Monday notes

[selenak]

Heroes having been cancelled has evoked grief from some of my flist and celebration from others. I said my personal goodbye to the show two seasons ago, and I never doubted I made the right decision, but I can't forgot how much I enjoyed watching it once upon a time, how I used to love the characters (well, Sylar excepted...), that it inspired me

Comments

[buffyannotater]

Heh, speaking of "resurrected," NBC has put out a statement that they are considering allowing Heroes to film a 2 hour TV movie next season to wrap it up.

[selenak]

I heard, but I won't watch either way.

[ponygirl2000]

Poor Heroes! It should be a lesson to all about how hard it is to capture lightning in a bottle, or possibly how creative talent needs to be nurtured, as the show truly lost its way after Bryan Fuller left the first time. I've never seen a show admit so often it had lost its way, and yet consistently find new ways to get lost again.

[selenak]

I don't think it was Bryan Fuller as such, because a show should be able to survive the loss of one of the scriptwriters. I mean, The West Wing made it through the loss of Aaron Sorkin, and he was a hell of a lot more essential to it than Fuller was to Heroes. Heroes & Tim Kring strike me more like the X-Files & Chris Carter, i.e. you have a show runner who has to come up with an arc when he clearly hasn't planned for one and isn't very good at improvising one, ending up in ever more illogical developments. Maybe if they'd stuck to Kring's original idea of rotating ensembles each year, i.e. one set of characters gets one season to tell their story, and that's it, the weaknesses of the creative team would have kept being balanced by their strengths. Ah well. What's done is done.

[zahrawithaz]

Just popping in to say how much I like your point about Bagoas in The Persian Boy. It really is a marvel in terms of putting the first-person narrator's view-point out there but never letting us forget how partial it is, and that there are other perspectives that may be truer. And it helps enormously with the fact that Renault had an improbably rosy-eyed view of Alexander herself; it works better from Bagoas's perspective than it would from an omniscient authorial one. (I'm told this is a large problem with her biography of Alexander, though I haven't read it.)

Renault really was a genius when it came to the first-person POV. The Last of the Wine never fails to amaze me with how quickly it sucks me into the perspective of someone from a very different time and era.

[selenak]

And it helps enormously with the fact that Renault had an improbably rosy-eyed view of Alexander herself; it works better from Bagoas's perspective than it would from an omniscient authorial one.

Yes yes yes. That's one reason why I'm in the minority who prefers The Persian Boy to Fire from Heaven, where we do get third person. And evil, almost child molester Demosthenes. It's entirely in character for Bagoas to dismiss the Athenians as unfair towards Alexander, but to have a third person narrative tell you the same thing irks me in a way Bagoas' understandable pro-Alexander bias does not.

[zahrawithaz]

That's a minority opinion? You're kidding. I enjoyed Fire from Heaven (and I appreciate its portrayal of bisexuality in a non-stereotypical manner), but The Persian Boy is so much better, especially on a technical level, and in large part because of the dueling perspectives you describe. I do not understand.

And oh yes, evil would-be molester Demonsthenes. Almost forgotten about that. *headdesk*

[selenak]

It's the Alexander/Hephaistion OTP 4EVER!!!! factor, I suspect. Since the main objections against The Persian Boy I saw were a) "Hephaistion doesn't have enough scenes", and b) "That Interloper Bagoas comes between the OTP".