Blue, Orange, Red, Grey... The Colours of Fringe.

Fringe ended last night in the UK (spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't seen it) so it seems to be an appropriate time for me to have a rant about a plot point that they've had this year and how it has irked me somewhat.


As viewers of the show will know, Fringe has featured a number of different 'universes' over the years, with each one differentiated by the colour of the opening titles. Blue was the 'normal' universe, Red was the alternate one, Grey was the future. This season they introduced a new Orange universe which resulted from Peter being removed from existence.


Of course he came back, but he was the only character with any memory of the Blue universe.

The Orange universe continued to be used for the rest of the season, making everything the viewer had learned about the characters and plot from the previous three seasons irrelevant. Sometimes. And sometimes that old stuff had happened. Since Peter had previous dealings with the Red universe, this meant that all the characters from 'over there' were also changed and you couldn't be certain about their histories either any more. Characters who were once dead were now alive, characters who were good were now evil, and so on.

In many ways it was a reboot of the series, in what can only be assumed was a desperate hope to attract new viewers.


I'd assumed that Blue would return after a few episodes, but it didn't. Orange has remained for the entire season, with no indication that it's ever going away. So now I'm scratching my head and wondering what the point was of watching seasons 1-3. Those characters (apart from Peter and Olivia who got her 'old' memory back) are gone, like the series ended and was replaced with something else.


It's the uncertainty that gets to me. I can't be certain what happened previously, and therefore can't be certain of anyone's motives or actions. It's definitely not rewarding the viewer who has stuck with the series since the beginning.


The Orange universe just seems like a convenient way to write off any unexplained plot points, or bits the writers perhaps just don't like any more, from earlier in the series.


Plus the orange credits look no where near as nice as the blue ones did.

Creator Rights

There's been a lot of kerfuffle in the press recently about the rights of comics creators over their, well, creations. We've had fights over Superman rights, Starlin annoyed about Thanos, Before Watchmen, various writers quitting DC and so on and so on... Indeed, it doesn't seem that a day goes by without someone else being rather annoyed that their not receiving their due (ie money) for their work.

The problem is that every single person has been paid exactly what their contract stated. Some of the contracts were a bit crappy, but the creators signed anyway.

While it would seem a good idea to pay Kirby (or his estate) a load of money for the work he did, paying out retrospectively like this throws up a thousand problems.

The main one is how much do you pay? Say DC & Marvel were suddenly feeling very generous and decided to give Kirby et al some money for the use of their character. Would a couple of $ do? How about $100? What about writers who only created a minor character? And the artists, surely they deserve something to? What about reinventions of characters? Drax the Destroyer, or example was created by Friedrich & Starlin but then had a drastic makeover during Marvel's Annihilation event. Starlin created Thanos, but was heavily influenced by New Gods so should we give Kirby a little something too regarding that character?

Storytelling will suffer. Say you now have to pay Bendis some money every time Maria Hill appears. The Marvel editorial staff will almost certainly demand that she no longer be written into stories. And if Bendis got a percentage from her appearing in the Avengers movie, then suddenly she'd be replaced with a very similar character, yet with enough difference so payment wouldn't be needed.

All of the characters created for DC & Marvel were 'work for hire', which is the main reason why the creators don't get paid anything beyond the wage they were paid at the time. The Big Two own the characters & everything else the creators did at the time.

...which makes it all very similar to every other job on the planet. If I go and work for a pharmaceutical company and help create a super drug to eliminate cancer, I wouldn't get a cut of the inevitable billions of dollars that that drug would make. I'd get paid my salary and that's it.

These days things are a little more improved. There are numerous creator-owned comics being published these days. If you work for DC & Marvel then everything you create belongs to them. Sounds bad, but then you do get to play around with a pool of characters which includes Superman, Iron Man etc.

And these days everyone is much more wary of the details before signing a contract.

This doesn't help the old guys, though. They still only received what they were paid at the time, back before anyone imagined $billion movies would result from their work. I do not think they will ever get anything more, it's just too much muddy water to sort out who deserves what. Time to learn from the past and ensure things are better for the future.

Prison Break: Where did it all go wrong?

The first in a series of posts about great TV shows which somewhere along the way turned truly terrible.


I came across Prison Break via a friend. He described it in a similar way as to how Homer Simpson described a certain blockbuster film...

There was a lot of 'these guys are in prison and they're trying to break out, then they break out and there's another prison and...'

Bless him.

Anyway, after a little research it seemed that almost everyone was raving about Prison Break. After a little more research I found out that they were only raving about the first couple of seasons. Apparently it was all downhill from season 3.

Eventually I got around to watching it. Not all of it - I'm still a couple of episodes away from the end - but I can see what 'people' meant about the drop in quality.

To be honest, I wasn't blown away by season 1. It was good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't amazing. Most of the problem was that it was very episodic. Start of the episode there'd be a problem with the break out of prison plan. They'd spend the whole episode solving the problem. End of the episode there'd be another problem. Repeat for every single episode that season.

Then there was the whole 'lawyer' thing, which was completely terrible. I didn't give a damn about the people outside the prison, that was dull & boring. The interesting stuff was the break out, not the conspiracy.

Season 2, on the other hand, was fantastic. They were on the run, people were being killed, you had no idea who'd live and who'd die. The lawyer stuff was gone & the conspiracy was now interesting.  Everything came to a head as the season ended and then...

There was some silly set up for another year.

Huh.

It should have ended there. The entire plot was more or less resolved but then it carried on. Obviously the writers didn't quite know how to progress the storyline, so with season 3 everyone is back in prison.

Hmm.

Actually, the prison bit wasn't really that bad. What was really bad was that at no point was the character - Whistler - that the evil company wanted the good guys to break out of prison, made clear whether he was good or evil. Fair enough, keep the audience guessing, but his motivation seemed to change so often that it didn't come across that even the writers knew who's side he was on. As a result I didn't really give a damn.

Season 2 resolved completely the plot surrounding the Evil Company controlling the president of the USA, possibly the most powerful person on the planet. In season 3 they're not trying to do this any more, which makes their plans seem a lot smaller from then on, when really as the story progresses the plans of the Big Bad ought to be getting bigger.

Thankfully the season was cut short due to the writer's strike. Unfortunately, Prison Break came back for season 4.

This didn't begin too badly. True, some of the set-up was a little... Well, it wasn't something a viewer ought to pay too much attention too because it didn't really make any sense. But at least there was a plot - bring down the company - and it rattled along a bit like MacGyver or Hustle, with a new mission every week building to a Big Mission.

And it was okay, until halfway through when the Big Mission was over...and then it all went silly again. The entire season's plot thus far was rendered pointless, at which point I wanted to give up watching. I didn't want to see how the characters moved forward from absolute bottom, as I suppose the writers intended, I simply wanted to stop.

Seasons 1 and 2 were heavily grounded in reality. True, a man having his entire escape plan tattooed all over his body doesn't sound too plausible, but it made a kind of sense. The entire escape plan made sense. It seemed reasonable. In season 4 we get a ridiculous amount of super technology. It's almost moving into sci-fi and certainly isn't a world I can relate to any more.

As I move into the final few episodes, things have gone Super Silly. With time running out for the series it seems they're throwing everything they can into it in a desperate attempt to make it exciting. Allegiances switched, people back from the dead, more super-tech, plot holes as big as craters...

It's all too much.

Prison Break should have ended after season 2. It was fantastic television up until that point. Sadly it seemed that upon conception of the show no one ever considered what would happen beyond the first couple of years and there simply wasn't enough story there to sustain the show for any longer. I've heard the counterargument - that a load of shows that do have a 5 year plan mapped out are cancelled early on. Things like Flash Forward or Carnivale, for example. But to me, that doesn't seem a good reason not to plan ahead. For every one of those shows cancelled before their time, there's a Babylon 5 which, against all the odds, managed to complete its entire planned run.

Stuck

So I've been working on my new book for a while now. I really can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but if I did it was quite a long time ago so you'll forgive me for briefly going over it again.

I've always wanted to write about a war from two different sides. First half of the book takes you through events from one side, then for the second half the perspective changes and you see events over again from the opposition. Who you thought were evil might not be quite so etc etc.

Anyway, I've reached a bit of an impasse. Things are not following quite as well as they might(/at all) and I really don't know at the moment how(/if) it's all going to come together in the end.

To summarise, I'm stuck.

So the question is, do I continue to hack away at it, desperately hoping that eventually I'll come across literary gold, or do I abandon it for the time being and come back fresh at a later date.

Of course abandoning it would create a new problem: what the hell do I write next? I have a notebook (yes, an actual book with paper in!) with some ideas scribbled on but none are particularly fantastic, and at worse cover stuff I've already written about elsewhere.

So there we have it. Deciding between two options, none of which are really that good.

Making it up as you go along

It's an old story, dating back to...a long time ago. I think it really became big during the X-Files -

TV shows with arc plots.

But not just that; when the show has been going for a while, developing a large and complex back story. Little inconsistencies begin to creep in between the episodes, flat-out errors appear, and you begin to wonder...

Are they just making all this up as they go along?


You - or at least most of the viewers - watch a show hoping that the creators are weaving an interesting tale to draw you back each week.  That's the idea - fill it full of mysteries that the viewers want an answer to so they'll keep watching.

But with the X-Files the answers didn't come. People got bored. And they got pissed off when things didn't make sense. Suddenly you've lost the 'hook' for the show, as people realise that there are no answers. There never were. The writers didn't have a history all planned out.

Take Lost. One of (I'm not saying the only) reasons people watched was to get answers to the mysteries.

The pilot, the creators admit, was pretty much made up without any thought to resolutions. I think it was part-way through season 3 that they realised that they had to stop introducing new stuff because it was cool and provide some answers before people became annoyed a la X-Files. But even then, whether you liked the finale or not, as you sit and mull it all over after wards you don't think 'well, that was a great journey' you wonder 'why couldn't any babies be born?' or 'what was the horse all about?' or any number of other things that weren't answered.

And then there's Babylon 5. JMS planned out a 5 year arc at the beginning. And, despite everything, he achieved it. It wasn't exactly what he set out to do, but it was pretty damn close. He thought ahead and realised that actors come and go and thus every character had to have a 'trapdoor' available so they could be written out if necessary (which happened on a few occasions).

Babylon 5 wove a rich and complex tale, covering thousands of years, with a beginning, middle and end. If this relatively little show could achieve it, why not some of its bigger TV brothers?

Captain Chair and the Lost Wand

Nate continued to stare at the screen for a good five minutes after it had ended.  It was only then that he was able to summon the strength to move his finger the centimetre required to hit the button on the remote and turn off the television.

“No.  Not another one of those things.  How low can they go?”

It was four weeks later.  Nate had attempted to put the trailer out of his mind, to pretend it didn’t exist.  But there was little chance of that.  The billboards were everywhere.  Every other commercial on the television seemed to be for it now.  Every website he visited had an advertising banner with COMING SOON emblazed across. The marketing budget for Captain Chair and the Lost Wand must have been huge – well, a lot more than the cost of making the damn film, if the previous instalments were anything to go by.

The fact that it had an internet premiere told you all you needed to.  High-quality, well-developed films didn’t have their premieres as streaming videos.

There had been a slight title change somewhere along the way.  Nate didn’t understand why a ‘lost’ wand would be more likely to attract an audience than a ‘magic’ one.  Maybe someone had just made a mistake typing it out, like with Tomorrow Never Lies or that video game which had nothing to do with donkeys.

“I don’t know why you take it so personally.”  Sat next to Nate in front of the computer, Caitlyn typed the URL into the web browser.  “It’s just a bit of fun.”

“Fun at the expense of a hero.  Someone who gives his all to protect this city.”

Caitlyn shook her head.  “Captain Chair must have a better sense of humour that you do.  You only have to look at that uniform…”

As she turned away to concentrate on the screen, Nate scowled.  A lot of work had gone into putting that uniform together.

“Where’s that link…ah.” Caitlyn clicked the mouse and there it was: a painful read and yellow eyesore that some trainee web designer appeared to have cobbled together in his lunch hour.  “I don’t understand why, if you hate these films so much, you insist on watching them with me.”

It was a good question: why did he watch?  The films (and the puppet show and the cartoon strip and…) caused Nate nothing but embarrassment, not that he could let on.  Other heroes didn’t have to suffer this, why him?  He could imagine all the others sitting round, laughing about it over a pint, at one of the hero socials he was certain took place but to which he had never been invited.

He glanced down to the clock in the bottom corner of the screen.  It was almost 8pm and starting to get dark.  He could go on patrol for a while instead.  Show that Captain Chair was something other than…than…whatever it was these films made him out to be.

But he had to watch.  He had to know.  Like it or not, these films were being made and were the public’s main source of information about him.

If only the studio would reach deeper into their pockets and hand out enough money to invest in a decent script.  And some better special effects.  And some actual actors.  And…

“It’s time,” said Caitlyn.  The screen had changed and replacing the trailer was the full-length monstrosity of a film.

“Come on then, let’s get this over with.”

Caitlyn nodded, moved the mouse across the screen and clicked ‘play’...

Rocky IV

I like Rocky IV. For a start, it's not Rocky V which is, well, it's pretty darn terrible. But Rocky IV has a couple of great scenes and, um, lots of montages.

Yeah, it must have taken Stallone about 2 minutes to write Rocky IV.

It starts - as with all Rockys - with a clip of the last few minutes of the previous film. Then Apollo and Rocky have a chat round a table. James Brown sings a song and we get the first fight. Then there are a whole bunch of musical sequences & training montages. And suddenly we're at the finale. Um, where did the rest of the film go?

"It's Rocky," you say, "it's not meant to have a plot."

Except the first one definitely did. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, winning 3 - including Best Picture. The second and third had decent plots too. And the forth...

Well, it was educational. Somehow. In my first year at uni, Rocky IV taught a guy on my corridor in halls about the Cold War. Seems he'd never heard about it before.

Seems they let anyone into uni in 1999.