How not to end a TV Series

Matthew Fox as Jack in the final shot of the Lost finale. Photo courtesy of ew.com.

The AV Club just ran a very interesting article that dealt with the problems inherent in sustaining the momentum of fantasy series like A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time, as well as the tricky proposition of ending such a series. The article is a response both to fan criticism of the glacis pace at which George R.R. Martin is producing ASOIAF and Neil Gaiman's reaction to that criticism, which came in the form of an essay called "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch."

The situation in which Martin currently finds himself is one familiar to many authors and fans of long-running fantasy series. It also happens to be extremely relevant to fans of serialized, mythology-heavy TV shows with unsatisfying ending, like Battlestar Galactica (which I just finished watching) and Lost (the finale of which I can finally talk about without vomiting from rage). There are a number of parallels between these two shows and various literary fantasy series, and I think these parallels can help explain why the finales of Lost and BSG were so explosively bad.

One of the problems that author Zack Handler brings up in the AV club piece is the issue of a series ending up much longer than originally planned because of a writer's tendency to "get lost inside his work." This was a huge issue at various points during Lost's run, most notably during the pointless Hydra station arc in season three and "Stranger in a Strange Land," a.k.a. that episode where Bai Ling gives Jack his tattoos and the audience takes a nap.

These particular irrelevancies remind me of So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, the fourth book in Douglas Adams' other wise fantastic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. The book isn't as bad as "Stranger in a Strange Land," but it is just as pointless. Most of the characters we've come to adore - Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android - are completely absent, and in their place we get Arthur and his new girlfriend Fenchurch having sex on the wing of an airplane. The one or two relevant facts we learn could have been introduced in the next book, perhaps at the moment when we learn that, between the two volumes, Fenchurch has died, rendering So Long even more pointless than it already appeared.

The previous problem was not necessarily the fault of the Lost writers - at that point in the series' run the show had no end date, so Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were actually trying to stall the plot. Lost's biggest problem was the finale, which Cuse and Lindelof can blame on no one but themselves (just as Ron Moore is solely responsible for the clusterfuck that was the BSG finale). The flaws of these two finales are eerily similar, and they boil down to two fundamental issues: an attempt by the writers to wrap up every individual character arc at the expense of the larger issues, and a solution to the show's ongoing mysteries that throws the complexity of the series out the window in favor of a sudden descent into religion-fueled, pseudo-philosophical mysticism.

I should probably mention here that I don't have a problem with the religious aspects of these shows, which were present from the beginning. I do, however, have a problem with grafting a simplified religious ending onto a complex, multifaceted TV series and pretending that it explains everything. In particular, both finales contained an ultimate message of faith trumping science and reason. I've talked about BSG's anti-intellectual streak before, but it bears repeating that the ultimate "faith is good, science is bad" conclusion is a disservice to the four seasons that BSG spent exploring the complexities of faith, the dangers of dogmatism and the horrors of conflict driven by religion, instead replacing these issues with an inane warning to be afraid of dancing robots.

The Lost finale did exactly the same thing a year later, which I can only explain using the following imaginary conversation:

LINDELOF: Hey Carlton, did you check out that BSG finale?

CUSE: Yeah! I loved how they discarded the complexity of the whole series and boiled everything down to a simple pro-faith, anti-technology message!

LINDELOF: I know! We should totally do the same thing.

CUSE: Awesome idea! And while we're at it, let's ruin Jacob's evocative cork metaphor by putting a literal fucking cork in the island!

LINDELOF: We are going to win so many awards for this.

What I'm trying to say here is that Cuse and Lindelof resolved one of the most interesting conflicts on the show - the tension between science and faith, as personified by Jack and Locke - by giving Jack a religious conversion, just as BSG did with Gaius Baltar. This not only cheapened six seasons of rich dialogue about the nature of science and faith, it spat in the face of viewers who feel science to be useful and who, for whatever reason, don't happen to be among the faithful.

I wouldn't have had such a problem with the religious aspects of these finales, however, if they had actually helped to explain the shows' larger mysteries. Instead, the writers ignored the mysteries in favor of resolving every character's arc. I'm certainly not saying they should have completely ignored the character arcs - it was nice to see Sawyer and Juliet's sideways-world reunion and Helo and Athena's happy new life with Hera - but all the focus on these arcs meant there was no time to answer the many other questions raised over the series' runs. I for one would have liked to find out more about the Island's electromagnetic properties, or the importance of the Opera House beyond having Gaius and Caprica carry Hera all of three feet into the CIC.

Admittedly, it was always going to be absurd to expect the writers to answer every question and please every fan. Hell, even the final book of the classic fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia suffered from the same problems discussed above. Narnia is actually worse in some ways, particularly the fashion in which C.S. Lewis condemns Susan because she was a teenage girl interested in - god forbid! - boys and makeup. (If you haven't thought through the implications Susan's fate before, I highly recommend Gaiman's short story "The Problem of Susan," although you probably shouldn't read it if you don't want to hate Lewis). Ending a mythologically complex series is hard, and very few people have ever managed to do it successfully. I'm still angry about the resolution of Lost, but I can understand the kind of pressure Cuse and Lindelof were under. I just wish they had worried less about placating the fans, and more about crafting an ending as groundbreaking as the series that led to it.

In conclusion: pray for Fringe, because trust me, they're going to need it.

Zombies on TV: White Walkers and Walking Dead

A White Walker from the first episode of Game of Thrones. Photo courtesy of screened.com.

Recently, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about zombies. That's not to suggest that I don't always spend a lot of time thinking about zombies, as I am the sort of crazy person who puts together contingency plans for the zombie apocalypse in my spare time and really want to own these real (!) Kabar zombie knives in case of a worldwide catastrophe. (I'm only sort of kidding about that.) I've been reading Simon Pegg's excellent memoir Nerd-do-well, and musings on his obsession with the films of George A. Romero (reflected in his own Shaun of the Dead), and the way Pegg uses his critical film background to pick apart the zombies in these films inspired me to do some picking of my own.

To my mind, the interesting thing about zombies is the fact that they are pretty much the only completely inhuman, unsympathetic horror trope left in our culture. Vampires, werewolves, witches and serial killers have all been humanized to the point where we feel bad about killing them; even robots and aliens (as seen, respectively, in Battlestar Galactica and District 9) are thinking, reasoning beings who deserve a fair trial at the very least. Zombies, however, are nothing more than an unfeeling, bloodthirsty mass. You can't reason with a zombie in the same way you can't reason with a blizzard, the only difference being that a blizzard isn't actively trying to eat you.

The sheer inhumanity of zombies is one reason, I think, that they don't appear on television all that often. Movies can be largely driven by visual spectacle, while a TV series requires at least some sort of interesting character interaction in order to keep a viewing audience from week to week. Thus, the two TV shows that do include zombies - The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones - do it by, respectively, adding drama through conflict amongst the survivors and making the creatures a vague threat rather than a pressing issue.

The Walking Dead is a fairly straight-up zombie story, along the lines of Romero's excellent Dead trilogy or more recent offerings like 28 Days Later. As such, it isn't particularly interesting to analyze according to the Romero Zombie Framework (or, as I will be calling it from here on out, the RZF), because the parallels are all there on the surface. However, the White Walkers in Game of Thrones present a much less obvious, but equally fascinating point of RZF analysis. This analysis will, hopefully, shed some light on the role of the White Walkers in the symbolic framework of Game of Thrones, as well as convince any doubters out there that they can, in fact, be classified as zombies (as if the above picture couldn't do that for you).

Critics have read many different things into Romero's films over the years, particularly Night of the Living Dead and the masterful Dawn of the Dead. The most common view is that the zombies in Night represent some combination of Russian communism and anxiety over Vietnam, while the creatures in the shopping mall-set Dawn are representative of the dangers of mindless consumerism. In Pegg's Shaun of the Dead the zombies are satirical, notable for how closely they resemble their non-zombified counterparts in modern Britain. A major question, then, is what the zombified White Walkers symbolize in the world of the Seven Kingdoms. I'll get back to that question later, as the answer relies on another issue that often comes up in the existing zombie literature and the RZF: the question of infighting amongst the non-zombie contingent.

Despite what I said before about zombie films often being driven by visual spectacle, a fraught relationship between a group of survivors is a mainstay of zombie media. In Night of the Living Dead the conflict falls out along racial lines, as the bigoted white characters object to the fact that Ben, a black man, has become the de facto leader of their group. In Dawn of the Dead, the conflict is between the group of survivors who have taken over the shopping mall and made it their own safe haven and a biker gang that wants in. More recent zombie movies often intensify this conflict: Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later features a group of soldiers who are arguably more frightening than the zombies, as they rescue the main characters only so that they can rape the females in the group, one of whom is only a child. As film scholar Stephen Harper puts it, these films "incessantly pose the question - who is the enemy?"

There are strong parallels to be found here with the White Walkers. During the final episode of the season, Lord Commander Mormont scolds Jon Snow for wanting to leave the Night's Watch and help his brother in his war against King Joffrey, telling him that the fight for survival happening at the Wall is much more important than the fighting over the Iron Throne. The power struggles of Westeros are hurting the Watch's attempts to protect the kingdom, as the focus on political infighting has prevented those in power to see the true importance of the Wall. This parallels the way in which the fight between the mall survivors and the biker gang in Dawn ultimately leads to the deaths of most of the characters - while Game of Thrones viewers don't yet know the outcome of the fight with the White Walkers, it can be assumed that attention from the kingdoms' rulers could only help the effort.

While zombies are always a threat, they are also often representative of any oppressed minority in society. The violence against the zombies becomes a metaphor for power relations, as the deaths of the zombies in Night are presented using imagery that is strikingly similar to footage of both the war in Vietnam and the lynching of black Americans. Very similar imagistic parallels are drawn in Game of Thrones. In order to destroy the Walker that threatens Mormont, Jon Snow sets the creature on fire, an image that echoes Daenerys' execution of the witch who killed her child and Tywin Lannister's orders to have Ser Gregor Clegane "burn the riverlands." Harper argues that these parallels prevent the audience from ever feeling fully comfortable with the death of the zombies, and the same could be argued for the White Walkers.

There is an interesting dichotomy at work here. As I mentioned earlier, zombies are one of the few villains left who are seen as purely malevolent and inhuman. Scott Niall, in his book Monsters and the monstrous; metaphors of enduring evil says the same thing, arguing that the defining characteristic of a zombie is the absence of "its essential self - its human soul." Harper, however, points out that Fran, when looking at the zombies trying to get in to the mall in Dawn, says aloud, "They're us." How, then, can we reconcile the inhumanity - the soullessness - of these creatures with their role as metaphors for downtrodden groups?

Harper claims that the parallels between zombie and human serve to humanize the zombies. However, I would argue that, at least in the context of Game of Thrones, these parallels serve the opposite purpose: they zombify the humans. Is the soulless, ruthless way in which the White Walkers kill really that different from Joffrey's execution of Ned? If anything, the Walkers are less malevolent than Joffrey, because they do not take pleasure in their kills the way he does. They are indifferent to the deaths they cause, just as they are indifferent to the politics of Westeros and the name of the man who sits on the Iron Throne.

This cold indifference is the key point that, for me, defines the role of the White Walkers on the show. Unlike in Romero's films, the Walkers do not represent a downtrodden minority, or a societal fear such as consumerism or communism. The Walkers represent something much more elemental: they are nature, at her coldest and most uncaring. They are the blizzard and the snows, they are the long nights, they are the winter that is inexorably coming. They are the ice in A Song of Ice and Fire.

If I had to guess how George R.R. Martin's saga ultimately ends - and I am doing this based entirely on the TV show - I would predict that the final showdown will be a literal translation of the title of the series. The ice - the White Walkers - will face off against the fire. Ultimately, only Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons will be able to protect Westeros. The White Walkers have not been seen in thousands of years, and they are threatening to return now that there is no longer a Targaryan on the Iron Throne. For all the realism of Westeros, I can't help think that the final outcome will hinge on something much more mythic, and the mythic is where the zombies come in.

Works Cited

Harper, Stephen. "Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic." Bright Lights Film Journal 50 (2005). n. pag. Web. November 2005.

Harper, Stephen. "Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero's Dawn of the Dead." Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture: 1.2 (2002). n. pag. Web. Fall 2002.

Niall, Scott. Monsters and the monstrous; myths and metaphors of enduring evil. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2007. Print.

"Game of Thrones" Controversy: Is Fantasy Just for Boys?

Mark Addy, Lena Headey and Jack Gleeson in HBO's Game of Thrones

Anyone who has watched television or been on the internet in the past few months has probably heard about HBO's luxurious and expensive adaptation of Game of Thrones, the first novel in George R.R. Martin's ongoing fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. Those who follow television news and gossip a little more carefully have probably heard about the controversy surrounding Ginia Bellafante's review of the series for the New York Times, specifically the way in which the author implies that fantasy series are "boy fiction," not for women, claiming that the many, many (many) sex scenes that appear in the first few episodes were placed there as "a little something for the ladies," and because "no woman alive would want to watch otherwise." Bellafante goes on to say that she has "never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to The Hobbit first," a statement which is not only completely irrelevant to the task at hand, which is reviewing a TV show and not pontificating on perceived gender differences, but which also demonstrates that she has an extremely limited group of female friends. I for one have never heard of Lorrie Moore, but I am a voracious lover of Tolkien who has, on several occasions, dressed up in a homemade elf costume just because I could.

Bellafante has also clearly never made the acquaintance of Ilana Teitelbaum, who wrote a brilliantly insightful article in the Huffington Post about the sexism inherent in Bellafante's article, namely the idea that women aren't bothered with watching fantasy, and would instead spend their time shoe shopping and watching Sex and the City. Indeed, in the opening paragraph of Bellafante's article (I'm going to stop calling it a review, because there is very little actual reviewing happening here), she says that the show's opening credits should come with a warning stating, "If you can't count cards, please return to reruns of Sex and the City." For the record, while I am a huge fantasy nerd, I also really enjoy stereotypical female activities like shoe shopping, spa days and lunches that include mimosas. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I'm not even going to go into all the sexism (aimed, oddly enough, at her own gender) contained in Bellafante's article, partly because Teitelbaum does the job much better than I ever could, and partly because I think it's fairly apparent in the aforementioned quotes. (Seriously though, just because someone happens not to like Game of Thrones doesn't automatically imply that they're a woman, and even if they are a woman, it doesn't automatically imply that they will be watching Sex and the City. They could be watching baseball, or Fringe, or Community.) Instead, I want to respond with my own opinions about Game of Thrones, the first episode of which I decided to watch before writing this post.

I should state that, because I am not a critic for any of your fancy newspapers, I did not get screener copies of the first six episodes of the season, so this review is based entirely on the pilot episode. Having noted that, I really liked the show. Scratch that: I LOVED it. Game of Thrones was well-written and well-acted, the production values were absolutely top-notch, and there was just enough sex and violence to provide a nice, gritty atmosphere without completely upstaging the plot, although the producers could have cut down a bit on the exposed breasts. Plus, there were zombies. Zombies! I particularly enjoyed the performances of Sean Bean as Lord Eddard Stark, a man torn between loyalty to his king and his family; Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf brother of Lena Headey's Queen Cersei who is witty, often drunk, fond of prostitutes, and much tougher than he looks; and the luminous, marvelous newcomer Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, descendent of the deposed king who is now being used a bartering tool by her nasty brother to get his kingdom back. Clarke perfectly captures Daenerys' innocence and fear, and her performance in the scene of her wedding to savage warlord Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) is mesmerizing.

Speaking of Daenerys and her forced marriage to Khal Drogo, the scene later in the episode in which she unwillingly consummates her marriage is a refutation of Bellafante's assertion that the sex was put into the series for the purpose of pandering to women. Even if all the sex in the episode was not in the books, which is most certainly was, there a three major sex scenes in the episode, and none are the sort that strike me, a woman, as being particularly sexy. They are: a scene in which Tyrion pays four prostitutes to have sex with him at once; Daenerys' consummation of her marriage, which is, to put it bluntly, rape; and a scene in which Queen Cersei is glimpsed having rather vigorous sex with her twin brother (not the dwarf, her other brother). These scenes are not titillating so much as degrading, and the first two in particular serve as a commentary on the place of the women in the fictional kingdom of Westeros and, by extension, the very real setting of medieval Europe.

There are certain small problems that I had with the series. The number of characters and their shifting allegiances confused me, and I don't know if I would have been able to follow had it not been for the assistance of my boyfriend, who has read A Song of Ice and Fire. The episode was also extremely expository, and while the exposition was well done, there's only so many times you can hear a character refer to another character as "my brother" or "my husband" without completely giving up on the verisimilitude of the thing. However, these were small quibbles, and I suspect that the second in particular will be resolved in a few episodes, after the audience has become better acquainted with the intrigue. I, for one, will definitely be watching the second episode come Sunday, and I can't wait to see where the series takes me. I might be a little late though; I have to get in some shoe shopping first.