outside the government

April 8, 2019

Outside the Government: The Final Problem

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It’s January 15th, 2017. Clean Bandit have been knocked off of number one by the dawn of the Sheeraning, as Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and “Castle on the Hill” debut at number one and two respectively, heralds of his forthcoming album that will, on its release in mid-March, lead to Sheeran occupying 14 of the top 15 slots in an absolutely unprecedented (and before the streaming era impossible ) turn of events. JP Cooper, Starley, and Jax Jones featuring Raye also chart.

In news, the Justice Department concludes its lengthy investigation of the Chicago Police Department and concludes that, yeah, they’re really bad. Trump gives his first post-election press conference and mostly attacks the press. Much of the London Underground is shut down due to a strike. Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, resigns, sparking the collapse of the power-sharing government. And the Playboy Mansion goes up for sale.

On television, meanwhile, Sherlock reaches its presumptive end with The Final Problem. The central and defining mechanic of Sherlock is as it has always been: a sense of unrelenting, propulsive motion. It’s just that with The Final Problem this motion is not aimed anywhere. The result is like a rocket pointed sideways—undoubtedly spectacular, but still just an exploded mess. Nothing follows from this. How could it? The manic enthusiasm and gusto with which The Final Problem runs in circles does not change the fact that it remains essentially stationary. The sheer quantity of nothing that happens here does not magically transmute into something.

And so one is left with little to do but that laziest of cheap thrills in criticism: the brutal inventory of faults and failures in a crappy piece of media. Call it a craven attempt to someday get Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to call me while I’m playing video games, but The Final Problem is garbage and here’s why.

The first and biggest problem, from which most though by no means all of the others extend, is Eurus. Or, rather, it’s the degree to which all of the emotional weight that Eurus supposed to conjure is unearned, existing more as an assertion of importance than as anything substantive. Eurus is one of the most over the top premises the show has ever tried to sell—that Sherlock Holmes not only has a previously unmentioned sibling, but that he completely blocked her out of his memory. And yet the effort that’s put into that sales job is frightfully minimal.

More to the point, however, the premise undermines what the story is trying to do. The script requires that the Sherlock/Eurus confrontations at the top of act two and the climax of act three carry emphatic emotional weight. But by loudly insisting on the total lack of existing emotional connection with Eurus that Sherlock can draw upon, Moffat and Gatiss keep her at arm’s length, creating a sense of distance at the precise moment when the story needs intimacy. It’s supposed to feel big and important, but the only thing the script can figure out to do to make it feel that way is to tell us how big and important it is.…

April 1, 2019

Outside the Government: The Lying Detective

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CW: Discussions of Jimmy Savile and sexual assault.

It’s January 8th, 2017. Clean Bandit remain at number one, while Zara Larsson, Little Mix, Neiked, and Louis Tomlinson & Steve Aoki also chart. In news, the British Red Cross declares there to be a humanitarian crisis in England’s NHS hospitals, and the US Intelligence Community releases the results of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. On television, meanwhile, Sherlock’s fourth and potentially final season reaches its hump episode, which this time around is the one written by Steven Moffat.

Faced with an impossible task, Moffat took the obvious approach and failed. The Lying Detective does not fix the stumbling fourth season of Sherlock. Indeed, its efforts to do so are by and large its biggest problems, a point we will get to in good time. But I’m still coming off of two months of talking about why Class failed every week, and my next two posts are the finale and Broadchurch, so let’s put off that perspective for as long as we can and see what else we can do here.

After all, this is the first time Moffat has opted to give himself the middle episode. These have always vexed Sherlock to an extent, featuring so far their single worst episode, a low-stakes adaptation of a Doyle classic, and an ostentatious bit of comedy fluff. We’ve even talked, albeit a long time ago, about the way in which the three episode seasons of Sherlock and its own tendency towards constant event means that the middle episode, the only one not to be a premiere or a finale, is an inherent challenge. And so finally they think to have Moffat do one in the manner of Listen, a lower stakes “prove he can write” episode.

Well, for Sherlock at least. Sherlock never quite goes low budget, but this one largely avoids action scenes and elaborate set pieces. Mostly it functions by putting Toby Jones and Benedict Cumberbatch in a room and letting them do stuff. And there’s no time for an episode that doesn’t have at least some big arc responsibilities, and so this has to repair John and Sherlock’s relationship off the back of Mary’s death, give John a satisfying grieving arc, and do the Eurus reveal. Then again, the “prove he can write” pieces include Heaven Sent as well as Listen, so it’s not quite that these inherently have to be the quiet ones.

Nevertheless, at its heart what we have here is the long overdue return of Moffat writing out of anger. Last time we saw this was, fittingly, His Last Vow, where Moffat relished creating a truly nasty villain out of the detritus of current events and then saying exactly what he thought should be done with him. Here he repeats the trick. Ultimately, The Lying Detective is an exercise in monster design. Except instead of child-friendly creepiness, Moffat is depicting moral depravity. For this, unsurprisingly, he turns to Jimmy Savile.…

March 25, 2019

Outside the Government: The Six Thatchers

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It’s January 1^st, 2017. Did you guess that Rockabye were at number one with “Clean Bandit”? If so, well done. Zara Larsson, Little Mix, Bruno Mars, and Wham also chart, the latter with a post-Christmas surge for “Last Christmas.” In news, US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Obama imposes sanctions against Russian intelligence agencies for interfering with the election, and Nevada’s marijuana legalization goes into effect.

While on television, the puzzling failure of Sherlock Season Four begins with The Six Thatchers. Let’s begin with the obvious, which is that the death of Mary is a terrible idea. There was a bit in comments a few weeks ago about fridging, including a discussion of the fridging of male characters. But it’s worth de-genericiding the term a bit and remembering exactly what it is and why it’s bad. Because fridging is not simply character death in the general case. It is not even character death as a means of motivating other characters, a category that can also include plot beats like the mentor figure dying so that the hero can step up. Fridging was a term created by then comics journalist and now comics superstar Gail Simone in 1999 to describe the specific phenomenon of female comics characters who had been “killed, raped, depowered, crippled, turned evil, maimed, tortured, contracted a disease or had other life-derailing tragedies befall her” to provide dramatic stakes.

Since then the term has been widened considerably, sometimes fairly (it’s absolutely worth talking about the tendency to use other less frequently represented groups as cannon fodder), sometimes less so (i.e. the tendency to use the term to refer to any death whatsoever). But the core of it is twofold: a woman or minority character, and a death that exists to add drama or up the stakes for whoever the story views as the real main characters. Indeed, the original Women in Refrigerators page has a secondary essay called “Dead Men Defrosting” that looks at the various male characters that have been killed, depowered, or otherwise tormented and the way in which they routinely bounce back from it, which implicitly highlights a different sort of death characters can go through. (And there’s plenty to talk about in the intersection between fridging and the current “death is reversible” trend across SF/F.

But no matter how you cut it, the heart of the trope is the gendered dynamic. It’s the fact that in addition to being underrepresented in almost every creative industry, in addition to things like the chart of Best Picture films and the percentage of lines spoken by women and the fucking Bechdel test, in addition to the lack of pay equity, in addition to the fact that it took seventeen years from the start of the superhero film boom to us actually getting Wonder Woman, in addition to all of that monstrous fucking crap, one of the primary roles of women in popular media is to get killed off to add drama. And if you widen the description of the trope to include groups that are not traditionally underrepresented you lose the reason this was interesting and troubling in the first place.…

March 4, 2019

Outside the Government: The Lost

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It’s December 3^rd, 2016. Clean Bandit remain at number one. Weeknd and Daft Punk get a seond song in the top ten, while Neiked, Maroon 5 ft. Kendrick Lamar, and Bruno Mars also chart. In news, a plane crash kills the bulk of Brazillian football team Chapecoense. Donald Trump sparks a touch of international incident when he calls the President of Taiwan, while a fire in an Oakland art space known as the Ghost Ship kills 36. A man opens fire inside a Washington pizza restaurant because, basically, Mike Cernovich said there were pedophiles there.

While on television, the season and de facto series finale of Class, “The Lost.” “The Lost” hangs over the rest of Class. Without it you have seven well-meaning episodes of various levels of success—a show that could frequently have stood to be a little braver, but that always meant well and wanted to be good. With it, however, the picture gains an ugly, cynical tinge. “The Lost” is not Class’s first bad episode. It is its worst episode, which is never a good thing to have happen with your finale. But more damning than its general crapness is the particular flavor of badness that it offers. There are, after all, many ways to suck. “The Lost,” however, picks one of the laziest approaches possible—one that it is difficult to feel anything other than contempt for.

God, where do we begin? The beginning, I suppose. This is an episode of television that attempts to deliver the line “do you ever feel like it’s so dark that it’ll never be light again” as an entirely sincere and meaningful piece of dialogue that sets out the basic terms for the episode. I mean, what do you even say to that? I cannot actually imagine how someone would sit at a computer, type that line, and think, “yes, good, I am writing serious and insightful drama about the lives of teenagers.” It’s shockingly crap in a way that suggests a complete failure to care.

From there we have the cheap slaughter of POC to raise stakes, a return of a villain we defeated two episodes ago with no explanation beyond “I had guile,” a plot resolution in which Tanya becomes the second biggest badass in the show after a quick training session, Ram’s complete lack of any involvement in anything, the absolutely appalling “Black is the Color” musical cue over April’s non-death… I mean, there’s a lot here that’s egregiously, painfully inept. This is the rare piece of media that actually does call for an “everything wrong with” video that points out all the massive plot holes and gobsmackingly lazy bits of writing it employs.

But the larger problem is just how dull the episode’s basic ideas are. The crap big bad comes back again, fridges some tertiary characters, and is then defeated by the MacGuffin that’s been pointedly hanging around all season. It’s utterly bog standard season finale stuff, made worse by the way in which the episode has one eye on setting up its season two plot, a frankly humiliating moment of hubris in light of how badly Class flopped.…

February 25, 2019

Outside the Government: The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi, class, outside the government 10

It’s November 26th, 2016. Clean Bandit are at number one with “Rockabye,” with James Arthur, Bruno Mars, and Neiked also charting. Indeed, the overall top ten are the same as last week in a very slightly different order. In news, the government of Colombia reaches a peace agreement to end the fifty-year long fight against FARC revolutionaries. 300 people are injured when police attack a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation. And Philip Hammond makes his Autumn Statement to Parliament.

On television, meanwhile, Class tries something different. “The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did” focuses almost entirely on Quill, telling the story of her efforts to get the MacGuffin removed from her head so she is no longer enslaved to Charlie. This is already unusual, in that it gives us a YA show that has temporarily dropped all of its YA characters to focus on… well, exactly who and what Quill is as a character will come up later, so let’s save it and move on. Adding to the strangeness is the eponymous concept—a device that allows people to travel into the afterlifes and higher planes of any species that has imagined one. This means that the episode takes an unusual picaresque structure that is unlike anything else in Class.

What’s going on with the Metaphysical Engine itself should be obvious, especially if you look to any of the shots of its interior in which it the camera stares down at its hexagonal metal floor. It’s the TARDIS. Which means “The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did” can basically be summarized as “Class does Doctor Who.” So immediately there’s a lot to unpack.

There’s a line of thought regarding Class—one pushed most notably over at the excellent blog Downtime—that reads it as a critique of Doctor Who. Actually, I suppose it’s pushed most notably by Patrick Ness, who has explicitly said that the show is about ordinary people when the Doctor isn’t there. In this reading, the show is about the bad consequences of the Doctor’s decision in “For Tonight We Might Die”—a critique of his tendency to swan off into the next adventure instead of staying and grappling with the consequences of his actions. This is of course a common critique of the character, typically within the show itself. But as a central thesis of Class there’s something less satisfying. Part of it is that, contrary to Ness’s protestations, Class is not about ordinary people but rather about television characters. As a result, the show never quite manages to be about what happens to ordinary people in the Doctor’s absence, instead ending up just being about what happens to characters from another TV show.

More complexly, Class’s protestations on this front end up sounding uncomfortably like that Edgar Allen Poe quote dragging bad mystery writers as trying to look clever for figuring out solutions to problems they invented. The show endeavors to construct a Doctor-shaped hole at the heart of its narrative and then to present this hole as a substantive subject of critique as opposed to as something that’s been deliberately excavated.…

February 18, 2019

Outside the Government: Detained

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It’s November 19^th, 2016. Clean Bandit has debuted at number one with “Rockabye,” while Rae Sremmurd, Bruno Mars, James Arthur, and the Weeknd also chart. In news, the British Medical Journal calls for the legalization of drugs while Donald Trump agrees to pay $25m in settlements over Trump University.

On television, meanwhile, Class does its bottle episode. As with “Nightvisiting,” there is a sense of “really, already?” to this. The bottle episode is a classic contrivance. And while better shows than Class have gotten to them as soon as their third stories, they are generally a sign that something has gone oddly somewhere else in the season. In this case the culprit is fairly obvious: this is a Quill-free episode done on the cheap. Next week we have a Quill-only episode that’s blatantly where the money has gone.

If this sounds familiar, it’s presumably because you’ve watched Doctor Who and remember Russell T Davies tossing David Tennant into a cheap bottle episode he wrote in basically two days so that he could have Catherine Tate and Billie Piper do a costly greatest hits tour of his era the week after. Indeed, the basic setup, with its incorporeal monster and ratcheting internal tensions, owes a pretty obvious debt to Midnight. And the other obvious source for an episode in which people are trapped somewhere and being made to confess is, of course, Heaven Sent, which lacks the budget motivations of a proper bottle episode but is still working in the same general mode.

A peculiarity of bottle episodes is that, despite generally being born of desperation, they’re also historically pretty good. This is easy enough to explain: countless artists across media have discovered the creatively liberating power of constraints. And so it is not a surprise that when Class both takes on this structure and starts pilfering the show it’s a spinoff of instead of deciding that its main peers are American shows that mostly air on the CW, things improve above the baseline.

This has a satisfyingly propulsive structure over its forty-five minutes. A weird disaster traps everyone in a classroom with a glowing rock that both compels the revelation of unpleasant truths and advances the plot when it’s picked up. One by one the characters pick it up. Wacky hijinks ensue. This is strong enough that a variety of small contrivances like “making everybody angry is an arbitrary and slightly hackish escalator,” “the explanation of what’s happening here only narrowly makes sense,” and “there’s not actually a clear reason why nobody can pick up the rock more than once” don’t really interfere with proceedings to any meaningful extent. This works, and does so with a breezy confidence that borders on swagger; something that Class generally comes nowhere near mustering.

At the heart of its success, and something that has consistently been rescuing Patrick Ness from peril, is that he really is quite good at writing adolescence. Characters fuck up in fundamentally understandable ways here.…

February 11, 2019

Outside the Government: Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart/Brave-ish Heart

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It’s November 5^th, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out To My Ex.” James Arthur, Clean Bandit, Bruno Mars, and Drake also chart. Everything is fine. The Chicago Cubs have won the World Series for the first time in over a century. US Presidential election is in three days and Hillary Clinton is obviously going to win. Then, three days later, she doesn’t. Clean Bandit seizes the number one spot, Maroon 5 and Kendrick Lamar enter the top ten, and the other half of Class’s only two-part story airs

Let’s start with the basic structural oddity: a midseason two-parter in an eight episode season. This means that there’s never really a sense of momentum in the show. Its apparent initial pattern of being a monster-of-the-week show that picks a focus character each week is discarded. The subsequent structure of the next two episodes, in which the cast is split to do a bottle episode and an expensive episode that takes place at the same time, is too singular to establish a new pattern. This could be a compelling gambit of a show that has no pattern and is constantly surprising the viewer, but as we’ve seen, Class just isn’t that show; its source material is all about the repetition of patterns, and indeed the ritualized reiteration of their basic structure is part and parcel of their fun. Class instead blows up its patterns before it’s really established them, and ends up feeling like a dilettante, flitting from structure to structure without ever honing one to the point where it shows off its full potential.

The obvious solution to this would have been to rethink the arc of this, either splitting the Shadow Kin plot over two prospective seasons so that the big two-parter comes at the end of the season or reducing this middle beat to a single episode. Certainly the underlying structure of this, with its parallel crises and perpetually escalating stakes, is well-suited to a finale. (Indeed, this is more coherently imagined finale than “The Lost” will end up being.) This would have forced the show to build and use its status quo for a few more episodes, and then allowed for enough of a shift following this as Quill is let off her leash. The biggest problem is that you’d lose the next episode in this structure, as it’s unimaginable as a season premiere, and of course that the show had flopped by its second episode and was never going to get a second season anyway. Well, that and it would (assuming the show continued to build to the same basic plot beats and just took longer to get there) involve spending two seasons on the Shadow Kin.

Indeed, this is the even larger problem with a midseason two-parter in the course of an eight episode season: it leaves the show stranded with four episodes about the fucking Shadow Kin. We talked back in “For Tonight We Might Die” about the basic pointlessness of creating a monster that’s “the Vashta Nerada only stompy.”…

February 4, 2019

Outside the Government: Nightvisiting

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It’s October 29^th, 2016. Little Mix remain at number one. Actually, the second, third, fourth, and fifth songs on the chart do too. The news is altogether more volatile; Parliament approves the long-gestating Heathrow third runway project, which isn’t that big. In the US, meanwhile, the far-right militiamen who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier in the year are all acquitted and FBI Director James Comey makes a stunning intervention into the US Presidential race less than two weeks before election day as he announces the re-opening of the investigation into Hilary Clinton’s e-mails due to e-mails found on a device during the investigation of Anthony Weiner’s sexting of a fifteen year old girl while continuing not to disclose that Trump Campaign was also being investigated over its links to Russia. This has consequences.

On Internet streaming platforms, “Nightvisiting.” It is here the cracks begin to show for Class. It’s not that “Nightvisiting” is bad. Its ending is slightly misjudged (having Tanya’s effort fail so that Miss Quill can get a hero moment driving a bus into a tentacle mostly serves to ostentatiously deny the black girl an earned hero moment so the femme fatale white woman can get an unearned one), but on the whole it’s a perfectly reasonably constructed thing. It’s an effective execution of “the cheap one,” getting most of its mileage out of human actors in rooms talking with a minimum of effects shots and scheduling hassles.

The problem is that this is episode three, and functionally episode two because of the (increasingly clearly bad) decision to bundle “For Tonight We Might Die” and “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” Plenty of shows have resorted to the “cast members are visited by their dead loved ones” episode. But it’s generally a late-series contrivance—something you throw out to put your longstanding characters in a new light. Doing it as episode three in order to substantially introduce and flesh out two of the characters, on the other hand, feels desperate. And indeed, it leads to mixed results. Quill’s scenes with her sister are shockingly devoid of content, adding exactly no depth to a character who risks being a cartoon. And Tanya does only slightly better. There’s some decent character beats for her, but they’re all origin story stuff, and generally don’t relate to the character as we see her. The origin of her “puddle” nickname is indicative. Not only is there something slightly unsettling about the fact that Tanya’s nickname is based in a story in which she dives into a puddle of horse piss, this never comes up outside of this story and doesn’t actually tell us anything about who she is.

A larger problem, though, comes in the form of Tanya’s basic arc in this episode. Last week Ram engaged with his grief and trauma and used an articulable lesson about it to defeat an enemy who was thematically adjacent and mirrored his previous inadequate response to the trauma. It was smart and well-structured.…

January 28, 2019

Outside The Government: The Coach With The Dragon Tattoo

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It’s about as long since the last post as it took anybody to select the next episode in the BBC Three menu system. I mean, unless it autoplays. I have no idea. Anyway, neither the music nor news have advanced much in that couple of seconds.

This gap, or lack thereof, does not do “The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo” any favors. In the course of a double release it largely disappears as “the one that isn’t the premiere” in terms of how Class made its first impression. Actually, it mostly just disappears in general—more than half the audience didn’t even bother playing the second episode, with only 300,000 people tuning in on BBC Three and 600,000 on BBC One a few months later. But taken as originally presented, as a singular item with “For Tonight We Might Die,” this was always doomed to be the smaller one, establishing what the show did in its default setting as opposed to setting the mission statement for it. The unfortunate thing is that this is only half wrong. This isn’t setting the mission statement, but it’s also not the default setting; if it were, Class would be a much better show.

What we have here is a story that looks at trauma and toxic masculinity via a Hannibal/Red Dragon ripoff in which a literal dragon eats people at a high school. This is, at baseline, fucking fantastic. I love everything about this concept. It’s like “the moon is an egg” in that you can just repeat the concept over and over again with the emphasis on different words and get a perfectly coherent argument for why it’s good, only you get more words to do it with. It’s just an intrinsically satisfying setup; one that finds a patch of ground no other show is quite set up to explore and does it. It’s a beautifully inventive setup where all of the parts go together and are still surprising.

Let’s start with the monster. The red herring that Coach Dawson isn’t being possessed by his tattoo but is abusing it in a display of gendered violence is a rock solid twist, but the fact that it works—that the show can get away with a fakeout just by having a tattoo that moves, a bunch of dead bodies, and a guy grunting “I AM IN CONTROL” like he’s a Robert Holmes villain shows an awareness of genre tropes that goes beyond knowing how to lampshade them and into being deft at transcending them. It’s obviously utterly wrong to suggest that this is smarter than the final six episodes of Hannibal, but it has a brash confidence that the iconography that Hannibal went to such gloriously baroque lengths to establish can be sketched lightly and then slyly detourned.

More to the point, however, this is just a smart villain. The Robert Holmes comparison is apt, because Coach Dawson is in many ways a 2016 version of the classic Robert Holmes villain.…

January 21, 2019

Outside The Government: For Tonight We Might Die

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It’s October 22^nd, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out to my Ex,” with James Arthur, the Weeknd, Sia, Ariana Grande, and Calvin Harris also charting. In news, most of 2016 has happened. The US Presidential election is in full swing, Theresa May is in 10 Downing street, Jeremy Corbyn has survived an attempt to replace him as head of the Labour Party, and UKIP is in its usual chaos.

While on television… well, actually, let’s start there. Class is on television in a sense that we’ve never really dealt with before. It’s a BBC Three show. But unlike Torchwood, which premiered ten years earlier to the day, BBC Three in 2016 is an online only channel following a round of budget cuts that resulted in the shuttering of BBC Three as a broadcast channel. This move contained a wealth of decisions about priorities and privilege. For instance, BBC Four, the more adult-oriented channel with a heavy focus on arts and entertainment programs, remained in place. Instead what was axed was the channel focused on the 16-34 age group and on experimenting with new programs and new talent.

As a hedge against the obvious (and true) perception that taking it off the air consisted of some sort of deemphasis of BBC Three the BBC looked for some high profile programs to commission for the new online service. Unsurprisingly given that their previous Doctor Who spinoff was among the network’s biggest hits, one of these, announced a month before the decision to pull the plug on BBC Three was actually formalized, was another spinoff: Class. Tragically not the result of hiring Jack Graham to write an openly Marxist Doctor Who spinoff, Class is instead a series by acclaimed young adult author Patrick Ness in which kids at Coal Hill School (now Coal Hill Academy) fight aliens.

In practice, this was a flop. The first episode pulled 660,000 people on iPlayer, with 1.1m tuning in in early 2017 for a BBC1 re-airing. By episode two, those numbers fell to 300,000 and 600,000 respectively. The BBC1 airing would eventually bottom out at 300,000, while the BBC Three version dropped to 195,000. Its AIs ranged from 70 to 82, with five of the episodes coming in below 80. This was in no way a good enough performance on the part of the new BBC Three’s flagship program, and so Class wrapped after a single season to minimal alarm and consternation.

None of this is unfair per se; Class was in practice a deeply flawed piece of television that, in lieu of finding its own voice, borrowed several others, mostly Joss Whedon’s. It routinely lacks the courage of its convictions, slouching towards genericism even as it flirts with more interesting alternatives. It is frequently hokey and way too proud of itself, such as its invocation of the Bechdel test in its ninth line and its super knowing “it’s like the Hellmouth” exchange at the end.…

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