The trouble with taking over the world
Finally getting around to watching the fourth season of Being Human UK. I liked a lot of individual episodes, but the entire season is based on several narrative tropes that really irritate me:
1. Prophecies. Meh.
2. Time paradoxes. Unless they're done really, really well, they disintegrate if you think about them too hard.
3. The vampires-conquer-the-world thing.
In the penultimate episode of the season, Eve shows Annie a dystopian future where vampires rule the world by keeping humans in camps, banning pregnancy (wtf? Why are you preventing your food supply from breeding?) and generally making like pretend Nazis. The problem with all this is...
Why the heck would the future vampires need to do this?
They already exist comfortably, killing pretty much whoever and whenever they like. They control police departments and government officials - will a very little work, they could control entire governments. Maybe they do. I can see individual vampires (especially younger ones) being egotistical enough to want more open power, but the Old Ones have been around for a long time and when you're immortal, do you really have the same sort of desperate need to be noticed?
Being Human vampires are.... well, really kind of rubbish, powers-wise. They're immortal and vicious, but that's about it. They can't control minds, save by ordinary threats and blackmail. They can't turn into bats or mist or leap tall buildings in a single bound. The show is really inconsistent about whether they're stronger than humans. And comparatively speaking, there aren't that many of them. Honestly, the minute they come out in the open, humanity would kick their pasty asses. (I found it really, really hard to buy that all humans everywhere would just sit compliantly by and wait to be saved.) Plus there's the essential idiocy of the vampires going on a crusade to wipe out their own food supply. They'd benefit far more by remaining hidden and controlling things behind the scenes, as they appear to have been doing for thousands of years.
Cutler's idea made more sense than what the future flash-forwards showed.
The whole setup made me think, oddly, of Cabin In the Woods, and Children of Earth. Both were also based on the premise that in order to save the world, you have to sacrifice an innocent, and there is no third choice. And for all that Cabin was the least 'serious' of these various productions, and certainly had its flaws, it was the only one that convinced me that there really was no third choice, and the world really was doomed without the sacrifice. Usually in such cases, either the heroes find an out at the last minute (as with The Gift) or they go the grimdark ~edgy~ route of COE and then have the heroes brood angstily about it. CitW took the truly unusual step of having the heroes say fuck this noise and opt out of the whole business, because if that's what it takes to save the world, is the world worth saving? I wasn't all that thrilled with CitW when I first saw it (slasher movies are not my thing, even when they're being subverted) but the more I think about it, if humanity can't get off its lazy ass and save itself from pretty rubbishy vampires without sacrificing babies, maybe it deserves to be eaten.
Rants Talk to me
1. Prophecies. Meh.
2. Time paradoxes. Unless they're done really, really well, they disintegrate if you think about them too hard.
3. The vampires-conquer-the-world thing.
In the penultimate episode of the season, Eve shows Annie a dystopian future where vampires rule the world by keeping humans in camps, banning pregnancy (wtf? Why are you preventing your food supply from breeding?) and generally making like pretend Nazis. The problem with all this is...
Why the heck would the future vampires need to do this?
They already exist comfortably, killing pretty much whoever and whenever they like. They control police departments and government officials - will a very little work, they could control entire governments. Maybe they do. I can see individual vampires (especially younger ones) being egotistical enough to want more open power, but the Old Ones have been around for a long time and when you're immortal, do you really have the same sort of desperate need to be noticed?
Being Human vampires are.... well, really kind of rubbish, powers-wise. They're immortal and vicious, but that's about it. They can't control minds, save by ordinary threats and blackmail. They can't turn into bats or mist or leap tall buildings in a single bound. The show is really inconsistent about whether they're stronger than humans. And comparatively speaking, there aren't that many of them. Honestly, the minute they come out in the open, humanity would kick their pasty asses. (I found it really, really hard to buy that all humans everywhere would just sit compliantly by and wait to be saved.) Plus there's the essential idiocy of the vampires going on a crusade to wipe out their own food supply. They'd benefit far more by remaining hidden and controlling things behind the scenes, as they appear to have been doing for thousands of years.
Cutler's idea made more sense than what the future flash-forwards showed.
The whole setup made me think, oddly, of Cabin In the Woods, and Children of Earth. Both were also based on the premise that in order to save the world, you have to sacrifice an innocent, and there is no third choice. And for all that Cabin was the least 'serious' of these various productions, and certainly had its flaws, it was the only one that convinced me that there really was no third choice, and the world really was doomed without the sacrifice. Usually in such cases, either the heroes find an out at the last minute (as with The Gift) or they go the grimdark ~edgy~ route of COE and then have the heroes brood angstily about it. CitW took the truly unusual step of having the heroes say fuck this noise and opt out of the whole business, because if that's what it takes to save the world, is the world worth saving? I wasn't all that thrilled with CitW when I first saw it (slasher movies are not my thing, even when they're being subverted) but the more I think about it, if humanity can't get off its lazy ass and save itself from pretty rubbishy vampires without sacrificing babies, maybe it deserves to be eaten.
Rants Talk to me