Will We Ever Get Tired of Re-Fighting Old Battles?

Promo still from the last time someone dragged The X-Files out of the deep freeze

This weekend’s illegal American bombing of Iran arrives hand-in-glove with another cultural announcement: Hulu is relaunching The X-Files. Preliminary announcements call it a “reboot,” but deeper reportage suggests it’s more a soft reboot, a continuation with new leads. Simultaneously, reports suggest there might be a long-awaited season five for Veronica Mars. (This is more ambiguous, maybe misreading the series being acquired by Netflix; wording is fuzzy.)

I’ve complained before about the cultural currents behind constant reboots. Pop culture is always behind the times anyway, and the flood of streaming media has made the biggest entertainment conglomerates more timid, not less. But this feels different. The resurrection of two popular franchises, thirty-three and twenty-four years old respectively, amid a “Make America Great Again” culture feels more than timid. It feels like a hasty retreat from reality.

Throughout the Current President’s 2016 campaign, he decried urban violence and burning cities, despite such violence being at near-historic lows. But his rhetoric makes sense in his life context, as the Bronx famously caught fire in the late 1970s, the same time he moved into Manhattan real estate with his purchase of the former Commodore Hotel. The poor future President was simply trapped in the sociopolitical milieu of his thirties, unable to grow.

Similarly, this weekend’s bombing of Iranian civilian targets mirrors the President’s unhealed past. Consider his inability to stop heaving accusations against the Central Park Five, nearly a quarter century after they were exonerated. This President retains grudges and political interpretations molded by a privileged youth and segregated social set. In context, he likely bombed Iran, not really for its nuclear program, but as payback for the 1979 Hostage Crisis.

This has become the default for much American politics. We aren’t facing the past, we’re relitigating the past. In the 1980s, both political discourse and mass media desperately wanted to re-fight the Vietnam War, but correctly this time. Franchises like Iron Eagle, Rambo, and Top Gun promised to purge America’s Vietnam disgrace. More recently, Call of Duty and James Bond try to tweak our memory of the Cold War.

Caught in the interregnum between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, the Clinton decade offered enforced cheerfulness, a frothy meringue of Empire Records and Ben Stiller’s early career. The X-Files directly countered that, maintaining post-Reagan cynicism toward America’s surface culture. Scully and (especially) Mulder walked through neon-soaked midnight landscapes, uniquely able to see the venality that made that era’s party ethos possible.

Kristen Bell in the original network run of Veronica Mars

Veronica Mars pushed this contrast to the extreme. Read superficially, the series presented a stereotyped Southern California panorama, all hypersaturated colors and loud, jangly indie pop soundscapes. Only Veronica and her father—and, eventually, those trapped in their decaying orbit—understood the vulgar horse-trading and human commodities that subsidized Neptune, California’s skin-deep glamour. Veronica, like Mulder, was ready to expose the lie, damn the consequences.

Both franchises took dim opinions of power structures. Veronica Mars fought plush-bottomed police as often as criminals, while Mulder and sometimes Scully brought official corruption to light despite, not because of, the law. But both presented a morally distinct, binary universe. Neptune’s Sheriff Lamb and the Smoking Man were clearly evil, and needed exposed to a public which their shows depicted as passive and sheep-like, desperate for an underdog hero.

Unfortunately, the political tenor has changed. From the impotent government depicted in the 1970s, to the malignant one of the 1990s, the problem has been presented as siloed at the top. The disclosure of the Epstein documents, like the Panama Papers before them, has revealed a network of politicians, capitalists, entertainers, academics, and scientists colluding to support an otherwise decrepit system. The “secret” isn’t secret anymore.

While politicians and media captains want to refight the battles of their, or our, childhood, rapidly unfolding news reveals their vision of the problem as charmingly naïve. Nary a top-tier capitalist or government insider didn’t share information with Epstein. Public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins had their hands in his pockets. The rot isn’t an isolated, partisan tumor. Everyone, everywhere in the system, has been proved complicit.

Veronica Mars and The X-Files helped define a generation’s idea of acceptable villains. They showed our lawkeepers were complicit with lawbreakers in the anarchy most people felt in their ordinary lives. But reality has overtaken the scope these shows made possible. Bringing back the monsters of my twenties is worse than quaint. It offers audiences my age an excuse to avoid the monsters that have revealed themselves in reality.

The First and Last Days of AI TV

When this screencap of a hypothetical AI-generated sitcom hit social media, critics focused, perhaps not unfairly, on the phantom hand holding the floating guitar. Notice also that it mashes Penny’s kitchen together with Monica Geller’s living room, or that some pieces of furniture are vanishing into other pieces, Beetlejuice-style. Or that both women are clearly Alyson Hannigan circa 2010. Visually, it’s a mess.

The source video was yanked shortly after posting, so heaven only knows whether this “sitcom” is funny. But how many of them are? Based on this orphaned screencap, it looks like an unholy collaboration between Chuck Lorre and Hieronymus Bosch. Worse, it looks like an inbred bastard child of every White sitcom of the last thirty years. Which explains why the poster, a generative AI enthusiast, thinks it’s great.

It also explains why, if programmers could successfully remove the psychedelic artifacts, networks will likely buy it. Since Friends debuted in 1995, most American sitcoms have featured some variation on its beat sheet. How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Community have been largely reskinned variations on Friends. But even Friends itself simply scrubbed the Blackness from Living Single and resold it.

Generative AI consumes the largest possible sample of existing media, whether images or text, and regurgitates something passably similar. The law of averages foretells that, the larger our core sample, the more the product will drift toward the middle. Thus, an AI enthusiast will regard the blandest, most derivative product as a triumph of the art form. We know it works because it resembles everything we’ve seen before.

Unfortunately, the network commissioners who buy content will probably also love it. I’ve written before, primarily about music, how the corporate conglomerates that control our media have become risk-averse. They literally have analytic software and focus groups, modeled on the latest behavioral economics, to reassure shareholders that all new content sufficiently resembles everything that’s been successful before.

We could argue that this happens because corporate overlords see their product not as art, but as content. It also reflects chokepoint capitalism, since all music, to succeed, must pass Spotify’s filters, and all TV ultimately heads for Hulu, Netflix, or Disney+. But it also reflects changes in consumption. The streaming services that control our viewing and listening require massive audiences to keep subscription prices low, and 🌟art🌟 can’t do that.

Gone are the days of subcultures and audience segmentation. Streaming services generate audiences, not by creating something innovative or uplifting, but by remaining minimally offensive. Admittedly, this isn’t new in mass media, as network TV’s largely interchangeable Westerns of the 1960s segued into spy thrillers in the 1970s. I’ve already commented on how Friends’ cinematic, character-driven style displaced Norman Lear-style three-camera sitcoms anchored to bankable stars.

Generative AI will reduce this trend to silliness. The nameless spec clip memorialized above shows how the system reduces storytelling so thoroughly, it pinches the same actress twice. If the existing model reduces BIPOC actors to contract players holding supporting parts, generative AI will eliminate them completely. One needn’t ponder hard how it will treat disabled actors, or even capable but slightly funny-looking actors. Like me.

Children and the aged are also underrepresented on existing TV, and often reduced to stereotyped, moralistic roles. Aging actors already struggle to get parts, especially if they don’t have established star power—and that goes double for women. If existing sample TV shows and movies have few children or older adults, the middle-of-the-road produce will inevitably have even fewer, a trend likely to only compound over time.

I don’t want to romanticize the past, especially the recent past. Disney currently shepherds talent like Ariana Grande or Olivia Rodrigo from childhood, molding them according to data and metrics, creating a media landscape already struggling with anodyne blandness. Constant remakes of lucrative IPs like Dune, Harry Potter, Gossip Girl, and Stephen King, reveals corporate leadership paralyzed with fear at even the most rudimentary innovation.

AI is thus not a declension, but an extension of already existing trends toward the mean. It accelerates corporate media’s desire to produce the blandest, most studiously inoffensive oatmeal. In the constant struggle between art and commerce, it supports the bean counters. By controlling the kinds of stories and faces available to viewers, it promises to continue starving the public imagination at a pace once unimaginable.

In short, it helps nobody but the shareholders. One wonders what will help them, when we shut off the TV and read a book.

The Shallow State, Part Two

Keri Russell (left) and Rufus Sewell as Kate and Hal Wyler, in The Diplomat Season Two

This essay follows the prior review The Shallow State.

The first season of Netflix’s series The Diplomat turned heavily on its relationship with then-current events. A career American foreign service officer gets appointed to manage the relationship between an aged American President, who is terrified of appearing old, and an oafish British Prime Minister who opportunistically seizes a catastrophe to improve his public image. In the eighteen months since Season One dropped, global politics have shifted violently.

First, Rishi Sunak’s Tory administration imploded, culminating a decade-long train wreck that included such questionable luminaries as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Almost simultaneously, Joe Biden removed himself from consideration for reelection as U.S. President. This set American politics up for a contest between a highly competent but anodyne Democrat, and a charismatic Republican spouting talking points plagiarized from Weimar Germany. Politics stands idle for nobody.

The Diplomat foregrounds the unelected professionals who make American and British government offices run. On the American side, this mainly includes career foreign service officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who didn’t want the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom, but accepted it because it’s right. Wyler has built her career preventing impending wars and violence. The State Department thinks this makes her a good potential political candidate; she disagrees.

Season One ended with Wyler and her chief ally, British Home Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), believing they’ve discovered a conspiracy running through Britain’s government. Anybody who reads or watches thrillers regularly knows that, the more fervently characters believe something in Act One, the more thoroughly Act Three will dash their beliefs. Our only questions are: how will their expectations be upended? And, what will replace them?

This matters because the British Prime Minister isn’t elected by British voters. Though the PM traditionally must be a member of Parliament, this isn’t legally mandatory, just expected. The PM is elected by Parliament itself, and therefore is almost always the leader of the majority party. This gives the PM extraordinary power and, as Boris Johnson proved, tragically little oversight. Government conspiracies have liberty to travel quickly with little impediment.

Season Two runs two episodes shorter than Season One, primarily because it dispenses with character-building. Creator Deborah Cahn assumes you remember the characters and their relationships; she introduces few new characters this season, and no new core ensemble members. This lets her dive straight into the action, a movement made possible because Season One ended with an explosion, and lingering questions about who survived.

Allison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn

Therefore, for a show driven substantially by dialog, the pacing never feels slow and talky. Every conversation carries weight, and nobody speaks flippantly. The terse, telegraphic language packs every interaction with weight, as characters talk bullets at one another. The show bespeaks the influence of Aaron Sorkin’s similarly dialog-driven The West Wing. Probably not coincidentally, this season introduces West Wing alum Allison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn.

But this creates a difficult dynamic with the show’s real-world inspiration. Two season’s worth of events have happened in just weeks, while Anglo-American politics has whipsawed drastically over eighteen months. The aspersions cast on President Biden’s age, which Season One name-checked without mimicking, seem dated now. As Kamala Harris tries to sustain Biden’s legacy, the character of Grace Penn seems unexpectedly pointed, and potentially dangerous.

This series emphasizes an important Platonic principle: the people who most fervently desire power over others, deserve it least. One achieves political power in modern democracies by showing the people an amiable public face, but by engaging in backroom negotiations and cutting deals which push the boundaries of legality. Prime Minister Nichol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) is an effective leader, if he is, to the degree that he’s a terrible person.

Same goes for Grace Penn. Season One established that the American government wanted to remove Penn behind a scandal. This season establishes that Penn knows this, and seems willing to cultivate Kate as her replacement. However, Kate quickly learns that Penn faces consequences only for the scandal where she’s been caught. Like Trowbridge, Penn scaled the heights of American politics by sacrificing her morals.

Anyone who follows politics, American or international, learns quickly that purity of heart is for fools. Situations necessary for the common good, often are deeply unfair to selected individuals. Life in politics requires candidates to question which of their principles they’ll willingly abandon under pressure. This series forces Kate Wyler, a career civil servant driven by high morals, to ask these questions of herself.

And by extension, it asks us, the audience, what price we’d willingly place on our souls.

Dracula and the Problem With Modern Morality

Claes Bang as Dracula (left) and John Heffernan as
Jonathan Harker, in Moffat and Gatiss’ Dracula

Audiences who have read Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula will notice something about Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ 2020 adaptation: the Count is on screen a lot. Count Dracula is absent from over three-quarters of Stoker’s original novel, a looming presence whose terror grows more ominous because he could be literally anywhere. By contrast, Moffat and Gatiss foreground the character, who remains present and amorally aggressive even when characters (and viewers) need their rest.

Moffat and Gatiss are the creative team behind Sherlock. Yes, *that* Sherlock, the one that kickstarted Benedict Cumberbatch’s career and revitalized TV mysteries. The show was a rollicking success until it overstayed its welcome by one season, and the meme-driven zeitgeist turned against it. Steven Moffat previously paid his dues in contemporizing Victorian literature with Jekyll, which postulated a high-tech corporation wanting to harvest Mr. Hyde for profit. These guys know their modernized Victoriana.

All three original properties withheld information from readers, information which today’s audiences already have. Pretending that, for instance, Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde aren’t manifestations of the same person, would be naïve and coy nowadays. While some Massively Online Critics still complain that Sherlock suffered because the viewpoint characters withhold information from the audience, this overlooks that all three original properties did this regularly. Victorian audiences apparently loved last-minute reveals: “The killer was here the whole time squeeeee!!!”

Dracula isn’t mysterious anymore, as he was in 1897—though admittedly, more audiences probably know Todd Browning’s version than Stoker’s. Therefore withholding Dracula from audience view makes little sense. Instead, Moffat and Gatiss reveal him early, showcasing his rapacity, his sexual appetite, and his lack of common morals. Instead of making the well-known vampire appear falsely mysterious, our creative team must instead convince us why everything we believe about the famous story is wrong.

Therein lies the problem. As Susannah Clements writes, Dracula represents a specific Victorian Christian morality. Van Helsing presents himself as a “man of science,” a much less precise term than we’d accept nowadays, whose scientific acumen hoovers up any stray evidence it encounters; yet in fighting Dracula, Van Helsing reverts to the language and doctrines of Christianity. The monster fears churches, crosses, and vicars. Fundamentally, he affirms that modernity cannot survive without ancient religious truths.

Dolly Wells as Agatha Van Helsing

Except, the longer I live with Clements’ thesis, the less airtight it becomes, because that Christian morality was window dressing. Victorian England required a strong state to maintain the appearance of public virtue. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” had become Britain’s background noise. Sherlock Holmes shot intravenous cocaine to control his moods. At this point, it’d be disingenuous to deny that Bram Stoker was probably a closeted homosexual; his schoolfriend Oscar Wilde was jailed in 1895.

Abraham Van Helsing (rendered by Moffat and Gatiss as Agatha Van Helsing, a Carmelite nun) didn’t restore foundering Victorian Christianity; he enforced a specific kind of moral vestment on a largely secularized, industrialized nation. He encouraged the cadre of men driving the story to punish Lucy Westenra, who had, in coded language, been sexually liberated enough to choose her own lovers. As punishment, the men took turns, ahem, driving their wooden stake into her.

Agatha Van Helsing, opposite her literary ancestor, has no patience for public morality. Though a nun, she’s substantially secularized; she describes her holy orders as “a loveless marriage.” Her Dracula reacts with the same vehemence as Stoker’s to crosses and other religious appurtenances, but Agatha rejects the religious explanation. She accuses Dracula of retroactively constructing a moral explanation for his abilities and weaknesses—then she does the same. For her, morality is as morality does.

The lack of underlying morality—even one the characters only observe for ceremonial purposes—is the defining difference between this Dracula and Stoker’s. Unfortunately, without such an underlying morality, the story has nothing to be about. Van Helsing speculates aimlessly about why medieval European morality still has power over Dracula, and reaches a resolution that satisfies her only in the closing minutes. For us peons watching, however, the explanation raises more questions than it answers.

Nobody could rewrite Dracula for modern audiences and retain Victorian morality. In Britain, Christianity has retreated to the second most common religious identity, after “none”; and even in America, which (unlike Europe) emerged from two world wars more religious rather than less, Christianity has fallen below two-thirds of the population. Our vampires today are Lestat and Edward Cullen, not Dracula. Yet as with Van Helsing’s religion, the premodern story keeps intruding on our modern world.

Free Will, Determinism, and Time Travel Fiction

DC Iris Maplewood discovers one of the titular bodies in Netflix's Bodies

Something about science fiction makes writers feel compelled to break down the story’s speculative core somewhere around the halfway mark. Though Obi-Wan Kenobi introduces Luke to the Force early, halfway is when he explains its principles of mindfulness and flow. Similarly, though Kyle Reese has introduced Sarah Connor to his dystopian future, only around the halfway mark does he explain it to Dr. Silberman in any detail. Same applies to Netflix’s recent limited series, Bodies.

In episode four (of eight), the breakdown comes in two increments. First, we witness physicist Gabriel Defoe’s (Tom Mothersdale) lecture summation, describing the hypothetical Deutsche Particle, which simultaneously exists forward and backward in time. Later, speaking privately with Detective Constable Iris Maplewood (Shira Haas), Defoe extrapolates that, if the future already exists, free will is illusory. Maplewood demurs. Though structurally, Bodies is a police procedural, this science fiction rumination of liberty drives the series premise.

Recent philosophy has seen the resurgence of a previously endangered idea: determinism. Medieval Thomist philosophy contended that everything which happens in the material world has a prior cause. Yet every cause is, itself, an effect of a prior cause. Thus, reality exists in a causal chain descending through history to what Thomists call the First Cause. As Christians grounded in Aristotelean philosophy, Thomists correlated this First Cause with God, who set all reality in motion.

Determinism, this belief that all reality was set in predeterminate motion at the moment of creation, came under conflict during the Reformation, when many reformers contended that humans have the capacity, within our sensory limits, to accept or reject God. (Replace “God” with “philosophy” if that streamlines your thinking.) Reformers called this capacity “free will.” By the Enlightenment, free will became the operant European philosophy, mutatis mutandis, and arguable remains so through to the present.

Free will has recently come under fire from prominent atheists and sceptics. John Gray and Sam Harris are probably the most prominent, but an entire subthread of philosophy of science contends that free will is an illusion. Because our choices are conditioned by outside events and circumstances, most of which we cannot possibly comprehend, choice therefore isn’t real. (It’s more complicated than that, but bear with me.) This philosophy has limited traction outside narrow circles.

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn)
near the culmination of their journey, in The Terminator

Okay, our choices are conditioned; anybody who’s had a job or otherwise interacted with complex human society will accept this. But to what degree are our choices determined? Philosophers consistently fail to close this gap. In Bodies, Defoe himself leaps that gap, even within himself; though he argues verbally that our choices are determined, we discover, eventually, that he attempts to change their conditions. (No spoilers; this is about Bodies’ philosophy, not its story.)

In the early seasons of the resurrected Doctor Who in the mid-2000s, the Doctor avoided intervening in history with two arguments. Sometimes he couldn’t revisit preceding actions, claiming that “we’re part of events now.” (This was mainly the Tenth Doctor, who couldn’t stomach contradictions or paradox. The Eleventh Doctor actively sought paradox.) Other times he claimed “a fixed point in time,” something so important that, even if it was terrible, intervening would create something far worse.

James Cameron’s first Terminator movie ends withSarah Connor’s realization that, though she and Reese defeated the monster, the monster’s creation was inevitable. Time, in the first movie, is circular, and attempts to alter it instead create it. But Cameron couldn’t stomach that forever, and reversed himself in the second movie. History can change; no fate but what we make. Cameron, like Bodies, initially accepts that we’re trapped in a causal loop, but finally resists such fatalism.

Thus, time travel fiction manifests a recurrent theme: history is contingent, without necessarily being inevitable. Just because events occurred in a certain way, doesn’t mean they had to occur that way. We cannot always know what contingencies define our actions, and some contingencies we can never know. Yet that doesn’t mean our choices are determined. Humans aren’t inevitable products of physics. We have the unique capacity to pause, think, and change our minds.

Bodies is, essentially, an allegory of the human capability to change our minds. Professor Defoe’s lecture on determinism stems from the assumption that, because time exists both forward and backward, the entire past and future already exist in fixed forms. But DC Maplewood realizes, as James Gleick has written elsewhere, that the laws of physics are a description of reality, not reality itself. We can accept our contingencies, she reveals, without our contingencies owning us.

The House of Usher and the Fall of Capitalism

Promo photo from Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. (the pic is deliberately off-center)

Near the climax of Netflix’s new adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell) delivers a monologue almost directly at the camera. Half-mad with grief, Madeline rants about the American condition, taking in almost everything synoptically: runaway consumerism, prescription drug abuse, wage stagnation, the Dodds decision. Then she asks her moon-eyed brother Roderick (Bruce Greenwood): are we culpable for this? Or do we just provide services which market forces demand?

The ”we” in this question is the rich. In Poe’s original short story, the Usher family’s wealth is poorly defined, the inheritance of a waning feudal aristocracy, and Madeline barely speaks. But in this adaptation, the Usher family’s wealth is very specific: they own Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, which aggressively markets an opioid drug to pain sufferers worldwide. This unsubtle dig at the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, which manufactures OxyContin, is just one anti-capitalist theme.

First, the overview. This is filmmaker Mike Flanagan’s fifth Netflix limited series, and the third adapting American horror properties, after The Haunting of Hill House and The Turn of the Screw (as The Haunting of Bly Manor). Like the previous two, this one samples liberally from the source author’s collected works, adapting the spirit of the text rather than the words. It’s beautifully paced, somber, and elegiac, but also gory enough for seasoned horror fans.

Flanagan’s previous adaptations have frequently commented on contemporary society. Midnight Mass has called out religious intolerance, for instance, and the ways that outward piety invite moral rot into communities. Usher, however, is distinct for not only having one-to-one criticisms of contemporary issues, but also for calling those issues out by name. In later episodes, several characters deliver monologues like Madeline’s, sounding suspiciously like courtroom closing arguments. Fitting, since the frame story is Roderick Usher’s “confession.”

The Usher twins have achieved earthly power by selling consumers what they think they want. Early on, in flashback, young Roderick (Zach Gilford) pitches the motivating opioid drug, Ligadone, by promising “a world without pain.” It’s unclear whether he knows, making that pitch, that his drug doesn’t cure pain, only defers it until later. In later episodes, he clearly does know this, eventually. But he tells regulators and corporate execs what they want to hear.

Carla Gugino as Verna, a mysterious presence hovering over the house of Usher

Roderick’s six children represent different forms of vice. None grew up with Roderick as primary caregiver, and he bought their affection by showering them with money, and the appurtenances money can buy. Therein lies an important difference between Poe’s world, and Flanagan’s. In Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” fat aristocrats have their party to flee a plague-ravaged world. Flanagan’s Prospero Usher has the same party, but flees a world of excess, not lack.

Of Roderick’s six children, three explicitly abuse drugs. Two others indulge bizarre, distorted sexual appetites. Of the six, only Victorine, a surgeon, lacks conventional vices; but she’s a workaholic. Just because an addiction isn’t illegal, doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful. As addiction specialist Dr. Gabor Maté writes, addictions are almost always manifestations of the abuse and neglect we’ve suffered, either as children or adults. The Ushers got rich selling substance abuse, while indulging covertly themselves.

In other words, the Ushers endure the same capitalist “win or die” mentality they’ve exploited to harm others. They simply game the system sufficiently to defer their suffering onto the future. Money grants the family an illusion of control, and encourages Madeline’s frequent exhortations that the Usher family is destined to change the world. (Madeline’s unflattering parallels with Hilary Clinton’s post-hippie idealism grow increasingly pointed.) But the Ushers never fix the system, only exploit it.

The series’ conclusion implies a just universe, where the more pain the Ushers have deferred, the faster it rolls over them. Flanagan, an atheist, doesn’t believe the Ushers will face consequences in “the next life,” but he declares everyone will answer for their transgressions. The script compares the Ushers to Donald Trump, the Koch brothers, and Mark Zuckerberg, all facing greater or lesser consequences for their actions. Flanagan apparently believes our universe is ultimately just.

I must acknowledge Netflix, which has recently demonstrated a willingness to platform blunt anti-capitalist messages. Black Mirror’s recent sixth season is tightly self-referential, with episodes tied together by “Streamberry,” a media platform so obviously modeled on Netflix that one can only laugh. As the Disney model of conglomerate media has grown increasingly silly, Netflix has shown a willingness to laugh at itself. Evidently Reed Hastings can do something Roderick Usher can’t: change with the times.

The Wheel of Time After Time After Time

The main ensemble from Amazon's Wheel of Time, season one

The Amazon Studios adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has obtained largely warm reviews, but mostly from critics who haven’t read the novels. A minority of critics have lambasted the adaptation for its lukewarm fealty to the source material; they’ve accused showrunner Rafe Judkins of not so much translating the source, as nesting inside it. I have a different problem. This series demonstrates the greatest problem of media in the streaming era: content bloat.

On one level, the series shows Peter Jackson’s influence on screen-based epic fantasy. Beautiful arboreal landscapes and rushing rivers, frequently viewed from high above with cameras in motion, create not only a sense of intricate world-building, but that real characters occupy this world, moving through space and time. Sprightly theme music underscores the lushly colored visual palette. The young, attractive ensemble cast wears vibrant, prismatic clothes, unsullied by dusty agricultural work or unpaved village roads.

These visuals call attention to themselves. Presumably the creative crew intended this, as they use many long, lingering shots of The Shire Two Rivers, the White Tower, elaborate medieval streetscapes, and primordial terrain. As shots linger, however, making the scenery itself the center of audience engagement, we start paying attention to the design. We start analyzing which shots were created on location, which virtually in 3D modelling, and which are composites, matted together in postproduction?

Like Jackson’s LotR movies, the series premiers with a wizard’s arrival in a bucolic village, followed by a party. This provides an opportunity to introduce characters through dialog and interaction. Lots and lots of dialog and interaction. Again, these scenes are beautifully designed, but they continue interminably. The introductions of character relationships, larded with soap-operatic detail, mount up relentlessly. When the Uruk-Hai Trollocks finally attack the village, we’ve grown bored waiting for something to happen.

Maybe Judkins and the creative team watched Jackson’s “long-expected party” scene and felt they needed one of those, except it occupies the entire first episode. That’s an hour of content. What Jackson completed in twenty minutes, Judkins extends for almost sixty. Each season of The Wheel of Time contains eight one-hour episodes, meaning that together, each season is longer than the theatrical release of the full LotR trilogy. (At this writing, there are two seasons.)

This pattern continues. Having fled the monsters, our ensemble of protagonists journeys with Gandalf and Aragorn Moiraine and Lan to meet destiny. The characters keep demanding explanations, but their self-appointed mentors keep answering: “Now is not the time.” Somehow, despite months of travelling together and long nights spent huddled around the campfire, now is never the time. The characters have identity-building encounters, and make occasional meaningful discoveries, but real exposition remains punted down the field.

Our ensemble remains mostly unified throughout the first season, though briefly separated for… purposes. They then spend the entire second season pursuing side quests, before unifying atop a wizard’s tower. Along the way, they encounter an ageless monarch, a lost nation, and an enemy thought destroyed three thousand years ago. Though the story arc doesn’t slavishly copy Tolkien, it’s nevertheless one giant spider away from matching the beat sheet in his first two LotR novels.

Some of this overgrowth comes from the source material. Full disclosure, I haven’t read Robert Jordan’s original novels; but I have it on authority from friends who have, that his writing often rambled, and later novels particularly suffered lack of firm direction. Yet the transition between media should’ve resolved some of this. Traditional broadcast or cable television would’ve forced the creative team to make hard decisions, because airtime is limited, and advertisers’ patience isn’t infinite.

With no requirement to fit into scarce, valuable airtime (or to empty the cinema for the next showing), Judkins and the creative team apparently feel authorized to keep creating more and longer scenes. Again, in fairness, these scenes are often beautifully designed, and individually, introduce interesting, thoughtful character moments. But as they accumulate, we increasingly see the story as constructed. We desperately wish we could tell the creative team to just make something happen, already!

Streaming distribution removes many limitations forced on traditional television. The one-hour format, advertisers who need appeased, and network Standards & Practices are out; graphic language, sex, and violence are in. But traditional limitations forced creative teams to make choices; what they omitted often mattered as much as what they included. Streaming doesn’t force them to cut anything. As content gets longer, with interminable exposition and vague resolutions, we start wishing someone made them make choices.

Richard Madden and the Systems of the World

Richard Madden in Citadel, with Prianka Chopra Jonas

Watching Amazon Studios’ recent over-the-top spyfest Citadel, I couldn’t help wondering why the MC, Kyle Conroy, looked suspiciously familiar. Oh, yeah, because he’s played by Scottish actor Richard Madden, who attracted global attention in 2018 when the ITV/BBC thriller Bodyguard became an international streaming sensation. Though Madden plays Conroy with an American accent, both stories feature Madden as a war-scarred veteran dragged back into somebody else’s war.

These two vehicles play very differently. Bodyguard is a conventional British police drama: gritty, unsentimental, and character-driven. Citadel is campy and overblown, despite its largely serious tone; it resembles the unintentionally silly James Bond films that murdered Pierce Brosnan’s take on the character, and prompted the series reboot with Daniel Craig. Bodyguard is often visually murky, with jarring handheld camera work, versus Citadel’s oversaturated colors and elaborate sound design.

Importantly, Bodyguard features real-world politics. Madden’s character, Police Sergeant David Budd, fought in Afghanistan, and now works for London’s Metropolitan Police. He’s assigned to protect the Home Secretary, a powerful office within Britain’s Cabinet. Early episodes contrast Budd’s PTSD scars with Secretary Julia Montague’s strict authoritarianism; after an abrupt tonal shift, later episodes pit the Met’s civilian Counter Terrorism Command against MI5’s militarized Security Service.

Citadel features two fictional intelligence agencies. Both the titular Citadel, of which Madden’s Conroy discovers he’s a deep-cover agent, and the enigmatic Manticore believe themselves heroic. Citadel hunts and bags potential terrorists, while Manticore hunts Citadel, which it believes has grown corrupt. Both agencies have elaborate technology, an army of agents, bottomless funds, and global reach, despite being non-state actors. Who, we wonder, bankrolls these feuding Illuminati groups?

What these series share, besides Richard Madden, is a prior assumption that massive, shadowy systems control our lives. David Budd must investigate crimes which could destabilize British government, fighting an enemy that can make evidence vanish from locked rooms and air-gapped computers. Kyle Conroy (dba Mason Kane) must unlock secrets which two quasi-legal agencies want buried, many of which involve himself. Both men ask: am I sure I’m representing the good guys?

From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, multiple mass-media properties asked whether our lives are falsified. The Matrix, Dark City, and Star Trek’s later holodeck episodes spotlighted the idea that “reality” is only what we accept as reality, and powerful people can deceive our senses to condition our acceptance. Citadel and Bodyguard signify a shift away from reality itself, onto the people who control our ability to perceive reality.

Richard Madden in Bodyguard, with Keeley Hawes

We live, both series imply, beneath powerful structures that speak in our names, and make moral decisions for us, but which we don’t control. Nobody elected the Citadel, and while Secretary Montague was elected MP, she achieved her executive position through intra-party horse-trading. Violence, strategic deception, and force of law compel us to accept these unelected power structures, because we can do nothing about them except join opposite-number violent organizations.

Perhaps these themes are unsurprising. As we’ve acknowledged systemic concerns like “structural racism” or disaster capitalism, we increasingly understand how little individual control ordinary people have. Politics, economics, and war aren’t gods we can petition in temples; they’re forces, like hurricanes, that destroy everything they encounter. Doing right in politics or economics changes nothing, because we’re individuated and lonely, and the forces are systemic, impersonal, and huge.

Bodyguard and Citadel drew my attention because of Richard Madden, demonstrating how essentially powerless Madden’s characters are, despite their shared dedication to law and justice. But once aware of these themes, I started seeing them everywhere. Heart of Stone, a Netflix showcase for Gal Gadot, features a similar non-state intelligence agency that pervades everything, yet is so elusive that even MI6 can’t root it out.

The recent Equalizer movies with Denzel Washington, Netflix’s The Grey Man with Ryan Reynolds, and the Mission Impossible movies mostly don’t impute non-state actors with the kind of reach (and finances) only available to governments. However, they frequently feature government corruption, incestuous relationships between money and power, and people who profit unfairly from the status quo. These malefactors oppress our heroes, who often go rogue to root out corruption.

However, these heroes are equally defined by what they can’t do as what they can. There’s no Chosen One, no Neo or Luke Skywalker to establish a just world. Rachel Stone, Ethan Hunt, Robert McCall, and Richard Madden might remove corrupt operators, but they can’t dismantle unjust systems. They (and therefore we) can only reset broken systems to the status quo ante. Reality now exists, but reality is historically unfree.

Neil Gaiman and the Road to Truth

Michael Sheen and David Tennant as Aziraphale and Crowley in Good Omens 2

This essay contains spoilers.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens specifies that Aziraphale and Crowley, the angelic protagonists, don’t have a sexual relationship. Though Pratchett passed away in 2015, Gaiman maintained this parameter when adapting the novel for the 2019 BBC/Amazon joint production. Though he didn’t deny anybody their personal headcanon, he rejected the idea that Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship was anything but platonic.

Therefore it’s sudden and jarring in the final minutes of Good Omens 2 when (seriously, spoilers) Crowley grabs Aziraphale roughly and kisses him. This becomes the first moment that concretely sexualizes the characters. Throughout the season, Aziraphale and Crowley struggle to create a meet-cute between their neighbors, Nina and Maggie. But they’ve failed miserably because their knowledge of human romance comes entirely from Richard Curtis movies and Jane Austen novels.

Understanding the change requires understanding the context. Though Gaiman and Pratchett share billing on the original novel, Pratchett did most of the actual writing; Gaiman, a novice prose writer, wasn’t equipped to write an entire novel. Pratchett wanted to remain faithful to the Abrahamic mythology their novel satirized, which meant that transcendent beings lacked binary gender. To pinch a Kevin Smith line, angels are as sexless as Ken dolls.

Although Good Omens 2 is co-written by Gaiman and John Finnemore, it’s the first time the setting reflects exclusively Gaiman’s vision. And it bears noting Gaiman’s other recent streaming success: Sandman on Netflix. Not only does Sandman contain a noteworthy number of same-sex couples, Gaiman even gender-swaps John Constantine, a longstanding DC Comics character, to create increased Sapphic tension. Same-sex partnerships mean something to Gaiman.

In Sandman episode 5, Bette, a diner waitress, expresses purblind views about sexual identities. She claims Judy, a regular customer, is too pretty to be a lesbian, and engineers a meet-cute (another theme) with another customer, Mark. But when John Dee, empowered by Dream’s magic ruby, stops everyone lying and sheds their inhibitions, Bette and Judy find themselves entangled in a passionate embrace. That, the story implies, is their truth.

Throughout Sandman, Gaiman uses same-sex relationships as shorthand for characters who follow their own moral code. Johanna Constantine, Bette and Judy, Hal Carter, and Chantal and Zelda are all depicted as characters unbeholden to convention, free of judgement, and wholly alive. This freedom isn’t necessarily “good” in any moral sense, as The Corinthian’s ravenous sexuality is second only to his murderous impulses. But it does mean one is unbound.

Shelley Conn and John Hamm as Beelzebub and Gabriel in Good Omens 2

Good Omens depicts a world deeply bound to binaries. Good and evil, Heaven and Hell. We glimpse both eternal realms: Heaven is orderly, brightly lit, and aseptic, while Hell is noisy and cluttered, and several denizens show signs of gangrene. Both realms also keep demanding transcendent beings, like Aziraphale and Crowley, and their human allies, make binding declarations for one side or another. They demand complete moral absolutes.

Crowley and Aziraphale, however, spend the entire series finding ways to thread the moral needle. Both beings balk, for instance, at the biblical Job’s predicament, with its requirement to kill, and gradually devise a workaround. When they find an urchin robbing graves to escape poverty, Aziraphale learns that humans face degrees of wrong, while Crowley decides that death doesn’t resolve his sympathies. Broken moral bromides litter this story like flies.

Therefore, reaching the series culmination where (again, spoilers) the Metatron offers Aziraphale command of Heaven’s forces, this pushes the limits of Gaiman’s disdain for moral absolutes. By accepting the offer, Aziraphale must accept Heaven’s moral straight jacket, something Crowley can’t do. Crowley would rather continue mapping his own moral landscape, something both powers have done successfully for millennia. But, as Aziraphale notes, they have little to show for it.

Gaiman believes, from the textual evidence, that all absolute morals eventually collapse. But that doesn’t mean seeking one’s own moral resolution makes everything better. Johanna Constantine, John Dee, and now Aziraphale and Crowley have manufactured their own moralities, evidenced by their rejection of sexual identity myths, but they’re also terribly lonely. They occupy society’s margins, with only a few friends. Their stand requires courage and durability that most people lack.

Where Crowley kisses Aziraphale, therefore, it’s arguable whether the action is sexual. Maybe the characters remain, as both authors assert, essentially sexless. But Crowley demands, with his kiss, to know whether joining Heaven’s moral absolutes will, as Aziraphale claims, make a difference. Does morality, without context, mean anything? Neil Gaiman seemingly thinks not. Truth may be a lonely road, Gaiman suggests, but it’s the only one worth walking.

Hollywood Is Awful, and It’s Getting Worse

Annie Murphy in Black Mirror S6E1, “Joan Is Awful”

If you watched entertainment news this week, you saw two weird events almost simultaneously. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, voted to strike, the day after a spokesperson for the affiliated studio heads announced Hollywood’s intent to simply endure the Writers’ Guild strike until the writers were too broke to negotiate. In response to SAG-AFTRA, a press release postulated several possible studio responses, including performing digital scans on background actors, preserving and reusing their image, uncompensated, forever.

For those playing the home game, this is the premise of “Joan Is Awful,” a Black Mirror episode which distributed on June 15^th—not even thirty full days ago. Though the episode is more complex, the pivotal premise is that everyone, from Hollywood A-listers to seeming nobodies, has signed away their names, life stories, and images. Hidden in “Terms and Conditions” contracts so abstruse that literally nobody can read them, the ironclad clauses prove humiliating.

Simultaneously, my online feed became jammed with the same ad repeated endlessly: trailers for the upcoming Wonka movie. Timothée Chalamet, who recently became the third actor to play Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune, now becomes the third actor to play Willy Wonka, Roald Dahl’s wacky chocolatier and slave-owner. My long-time readers know I despise how risk-averse Hollywood has become, recycling the same piddle while serious writers beg for work. This only proves my point.

When writers demanded pay commensurate with the value they create, defenders of the status quo warned that studios would simply replace writers with artificial intelligence. They weren’t dissuaded by the fact that AI hasn’t yet produced much worth reading, and requires human editors to force the product into a shape. Because AI text generators can currently only create grammatically correct sentences, and cannot judge their own writing holistically, their product is generally rambling and mushy.

Further, AI only outputs what its algorithm generates from its inputs. Text generators like ChatGPT, and image generators like MidJourney, scrape the internet for representative samples, and reassemble the product into something that looks just different enough to sail under copyright guidance. At least currently, writers and artists can maintain their advantage by creating conspicuously new content and constantly breaking new ground, something AI just can’t do. Easier said than done, yes, but still possible.

But I can’t tell whether audiences want anything groundbreaking and innovative. Thanks to Timothée Chalamet’s memorable face, Dune and Wonka currently embody slick franchise redundancy. But Disney, the largest entertainment conglomerate, makes most of its substantial bank on two lucrative properties: Lucasfilm and Marvel Comics. Meanwhile, the second-largest conglomerate, Warner Bros. Discovery, is trying to salvage its would-be tentpole franchise, DC Comics. Studios are banking everything at least for now, on reliable, uncontroversial franchise content.

Timothée Chalamet in an advance promo image from Wonka

Whether audiences want that, however, is questionable. Without Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr., recent MCU box office numbers havebeen lackluster. Lucasfilm properties have been hit-or-miss, especially anything outside Star Wars; the Willow relaunch fared so poorly that Disney flushed it down the memory hole to avoid paying outstanding taxes. Studios create the appearance of demand for lucrative franchises through saturation marketing and media monopoly, but in practice, audiences seem something other than impressed.

The digital solutions which studios propose to overcome this loss don’t look particularly promising, either. Consider the difference between 1994’s Jurassic Park, and the Jurassic World sequels. Though Park was ballyhooed in 1994 for its pioneering CGI imagery, the movie only used about six minutes of digital art, mostly in long shots. By contrast, the latest films consist almost entirely of pixel illustrations. Nearly thirty years later, the original remains eminently watchable. The sequels don’t.

I’ve complained about this before. Much current science fiction and fantasy places human actors centrally, very obviously inside a studio before a chromakey background, then digitally mattes in the surrounding environment later. The product looks exciting when it’s new, but doesn’t bear repeated watching. When studios promise digital actors and AI scripts, they pledge stories stapled together from the undead remains of past success, performed by actors you can’t stand to watch more than once.

Things don’t have to be this way. If studio executives accepted a smidgeon less money, and paid their creative and technical personal commensurate with the value they create, everyone could get back to creating art, and everyone would be happier. But, like President Bush before the second Iraq war, Hollywood execs think technology has made human labor obsolete. President Bush found out how wrong he was, and soon Disney and Netflix will find out, too.

The Shallow State

Rufus Sewell (left) and Keri Russell as Hal and Kate Wyler, in The Diplomat

Previews for Netflix’s The Diplomat are edited in a rapid hip-hop style, implying a series anchored on explosions and sex, like a Tom Clancy thriller. Both of these are in relatively short supply. Instead, we get a series anchored on the machinations of the unelected bureaucrats whose presence always lingers beneath normal politics. These are the members of the “deep state” we’ve been coached to fear in recent years.

Kate Wyler, a longtime member of America’s professional diplomatic corps, has packed her bags for Afghanistan. She’s spent her career identifying and exploiting weaknesses in other nations’ political organizations; this skill has rewarded her richly, while also serving American interests. So she’s baffled when, on the eve of the departure, President Rayburn calls her into his office. The President has an alternate offer: the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom.

Start with how showrunner Debora Cahn casts Keri “Felicity” Russell as Kate Wyler. Early in her career, Russell was so thoroughly pigeonholed by her beauty that an over-hasty haircut nearly derailed her first starring role. But she’s now forty-seven, an age when Hollywood puts most women out to pasture. Cahn casts Rufus Sewell, an equally famously attractive showcase, as Kate’s husband Hal, but he’s a man. His greys are “distinguished.”

The show’s characters comment that the U.K. ambassadorship isn’t usually considered a serious diplomatic posting. Embassies in America’s NATO allies are usually plum appointments for prestigious political donors—a fact considered shocking when George H.W. Bush dispensed ambassadorships that way in 1989, but banal now. Skilled diplomats historically run things in America’s friendly embassies, but wealthy, semi-retired palm greasers get the prestigious chair.

Except things have changed. Business executives face steeply reduced pressures to retire at a certain age; Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, and Donald Sussman continue running their corporations well into their seventies and eighties. A two- or three-year hitch in some plush London mansion, shaking hands with King Charles, hardly seems like an appropriate career capstone anymore. Especially when, as now, international tensions remain permanently peaked.

This series contains numerous pointed references to current events. Kate Wyler is appointed ambassador by a rough-hewn but semi-progressive American President who’s terrified of being perceived as old. President Rayburn wants Kate to stage-manage America's relationship with Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge, whose folksy, off-the-cuff manner makes him popular with British voters. However, events hint that both Rayburn and Trowbridge are craftier than they appear.

David Gyasi as U.K Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison, with Keri Russell, in The Diplomat

Everything described occurs under the constant shadow of war. President Rayburn picks Kate for the British ambassadorship because somebody’s just hit a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, killing forty-one sailors. The British public is braying for blood, and PM Trowbridge’s off-the-cuff comments only make that more likely. Except that professional diplomats like Kate know the evidence doesn’t add up. The obvious suspects are, in this case, hardly obvious.

It’s impossible to overlook the direct real-world parallels. Streaming TV, with its relatively short lead times, can comment in ways that legacy scripted media can’t. While the next presidential election promises to feature two very old and broadly unpopular White men, the British public has watched three consecutive Tory PMs disintegrate rapidly, and possibly a fourth. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war drags interminably, and Putin has been indicted for war crimes.

PM Trowbridge is played by Rory Kinnear, who last appeared on Netflix in the Black Mirror premier episode. If you missed that, he played a Prime Minister who, to appease a terrorist, is compelled to fuck a pig on live national television. Though Trowbridge is a darker, angrier figure than PM Callow, surely showrunner Cahn recognized this parallel. Because Trowbridge specifically, and elected officials generally, come across as crazed pig-fuckers.

Again, online trailers spotlight explosions and sex. But after the opening scenes of episode one, the explosions are largely limited to verbal sparring and personal conflicts. This is a series about the backroom log-rolling sessions that voters never see, but which make politics happen. The characters quarrel, swap favors, and submarine one another regularly. Elected officials like Trowbridge and Rayburn are there to be managed, not to call the shots.

But if this is the feared “deep state,” it really isn’t that deep. Far from a finely tuned engine of political know-how, this show features a complex nexus of wounded egos and resentment. Other than a brief on-screen appearance by an Iranian ambassador, this entire show features American and British characters, nominally allies, who constantly play one-upmanship games and personal horse trades. The deep state is, apparently, really quite shallow.

The Search for a Modern British Messiah

Tom Moran, The Devil’s Hour

Peter Capaldi and Jessica Raine in The Devil’s Hour

Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, receives second billing in The Devil’s Hour, behind Jessica “Call the Midwife” Raine. Yet he’s remarkably absent from the first half of the series, commenting on things he’s seen, but unseen by others. We don’t even learn his character’s name for several episodes. When we do, it confuses more than it resolves: who, exactly, is Gideon Shepherd? Needless to say, the following involves spoilers.

For practical purposes, we know Gideon (he’s generally addressed by his first name, once it’s uncovered) combines aspects of Capaldi’s two most influential roles, the Doctor and Malcolm Tucker. When the show’s other male lead, DI Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel), asks whether Gideon is perhaps a time traveler or a soothsayer, given his foreknowledge of events, he hedges. Because the show knows its audience already recognizes Capaldi’s face and voice.

Perhaps the solution comes in Gideon’s name. In the book of Judges, Gideon arises from the disorganized tribes of Israel when the nation has lost its collective respect for God. When the neighboring Midianites invade, Gideon alone recognizes this as God’s judgment upon the people. He musters an army and, after winning the unworthy from its ranks, challenges and defeats an overwhelming Midianite force in a Thermopylae-like underdog performance.

The specifically Biblical implications of Gideon’s name, contrasts with his superficially violent approach. As both a Judge of Israel and a shepherd, a title used by Jesus Christ, he’s implicitly declared a Judeo-Christian messiah. But like Malcolm Tucker, Gideon is violent and vulgar, turning an almost operatic language of vindictiveness on anyone who crosses him. If he’s a messiah, he certainly isn’t anybody’s Prince of Peace.

Not that he lets that stop him, protected by the certainty of deterministic destiny. The universe seems to provide him favor; cornered by DI Dhillon in Gideon’s first substantial appearance, a literal lightning bolt from above provides the protection he requires. Once he finally becomes an active participant in the story, we see him appearing to target children for psychological conditioning and torture, which he justifies with self-righteous rationales.

Peter Capaldi as Gideon Shepherd
in The Devil’s Hour

Gideon displays his Christian implications through the interstitial narration that unifies the series. As the story unfolds out of sequence, we see two tracks throughout the story. Lucy Chambers (Raine) and DI Dhillon watch their story unfold, as Dhillon tracks Gideon’s trail of destruction, and Lucy struggles with her son’s flat affect and her own seemingly psychic premonitions. In the moment, little makes sense, for them or us.

In the second track, Gideon explains the truth about everything the characters previously experienced. What seemed meaningless as it happened, turns out to possess explicit purpose. But that purpose isn’t frivolous, and it happens in the person of Gideon himself. For the religiously inclined, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons to the Gospel of Luke, wherein the resurrected Jesus, at Emmaus, explains how the whole Tanakh points ultimately to himself.

If Gideon is a messiah, though, he’s an unquestionably brutal one. What gospel does Gideon preach? He certainly follows the apocalyptic facet of Christ, who on the final day, looks into every person’s heart and judges accordingly. Unlike DI Dhillon and the police, who can only respond to crimes that have already occurred, Gideon judges people according to their hearts, and metes out responses accordingly. These responses are frequently violent.

Unlike the Doctor, Gideon has only one approach, to crush humanity’s worst inclinations. The Twelfth Doctor’s anti-war speech in the episode “The Zygon Inversion” urges Kate Stewart, as representative of humanity’s power structure, to uphold humanity’s best tendencies, to avoid war, and to resolve conflicts through our better nature. Gideon, by contrast, can only hope to stop people by hurting others, usually by hurting them first.

Only in the sixth and final episode do we discover Gideon’s motivation. His worldview is bleak and deterministic because he, uniquely among humanity, understands time’s nature as a flat circle. Gideon’s messianism directly counters his father’s Presbyterian religiosity, but it isn’t nearly as counter as he believes. Both are judgmental and believe in corrective violence. Gideon just doesn’t justify his brutality through appeals to an invisible God.

Like the Biblical Judge, Gideon Shepherd’s mission begins when the people have lost their communal faith: Gideon’s mission of retributive justice begins in approximately the middle 1960s, when British religious observance plunged dramatically. Both Gideons want to restore justice to the land. But this Gideon brings a truth that Britain’s power structures don’t want to hear, and work to quell. We know his crucifixion must be imminent.

Dark Rogers and the Illusions of Power

So I’ve seen this image drifting across social media, as they do, and it got me thinking. (No, surely not you, Nenstiel!) Fans of both Fred Rogers and Star Trek will recognize this thought process. The “Mirror Universe,” a recurring Star Trek thread, depicts an interstellar civilization controlled, not by a United Federation of Planets, but by an Imperium. The Mirror Universe is antidemocratic, violent, and ruled by the strong.

Star Trek fans love the Mirror Universe to the exact extent we generally admire Gene Roddenberry’s underlying humanist ethic. Roddenberry believed the modernist myth that all human history marks an unwavering path from caveman savagery, through an arc of warring tribes and nations, toward an ultimate gleaming future defined by peace, prosperity, and the shedding of divisions. Human societies are always moving from mud-dwelling to utopia.

This involves a sort of civic Calvinism. Okay, Roddenberry himself was personally atheist, and believed the arc of history would move away from religion and “blind faith.” But in accepting the modernist myth, Roddenberry believed the Calvinist precept of “Total Human Depravity,” the principle that humans, left to ourselves, are selfish, venal, and angry. John Calvin believed Jesus Christ would redeem this innate venality; Roddenberry trusted in an evolving state.

Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister (a form of Calvinism), had a difficult relationship with Total Human Depravity. He didn’t accept the maxim that humans are innately bad, and that Christianity must purge our sinful desires. But alongside icons of childhood like Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak, Rogers recognized that children live in long-term states of intrinsic powerlessness. Children lash out, sometimes violently, because they have no other tools available.

Many ex-kids, especially we who preferred to think and build rather than compete and vanquish, have chilling memories of childhood authority. I understand now, as I couldn’t then, how many schoolyard bullies were simply reenacting the power dynamics they learned at home. But that didn’t matter when they’d literally form crowds intended to corner me, shouting and screaming and shoving. The only thing I understood then, was my own powerlessness.

Rather than stopping the constant low-grade violence, school authorities encouraged us to mollify the bullies around us. Not even metaphorically, either: my parents literally told me that bullies acted out of their own terror and pain, and they needed somebody willing to embrace them, regardless of their inappropriate behavior. My family literally told me that it was my Christian moral duty to befriend the kids who made me terrified to go to school.

Current sociology suggests early humanity wasn’t violent, despite what Freud, Marx, and Calvin believed. Little evidence of warfare exists before humans became settled. But then agriculture, with the limits of space and resources, took over. Just as the Biblical Cain, a farmer, killed his brother Abel, a herdsman, so early civilization invented war, and the scars which war produces. Humans had to learn how to be angry, violent, and resentful.

The meme jokes about Mirror Rogers claiming children are weak. But our Fred Rogers acknowledged that same weakness. The difference is, Fred Rogers didn’t see weakness as something to exploit or punish. Like Jesus, Fred Rogers encouraged children to embrace their weaknesses. He authorized us to care more deeply, to reach out to those suffering, to love without reserve. He didn’t promise it wouldn’t hurt, only that we would emerge.

Star Trek’s Mirror Universe, like its Klingon Empire, depicts a society ruled not by humanist values, but by chest-thumping displays of strength. Because Roddenberry realized, despite his ideals, that some people never outgrow their childhood vulnerability stage. We’ve all worked in jobs where the biggest assholes have the most friends, because just like on the schoolyard, scared peers never stop trying to constantly mollify them.

Roddenberry, an atheist, and Rogers, a Christian, shared an underlying belief that rule by fear seems enormous when we’re in its midst, but can never truly last. Roddenberry believed society itself would reach a stage of development where it shackled our violent impulses, but the shadow self, the dark mirror, would remain. Rogers believed the fight would never truly be won, but which side we chose would define our lives.

Because yes, fundamentally, children are weak. Humans are weak. We spend our lives vulnerable to money, violence, and injustice. We never outgrow our weaknesses; we only reach a stage of development where our weaknesses no longer rule us. Whether we reach that individually or together, we’ll all, hopefully, reach a point where weakness is no longer shameful.

Pie in the Sky on TV's “Firefly”

Promotional cast photo of Firefly

“Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me.” Bluesman Sonny Rhodes’ theme-tune performance nailed the tone of TV’s Firefly. The nine crewmembers of the bucket freighter Serenity have, for individual reasons, abandoned life on terra firma and elected to live in the vacuum between planets. Over fourteen episodes and one feature film, those individual reasons dribble out slowly, equating to various forms of injustice.

American theologian Howard Thurman insists we understand Jesus best by understanding historical context. Jesus’ message of humble resistance makes most sense amid Roman occupation and Jewish subjection. Before Jesus, Jews had three responses. “What must be the attitude toward the rulers,” Thurman asks, “the controllers of political, social, and economic life?” Some, like the Sadducees, adopted Greco-Roman styles, while others, like the nonviolent Pharisees and violent Zealots, doubled down on Jewish identity.

Thurman’s third option is simply absenting oneself from society. This was the option favored by the Essenes at Qumran. Rather than submit to Rome’s bootheel, the Essenes fled Judea altogether, tended flocks among the caves, and refused to participate in society. This allowed the Essenes to maintain Levitical purity by simply not having their practices challenged. The empire can’t threaten us if we simply walk away from the empire.

This third option seems appealing when the empire’s yoke is intolerable, but also inescapable. Religions in particular, but also certain philosophies, urge True Believers to leave the empire. From ancient Essenes and Benedictines to modern hippies and Maharishi followers, morally pure people often yearn to rebuild society. The simple fact that these communities seldom outlive their founders doesn’t dissuade True Believers from trying again.

Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm Reynolds

Captain Mal, commanding the Serenity, takes this impulse to an uncommonly literal level. Saint Benedict promised believers they could, by following simple rules, reject the empire and live in the Heavenly City now. Captain Mal literally lives in the sky. Because his empire, yclept the Alliance, controls every planet in the ’Verse, he simply rejects the empire, leaves the planets, and—despite being outspokenly atheist—tries to go to Heaven.

I’m reminded of Swedish-American labor activist Joe Hill, who wrote folksongs to unify the labor movement. Among his most famous, his song “The Preacher and the Slave” coined the phrase “Pie in the Sky When You Die” to mock conservative Christians’ belief that passive compliance with unjust laws guaranteed a beneficent afterlife. Going to Heaven, in Hill’s view, seemingly meant selling out to unjust authorities here on Earth.

Both Captain Mal and his creator, Joss Whedon, would seemingly agree there. Whedon, like Mal, has nothing generous to say about Christianity. Yet throughout his works, characters continue believing in capital-T Truth, which is found through first leaving human society, then returning to it. Many Joss Whedon narratives, like Buffy or The Avengers, have a contemporary setting that, while altered, reflect our world. Firefly uniquely leaves Earth altogether.

This lets the protagonists do something seen frequently in other Whedon properties: go to Heaven now, before they’re dead. Captain Mal makes explicit something only lurking tacitly behind Buffy or Captain America. Whether fighting the Alliance, vampires, or Chitauri, Whedon’s protagonists must first leave this plane, often multiple times, then return armed to fight this world’s battles.

Joss Whedon

(As an aside, Captain Mal provides a perturbing metaphor. Whedon modeled Mal on ex-confederates who refused to surrender, like Frank and Jesse James, and headed West as outlaws. This seems like Lost Cause apologia, and former fans have turned against Firefly for this. But the episode “Shindig” specifies that the victorious Alliance, not the defeated Independents, practice slavery. Historically, this makes sense. As James McPherson writes, the Confederacy lost the war, but arguably won the peace.)

Unfortunately, fleeing the world never works. The world eventually barges in. Throughout history, peoples have used the cloak of religion to seek solace in isolated locations like Qumran, Monte Cassino, or Canyon de Chelly. The empire eventually overrun and destroyed all these locations. Each one is now a national park or historical center, demonstrating the ultimate fate of those who flee: their lives are frozen in time, as artifacts.

Like the Essenes at Qumran, or the Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, the Serenity crew attempts to disavow participation in the empire. But the empire keeps dragging them back in. That’s because, as Joe Hill realized, Heaven isn’t a place to camp during this life. Capital-T Truth will only be found by facing the empire on the ground. Because eventually, they will take the sky from you.

I Am Vengeance, I Am the Night—And So Much More!

It’s been touching to watch tributes roll in for American voice actor Kevin Conroy, following his passing this past Thursday at age 66. Fan loyalty to an actor they knew almost entirely through his voice speaks volumes to how important that symbol remains for so many who were young in the 1990s and early 2000s. I suspect Conroy knew his importance to a generation; his enthusiastic reception at fan conventions is the stuff of legends.

Live-action superhero actors come and go; cinema is currently on its sixth or seventh Batman, depending how you count. Fans greet every new Batman actor with hostility, though public sentiment usually adjusts quickly (pipe down, George Clooney). Behind them all, Kevin Conroy has persisted; he portrayed Batman from 1992 to 2019, when he finally portrayed the character in live-action on an episode of Batwoman. Twenty-seven years associated with the role.

However, I can’t help noticing how every tribute focuses on one role. Besides Batman, Conroy played a handful of other television and movie roles, particularly supporting roles on daytime soaps and crime dramas; few got any particular traction. But his theater career was extensive, and focused heavily on Shakespearean roles. Conroy studied at Julliard, under John Houseman, and his classmates included Robin Williams and Kelsey Grammar.

As a sometime actor myself, I wonder the implications of being so closely associated with one role. Like Jeremy Brett, whose once-storied career collapsed entirely into the role of Sherlock Holmes, every eulogy for Kevin Conroy remembers one role. His entire career has been compressed into something that happened in a sound studio, while the mostly anonymous animators worked around the needs of his voice.

I don’t want to disparage Conroy, or the influence his raspy, war-torn performance had on his intended audience. For two generations, his performance encapsulated not only Bruce Wayne’s willingness to fight for his beliefs, but the price he paid for continuing that fight. Conroy was the first gay actor to portray Batman (though this fact wasn’t initially known), and with his hard-chisled features and intense stare, it’s amazing he didn’t get live-action screentime sooner.

Kevin Conroy pictured with frequent co-star Mark Hamill

But actors with diverse range and untapped capabilities often get their careers reduced to one iconic role when they die, or even retire. When Ian Holm passed away in 2020, dozens of obituaries named his appearance in only two franchises: Alien and Lord of the Rings. When David Letterman retired from nightly TV, The New Yorker ran an illustration of him throwing pencils at the camera—which he hadn’t done in over twenty years.

Likewise, Kevin Conroy’s Shakespearean career largely vanished. So did his dedication to public service: following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, Conroy cooked and served meals for first responders sifting the rubble of the World Trade Center. In an era dominated by public attention-seekers like Kanye West and Elon Musk, Kevin Conroy happily worked hard, gave back, and let the results speak for themselves.

Conroy persistently remained conscious of his public role as an actor. As a gay man performing during a time when being publicly out could submarine a man’s career, Conroy took seriously theatre roles like “Peter” in Richard Greenberg’s Eastern Standard, a closeted entertainment executive who didn’t dare live his truth, for fear of imploding his career. In interviews, Conroy described such roles as an important moral statement.

Therefore I find myself torn. Like everyone, I think it’s fitting to celebrate the role that had such wide-ranging influence on a generation, and mourn the fact that this role has now ended. Yes, some other voice actor will certainly portray Batman, and probably mimic, to some degree, Conroy’s performance; but it’ll never be Kevin Conroy. Like Adam West before him, Conroy’s Batman mattered, and now it’s over.

Yet that isn’t Conroy overall. Like Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, or Harry Corbett as Harold Steptoe, Conroy’s career has largely vanished into one role. I don’t suppose Conroy minds, considering his active embrace of the organized fan community. (Unlike Corbett, who despised his iconic role and tried to distance himself from it.) Fan tributes to Conroy are remarkably one-note, and though it’s an awesome note, it isn’t a symphony.

Batman’s message matters, and the animated performance, uncluttered by the studio interference that reportedly hamstrung Tim Burton, conveys that moral complexity. Kevin Conroy will always be vengeance and the night for an entire generation, and he rightfully should be. But he was so much more than that and, actor to actor, I fear that getting lost.

Doctor Who and the Myth of Time

Various writers and artists, Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension (two volumes)

Time itself is coming apart; but when isn’t it, when the Doctor is around? A massive, terrifying vortex of pure white light is traveling the universe, eating everything it encounters. We first witness it swallowing Captain Jack Harkness off a distant planet. But this monster isn’t satisfied with one planet, or even one timestream; it’s consuming the universe in reverse order. And it’s apparently started consuming the Doctor’s past selves.

Why can’t fans let prior iterations of the Doctor end? This two-volume collection from Titan Comics includes appearances by every canonical version of the character through 2018. They appear unchanged, unaged, from their onscreen appearance—a pointed fact with the Fourth and Eighth Doctors, who changed markedly between their first and last appearances. Franchise fans, and content creators who appeal to them, won’t let old forms of the character go.

In his 1972 article “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco claims the archetypal hero is everyman, is universal. But in being universal, the hero is finite. Every time Superman punches villains, his mythic justice is extended, but he himself is consumed. Which sounds great when talking about past mythic heroes, like Odysseus or Charlemagne. The problem is, Superman isn’t used up; he’s continually recreated, and therefore, on paper, continually young.

Comic book characters don’t have to age. Superman, with his broad shoulders and iconic spit-curl, remains largely unchanged since 1938. The problem, as I’ve noted previously, happens when characters are depicted onscreen. Superman remains constant, outlasting George Reeves’ suicide, Christover Reeve’s quadriplegia, and the all-around disappointment of Brandon Routh. Artists continually recreate Superman, but human actors inevitably get old and die.

Something similar happens with the Doctor. The BBC writers’ room invented the narrative contrivance of Regeneration in 1966 when William Hartnell, “The First Doctor,” became too stricken with atherosclerosis to continue acting. Writers and fans continued recreating the mythological character, leaving Hartnell, a mortal, behind. The Doctor’s human aspect is transitory; his character remains present and part of audiences’ lives.

Where possible, official productions keep original actors involved: Big Finish Productions, for instance, put the Fourth and Tenth Doctors together in 2020. Tom Baker hasn’t played the Fourth Doctor onscreen since 1981 (not directly anyway) and is pushing ninety, yet he remains altogether synonymous with the role, and able to continue playing it. If original actors aren’t available, alternatives suffice: voice actors Frazier Hines and Tim Treolar currently play the Second and Third Doctors, respectively.

This recreation isn’t dependent on official BBC imprimatur, either. Fan culture, including fanfiction writers, cosplayers, and others, participate in recreating the Doctor. The BBC nominally “owns” the Doctor, yet the character is most alive and fertile in fans’ imaginations. Like all copyrighted productions, the Doctor will eventually pass into public domain, but morally, he already lives there. Every “official” franchise relies upon backstory existing in fans’ imaginations.

Titan Comics, however, tacitly acknowledges something fans already know: because the Doctor remains living, the character needs new adventures. As Umberto Eco writes, Hercules, King Arthur, and other mythic heroes are dead; writers may rewrite existing stories and apply new psychological insights, but seldom add actual new events to the mythology. Superman or the Doctor, however, always require new adventures. The narrative canon is always expanding.

Therefore Titan invents stories like this, which transcend time and bring the Doctor’s multiple incarnations together. Though this story highlights the four (male) iterations from the revived TV show, it incorporates every onscreen version to date, always looking exactly like they appeared back then. Human actors age and die, but on paper, the Second Doctor is always fortyish, the Fourth Doctor is always dark-haired and energetic.

Always the same, yet different.

Audiences yearn for new adventures starring the Doctor, but only as he/they appeared onscreen. Casting David Bradley as the First Doctor is a satisfactory workaround, one time. But audiences probably wouldn’t accept that substitution permanently. Just as Timothy Dalton’s James Bond isn’t Sean Connery’s, each regeneration of the Doctor becomes a new being, but also doesn’t. Because the Doctor moves on, but we, the audience, carry the old mythology with us.

Fundamentally, the BBC “owns” Doctor Who on paper, and licenses companies like Titan Comics or Big Finish Audio to invent new adventures, but that’s a legal fiction. The mythology has taken root in audiences’ imaginations in ways that, say, Quatermass just hasn’t. New adventures rely upon, not licensed canon, but the audiences’ living imagination. Old versions of the Doctor remain because they live and have new adventures inside us.