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I love Sarah Connor, if not like family, then like I love Batman, Robin Hood, Morgan le Fay (the modern revisionist one who's somewhat screwed over, not the bad babe temptress of the middle ages), Elizabeth Bennet and Viola.
I'm rather pissed off at the SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES tonight, however, despite an episode that was really brilliantly acted and very well-written. And the thing is it comes down to something the head writer said in a podcast which was a deliberate attempt at misdirection.
We've seen this game before - most recently with Ron Moore and the big fake-out over Starbuck. In March in 2007, I wrote this about it:
What is important is that you are always conscientious as a creator to give your audience all the information they need to reach the same point in the story as your characters - how well or poorly you do this is a question of talent and skill - just look at Shakespeare. But if you try to be coy with your audience, you not only risk losing their attention (either because they're confused or they're pissed off or some combination of both) you risk losing the thread of your own narrative.
For example, the story about a girl who shoots the bad guy who's menacing her is a different story from the one about a girl who is rescued when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and shoots the bad guy who's been menacing her is a different story from the one about girl who is about to shoot the bad guy menacing her when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and pulls the trigger is a different story from the one about the girl who believes she's shot the bad guy who was menacing her only to discover that her gun was loaded with blanks and it was Colonel Plumb with the parlour with a candlestick. The corollary to the principle that you always show the gun in the first act is that once you've shown the gun, you must use it - if you lead your audience to expect a certain result (our heroine shoots the bad guy) you take a risk if you choose not to meet those expectations.
However, that can still be a valid and interesting choice but you as writer need to be aware that your audience (let alone your characters - a post for another time) will react very differently to the ending where your heroine saves herself as opposed to the ending where she is saved. In dramatic narratives, the narrative is meant to create a specific emotional response from the audience be it triumph or tragedy, which is why expectation matters. If you build up your audience to believe that the heroine will pull the trigger and, in that final moment, a shot rings out behind her and we pull back to see the dashing detective emerge from the shadows, a smoking gun in his hand, you've created an expectation that has not been met. Even if the bad guy is still dead on the floor and the heroine and the dashing detective still drive off into the sunset, there is still that unmet expectation to be addressed.
Some writers use unmet expectations to create a specific mood but most, in my experience, don't seem to understand the difference between manipulating an audience's mood and a bait and switch. David Fincher's Zodiac is an excellent example of the former, a police procedural that ends with the same frustrating ambiguity as the real-life investigations into the Zodiac killings. It is a disturbing and unsettling movie, in large measure precisely because it fails to meet our expectation that, at the end of last reel, we'd see the forces of goodness triumphant and order restored. Sunday's episode of Battlestar Galactica is, despite some of the best performances of the season, the one of the latter, I think - the narrative equivalent of taking away the football after your audience has committed to punting.
Even if it all does turn out to be a ploy to foil Internet spoiler hounds on Ron Moore's part, he's sacrificed a big chunk of his audience's faith in his storytelling - your team may, in the end, wind up with a touchdown but your kicker will still remember what it felt like to thud against the deck and will be just that little bit more tentative on the next play.
Trust between people is hard enough to repair when you can talk face to face. Trust between storytellers and audiences is far flimsier and, in my experience, once lost, gone for good. Caveat scriptor.
I was lead to expect one thing - in part based on the writer's comments in the podcast, which kind of makes it that much more annoying because I really do know better - and those expectations were not met. And even though I find the idea itself fascinating, the execution of the reveal and the fact that it took five episodes of more of less stagnant character interactions to get us here is decidedly unsatisfying. Moreover, the reveal itself only raised more questions about why the characters are acting they way they are rather than answering them.
I hate being wrong, I really do, but I love being surprised. The flip side of that is that the surprise has to be a true surprise, not monkeywrenched into place at the expense of logic or characterization. Tonight's episode, or rather this story arc, so far seems to have tossed both to the wind in favour of some fairly questionable melodrama.
I really want TSCC to prove me wrong on this one. Let there be a third act out there that squares this circle because right now, fellas, you're spinning your wheels as far as I'm concerned. Win me back. I'm easy.
Just ask Farscape.
I'm rather pissed off at the SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES tonight, however, despite an episode that was really brilliantly acted and very well-written. And the thing is it comes down to something the head writer said in a podcast which was a deliberate attempt at misdirection.
We've seen this game before - most recently with Ron Moore and the big fake-out over Starbuck. In March in 2007, I wrote this about it:
What is important is that you are always conscientious as a creator to give your audience all the information they need to reach the same point in the story as your characters - how well or poorly you do this is a question of talent and skill - just look at Shakespeare. But if you try to be coy with your audience, you not only risk losing their attention (either because they're confused or they're pissed off or some combination of both) you risk losing the thread of your own narrative.
For example, the story about a girl who shoots the bad guy who's menacing her is a different story from the one about a girl who is rescued when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and shoots the bad guy who's been menacing her is a different story from the one about girl who is about to shoot the bad guy menacing her when the dashing detective steps across the threshold and pulls the trigger is a different story from the one about the girl who believes she's shot the bad guy who was menacing her only to discover that her gun was loaded with blanks and it was Colonel Plumb with the parlour with a candlestick. The corollary to the principle that you always show the gun in the first act is that once you've shown the gun, you must use it - if you lead your audience to expect a certain result (our heroine shoots the bad guy) you take a risk if you choose not to meet those expectations.
However, that can still be a valid and interesting choice but you as writer need to be aware that your audience (let alone your characters - a post for another time) will react very differently to the ending where your heroine saves herself as opposed to the ending where she is saved. In dramatic narratives, the narrative is meant to create a specific emotional response from the audience be it triumph or tragedy, which is why expectation matters. If you build up your audience to believe that the heroine will pull the trigger and, in that final moment, a shot rings out behind her and we pull back to see the dashing detective emerge from the shadows, a smoking gun in his hand, you've created an expectation that has not been met. Even if the bad guy is still dead on the floor and the heroine and the dashing detective still drive off into the sunset, there is still that unmet expectation to be addressed.
Some writers use unmet expectations to create a specific mood but most, in my experience, don't seem to understand the difference between manipulating an audience's mood and a bait and switch. David Fincher's Zodiac is an excellent example of the former, a police procedural that ends with the same frustrating ambiguity as the real-life investigations into the Zodiac killings. It is a disturbing and unsettling movie, in large measure precisely because it fails to meet our expectation that, at the end of last reel, we'd see the forces of goodness triumphant and order restored. Sunday's episode of Battlestar Galactica is, despite some of the best performances of the season, the one of the latter, I think - the narrative equivalent of taking away the football after your audience has committed to punting.
Even if it all does turn out to be a ploy to foil Internet spoiler hounds on Ron Moore's part, he's sacrificed a big chunk of his audience's faith in his storytelling - your team may, in the end, wind up with a touchdown but your kicker will still remember what it felt like to thud against the deck and will be just that little bit more tentative on the next play.
Trust between people is hard enough to repair when you can talk face to face. Trust between storytellers and audiences is far flimsier and, in my experience, once lost, gone for good. Caveat scriptor.
I was lead to expect one thing - in part based on the writer's comments in the podcast, which kind of makes it that much more annoying because I really do know better - and those expectations were not met. And even though I find the idea itself fascinating, the execution of the reveal and the fact that it took five episodes of more of less stagnant character interactions to get us here is decidedly unsatisfying. Moreover, the reveal itself only raised more questions about why the characters are acting they way they are rather than answering them.
I hate being wrong, I really do, but I love being surprised. The flip side of that is that the surprise has to be a true surprise, not monkeywrenched into place at the expense of logic or characterization. Tonight's episode, or rather this story arc, so far seems to have tossed both to the wind in favour of some fairly questionable melodrama.
I really want TSCC to prove me wrong on this one. Let there be a third act out there that squares this circle because right now, fellas, you're spinning your wheels as far as I'm concerned. Win me back. I'm easy.
Just ask Farscape.
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