Category Archives: Television

TeeVee Morghulis Or Why Game Of Thrones Must End

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Valar Morghulis – All Men Must Die – and the same can be said about every show on TV. Moreover, for a TV show to be considered truly great, I believe that it needs to have a strong beginning, middle and (perhaps most importantly) end.

HBO more or less just announced that Game of Thrones will run at least eight seasons. It had previously been suggested that they would wrap after seven seasons while, at the same time, HBO execs have said they’d like to see the show run ten seasons. I was personally very happy with the idea of seven seasons, that way they could ride out the momentum they’ve built without losing steam in the same manner that George R.R. Martin has several times in his Song of Ice and Fire novels.

A last season needs to be settled on sooner rather than later, so that the showrunners can set the home stretch in motion and deliver a conclusion on the highest level possible. Seven made sense to me, as that would give them twenty more hours after this past season to get to where everyone already knows the story is going. That being an army of nightmare creatures breaking down The Wall and laying siege to Westeros.

Already in this past season’s episode “Hardhome” we got a good look at the terror waiting to be unleashed once winter eventually arrives. After seeing that episode, I know I’m not the only one who cared considerably less about all the other storylines that were still dealing with political positioning, and smaller personal skirmishes. Assuming there were only two seasons left, I was ready for season six to be the last time winter was coming, and season seven being the madness that ensues when winter finally arrives. All-in-all, I’m just not sure how you can wedge another ten episodes in between there.

Game of Thrones shares DNA with something like Breaking Bad in that it is all clearly leading somewhere. There were events set in motion early on that would lead to a inescapable reckoning. In Breaking Bad, Walter White was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then rose to power as Heisenberg . It was therefore inevitable that either the cancer, or the sins he committed as Heisenberg, would kill him. Everyone knew this was coming, which is why everyone was excited when an end game was promised for season five. If they had tried to milk two or three more seasons out of the story, it would have diminished the legacy of the show.

I can also reference Starz’ Spartacus. They did a great job of going full speed ahead through the entire run of the series. That run lasting only three chronological seasons and one prequel season. Spartacus is a well known legend, and you’d have a hard time finding someone who didn’t know how it ends. With that in mind, it was important to make the journey to that ending as effective as possible, without any sort of lag time. Spartacus is one of the very few TV series that I own on blu ray, so you can draw your own conclusion about how I feel they did.

Lost is a cautionary tale on the flip side of this. I loved that show, even though I remember a couple of the middle seasons being a mess. The problem was that they had promised answers, and waited too long to lock down a time of resolution. The same could be said for another show I loved that suffered from stretching itself too thin over too many episodes – Battlestar Galactica. This show was also had what was, essentially, a single large story arc that required an ending. Part of the reason why both of these shows have sat in my Netflix queue for years with the unfulfilled intention of rewatching them is because they are both at least twenty episodes longer than they should have been.

Episodic shows like Mad Men, or The Walking Dead, or The Flash can run as long as they please. This is because they don’t need to worry about momentum building up over multiple seasons. When done well, an episodic series will build up momentum and deliver a measure of resolution at the end of each individual season. Game of Thrones does not have that luxury. Any time spent not leading towards the finale feels extraneous. In fact, you can feel this sort of stalling in many episodes of Game of Thrones that fall in the middle of each season.

Maybe eight seasons of Game of Thrones will be fine. I certainly hope they manage to pull it off, as it’s probably my favorite continuing series on TV (fare thee well to the already canceled Hannibal). That being said, I know that my attention will still waiver during scenes that don’t push the story towards its inevitable climax. I’d like to revisit Game of Thrones again once it ends but, if they keep driving it until it’s running on fumes like Lost or BSG, then it will likely end up sitting on my HBOGO watchlist as unwatched as those other shows in my Netflix queu.

The Risky Risk Aversion Of Vince McMahon

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There was a WWE special event this past Sunday – they still refer to them as Pay Per Views even though people who have the WWE Network are not actually paying per viewing any longer – called Battleground. It was fine for a non-major event, with some good matches.

The big twist that WWE would like people to be talking about is the return of The Undertaker seeking revenge on Brock Lesnar for ending his WrestleMania win streak. But what the “smarks” and the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC) are really talking about is John Cena winning yet another match that does nothing for him and hurts his opponent.

The opponent in this case was Kevin Owen, who earned a reputation as a big time performer in the indies. He burst onto the NXT scene earlier this year, and possibly made an even bigger debut in a WWE ring a few months ago. Cena won the United States Championship at WrestleMania, presumably with the intention of restoring the credibility of that title by putting it on Vince McMahon’s hand-picked face of the company. The end game was seemingly to bring up a new star who would take the title off Cena and instantly become a main event level player. Owens had, in a very short amount of time, proven that he was the perfect guy to step into that spot.

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Naturally, he lost clean to Cena by tapping out in the middle of the ring. This was just the latest in a long line of instances where Vince McMahon – at least over the past few years – shucked away from creating a new main event star in order to retreat to the comfort of a guy who was made ten years ago. It doesn’t always go the same way, sometimes Vince just kills a guy’s push with no real Plan B. I’m sure it’s not all Vince’s doing (you can get a better idea of the sort of “yes men” he surrounds himself with by googling the name Kevin Dunn). The bottom line is that Vince McMahon is, for some mysterious reason, terrified of taking chances on creating new main event stars.

I’m not going to go into how creating new stars back in the Attitude Era led to the most successful period in WWE history – that’s a whole other article. The fact was that Vince was forced to make new main eventers because WCW had signed away all of his current main eventers. The sad truth is that there’s no outside parties pushing Vince any longer, and so he doesn’t feel he needs to create new superstars. Even though, by that same token, there’s no real risk in pushing new guys to the top because WWE is really the only show in town. Thriving profressional wrestling organizations in Japan and Mexico are  fine, but they’re not really competition. The same could be said for TNA and ROH who, even after recently pairing up, are still not a genuine threat.

Even with some bright spots popping up here and there, WWE has a very stale product. A big part of the problem is Vince McMahon & Co keeping fresh faces away from the top of their cards, and regularly digging up stars from past eras to take those spots. In this blog, I’m going to explain several instances where they could have gone in exciting new directions before copping out and returning things to the status quo.

I’m only going to go back to 2011, since four years really is a large enough sample size to make my case. Throughout the summer, CM Punk was cutting blistering promos and having exceptional matches. He impressed so much that Vince decided to put the WWE Championship on him at the Money on the Bank PPV that July. After getting one of the loudest pops in recent history for beating John Cena, Punk was written off TV to build up anticipation for the rematch at SummerSlam.

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The crowd is hot for Punk all the way up to SummerSlam, and he won that match as well. Of course the end of the match was a bit overbooked, which took some of the wind from it. Not nearly as much, though, as having a has-been who played a very large part in the death of WCW – Kevin Nash – come to the ring, drop Punk and allow lukewarm heel Alberto Del Rio to cash in a Money in the Bank contract to take the title off Punk. Punk then proceeded to have a pointless, several month long feud with Triple H before the powers that be finally realized that Del Rio wasn’t doing anything for the fans and put the title back on Punk at Survivor Series in November 2011.

CM Punk went on to have the longest WWE reign as WWE champion in 25 years and had a series of great matches. He may not have main evented as much as he should have during that reign, but things worked out at least. Dolph Ziggler was not as lucky.

Ziggler is a great worked who, at the time, was a heel who got more cheers than most of the babyfaces that WWE wanted the people to actually cheer for. He won the Money in the Bank contract in 2012, but still was booked to lose a lot more matches than he won – which is really how his career has gone for the most part. On the night after WrestleMania in 2013, Ziggler finally cashed in his contract and won the World Heavyweight Championship from Alberto Del Rio. Del Rio was a lukewarm babyface at the time, and the pop Ziggler got when he won rivaled the massive one that Punk got the year before.

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Unfortunately, Ziggler got a concussion off a blown spot and ended up having to sit out for a few weeks. This did nothing to dim his popularity and, when he came back to finally defend his title, WWE decided to make him a full-on babyface. He then proceeded to lose the title back to Del Rio, much to the dismay of everyone other than Vince McMahon. Championships are won and lost all the time, and so the fan naturally figured they would put the title back on Ziggler in short time. But it was not to be. Del Rio held onto the title until October 2013, where he dropped it at Hell In The Cell to Vince’s safety blanket John Cena.

Ziggler continues to be a great worker, in fact he had an awesome moment at Survivor Series 2014 where he was the sole survivor in a match that ousted mega heel group The Authority from power. In an act of atrocious and lazy booking, The Authority was back in power less than a month later. Ziggler, meanwhile, was finally booked so badly for so long that the fans seems to have finally accepted that he’ll never be the main eventer that he should have been.

The arc of Daniel Bryan’s odyssey started in summer of 2013, when he split from a wildly popular tag team with Kane to become the single most over performer in WWE. His unmatched work rate, easy charisma and everyman sensibilities made him the most universally cheered WWE superstar since Stone Cold Steve Austin’s heyday. Bryan was essentially the only guy who every demographic in the crowd were rooting for. Vince and his henchmen are known for going all starry-eyed a very specific type of musclebound human action figure, and so he was not apt to move the undersized Bryan to the top of the card.

But every crowd in every city WWE went to had a different idea, and so Bryan finally got a main event WWE Championship match against (you guessed it ) John Cena. Bryan won the match, and the title, clean in the middle of the ring. This is all the more astounding since Cena only does one or two clean jobs every calendar year. After a few minutes of celebration, Triple H, the special guest referee in the match, dropped Bryan and allowed Randy Orton to cash in a contract to take the title off Bryan.

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The next few months went much the same as they had for Ziggler earlier in the year. Bryan never won the title back, and was phased out of the title scene by the end of the year. Randy Orton squared off with John Cena to unify the titles- which was another terrible idea that I’ll have to address in another blog – and the world yawned. The fans, however, would not let Bryan suffer the same fate as Ziggler, and they simply cheered louder and louder for him no matter who he was in the ring with or if he was even in the ring at all.

It took all of Vince’s WrestleMania plans to fall apart – formerly popular superstar Batista came back and got booed out of the building, followed by CM Punk getting sick of the sort of things listed above and simply quitting the company – in order for Vince’s hand to be forced and allow Daniel Bryan to be the star of 2014’s WrestleMania. Bryan became the undisputed champion after a pair of great matches on the same night, and everything seemed right in the world of wrestling.

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Sadly, a serious neck injury forced Bryan to vacate the championship, and the fans never truly got to see him have the title reign they were dying for. Of course, had they put the title back on Bryan back in September or October of 2013 like they should have, then we would have had a very satisfactory seven month title reign filled with a number of guaranteed great matches.

After Bryan vacated, Vince could have put the title on another up and coming superstar in an eight man ladder match held in June 2014, but boringly and lazily plopped it back on Cena. It’s worth noting that two guys who I’ll get to in a moment – Bray Wyatt and Cesaro – were also in this ladder match. Cena was then used to put the WWE Championship on part-time bad ass Brock Lesnar.

It may sound like I’m piling on John Cena here, but I’m really not. He’s a fine worker and, after all, he’s not the one booking his programs. That being said, he’s been used over the past year to bury a trio of heels who could have been used to freshen up the man event picture – Bray Wyatt, Rusev and Kevin Owens.

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To summarize, a win for Wyatt over Cena at WrestleMania 2014 would have established him as a made man. Naturally he lost in the center of the ring. Wyatt hasn’t even sniffed the main event scene since then. At WrestleMania 2015, Rusev was the undefeated United States Champion who would have gotten a similarly massive boost by beating Cena. So, he also lost in the middle of the ring, and has become a bit of a comedic act since then.

Cena has since brought a lot of credibility and excitement to the US Title picture with his weekly US Title Open Challenges on Raw. But the truth was that he should have just been holding the title until the right time and right guy came along to take it from him. Kevin Owens was that right guy, and this past Sunday at the Battleground PPV was the right time. So, of course, John Cena was booked to beat him in the middle of the ring. Now, this just happened, so it’s not too late for things to work out. But it seems pretty unlikely, and the optimal moment for Owens to win the title has passed.

As I type this, Cesaro is on a run of fantastic matches that rivals Daniel Bryan’s leading up to SummerSlam. His popularity is blowing up, and the fans are ready to see him take the leap into the main event scene. Years of sour experiences have given me very little faith in ever seeing him reach the top of the card, though I’d love to be proven wrong. That being said, there’s no legitimate reason for him not to. Then again, Vince McMahon & Co have never seemed to need legitimate reasons to do any of the stupid things they do.

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CM Punk, Dolph Ziggler, Daniel Bryan, Bray Wyatt, Kevin Owens and Cesaro are all guy who could have – or still can – make the WWE main event scene a lot more entertaining. Yet Vince McMahon prefers to dwell in his John Cena-shaped cave. When he does venture out, he brings along part timers like The Undertaker, Brock Lesnar or The Rock, and sticks them at the top of the card until they go away again a month later.

It’s a bummer, but it’s not too late. Punk is gone, Bryan may be finished and Ziggler’s cred may be damaged to the point where he’ll never get his WWE Championship reign. But Wyatt, Owens and Cesaro are still in spots where they can succeed if they’re given the opportunities that Vince gave to John Cena a decade ago.

But Vince is scared of the future, and he’s scared of taking risks even though there’s no genuine risk involved. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no real competition for WWE’s market share. The best hope we, as fans, have is for Vince to finally step down and let Triple H and Stephanie McMahon take over, as they have shown a very promising vision of the future with NXT. Barring that, maybe John Cena will decide that making his living in Hollywood is a better deal than getting bounced off a ring apron every night. I’ve heard only good things about his roles in Trainwreck and Sisters.

Anyway, that’s my diatribe. I’ve been a fan of WWF/WWE for way too long to pull myself away – even though I do fast forward through about 65% of Monday Night Raw on a given week. Still, I’d like to see new stars being made, and new match-ups at the top of the PPV cards.

The most exciting part of pro wrestling, after all, is the fact that it’s a “sport” where the fans actually have an influence on how things play out. Or at least they should. We can’t hit three pointers for our favorite NBA teams, and we won’t catch touchdown passes from the QB of our favorite NFL teams. No matter how loudly you cheer for your team, it’s not really going to affect the outcome of the game. But with pro wrestling, you buy a ticket and you cheer as loud as you can for your favorite performers. The powers that be hear those cheers and sometimes, though less soften than they should, they will give those stars a well-deserved push.

TV shows have production schedules that stop them from changing course on a dime if something is not working. On the other hand, if something is not working on WWE TV, they can flip that story around the very next night. But too frequently they do not. I’ll keep watching, regardless, and I’m sure I’ll keep complaining. Hopefully, though, there are enough of those CM Punk/Dolph Ziggler/Daniel Bryan pops to keep me from becoming disenchanted enough to finally cancel that WWE Network subscription.

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Ah, who am I kidding. There’s always that back catalog to keep me on-board. Ironically enough, that might be the exact same stance that Vince McMahon has been taking.

The Alpha Breakdown – Story

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Now it’s time for the last part of my three part series breaking down The Alpha. This one will focus on the influences and inspirations for the story itself.

**There are spoilers involved so, if you haven’t read The Alpha (or The Pack for that matter), you may want to skip this until after you have.**

As mentioned in the characters post, the main theme of The Alpha is finding where you belong in the world. Of course, that also involves resolving past traumas and moving on to where you’re meant to be.

That the characters are working through their tragic pasts also allowed me to go a bit lighter with the tone. Which makes sense since who didn’t have a better time in college than in high school? You get a fresh lease on life, and you really are more well equipped to handle the emotional landmines that life lays in front of you.

I’ve also always been intrigued by the idea of secret societies directing the course of the world for their own nefarious ends. I was glad to have Hadrian Graysmith’s long tendrils give me a chance to explore that in this novel.

I wanted to change the mechanics of the story to differentiate it from the dread of the unknown that permeated The Pack. That is why I presented a trio of fully-formed venatores in the prime of their lives. In a way it was me reliving the excitement I felt when Star Wars: Episode One promised to show us that sort of fully-trained Jedi.

Luke never really became a true Jedi, Yoda and Obi Wan were past their primes, Darth Vader was an abomination, and The Pack only really showed Jack Halliday doing his best after being on a 10 year bender. Meanwhile, Craig, Izzy and Michael are all in mid-season form. I do rather hope that The Alpha was executed better than Episode One, but that’s still what planted the seed.

I also wanted to get into more action in this book than in The Pack, which built up the tension for the first two-thirds of the story before unleashing the horrific fury of violence of the last third. Allow me to indulge myself and discuss my favorite action set pieces from The Alpha.

The subway train/tunnel massacre was inspired by my many subway rides that were spent imagining what would happen if the train were suddenly attacked by monsters. What can I say, being stuck in a subterranean metal tube causes my mind to wander. It was also inspired a bit by the cult classic C.H.U.D, the creatures from which I also spent time looking for in the darkened tunnels that shot off in all directions.

That led directly to Michael winning a hard fought battle against a horde of vampires, and then moving directly onto the big boss. The rooftop pummeling  was my chance to lay some groundwork similar to Batman: Knightfall, wherein our hero is not really prepared to deal with his nemesis and so is nearly beaten to death by him. That, of course, sets up the big rematch at the end.

Michael and Natalie as reluctant partners has its roots in most buddy cop movies or team-ups similar to Buffy & Spike or Daredevil & The Punisher. The pair fighting their way up the Graysmith Enterprises building was inspired by a number of sources as well. Not the least of which would be Ong Bak 2, The Raid and Dredd.

Alpha Michael vs Vamp Lord Graysmith was probably based more on the countless hours of pro wrestling I’ve watched over the years than anything else. Natalie cleaning up after Michael, and being the one who actually finishes off Graysmith, was just a fun twist on the typical End Boss Battle.

That concludes my three part blog breaking down The Alpha. I hope you found it insightful and, if you haven’t yet read The Venator Series, maybe it will inspire you to do so. There will be another Venator Series entry in the near future, but be on the lookout for a couple of other works coming from me in the even nearer future.

Thanks for stopping by, and keep readin’!

On Time Travel & Terminators

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Terminator Genisys opens on July 1st and, while I am cautiously optimistic that it will be good, I am certainly going to use the opportunity to discuss the use of time travel in entertainment.

I’m no quantum physicist – sorry to disappoint – so I’ll be giving a bit of a layman’s take on the three most frequently used types of time travel. Of course there have been many other types used here and there, but I’ll be focusing on the ones that seem to be the most recurrent. The Terminator film franchise had really made use of all three types, which is why I’ll be using that as a jumping off point.

I will be referring to the theories here as the the Infinite Loop, the Running River and the Parallel Timelines theory.  Not exactly scientific terminology but I find them to be fitting, so let’s just roll with it.

The Terminator goes with the Infinite Loop theory, which essentially states that time is a circle. Everything that will ever happen has already happened and will happen again and again and again. Specifically in this case, John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother Sarah Connor from a Terminator sent back to kill her by Skynet, and then Reese ends up becoming John’s father.

The suggestion here is that Reese was always John’s father, and so the future and the past have always been set in stone. By the end of the movie, Judgment Day – the nominal nuclear destruction of the human race – has not been averted. So, humanity is blasted, John Connor leads the rebellion against the machines, Skynet sends a Terminator back in time, John sends Reese back in time to protect his mother, and the events of the film continue on an infinite cycle.

The Infinite Loop is typically used in tragic stories, as it plays with the notion of unavoidable fate always trumping free will. This is why it’s the theory favored by the fairly nihilistic Rust “time is a flat circle” Cohle in True Detective, and Battlestar “all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again” Galactica.

T2 switches gears and uses “no fate but what we make” as it driving mantra. I’m going to skip the details of the film since, if you haven’t seen it, then I’m sure you’ve already stopped ready this blog post. The bottom line is that Sarah Connor, the super annoying preteen version of her son John, and a Terminator fresh off a babyface turn (wrasslin’ reference alert) decide to go ahead and stop Judgment Day from ever happening.

It’s not made clear whether they succeeded in the theatrical release, but several of the home video versions have a deleted epilogue where an elderly Sarah Connor is playing with her grandkids in a park. All of which suggests that Judgment Day was, in fact, averted.

This is the Running River theory, called such since a good analogy for it is that, if a river’s course is diverted at any point, then every point that flows after that affected point is changed as well. However, it is still the same river. This theory is used in stories with happier endings, as it illustrates that we can change our future for the better. The best example of this is perhaps Back To The Future, wherein Marty McFly changes his family’s life for the better after a brief, reverse-Oedipal wracked, visit to his parents’ past.

Terminator 3 flipped back to the Infinite Loop theory and, while I wouldn’t mind blogging about how that movie get a bad rap and is actually pretty good, it would be superfluous to go further into it.

Terminator Salvation, also better than its reputation though still not especially good, doesn’t really have much to do with time travel. As such, I’m going to twist the facts here to get to my last point. It could be interpreted as saying that the future (or the present, I suppose) may not be the same as it once was. In fact, it may be an entirely different timeline.

Parallel Timelines have long been the theory of choice for ongoing stories. DC  and Marvel Comics have had several “Event Series” and one or two movies that stemmed from this version of time travel. Buffy The Vampire Slayer had a great episode titled Dopplegangland, where a vampire version of Willow crosses over the the “Prime” timeline.  That’s a good specific example of why comic books favor his method – because it allows for different versions of characters to interact with one another. It also enables them with to do things with – and to – famous characters that they otherwise couldn’t (for primarily economic reasons).

The broader explanation for Parallel Timelines is that anytime someone goes back in time and changes something, a whole new future is created from that point forward. The original timeline still exists, adhering to the Infinite Loop rules, but the new timeline essentially falls under Running River rules. But, again, that timeline has not been changed. A new one has simply been created.

Looper, an awesome time travel movie that you should see if you haven’t yet, sits on the fence between Parallel Timelines and Running River, but I always interpreted it more as the former than the latter. The underseen Source Code is a better pure example of Parallel Timelines, where soldier/lab rat Colter Stevens is continually sent back in time to try and stop a terrorist attack on a  train. This theory can be bittersweet, as it allows for a happy ending in one timeline, but you know that things still turn out crappy in the others.

The Parallel Timelines theory of time travel actually plays off of a similar philosophical theory. The philosophy states that, to keep it as brief as possible, every decision that every living being makes creates its own distinct timeline. I’m rather fond of this theory, but it would take another couple thousand words to get into.

To bring things full circle, or back to the start of this particular Infinite Loop, Terminator Genisys opens on July 1st and I’m going to check it out. Looks like they’re throwing together a grab bag of every time travel theory mentioned above, and so it may be an unholy mess. But I’m never one to pass on a time travel movie, so I’ll be there.

Thanks for indulging my crackpot take, I’ll be back soon with some news about my own works, so keep readin’!