(no subject)
Between renting DVDs and the internet, I’ve been able to get caught up on Burn Notice, Leverage and Chuck.
All told, that’s a lot of time spent watching characters that do a lot of lying.
Burn Notice remains fun, fascinating and fact-filled. I envy them their consultant: someone extremely knowledgeable is providing them with some really good info on everything from explosives to intelligence methodology to agents’ mentalities, relayed to the audience in the protagonist’s voiceovers. The fight scenes are especially well-staged in this regard, eschewing showy moves for the brutal close-quarters combat and grappling that tends to occur in real fights. The way the main characters out-think the adversaries-of-the-week, playing off their emotions, misinforming and manipulating them into turning on each other or making the crucial mistake that causes their downfall, is smart and highly entertaining. Watching Michael take on different cover identities and different personas each week is fun, a good example of how to play a role within a role. (Hmm… takes on different identities and personas, able to lie his way through situations on the fly, has a scar on his face that he integrates into his characters’ backstories… I wonder if Jeffery Donovan would be a good choice to play Face Loran from Wraith Squadron. Not that anyone will ever film an adaptation of Wraith Squadron…) Watching Bruce Campbell be Bruce Campbell (which is a synonym for “made of awesome”) is always enjoyable. Gabrielle Anwar… was so unhealthily skinny that her protruding ribcage was creeping me out, but apparently someone got her to eat something, as she seems to have filled out a little.
Still, season-long plot arcs seem to lack cohesion, tending to be aborted at the half-season mark by some game-changing event and replaced by some new arc rather than resolved. (16 episodes is a rather odd length for a season to begin with.) And whatever happened to all that noise about how Michael’s old enemies would be coming after him once he was out in the cold? That happened all of once and then never came up again.
Leverage is also fairly entertaining, but in contrast it’s pretty unrealistic. Like a lot of people, the writers seem to think that computers are magic. And some of their infiltration strategies really shouldn’t work. A lot of their attempts to talk their way into places would just immediately make any guard (who wasn’t too apathetic to care, anyway) extremely suspicious. Some of Parker’s plans to sneak in would actually draw more attention, rather than less. And you cannot Bavarian Fire Drill your way past military guards. Period. They expect that sort of thing. (As I understand it, they have written orders that say that temporarily outrank anyone trying to come through their gate. Depending on what you’re trying to get into, failure to have proper authorization or know the proper codes-even if they know you personally and that you work there-could lead to being ordered to get on the ground at gunpoint. A guy I work with used to load nuclear cruise missiles for the Air Force. If he forgot the number of the day, he could expect to wait with his hands on his head under the watchful gunsights of his own coworkers until his superior came out to verify his identity.) And a lot of their plans seem to require them to be able to see the future or blatant idiocy on the part of the opposition. (Do they really expect us to believe that Feds would keep a guy in a hotel room and not also take and secure the adjoining room? Bullshit.)
But it’s still a lot of fun, even if it is nonsense. A bunch of criminals with varying skillsets coming up with wild schemes? It’s very Shadowrun, only without the cyberpunk.
But, can we talk about these silly videophone scenes Sophie has been doing for the past half season to disguise the actor’s pregnancy? They’re laughable. Not just the bluescreening, which is so fake that I thought they were going to reveal it to be misdirection, but the backgrounds. She’s calling from Egypt, so there are pyramids and a camel in the background? Did she get a Skype connection from the set of The Mummy? It’s so stupid it’s offensive. Yeah, having a character teleconference beats trying to hide her abdomen in every shot, but then they went ahead and did that anyway, having her appear in a huge, fluffy coat in the season finale. Oh, my poor suspension of disbelief…
I’ve been having some real misgivings about Chuck this season. It’s still fun, but… there are some things that are starting to bug me.
I can normally suspend my disbelief pretty well: this show’s wildly unrealistic and doesn’t pretend to be anything else, playing on the style of those old-school ‘60s spy movies that made James Bond seem grounded by comparison with a more modern aesthetic. But the whole thing with the Intersect flashing skillsets into Chuck’s head is pushing it. There’s a lot more to being able to perform physical feats like acrobatics or martial arts than just knowing the moves. You need to train your physical condition up so that you can use what you know effectively. Chuck knowing everything there is to know about striking is meaningless if his limbs are neither quick and coordinated enough to actually connect not strong enough to do serious damage. In some cases he might not be flexible enough to even do the move, not having done enough stretching over the years, and should probably be pulling a lot of muscles as he tries to do things that his body isn’t used to. (Especially groin muscles, for maximum comedic effect, with all those high kicks and gymnastics.) I doubt I know much less about doing a front rising kick now than I did ten years ago, but that doesn’t mean its as easy for me to get my foot over my head as it was when I was a teenager. (Not that I should be trying outside of practice, anyway. Kicking high is completely impractical in a real fight, and a good way to wind up knocked on your ass. But I’m used to suspending my disbelief about showy-yet-impractical martial arts.) Also crucial is training and practicing repeatedly so that moves aren’t simply known, but established in muscle memory and occur without any conscious thought. Fights happen too quickly to think about your reactions. You have to be able to react on instinct, the way you were trained to. You have to be able to choose a course of action quickly enough to take advantage of openings, without stopping to think about them. For your reflexes to be any good, you have react reflexively. And even if the Intersect is somehow taking care of that, completely taking control of Chuck’s nervous system and running some kind of combat program (akin to skillwires from Shadowrun-and that’s twice that game’s come up in this post, but this time it’s with the cyberpunk, because we’re talking about some awfully advanced tech here), all of its knowledge of how to fight will be designed for the body whoever it was whose knowledge of martial arts got downloaded into the Intersect. (And since when can they do that? Just download people’s brains into computers? The original Intersect just took an intelligence agency’s files and let someone learn their contents subliminally. Now we’re downloading people’s knowledge? See why I say it’s suddenly cyberpunk?) The size, strength, speed and reach it would be assuming would be all wrong for Chuck’s body. It’s not like knowing a technical skill. “How to fight” changes every instant.
Also, the use acrobatics to evade security systems is just getting silly. I mean, even sillier than it was to begin with. Somebody’s watched Entrapment too many times, but was too busy staring at Catherine Zeta-Jones’ butt to actually pay attention. Like the hallway of darts-shooting-from-the-walls. How does backflipping help you get through ahead of the darts? If it’s just a matter of raw speed, shouldn’t running be the best way? With the rotation, wouldn’t half of him be constantly moving backwards (or at least forwards less quickly) back into the way of the darts? Why would you rig a hallway to fire darts at people who pass, but not do so quickly enough that they can’t get out of the way? And why would somebody coming down a hallway be enough cause to fire a dart at them, but not to set off an alarm? Argh, this makes less than no sense. It makes negative sense. If Chewbacca does not make sense, you must acquit!
…sorry about that, had a Little Moment there… it’s just so stupid…
(And WTF is this about only five people in the world being able to make a sniper shot at half a mile? The world distance record for a sniper kill is more than a mile and a half. Okay, yeah, that was with .50 BMG, but still, half a mile isn’t unusual for a military sniper rifle. Yeah, it’s a minor nitpick, but it’s one that should have been easy to avoid. I might be convinced to let the man-portable minigun slide on Rule of Cool, but this isn’t even cool. Couldn’t they have Wikipedia’d it? Do they not have the internet in Hollywood or something? That would explain why screenwriters don’t ever seem to know how the internet works: they’ve never actually seen it.)
Mostly, though, what’s bothering me is that there seems to be a lot of potential for gender!fail and clichéd writing in the near future. Now that Chuck can deus ex machina whatever skills he needs into his brain, it means more “action hero” moments for him and less for those that earned those skills the old-fashioned way, and Sarah seems to be losing a bigger share than Casey. She seems to be getting rescued a lot more lately, with her imminent peril providing Chuck an impetus to flash. Sarah’s always been a problematic character in this regard, not-infrequently relegated to the Designated Girl Fight and often forced to dress in exploitative outfits to titillate the viewers, but if they’re not careful they’ll push her all the way into Faux Action Girl territory. (A recent episode where she takes on five bad guys and emerges victorious soothes these worries somewhat, but it’s an exception to the recent trend.) And this whole business with Shaw is just dumb. As a way to draw out the romantic tension, it just all feels so… obligatory. It feels forced. The mid-episode shift from “please quit sexually harassing me” to “on second thought, I don’t mind so much” is almost offensive in its implications. And for someone who is constantly saying how getting involved with a spy is a bad idea, Sarah can’t seem to go very long without being involved with one. And while we’re on the subject, everybody and their brother seems to be lining up to tell Chuck that it’s obvious that he still loves Sarah and that if he still wants her, he should go for it… but absolutely none of them seem to be asking if she still wants to be with him. For a secret agent, she seems to be coming up short on agency.
Look, I’m not opposed to romantic subplots in fiction. They can be really good if done well. Some of my favorite series have really good ones; hell, one of my favorite series basically used an impeccably-crafted myth arc and well-choreographed fight scenes as the framework for what is essentially a big gay love story. But there doesn’t necessarily have to be one: some of my other favorite series don’t have one, or have only ones that could easily be dispensed with at little cost to the story as a whole. I’m not even necessarily opposed to the idea of throwing up obstacles between the leads, even though I think that the idea that they must be kept apart until the finale is clichéd, overused and often based on wrong premises. But if it’s going to come off obligatory and contrived, then maybe it’s not worth doing. What characters do in a story has to arise organically from who they are and the circumstances they’re in. And serialized fiction (such as a TV show) There’s few quicker ways to destroy suspension of disbelief than by trying to shove a round character peg into a square hole by making them do what the plot needs them to do instead of what they would do. (That includes you, Ron Moore.) The audience might not know anything about science or fighting or sniper rifles… but they do know people. So if you have to pull things out of your ass and force them into place in the story to make the plot go a particular direction, then maybe you should go in a different direction instead.
Well, two of these shows have finished their seasons, and the third will soon enough, so I guess it’s time to start looking for some new entertainment. Classic TV shows on DVD, or back to anime? Or classic anime on DVD? Decisions, decisions.