Anthony Lee Collins

1) Doom Patrol is coming back. The current season (the fourth) was split into two parts, and for a long time it wasn’t clear if the second half was ever going to be shown. The episodes were completed, from what I’ve read, so the current strikes weren’t a factor. The series has been canceled (also from what I’ve read — these things are always in flux), but we wanted those final episodes.

And now they are (in theory) coming. I’ve said it before, I like some different shows, but there’s nothing like Doom Patrol.

 
2) I’m watching Wheel of Time (Season 2), and I’m enjoying it, but I’m realizing that I’m enjoying it at a distance. Based on what I’ve seen online, the fandom mostly consists of 1) devoted fans of the book series, who are either interested in or dismayed by (or violently opposed to) the ways the show’s story deviates from the books, and 2) people who have not read the books but who are captivated by the complex story and/or emotionally attached to one or more of the main characters.

The acting runs the gamut from very good to actually great. I’ve seen several people online declare that they are on “Team Liandrin,” and book readers point out how thoroughly evil Liandrin is, but Kate Fleetwood, who plays Liandrin, is riveting in every scene she’s in. This reflects how I watch the show: I’m not rooting for anybody in particular, or for the “good” characters or the “evil” characters. I’m here for the complexity and the mysteries and the design elements, and the acting.

 
3) Season 3 of The Witcher is over, and it was very satisfying. A lot of people didn’t like it (and many of them had made that decision before the season even started, for reasons which I have no interest in), but I enjoyed it. Not perfect (no season has been perfect so far), but I had a good time. I’m eager for Season 4, but production hasn’t started yet, and there are various strikes, of course, and viewership apparently tanked for Season 3, so I’m not holding my breath. (For example, a second season of The Peripheral was confirmed, and now it’s been canceled, and that’s happened to other shows, too.)

The difference, for me, compared to Wheel of Time is that with The Witcher I’m (very) attached to the main characters. I still tear up a little when Yennefer, who has wanted a child for many, many decades, bids farewell (possibly forever) to Ciri and kisses her (on her eyelid, apparently) and whispers, “I love you, my daughter.”

::sniff::

The point being that there a different ways to enjoy things, and, as I’ve talked about before, finding “relatable” characters to root for doesn’t work for everything. It’s not going to get you very far with Macbeth or King Lear or The Shining (or any Kubrick film, really) or Chinatown or Apocalypse Now.

Some days, it seems like everybody is watching House of the Dragon, or The Rings of Power, or both. And it definitely feels, on most days, like everybody is watching Marvel movies and shows.

(Of course, some days it seems like a lot of people are watching one or two or all three primarily in order to complain about them, but that’s a separate question. That’s not what this is about.)

I’ve read Lord of the Rings several times, starting back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Quite a satisfying end, actually. I saw the movies when they came out, and I’ve seen them since as well. Similarly: beginning, middle, and end. Very satisfying.

I don’t need more. I may have seen one of the Hobbit movies, but I don’t remember much of anything about it. There was a dragon, with the voice of a famous British actor.

I’ve seen a lot of Game of Thrones, including the end. Not as satisfying an ending as Lord of the Rings, but it was an ending. So, I’m done with that. Time for something else.

I was never as attached to the Marvel movies (except for Guardians of the Galaxy) as I am to Lord of the Rings, but Endgame was a big finale, so I’m mostly done with that whole thing also. (Well, except for Moon Knight, which was excellent.)

Once again, as usual, I have my finger very far from the pulse.

Even with The Witcher (which I’m still obsessed with), I’m mostly impatient for Season 3 to come out, but I haven’t seen the two spin-offs (one movie and one short series) yet, because they’re not about the same characters. Maybe that’s the problem in general. No Ser Davos or Ser Jorah, no Samwise (or Samwell), or Geralt or Yennefer or Cirilla? No thanks.

 
On a possibly related note, it occurred to me recently that I’ve never listened to the 10-minute version of Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well.” I really like the original (especially this version from the Grammy Awards show), but I don’t need 4.5 more minutes of it.

Actually, that’s probably different. I wrote a lot of songs, way back when, and a big part of the art of songwriting is editing and paring down and ruthlessly cutting. Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory” definitely applies to songwriting, as much as it does to short stories. I don’t need (or want) to read the stuff Hemingway trimmed from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

 
I have been watching The Peripheral, which is good so far. It works because the present day (near future) stuff in rural North Carolina and the future-future stuff in London are both interesting. There’s never that feeling when you’re in one location and timeline, and you’re just impatient to get back to the other one (at least for me).

I also saw the movie Amsterdam, which was really good. I want to see it again. The first time I saw it I was constantly distracted by all the familiar faces which kept popping up (“Hey, that’s Taylor Swift… Okay, she’s gone.”). It was written and directed by David O. Russell, who also did American Hustle (which I liked) and I Heart Huckabees (which I liked more).

 
Later:

1) I thought of adding that nothing mentioned here compares to Doom Patrol, but it seemed unnecessary, but then I just read that the current season of Doom Patrol will be the last. Sigh.

2) I liked this article: “The Lore of the Rings,” particularly this paragraph:

This is an imperative of the contemporary franchise: everything must be connected somehow in an endless feedback loop (or ring). This is usually achieved through “fan service,” knowing winks and nods to characters and events the audience already knows, but an overreliance on such references seals the worlds off, and the air in them soon turns stale. There is no room for the organic happenstance of real life, for the inexplicable and strange, like Tolkien’s immortal weirdos Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, who were jettisoned from Jackson’s adaptation.

1) I used to read quite a few blogs by aspiring writers* (back before that blog world was swallowed up by social media), and there were always “helpful” bits of “wisdom” being thrown around, like “adverbs = bad” and “kill your darlings” (in other words, whatever you most love in your story, take it out**) and “never have a preface — always start in medias res” and “if there’s a gun, it has to go off at some point” and so on.

All of these are interesting, more or less, and all of them are easily refuted by great novels by great writers.

Another one was that the key to any story is conflict (the more the better), so I was glad to read this:

Without quite knowing why, I’ve always disliked the truism that conflict is drama’s fundamental ingredient. Yes, we fight and cajole and coax and settle scores: that’s our species, and it’s frequently how we show ourselves onstage. But this bit of craft wisdom—conflict is king—is the handmaiden of a paranoid anthropology, and a limited way of thinking about action and speech. We humans do much more than struggle, will against will. And our talk isn’t strictly coefficient with our need to act upon or influence others for our own ends. Often, to the contrary, it springs from a mysterious overflow of unbidden feeling, more a free gift of sound and syntax—of humor, of love—than a blunt instrument of acquisition. [From this review]

____________
* I frequently had to clarify that I myself am not an “aspiring” writer. I am exactly the type of writer I want to be, and my only aspiration is to get a bit better at it.
** “Be willing to kill your darlings, if necessary,” is actually tolerable advice.

 
2) Legends of Tomorrow was canceled — there will be no Season 8. Some people are really upset about this (particular because, with Batwoman being canceled at the same time, that’s a whole lot of diversity gone from the world of TV superheroes in one day), but I’m okay with it. With long-running TV shows, some people apparently want a final episode to wrap everything up, but I don’t. I prefer to think they whole story is still going on. Do you want Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to have a retirement party?

Besides, there was a “the Legends all retire” episode, it just wasn’t the last episode of the last season, which was a cliffhanger. It was the episode right before that. So, you can pick whichever ending you want.

 
3) Moon Knight is done, and I was really glad I subscribed to Disney+ to see it. Pleasantly, it did not depend on my having seen all the other Marvel movies and TV shows. I saw an article that said people are tweeting jokes about how much homework and research you have to do to really understand the new Dr. Strange movie.

The best part of the series was the fifth episode (of six) where the plot stopped completely to delve really deeply into the main character’s DID (dissociative identity disorder) and what caused it. Oscar Isaac (who plays Moon Knight) did an amazing job at showing the different alters and their history. I’ve seen videos by DID systems saying that this was, overall, a good representation of DID (compared to the usual, where there’s often one alter who’s a serial killer or something like that). Since I write (very obliquely) about DID, I’ve learned a lot from this myself.

Moon Knight may or may not get a second season or a movie, but the season we have ended well, and now I can cancel my Disney+ subscription and go back to focusing on The Witcher.

(And I’m thinking it may be time to watch the third season of Twin Peaks…)

I’ve had this blog for a while now.

(In fact, I just checked and I’ve made 965 published posts, dating back to 1999. Damn. That’s actually even more than I expected.)

One result of this longevity (and loquacity) is that I often run into earlier posts which I have no memory of writing (although, at least so far, I’ve never found any which I thought were completely wrong). Also, sometimes I remember writing on a specific topic, but then I can’t find the actual post.

I was thinking about this when I just searched for an earlier post about the benefits, and pleasures, of rereading things, but the post was, fortunately, easy to find: “On Rereading.” I thought of this in relation to the articles from the beginning of the pandemic about people yearning for more and more “content” to binge, as I talked about here.

I think I started watching The Witcher around the beginning of this year, and I’ve watched all eight episodes from the second season, but I’m still focused on it. I’ve watched multiple reaction videos to all the episodes, learning a lot from what other people see and don’t see in each one.

I think my next project will be to go back and watch the first season, which I’ve never seen.

I do not plan to read any of the Witcher books. If I like something enough, even an adaptation, I don’t need or want more information, or, possibly, contradictory information. One example is the movie Let the Right One In, which I like a lot. It’s based on a novel, which is apparently good, but the movie is nearly perfect, and any good story depends on what was left out. Why would I want to undo the (apparently correct) decisions which were made in creating the movie?

(Demonstrating my lack of interest in foolish consistency, however, there is a deleted scene in the movie Gosford Park which is definitely part of my headcanon version of the film. It was removed because it referred to the subplot of the murdered man’s will, but it does show a very nice reconciliation between two of the characters, and I like that.)

I’m finding that I like to have a TV show to follow. I guess it’s a replacement for the weekly comic books that I no longer buy.

Of course, I don’t have a TV, so it has to be on some sort of platform (is that the right word?) that I can get on a computer or a tablet (and without paying for Disney+, which I’m still resisting — they have too much content).

Last fall, for example, my TV schedule was too busy for my taste because Stargirl and Legends of Tomorrow and Wheel of Time were all cooking at once, but then Stargirl and WoT ended their seasons, and Legends took a mid-season break, so I decided to try The Witcher, mostly because some of my favorite reactors are following it (and it’s on Netflix, which I’m already paying for).

It’s a fantasy series, a bit like Wheel of Time, but more subtle in terms of “good” and “evil.” Everybody is much more ambiguous (though not to the level of Game of Thrones). Geralt, the main character, is a “witcher,” who kills monsters to protect people, but the monsters are complex, too.

As one character (a monster) says:

Monsters are more than just horrid looks and claws and teeth. Monsters are born of deeds done. Unforgivable ones.

I think my favorite thing in the show is that Geralt is now traveling with Ciri, a teenage princess who he’s sworn to protect, and it’s (gradually) becoming an interesting father-daughter relationship. It’s such a Disney cliche (with superheroes and Star Wars and so on) that heroes are orphans, or have big-time father issues, or at least one dead parent, or something like that.

Parents are not only compelling in absentia. Parents can be very interesting even if they’re actually around, which reminds me of a line from Moonrise Kingdom:

Suzy: I always wished I was an orphan. Most of my favorite characters are. I think your lives are more special.
Sam [an orphan]: I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Geralt and Ciri have a complex relationship, and it develops over time. Is the most important thing for him to protect her, or for her to learn to protect herself (in a very dangerous world)? If he does teach her to fight, who and what do you fight, and when, and why (as opposed to just worrying about the “how”)?

The story has season-long elements, but it’s also rather monster-of-the-week, which I’m fine with. Not everything needs to be, or should be, Game of Thrones (where there was a murder mystery introduced in the very first episode which wasn’t resolved until the seventh season when nobody was really thinking about it anymore). A series of individual stories which also link together as a longer unit — that’s my favorite (it should be — that’s what I do).

The negative aspect of it being on Netflix, of course, is that the entire season is made available all at once (serial stories should always make you wait), but so far I’ve been pacing out my watching of the episodes, so that’s almost as good.