-The X Files:
Fight The Future movie essentially condensed five seasons of mythology into a
112 minute movie, did not advance the mythology at all, and even repeated the
beats of Mulder & Scully’s relationship. I enjoyed the movie, though,
except for the latter half of the third act when Mulder has an adventure
rescuing Scully from an alien aircraft. I heard somewhere that Scully saw the
spaceship, but time and the untrustworthiness of memory proved me wrong. She
didn’t see the gosh darn space ship.
I began watching
the series for writers that made their names and careers working in the
Whedonverse. Those guys are David Greenwalt, Tim Minear, and even Jeffrey Bell
(though I’ve yet to reach his episodes). It so happened The X Files received a
pop-cultural regeneration around the time I started watching and a six episode
order for 2016. Perhaps I’ll review the series if I finish watching another 88
episodes and a movie before then.
Grimm reminds me
of The X Files. Yes, that little Friday night genre series created by David
Greenwalt and Jim Kouf. I mentioned the comparison in a January review of
Grimm. Grimm has a nonsense mythology that rarely achieves anything
narratively. The stand-alone episodes often surpass the mythology episodes. I’m
weary of The X Files mythology, but the stand-alone episodes make it worth
watching despite mythology weariness. I know the series didn’t satisfy the
majority of fans, which I’m rather indifferent about anyway. Endings of shows
do not make or break a series for me. Answers to questions don’t enrage me as
it did to some LOST fans that were enraged five years ago or some X Files fans that
were 13 years ago.
-ABC Family will
air reruns of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and Dawson’s Creek, starting June 22.
The news inspired me to tweet about the episodes I voted to air during Fan
Favorite Week. I considered writing about all of Dawson’s Creek during the
summer (and Everwood), but I decided against it. I very well might write about
some of the episodes that air for both shows. I’ve written quite a bit about
both shows in the past. It’s fitting that ABC Family chose one episode a piece
from the last two miserable seasons of Dawson’s Creek. “Castaways” is a solid
Joey/Pacey episode that’s only Joey/Pacey stuck in a K-Mart. The amount of
product placement during the last season is staggering. There’s another decent
Joey/Pacey episode in season 6: Joey leaves Pacey at a dance for Kate Hudson’s
brother.
-Game of Thrones
continues to outrage and offend fans this season. I immensely dislike all the
fan outrage because it’s bordering on a kind of censorship at this point. Dan
Harmon came very close to making a great point about the fans’ relationship
with the series before he decided against it, because he didn’t want to become
a pariah. Alan Sepinwall, the Internet’s most famous critic, also made a
salient point about the brutal violence in the series. Sepinwall figured fans
felt outraged and upset about Shireen’s death because she’s an innocent girl
betrayed by her father whereas the Harpy’s tried to kill the good guys and thus
deserved to be burned by Drogon’s fire. My friends and I discussed the essence
of Sepinwall’s point in a horror-themed episode of my podcast in 2009 or 2010,
in which we agreed that there’s a darkness to us watching horror movies and
rooting for the heroine to brutally fight back against the killer—or the killer
to kill dumb teens. We craved and wanted Drogon to burn Dany’s would-be
assassins to ash, and we also want Stannis to suffer a horrendous fate. Of
course, I couldn’t care less for the impassioned moralistic outrage about the
show’s brutality. David Foster Wallace said, “Good fiction’s job is to comfort
the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” I don’t like anyone imposing
socio-political issues onto a work of fiction, because I don’t think it’s the
job of fiction to amend society. I studied English at a university that more
often than not turned away the artistry in literature for the sake of social
and political commentary. Art for art’s sake is my personal preference, though.
I’m aware people think it’s worthwhile for authors to address issues in
society. Heck, I loved Catch 22.
George R.R. Martin chose to set his fantasy in a time similar to the Middle
Ages during the War of the Roses, which was a brutal era in history where
family members killed each other. The author and the reader make an agreement: this
is the world you’re entering, an imagined world, more like a fairy tale than
not. Fans may easily stop watching.
2 comments:
I wonder how much of people's anger about the whole Stannis thing really is about a little girl being killed by her dad (shocking but it wasn't graphic or really out of character at all for Stannis)? Maybe some of it stems from the fact that Stannis was supposed to be a good guy. He rode in last season and saved the Night's Watch like fairy tale character. He was supposed to kill that awful, awful Ramsey and we were going to root for him to do so, like you point out with the Drogon thing. Now characters no longer fit neatly into a box and that makes people uncomfortable. From my memory, show Stannis has pretty much only cared about being king. He's killed his own brother, pushed his wife and his faith aside and traveled the world to fight everything he can all to achieve that one goal. Why wouldn't he do what he did?
Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of people like those boxes in fiction because there aren't boxes in life. Also, he'll do whatever Melisandre tells him to do. He would've burned Gendry if he had the chance. Stannis would've burned someone. Book Stannis wants to burn alive a little boy. The twist is that Stannis is the most boxed character. He's convinced he's right and just, the true king of Westeros--like any fanatic. Benioff and Weiss could've gone way darker with the Shireen burning. They made the effort to humanize him a little so that he'd struggle with it. Stannis is one of the true dickheads in Westeros.
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