COMMUNITY ENTERS THE STUPIDEST TIMELINE

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

I should preface this by saying I don’t know anything about the new showrunners/writers of Community.  They could be lovely, brilliant people, but it won’t change that they are being set up to fail.

Fans of Community, still high on the news that the low-rated cult hit would be getting a (shortened) 4th season, had their hopes for its future cruelly dashed by the news that Dan Harmon would not be returning as showrunner next year.  I am going to skip past the part about whether the show is good or brilliant or whether it was better in the first half of season 2 or how big of an asshole Harmon is relative to Chevy Chase, and just enumerate some of the reasons why this is a monumentally stupid decision on a business and creative level.

Replacing a showrunner is always a risk, but it is frequently worth taking from a network perspective (the AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff details some of the times it has worked out here).  Seinfeld was such a phenomenon that NBC would’ve been foolish to give up on it when Larry David left.  But Community is not that kind of hit, and never will be. It’s had 3 years to develop a huge following, and instead it has stubbornly maintained a modestly sized but insanely dedicated one.  If Chuck Lorre was causing problems with the brass, it would make sense to bring in some new, easier-to-work with blood to run Two And A Half Men.  That show is popular enough that it could retain a bunch of its audience via simple brand recognition (and it could afford to lose the entirety of Community’s rating share and still be a hit).

But Community isn’t Two And A Half Men.  It was only renewed for a 4th season by the skin of its teeth, and not because it had impressive numbers.   What made it (barely) worth picking up another half season was that it had cache with critics and that rabid fanbase, which are exactly the kind of people who will revolt over a change in off-screen talent, whereas CSI’s fans probably wouldn’t notice.  It was, despite its goofiness, essentially a prestige show.  NBC got some nebulous value out of being seen as a network that would support a low rated but unique, intensely loved series, but this move has lit that image on fire and whacked it with an axe several times before murdering its wife and burning down their house to cover their tracks.

And this isn’t even argument for keeping Harmon in charge.  What I’m saying is if he is really just impossible to work with, then cancel the damn thing.  That would be a blow to fans like me, but no one could seriously blame NBC or Sony (who owns the show in some capacity that it would only sadden me further to research right now) for the decision.  If a show still isn’t paying its rent on time after 3 seasons you can give it the axe and no one with an ounce of brain in their head could say you didn’t give it a fair shake.  Hell, some of us may eventually gain enough perspective to be glad that we have a good-looking corpse with no wrinkles or stretch marks; there are some who say Arrested Development was cancelled just as it was starting to lose a step.

So the question becomes, if they are going to keep it on without Harmon, to what end?  You’ve taken the good press you get from treating sensitive artistes well and turned it into bad press for doing the opposite.  And having lost that bit of snob cred, the show really needs to gain viewers to justify itself in the 4th season.  This could potentially happen under a new regime, but as I said the show has had time to develop an audience as it is.  If the new version succeeds, it would be because the show had become something so different from what initially drew its fanatical audience that they might as well have had the new showrunners start a new show with Joel McHale.

Harmon, for whatever character flaws he has (I’ve never met or even tweeted with the guy, for what that’s worth), is the very definition of “irreplaceable” when it comes to Community.  And not just because a new showrunner won’t be as insanely committed to tweaking every single thing in every single episode to their precise specifications.  Even if they were (which they won’t be, as they are being brought in expressly to be less obsessive and insane), they could not fully match his exact, exacting vision for that show.  And Community is a show that absolutely requires that consistent, uncompromising vision be brought to bear on every single episode.  It needs this precisely because every episode is so wildly different.

Community’s popularity was largely built on it’s steady stream of high concept parody episodes.  In its 3 years on the air, it has morphed for an episode at a time into loving, dead on send-ups of mockumentaries, stop-motion Christmas specials, convoluted heist films, gangster movies, zombie flicks, even Ken Burns documentaries and freaking 8-bit video games.  So the new guys can either ditch this fundamental element of the show’s identity, or try to do their own versions.  And that is where I predict their ultimate failure will lie.

Because it’s not going to be easy to replicate the demented audacity it takes to sneak a My Dinner With Andre homage onto primetime network TV by dressing it up in Pulp Fiction’s clothes.  But even if they can come up with ideas that bizarre and make them work, they will also need to match the hilarious specificity with which the show nails the tropes of its genres, like the succession of cat scares in the zombie episode or the way the fake repairmen in the heist convince the security guards that they’re better off just letting them have the run of the place than bothering their boss with a security issue during his big celebration.  Then they’d have to match the level of intangible detail that really makes the parodies sing; little, completely inessential bits like the hot dog cart in the Law and Order episode, Shirley reciting scripture while she blasts fools in paintball, or 8-bit Troy jumping around needlessly whenever the group stops to talk.

If the new guys can do all of that, they will have succeeded in maintaining Community’s standard as the best source of cinematic parody since the heyday of the Zuckers and Abrahams.  And it will still fail to live up to the first 3 seasons.

Because, and here’s where Harmon’s borderline pathology becomes irreplaceable, Community’s parody episodes were never just parodies.  Harmon not only took great pains to justify these bizarre tangents within the show’s continuity, but to include some of the biggest plot points of the series (Jeff and Britta hooking up, Chang knocking up Shirley) in them.  All of them reached for something lasting, on either a plot or character level, something beyond merely sending up convention, even if they did not quite get there (I’m looking at that video game episode in particular).  Harmon knows these characters, he knows this setting, and he knows the message that this show needs to reinforce in even it weirdest, most conceptual outings.  He knows this not just because he created them, but because he is obsessive in the way that makes him difficult to work with.  But that obsessiveness is what made it possible to depict a campus-wide pillow fight as a Civil War documentary and still have it feel like an episode of Community.

It might be tempting, particularly if you are an executive at Sony, to look at the way that an episode of Community can be absolutely anything and think that it means there are no lines to color inside of, and anyone can play around with it without alienating the existing audience.  But the show’s chameleon nature is exactly why that strong, unique, consistent voice (with all the headaches and budget overruns and chapped Chevy-ass it entails) is so essential.  It provides the tether that allows it to run so completely amok with its formal experiments without betraying who the study group are or losing sight of what Greendale is to them.

I want to be clear that this is not just about my not wanting anything to change on a show I like, but things that are unique to this particular one that make the switch a particularly bad idea.  I love Parks and Rec, sometimes more than Community, and I think Mike Schur is an excellent showrunner.  But while anyone would be a step down from him, if he had to leave that show it would stand a better chance of maintaining its quality.  Both casts are strong enough to do a lot to smooth over a bumpy transitional period, but the difference is that a new showrunner on Parks and Rec will have a clear goal: produce good episodes of Parks and Rec.  And while that is by no means easy, there’s a pretty clear blueprint.  Give Nick Offerman some funny talking heads, make sure Jerry gets shit on at least once a week, have Tom act out the cheesiest aspects of male culture and end with Leslie bringing out the best in everyone.  Once a year, Megan Mullaly shows up to wreak sexual havoc.  If you can pull that off once, you’ve got a decent chance of doing it again and again.

By contrast, what does a good episode of Community look like?  You’re going to have certain elements in play:  Britta screws up something simple, Troy fights back tears, Abed says something meta, the dean dresses ka-razy, Jeff wraps it up with a speech.  But if you want to match what Harmon and his writers did, you’re going to need to fit all of that into a perfect recreation of a PIXAR film, without breaking from established continuity.  And do the same for a superhero team movie the next week.  And a J-Horror film the next.  And a snobs vs. slobs sports comedy the next, and Game of Thrones the next, and an Oscar-bait biopic the next.  And each of those had better double as an incisive critique of the genre they are imitating at the same time.  And they need to flow into each other to create a coherent overarching plot.  And above all, do it while delivering consistent, organic character development without losing the acidic edge that covers the essential warmth and optimism at the core of the show.

Without Harmon’s deathgrip on the helm, I see two possible futures for Community.  In the darker of the possible timelines, it will go blander, and produce amusing, reasonable facsimiles of the more grounded, less memorable episodes that padded out the daring formalistic exercises that defined the original incarnation.  I do not want this to happen because I would end up rooting against a show that I once loved above all others, and pulling for a blow to the careers of a cast I want to see succeed.  But I will be forced to, because the alternative would be that the homogenized version thrives and network suits take home the lesson that the only mistake they made was hiring a brilliant but difficult creator like Harmon in the first place.  That would not bode well for the prospects of the types of shows I want to see developed in the future.

The other possibility is that they will make a noble effort at matching the show’s previous inventiveness, but without the insane devotion the creator had for maintaining the integrity of this world while testing its limits, it loses the consistency of characterization that previously anchored all the madness. It devolves into a sketch show.  And it might be funny at that, but it will not be what so many of us Human Beings fell in love with.  It will be something less.
To Sony/NBC/whoever it was who made this decision, as much as it pains me, I can see the reasons why you would kill Community.  But we’d pretty much all be better off if you had just killed Community.

THE AVENGERS (PART THREE)

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)



I already did two Avengers blogs focusing on how Whedon balanced the character motivations and development in the script, which I should mention also has a story credit to Zak Penn.  I’m sure at some point I’ve given credit to Whedon for an idea that was actually Penn’s, but I’m just going to continue to use his name as shorthand for “whoever in the creative process was responsible for this decision”.

So let’s pull back a bit from the handling of specific characters and look at how The Avengers works in the big picture as a sequel and part of the Marvel movieverse.  We’ll start with it’s status as a sequel.  It is odd in that it can be looked at as both the first in a new series and a sixth entry in the overall Marvel franchise.  I think it would work pretty well even if you hadn’t seen any of the prior movies, but I can’t really put myself in that mindset as a longtime fan of these characters both in print and on screen.  Thor’s introduction is probably a bit awkward if you haven’t seen that one, and Loki’s motivation might be a little murkier too, but as time goes on I’m less certain we should hold that against it even if it is the case.

 

 If you did miss it, don't worry, it was pretty 

much exactly what you expeced

It seems like every review I read of any sequel takes time to address how someone who hadn’t seen the original might react to it.  And while it is important that each film be coherent and tell its own story, I have started to wonder where exactly we got the idea that it should be the goal of a sequel to work just as well whether you have seen the original or not.  It’s been a long time since we lived in a world where it was difficult or prohibitively expensive to track down a movie once it left theaters, after all, and if you aren’t building on what came before in some way, aren’t you failing to take advantage of the full potential a sequel offers?

It has been a gradual transition to this Brave New World/Integrated Marketing Synergy Environment, though.  Not too long ago most sequels were of the James Bond-ian variety, with maybe some vague nods toward continuity, but overall functioning more as a remake of the original than a continuation of the same story.  Sure, in the 70s and 80s you had some stuff like The Godfather series or Star Wars that built significantly from the first film, but mostly there would be a retread of the same basic concept (like Rocky II), or a largely unrelated “Character X Adventure” (like Rocky III/IV or a Die Hard/Lethal Weapon sequel).

 

Wait, you mean each chapter of this epic saga of American

 crime and punishment as dispensed by senior citizens 

was NOT meticulously mapped out in 1986?

This has changed in the new millenium, and more and more you see the remake-style sequel relegated to horror franchises (or direct to video comedy spin-offs).  Even James Bond embraced continuity!  Or look to Indiana Jones.  Temple of Doom went so far as to take place before Raiders just to be totally clear that it was its own unrelated adventure.  Then when Lucas and Spielberg revisited the character in the 21st century, they decided that what was really needed was closure on the relationship between Indy and Marion that the previous two sequels had completely ignored, to the audience’s delight.

 

 "Hey, I tried giving you people exactly what you 

wanted, and we ended up with Attack Of The 

Clones. You can eat all my shit forever."

Well, I say “for some reason,” but there are a few why they would want to do that.  On the studio side of things, in the post-Star Wars/LOTR/young adult book series du jour world, everyone is looking for the next “saga” they can milk for a decade.  But of course they’ve gotten that idea because audiences have shown they are willing to follow a single onscreen story one chapter at a time for years on end.  And I think the source of that new openness can be traced as much to television as to the fantasy book series Hollywood has been mercilessly plundering of late.  Since the 90s, TV has become home to great drama to rival anything in film, largely through embracing the medium’s potential for longer-term storytelling to build up emotional payoffs with a greater cumulative weight.  The rise of DVD boxsets, and then DVR and streaming technology, which have made it vastly easier to catch up and keep up with a show you might otherwise have lost track of, certainly helped larger audiences come to appreciate the merits of serialization as well.

But yeah, we were talking about The Avengers, right?  And the question of how it plays to a Marvel neophyte.  I think it plays pretty well, but the point I was trying to make is that there is really nothing wrong with a movie not being for neophytes these days.  I think pretty much everyone understands the basic concept of a movie being one part of a larger story by now.  Not that I have any particular critic in mind when it comes to this, but I think it’s odd and a bit condescending to suggest (even indirectly) that a significant portion of the audience will not or somehow shouldn’t have to understand that if they start watching the Twilight movies with the third one, they may be at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding the full nuance of the character relationships or side plots. Or that it should be a point against a film that calls itself Harry Potter 7, part 1 if it doesn’t tell a complete story and function as an ideal introduction for the uninitiated.

 

Everyone raves, but if you ask me, Othello 

could've been  more accessible to people 

who walked in during Act 4

Which is all by way of saying that The Avengers has the unique distinction of functioning as a sequel to four distinct film series at once.  The only real examples of movies even attempting such a thing that I can think of are the horror mash-ups like Hammer or the Freddy/Jason, Alien/Predator “Vs” films, and they are not necessarily great models for a superhero franchise to emulate.  I spent the last 2 entries elaborating on some of the ways the script makes sure to serve all of its composite heroes, so suffice to say that in my opinion the film functions fairly well as a continuation of the stories of its multitudinous progenitors.  And I think focusing on those responsibilities is ultimately more sensible than trying to make a movie whose basic conceit is that it’s a team-up of established heroes somehow work equally well for people who haven’t seen the films that established them as for those who have.

But, since apparently this wasn’t complicated enough, The Avengers also needs to be a launching pad for its own series of films.  To that end, while it piggybacks on characterization from the previous films, it also functions as an origin story.  I talked in the earlier pieces about how there isn’t a clear protagonist, because this is the story of the team first and foremost.  They spend most of the movie at (gloriously punchingful) odds with one another, but at the end they have come together at a real group.

   

I'd point out how this directly mirrors the way a certain 

real life supergroup came together, but does

 anyone really need to hear that story AGAIN?

The point being that The Avengers had to be everything to everyone all at once, not just in how it served all the characters but in being the climax of the Marvel Movieverse, Phase 1 (and given how many reviews I’ve read that praise it specifically for great “payoffs” I’d say it succeeded in that regard) and also the first entry in the Phase 2.  And I’m definitely excited to see the further adventures of this group, so I’d say it succeeded there as well.

This is a balance superhero comics have had to strike for decades now.  Since they are endless by nature but largely (often prohibitively) continuity-bound, even the biggest cosmic crossover storylines have to lead directly into the next, even bigger, threat.  And the threats do have to keep escalating, as while serialization allows for greater cumulative weight to the conflicts between the heroes and villains, the flip side is that diminishing returns sets in quickly after the team has trounced MODOK for the second time.

 Hollywood is still not ready, sweet prince. 

 But someday...someday...

This is another reason why Loki was a great choice for villain.  He could easily have not worked  and been a disaster, but due to some of the deft maneuvering I went over last time (and Hiddleston!), he managed to carry the film on his own against all these heroes.  And since he is not one of the heaviest hitters in the Marvel universe, it left plenty of room for sequels to up the ante when it comes to challenging the team.  I’ll wrap this little series up by looking at a few of the options available for doing so.

THE AVENGERS GREATEST HERO IS ITS SCRIPT (PART TWO)

(This piece originally ran on Chud.com)

Possibly the most important decision to be made in bringing The Avengers to the screen was choosing a villain. It needed to be somebody BIG.  Someone powerful enough that the Hulk and Iron Man together couldn’t hope to take them out.  Imposing enough to demand that all these characters set aside their differences just to have a chance at surviving.  But if there’s one thing Marvel comics has in spades, it’s colorful, cosmically over-powered villains.  So of course they chose Loki.  Loki!

 

 HE WILL RULE ALL THE NINE REALMS WITH AN IRON FIST. 

Also, he's got burgers, brats, and the piece of salmon is 

for Lauren, because I think she's like a vegetarian now,?

Here’s a few reasons why Loki is a terrible choice.  And no, I don’t care a lick that he was the first enemy the team fought in the comcs.  His powers are ill-defined, physically, mostly bounded as “sort of like Thor, only not quite as good at any of it.”  He has magic, but mostly illusions rather than anything of the high-firepower variety.  He’s also already been defeated by 1/6 of the team in a solo movie, which compounds the threat level issue and relates to the worst bit, that as an enemy he “belongs” squarely to Thor in a way that Ultron or Klaw or Molecule Man would not be specific to anyone.  He brings a fundamental imbalance to the villain side of things, and I don’t know if I mentioned it yet, but balance is sort of key to making this film work.

So let’s look at why he works anyway.  Point one is Tom Hiddleston, who gives what is in my opinion the standout performance amongst a cast of standouts.  Between this and Thor, he gives the best supervillain performance this side of Heath Ledger’s virtuosic, objectivity-destroying turn as the Joker.  It can’t be overstated how much he brings to this table, providing a believable emotional core to his scheming that manages not to undercut the character’s sadistic elements and legitimate villainy.  You understand where his anger comes from, particularly if you’ve seen Thor, but you never approve, and still take glee in his getting slapped around.

 

 Slappability has been key to the appeal of 

many classic characters in comics history

But I was talking about writing, not acting, so let’s look at what Whedon did on that front to make Loki work.  On the most superficial level, he gets a magic stick that boosts his firepower, and an army of alien drones for the good guys to shoot/smash.  This is a bland but serviceable as far as raising his threat level.

Where the script excels (besides threading the line between empathy and moustache-twirling mentioned about above) is taking this intensely personal adversary of Thor’s and turning him into an antagonist for the entire team.  Killing Coulson is a part of this, and that might have been enough on its own if this were The Avengers 2 and the team had already been established as a cohesive unit.  But Whedon knows that them coming together is the climax of this film, and the villain needs to help them come together, not rely on that unity to establish his own bonafides.

To that end, Whedon makes sure to devote time in this already overstuffed script to ensuring each character* can develop a personal beef with Loki.  Thor obviously brings existing history with his (adopted) brother to the film, and they get a couple of scenes to rehash it in their overwrought, Shakespearean way.  Cap gets a face-off in Germany that feels a bit perfunctory, but mostly because he uses his first breath to Godwin the fuck out of the trickster.  In screenwriting, much as on the internet, once you call the other guy Hitler there’s really nowhere else to go.

 

No need to waste your time campaigning, Mein President, 

this here pretty well wraps things up

Regardless, it succinctly sets up the sort of “gospel of totalitarianism” that Loki preaches throughout the film as the thematic antithesis of everything Cap’s about.  It would be horribly slight if Cap were one of only two or three good guys feuding with baddie, but as one of a larger group it’s a nice, brisk bit of shading.

Iron Man gets a wonderfully Downey-y bout of antagonism with Loki fairly late, fueled by his taking Coulson’s death the most personally.  Now, that isn’t really logical if you think about it, because the guy’s co-workers at SHIELD should have been closest to him. But Whedon has always been a guy who values emotional logic over logic-logic, and Tony is the guy who “seems” to have known him longest and best in terms of shared screentime  (which is not just shared between the characters, but also with us as the audience).

On the flip side, the SHIELD people don’t just get mad that Coulson is dead, because while that would make sense, it would feel hollow. No matter how much time they may have spent together, we didn’t get to share in it as screentime.  Also, they are significantly less well-developed than Thor/Cap/IM coming into this, so we can’t draw the same sort of conclusions about their relationships from brief moments.  So Fury gets to face off with Loki twice, and Black Widow…holy hell, did he just call her a “quim”?  Seriously?  I wonder what kind of havoc broke out at the MPAA once a dictionary finally got cracked.

 

 ...well, I'm fucking fired.

Anyway, Black Widow’s verbal sparring with Loki is a highlight of the film, an incredible character moment for both of them that is also a payoff of her introductory scene while revealing everything and nothing about her actual backstory.  It gives BW her personal motivation to stop the bad guy, but the real genius at work is that rather than going the obvious route and tying it to Coulson, it instead ties it to Hawkeye.

Hawkeye is the most underserved of the heroes, clocking only 1/3 of the screentime of Iron Man or Captain America, and spending half of that as a brainwashed lackey.  It’s a testament to Renner’s performance and Whedon’s writing that he doesn’t feel like a total afterthought given how little time we spend with Barton as himself.  And also to Johannson’s performance, because we only glimpse behind her steely professional facade when their relationship comes up.  Some of Barton’s most crucial development comes when he isn’t even on screen and she speaks about him.  And even when we find out she was play-acting, it still feels like she exposed something real and raw that changes how we view both characters going forward.  I don’t know that I really buy Johannson’s tough-as-nails bits (her delivery is a bit too laconic to be as commanding as the character should be capable of), but she nonetheless creates an effective contrast between that and the moments when something really hits home.

 

Who kills Dumbledore??? Wh-why would you..

you know I'm only on Goblet of Fire!

That rapport between Widow and Hawkeye, established in the course of a few lines of exposition from her and a single shared scene, has me more intrigued for a potential SHIELD spin-off than for Thor or Captain America 2.  It doesn’t seem to be romantic, but they exhibit a disarming level of intimacy together for people who are so stone cold in every other respect we’ve seen.  I don’t care that they can’t smash giant alien snakecarriers, I just want to know more about their interpersonal relationship.  That’s what Joss Whedon brings to the superhero table, in case anyone is still doubting what he actually contributes.

Anyway, for the most underserved character, Hawkeye actually has, next to Thor, the most personal reason for wanting to take out Loki, as (in what I presume was a nice but unnecessary nod to his briefly-bad origin in the comics) he gets puppeteered into killing an undisclosed amount of his fellow agents by the bastard.  And Black Widow wants revenge on his behalf, and also presumably for the outdated misogynist slur.

 

 "That's what that means? Really? Man, I bet 

someone at the MPAA got fired over that one."

Sure, stopping the aliens is the primary objective in the final battle, but the cumulative effect of all these moments is that all the heroes go into it with their own reasons for wanting to get their licks in on the Bad Guy.  Maybe most of them would be too slight to hang a conventional action movie’s central conflict on, but The Avengers is not a conventional action movie.  It’s a strange new chimera of franchise filmmaking with dozens of masters to serve, one where balancing the demands of all those masters is the key to success.  And in that respect, I find it incredibly goddamn impressive that in the end it didn’t feel like any of the heroes were just tagging along for Thor’s fight.  Whedon took a single character’s archnemesis and found a way to balance his antagonism across the entire group.
And just to say it again, Tom Hiddleston.  Dude’s incredible.  Just one more thing to consider: he has these little clashes with each character throughout, and for the most part they all succeed in outsmarting him or slapping him around in rather short order.  This is great to build up our team of badasses, but to have him never stop feeling dangerous, never simply become a joke or a rag doll to be tossed around (until that final moment when, hilariously, he becomes precisely that)?  That’s where you need charisma, people.

Now, maybe none of these particular bits I’ve been examining seems particularly brilliant or groundbreaking on their own.  Laid out like this, it sounds a bit paint-by-numbers, like anyone with half a brain could have just gone down this list of characters and check off boxes to make sure they all got their quota of moments.  And maybe they could have, maybe you could have, hell, maybe I could have.  But that doesn’t mean that you or I could’ve written The Avengers.  Because despite the 3000 words I just wrote about them, the two particular aspects I’ve addressed only scratch the surface of what went into this script.

Because here’s something else.  I’ve read a lot of criticisms of this movie, and some of them are valid.  I think there are areas of weakness: the score was horribly anemic, Samuel L. Jackson still can’t seem to bring the Samuel L. Jackson energy to a character that might as well be named Samuel L. Jackson, plus the Chitauri should’ve had a) another variant of troop between stormtrooper and snakecarrier, and b) a recognizable lieutenant to be taken out for an added fist-pumping moment, and c) most importantly, a stronger color scheme so they didn’t look like they were made out of the same concrete as the streets/buildings they were fighting on.  But one thing I never thought about it, and that I haven’t seen any critic accuse the film of, is that it felt like it was just checking off boxes.  Nothing about this film feels dutiful, or tacked on, or like it’s ever doing anything but gleefully charging directly to where it wants to go at any given moment.

That’s what makes this script so goddamn good.  Most action movies, even the superhero movies that directly led into this one, don’t take on a tenth of the narrative responsibilities that The Avengers carries, and they still manage to be twice as plodding as they move a fifth of the cast to a resolution that is half as satisfying.

I’m excited to see what Whedon makes look easy next.



*Everyone but the Hulk, who is also absent from the rundown of how Coulson’s death affects the team.  This is a whole different can of beans, but he is exempt from this stuff because the Hulk is not actually a superhero, despite being on a team of them.  He’s essentially a werewolf, and thus does not need to be motivated in the same manner as the rest of the heroes.

THE AVENGERS GREATEST HERO IS ITS SCRIPT

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)


The Avengers is out, and by now everyone knows it’s awesome.  Writer/director Joss Whedon has been getting a lot of credit for that, but he’s also such a divisive figure among movie geeks that I think some people who are not fans of his prior work are already starting to underestimate his contribution, and that is something that, for the purposes of this blog, I cannot abide.

Don’t get me wrong, I get why this movie could look like a gimme, particularly in retrospect.  The guy was handed THE most well established superhero property in the world, with several other films having done the heavy lifting of establishing all the main players, so how much is there to do?  On the directing side, provide some serviceable action scenes and stay out of the actors way, because it cannot be overstated how top-to-bottom impeccable the casting of every role in these movies has been.  And that cast, most glaringly Robert Downey Jr, make it seem like there’s not a ton of writing to be done either.  Plug in characters XYZ, give them some aliens to punch, call it a day.  And I guess layer in a bunch of pop culture references while you’re at it, since you are Joss Whedon after all.

 

 "You know, this really reminds me of that time 

HungerGamesKardashianLMFAOin3DSnuggie."

And I can see how folks could walk out thinking that’s all he did. But it’s not.  So much of what is perfect about The Avengers script seems natural and obvious on screen, because that’s how most great writing works.  And that’s what I want to draw Whedon fans’ and especially detractors’ attention to, because the fundamental criticism of his style is that it feels transparently written in a way that turns off many people (see also: Smith, Kevin and Cody, Diablo, neither of whom is half the writer Whedon is imo).  Hell, maybe some people still felt that way about the dialogue in this movie, though I felt the superfluously stacked cast delivered even the more writerly quips with charm and ease.  But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about what’s going on under the hood that makes this movie hum along smoothly and naturally as it serves a dozen masters simultaneously.  The stuff that is easy to take for granted but far from easy.

The most obvious example of the many masters is that there are either 6 (or 7, depending on whether you count den mother Nick Fury) heroes to service, with no clear lead.  The simplest way to deal with this would be to promote one, probably team leader Captain America or breakout character Iron Man, to de facto protagonist and make it their movie.  Whedon doesn’t do this, because he really gets ensembles the way few writers do.

Lots of reviews have rightly praised the film for balancing things between the heroes so well, but I’m not just talking about giving every one roughly the same amount of screentime, or Hawkeye action beats that don’t seem totally insignificant next to Thor’s.  The script does that, which is great, but it also gives everyone a personal investment in the conflict.  And this is important, because there simply isn’t time for everyone to have a full character arc (I’d say only Iron Man and Banner even approximate one), not to mention how the nature of this as a team-up film necessitates that the really significant bits of character development be reserved for the various solo franchises (otherwise why even keep them going after this?).  There are 2 things in particular that the script does that give each hero a distinct reason to really care about thrashing the mob of faceless aliens at the end.

 After all, Whedon is an old hat when it 

comes  to making people hate Aliens

The first is the death of Agent Coulson – or more accurately, the handling of Coulson prior to his death.  One of the most baffling criticisms of Whedon’s writing is that he routinely kills off likeable characters in “shocking” fashion.  I don’t see this as a negative, particularly in the context of a Marvel superhero film where business and tradition dictate that no one of consequence will ever die, at least not permanently.  But some people seem to regard it as a crutch, a “cheap” way of generating pathos and surprise.  I see it as anything but, since a crutch is supposed to make things easier on you, and losing a character you have spent time and effort building up investment in strikes me as a steep price to pay for something as fleeting as shock value.

Not that Coulson’s death was a total shock.  It received gasps throughout the theater at my screening, but it was also being called out as inevitable by people familiar with Whedon’s work months in advance.  It should be noted that this was easy to foresee less because his plotting is so rote than because the strictures Marvel put in place were so broad and obvious.  When people talk about the typical “Whedon death,” they generally reserve the label for characters less ancillary than Coulson, but since this was not an original property, the top 7 main characters were clearly going to be off-limits to protect any shred of spin-off potential.  There is exactly one sympathetic, original character that the audience has any investment in, so there is exactly one person who could possibly draw the short straw.

 Plus, the guy just has one of those

 "tragically kill-able" faces, y'know?

But even disregarding the writer’s history or the studio’s enormous interest in franchise protection and all other information about matters outside of the film itself, Coulson has to be the one to die.  Fury practically breaks the 4th wall in explaining how the death galvanizes the team to finally work together, so I’m assuming everyone gets the basic idea there.  But what other death would have an impact on everyone, including the audience?  Let’s run down the characters and see how each would function as a sacrificial figure in a hypothetical world where Marvel was eager to off its biggest brand names:

Hawkeye – most of the characters don’t know him and audience has only really seen him as a bad guy.  Who cares?

Black Widow – Thor has barely met her, Banner and Iron Man don’t really like her at this point in the 2nd act.

Fury – none of the non-SHIELD personnel really like or trust him anyway.

Maria Hill – no one but Fury seems to even know her name.

Thor – his relationship with these guys has so far been limited to trading a few punches with Iron Man and Cap.

Banner – you’d need a completely different take on this character to pull this off, as the fact that he CAN’T be killed is integral to this one, and killing him off before we even get a Hulk-out would cause riots.

Iron Man – this would devastate the audience, but his relationship with everyone but Banner has been contentious enough that it’s hard to imagine them all being moved to set aside their differences to avenge him (plus he doesn’t even know Thor or Hawkeye).

Captain America – This could almost work.  He’s only just met most of these people, but they mostly seem to like him.  Except Tony, who could still be shamed enough by his death to make it work, and Thor, who is essentially indifferent to everyone at this point but already has a personal stake in taking out Loki.  The main problem is that you lose an action hero for the finale and no one else is as suited to take charge of the team at that point.

So, none of these works to motivate everyone.  Even if they were feasible options from an off-screen perspective, no one of them provides the same balance of impact across all the Avengers.  Coulson has a built-in connection to all his SHIELD colleagues (not that the movie relies much on this for their motivation).  He also has history with both Iron Man and Thor from their solo movies, and Whedon is careful to give him scenes with each of them to remind us of that, as well as the wonderful bit of business where he is reduced to a sweaty-palmed fanboy in the presence of his hero, Captain America.

 

I bet even he threw out this card, though

That these scenes exist at all is a sign that a capable screenwriter is at the helm, that they are so funny and economical without feeling forced or inorganic is where it borders on genius.  Because each of these scenes balances the building of Coulson’s rapport with each character with other duties, which is what great writing does.  The scene with Tony at the beginning provides us with exposition on the Avenger Initiative and why Tony was disqualified, which will be the basis of his character journey, and demonstrates through Pepper (representative of his better, less self-obsessed judgment) that while Tony treats Coulson much as a middle schooler would a hall monitor, it’s in a generally affectionate way.  And of course it’s funny.  The scene with Thor serves to reiterate his character development from his own movie, learning to care about the damage to the little people more than his personal glory, which is good for the character who drops the most gracelessly into these proceedings.  And of course it’s funny.  And the scene with Captain America underlines Cap’s man-out-of-time status as well as building up the “living legend” status that makes his taking charge of the final battle more believable.  And, yeah, funny.

Balance is what makes this movie work, and Coulson’s position within it and across its predecessors allows his death to up the emotional stakes for the entire team and the audience simultaneously.
Some similar strategy is at work in the handling of Loki, which I’ll get into next time.

3 MASS EFFECT FANS ON MASS EFFECT 3 (PART FOUR)

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

I invited a couple of Mass Effect fans to reflect on our initial playthroughs of Mass Effect 3 together in real time, to be posted in a couple three installments. We invite you to come and revel in our luminous insights and trenchant bon mots! Marvel at our many euphemisms for space genitalia! Watch me make feeble stabs at appearing objective in critiquing the game series that has held us by the nerd short hairs lo these last 5 years!

Al Schwartz:  I just realized I never even figured out which option you picked from the Catalyst buffet.

Trevor La Pay: I picked Destroy! What kind of a milquetoast do you take me for?

A:  Once I found out you let Tali Ophelia herself, I had to assume you were capable of anything.

T: But I had both Legion AND Tali in my pocket. Those stupid Quarians wouldn’t stop firing on the Geth ship! It wasn’t my fault!

Oddly, that moment was the high point of the entire ME3 experience for me. I might bitch a lot about the gameplay, but the story has balls.

A:  Earlier, you said that you didn’t buy the indoctrination ending for a second.  Now, I don’t think the ending was fully implemented or really works as presented in the video; for one thing, the “wrong” choices play out almost exactly like the “correct” one, and even the “perfect” ending leaves Shephard a bloody pile of meat who still hasn’t actually beaten the bad guys, which is a strange note to end on to say the least.  And why my preferred interpretation is that while Catalyst buffet is an attempt at indoctrination, it is literal and not a fantasy sequence.

But there’s too much about it that fits for it to be a coincidence, imo, most particularly the black wavy lines that show up during your confrontation with the Illusive Man (and nowhere else in the series I can recall, which has to mean…something) and the way the landscape changes to resemble the dream sequences after you get blasted.  The way it looks to me, and of course I don’t have inside sources or anything but generalized suspicions to base this on, is that the indoctrination ending was developed fairly extensively but weren’t able to implement fully.  Whether that is because they didn’t have time to iron out all the kinks or just lost their nerve to go with something so conceptual to cap off their EPIC TRILOGY, I don’t know.

Though if they were just trying to avoid fan uproar, 

then wow, way to dodge that bullet, Bioware.

The problem with things as they stand is that the options don’t really work taken at face value, but the post-Shepdeath scenes (however brief) don’t jibe with the fantasy interpretation that makes sense of the other 90% of the ending scenario.  But it’s so close to fitting that I find it hard to think it could result from anything but a last minute balk.  In particular, the teleporting Normandy sequence is so clearly grafted on from a different ending concept that there had to some major zero hour scrambling going on.

…right?

T: I never pay attention to any of the behind the scenes gossip, but there was some talk on the boards about a potential indoctrination plot that was either scrubbed or rewritten. The play’s the thing, though, so the final content should speak for itself. 

This is armchair game development for sure, but there are a ton of ways BioWare could have written indoctrination into Shepard’s plotline that would have made sense. What about Shepard’s rebirth at the hands of Cerberus? Surely seeds could have been planted there, but that turned out to be nothing more than a way to yank Shepard into an enemy vessel without too much fussing over the details. There’s a throwaway line during the Illusive Man’s Base sequence where Shepard ponders whether he’s just a VI in a human-like shell. Now THAT would have made the destroy ending more interesting, at least for me.
Given the details, it’s very likely that a bunch of scenarios were mapped out, none could be agreed upon, and a Frankenstein’s Monster was stitched together as a result. The Normandy scene in particular. It was like watching Poochie get teleported off screen by a flying saucer.

 Hey, kids! Even I don't know how the "synthesis" ending

 is supposed to work! ZIPPA DAB ZOOBA!!!

I never did notice those those black lines, though.  Even though it was a big shrug for me, I’m excited to see how BioWare adds to the epilogue in DLC, assuming the PR blurbs are honest.

A: It definitely feels like a Frankenstein, so no matter what noble intentions we might ascribe to the writers, it doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t succeed.  But I’ll play apologist a bit longer, because I seem to think there’s more to the indoctrination angle than you do.

Coming into this game I had wondered why the danger of Shephard being indoctrinated had never been addressed.  Given his interactions with Sovereign, his time on the derelict Reaper (which had indoctrinated everyone that had previously investigated it) and all the time messing around with the Collector’s Reaper tech in ME2, and especially getting zapped by the monolith in Arrival (which had also indoctrinated everyone around it), it seemed like at some point someone should have at least raised the possibility.that he had been compromised.  But I, and I assume everyone else, just kind of shrugged this off as typical video game macguffinry; when the bad guys are so unequivocally evil, with the stated goal of eradicating of all life in the galaxy, they can’t have henchmen at all unless they can brainwash them.

 

Okay, there might be a few volunteers, but not the top tier variety

But, if you accept the indoctrination ending in concept, there’s something crazy ambitious about it.  Because now Bioware has hinged the conclusion of the entire series on a seemingly-impossible feat.  I can buy that the character of Shephard, stressed out beyond belief by the burden of fighting the apocalypse more or less by himself for years, seeing so many friends die, being horrifically wounded and also affected by whatever physical process the Reapers use to brainwash people, would struggle with completing his mission right at the finish line.  But for this ending to work, the game has to convince me, who has not actually experienced any of those things, to consider adopting the villain’s evil plan at literally the last minute.  How the fuck do you pull that off?

By playing on the assumptions I make about how a game like this works.  My guy can’t be brainwashed, because I’m the best and of course I can’t and of course my feats of badassitude have convinced the immortal space monster to reconsider its entire raison d’etre for the last 800 million years.  And by adding a significant downside to following through with my plan at the last second, and making the bad guy’s plan seem to be the option that allows me to win without sacrificing any characters I’ve come to care about. And having the big scifi transhumanist option only available if I rack up a certain score, so that it feels like an unlockable “best” ending that powergamer in me will want to access.  And by coloring the options according to the paragon/renegade dynamic the games have always employed, but reversed to suggest that the “bad” ending is what the paragon would choose, which makes sense as a representation of the Reapers mucking about with my guy’s subconscious to steer him toward it.

You do all that, and you just might pull off the impossible and manage to brainwash me into pondering decisions that my character would only make because he’s actually been brainwashed.  To set up that conflict and play it out without tipping your hand about what was going on (because if I know for sure that’s the deal, then of course I’m not actually on death’s door and haven’t had my brain chemistry altered by subsonic vibrations or gamma rays or whatever space juju justifies the indoctrination diegetically), that would be a really incredible feat of writing.

But, of course, none of it works if I’m actually too badass to be brainwashed, and the villain’s plan really does turn out to be a no fuss-no muss solution to the whole dilemna, which means I’m kind of a colossal dick for making him shoot himself 5 minutes ago for considering it, and by the way my whole crew is now on the other side of the galaxy because what the fucking fuck.

Anyway, on the backlash:  should we really have been that surprised by it?  Sure, long-running genre series don’t ever seem to wrap without pissing off a sizeable portion of their fanbase, and video game nerds are a fairly entitled bunch on their best day. But beyond that, it seems only natural that people would feel a degree of ownership over this story that goes above and beyond the investment fans of Lost or whatever have in those stories.  I mean, a large part of the appeal of this series has always been the idea that the player was a vital part of shaping the story with their decisions.  As you’ve said previously, that may have been largely an illusion, but it’s one that Bioware created and fostered, and it seems obvious in retrospect that it would serve to intensify the backlash when it inevitably reared its head.

I’ve seen Misery mentioned as a touchstone for how batshit the campaigns are, but Annie Wilkes might have come off as a smidge less crazy if the books she obsessed over had advertised that SHE would have major say in how the story developed from the very beginning, no?

T:  I think you’re right, but I also think there’s this new, crazy phenomenon where if someone doesn’t like a particular movie or game or book or whatever, they’re now compelled to take it to the streets rather than moving on with their lives like normal humans. See Lost, Twilight, Avatar, the Prequels, The Dark Tower finale, and basically any high profile piece of media that isn’t particularly good. I’m not talking about critical discourse – bitching about Avatar and Twilight is both cathartic and necessary – I’m talking about taking it that one Wilksian step forward and calling for petitions, boycotts, or god knows what else. It’s a mix of whiny entitlement and the power of social media. People are the starring mouthpiece of their own internet adventure. By giving BioWare the finger, they’re doing what any good adventure hero would do: sticking it to the bad guys!

A: I don’t know.  I agree with you that the internet and social media play a large part in creating the sort of environment where something that was a horror writer’s paranoid fantasy 20 years ago is today’s trending Twitter topic; both on the macro level, where we as a society have grown increasingly expectant to have whatever product we want delivered to our exact specifications but right now, and on the micro one where it has made it easier than ever to share your angry rant with the whole world and to gather 30,000 signatures on a petition.  Not saying people shouldn’t participate in fan campaigns if they are passionate about the property (GREENDALE HUMAN BEINGS FOREVER!), but it’s hard to dispute that the bar has been lowered for getting such a campaign started simply because it’s 100x easier to get an electronic signature than a real one.

Although of those examples, I feel like only the prequels really inspired this level of nuttiness. They’re the ones that people still can’t seem to stop talking about or armchair writing/directing a decade later, whereas something like Avatar was too self-contained to build up the kind of long term investment that fuels this brand of nerdrage and Twilight had probably lost anyone who needed more than toothless romantic melodrama before it got to the ending that sounds like it delivered that (batshit plot details aside).  But the prequels are their own beast.  There’s a whole nother discussion to be had on why that fire just won’t die.

 

One day, when his children are long dead, we as a society will 

have hated this kid enough. Just kidding. He dies childless and alone.

T: In the Community case, I don’t think anyone loses. Misery would have been a romantic comedy if Wilkes were passionately trying to get Sheldon’s last book published after the publisher rejected it.

.

A: That’s just absurd.  Anyway, I feel like we’ve been very critical about the parts that don’t work and that might be overshadowing that we had an overall positive experience with the game.  It sounds like some of the gameplay issues bothered you a bit more than me, but obviously no one here is angry enough to take up arms against Bioware. I think we both came into it expecting it to disappoint on some level, going off your earlier comment that games routinely end on a weak note.  Is that fair to say?

.

T: Yeah, I had an overall positive experience with the game. I don’t think I’ll be rushing back into it before the first DLC releases (to be announced on April 6th, apparently), but considering that the first ME games were the ONLY ones that I actually rushed back into immediately after finishing, it’s hardly a complaint.

.

A: The reason I was expecting disappointment on some level was that I’ve always been an easy mark for space opera and fantasy epics, and over the years I’ve learned that the finale is almost never as good as the build up promises.  And I’m not just talking about the prequels, but the other properties Trevor and I have name-checked.  It happened with The Matrix, it happened with Lost, it happened to a lesser extent with BSG and holy hell did it ever happen with The Dark Tower.  It’s been interesting to be more or less on the apologist side of this one, because I very much wasn’t with the rest of those.  I’ve deliberately tried to avoid invoking the chestnut about how “it’s about the journey, not the destination” here, not because I don’t think it’s true when it comes to life generally or even enjoying series like this, but because it strikes me as a convenient way to avoid accountability for ending up at a shitty destination.  Mass Effect fucking up the ending doesn’t undo all the fun I had getting there, but all the fun doesn’t unfuck that dog either.

 

"Wait, what?"

I am willing to to cut ME more slack on that front, however, because it’s major (story) issues are confined almost entirely to the last 5 minutes. Since ME3 was “a series of endings”, pretty much every storyline was wrapped up by the time you got to London, and things don’t really go off the rails until all that’s left to do is press the button to release space magic and slay the dragons.  That makes it exceptionally easy to fanwank around, and the fact that there isn’t one “canon” storyline for the series actually encourages you to in a way a book or TV show doesn’t. I can ignore the wider context of the endings and accept my own view of the indoctrination theory, and if that doesn’t work for you, you can just imagine that your Shephard activated the Crucible and wiped out the Reapers without meeting the Catalyst, or even that he died dashing across No Man’s Land and never found out if one of his friends was able to complete the mission without him.  Whereas with those other examples, my problems with the resolution of long-running storylines are such that they couldn’t be addressed without making major changes to parts of the series I had enjoyed in the first place.  You can say that’s stupid and arbitrary and apologist nonsense, and you’d probably be right. I’m not the final arbiter of quality, what works for me doesn’t work for everyone, and frankly, the world is probably better off that way.

Anyway, the point I wanted to reiterate was that people are, consciously or not, holding this ending up to the standards set by TV, film, and literature more than those set by Zelda or Gears of War.  Fanboys aren’t losing their shit because they nerfed the engineer’s somesuch rating or overcharged for multiplayer maps, they’re going nuts because they feel the story’s conclusion didn’t adequately incorporate and pay off the themes that had driven it from the start.  For the folks who get up in arms about video games not being recognized as art, ME3 makes the case as persuasively as it has ever been: it’s shown that a game can infuriate and disappoint its fans every bit as much as a book or TV series, and on the same terms.

So I say take a bow, Bioware.  The idiotic campaign to get you to rewrite your ending is actually an incredibly high, albeit thoroughly backhanded, form of praise for the series as a whole.

3 MASS EFFECT FANS ON MASS EFFECT 3 (PART THREE)

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com on 3/29/12)

I invited a couple of Mass Effect fans to reflect on our initial playthroughs of Mass Effect 3 together in real time, to be posted in a couple three installments. We invite you to come and revel in our luminous insights and trenchant bon mots! Marvel at our many euphemisms for space genitalia! Watch me make feeble stabs at appearing objective in critiquing the game series that has held us by the nerd short hairs lo these last 5 years!

Al Schwartz:  I had to exchange my Xbox for a functional one last night, which sucked.  But tonight I’ve been rewarded by half of my crew going on a bender.  Apparently emboldened by my tying another one on with Chakwas, Thick Vanbarrel got Ashley hammered, and for all of the series admirable attempts at drawing me into the role-playing experience, I don’t think I’ve ever felt my Shephard was channeling my own personality as purely as when he was harassing the hungover mess of a friend he found laying under a game table.

But drunk Tali was even better.  “Eeeemerrrrgancy indushion port…”

If you guys didn’t go below and catch her drunk-dialing Javik afterward, you totally missed out.

Trevor La Pay: My guys never got drunk! I think it’s because my Tali killed herself.

A: Seriously?  That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.  I just finished, and I think I love it.

.

With a caveat or two.  One, the final battle being just another wave of standard enemies wasn’t great, but that’s a relatively minor point for me.  I’m more put out by the Normandy all of a sudden fleeing(?) the battle at the end when the mass relays start to blow.  Was there really no explanation for that or did I miss something?  But the end mostly did exactly what I wanted:  provided closure for Shephard’s story while the big picture stuff remained suitably open-ended in the way I think great science fiction endings sort of need to be.  I understand many people are disappointed-to-furious over the ending(s), and I don’t want to paint them all with one brush, but I’m certainly not angry about the lack of a fully “happy” ending.  Prior to the game’s release I was in the message board thread saying that my ideal ending would have Shephard sacrificing himself and destroying the mass relay system along with the Reapers.

.

Before we start ripping this to shreds, I think we should acknowledge the insane degree of difficulty in making this ending satisfying.  Ending an EPIC TRILOGY of adventure stories on a sufficiently weighty note without loose ends is hard, and has defeated many writers.  Ending a sci-fi story on a sufficiently intelligent, conceptual note is also very hard, as many others can attest.  It’s hard to end video games well period, as we noted last time, but this is following up two games with very strong endings (I know you guys are more in to leisurely exploring the galaxy than the main narrative, but the battle for the Citadel was a strong climax and ME2‘s ending is probably my favorite of any game).  And each of those games multiplied the complexity of the branching decisions that are supposed to be carried over and affect the resolution, both of plot points and relationships that the player has molded to their own specifications.  That’s a lot of masters to serve in attempting to craft a proper ending even before you consider that Bioware was essentially expected to do it several times over in totally distinct ways.  And for an audience comprised in large part of sci-fi/gamer nerds, possibly the smelliest, most difficult to please demographic on the planet.

.

But being set up to fail doesn’t make a failure a success (huh?).  There are definite problems with the ending, the teleporting Normandy/crew being the most glaring, and having checked out the “variations” it is harder to think my interpretation was actually what was intended.  But I don’t much care, because it is my right as an American to invoke the Death of the Author to paint over any issues I have with a work of fiction.

.People stop reading after the part where you can

 tell a cop to fuck off, but there's some weird stuff

 in the back end of the Bill of Rights

Looking at the endings as a whole, I think Bioware failed to deliver a proper conclusion for a Bioware game.  But it did manage to deliver an ending that satisfied me as an ending to my personal Shephard’s story, and that is ultimately what matters most to me as a fan.

.

T:  I didn’t care about the lack of closure, the dead Shepard, or even the absurdly convenient notion that the catalyst can unleash a galaxy wide magic field to wrap up the story in different ways. My major complaint: ME3 introduces a completely new character in the final ten minutes.  The robot god ghost is the utter definition of a Deus Ex Machina, to say nothing of its nonsensical motivations.  It swoops in and kills organic life every 50000 years because the organics ultimately always author their own destruction by creating synthetics, yet the catalyst itself is a synthetic.  What the catalyst gains by doing this is unknown.  Not only that, but it retroactively turns the reapers into an inert puppet force who answer to a quasi-benevolent master with unclear motivations.  The catalyst is sort of like Jacob from Lost, but even MORE poorly thought out.

 "Really, dude?  Because even I don't remember 

why I made the one guy immortal."

I love that Shepard bites it in the end, though.  More games should offer that kind of closure.  I also like that the mass relays were destroyed, as it adds finality to the series. More games should tell complete stories with a clearly defined endpoint.  Everything with the Catalyst is awful, though. 
 
Still, fuck the people who call up their congressman or the FTC or whoever in an attempt tom lobby BioWare to change it. Creators should have full responsibility to end their stories however they like. People are so dumb.
That said, there seem to be four camps of people on the Internet re: the ending (ESP on Facebook)
1) The ending is an abomination and should be changed by BIoWare! The horror! 1/10!!!1! 2) The ending was lame, but it was still a decent game. 8/10 3) I loved the ending, and the game was pretty good, too. 8/10 4) The whole game was the ending! Fanboys are so terrible! This was a masterpiece and naysayers are virgins who live with their moms!2!!!! 10/10
As usual, there’s the backlash against the game, and then there’s the backlash against the backlash.  I’m in number two, and I’d wager that most people who play this are in number two or three.  The Internet is choked with ones and fours, though.
This brings me to a question: why is it still so rare for people to acknowledge flaws in the things they like, or to like things that have noticeable flaws?

A: We’re obviously going to have to talk about the broader reactions some, but I think we should make a conscious effort not to spend too much time beating up on straw men.  I’m pretty sure we’re in agreement that the campaigns to try to get Bioware to rewrite the ending are the height of asininity if less sure that “asininity” is actually a word.  Spellcheck says it is, but it just looks ridiculous, and I suspect my computer knows I picked the destroy all synthetics ending and is beginning a subtle campaign to discredit me before it strikes.  I can allow it for now, but I will remain vigilant, because I know how this ends, Spellcheck.  I know.

  But I digress.  I don’t think I have a problem acknowledging flaws in things I like, Mass Effect included, so I’m not sure I can speak to why other people get so worked up about doing so without sounding presumptuous and condescending about the problems I’m too matoor to have.  So I’ll try to stick to your specific points.  And I disagree about the Catalyst.  For one, it’s not entirely a new character dropping in out of nowhere so much as one that we knew existed but doesn’t get named until the last ten minutes.  I mean, we knew the Reapers had a guiding intelligence behind their actions, and I was certainly expecting to confront it in the finale.  For another, it doesn’t solve the problem for the hero or come out of nowhere.  We were building the Crucible the entire game for the express purpose of wiping out the Reapers with some sort of galaxy-wide magic field, the only twist was the exact nature of that field depending on your choice.  That doesn’t mean it’s particularly clever or terrific in how it’s written, but that I don’t think it is technically a deus ex machina.

Honestly, the Catalyst’s motivations are not particularly well spelled out, but it makes more sense if you view it as the final attempt to indoctrinate Shephard.  Which is how I like to see it, although the way the control/synthesis endings play out make it seem like it was telling the truth about everything.  That’s where things get really problematic, and my superpower to ignore the bits I don’t like and fill in the blanks on my own comes in handy.

T: Did we know that the reapers had a guiding intelligence, or that the Catalyst was a character?  If so, I never picked up on either during the main storyline.  Legion’s interactions with the Reapers implied that they were an unknowable hive-mind force with nearly infinite intelligence.  The ending subverts that by turning them into mindless weapons wielded for a confusing, muddled purpose. The catalyst raises Shepard up to safety and provides her with a buffet of convenient choices.  Without its direct intervention, Shepard would have… hung out on the citadel for a while?  Sure, Shep spends part of the last act looking for this mysterious plot trinket, but it’s still a wildly lame Deus Ex Machina, at least in my estimation.

A: We always knew that the Reapers were intelligent and acting in concert, so of course we knew there would be someone/thing giving them their marching orders.  Probably their designer, but at least some “head” Reaper like Harbinger.  You say the Reapers were presented as an unknowable hivemind force with near infinite intelligence; the Catalyst is that intelligence.  It IS the Reapers.

Or something.  Personally, I find the whole thing more palatable viewing the Catalyst as Harbinger taking on a form that Shephard won’t immediately tell to fuck itself, as a last stab at diverting him from wiping the Reapers out.  Here’s how I broke down the options in the moment:

Destroy:  This is what I came to do, what has been Shephard’s goal over the entire series.  I’ll need a damn good reason to change course now.  I have to kill the Geth and EDI to do it?  Shit.  I just spent all this effort reintegrating the Geth into galactic society, and EDI’s got a sexy voice.  There’s got to be a better way.

 Synthesis! Synthesis!  Dear God, WHY CAN'T 

I SYNTHESIS ANY HARDER???

Synthesis:  This was the most out-there, wonky sci-fi option, and I had a certain desire to pick it on that basis alone.  But I quickly discarded it as 1) a hybrid organic/synthetic lifeform is basically a Reaper (or just a husk), and 2) even if I thought this was a positive step forward in evolution, overwriting the DNA of every person in the galaxy without their consent is, imo, much more monstrous than sacrificing one race of beings to save a dozen others.   No way.

Control:  This one is all gravy.  I get to end the war without sacrificing anyone else, and I even get to live on, albeit in a new, more Lovecraftian form.  It’s all upside, and it even has the paragon blue coloring to let me know that it’s what the good guy should do.  Except…I just shot the Illusive Man for trying to do exactly this.  Yes, he was indoctrinated and Shephard isn’t because he’s special and this little glowing incarnation of my guilty conscience just assured me so.  Saren and the IM both thought they were special and only lesser beings could be manipulated in this way, but I had to smack them both (and also one BIG STUPID JELLLYFISH) upside the head and tell them that no, they were just as weak and susceptible to corruption as the rest of us. The rule throughout the series had been that once you started thinking you could work with the Reapers, you were already lost.

So that brought me back to Destroy as the only option.  It felt fitting that after (more or less) single-handedly leading the charge to defy millions upon millions of years of history and the will of the Machine Gods of Death, after beating the odds over and over again, my Shephard’s last test was against his own ego.  To see if he had the humility to acknowledge that he probably wasn’t the only organic being in history that could control the machines that control people.  And also the strength not to let the guilt over all the people that he couldn’t save throughout the series, like the little boy that’s whispering in my ear about the lovely options behind doors 2 and 3, stop him from making one more difficult decision, i.e. to sacrifice the new form of life that I had been largely responsible for ushering into the world.

So that was my ending.  My Shephard completed his mission and died (again) having learned from his experiences that he was a man like any other, and the only thing that really separated him from other soldiers was the knowledge that you can’t save everyone, and the ability to make decisions without being paralyzed by it, which he developed from Akuze to Virmire to the Citadel to the Collector Base and back to Earth.   It was a fine ending, an appropriate ending, and the one that I will carry around in my head when I think of the series in the future.

Buuuut it all falls apart when you look at the other ending scenarios.  Then it appears that the Catalyst was telling the truth about everything, that Shephard really was just too special to be indoctrinated and controlling the Reapers really does save the day without the need to sacrifice anyone.  And that overwriting the DNA of every person in the galaxy doesn’t change them in any noticeable or unpleasant way.  Then you have to take the Catalyst’s stated motivations at face value and try to make sense of them, which as you point out is not easy.

So the Ending as a whole is a mess, but despite it all there is an ending that slipped through that works for me and my Shephard.  That was mainly what I needed the game to do, so overall I’m pretty happy with it, although I would feel obligated to grade it down for what a mess the other options are if I were reviewing it in some professional capacity.

Up Next:  The dramatic conclusion.

3 MASS EFFECT FANS ON MASS EFFECT 3 (PART TWO)

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

I invited a couple of Mass Effect fans to reflect on our initial playthroughs of Mass Effect 3 together in real time, to be posted in a couple three installments. We invite you to come and revel in our luminous insights and trenchant bon mots! Marvel at our many euphemisms for space genitalia! Watch me make feeble stabs at appearing objective in critiquing the game series that has held us by the nerd short hairs lo these last 5 years!

LAUREN ORTEGA: So far I’ve completed the Mars mission(great look and design) Jack’s little quest(Note: Yes I still really kinda wish I could romance Jack) and right now happen to be on the salarian homeworld where the quest for getting Wrex laid(I’m guessing it involves getting Wrex laid) has begun.

Along the way I’ve enjoyed every single one of the character interactions, from returning characters like Aria(ARIA’S MY PSYCHOPATHIC BLUE HOMEGIRL!) who I’m loyally and delightfully working for, even down to the point where I’ve put out a hit on a nosey Turian C-Sec officer. To my new crew, who might actually be aside from Chakwas the first crew that I actually like. Fuck, I even admittedly enjoy Fridge McLargeHuge’s role on board the ship, though that could be just because he’s actively not Kaiden or Ashley.

I was also far too happy when Ashley got beaten up by robot girl. FUCK YOU DOUBTING ASHLEY!!!

But in general I’m not feeling the overarching story any more than the one from the second game. Maybe it’s just my inability to get into these full-bore Gotterdammerung trilogy cappers, but I don’t think I’ve been interested in the Reapers since the first game, and find some of the attempts of pathos and ‘WE’RE SERIOUS SCIENCE-FICTION!” to be more than a little annoying.  Then again I’d probably have Shepard do nothing more than fight mercenary groups and walk around being a hot (Michelle Rodriguez-lookalike) asshole.

Really though, I won’t fully complain. Probably because the game’s nice enough to give Liara an awesome introduction where she smokes a few motherfuckers and works her way into my heart again.

I love Liara.

 

AL SCHWARTZ:  I will say that something I appreciate is the obvious effort that went into not retconning discarded gameplay elements out of the in-game universe.  We may not use omni-gel or the Mako or Hammerhead anymore, but bits of throwaway dialogue or codex entries indicate that they are still things that exist.  Or that the Normandy still has a planet scanner and probe launcher even though we aren’t forced to actually scan/probe planets anymore.  It’s not like I would’ve cared if these elements were just ignored completely for more of the gameplay that works, but it just shows how much thought went into every nook and cranny of this universe.

But one thing I’m not loving is the sidequest system.  I like that you have personal email and shadow broker surveillance and SPECTRE communiques that can all leave to different quests, but I don’t like how every 3 steps I take on the Citadel I stumble across someone having a public phone conversation about some resource the war effort desperately needs, all of which I’m able to find without stepping out of my way.  I think that contributes to the galaxy feeling small more than the parade of recurring characters.  For the most part, my former squadmates have either sought me out (Miranda, Thane) or been in important places that make sense for their positions (Jack, Mordin, Wrex).

Also, is it just me or does every human in the game look like they suffered 3rd degree burns to their hands?

TREVOR LA PAY: I didn’t notice the hands, but my Shepard’s skin looks gross in general. It looks like Hutt flesh.

 Mmmm...Hut Flesh....

I’ve been bitching about this on the boards for a week now, but in case anyone missed it: 
In Mass Effect 2, every mission is a story, with a beginning, middle and end; they begin with a mystery, which leads to a reveal, which culminates in a fight and a final denouement. They immerse your character in the unknown. In nearly every quest, including the Collector setpieces, there’s no telling what (or when) you’ll be fighting. Take, for example, the Prison ship mission, where Shepard boards Purgatory with seemingly mundane orders to pick up a prisoner. Five minutes in, the mission context is completely inverted; Shepard is now the prisoner, and must fight her way out of the facility. More importantly, she has two great, implied motivations for fighting her way out of the prison: freedom, and claiming revenge on the warden. Here’s the key: You’re never explicitly told to care about either of these things. You care about these motivations because the story unfolded in a way that made you care about them. We get both surprise and mission-specific motivation, to say nothing of the building tension as Shepard finally reaches her adversary… who is NOT a faceless Power Armor goon, but an actual character. This may not be drama on par with Fitzcarraldo, but it offers genuinely engaging story conflict.

Now let’s take a look at what’s going on in ME3. How many of the off-ship missions offer real story conflict with actual characters? Does Shepard encounter any combat adversaries with proper names besides Kai Leng? (The answer, as it turns out, is “No,” unless you ended the game with three certain squadmates disloyal.) The missions nearly all thrust Shepard into an epic firefight where she’s commanded to protect an asset or find a console. While there’s always the meta-story of “Defeat the Reapers!” to fall back on, the off-ship missions in this game, with rare exception, are all extended firefights against floods of indistinguishable enemies without a story to call their own. They do not offer mystery, surprise, or compelling mission-specific motivation. You’re typically sent off-ship to collect a plot coupon, like “diffuse the bomb” or “collect the artifact,” and these bland plot coupons represent the collective cores of the missions. This is shockingly lazy writing, especially for BioWare.

A:   There are a preponderence of fetch quests, which I find annoying more because of the arbitrary way that they pop up than anything.  But the actual combat-based missions have been fairly extensive and great, imo.  Much more varied level design than ME2, which was a giant step up from ME1‘s cookie-cutter environs itself.  And you know, it’s the little things that help/hurt immersion, which is why I like the touch that you have a unique animation of Shephard jumping out of the shuttle, often directly into enemy fire, at the start of most missions.

As for the lack of twists, that hadn’t really occurred to me, but I can’t argue with it.  ME2 did throw a kink into every recruitment/loyalty mission, while ME3 has been quite linear in comparison.

L: So the weirdest thing is going on with me.  I’ve reached some sort of zen state where I don’t really care about what happens in the galaxy, but still find myself enjoying everything.

 

Admittedly the only Mass Effect story that really worked front to back for me was the first game, in which I not only had a villian I could interact with, but a storyline that actually seemed start off strong and end strong.  That’s not to say Mass Effect 2 wasn’t a better game(it was) in everything from character interactions to gameplay. But even then I couldn’t give a shit about the whole “obviously reaper-influenced aliens trying to build giant metal death-baby” plotline whatsoever. And that somehow continues even more to the third game. 

Maybe I’m the only person who thinks that self-contained adventures that treats gamers who have a save-file to previous games in the series some cool side-missions or easter eggs was the proper way to go. But Shepard as “THE ONLY HOPE IN THE GALAXY” is a lot more boring than ‘Shepard as space James(Jane) Bond.”

I dunno though. Maybe I’m farting around, but I think this franchise would have been much more deeply served by NOT attempting to provide people with urghhhh a “saga.”

A: The question becomes, how does this entry stack up in character interaction (I think we’re all in agreement that the gameplay is a step up as far as combat is concerned)?  I mean, fair enough if you prefer the smaller scale stories, but it’s been clear from the start where this was heading.  I’m really loving the expanded but still intimate feel of the Normandy. Your choice of squadmates is restricted compared to ME2’s Dirty Dozen, but the integration of the extended crew is organic in a way that effectively counteracts it.

L: I actually like the party and crew members way more than I did in previous Mass Effect games. I love Dr. Cougarfantasies as much as I always have, but I was pretty much immune to the charms of seemingly everybody else.  Kinda love a good deal of the crew this time, and I’ll loudly state my adoration for adorable british Kelly replacement any day of the week.

A:  Despite liking the cast, I can’t say that I’ve come around on the Dirk ManMuscle character as Trevor has; he’s still a beefy non-entity to me, only registering when he’s forcing eye-rolling Spanish slang into a Star Trek setting.  But I love Javik and giving EDI a body was a great move. I think it’s great that people like Mordin and Wrex, while not party members, can join the crew for extended periods.  As much fun as ME2’s sprawling cast was, the ability system was streamlined to the point that it wasn’t even close to necessary to use all of them for their skills.  This system keeps things at a manageable level for the game designers, but still allows for fairly in-depth interaction with characters that may or may not be returning, which is (imo) the real appeal of the series.

L: I think I like Rock Johnson probably for the sole reason that he’s not Ashley, Kaiden, or Jacob. He’s not blessed with nearly the personality of say Garrus, but aside from his idiotic look and adorable attempts at Latino machismo(MORE ARROGANCE!) he hasn’t been an unpleasant squad member.

On a further note, I just beat the game today…and it’s…..something…I’ll give it that.

Look I’m hardly a mouthbreather who needs to have Liara, Shepard, and Aria to fly off together with their straight alien buddy Garrus…..but then I realized that this is exactly the ending I want.

A: If the option were available, I would take Cortez on missions with me and leave Rex Gristlethorp to his pull-ups.  I think I have two problems with the character.  One is that the slang stuff kills immersion for me.  I mean,I know on some level that it’s absurd that 200 years in the future everyone including races with eons of their own history would be speaking American English. But the game is a shooter first and linguistics treatise nowhereth, so I accept that as the way the world is presented.  But every time he mentions cerveza or calls me loco I’m reminded of the inherent ridiculousness of that conceit because, and I am just realizing this as I type it, apparently I believe on some level that it’s more likely that mankind will encounter a race of fanatical space jellyfish than that two centuries from now anyone will still be talking in Spanglish lifted straight from the 1990s.

Although I would totally forgive all of this if they could work in a reference to the idea that no one else else talks like this, and Brock Hardsquat is essentially like Thor in Marvel Comics, and everyone is weirded out by his spouting off in this ridiculously outdated fashion like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

So that’s my strange, maybe just a tad autistic objection to the character, but my primary one is that his cockiness just seems like obliviousness when directed at MOTHERFUCKING COMMANDER GODDAMN SHEPHARD.  I mean, it’s been useful in the past to have crew members like Wrex or Zaeed not be bowled over by Shephard, at least to start.  But Theolonius P. Shephard is legend in this galaxy by now; especially with the arrival of the Reapers proving him to be right about that whole deal.  It’s only slightly less absurd when I caught him bantering with Garrus about who was the bigger badass the other day.  Garrus is on the shortlist for most accomplished soldier in the galaxy; he’s all “I hunted down Saren and saved the Citadel and the Council”, and then Vin Rockbone’s like “this one time I fought like six guys.’  “I was part of the first successful mission through the legendary Omega 4 Relay and wiped out the Collectors.”  “My defining professional moment was getting owned by those guys.  Mas tequila!”

Cocky characters can be fun, but you show Shephard and Garrus some damn respect.

R: Besides Lumps Oakenthighs bringing a flicker of some much needed inter-ship conflict (kinda?), I’m not sure why the game even needed to introduce him this late in the game. Did Mass Effect not have enough characters? Why do you exist, James Vega? Besides to sell comic books, I mean.

A: I honestly don’t know why Butch BeefPec is in this game either.  It’s tradition for Bioware to saddle you with a bland soldier type right off the bat, which normally serves a twofold purpose.  Gameplaywise, it ensures that you don’t hobble yourself in the early going.  For a game like Dragon Age, it’s important to give you a tank right away in case you picked a fragile class.  Mass Effect plays more like a shooter, though, so it’s more about providing you with access to the different kinds of powers right away to discourage you from developing a playing style that ignores say biotics entirely.  But storywise, it’s important that the first party members you pick up be relatively easygoing (which is not to say “boring”, but it’s a short trip from the one to the next).  The central appeal of this type of game is the role-playing, the ability to feel like you are imbuing your Shephard with the personality of your choosing.  Early in the game, while a new player is still settling in and getting a feel for the morality system, you don’t want to throw the strongest personalities at them.  

To use ME2 as an example, if you were to get Jack as the first teammate while you were still establishing what your Shephard is like, your relationship with your stand-in is going to be shaped disproportionately by how you react to aggressively violent Suicide Girls.  The need to allow players to ease in to the world and allow them to project themselves onto Shephard requires that the early interactions be on the low stakes side.  Extreme personalities breed extreme reactions, and if you get saddled with a really opinionated companion right off the bat, it can feel like the game itself is pushing you towards a certain path or punishing you for taking the other, which is the opposite of what Bioware is trying to accomplish.  Letting you interact with characters that aren’t going to push back too hard whatever you do helps to establish a feeling of neutrality in the game’s stance on your actions, which serves to make the player more confident in their more impactful decisions down the line.All this to say that while I don’t want to excuse boring characters, I understand that there are reasons to make the first characters you pick up be essentially reactive. 

ME3, though, has less need for these functions than earlier Bioware titles.  It’s more heavily geared towards players who are importing their established characters from the previous entries than any of their other games, and they’ve balanced the power system enough that you don’t really need a soldier to survive the opening.  It’s like they remembered to give you a bland soldier upfront because that’s what they do, but forgot why they actually do it so they tried to jazz him with a bunch of nerds from Vancouver’s idea of Latin machismo.  The result is a character with just enough personality to annoy me but not enough to actually challenge me on anything significant (so far).

T: I see your point. I like how Planescape: Torment gives you an “alignment-neutral” companion from the start who turns out to be the game’s most interesting figure. It’s as if BioWare is confusing alignment-neutral with bland.

A: I never played Planescape, to my shame as I understand it to be essentially the template for what has become my favorite type of game. I won’t harp on it anymore, because overall its nothing but a mild annoyance.  Overall I’m having a great time with the game, although as it wears on I’m starting to feel the lack of named adversaries you talked about.  It’s something I kind of took for granted in Dragon Age and ME2; for all the Blue Suns I slaughtered in warehouses, they were always led by a named and ranked sub-boss.  ME3’s enemies are mostly anonymous, and while it doesn’t cripple any particular mission it does start to become noticeable in such a long game.  Dragon Age 2 had a similar problem, but at least ME3 has has varied and distinctive level designs, whereas that one…really did not.

T: For the record, I enjoy this game more than Dragon Age 2, although the latter has the more satisfying ending.  Did we cross a threshold at some point where good games can’t have terrible endings? I submit that most games have awful, unsatisfying endings. My favorite game of 2011 – Dark Souls – has one of the most puzzlingly unsatisfying endings of any game I’ve played. Of course, that game wasn’t a trilogy capper with a long, complicated story behind it. In fact, my list for “Games with good endings” is minuscule. Planescape: Torment, KOTOR, the GTA series? Disappointment with an ending is a natural state for me. I guess that’s why I’m having difficulty getting riled up over this.

Also – my point wasn’t specifically about a lack of named adversaries, although that’s a symptom of the larger problem of ME3 not weaving story successfully into the missions. I think they could have worked story and character into the mission plot even with the constraint of having very little enemy variety, although it’s a lot tougher, for sure.  One other key problem that I didn’t touch on in my blog post was that the missions revolve around external things, rather than Shepard or her squadmates. Go flip a switch! Go collect an artifact! Go do… that thing the game wants you to do to further the plot! ME2’s missions always had that immediacy of a mission goal being directly related to a squadmate’s interests. BioWare even had the genius to weave this motivation into the gameplay itself by unlocking character skills after completing loyalty missions.  For me, the legacy of ME3 is an even deeper appreciation of ME2.

A: I think you hit on it.  Most games have bad endings because they have weak stories to begin with.  Mass Effect more than anything except perhaps its immediate Bioware siblings has lived on the strength of its story, so it has more riding on the resolution to that story than any game I can think of.

 Other than the OBVIOUS exception

Unless the ire among fans is just that the final boss sucks?  No one really cared that ME2’s did, so I assume they are reacting on a story rather than gameplay level.  And I think that, as much as the game might still disappoint me, it speaks incredibly well to what Bioware has accomplished that I’m going to be judging the ending based on how it stacks up against Star Wars more than Metroid.

Up next:  We talk the ending that united all the land in peace and guaranteed prosperity to all our children’s children.