Spoilers, Sherlock, Crazypants, Warning, Etc.
So at 10:38 last night, following the conclusion of The Reichenbach Fall, I muted the TV sound and pulled out a pen and a notebook. Flipped the notebook to the first blank page, and wrote the following heading: The Problem With The Reichenbach Fall (a brainstorm)At 2 this morning, I was still chewing on it
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And the mention of Lost makes me think of allll the stories out there I don't get into, and what the unconscious choice criteria might be. Obviously with the way I crawl in and chew things apart, and the level of energy and attention maintained, I have to be really selective or else start blowing fuses. So certain things have to come together before I'll sit down and check a thing out, or bother turning my brain on. I was perfectly happy not turning my brain on for Iron Man, for instance, because it was delightful, and Robert Downey Jr. is delightful, and I'm totally content to just watch him do his thing, even with a film script that's made of like, Saran Wrap. It's okay, he's not gonna disappoint me.
But looking at a thing like Lost, the number of characters is one issue. I have this in books too, when there's too many people to keep track of, I start losing interest. S'why I haven't finished The Tale of Genji, suddenly all these people were pouring out of the woodwork and it was too much to keep them all in my head, and anyway the story was going downhill to Genji's inevitable moral punishment, and that's way less fun than him dragging that girl's brother into his bed because the girl won't give him the time of day.
Uh, anyway. So number of characters in the foreground. That's one. The length of the story arc, that's another. I'd rather films or miniseries over long episodic multi-season outfits. Buffy was my one exception in that regard, and once I understood why, I understood something crucial about how my head works. Joss Whedon started out as a script doctor. He still does it, and it's a very nice talent of his; conceiving a story across an episodic arc, understanding Point A to Pt F, and how to get there in a way that makes organic, intuitive sense. He understands what makes a story arc satisfying, which is one of the most important things for a writer to get a solid handle on: what the audience needs and how to pace that out, what to provide and what to withhold, when to gratify and when to deny, when to meet their predictions and when to shock them utterly.
Anyway, I don't find a lot of episodic series that I feel like getting that invested in. And if I'm not sitting there trying to pick apart all the threads and engage actively in the intent of the story, I don't see much point spending my time staring at it. There are dozens of better things I can be doing at any given moment, like haranguing my friends on the internet about imaginary people and exciting new ways to stick pins in them.
As I understand it, Lost was a lot about puzzles and codes and nested sub-plots and discovery of backstory. Which yeah right on, that stuff is terrific. But I started playing with those things in Fox Country, and the point I found myself gravitating to, was that all the stuff with magic rocks and Mah Jong tiles and the lady ghosts' gifts, and dreams, was that it was all symbolic. Symbolism that spoke to what that story and that world wanted to say about our place in the universe, and how sometimes that place can feel so isolated, so dark and frightening and vast and directionless. And then what Mori does, is he makes a direction, he makes all these choices according to what he is, and what he needs his universe to be, and basically it all boils down to making the home you've always yearned for in a big dark mystifying wilderness.
I guess the TL;DR version of that would be, give me people over puzzles. Complicate it as much as you like, get your symbolism groove thang on, I'll enjoy the shit out of that, but every string of the puzzle has to be anchored back to the bone marrow and gizzard and heart-ventricles of the character. Otherwise, and I perfectly understand this is a personal quirk not everyone shares, I am apt to get irritated with the writer being a showoff just because they can.
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And god help those writers if they lose their roadmap with the story partway through. I'll be on that like a trainload of crotchety vultures. Professional writers aren't allowed to do that, in my book. You and I are allowed, because we're amateurs, and we're teaching ourselves how this crap works by experimenting and occasionally failing. But when it's a person's full-time job, there are no excuses. Unless they're taking an insane experimental risk, and then maybe okay, I do give points for sheer balls and spectacular failures. But if they're throwing around plot twists and character contortions just because they don't actually know what the hell's going on, and hope to distract us, no. Sorry, I am not that easily distracted, and I can smell fear and stupidity.
And yeah, I'm kind of an asshole about it. But I sincerely, genuinely want a writer to be smarter than me, and to drag me up a level, and demand I pay utmost attention, and blow my mind. And when they do, they have my starry-eyed admiration for life.
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