, Changeling to producer Ron Howard—recounted by yours truly in the November/December 2006 issue of Creative Screenwriting.

A followup cover-story on Changeling ran in the September/October 2008 issue of Creative Screenwriting, and  that’s where Jaclyn Easton and I intersected once more.

Universal pictures had supplied a photo of J. Michael Straczynski to run in the piece and the subject of the photo wanted to track down the image’s source with the intent of using it as his standard headshot when such things were required. Jaclyn, having remembered that I worked for Creative Screenwriting (but unaware that I’d written the article), called me and I relayed the necessary information.

In the course of the conversation, Jaclyn asked if I knew anyone who’d be up for writing a Babylon 5 encyclopedia. I happily volunteered for what was—at that time—imagined as a two-month gig.

Then, Jaclyn began having ideas; very dangerous things, ideas…

These ideas evolved into  something like 28 other books.

Story #6 – 6 January 2018

Suppressing his excitement, Toby thanked Alicia for participating in his telepathy experiment, and ushered her out of the psychology lab. As she crossed the walkway that bridged the third floors of the more conventional, 1950s-built psychology building and the modernist 1970s-nightmare where the physical sciences resided, Toby lost sight of her in a sudden surge of transiting students. He returned to the lab.

Fifty out of fifty, he thought, picking the uppermost Zener card from the stack, that’s statistically impossible. Then he noticed the card: three wavy lines. He consulted the notepad where he’d tracked the actual cards against Alicia’s verbal guesses; a circle was the fiftieth card drawn according to his notes. He checked the forty-ninth—the card was a square, but his notes recorded a star.

Panicking, Toby wound back the audiotape he’d made of the session.

His voice, irritatingly high, confirmed “Star. And number fifty…”

Then another male voice, a much deeper one, said, “Circle.”

“…is a circle,” Toby’s voice concurred. “That’s fifty out of fifty, Alicia. I think you must be reading my mind or something.”

The deep, male voice replied, “Or something.” The deep voice laughed. “I should go; I’ve got a class to get to.”

© 2018 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved.

In 2018, I tried to write a short-short story every day. I was eventually derailed by a weekend away from my desk and mounting guilt that the Harlan Ellison Books Preservation Project was taking longer than expected, and every waking moment should be dedicated to its completion.

With five years distance, I like some of the stories, each one having been placed before me by Facebook for the last week, and I think the exercise is serving a purpose now that it failed to accomplish at the time. We shall see.

Anatomy of a Spec Sale: Changeling

“It’s all storytelling, one’s just longer than the other, and with a larger budget,” says J. Michael Straczynski regarding his feature script, Changeling. “You still have to keep up the pacing, deliver strong characters, and tell a coherent, internally consistent story.” Despite a varied career of writing for magazines, newspapers, comicbooks, novels, and television, Straczynski’s aversion to film has been based on the industry’s uncertainties. “In tv, when they say, ‘Here’s a series order; go make x-number episodes,’ that’s what you do. When you get into film, suddenly there’re all kinds of things that can go wrong…you have to get foreign investors, there’re various distribution deals; it’s go, then no-go, then go again…it can make you crazy. It’s too much like going to Vegas and betting your house on one roll of the dice.

“Consequently, I only go to the feature world when I think the story really, really merits it…and even then it’s with great caution,” says Straczynski alluding to Changeling, a spec script he sold in June to Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. “For many years, I’d been a freelance reporter/stringer with such publications as the LA Times, the LA Herald Examiner, TIME Inc. and others, and as such you develop a lot of contacts around town,” said Straczynski, recounting the screenplay’s origins. “I’d gotten a call from one source at City Hall who was getting rid of some records from the ’20s and came across a transcript of a hearing he thought I should see. So I zoomed down there and was allowed to read some of it before it was destroyed. As I read the transcript, I initially couldn’t figure out what had been going on, and when I did finally figure it out, thought, this can’t possible be real, this can’t possibly have actually happened. I was able to copy a few pages before they took it away, just some critical pages, enough to get dates and places to launch into several years of research into the events of that story.”

“The main thing with this story—which involves a woman whose young son goes missing, and is later supposedly returned, but there’s something very much wrong here—was just getting it as accurate as possible,” Straczynski continues. “I didn’t want to fictionalize it much, because the story is so extraordinary, so hard to believe, that if you start faking things suddenly you call the whole story into question.” Rigorously adhering to the facts, the writer found his greatest challenge was determining which material would be left out of the screenplay. “I went through several iterations of the script, tried various different approaches over a very long period, then put it away to stew. Finally, one day, it dinged like a toaster in my head, and I sat down and I knew suddenly how it had to be written. I blasted through the script in eleven days.”

Upon finishing the draft, Straczynski ran it past his feature agent, Martin Spencer of CAA. “He was stunned by it,” says Straczynski who notes that Spencer read the script in one sitting. “He was also kind of taken aback by it because, as he put it, it’s ‘outside the box’ of what I’m known for, which is for being a sci-fi kinda guy,” says the writer best known for creating the science fiction television series Babylon 5. Refuting the industry pigeonhole in which he’s often filed, Straczynski notes “I’ve written, and sold, comedy, mainstream drama, murder mysteries, cop shows, sf, fantasy, horror…but in this town you are what you’re most recently known for, and that’s B5.”

On the script’s reception, Straczynski couldn’t be more pleased. “As was expressed to me by a number of folks after the fact, when a spec comes in the door, there’s usually some measure of backing-and-forthing, where one person likes the A-story, another the B-story, this or that needs work. But this one came in over the transom fairly bulletproof, which I attribute more to the original events than my skill as a storyteller.” With one suggestion from Spencer, Straczynski revised the script and the agent sent it out. “I have to say that my agent approached this in a very strategically smart way. He kept a tight rein on the script, and let it only to a couple of people in a very measured fashion.”

“We could have taken it to auction and probably made twice or three times what we ultimately got for it—which is already rather substantial—but my agent believed in the story as much as I did, and wanted not just to sell it, but to do everything to get it to the right people who could get it made—someone who was temperamentally suited to the material.” This led to Spencer sending the script to Imagine Entertainment, the company founded in 1986 by director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer. Straczynski continues, “They got the script on one afternoon, the president of Imagine read it that night, called Ron the next day, got it to him, Ron read it that night, and they opened negotiations the next day.”

For Straczynski, “The hardest part of the last stages of negotiation was doing nothing. When you get down to the wire, it’s easy to micro-manage your agent, to take what’s on the table and run, but I know and trust Martin as one of the best.” Thus, the writer did not hover over his agent while the deals were being made. “He’d call when there was something to say, and if I heard from him just once during a day, or not at all, I knew he was in there doing what he had to and I kept out of it.” As Straczynski puts it, “I do what I do, and leave him to do what he does. It wasn’t easy, but I did it.” When the deal was done, Spencer thanked Straczynski for giving him free reign. “I think you hire good people and leave them to do their job, otherwise what’s the point?”

When asked how he feels about having conquered another storytelling medium, Straczynski says, “I don’t think I’ve conquered anything. I’ve written over 200 produced tv scripts, created the Babylon 5 franchise for Warner Brothers, written some of Marvel’s top-selling books with their main core characters, now sold this…but I’m still learning and I’ve never considered myself having ‘made it’ at any point. I think the moment you get complacent, the moment you think you’ve conquered something, that’s the moment you get creatively dead.”

Originally published in Creative Screenwriting, Vol. 13, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2006).

Answers Are a Prison

Slightly early for its 40th anniversary, the enigmatic British TV series, The Prisoner, makes its second DVD encore, raising more questions than it offers answers and extolling the virtues of the medium as a societal critic while delivering a thoroughly entertaining and mind-altering viewing experience.

Upon resigning from a top secret post in Her Majesty’s government, a British agent (Patrick McGoohan) is abducted from his London flat to awaken in a surreal holiday camp known as the Village. An introduction to the chief administrator, designated “Number Two” (Guy Doleman), reveals that the prisoner has been incarcerated because the confidential information in his head is too dangerous to leave at liberty. Designated “Number Six,” the Prisoner immediately sets about undermining the seemingly endless succession of Number Twos’ (George Baker, Eric Portman, Mary Morris, et al.) attempts to break his will while simultaneously seeking any escape from his picturesque coastal (or island?) prison. The brainchild of actor Patrick McGoohan—then famous for his portrayal of NATO/M9 spy John Drake in Danger Man (1960–62, 1964–66, known in the U.S. as Secret Agent)—and writer George Markstein, The Prisoner was as much a struggle between the two men’s personal æsthetics as it was McGoohan’s philosophical assault on 1960s British society.

At the heart of the concept resides McGoohan’s desire to create an avant-garde exploration of society that criticizes everything from rote learning in schools (in “The General”) to free democratic elections (in “Free for All”) while script editor George Markstein aimed to tell riveting adventure stories in the espionage/sf milieu. The constant tug of war between the two creative forces ensured that the series could be appreciated as straightforward television fare while offering hidden depths for viewers keen to look below the surface.

The honeymoon of the first 13 episodes ended with Markstein’s resignation—an irony, as he portrayed the official to whom the Prisoner submitted his resignation during the title sequence every week—and the final four episodes exhibit unbalanced excess on McGoohan’s part, with the underlying allegory of the earlier episodes rampaging over any semblance of narrative realism. The anarchic finale “Fall Out,” for example, is rich with symbolism, but lacking in substance, and the audience is forced to take their metaphorical medicine without any storytelling sugar.

Nothing is sacred as far as the series and McGoohan are concerned. The tropes dividing one genre from another were trampled with abandon. “Living in Harmony” re-stages the series as a Western with Prisoner as a retired sheriff unwilling to take up arms on behalf of the Village while “The Girl Who Was Death” spoofs the very style of spy earlier series in which McGoohan made his name. Sf elements like virtual reality and thought transference play key roles and an undercurrent of mystery informs every moment that the Prisoner remains in the Village, unsure of the true reasons behind his imprisonment. In keeping with the mystery element, the show dispenses an unending array of questions about the nature of the Prisoner, the Village, and indeed the world in which the story is set. Unlike traditional mysteries, the questions are rarely answered, and only with ambiguity when they are. It’s up to the viewer to fill in the blanks and establish the meaning of what they’re watching. In that way, The Prisoner is a Rorschach test with the audience interpreting the show in light of their own psychological baggage, rather than offering a concise interpretation dictated by the anti-authoritarian McGoohan.

The only disappointment with this otherwise-fine DVD release is the dearth of new supplemental materials. Though the informative interview with production manager Bernie Williams sheds some light on the show’s tumultuous origins and the ubiquitous early, alternate edit of “The Chimes of Big Ben” offers a different take on the familiar material, the rest of the extras are trivial ephemera and the same tired facts and figures available in any worthwhile book on the series (as is the case with The Prisoner Video Companion). The absence of any documentaries on the series and the inexcusable omission of the alternate version of “Arrival” (available on the UK collection The Prisoner – 35th Anniversary Collection) is a serious oversight for a series so often reissued by the same label.

More potent in today’s computerized, politically correct, and socially conscious world than it was even at the height of the ’60s, The Prisoner’s exaltation of the individual over society stands as a monument of relevant television written for a purpose. Style imbued with substance, and occasionally overrun by its own ambition, the series serves two masters seeking to both enlighten and entertain.

[For the record, this reviewer presently recommends two separate Region B Blu-ray releases of The Prisoner available in the UK: Network’s 2009 reissue (briefly available in Region A from A&E, but tragically out of print) was absolutely brilliant with a superb supplemental package including the documentary Don’t Knock Yourself Out, the aforementioned early edit of “Arrival,” and stunning transfers of the episodes accompanied by restrained-but-effective new 5.1 sound mixes (and the original mono, for purists). The other contender is Network’s 2017 50th Anniversary Limited Edition, which features the same transfers as seen on the 2009 release (sans 5.1 mixes), dumps most of the earlier supplements and adds informative text production commentaries, film historian Chris Rodley’s enigmatic exposé of Patrick McGoohan—In My Mind—six CDs containing all the specially composed and library music used in the series, and a hardbound book by television historian Andrew Pixley.]

Review © 2006 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved. Images courtesy of Incorporated Television Companies Ltd.

TV Wasteland: Lost in the Village

Do you ever look at something and think, “Has no one else noticed this?” That’s exactly what I did when I sat down to watch The Prisoner in a marathon session earlier this week. Think about it. You have an isolated location honeycombed with strange bunkers where bizarre experiments are being carried out on unsuspecting subjects and no one’s quite sure who are the prisoners and who are the wardens. There’s an unconventional sentry in the form of Rover. Even those who seem to have power might be pawns in a larger, unseen game. Does this sound increasingly familiar? It probably does if you watch Lost.

These are broad points of comparison, but one could get even more specific—the raft Number Six builds in “Many Happy Returns” is reminiscent of Michael’s similar endeavor while the crew of the boat that picks up the Prisoner in “Checkmate” has much in common with the motives of the Other called Tom in “Exodus Part 2.” The Prisoner’s excursions outside the Village in “Many Happy Returns” and “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling” serve the same purpose of exposing his backstory that the character-oriented flashbacks do in a given episode of Lost. The overriding notion that the government has the right to keep a former employee with specialized knowledge under lock and key in the Village seems to be the same attitude underlying the DHARMA Initiative Island, simply substituting the corporate power of the Hanso Foundation for the British (or enemy) government behind the Village. Both shows, at their ethical roots, are about the individual enslaved at the convenience of an all-powerful organization with no recourse to appeal.

I could go on and on, detailing correlations perceived in reviewing Patrick McGoohan’s televisual masterpiece, but all these cosmetic and philosophical similarities seem to point to one key notion imbedded in the creation of both shows. In each case, the series seem to serve as a weekly Rorschach test for the audience. You come to the episode with all your personal baggage and you perceive the hour’s presentation through the lens of your own experience and opinions. Take, for example, my first experience with The Prisoner. I was around 13 years old and had been a fan of Doctor Who for at least a couple years. I had seen a mail order catalog of sf merchandise and noted The Prisoner’s proximity to Doctor Who in the British ghetto at the back of the publication. When I noted a listing for the first episode on my local PBS station, I stayed up to midnight to watch it—there weren’t many opportunities to catch obscure UK shows in those pre-DVD days. I can honestly say that I didn’t get it, but that didn’t stop me from trying to grasp what it was doing.

I watched the first 16 installments religiously and suffered something of a crisis when a power outage caused me to miss the 17th and final outing. Luckily, the advent of Suncoast Video in my local shopping mall solved the problem for the hefty fee of $29.95 (six weeks’ allowance, plus sales tax), and “Fall Out” rolled over me like an 18-wheeler with a radar dish on top. I still didn’t get it, but I was certain it must be brilliant. It did, however, give me what I needed—a nice dose of something foreign and thoughtful. A few years later, I saw the series again and my teenaged mind locked onto the notion of rebellion and the need to challenge the status quo. Of course, I wasn’t sure why I needed to rebel or how to go about it; looking back, I see shades of the finale’s Brando-esque Number 48 in my thinking. “Whadda you got?”

Later viewings found me refining my appreciation of the ambiguities proffered by The Prisoner, although my estimation of the four episodes filmed during the second production block (“Do Not Forsake Me…,” “Living in Harmony,” “The Girl Who Was Death,” and “Fall Out”) has not fared as well as my sentiments toward the whole, but that’s a talk for a different time.

I hope, in future viewings, that my feelings toward Lost will continue to evolve and change, depending on my situation in life. The series has captured the public imagination and is committed to asking more questions than it answers in true Prisoner-style. The larger cast offers a broader array of perspectives from which to perceive the action of the story and, like the surreal campus of the Village, the island is an iconic setting for the philosophical struggles at hand. For the moment, I find my allegiances rest most often with John Locke, Eko, and sometimes Sawyer. I suspect that as I grow older, I may find other characters closer to my sympathies. Regular readers of my opinions here on Cinescape know that I can’t abide Charlie or Michael and there’s probably a marvelously Freudian reason that I’ve yet to ascertain. I find Kate an enigma at best and a two-dimensional cutout at worst. Maybe I lack something in my own make-up that prevents me from relating to her.

In developing the cast, the creators of Lost have represented every man rather than The Prisoner’s Everyman—a statement on the divergence of our society or an embracing of diversity in our cultures…I’m not sure. Whatever the case, I’m held captive by both shows and escape seems unlikely.

This essay originally appeared as the 31 July 2006 installment of my TV Wasteland column at Cinescape.

©2006 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved.

Irredeemable

 DVD REVIEW: Star Wars – Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

The culmination (or rather, the missing link) in a 28-year cinematic saga, Revenge of the Sith aspires to tell a tragic tale, but instead succeeds in dismantling the classic mythology it seeks to complete. As writer-director George Lucas continually reiterates in his DVD commentary, the six films are of a piece, and this component undermines the whole.

As the clone soldiers of the Galactic Republic fight a devastating battle with the droid armies of the rebelling Separatist faction, Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) race to rescue the Republic’s Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) from the Separatist leader, Count Dooku (Christopher Lee), and his cybernetic henchman, General Greivous (voiced by Matthew Wood). Anakin falls increasingly under the charismatic politician’s influence despite the warnings of his pregnant wife, Senator Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman), and soon Palpatine—secretly the puppetmaster behind the Separatists—initiates his endgame against the Republic.

The key events of Revenge of the Sith are known before the 20th Century Fox logo opens the film: the Jedi will fall, the Empire will rise; Anakin Skywalker will become Darth Vader, Luke and Leia will be born. The broad strokes are expertly realized with the unfettered visual style that George Lucas has developed across the prequel trilogy, but the details reveal philosophical gaps that paint a troubling picture of the saga’s central conceits. From the casual (and casually easy) extermination of the order Kenobi (Alec Guiness) called “the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic” in Star Wars (1977), to the questionable metaphysics of the Force and Anakin’s redemption in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), Sith dismantles the magic of the Star Wars universe.

The Jedi, described with reverence by the elder Ben Kenobi in the quote above, are somewhat less impressive than audiences were led to believe in 1977. In a matter of minutes, they are systematically exterminated by their clone soldiers, offering virtually no resistance as they are gunned down from close range seemingly oblivious to their betrayal. Few of them even seem to see the attacks coming, and those that do barely react. Only Kenobi, by chance, and Yoda, by evincing minimal awareness of his surroundings, manage to escape. Were these two warriors the only lions in an order of lambs? If the Jedi instincts for survival are questionable, their capacity for mercy is of even greater concern. Kenobi’s abandonment of his apprentice at a moment of incomparable suffering is unforgiveable. Surely, a noble Jedi Knight would ease that pain with a merciful slash of his saber, but the great Kenobi manages only a sneer of disgust as he leaves his best friend to burn alive. Given the temper he exhibited in other installments of the franchise, Vader showed remarkable restraint when he dueled Kenobi 20 years later.

Sith’s greatest betrayal rests with the undermining of Anakin Skywalker’s “redemption” in Jedi, rendering the sextet’s climax laughable 23 years after the fact. As Yoda explains, in a speech that seems like an afterthought, he and Kenobi will learn the secrets of becoming one with the Force from the departed Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson). Apparently, no less a acquired skill than summoning one’s lightsaber from a distance, this ability to return from the dead has long been the spiritual coda of Anakin Skywalker’s story—he appears alongside Kenobi and Yoda in Jedi’s final scene—which Lucas revised for the 2004 DVD release, replacing the elder Anakin Skywalker (Sebastian Shaw) with Christensen’s youthful incarnation…forgiven with a complimentary facelift, no less.

In Jedi, we see Vader kill the emperor and reconcile with Luke before expiring aboard the Death Star. Lucas has made it clear that the Sith is a religion of two—a master and an apprentice—and that ascendancy is based on betrayal, as Vader suggests in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) when he implores Luke to join him in overthrowing Palpatine. Why then does the killing of Palpatine in Jedi indicate a change of heart? Vader is well within the parameters of Lucas’s Sith philosophy, and only his own death preempts him repeating his solicitation for Luke to become his apprentice. Vader is a man whose violent temper belied every assertion that he voiced about his motives for delving into darkness; a man who, having grievously wounded a fellow Jedi in a misguided rage, decided to finish him off simply because he may as well finish what he started; a man who slaughtered an entire community Tusken Raiders on Tatooine in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), murdering children in cold blood. Are we to accept that a final act—completely consistent with Vader’s adherence to Sith philosophy—undoes decades of sin that he doesn’t bother to apologize for upon his death? Apparently so, the Force having restored his youth in death, a boon not granted to either Kenobi or Yoda who stand beside him, all quarrels forgotten.

In completing his story, Lucas has pulled a bait and switch. The audience, via the original trilogy, is offered a tragic tale ending in redemption. The prequels offer something far more cynical, the idea that one debatably noble act can redeem a lifetime of atrocities. This isn’t how things used to be done in a galaxy far, far away.

Though philosophically flawed, Revenge of the Sith ends on just the right note—one of optimism and hope. Recalling Luke’s longing glance into the setting suns of Tatooine, the final shot reminds us what we love about Star Wars, and though the later installments of the saga no longer speak with the strength of the original trilogy, they still stir an element of wonder in the imagination. That can’t be all bad—after all, Anakin wasn’t, was he?

Originally published in the 4 November 2005 issue of CS Weekly. Copyright ©2005 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

DVD REVIEW: Carnivàle: The Complete First Season

HBO’s admonishment that “it’s not TV, it’s HBO” couldn’t be more accurate in assessing a series that takes place in a unique setting, at an eccentric pace, with a remarkable sense of foreboding, and a penchant for unanswered question. Take a ride on the merry-go-round and hang on for your life as this biblical battle between good and evil starts to turn, like clouds becoming a twister.

Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl), escapes from the chain gang in time to watch his mother die cursing him. As the bank prepares to demolish his house while he buries his ma, a travelling carnival comes out of the dustbowl to offer him a strange new life on the road. Meanwhile, in California, Brother Justin Crowe (Clancy Brown), a Methodist minister, begins to experience supernatural power over members of his congregation—a thief vomits money while a pederast sees visions of his evil acts. Vanishing into the wilderness in an effort to hear God’s voice, Brother Justin is unaware that his unsettling dreams are shared by Hawkins, half a continent away, as he learns, under the tutelage of the sinister seer Professor Lodz (Patrick Bauchau), that he has the power to resurrect and to kill.

In a television universe where doctors, lawyers, and cops are de riguer, anything that steps outside these well-walked genres is something to get excited about. A series that takes the added step of venturing out of contemporary settings and exploring an interesting, and little explored—unless Steinbeck is involved—era of American history through the eyes of itinerant performers and a Methodist minister is to be applauded for covering new ground. That these characters are archetypal cannot be denied, but when Daniel Knauf’s writing staff plays against the archetypes, the audience gets a real surprise or two.

In considering characters, it should be noted that, thus far, the series has offered two casts: the carnies and Brother Justin’s flock. Neither side has crossed paths with the other, save the shared dreams of Hawkins and Crowe (birds of a feather?), themselves avatars of the forces of good and evil (respectively?). The writers tell the audience that both men are of a kind, but their nature is only obtusely examined through scenes where others discuss them. This third-hand exposition makes the show’s characters a veil through which the audience experiences the events and thus clouds the reality of the series with half-truths and lies.

While the depiction of character is a foremost accomplishment, the show’s slow, deliberate, and moody pace is another departure from the norm. Unlike network television, which must get the action going and build to forced climaxes for every ad break, the pay-cable medium affords much more latitude in structure. There’s no particular need to play up the tension to retain the audience through the commercials, and the viewer knows that HBO won’t pull the plug mid-season. As chapters in a book, the breaks between episodes seems almost arbitrary in some cases and one feels that the whole twelve-hour run could be seamlessly edited together. This disregard for traditional televisual values even extends to a flat refusal to tidy up the unanswered questions posed by the end of the year. There is a confidence in the writing that assures the viewer that all matters will be attended to, but it will happen in the show’s time, not the viewers’.

Creator Daniel Knauf and his collaborators offer informative looks at the evolution of the Carnivàle concept from a spec feature by Knauf to an HBO series following in the wake of the network’s success with innovative dramas like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Much is discussed of the show’s carnival advisers and their input and influence in the creation of stories for the show. Aside from the obvious chat over the pilot, two other episodes—“After the Ball is Over” and “Hot and Bothered”—seem peculiar choices for commentary since the mid-season stunner, “Babylon,” and the climactic “The Day That Was the Day” both feature more meaty material. Still, the nearly one-hour Museum of Television seminar featuring almost the entire cast, Knauf, executive producer Howard Klein, and the HBO programming executive responsible for commissioning the series, is worth the investment in time as the creators of the series discuss in detail the style and content of the show and how it differs from everything else in the market.

With its utter apathy toward the standard “rules” of the television, some might suggest that Carnivàle is an exercise in rebellion, but the bottom line is that this irreverent take on the medium is wrapped around a cracking story of good versus evil in a time when the world was more innocent and even more strange.

This review originally appeared in CS Weekly, circa December 2004, just before the second season debuted on HBO and the show’s cancellation was announced.

Text ©2004 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved.
Images courtesy of HBO Home Entertainment.