so let's talk about ~continuity
As I’ve mentioned once or twice, my personal fandom bête noire is when people cloak snotty one-upmanship in objective-sounding language which is in fact based in terrible logic. One of the big ways people do this is “continuity” pedantry, where people claim world-busting rends in the fabric of canon. This tactic is far more popular than true continuity issues are common.
That’s not to say continuity issues don’t exist, just to say they’re far overstated. I’m going to do a couple of case studies in continuity from The West Wing. I don’t think many people would argue against the point The West Wing was one of the best and most influential shows of its time frame. Sopranos, Buffy, West Wing, right. That said, it had some continuity issues, many of which were clear cut enough to illustrate what is and isn’t an actual failure in worldbuilding logic. I picked it for this post for a few reasons: I’ve seen it enough to have some examples more or less handy, it’s fifteen years old so I don’t feel bad about spoilers (even then I tried to duck the big stuff), and the continuity bar is harder and higher than on most of my shows because FUCK YOU IT’S MAGIC isn’t an option.
Put it in a drawer: real, flat-out discontinuity
MARK: Good evening. Before we get to Chris and Marjorie tonight on the Capital Beat, the House is expected to vote next week on President Bartlet's one point five billion dollar education package. Sam Seaborn: Why is this bill better than its Republican counterpart that the President vetoed last year? (S2, ep4)
The character speaking is a reporter broadcasting nationwide, mentioning an incident which is readily verifiable as a matter of public record in this ‘verse. Neither Sam nor Ainsley, both firmly established as being quite knowledgeable in this subject matter, argue with Mark’s assertion here. There is no dispute that in the WW-verse, the year before S2 - so in the year 2000 (AND GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!) - Bartlet vetoed an education bill. This is fundamentally irreconcilable with the following:
DOUG: I think he should take out the A-bomb. I think he's got to do something he's never done even once before. "You think I'm weak? How about I shove Article 1, section 7 up your ass?" Screw the compromise! I think he's got to veto. (S3, ep 3)
Doug is another highly knowledgeable character speaking to a room full of people who are highly knowledgeable about the events of 2000, because they were all on the President’s staff at that point. And yet during a high-stakes tactical argument concerning the 2002 presidential campaign, none of these arrogant, argumentative characters bothers to dispute Doug’s assessment of President Bartlet as a veto virgin.
This is what a continuity error looks like.
Important note: as with most pedantic crap, the continuity problem doesn’t actually matter to the substance of the episode. A veto of the bill in question remains the dramatic and politically risky move that Doug asserts it is, whether or not the earlier veto occurred in the ‘verse. If one should choose to take the irrelevance of this discontinuity as a metaphor for first times being not just overrated but downright forgettable, nobody here would argue.
Schrodinger’s veto here leads to a good example of pedantry that isn’t. There’s another incident in the earlier seasons of the show which I think people would be wrongly tempted to use against Doug’s assessment here:
BARTLET: [WW-‘verse’s DOMA-equivalent]'s gay bashing. It's legislative gay bashing. How do I put my name on it?
JOSH: I wouldn't, sir. I'd put it away.
BARTLET: Pocket veto's a politician's way out.
JOSH: They'll send the bill again when they're in session.
[Bartlet rants, Josh continues his appeal to reason, Leo says “Sir” a lot, Bartlet rants thunderously]
BARTLET: I should get out a rubber stamp that says 'Josiah Bartlet votes no.'
JOSH: That's just what the conservatives are hoping you'll do.
BARTLET: I should get out a rubber stamp! [sighs]
LEO: Sir.
BARTLET: Put it in a drawer. (S2, ep 7)
A pocket veto is still a veto in effect, in that it prevents the bill in question from going into effect as a law. But in this case, Bartlet chooses a pocket veto rather than a veto-veto precisely in order to avoid the political spectacle which Doug suggests as bold new territory in S3. Doug’s comment does conflict with the education bill referenced in S2e4, but does not conflict with the actions taken (or rather, not taken) concerning the Acme-brand DOMA.
Conspicuousness by Absence: Mendoza
A running subplot of the first season (and the core of one of TWW’s best episodes and IMO one of the great comedic episodes of any hour-long drama to date) was the confirmation of Roberto Mendoza to the Supreme Court. The characters considered Mendoza to be worth several months of plot-inducing drama because he reflected their reluctantly-but-oft-ignored liberal values.
……OR DID HE?!?!?
JOSH: We've got centrists [on SCOTUS]. We've got 6 of them plus 2 staunch conservatives plus Justice Ashland. The one clarion voice articulating a liberal vision. He's going to go and then what? (S5 ep 17)
I’m not quite sure that this counts as a continuity error per se, since Josh is offering an analysis of the status quo rather than verifiable fact. It’s plausible that Josh and the characters he’s conversing with think that Mendoza shifted to the center in the four years since his confirmation, or that Ashland and his potential replacement Lang are liberal like, you know, I’m liberal, and so they could potentially make Mendoza look centrist by comparison. (This second explanation raises the haunting question of what kind of knuckle-dragging fascist Harrison the “moderate” first choice for Mendoza’s seat was, but let’s just spare ourselves those nightmares.) However, that kind of judicial drift is the kind of thing they’d consider before deciding on their strategy at the end of the episode. Perhaps Mendoza retired or died and was replaced and the audience just didn’t hear about any of this, but that seems even less likely. By and large, this episode suggests that the characters (ie, the narrative) have forgotten about Mendoza, whose appointment was one of the crowning achievements of their first term. If nothing else, the omission is distracting and that distraction serves no purpose to the episode.
So yeah, I’d say this comes close enough to discontinuity to be an episode with questionable continuity. Like Doug’s comment above, this isn’t something that has any bearing on the quality of the episode, though in this case because it was a terrible episode which so perverted the politics of the bench as to be irresponsible, given the amount of credibility The West Wing had built up as a sometime venue of civic education. Overstating or fixating on the questionable continuity in criticism of the episode would still be far beside the point.
What’s not a continuity problem is that they haven’t spent the past four years stopping conversations whenever they mention an issue before SCOTUS and say “hey, wonder how Mendoza’d rule on this?” or “wow, remember all those kooky hijinks we got into with Mendoza?” or whatever. A little continuity nod like that can be fun for the audience, but it is not a requirement for a ‘verse with internal logical consistency.
Check the fine print: The 25th
As Doug’s discussion of the Executive Powers section shows, the Constitution in the West Wing ‘verse shares a great deal with the actual US Constitution. That said, seems to be a consistent truth in the West Wing ‘verse that their 25th amendment does not have Section 4 of the real 25th, which provides a fairly clear procedure for the transfer of executive authority if the president is alive but incapacitated and has not signed power over to the VP. When characters make a fuss about the transfer of authority after Rosslyn, this is not a problem with the ‘verse. It’s a perfectly acceptable dramatic departure from reality, just as the altered election schedule is. Everyone agrees on it; if you woke up in the WW-‘verse you could go check out a copy of the Constitution and read the 25th for yourself.
This is also a good time to talk about when Watsonian analysis becomes particularly useful to keeping our eye on the ball concerning continuity. Neither Danny’s (RUDE AS FUCK) nagging about “who was in CHARGE?!??!” or Toby’s rant about Leo’s level of influence constituting a “coup d’etat” actually call into question Hoynes’ authority, because an Acting President would be expected to ensure as much continuity with the President’s wishes as possible, and Hoynes knew that he could do that best by listening to Leo. That’s how the system is supposed to work, in any world, in order to prevent destabilizing actions taken by a person whose executive authority is limited and short-lived. Whether or not this was an authorial lapse in logic (which is not, like, completely out of the realm of possibility, GIVEN) it creates no discontinuity within the ‘verse, since Toby’s commentary comes at a time when Toby is actually pissed about something else, and Danny’s job depends on his being a shit-stirring troll. Those are distortions and misconceptions that real people might make or have and so would be silly to fixate on even if they didn’t occur in two of the show’s more famously impressive character-driven episodes.
Most of the stuff that makes up this WW ~continuity guide~ is pretty silly, because most of it consists of the kind of liberties we take in day-to-day speech: ie, Bartlet being specific about having met Abby 32 years ago but referring to an ex of hers as being someone she dated “thirty” years ago, because he cares less about that, or easy-to-explain changes in circumstance, such as how "the AG was black and now he's white" just means that the AG resigned and was replaced.
Point being, continuity expectations should not be built around “we the audience with a wiki open in front of us want to hear X,” they should be built around basic rules of logic (often seeming “paradoxes” can be easily resolved with the tiniest bit of thought), and around the fact that the vast majority of characters are unreliable narrators. People can be forgetful, imprecise or uninformed, and remember, everybody lies. I’m leaning hard on the idea of multiple sources and their likelihood of being forthcoming because I think that should be the standard: you wouldn’t make an important decision IRL if you could not verify critical information outside of one person’s commentary, particularly if that person’s trustworthiness is in question. (In case I’m being too oblique, “Drunky McCrazyEyes didn’t write it that way in his diary” is IMO not sufficient evidence to sustain a valid continuity conflict.) And crucially, there has to be actual conflict, not just “I’ve never heard of this before, so it can’t possibly be accurate!”
Most important to note is that despite a couple of instances of questionable continuity or outright discontinuity, The West Wing was still a great show. No amount of pedantic harping on vetoes or appointments to the bench negates the quick and fun dialogue, the impressive feat of making politics and public policy accessible and even emotionally engaging to a mass audience, or the heart-twisting observation that babies come with hats. It’s fun trivia, but not often much more than that, and if this kind of silly stuff is make-or-break to your enjoyment of something, you don’t like it very much anyway.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/331439.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
That’s not to say continuity issues don’t exist, just to say they’re far overstated. I’m going to do a couple of case studies in continuity from The West Wing. I don’t think many people would argue against the point The West Wing was one of the best and most influential shows of its time frame. Sopranos, Buffy, West Wing, right. That said, it had some continuity issues, many of which were clear cut enough to illustrate what is and isn’t an actual failure in worldbuilding logic. I picked it for this post for a few reasons: I’ve seen it enough to have some examples more or less handy, it’s fifteen years old so I don’t feel bad about spoilers (even then I tried to duck the big stuff), and the continuity bar is harder and higher than on most of my shows because FUCK YOU IT’S MAGIC isn’t an option.
Put it in a drawer: real, flat-out discontinuity
MARK: Good evening. Before we get to Chris and Marjorie tonight on the Capital Beat, the House is expected to vote next week on President Bartlet's one point five billion dollar education package. Sam Seaborn: Why is this bill better than its Republican counterpart that the President vetoed last year? (S2, ep4)
The character speaking is a reporter broadcasting nationwide, mentioning an incident which is readily verifiable as a matter of public record in this ‘verse. Neither Sam nor Ainsley, both firmly established as being quite knowledgeable in this subject matter, argue with Mark’s assertion here. There is no dispute that in the WW-verse, the year before S2 - so in the year 2000 (AND GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!) - Bartlet vetoed an education bill. This is fundamentally irreconcilable with the following:
DOUG: I think he should take out the A-bomb. I think he's got to do something he's never done even once before. "You think I'm weak? How about I shove Article 1, section 7 up your ass?" Screw the compromise! I think he's got to veto. (S3, ep 3)
Doug is another highly knowledgeable character speaking to a room full of people who are highly knowledgeable about the events of 2000, because they were all on the President’s staff at that point. And yet during a high-stakes tactical argument concerning the 2002 presidential campaign, none of these arrogant, argumentative characters bothers to dispute Doug’s assessment of President Bartlet as a veto virgin.
This is what a continuity error looks like.
Important note: as with most pedantic crap, the continuity problem doesn’t actually matter to the substance of the episode. A veto of the bill in question remains the dramatic and politically risky move that Doug asserts it is, whether or not the earlier veto occurred in the ‘verse. If one should choose to take the irrelevance of this discontinuity as a metaphor for first times being not just overrated but downright forgettable, nobody here would argue.
Schrodinger’s veto here leads to a good example of pedantry that isn’t. There’s another incident in the earlier seasons of the show which I think people would be wrongly tempted to use against Doug’s assessment here:
BARTLET: [WW-‘verse’s DOMA-equivalent]'s gay bashing. It's legislative gay bashing. How do I put my name on it?
JOSH: I wouldn't, sir. I'd put it away.
BARTLET: Pocket veto's a politician's way out.
JOSH: They'll send the bill again when they're in session.
[Bartlet rants, Josh continues his appeal to reason, Leo says “Sir” a lot, Bartlet rants thunderously]
BARTLET: I should get out a rubber stamp that says 'Josiah Bartlet votes no.'
JOSH: That's just what the conservatives are hoping you'll do.
BARTLET: I should get out a rubber stamp! [sighs]
LEO: Sir.
BARTLET: Put it in a drawer. (S2, ep 7)
A pocket veto is still a veto in effect, in that it prevents the bill in question from going into effect as a law. But in this case, Bartlet chooses a pocket veto rather than a veto-veto precisely in order to avoid the political spectacle which Doug suggests as bold new territory in S3. Doug’s comment does conflict with the education bill referenced in S2e4, but does not conflict with the actions taken (or rather, not taken) concerning the Acme-brand DOMA.
Conspicuousness by Absence: Mendoza
A running subplot of the first season (and the core of one of TWW’s best episodes and IMO one of the great comedic episodes of any hour-long drama to date) was the confirmation of Roberto Mendoza to the Supreme Court. The characters considered Mendoza to be worth several months of plot-inducing drama because he reflected their reluctantly-but-oft-ignored liberal values.
……OR DID HE?!?!?
JOSH: We've got centrists [on SCOTUS]. We've got 6 of them plus 2 staunch conservatives plus Justice Ashland. The one clarion voice articulating a liberal vision. He's going to go and then what? (S5 ep 17)
I’m not quite sure that this counts as a continuity error per se, since Josh is offering an analysis of the status quo rather than verifiable fact. It’s plausible that Josh and the characters he’s conversing with think that Mendoza shifted to the center in the four years since his confirmation, or that Ashland and his potential replacement Lang are liberal like, you know, I’m liberal, and so they could potentially make Mendoza look centrist by comparison. (This second explanation raises the haunting question of what kind of knuckle-dragging fascist Harrison the “moderate” first choice for Mendoza’s seat was, but let’s just spare ourselves those nightmares.) However, that kind of judicial drift is the kind of thing they’d consider before deciding on their strategy at the end of the episode. Perhaps Mendoza retired or died and was replaced and the audience just didn’t hear about any of this, but that seems even less likely. By and large, this episode suggests that the characters (ie, the narrative) have forgotten about Mendoza, whose appointment was one of the crowning achievements of their first term. If nothing else, the omission is distracting and that distraction serves no purpose to the episode.
So yeah, I’d say this comes close enough to discontinuity to be an episode with questionable continuity. Like Doug’s comment above, this isn’t something that has any bearing on the quality of the episode, though in this case because it was a terrible episode which so perverted the politics of the bench as to be irresponsible, given the amount of credibility The West Wing had built up as a sometime venue of civic education. Overstating or fixating on the questionable continuity in criticism of the episode would still be far beside the point.
What’s not a continuity problem is that they haven’t spent the past four years stopping conversations whenever they mention an issue before SCOTUS and say “hey, wonder how Mendoza’d rule on this?” or “wow, remember all those kooky hijinks we got into with Mendoza?” or whatever. A little continuity nod like that can be fun for the audience, but it is not a requirement for a ‘verse with internal logical consistency.
Check the fine print: The 25th
As Doug’s discussion of the Executive Powers section shows, the Constitution in the West Wing ‘verse shares a great deal with the actual US Constitution. That said, seems to be a consistent truth in the West Wing ‘verse that their 25th amendment does not have Section 4 of the real 25th, which provides a fairly clear procedure for the transfer of executive authority if the president is alive but incapacitated and has not signed power over to the VP. When characters make a fuss about the transfer of authority after Rosslyn, this is not a problem with the ‘verse. It’s a perfectly acceptable dramatic departure from reality, just as the altered election schedule is. Everyone agrees on it; if you woke up in the WW-‘verse you could go check out a copy of the Constitution and read the 25th for yourself.
This is also a good time to talk about when Watsonian analysis becomes particularly useful to keeping our eye on the ball concerning continuity. Neither Danny’s (RUDE AS FUCK) nagging about “who was in CHARGE?!??!” or Toby’s rant about Leo’s level of influence constituting a “coup d’etat” actually call into question Hoynes’ authority, because an Acting President would be expected to ensure as much continuity with the President’s wishes as possible, and Hoynes knew that he could do that best by listening to Leo. That’s how the system is supposed to work, in any world, in order to prevent destabilizing actions taken by a person whose executive authority is limited and short-lived. Whether or not this was an authorial lapse in logic (which is not, like, completely out of the realm of possibility, GIVEN) it creates no discontinuity within the ‘verse, since Toby’s commentary comes at a time when Toby is actually pissed about something else, and Danny’s job depends on his being a shit-stirring troll. Those are distortions and misconceptions that real people might make or have and so would be silly to fixate on even if they didn’t occur in two of the show’s more famously impressive character-driven episodes.
Most of the stuff that makes up this WW ~continuity guide~ is pretty silly, because most of it consists of the kind of liberties we take in day-to-day speech: ie, Bartlet being specific about having met Abby 32 years ago but referring to an ex of hers as being someone she dated “thirty” years ago, because he cares less about that, or easy-to-explain changes in circumstance, such as how "the AG was black and now he's white" just means that the AG resigned and was replaced.
Point being, continuity expectations should not be built around “we the audience with a wiki open in front of us want to hear X,” they should be built around basic rules of logic (often seeming “paradoxes” can be easily resolved with the tiniest bit of thought), and around the fact that the vast majority of characters are unreliable narrators. People can be forgetful, imprecise or uninformed, and remember, everybody lies. I’m leaning hard on the idea of multiple sources and their likelihood of being forthcoming because I think that should be the standard: you wouldn’t make an important decision IRL if you could not verify critical information outside of one person’s commentary, particularly if that person’s trustworthiness is in question. (In case I’m being too oblique, “Drunky McCrazyEyes didn’t write it that way in his diary” is IMO not sufficient evidence to sustain a valid continuity conflict.) And crucially, there has to be actual conflict, not just “I’ve never heard of this before, so it can’t possibly be accurate!”
Most important to note is that despite a couple of instances of questionable continuity or outright discontinuity, The West Wing was still a great show. No amount of pedantic harping on vetoes or appointments to the bench negates the quick and fun dialogue, the impressive feat of making politics and public policy accessible and even emotionally engaging to a mass audience, or the heart-twisting observation that babies come with hats. It’s fun trivia, but not often much more than that, and if this kind of silly stuff is make-or-break to your enjoyment of something, you don’t like it very much anyway.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/331439.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.