The Boob Tube Dude @boobtubedude - Tumblr Blog

Reposting my original “Lost” series finale review

(Originally posted May 23, 2010, on Zap2It. RIP, Zap2It.)

So here’s the deal: this will not be a complete recap of the series finale of “Lost.” To try to make complete and coherent sense of what just dropped our way would be 1) impossible, and 2) be a disgrace to what just happened. Because what just happened isn’t something you instantly react to, but rather mull over during the course of a few days, weeks, months, or years. After all, that was the final episode. We have all the time in the world to think about its implications until we “move on.”

And yes, I use the phrase “move on” specifically due to the use of the phrase by Christian Shephard in the sideways universe, which we know now to be real only in the emotional sense of the world. All throughout the season, the producers of the show have assured us that what happens over there had stakes and meanings, and this is still completely true in the most basic of senses. Neither the pro-epilogue camp nor the pro-Island timeline had it exactly right, even though both camps had valid perspectives to bring to the table and pieces of the puzzle in hand. What “Lost” brought instead was a third perspective, one that nobody really saw and one that I bet made a core section of its audience completely and utterly insane with anger.

Looking at the finale from a perspective of mythology isn’t the best way to go about it. (I started to jot down “So who put the stone in the devil cave in the first place?” before slapping myself silly.) Looking at the finale from a perspective of plot probably isn’t the best ay, either. (Waaaaay too much time spent on getting Ajira 316 up and running again, especially considering the sideways resolution. And there are enough holes in the overall plot as a whole to dig a few dozen wells down towards the light inside all of us.) But looking at it from an emotional perspective, I thought the finale was a masterpiece.

In a sense, “The End” was a love letter from the show to itself and, hopefully, to the audience as well. But it didn’t pay off donkey wheels and Dharma Initiatives but the core characters of the show themselves. The sideways universe did offer a second chance, but not in the way that those that saw the sideways world as a chance to live their lives free from the Island. Instead, it offered each character a tremendous grace note, one felt both by the characters but also the audience at home. When these people “flashed” to their Island lives, they didn’t flash to epic moments in Island history: they flashed to empty jars of peanut butter and freshly picked flowers and all the small moments that make up a relationship.

If the show had to get one of three aforementioned elements right (character, mythology, plot), then it absolutely focused on the right one. As of this moment, writing in the immediate aftermath of what I just saw, I could care less about what happened to Kate and Company once they left the Island. The point of the show seems to be that what you do is less important than the meaning behind what you do. And moreover, if you live those lives in the correct manner, then the specifics are null and void. In the end, you arrive at the same destination. (In Richard’s case, you arrive there with newly graying hair, and the chance to actually buy the eyeliner you’ve long been accused of using.)

Now, let’s talk about that sideways destination itself. If put on the spot, here’s what I think we’re supposed to take away from it: As Island Protector, Hurley envisioned a way to give a gift back to those with whom he shared his time on the Island. Mother had her style, Jacob had his style, and Jack had his extremely interim style. But placing Hurley in ultimate charge of the Island? Brilliant, and not just because I predicted this last Fall and am happy I got at least SOMETHING right.

He’s the absolute perfect person to take the Island from what it was (something to be protected) into what it should be (something to be shared). In a show full of selfish people, Hurley is the epitome of unselfishness. Go back to the pilot episode: he’s distributing food on the first night (including a double dose for Claire, eating for two at the time). In “Everybody Hates Hugo,” he once again institutes a massive redistribution of foodstuffs. In both the Island timeline and sideways one, he uses wealth as a means to help others, giving away his cash rather than hang onto it. So having him established as the final Protector of the Island that we see (though, I imagine, not the final one by any means) worked for me.

What I imagine did not work for a LOT of you is the fact that we’ve spent one-half of the final season of the show watching events that would have been solved in “LA X” had Haley Joel Osment been on the flight. It’s a feeling that I have sensed coming for a while: the sideways world was doing such a damn good job of providing emotionally resonant moments that it eventually turned into an overwhelming attractive option for both the characters and the viewers. In fact, it turns out that the major players had absolutely no problem moving on once they made their emotional connections/breakthroughs, and instead willingly moved onto whatever lies on the other side of that white light.

As such, I look at the sideways world now as something created by Hurley (with Ben’s help) as a stopping ground for all major players in the “Lost” universe to meet at once, irrespective of when or how they died. As Christian says, there is no “now” over there. Time is just a relative construct created by people who are used to seeing events progress in a linear manner. What does Hurley ever want? For his friends to be happy! So what does he do? Well, he doesn’t build a golf course, he builds a space for them to somehow connect after shuffling off their mortal coil and all end up getting the moments of happiness that eluded them, making connections that had been previously missed, and getting forgiveness once thought impossible. They don’t have to be alive to have these things matter once achieved in the sideways universe, which is why I was behind the ultimate explanation 100%.

In the end, electromagnetism had nothing to do with the sideways world. There was no Faustian bargain between Eloise Hawking and The Man in Black. I’ve spent the second half of the season (ever since “Happily Ever After”) arguing that theory, and I’m delighted to be wrong. Why? It’s easier to buy “Hurley’s gift” as a reason as opposed to trying to throw Schroedinger’s cat as a reason for the sideways world. And that “gift” yielded scene after scene in the sideways world that reminded us all why we care so much about this show: its characters. I’m sure everyone had their particular favorites: for now, I’m putting Sawyer/Juliet in the pole position with Charlie/Claire as a surprising second. I’ll take scenes like this over lengthy exposition of the true nature of the glowing cave any day.

It’s obviously easy to say, “Well, the characters are happy, so we should be happy.” But clearly it’s not that simple. After all, these characters are fictional, constructs of the writing staff, whom I am sure went into hiding knowing that there would not only be questions but flaming torches/pitchforks aimed their way once this episode dropped. If we didn’t care about these characters, then there wouldn’t be such anger. Either you read interviews and now feel deceived, or you’re generally displeased that our characters are all dead. I’m not going to tut-tut you from that perspective, since it’s your perspective and you’re totally welcome to it.

To me, anything in the sideways world ended up being something of a bonus, both a meta-level and a narrative level. The show didn’t do the one thing I prayed it wouldn’t: negate the sacrifices and deaths on the Island timeline for some sort of reboot/do over in the sideways timeline. So, we got to see really interesting combinations and remixes of existing characters in unusual settings, with those settings driven by a combination of subconscious psychological desires and latent psychological holdups. (Kate sees herself as the innocent victim, rather than an actual killer, but is still on the run. Sawyer fashions himself a do-gooder, but is still unable to shake the memory of his parents. Jack invents a domestic life he never had, inserting a new body in his life in the form of a son to replace the father he could never find.)

On a character level, the sideways world allowed these characters the chance to let go in ways that they were unable to do in their actual lives. To fault the show for creating such a space when we have so often lamented the unfairness or abruptness of their deaths seems a bit hypocritical to me. For example, let’s take Sun/Jin. Many howled when they died, unable to believe two seasons apart boiled down to one episode; many others noted that it didn’t move them, due to the couple being alive in the sideways world. Turns out, the sideways world gave them another chance to “be together,” as the latter group suspected, but also honoring the sacrifice that tore up the former. I’d love to call this win/win, but I’m not sure I’d get many takers on this.

Let’s take another example: John Locke. Here’s a man that died a potentially pitiful death in “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” only to have his life honored and vindicated in the finale. Without inspiring Jack, the good doctor doesn’t return to the Island, and never becomes Protector, and never stops The Man in Black, and never passes off the torch to Hurley who in turn creates a special world in which Locke not only gets to have the relationship with Jack they never had on the Island, but also gets to forgive his murderer. I could give a flying fig about the other people on the outrigger if I get payoffs such as this instead.

And, as many of us suspected, the show closed on a familiar image, in a familiar place. Some might find fault with the heart of the Island being so near the place where the show started, but if The Island has taught us anything, it’s that looking and seeing are two different things. Charlie couldn’t “see” his guitar until he chose to give up his drugs. The cave is no different: Jack couldn’t see it until he was ready to see it. That’s the work he had to do all along. By bookending the series around a man opening up his eyes to the unknown and closing them as a man who learned what it meant to truly live, “Lost” encapsulated its’ primary thematic concern: what it means to live and learn through other people. They lived together, and none of them died alone. Not in the end. Perfect.

I’ve tried to thematically address the biggest issues/ideas of tonight’s episode. I realize I am short on specifics, but I also realize that there’s probably a huge need on your part to talk about this episode as quickly as possible. So I’m going to end things here, but know that this is just the beginning. Over at Zap2it’s Guide to Lost, we’re going to spend all week looking back at this episode, and by extension, the series itself. Next week, we’ll be continuing our look back at this ambitious, epic, emotional, imperfect, messy, glorious, unique show. I look forward to hearing your comments below, and I look forward to continuing the discussion with you further over on the blog throughout the week.

sixpenceee

Clouds look like incoming tsunami. From here

thepowersofthemind

Earth is really mad at us

dechjo89

MOTHER NATURE

My Top 10 Shows Of 2017

Hi. Here’s a top ten list. People like these, right?

Close But Not Quite: GLOW, Speechless, Insecure, One Day At A Time, Brooklyn Nine-Nine

So what’s 2017 been about? Not about TV, really. Not for me. Hasn’t been the focus. It’s been there, like it always has, but not in the same what. What was an omnipresent obsession turned into something else. It didn’t go away, but it transformed, mutated, evolved, got pushed to the back. But what stuck really stuck, not really programs but lifelines, ways to make sense of senselessness, to realize there was a point to all of this. I didn’t watch nearly as much TV as I had in recent years, but taking a step back meant everything had to count. It had to mean something. It couldn’t be a way to pass the time but a way to define how I should spend it.

10) Wynonna Earp

It was a year in which listening meant more than speaking, when shutting the fuck up was more valuable than trying to articulate anything. Mansplaining my way through this calendar year, whether consciously or inadvertently, would have been the bad way to go. So it was more about looking for blind spots, having them displayed in ways that made me rethink what it meant to be not just a critic but a citizen. Being the former without the latter just means you’re an outsider observer rather than an active participant. Supporting voices that had been screaming to be heard was more important than sharing my own. Even a list like this is probably bullshit, but that’s why I’m not really talking about the shows at all.

9) Jane The Virgin

The shows are important, obviously. They are more than just TV shows but reflections of what’s possible. You can judge shows by how closely they reflect reality and how close they envision how life SHOULD IN FACT BE. I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong way to approach the medium. I do know that shows that simply state how futile it is to do anything other than what’s in one’s own self-interest are lazy and terrible and fairly close to immoral in this stage in history. We all know that life sucks. We won’t need a show to only remind us of that. We need shows that remind us that there’s light in the darkness, that there are options, that happiness is a possibility even when we can’t see it for ourselves.

8) Chris Gethard: Career Suicide

We need to know that other people feel as terribly as we do, and that doesn’t make it freaks but rather makes us human. The idea that we have to hide those kinds of thoughts and vulnerabilities for fear of shame or ridicule cripples us more than we know, and I know this because I’m only this year realizing how long I’ve been this miserable. I chalked it up to “normal” Irish-Catholic upbringing, something that was not worthy of even discussing because relative to so many it’s so fine that it’s not worth even mentioning. And while there are obviously a lot of degrees to this, I chose to just suck it all in for the first 40+ years of my life rather than even contemplate the fact that my left foot taps incessantly for almost every moment of every day I’m awake. I’m constantly aware of how anxiety-ridden and unhappy I am. The very idea of having to go out to meet people at an event I agreed to go to stresses me out, even while being at home all the time makes me wonder why I have so few friends. I can intellectually rationalize the insanity of that contradiction, but I live it all the same. The best stuff on TV doesn’t offer a solution to any of that, but lets me know I’m not alone.

7) American Vandal

We get stuck in routines. We get defined by what others think of us, which in turn reinforces actions that fit that description. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince strangers online that I’m a certain type of person, and that has calcified around someone I’d both like to be and mostly hate. All writing is performative to some extent, and it doesn’t matter if I do it in 140 characters or 5,000 words, it’s all a performance to some extent. You don’t see the crusty-eyed, hairy, smelly weirdo that’s typing any of this on his phone or his laptop. You don’t know me, because I don’t want you to, even though some part of me absolutely positively wishes you did. If you ever wondered if it’s exhausting being a narcissist with crippling low-self esteem, let me tell you: It is.

6) Twin Peaks: The Return

Nothing about this year makes any sense, which means that absurdity often reveals more than “real” life ever could. I’m a lapsed Catholic, so the idea of a God watching over everything seems peculiar, but I’ve never lost faith in the idea that there’s more than just the stuff that happens before we shuffle off our mortal coil. We’re connected to something, whatever it is, because without that connection we’re truly in an abyss. People that do the right thing should be judged differently than those that don’t, and I like the idea that the cosmos has some way of addressing that. Whether that’s through mathematics or morality, I can’t say. But we all sense there’s senselessness just around the corner, and even while that’s mighty tempting at times, there’s a fundamental need for order at the heart of existence that transcends mortgages, commuting to work, and the busyness of everyday life. That meaning is reflected on the inside of our eyelids, played across a screen that becomes impossibly vast once we go to sleep. It’s hard to literally interpret, but it’s there all the same.

5) The Good Place

Actions have consequences. As they should. The rising fear in 2017 centered around the idea that causality had been flung into space, a vestigial element of a life that no longer existed. Actions that once had consequences no longer seemed to have any, and the entire agreement between earthly citizen had seemingly been eradicated by those for who shame had been surgically removed. We all knew things were bad, but there seemed to be no mechanism by which to compel those that didn’t feel like abiding by the normal rules of nature to do so. Once that reality set in, nothing felt real, and action after action buried the actions before those. What was strange was how…familiar everything felt, even while nothing was the same. The post-apocalyptic fantasies gave way to benign realities: We still did more or less the same things while also feeling like it mattered less than ever before, or that by doing the same thing we were perpetuating the problem. Hashtags only get you so far. Many of us marched in January but were exhausted by June. We might as well have been arguing with the tides.

4) Review

What’s fascinating about making a bad decision, or indulging in a dark thought, can perpetuate itself and create its own logic loop from which it’s nearly impossible to escape. So people double down on a bad decision rather than admit it was one, and before long you’re so far down the wrong path that finding your way back to the main road is impossible. Mounting evidence of error yields entrenchment, resistance, and a further erosion of trust in anyone else that doesn’t march in lockstep with your worldview. At some point, objectivity turns into a quaint idea, and you can go insane so slowly that you don’t realize that you’ve been scrolling through tweets for the last ninety minutes because the onslaught of bullshit isn’t stopping but in fact picking up speed. There’s a self-perpetuating cycle with enough power to light up the entire United States but instead might just engulf it in flames. Driving off the cliff becomes preferable to looking in the rearview mirror at all you’ve lost on the way to the precipice. We’re ultimately and irrevocably alone in the bubble we’ve built for ourselves.

3) Better Things

That’s not true, but that’s how it felt for a lot of the year for many of us. I have the lottery ticket of life as a straight white American male, and if I felt this bad this year, I can’t begin to imagine a tenth of a tenth of what it was like for anyone else. That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy, but I can’t pretend to have empathy in a way that’s meaningful for anyone but myself to hear. The world is profoundly different than in was in 2016, but much of that change doesn’t come from something suddenly introduced so much as suddenly pushed into discussion. These aspects of life have always been here, and while it shouldn’t be a surprise to so many to hear them uttered, it is all the same. In that dissonance is opportunity: opportunity for those able to articulate what’s been under an unfortunate cloud for so long to speak out loud in voices both defiant but also hopeful. These are voices that show both an ugly truth but also a better way. These are voices that, now introduced, cannot and should never be silenced again.

2) BoJack Horseman

Instagram is a fairly new app, but the idea of papering over one’s less-than-ideal qualities has been around for, well, forever. We collectively decide we’re not going to talk about it, and we bottle it up, and then we slowly go bald and fat. Or so I hear. I wouldn’t know anything about that, with my luscious locks and 30’’ waistline. 2017 was, for me, a year in which I realized just how corrosive that rot was within myself, how much I was talking about everything other than what was on my mind, with TV a great way to talk about “important” things without having to deal with my own shit. “Of course everyone knows I’m writing about me,” I’d tell myself, usually after a few drinks, and yet I doubt anyone knew or anyone even cared to consider that option. I speak to 28,000 strangers a day on Twitter and have maybe three friends in my life. My family and I love each other and also are the primary sources of our respective problems. I have a wife that used to see me at my best and now usually sees me at my most exhausted. I didn’t see any of this as a problem because I thought I was too privileged to have problems. That doesn’t mean my problems are equal or more or less than anyone else’s. I’m not trying to lump myself in with anyone or anything. I’m just here and realizing how miserable here is and realizing it’s OK to admit that it’s not OK. I don’t know what the fuck to do with this information a month after my forty-second birthday, but it’s still something akin to a breakthrough for someone that’s really good at analyzing theme in narrative television and absolutely awful at looking at the themes that consistently undermine my attempts at anything approximating consistent happiness.

1) The Leftovers

Recently I came across a bunch of handwritten report cards from my high school that my folks saved for me. Each one said something along the lines of, “I don’t know how Ryan does all the things he does and still excels.” These were wonderful things to right and absolutely cursed me to viewing any moment of inactivity as a wasted moment on the path to death. If I wasn’t being productive in some capacity, I was throwing away a chance to maximize my life, as if life was something to be conquered rather than experienced. That message carried through into college, and into my 20s, and once writing about TV became a possibility, drove me through a decade in which I worked on average about 10-14 hours a day. When I took vacations from my day job, I took the opportunity to just do more writing, watch more screeners, do more podcasts. I was here, but I wasn’t here. Not in a meaningful way. I was an outline more than a fully fleshed-out figure. Recently, I’ve been using my weekends to do anything other than something productive. Stepping off the treadmill is antithetical to my nature, and something that I’m admittedly not comfortable doing. I spent so much time wondering what people I’ve never met thought of my writing and almost no time wondering how it’s been a year since I’ve seen cousins that live ten miles away. Television taught me a lot for the past decade, and introduced me to a host of super smart people that did more for me than they’ll ever know. But looking at that screen (and the second screen, for that matter) for this long has come at a cost: It took way too long to see it, but it’s maybe not too late to do something about it. These shows all helped me get to this place in my life, which is why they are my top ten shows of the year.

The Tournament Of The Archomentals, Part 3

Notes from the previous session can be found here.

The third session in the “Tournament Of The Archomentals” arc started right where the last one ended: with the heroes facing off against a djinn and its Air Elemental. For the first time in the arena battle so far, there were no walls blocking the team from one another, so they could take them on together. The Air Elemental struck early and often, creating cyclones that threw most of the heroes into the air and against the solid walls of the room. To counter this, Azrgarth grew a 50’ tree for reasons the DM could not fathom, while DanFielding crafted an impenetrable tent inside which he could hide in a place the spellbook described as “dry and comfortable.” So that was nice.

The cleric Peter Dinklage attempted a high-risk, high-rewards spell in which he tried to banish all but the djinn’s head, which would have basically destroyed the well-planned boss battle but potentially created a “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” scenario in which the big bad would start singing “Meka Leka Hi Meka Hiney Ho.” Sadly, the spell did not work. Ultimately, Chad The Conqueror cast Polymorph to successfully turn the djinn into a frog, and Peter used a stone-creation spell to essentially bury the frog alive inside a frog-sized freeway. Like ya do. With the djinn gone, everyone else focused on the Air Elemental, who had been rendered frozen with fear earlier in the fight thanks to another spell. When the elemental was defeated, things started to get interesting.

The elemental’s essence rose into the sky, and then formed what looked like large soap bubbles: The bubbles descended and enveloped the six party members and brought them into the air. The center cylinder lost its glowing surface to resemble a three-part structure inside. On the top and bottom portions were empty rooms. In the middle, walled off from the other two, was a pedestal on top of which was a red button. Two of the heroes were deposited in these rooms while the other four were taken to the four corners of the grid. As they moved there against their will, the other 20 grids now glowed with the same runes that were on the map that had been inserted under their door the night before the tournament. (Here’s the map again.)

At this point, Garrick got on the loudspeaker and told everyone the second phase of the game was about to begin. These were the rules:

In order to pass the round, eight separate squares had to be stepped on

No one HAD to step on any squares

You could step on any square in any order provided you could feasibly move to it (a person with boots that let them jump fifty feet could use them and avoid squares in the immediate vicinity)

Once a person made a move, they would replace one person in a cylindrical room

Once the round started, each person that moved into the cylinder would remain for two rounds and then replace the person on the board in the same square.

A person in that room would recover health, but could not participate in any activity outside the room (in game terms, a one-time 10HP bonus)

A person that room would have immunity to any effects, good or bad, outside the cylinder (if the room filled with poison, they were fine, but if spell slots were refreshed, they were out of luck)

After the results of the square were revealed and any subsequent activities completed, the party had to step on a new square as the next action (ie, no constant pausing/party heals between rounds)

Once eight squares were touched, the middle portion of the cylinder would open. Pressing the button ends the fight.

With little to go on in terms of being able to understand what the runes meant, Peter Dinklage decided that the Augury ritual would be best. As that takes an hour in game time, what ensued was a metric ton of fictional dilly-dallying. In real time, after about five minutes of group discussion and a few vague hints from the DM due to the Augury requests (in which the danger of some squares was vaguely defined), DanFielding stepped on Square 17. At that point, that symbol started to glow brightly on the floor and appeared up and down all sides of the glass cylinder. Over the speaker, the heroes heard Garrick’s seemingly pre-recorded voice say: “Treasure.” “Oh boy!” he said, now clearly in the present. “That means Danfielding gets an extra 1,000 GP if you all survive!”

After that, Chad the Conqueror stepped on Square 18. The same symbol activity happened, and everyone heard the words “Elemental Plane.” Chad was suddenly whisked away to a large wooden ship in the middle of a raging storm. Trying to figure out what the hell had happened, he noticed two things: all of his compatriots laid out on the deck besides him, seemingly dead, and a large tentacle descending from the sky directly at him. When the tentacle struck him, Chad instantly transported back to the arena, still in Square 18. Everyone was very confused by what just happened, but the team was 25% towards their goal. Garrick continued to narrate the action throughout based on what the heroes did.

Considering all the work that the DM went into balancing the runes so there wouldn’t be an impossible gauntlet of enemies to fight, the heroes did an annoyingly good job of avoiding just about all of the danger, and definitely all of the “oh shit this might be a TPK” options that abounded on the floor. They did fight off two giant snakes with an affinity for mind control halfway through the fight, but little gave them true trouble until three mummies attacked in round seven. DanFielding ended up bringing the tree Arzgarth had planted to life in order to swat them away, which was a totally baller move. Considering DanFielding had started this part of the tournament by casting a spell intended to make a cube of jelly feel bad about itself, he had certainly come a long way in a short time.

In the end, the heroes’ last rune was “Movement, Travel,” a square that meant the next person could move to any square without impediment. It was designed to give maximum movement options, but instead meant the game ended on a kind of “oh, huh” moment. It wasn’t as catastrophically anticlimactic as when the original four players made an unkillable vampire sneeze to death, but then again, what could be?

Since the players asked, and since you might wonder in case you want to borrow/steal this dungeon for your own, here’s how I laid out the activities for each rune. You’ll see the players mostly avoided the really dangerous ones, but that was by luck more than anything else. You could scale the monsters and damage according to the levels your characters are at. Mine were all Level 10, though they did move up to Level 11 for completing the first half of the tournament. The players assumed that each round meant a reshuffle of the effects of each rune, which was adorable as it implied I had the mental acuity to remotely keep track of that. I crossed off the ones they ended up stepping on in case you’re a “Archomentals” completist.

Free

Pursuit, Invisible Stalker

Secret (augury on any glyph)

Free

Regeneration (All HP and spell slots regenerated)

Evil Magic, Power (Two Spirit Nagas)

Life (20 HP)

Giant, Huge (Cloud Giant)

Insanity (player starts beserking and attacking other players)

Demonic, Fiendish (3 Mummies)

Dragon (Young Green Dragon)

Key (only one person now imprisoned in the cylinder)

Evil Power, Destructive Power (Dex Save, lighting shoots through holes that emerge in walls, 4D8 unsuccessful, 2D8 successful)

Strength (+2 Attack for Next Round)

Thrall, Prisoner (Crown Of Madness, doesn’t take effect until next combat, make it a surprise)

Poison, Poisonous (air fills with noxious green fumes, Cons saving throw 15, 3d10 or half on successful)

Treasure (1000 gp)

Elemental Planes (meaning hidden as its part of the future campaign)

Answer, Solution (intuitively understand one glyph)

Uncertain (everyone’s mind becomes clouded, disadvantage on first round of next combat)

Free

Power (+1 AC next fight)

Movement, Travel (next person can move anywhere)

Free

The Tournament Of The Archomentals, Part 2

Notes for the last campaign session are here.

The latest session picks up moments after the last one ended. Garrick runs out to greet the heroes, but immediately behind him are fifty guards that quickly surround them on all sides. Garrick insists that the heroes must go talk to the tournaments architects about what just happened. The cleric Peter Dinklage was having none of it, and what ensued was a ten-minute argument that perplexed both Garrick and the DM. Turns out, Peter had forgotten all about the end of the last session in which the sky went black and the audience wheel started to glow and unholy bright red, and thought the architects were mad they had won the round, and didn’t he feel silly about all of this now.

The five heroes went inside and were greeted by Demora, whom the Halfling seamstress had transformed from a half-elf female Rogue into a male, Dragonborn beserker Barbarian named Stripe. The now finally-united team went before the architects in a grand hall underneath the arena. Gundren Rockseeker, as one intimately familiar with the heroics of the original four from their first adventure in Wave Echo Cave, thought perhaps the group had brought something back with them unwittingly from Barovia. Arzgarth denied those charges. Chad The Conquerer and Peter were then questioned, as two whom Vivienne has transformed. As a warlock, Chad’s new god might have been responsible, Artin Battlehammer suggested. Chad said that his god spoke to him through the stars, which everyone agreed was a little weird but whatever, we’re all inclusive here. Theren Amastacia thought Stripe’s mysterious absence in the last battle now felt fishy, but Stripe described her vomiting in great detail, perhaps too great, if we’re all being honest. Theren then directed her inquiries to the two newest members of the group, Danfielding and Kieran Lonesword. They too denied any wrongdoing.

The group noticed that the last architect, Kallista Orianna, was silent. The Tiefling caught Stripe’s gaze, and Stripe instantly had a vision of a bright blue scepter, almost impossibly large, with a huge tidal wave cresting behind it. As soon as the image was present, it was gone. Kallista broke contact with Stripe and immediately left the room. The architects agreed to let the heroes participate in the next round, but would need to take more precautions with the audience.

Garrick and Vivienne then escorted the group to their room for the evening. The names of the other teams were on doors as they walked down the hallway. The DM worked super hard on these names, but the heroes were clearly too tired from their battle to ask. After much prompting by the DM, the heroes finally indulged his hint and asked about the names of the other four remaining teams.

They were:

Wave Echo Cave Of Mutilation

Quoth The Raven, Neverwinter

Axis: Kobold As Love

The Archomaniacs

The DM awaited the glorious and hearty response. Three half-chuckled and the other three went to get another beer. The DM vowed to make the next round much harder than initially planned.

Overnight, a few of the heroes were awoken by the sound of rustling paper and footsteps outside their door. What they found was a mysterious grid laced with symbols. Peering outside the door, they could find no sign of who had left it for them, or what it meant. They did all agree that the artistry on it was top-notch and museum-worthy, however.

After gearing up for the next day’s events, Garrick led them down the same hallway as before to the arena: The first two archomentals were no longer lit, as the “Earth” portion of the tournament was over. Garrick explained this round would honor the “Air” archomentals, Yan-C-Bin and Chan. “In every moment, the winds of battle can change!” warned Garrick, who was still a bit sore at Peter about the misunderstanding the day before. “You don’t have to win so much as survive this time. You’ll see what I mean.” The portrait of Asmodeus lifted again, but this time, there was no light shining from above. As soon as the heroes got onto the circular platform, the door shut behind them, the room filled up with gas, and everyone passed out.

Well, everyone but Chad, who as a 10th level Warlock is apparently immune to everything, which really rankled the DM’s narrative and overall demeanor, especially because Chad’s the DM’s real-life brother and this brought up all sorts of feelings about how Mom liked him best. Chad watched two guards pick up the limp bodies of everyone else and drag them onto the new arena. The two guards assigned to Chad panicked a bit at seeing him not passed out and quickly ran into the platform and hightailed it out of there. So much for the romantic nature of mystery.

Chad saw the room go from pitch black to bright white in an instant, and the lighting change managed to wake everyone else up. While they had been in many dungeons between them over the years, the heroes never saw anything quite like this. The room wasn’t so much lit by torches as much as lit by sleek, glass-like panels. On the floor and walls were 15’x15’ panels, of which 24 total were on the floor, yielding a 60’x90’ floor space. There was a clear 2’’ gap between each square, segmenting them cleanly from one another. The panels ran up all of the walls as well, shooting 60’ high. In the dead center of the room, about 4’ in diameter, was an equally-glossy cylinder. In the four upper corners of the room were screens featuring the faces of the four Architects, looking sternly at all six of them. No crowds could be seen anywhere. Peter looked at the floor for any signs of the symbols on the map they had gotten the night before, but saw nothing.

The six tried to talk to each other, and realized quickly that they could hear some better than others. An investigation yielded that the 2’’ gap running north to south in the dead center of the room featured an invisible wall, separating the group of six into groups of three. Just as they realized that, the east and west walls raised up 15’, and out came two enormous gelatinous cubes from the space within, moving slowly towards them, in a scene no way inspired by the trash compactor sequence in “A New Hope.”

Different folks took different approaches. The bard Danfielding cast “Vicious Mockery,” in the hopes of I suppose making the jelly feel bad about itself. Peter used his lightning prowess to deal damage but also keep pushing the cube back lest it ingest them whole. The fighters Stripe and Kieran slashed away, the paladin Arzgarth made one cube his mortal enemy in order to deal extra damage, and Chad was chill because he was immune to cubes, probably.

At one point, the eastern-based cube was obliterated to the point of exploding over every clean, glossy surface, which led to the creation of the hashtag #cubelube, and there was much regret.

After defeating both cubes, the heroes heard several whooshing noises, and realized that while the north-south wall was gone, there was one running east-west horizontally between all six rows. Luckily, because of their movement in the previous battle, they were all now paired up. This was good because into these narrow corridors poured a pair of Air Mephits. The DM tried to describe them as Watto from “The Phantom Menace,” but not everyone in the group had seen “The Phantom Menace,” which initially made the DM mad but eventually jealous, because some people had not endured “The Phantom Menace.”

Chad summoned the Fire Elemental Efreeti with 200 HP to take care of his Mephits, because why the fuck not, I guess. The heroes didn’t have a particularly easy time with these creatures, as the Mephits successfully blinded most of them in the first round which required more healing and ingenuity than normally required by them. Even Efreeti had a hard time hitting the Mephits, which would be like Ted Williams having a hard time hitting a ball of a tee.

The heroes ultimately defeated the six beasts, at which point the walls all seemingly disappeared on the floor. To the north side, a single panel lifted up, out of which a djinn walk-floated into the arena. Looking at Efreeti, it smiled and conjured his own equally large air elemental. “This will teach them to not laugh at my team names,” the DM thought to himself.

#Dungeons and Dragons

The Tournament Of The Archomentals: Part 1

As background, which I may spell out later: I started DM’ing a game of Dungeons and Dragons last summer. It was my first time ever playing the game, AND I was running it. I got a few friends who were interested and we all kind of learned as we went.

We started playing the pre-made intro adventure “Lost Mine Of Phandelver” in June, and segued into the “Curse of Strahd” about two months after that. I led a five-month campaign in which the vampiric Big Bad ended up sneezing to death, because Dungeons and Dragons is a weird game sometimes. This is the third arc, which narratively connects the adventures of four players and everyone they’ve met along the way. It’s my first attempt at a fully original campaign, although it borrows themes and plot points from some familiar pop culture pieces, as well as using some canonical D&D lore.

At this stage, everyone is a Level 10 character. These are the notes I normally type out to the players, as they literally cannot remember things between biweekly sessions, but thought it might be fun to start posting them for all to read. We had two new players decided to join the game this time around, which is why a tournament celebrating eight gods has six participants. I bet you’d ask because the players asked and were kinda asses about it.

The story picked up right at the end of the last session, with the gnome Garrick hurrying over to your campsite. He noted that he was excited but a little annoyed you guys waited so long to come back. Turns out what felt like a few weeks for you was 10 years in Neverwinter. During that time, your efforts at Wave Echo Cave have essentially turned Neverwinter into a rich, bustling ecosystem. And since then, you have become folk heroes that helped turn this place from Brookyln in the 1980s to Brooklyn now. (Lots of skinny jeans in Neverwinter now.)

Garrick had been holding your place in The Tournament of the Archomentals, which celebrates the 1,000-year anniversary of the defeat of the god Asmodeus. Asmodeus arose thanks to the assassination of Mystra, a goddess in charge of maintaining The Weave. The Weave is like the Force, only for magic, and killing her set off a chain reaction in which reality itself was warped and changed. Asmodeus was a decently powerful wizard before Mystra’s death, but The Spellplague (also known as the “Blue Breath Of Change”) then ensued after Mystra’s assassination turned him into a god-like figure. He turned the lands into hell itself with his empowered Ruby Rod, and was only defeated when the 8 archomentals (beings of supreme power in the earth, air, water, and fire planes of the multiverse) combined for the first time ever to defeat him.

The tournament involves four contests, after each week one of the five remaining teams is eliminated. Each contest celebrates of plane of elemental existence. Garrick’s an organizer, but not an architect, of the arenas in which these contests take place. He’s sort of a coach, but more of a fanboy at heart. (He may or may not have playing cards of the four heroes of Wave Echo Cave.) However, it won’t just be you in the contest: Since the challenges are designed for parties of six, Garrick has two more people that he’s gotten to fight along side you in order to balance out your team’s strengths and weaknesses. In no way did anyone think this was all major foreshadowing for the return of Asmodeus at the end of the tournament, which pleased the DM as he did not have to massively rewrite the narrative he had been planning for a month and a half.

As he takes you into the cathedral in which the tournament’s festivities are arranged, you see Mystra’s symbol above the cathedral door: it’s a red mist rising to the heavens, with seven stars surrounding it. The seven stars represent the seven schools of magic in this universe.

Inside, you see that Gundren Rockseeker (who gathered you all together on your adventure to find the Lost Mine of Phandelver) is one of the architects, along with three others:

Artin Battlehammer (Dwarf): A stout, keenly intelligent creature with an eye towards designing strongholds than looting them with treaure

Theren Amastacia (Elf): Think Cate Blanchett in LOTR, but somehow hotter

Kallista Orianna (Tiefling): about 6’, purple skin, horns that extend out from her eyebrows about 15’’ in a 45 degree angle. A large tail slinks back and forth behind her. She seems to regard you with distrust, whereas the others barely acknowledge your existence

From there, after exchanging pleasantries with Gundren, you met your two other teammates: a half-orc Fighter named Kieran Lonesword and a human Bard named Danfielding. You also meet a halfing named Vivienne, a gruff fashion designer/wizard who allows you all to create your own hero within the world of the Tournament. (In real-world parlance: This is a chance to re-spec your character.) Arzgarth Riffrocker the Paladin stayed the same. Peter Dinklage the Cleric switched his Domain to “Tempest” in order to indulge his inner Thor. Chad The Conqueror switched from Paladin to Warlock, which was badass on all levels. Demora the Rogue did not participate in this, as in real life she was very sick, so everyone established the canonical fiction that she had consumed room-temperature shrimp as her first meal in Neverwinter and was horrifically nauseous. This was not badaass on any level.

Vivienne also gave everyone a pin to help brand this team: a silver pin with the face of the monkey the group adopted in Barovia, Piccolo. Chad was greatly delighted by this development, as he loved Piccolo more than anything in the world. Garrick led you all the antechamber, a long hallway with paintings of the Archomentals on each side. He explained that this first exhibition honored the Earth Archomentals, Ogrémoch (generally eeevvvviiiiil) and Sunnis (generally pleeeeesssaaant). He told you that the fight was based on “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” and to avoid the dome protecting you from the audience that would be watching. Also, he noted that there was audience participation: Above the arena would be a wheel that would spin after everyone had completed a round of combat, in which something fun or terrible might happen.

You walk up to the final painting of the antechamber, and it’s of none other than Asmodeus himself. He’s painted as a twenty-foot figure crushing the hordes of fighters that had assembled to defeat him. In his hands is the Ruby Rod to which Garrick alluded earlier. This painting lifted up to reveal a circular platform inside, and a bright light illuminating it from above. Peter Dinklage kissed the three middle fingers of his left hand and held them up, because he’s a dick.

You all get on the platform, and ride it up. You see you’re in a dome that’s about 30 yards in diameter. On the periphery, two smaller but similar looking trees reside. In the center of it is a huge, beautiful tree. Facing it at forty-five degrees on each side are two stone statues, reminiscent of the Terracotta Army. It’s a beautiful, lush landscape, and your eyes go from that to realizing you’re surrounded on all sides by spectators. You can hear them, but the sounds are muffled due to the invisible dome. Due north in the crowd is a smallish section for the Tournament Architects, and the Wheel stands above them. The options on the wheel read:

Hale and Hearty

SkullCracker

Flight of Fancy

Ring Around The Posey

Amor-All

Broken Mirror

Well of Haste

Electric Slide

The fight begins when the fighters try to use magic to assess the area, which wakes up both the central tree and the stone golems. The tree does a lot of damage when it hurls a boulder at the entire party, forcing Danfielding to heal everyone up quickly. Just when it looks like the initial flurry was over, a dozen ropes descended from the top of the dome, and twelve men looking like Santa’s Elves gone to seed landed with a thud on the ground, wielding large sickles. “We’re the Scissors Gang, here to kick your ass!” the leader declared. Much head shaking was done by all at the DM’s voice for these creatures, but they said nothing, for lo, the DM had bought the pizza that night. Rock (golems), Paper (tree), and Scissors (Bastard Keebler Elves) had finally all assembled.

Combat continued for a few rounds. After the first, the audience wheel landed on Ring Around The Posey, which had the effect of switching all the elements to which these creatures were either vulnerable or immune. That wasn’t too obvious to the heroes, who mostly marveled at the fact that Kieran could seemingly roll nothing but twenties on her first night. The initial batch of Scissors Elves were eliminated fairly handily, as Peter and Danfielding teamed up to essentially roll the elves into the electrified dome like bowling pins, but the group couldn’t make their way to the tree (which had raised up the other two to help attack) nor make much headway with the golems.

Round two started with Flight Of Fancy, which made the entire arena zero-gravity. A new group of Scissor gangmembers floated down like a group of skydivers, which the DM erroneously called “plane jumpers,” because the DM had had a fucking week, so back off. Once again, Peter and Danfield feasted on these creatures, singeing them all with fire. Arzgarth teleported on top of a golem, and struck him down towards the earth. Kieran then curbstomped this sucker to death, and wove the newly-formed floating pebbles into a cape, because apparently half-Orcs have proficiency in Etsy. The DM granted Kieran a point of inspiration, because holy crap, you guys. The audience, on the other hand, threw up in their mouth a little at the violent (albeit creative) display before them.

Meanwhile, Chad decided to use his Warlock abilities to take over the mind of the tree, which it then ordered to hit itself with the boulder over and over again. Not only did the central tree take damage because of this, but so did the other trees. Everyone enjoyed telling the tree to stop hitting itself.

With the combatants earthbound for the next round, the wheel landed on Electric Slide, at which point lighting emerged from the Piccolo pins and singed every player. No one enjoyed that, not even Chad.

Finally, Chad realized he had a Warlock spell that could essentially incinerate plant life, which probably would have helped them out in the first round of combat. Game, set, match, ex-masochistic sentient tree. Garrick ran into the arena, pleased by the results. He noted that they came in second overall in terms of quickest victory, as another team had used that plant spell off the bat, which made things much easier.

Just then, the sky went dark, the wheel started spinning of its own accord, and glowed red from its central point. Just as soon as it started, everything went back to normal. The architects retreated hastily, and a nervous Garrick told the group to rest up for the next event in two weeks’ time.

#Dungeons and Dragons

How Trump Ruined The Super Bowl For me

Back in October 2004, I was pacing back and forth like a madman. It was game four of the 2004 World Series, and the Boston Red Sox were about to break the Curse of the Bambino. Watching me create divots in the hardwood floor with my pacing was my future wife, looking on in terrified astonishment at the man with whom she’d thrown her hat into the ring. “I promise,” I told her, “If the Sox can just win this, I can move on, and you’ll never see me this crazy again.”

That of course was a huge lie, and I had to give up baseball in subsequent years because 1) she didn’t like baseball, so watching it every night was a no go, and 2) I couldn’t come to grips with being that wound up in something that used to mean so much to me but increasingly felt irrelevant. Oddly enough, it felt like I was cheating on sports with my wife, which is why I said “oddly” because yeah that’s some crazy fucked up priorities.

Flash forward to tonight, where the New England Patriots have won the fifth Super Bowl in my adult life, and I can’t even truly enjoy it.

I enjoy it on a primal level of achievement yielding rewards. Even when the New York Yankees kept kicking the crap out of the Red Sox, I respected them deep down because they were able to achieve success through dedication and repetition. It reminded me of the qualities my parents beat into me (metaphorically, not literally) while growing up: Essentially, they taught me to outwork everyone else, which was a more important trait than any God-given talent. Maybe I had more smarts as an innate quality. I dunno. I just know they helped me work harder than everyone else, and I’m doing more or less OK now.

I respected that in sports’ dynasties, even when they weren’t my own. You can certainly make the argument that innate talent triumphs work ethic, but I always thought the Patriots in particular defied that logic. It felt like if you bought into a certain system and were willing to work harder than anyone else at the cost of personal profit, things had at least a chance of working out for the best. In a league designed to inspire parity above consistency, the Patriots figured out a way to put team above individual. That’s total homerism, I’m sure, but it kept me warm at night all the same.

Cut to now, when I wasn’t even remotely excited about the Patriots playing the Atlanta Falcons, and trying to square the circle of the momentous yet simultaneously insignificant yet also simultaneously problematic win tonight. I don’t even recognize how I’m feeling compared to 2004, any more than I can recognize myself from that person twelve and a half years ago.

Part of it’s just a function of getting older and/or busier. I don’t have the time to watch every Red Sox game anymore: In fact, I can’t remember the last one I watched start to finish. With the Patriots, it’s something I do in between watching highlights on NFL RedZone: I recognize the Culture Of More that comes with a successful franchise, and how even 4 Super Bowls this decade seems like not enough when you’re in the moment. But I also recognize that I get angry and frustrated about something I have literally no control over, and I hate how helpless that makes me feel. Sports triggered all sorts of anxiety in me, and it was making me sick and a miserable person to be around. It wasn’t that I got married I had to stop watching sports. It’s that I got married and realized maybe I could pour my time, energy, and sanity into something more much personal and concrete.

At 22, having something this inconsequential have this much hold over me made a type of sense. At 41, with all the actual shit surrounding me, it seems like insanity.

But also, the Patriots’ close association with Donald Trump just muddies the water even more. It’s not like the Patriots were ever inherently likeable as a group before this past year’s election: I generally celebrated the ethos that the team espoused, and how Tom Brady become great through application rather than innate skill. But it’s super hard to root for a team in which the owner, coach, and star all think the man who is threatening the stability of the world itself is a decent dude. I can both admire Brady’s ability to read a blitz package better than nearly anyone in recorded human history and think his inability to put even the slightest caveat in his relationship with Trump as problematic.

Rooting for laundry isn’t much better than rooting for the flag. Without context, both are slavish adoration. I can find faults in both my teams and my country without overtly disowning them, but ignoring those faults seems like a way to denigrate rather than celebrate those things I love. It’s like Moff’s Law, but for humanity: Criticizing something is often the greatest way to demonstrate affection for it. I can think Tom Brady’s work ethic is something to emulate and also think he’s probably a self-centered dick for not admonishing Trump. I can think America’s great without thinking it’s infallible. These are not contradictory impulses. But they are complicated, which is why most people tend to avoid them.

I saw a lot of people comparing the Patriots’ win to Trump’s win last November. That does not feel good! But I don’t take offense at those comparisons, but I think myself and a lot of other fans of the team had similar reservations leading up to the game. If the Pats won, great. If they lost, Trump would be pissed, which would also be great. I get all this stuff, which I can compartmentalize because sports are ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I have a family that is great but holding shit together by a thread, so you can forgive me I put Tom Brady’s fifth Super Bowl win on a secondary tier.

But that doesn’t mean I dismiss the anguish that comes from anything that Trump likes getting anything akin to a victory. I get it! Before the game, the original actresses that portrayed the Schuyler Sisters in “Hamilton” sang “America The Beautiful.” They inserted the word “sisterhood” in addition to “brotherhood” near the end of the song, and the FOX cameras cut to Falcons’ head coach Dan Quinn overtly appreciating that insertion. A few seconds later, the cameras cut to Bill Belichick, who looked as if Phillipa Soo had just taken a dump in his hoodie. So I get it, America: I was rooting for the Falcons at that moment as well.

The working class ethos espoused by the best Boston sports teams tends to go out the window when it’s tainted with the approval of Donald Trump. I just don’t have the capacity to look past it at this point. Even if Brady, Belichick, and Robert Kraft never envisioned he could be President, their inability to distance themselves in any way from him poses problems that a silver trophy and a Duck Boats-led parade cannot wave away. Tonight’s win isn’t a celebration but another example of how Trump has ruined things I’ve previously enjoyed. “Sports” is probably the least important thing he’s ruined, but on the other hand, I miss having unimportant shit in which I could overtly invest myself. That was much more fun and fulfilling than dealing with real life, which inevitably let me down.

Bottom line: There’s no escape now, even in the greatest comeback victory in the history of our country’s most popular sport. If that isn’t a commentary on how shitty this year is already, I don’t know what is.

A Hole In the World

I struggle a lot with how sane I’m supposed to be in the face of insanity.

I struggle with it because I’m in the best possible position to deal with the shitstorm that’s potentially about to rain down on us all, and yet I still feel like the best part of my life is over. I’m 41, and I’ve gone through the stupidity of adolescence and the confusion of my twenties and the get-your-crap-togetherness of my thirties to realize I probably should have just backpacked through Europe starting in 1998 because what’s a 401(k) mean when a madmen with a short fuse and an infinite capacity for grudges can unleash nuclear winter because of a tweet.

There’s a fine line between realism and fatalism, and maybe it’s a privilege to fantasy about the end of the world. Because how could it actually happen, right? But then why do so many popular entertainments indulge that fantasy? And why are those fantasies so popular? Are they popular because they’ll never be, or because we secretly suspect they are just around the corner and we need to psychologically adjust ourselves to the impending reality?

These are the things I think about on the train to and from my day job, and when I’ve had a few drinks and have the luxury to think about them while SportsCenter plays on mute ten feet away on my 4K screen. I watch tonight’s episode of “blackish” and I recognize the call to arms in the face of a gut punch, and how the current reaction to the world’s realities are themselves a byproduct of that privilege. I get that seeing the world as somehow incredibly worse now than four months ago betrays the experiences of others who don’t view the world as that vastly fundamentally different as then. That’s all fair.

But I think about my nephews, who are Jewish because my sister-in-law is, and my family is lapsed Catholic and therefore supported the decision. I think about my cousin and his partner, who are raising two amazing girls that they have adopted. I don’t think little about my life will change but I worry about how their lives might change and how that will absolutely mess with my life because how could it not. Those families work, and they are under attack by people that don’t know them and can’t know them and how can that not be all we’re talking about?

But we don’t, because we go to work and we pay bills and we go to the grocery store as if things are fine. Even if Russia isn’t trying to undermine our society, people within these border who don’t like things they don’t understand are trying to make things go back to a past that never existed and won’t benefit anyone except those that can profit off our mutual distrust. People who want to make America great again will end up making Exxon rich again. Those that want to go back to the “good old days” just want permission to spew hate without impunity. Compassion is now weakness and speaking one’s mind is akin to suicide. When a bully bulldozes his way to the White House, there’s nothing stopping anyone from indulging his or her worst impulses without impunity. Welcome to The Purge, one hashtag at a time.

In movies or television, it wouldn’t end like this. But reality has a shitty showrunner, so it might. There’s no guarantee that it won’t. But that’s what makes not laying down so important. I’m not making donations to charities or heading to Washington in two weeks for me, but for everyone else. Not because they can’t do it, but because they shouldn’t do it alone. This doesn’t make me a hero. It means I’m fulfilling the absolutely baseline level of citizenry that’s required without absorbing unnecessary oxygen from a worthier creature. That’s it. I can do something besides tweet about the problems of the world, so I will where I can and as much as I can.

If there’s a God looking down, She’ll hopefully approve. If not, it’s still the right thing to do. The absence of an afterlife doesn’t mean the absence of morality in this life. I can’t compare my struggles to those of other races, ethnicities, genders, or sexual identifications. I can only say that I’m more learning each day about those, that I’ll continue to do so, and that I’ll do my best to recognize them as long as I’m around. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start. Keeping my ears and eyes open is a constant struggle. Seeing so many who keep them closed is dismaying.

But the work continues. For all of us. We’re in it together, even while those with bully pulpits so often insist we’re not.

Back with five things I think I think…

1) Saw “Hamilton” for the second time last week, because I’m a special kind of asshole. Last time I was near the back of the orchestra, and this time I was sixth row all the way to the side. Having seen the show once, I knew I’d barely miss any staging even thought it was technically “partial view,” and the actors at times were so close as to be nearly upsetting in terms of intimacy. Most of the cast had turned over since I saw it last in April, and while all were still great, Jordan Risher (known to many from his role in “Grease! Live” on FOX) as Laurens/Philip Schuyler was the best new castmember by a mile. That dude is gonna be a mega star. I also saw the last night of the original PEGGY (Jasmine Cephas Jones), which was something else.

2) Also seen in New York: “Salomé” at the Met and “Oh, Hello” starring Nick Kroll and John Mulaney. Seeing an opera was a total trip: It was entirely in German, and could be summed up plotwise as “Who is in the well? Can I meet the man in the well? Can I fuck the man in the well? Well, FUCK that man in the well!” But seeing a show at the Met was something special. As for “Oh, Hello”: I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time, and a lot of it had to do with the improvised runner about John Mulaney’s real-life food poisoning that threatened to unravel the show at any moment. It ends in about five weeks, and I’d beg, borrow, or steal tickets to see it before it leaves.

3) I don’t mean to disparage New York City in any way, but holy hell I’m not built for that city. I’m old enough and “having a back yard” enough to admit this. It’s too much, too loud, too busy, too expensive. Great for a 3-day trip, not so great for my 30s. I’m in the “in sweats by eight pm sipping booze and catching up my DVR” phase of my life. It’s not sexy but hot damn it’s comfy.

4) I’m approaching seven months as Dungeon Master in my local game of “Dungeons & Dragons,” and I’d contemplate live-broadcasting the sessions if it wouldn’t undoubtedly compromise any chance of professional advancement. I’ve learned at this point how to prepare without spending twenty hours between biweekly three-hour sessions. The foursome for whom I create adventures are so good at doing exact the opposite of what I plan that I’ve settled on a barebones preparation that allows them to wander without me throwing out pages of prepared text. The last session involved thirty minutes centered around the fate of an NPC chicken. Needless to say I had not come up with a backstory for the chicken.

5) I’m trying to think of ways to either podcast more or write more in 2017. If I don’t have an official gig, I tend to slack off more than I’d like. So look for some announcements soon of some new projects, as there’s no worse use of a 24-hour cycle than sleeping, going to my day job, and then sleeping again. Life’s too short for that.

My Favorite TV Shows Of 2016, Part 3: The Top Tier

I’ve covered the Honorable Mentions, and the top half of the top ten. Now it’s time to get to the final tier: Shows that simply towered over everything else I watched this year. These are five shows I’d recommend to anyone that hasn’t watched them so far. In the era of Peak TV? That’s incredibly likely.

One quick thing before heading into the list itself: I love that Peak TV leads to non-uniform year-end lists. That’s a feature, not a bug. If anything, the true value in these lists isn’t arriving at an objective decision but rather exposing readers to programs that either missed entirely or may have underestimated. If one person falls in love with one show on my year-end list, then the effort that went into writing it was worth it. Full stop.

Let’s get to it.

4 [Tie]) American Crime Story: The People V. OJ Simpson (FX); Veep (HBO)

Yeah, I’m cheating a little, only if you assumed I’d have one show per slot or at least skip another number on the way to the top. Oh well. But trying to decide between two of the most entertaining-yet-devastating shows of 2016 provided to be impossible. You’re gonna make me decide between the two most scathing indictments of the intersection of politics and pop culture this year? You’re gonna make me decide between Sarah Paulson and Julia Louis-Dreyfus? No thank you. I’ll die on many hills, but not those two. “The People v OJ Simpson” had the power of distance to draw comparisons between the mid-90’s and today, while “Veep” proves more prescient with each passing moment. The shows that made the top three were smaller in focus, but these two shows went big and connected on nearly every swing.

3) BoJack Horseman (Netflix)

“Comfort food TV” is a valuable commodity. The ability to start an episode and more or less get what you expect is nothing to sneeze at. “BoJack,” on the other hand, leaves audiences in perpetual confusion over what might unfold. In lesser hands, this would lead to a jagged, uneven, disconnected experience. Instead, the myriad of ways that this show takes its viewers on unexpected yet ultimately interconnected journeys leads to some of the more cathartic moments in any medium. By all rights, there should be repetition at this point in BoJack’s “one step forward, three steps back” approach to self-improvement, but episodes like “Fish Out Of Water” (the best episode of TV in 2016, full stop) and “That’s Too Much, Man!” demonstrate just how much mileage this show can get from a character that knows the right thing to do, even if he worries that any action might ultimately be meaningless. Rather than give into nihilism, “BoJack” shows the struggle, and ultimate value, in putting in the work to make meaning out of life.

2) Jane The Virgin (The CW)

I often think of a certain “Hamilton” line while watching this show: “The fact that you’re alive is a miracle.” The “you” in this case is the show itself, something that is always on the knife’s edge of utterly falling apart and yet always manages to produce something sublime. Like “Westworld,” it’s as much a show about the stories we fashion to frame our seemingly random lives. Unlike “Westworld,” it actually populates its world with characters about whom we actually give a damn. That makes its metatextual flourishes and subjective Narrator additions to an already-solid foundation, rather than replacements for it. Jamie Camil’s Rogelio is one of the great sad clowns of modern TV, fighting his own obscurity but also his paternal primacy. But in the end, it’s about the Villanueva women: When those three are on the porch working out the problems, I feel like there’s a chance things might actually be OK in my own life. I can’t pay the show any higher compliment than that.

1) One Mississippi (Amazon)

Sometimes a show just lands an uppercut when you didn’t even know the fight had started. (That’s a weird metaphor, but I started boxing classes a few months ago, so cut me some slack.) I’m fortunate enough sometimes to get episodes ahead of time, and “One Mississippi” was part of a huge stack that I got all at once. I planned to watch one or two (max) before sampling other shows. Instead, I watched all six in one three-hour, laugh-and-sob filled session, and immediately thought I’d taken the most gorgeous journey I had all year. Months later, that feeling has yet to be altered. Tig Notaro’s approach here is initially difficult to decipher: It’s tempting to think that her deadpan delivery and use of ironic dream sequences are meant to be off-putting. Instead, they eventually reveal themselves to be defense mechanisms designed to deflect the almost absurd amount of shit heaped upon her by a seemingly indifferent universe. This is maybe the “smallest” show in terms of scope, but ultimately is “bigger” than a certain show set in Westeros. Along with “BoJack” and “Jane,” “One Mississippi” doesn’t just lament the world in which we live in, but is brave enough to suggest that we don’t have to accept it. None of these shows dare suggest change is easy, but does suggest that making a connection with just one person is the hardest yet most rewarding act a person can do. These shows are trying to crowdsource joy in world that’s in desperate need of it. And for that, these have my thanks in 2016.

My Favorite TV Shows Of 2016, Part 2: Shows 10-5

Yesterday, I kicked off my annual year-end list with the honorable mentions. Today, as promised, I’m starting with the next tier. These are shows that are in my Top 10, but I don’t really have a strong sense of how to rank them relative to one another. These six shows all had excellent years, and depending on my mood on a certain day, could be number 10 or number 5. There really isn’t enough difference for me to make an official decision, and since no one’s actually paying me to do so, there’s no requirement to do so.

When we get to my top four shows of the year (which we’ll do tomorrow), then I can start officially assigning rankings. Just know that if you watch any of the shows below, there’s a good chance you’ll be blown away. As I did yesterday, I’m listing out these shows in alphabetical order

The Americans (FX)

Most shows peak in their first or second season, but “The Americans” managed to produce its best work in this, its fourth season. It took advantage of the sheer time we’ve spent with its characters to make each episode more fraught with tension than anything post-“Breaking Bad.” It’s honestly unclear how this show has two more seasons left in it, given how perilously close that Stan is to discovering the Jennings’ true identity. But in “The Americans” we trust at this stage of the game. When all is said and done, this might be the greatest show FX has ever produced, and that’s saying something.

Better Things (FX)

It’s tempting as a critic to make wildly inaccurate statements in an effort to seem profound. So I’ll try to openly couch this statement up front: “Better Things” revealed aspects of motherhood that was simultaneously specific and universal that I’d never seen depicted onscreen before. And yet, these revelations felt immediately true and relatable. It was as if Pamela Aldon took my eyes, moved them just a few degrees, and suddenly wide swaths of everyday experience popped into focus like a Magic Eye drawing. The struggles seemed real, the victories seemed earned, and the family dynamics were free of any sign of overt artifice. I don’t know how Aldon did it, and I can’t wait to see her pull it off again next year.

Black-ish (ABC)

There’s probably no more consistently reliable brand right now than ABC family comedies, which have grown into a diverse set of crowd-pleasing, non-condescending programs. But “Black-ish” stands head and shoulders above them all, able to educate without lecturing at a time in which the national dialogue on race needed smart, diverse voices in its popular entertainment. For the February episode “Hope” alone, this show deserves to be on multiple year-end lists. But its mixture of warm, intergenerational family dynamics, near “Monty Python”-esque workplace absurdity, and interrogation of socioeconomic anxiety earns this show a place on this list.

Catastrophe (Amazon)

Much in the way that “Better Things” casts a unique-yet-familiar light on family, so too does “Catastrophe” on modern relationships. Plenty of shows can intoxicate viewers with lush visuals, but “Catastrophe” actually tricks the audience into thinking they are watching something they shouldn’t via the intimate, overlapping, profane, and sexy dialogue between co-creators/stars Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney. More than anything, this is an “adult” show, not in terms of its nudity but rather in its perspective. These are two people too smart to know they aren’t on the perpetual verge of failure, and yet ultimately too human to avoid dancing along the precipice rather than stay safely away from the edge. Why? Because they feel alive on that precipice, and realize that the only thing standing in the way of utter destruction is one another.

Rectify (SundanceTV)

Fourteen of you watch this show. I know this because I’ve seen the ratings, and you are the fourteen people that watch it. You’re the lucky ones. This paragraph isn’t for you. This paragraph is for the other 7.4 billion of you that haven’t watched it yet. (Yes, even you, infants in households without televisions. I’m lumping you in here as well.) The final season isn’t over yet, but it’s continued to be the most hypnotic, at times unbearably graceful shows of the past decade. This is a show that made paint literally drying approach the sublime. The program moves at a glacial pace, but that reflects the way in which the past refuses to let go of its characters, and how they run away only to find themselves stuck in quicksand. There will be no clean victories for anyone when all is said and done, but the fact that forgiveness can even exist at this point for them is a miracle unto itself.

Stranger Things (Netflix)

Are we on the backlash to the backlash yet? The backlash to the backlash to the backlash? It’s so hard to keep count anymore. Who cares. As a blast of pure, unadulterated entertainment that got to some fundamental truths about the power of friendship, “Stranger Things” was the best surprise of 2016, full stop. I never bingewatch anything, and I ripped through this show in two days. It ticked off every box in my internal nerd scorecard, but also managed to be analog in the best of ways. Its use of Christmas lights were the best practical effect of the year because the show layered in emotional meaning behind those lights from the outset. I didn’t really care what the true nature of The Upside Down was. I just wanted Eleven, Joyce, and Will to be happy. Forget the super cool title card sequence, overt homages to Stephen King, John Carpenter, and Steven Spielberg: This is a show that found huge stakes in seemingly small settings. But you don’t need a global crisis to create great drama. “Stranger Things” understood that scares only work if you care for those in danger. If you didn’t look at the image below and cry, I’m not sure what to say.

My Favorite TV Shows Of 2016, Part 1: Honorable Mentions

I say this every year, but it bears repeating at the outset: I hate year-end lists.

I don’t hate them in terms of an exercise but rather in terms of their consumption. I get on a fundamental level why we like to rank everything, and I even see merit in having a solid conversation based on different opinions about a piece of pop culture. The way I try and get around this is by stating at the outset that these aren’t the best shows of 2016, but rather my favorite. That’s what every list is really saying anyways, but throwing in the phrase “definitively ranked” is a great way to drive up traffic via outrage.

Plain and simple, all criticism is subjective, even if the based is necessarily armed in some literacy about the form. Both things are simultaneously true. Criticism is the art of defending your opinion, not to make it bulletproof but rather simply understandable. You don’t have to like the shows I do, but hopefully you understand why I like them.

“Understanding” turns out to be one of the overriding themes of my 2016 list, since with each passing month I realized that sympathy was in increasingly short supply outside the small screen. As such, I found myself drawn towards programs in which I found myself in initially unfamiliar territory, only to learn something new for the virtual journey I had undergone. I didn’t necessarily walk in the shoes of the characters in the shows below, but I did walk besides them, and often felt grateful that they let me tag along.

As such, more than any other year that I’ve tried to do this, I ignored anything and everything other than the emotional impact a particular show had on me. I penalized those that depicted the world as a relentlessly hopeless garbage fire and rewarded those that demonstrated how moments of grace can and do happen if you work hard enough at creating opportunities for them. Technical achievement and innovative narrative techniques weren’t ignored, but rather made secondary to programs that favored earnestness over archness. Below are shows that engaged with the world rather than distanced themselves from it.

So here’s how it’s going to work out: Honorable mentions today, part of the top ten tomorrow, and the rest on Wednesday.

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order)

Agent Carter (ABC)

The second (and unfortunately last) season of “Agent Carter” was the single-best one set in the MCU to date. You could argue that “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage” were more important due to the topics/casting featured on those programs. But neither had the start-to-finish consistency of “Agent Carter.” Building upon the solid character foundations of the first season, “Agent Carter” managed to tell three equally compelling stories about women that felt like outsiders in their own time, and interwove their various paths in ways that challenged audience sympathies in fascinatingly complex ways. On top of that, in Peggy/Jarvis, the show had one of the great small-screen couples of 2016. When they fought, it HURT, and that’s the mark of three-dimensional characters.

Documentary Now (IFC)

The second season truly only produced two classic episodes ( “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” and “Final Transmission”), but those episodes just happen to be two of the best three episodes that I saw this year. (The other will appear later on in this list.) I’m not sure I expected to be emotionally moved by a parody program such as this, but those two episodes hit me in the solar plexus. There’s nothing better than being surprised as a critic, and “Documentary Now” provided some of the best surprises on TV this year.

Fleabag (Amazon)

If you don’t see where this six-episode show is going, the finale will hit you like a freight train. If you do see it coming, the show turns into a slow-motion tragedy. Either way, it’s one of the most confident shows of the year, with writer-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge crafting one of the more complex protagonists of the calendar year. Anyone that strives to be good but perpetually comes up short will find something to identify with here, even if that identification highlights something potentially unpleasant. Fire up this show at 8 pm: By 11 pm, you’ll have gone on one of the best journeys of 2016.

The Good Place (NBC)

Less a sitcom and more a dramatic treatise on what it means to be a global citizen, “The Good Place” runs the risk of being preachy but ends up being quietly vital. There aren’t a lot of laugh-out-loud funny moments on the show (with most of those being provided by D’Arcy Carden’s celestial guide Janet), but there’s a relentless intelligence in every frame. Like “Westworld,” there’s a central mystery at play here, but unlike “Westworld,” I care enough about the characters on a week-to-week basis that the true nature of what’s really happening is secondary. There’s something subversive going on here, and I think we’re only going to truly appreciate it once that mystery is revealed. In the meantime, no show on TV makes a better weekly cases for not being dicks to one another than this one.

Killjoys (SyFy)

There’s something to be said for executing the basics. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, but of all the dozens of shows that look and feel like “Killjoys,” only this one provides enough visceral joy, solid character work, and unexpected humor for me to carve out time to watch. Peak TV means Peak Choice, and every show needs to do something to justify anyone actually watching it. Hannah John-Kamen makes every disparate tone on this show hold together as a bounty hunter who’s part Han Solo and part Daenerys Targaryen. More attention got paid to “The Expanse” and “The Magicians,” but this was the true SyFy gem.

Survivor’s Remorse (STARZ)

I came into this show thinking it would be the basketball version of “Entourage,” although I’m pretty sure “Entourage” never dedicated an episode to the topic of female genital mutilation. (It may have had an episode dedicated to Johnny Drama getting kicked in the groin, but that was more of an attempt at humor rather than social commentary.) Without spoiling the incident that kicked off this year, this third season saw tremendous growth for an already promising show. RonReaco Lee might have delivered my favorite performance in any program in 2016, deftly mixing near-Shakespearean monologues with downright scary rage bubbling under his character’s Reggie’s skin due to a late-season introduction of his long-long father. But this is also a show that lets every character shine, particularly via the unlikely duos of Cassie/Chen and M-Chuck/Jimmy. “Money can’t buy happiness” is a trope as old as time, but it gets a refreshing, and specific, spin in this underrate gem from STARZ.

What “The Best TV Of 2016″ means for me this year

I’ve been thinking a lot about what TV criticism means in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s Presidential victory. I’m a firm believer in the arts and criticism as important parts of any cultural, but it was hard to get too whipped up either way about “Westworld” when it felt like reality itself was turning into the worst kind of loop one could possibly experience. Were I full-time critic, the mandate would be more straightforward. But as someone who mostly writes in my free time these days? The mandate was murkier.

It’s only been three weeks (roughly) since Election Night, and I’ve focused more on making sure I spent more time listening than speaking. As a white cis male, I figured it was better to absorb than to talk, to sympathize rather than speak, and generally learn rather than teach. This isn’t about being woke, it’s about being (hopefully) a decent person. It’s simultaneously true that most worst case scenarios of a Trump president will not direct impact me and yet absolutely positively impact me as a mere citizen of the world. Short of a nuclear annihilation that leaves my hometown of Boston looking as it does in “Fallout 4,” I don’t have much directly to worry about.

And yet, if writing about TV for the past ten years has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t know much of anything. I’m so in my own zone that simply acknowledging that has taken most of my 40 years on this planet. Back in March, I wrote a lot about “The 100,” and the fallout of a certain plot point in that season that involved the death of a major character. What felt like a simple echo of another show to me turned out to be part of a much larger tapestry that I learned about simply by listening to other reactions to the same plot point. I didn’t have anything to add to their pain over this latest iteration of the “Bury Your Gays” trope that honestly wasn’t even on my radar until that point.

But once it was, it was IMPOSSIBLE not to see it and a host of other things through that lens. And while I can’t feel it as acutely as others, that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect how I saw the medium as a whole. If you’re a critic of any artistic medium, you owe the art both your honest opinion but more importantly your honest engagement. And sometimes, that means coming clean about one’s own blind spots. If I’ve developed anything since I started writing earnestly about TV back in 2006, it’s that I’m generally much more interested in living inside the shoes of someone different than someone that has walked the same path as myself. That path often leads to some uncomfortable places, but those are my hurdles to overcome. It’s not the responsibility of the show to be anything other than what it wants to be. It’s not supposed to cater to what I think I want, but rather show me something I couldn’t have possibly expected.

Maybe that’s why so many of the shows that will end up on my year-end list fall under the category of “different but same”: Shows that on the surface bear no resemblance to my own but in fact highlight an existing feature that had not come into focus with that show’s help. Shows like “One Mississippi,” “Jane The Virgin,” “Better Things,” “BoJack Horseman,” “The Americans,” “Fleabag,” and “Insecure” all take place outside anything that resembles my suburban Boston lifestyle, and yet feel absolutely relatable on almost every level. These shows leverage relatable people in extraordinary circumstances. Outside of “The Americans,” most of those shows have stakes that some might deem small. And yet, they plum the depths of what it means to be alive with a complexity that certain big-budget, apocalyptic-minded shows could never dream to achieve. Mistaking “large budget” for “quality” misses the point. Mistaking “nihilistic” for “important” also misses the point.

If we need anything since Trump got elected, it’s hope. Sugar-coated fantasies in which you could temporarily ignore your woes are fine, and even necessary. I have plenty of “Warm Blanket” TV in my arsenal, and most of them are half-hour family comedies on ABC. There’s nothing wrong with those shows, and they serve an important function. But the shows that really get me excited are those that stare into the abyss and dare to smile rather than scream. These are the show firmly rooted in the everyday horrors of 2016 but refuse to buckle in. These shows are important because they are stronger than I am and I need them very much to figure out a reason to go on with a sliver of optimism in the face of so much hatred. I don’t need a show to tell me the world sucks. I have the world to tell me that. I need a show to tell me how to make it through this week and be better on Friday than I was on Monday.

So those are the shows I’m going to celebrate next month. I’m working through the list as we speak, but really, I’m not celebrating the best shows so much as I am thanks shows that showed myself and countless others a better way to simply be. Not everybody got this message, but it’s a message worth sharing all the same. I’ve heard what these shows have tried to tell me, and passing on what I’ve heard is a solid reason to keep on writing even when it seems like the most frivolous thing I could possibly be doing right now.

Punching away

I’ve been staring at a blank Microsoft Word template for about thirty minutes.

That’s not my usual routine. When I get around to writing something, I usually know what I’m going to write about. That’s the whole point of opening up a template in the first place. But in this, my first full week off of work all year, I’m trying to write something each day, which means I’m forcing it more than usual.

In the past, when I’ve just started writing without any idea about what the final output would be, it was still fine. I can spew random crap until I hit upon something that actually interested me, and I’d call that “the process,” because rewriting from scratch is a luxury I’ve rarely been able to afford. Writing has always been what I’ve done in-between everything else that I’d call “life,” even though there have been thousands of these in-between hours since I started writing with some consistency about ten years ago.

But now, simply riffing on innocuous crap feels like a moral failure. To pretend like this is just another writing session invites the type of normalization that the last week has encouraged. I can’t just talk about the things I usually do (TV, sports, mocking the premature baldness that struck me at 25, etc) without calling attention to what I’m NOT discussing. That’s a problem, but NOT REALLY. The real problems lie elsewhere, not in the fact that I can’t talk about “Fresh Off The Boat.”

I can’t speak from any other perspective but my own. That doesn’t mean I’m not listening to and learning from other perspectives, which is primarily what I’ve been doing when not contemplating what horrors might be unleashed in the next four months, nevermind the next four years. It’s not a great time to hear the problems of a straight white man. (Know when a great time is? Oh right, NEVER.) I’m not going to tell anyone what to think or feel. I don’t have any answers to why “facts” don’t seem to actually matter in 2016, or why everyone’s personal feelings have to come at the expense of their fellow citizens. All I can do is talk about the two things that have keep me even semi-sane this year.

The first is starting to actually give a crap about my weight for the first time in years. Around April, I realized that I’d bought a series of successively larger pants rather than try to fit into those I already owned. It happened over the course of about two years, right as I approached and then hit 40. Metabolism is a jerk that way. I thought about doing a lot of things to battle the depression I was feeling, but eventually took up boxing. My brother and his wife had joined a gym nearby, and my wife had taken classes long before we’d ever met and wanted to get back into it. I, for my part, hate working out and hate classes even more. My running theory was that I never wanted to have anyone actually see me running.

To my surprise, I loved it almost instantly. Turns out punching the living hell out of something was a great stress reliever, and I soon added running in-between classes since the timing rarely worked out more than two times a week. About a month ago, I ran my first half-marathon. I’d love to say I did it for vanity, and there was certainly a component of that. But honestly, the best part about working out was that I was too tired to think about all the things that normally wore me down. I couldn’t be in my own head when I was focused on catching my next breath. There’s absolutely nothing unusual about that phenomenon, but it’s one thing to hear it and another to experience it. It’s probably as expensive as therapy, only with less talk about how my parents may or may not have fucked me up as a toddler. (Spoilers: They didn’t. I know that. I don’t need to pay a stranger to confirm that.)

The other thing I did was start running Dungeons and Dragons games every other week with a group of friends. Writing used to be my biggest creative outlet, which replaced doing theatre throughout high school and college. My writing fell off once I realized being a full-time TV critic wasn’t in the cards, and I replaced that time with drinking and lounging. My overall inertia in the Spring had as much to do with being mentally out of shape as well as physically. Now, I’ve replaced all the time I used to writing/play video games with plotting out the next three-hour campaign. It’s a fairly nerdy way to spend time, but the beauty of being 40 is giving less of a fuck than I did at 39, and now that I’m one day away from being 41, I care even less about any snickering that may come of admitting that.

Whether running outside or running a D&D campaign, neither really addresses any of the pain people are feeling right now. It’s all self-care for me, which worked fine enough when it seemed like the election itself might cure the festering fever in this country. But now that things seem like they will get way worse long before they get any better, I’m glad I’m not the pathetic piece of crap I was back in the Spring. I want to help where and how I can, but I simply wouldn’t have been any good to anyone seven months ago. I don’t know the best way to help now, but I’m trying my best to do more good than harm. If that means donations, great. Volunteering, great. Augmenting other voices, awesome. I’m feeling my way through this, because unlike earlier this year, I actually have the capacity to feel something other than my own self-pity. I know that if things seem overwhelming to ME, it’s at least a hundred times worse for those whose biologies, sexual orientations, gender identifications, and skin colors make them targets of fellow citizens now emboldened to show their true colors, not to mention enemies of the government ostensibly sworn to protect them.

The time for shock and self-pity is over. Time for the work to begin to make this right. Running away isn’t an option.

Post-Election Thoughts

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last twenty-four hours about what to do. About how to be. About how to exist in this very new yet oddly persistent world, a world in which time keeps spinning forward even while it feels like we’re going in the opposite direction.

Aside from waking up at 5:15 am in a cold sweat, the day pretty much went like it always did. I got up. I showered. I had my coffee. I walked to the train. I went to work. I came home. I ate dinner. I watched some TV. And yet all of those things transpired in a world that more or less felt the same but was completely different. I felt nauseous, upset, sad, confused, and more nervous about the world as I knew it ending during my own lifetime, and well before I’ll shuffle off this mortal coil, than I ever had before.

And if I’m feeling that as a straight white male, I can’t imagine how it is for anyone else.

But I’m trying, and I don’t know if that attempt if helpful or hurtful. I don’t pretend to know the rules here, which either makes me smart or insanely stupid. I’m just trying to get my bearings and be someone who can be an asset rather than a liability. And this is coming from someone whose default position is “I’d rather be tweeting.” Human, face-to-face contact is something I generally avoid, because I’m an introvert with low self-esteem. I can go to a party in which I know no one if I have to do so, but I need about three days and a few podcasts to help me emotionally and physically recover from that experience.

I worry about the leader of our country being someone who can start a war over a subtweet, but I worry more acutely about everyone I saw on the train to work this morning suddenly distrusting everyone else just a little bit more. You had to look for it, but once you did, it was unmistakable. And this is here in the greater Boston area, one of the more liberal and inclusive places in the country. Yet even here, the Trump/Pence signs were rampant, and I’ve seen enough ignorance that may or may not be weaponized towards people who don’t have my religion, skin tone, genitalia, sexual preference, or any of the other things that denote “other” to those that helped put Trump into the White House

Actions speak louder than anything, so it’s not about arguing whether Trump is racist/sexist, or those that voted for Trump are racist/sexist, but that those that voted for Trump endorsed behavior and rhetoric that was racist and sexist. Intent is hard to quantify. But votes aren’t! They are a statement of declaration. This isn’t about holding your nose to vote for someone that holds a different fiscal policy than you do. This is about sanctifying and enforcing that divisive language meant to placate people who long for an America that quite frankly never existed can be leveraged and weaponized to even greater extent for each subsequent election.

Because this isn’t the end of something but rather the beginning. Either Trump does turn into a Hitler-esque figure or has just provided the oxygen for that true inheritor to assume the mantle in the not-too-distant future. And if that’s a hard pill for me to swallow, I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone whose very existence feels like it could be outlawed in the next 12 months.

I think about things through TV a lot, because it’s way easier to think about TV than real life, even if the best art teaches us about exactly that. And everytime I praise a show because it features stories about people who don’t look, act, or love like me, there’s a temptation by some to chalk it up to liberal white guilt. Which, you know, fine, you do you. But I chalk it up to fundamental curiosity: What makes other people tick? Does that make them different from me? If so, why? If not, what does that say about us? It just has always seemed like a given to me that more diversity in storytelling leads to an aggregate of better stories being told. I love pizza, but Christ I can’t have pizza seven days a week. What fun is that? It’s about as much fun as watching nothing but middle-aged white male antiheroes live out the big-dick fantasies of small-screen writers.

Not all of these shows are good, and many are not for me. In the first, it’s totally subjective. In the second case, who fucking cares? Not everything is supposed to be for me, because there are so many other things that already are. The existence of a show that zigs where I zag feels (more often than not) like a feature, not a bug. It’s the peak of Peak TV, where a lot of small-to-medium audiences get served and everyone gets to curate their own overlapping-yet-unique experiences. That seems like a solid methodology for watching TV and living life.

Yet, when you look at last night’s results, it seems like enough people in enough places can’t handle the idea of lives that don’t conform to what they see in their immediate vicinity. I can’t pretend to speak for them, but I can certainly judge them on voting for a candidate who made fear of the “other” a primary platform position, who sought to absolve blame like some orange-skinned Sin Eater in order to offer the calming balm of an All-White America that never actually existed in the first place. Trump sold an idea, and even if the idea is too good to be true, the idea of it can be intoxicating. If you wanted to hear that your own problems weren’t your own fault, then Trump gave you the right to think you weren’t responsible for your own shortcomings.

Liberal guilt can make many of us feel OVERLY responsible for everything, but that doesn’t mean compassion for those that feel threatened right now is anything close to weakness, just as kicking people when they are down isn’t a sign of strength. Rather than dismiss these worries, the only thing I can do know is acknowledge them. Those fears exist. They are real. And they are valid. I don’t have any solutions, and I don’t think anyone expressing concern tonight actually wants any, especially from me, right now. None of this is new to those who have spent today crying or screaming or retreating inwards. But the national scale of these voices creates an atmosphere that makes many of us scared and many of our nation’s enemies thrilled. They don’t need to cripple this country. We’re going to do it all by ourselves at this rate.

That’s a fatalist attitude, and part of why I’m writing this is to push past fatalism. I’ve spent the last 24 hours figuring out how to do ANYTHING. I had a dream last night that I jumped off a giant mushroom, and died, and came back instantly as a ghost. I felt no pain when I died, and was still in the world, but couldn’t physically interact with anything. Then I woke up in that aforementioned panic, and my heart was going a thousand miles an hour at the prospect of living inside “The Purge,” and for a millisecond wished I was back in the dream, dead. I’m not suicidal, but I’d be a fool to say that 2016 hasn’t often felt like that amazing like from the “Hamilton” song “It’s Quiet Uptown.” At more than one occasion, there were moments when you’re in so deep that it’s easier to just swim down.

Now, it’s obviously SUPER cliché for a white liberal to quote “Hamilton” in 2016, but the sentiment holds all the same. We heard all year that love trumps hate, but that wasn’t true this week. Hate won, at least temporarily. Evil won. I don’t think Republicans are evil, but I can’t see anyone who watched this election cycle, saw the myriad of things that Trump said/did/didn’t do, and voted for him ANYWAYS are good people. I can’t square that circle, and can’t listen to any equivocations. That vote emboldened exactly the sort of people whom natural selection has unfortunately not fully removed from the gene pool, and enabled a new generation to feel like it’s OK to treat someone of a different race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity as somehow inherently lesser.

I don’t have any solid plans or answers here. All I know is I needed to do something, and while writing this all out isn’t much, it’s the best I could do for now. I’ll be better later, and I hope and pray that you will be too.

Making each other better than we were is the point of…well, everything, I suppose.

“Documentary Now” Review: “Final Transmission”

I’ve watched tonight’s “Documentary Now” episode “Final Transmission” about four times to date. I’m a “Stop Making Sense” fanatic, so for the first three times I thought I was watching a really clever restaging of that seminal Talking Heads concert. But somewhere along the fourth time I really caught on to the undercurrent of sadness amidst the blazing onscreen creativity, and realized this show is doing something really special in its second season.

It’s not just that this is an amazingly accurate visual and aural representation of that Talking Heads show originally captured so vividly by Jonathan Demme. It gets to the heart of what it means to be creative but also collaborative, something near and dear to my own heart. After all, I write about TV a lot, and even though it’s not my profession, it’s certainly one of my passions. But it’s a solitary one. That has its pros and cons. I have no one else but myself to answer to, but I’m also putting out for the world to see. But I rarely see those who see my work, which puts the whole exercise into an existential plane. For whom am I really writing?

I think that’s part of why TV Critic Twitter or Film Critic Twitter or Queso Twitter or whatever millions of subsets of Twitter exist: We crave isolation and contact in equal measures at all time. I have a lot of followers but almost no real friends. I don’t say that for pity, but state it as a bald fact. It’s mostly of my own doing and own preference: I enjoy interactions the most when I can walk away from them at the drop of a hat. That’s SUPER easy to do online, but super difficult to do at a real-life mixer. The version of me you see online isn’t really me. It’s (hopefully) the best version of me, even when confessing faults or weaknesses. I used to have a literal avatar as my Twitter bio picture, because it more or less told you what I wanted you to know about it.

“Final Transmission” is about “Psycho Killer” and “Crosseyed And Painless,” but it’s also about the conflict that can come between individual artist expression and any edifice that seeks to commercialize or contain said expression. It’s tempting to think about Fred Armisen’s David Byrne as an arrogant, self-absorbed narcissistic who sacrifices the happiness and financial well-being of his bandmates in the name of artistic freedom. But I’m not so sure it’s as cut and dried as that. The songs in “Final Transmission” are both banal but also really fucking hummable, which speaks to Armisen’s skill as a songwriter. They aren’t as good as the source material upon which it’s based, but it also suggests an almost mathematical way in which such songs could be written in assembly-line fashion to produce a facsimile of the original. “Final Transmission” therefore takes as many cues from Lady Gaga and Oasis as Talking Heads: At what point does homage transcend source material?

It’s something to think about as the sheer volume of creative material appears onscreen as well as online. Trying to come up with something original isn’t besides the point but isn’t necessarily the endgoal, either. Look at the landscape of pop culture writing right now: It’s all a grab bag of the same basic thing reskinned and repackaged across hundreds if not thousands of sites. Everyone’s working too hard to produce the same basic thing, but only SOONER than everyone else. Originality isn’t really the key factor, and the brand of the writer means less than the brand of the website, especially when people remember content, not necessarily who produce it.

“Stop Making Sense” was very much about the artifice of rock, whereas “Final Transmission” is about the human costs of artifice. It’s hard not to look at the “Saturday Night Live” roots of Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers, since that’s a show that for 40+ years has relentlessly moved onwards despite built-in turnover. No one person (save Lorne Michaels) is better than “Saturday Night Live,” just as no single person or act is bigger than rock n’ roll itself. Music, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And while the fans in the stands for the last Test Pattern concert will inevitably move on to the Next Big Thing, those inside the band have to live with their fans moving on without them. Change is built into pop culture, but that’s so much easier to accept as a consumer of it rather than as a producer.

And that’s what hit me so hard during the fourth viewing, where each song is a final statement of sort to a life that can exist in perpetuity but only as a memory. Maybe that’s why I obsessively watch concert films so much: They freeze-frame a point-in-time from which we are constantly distancing ourselves. One of the key moments in my entire life was seeing U2’s ZooTV tour in Foxboro, Massachusetts in 1991. I was 16, had just gotten my license, and drove down to see that multimedia show burn a hole into the back of my brain. I own the DVD of that tour, and watch it every few months the way certain people re-read old books. The show is always the same, but I am always different. Thus, what stands out in that show is also always different. It’s the same, but forever changing.

I think about that a lot in terms of how I approach writing and how I approach life overall. I tend to only write when I have something to say, and for some reason, “Documentary Now” is the show that tends to inspire me to say something. I know I have the same qualities as the lead singer of Test Pattern: I’m controlling, I know what I think is right, and I’d rather do it my way than compromise. But I also know it’s much more rewarding to be part of a group than do it alone. I get the sense Armisen’s character would love to keep the band going if he only knew how to do so. It’s telling how many of the off-stage interviews are done solo, with the band members talking to the documentary’s director rather than to each other. We’re often talking past one another, instead of to each other. The thing is, we KNOW we’re doing that, but keep doing it all the same. We’re shouting through megaphones instead of just talking to the person just to the left or right of us.

#documentary now #talking heads

Review: The “Documentary Now” episode “Juan Like Rice And Chicken” is a high point for the show and TV as a whole in 2016

I’ve never seen “Jiro Dreams Of Sushi,” the inspiration for tonight’s amazing episode of “Documentary Now.” I do watch “Chef’s Table,” which is what sprung to mind when I initially watched it.

The testament to how great this particular installment lies in the fact that knowing anything about what “Documentary Now” is referencing is complementary at best to one’s enjoyment watching it. Much of this program’s greatness lies in the artistry with which it mimics its source inspiration (season one’s “Kunuk Uncovered” and “Final Transmission,” the upcoming homage to “Stop Making Sense,” absolutely fall under this category). But “Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” actually works as a piece of dramatic storytelling in addition to eerily accurate mimicry, one as compelling as anything else on television in 2016.

That’s a strange thing to say about a show that often parodies format as much as content, turning many episodes into a meta exercise about the craft that goes into documentary filmmaking. It’s an exceedingly clever show, but rarely pushes beyond that. And that’s OK! Clever is enjoyable, especially in the 20-minute bursts of each “Documentary Now” episode. Where “Juan” excels is in marrying the artifice of the form and the shallowness of its ostensible object of satire with a family story that is genuinely moving. It’s almost as if every other episode of the show were setting up this sucker punch of an installment.

That’s obviously assigning intent where it wasn’t intended: Each episode of “Documentary Now” is an entity unto its own, with all the highs and lows that encompass such an approach. Maybe the show reaches the heights of “Juan” again at some point in its run, but it won’t (and can’t) be the same. That’s because comparing episodes is like comparing different types of fruit. Sure, they are all edible, but there’s no use comparing a carrot with a turnip. Form and function simply don’t align in an easily comparable way. What makes “Juan” great also makes it singular.

In many ways, that’s what the episode is all about. Again, I didn’t watch “Jiro,” but I’ve watched my share of “Chef’s Table” on Netflix. I used that as my reference point in terms of its shot selection, camera movement, and editing techniques. (Learning that director David Gelb had a hand in both “Jiro” and “Table” makes sense, but also really doesn’t matter in terms of what makes “Juan Likes Rice and Chicken” so singular an achievement.)

The “joke” of assigning a three-star Michelin rating to this hovel makes a mockery of high art, bespoke cuisine, and those that trust Yelp over their own taste buds. On the other hands, “Juan” takes the titular chef and his two sons EXTREMELY seriously, and never once mocks them or their dreams. It’s an important distinction, one that allows the episode to have its (three-star) cake and eat it too. The silly and the sublime don’t cancel each other out, but rather augment one another. You could see this episode as mocking those who buy into the restaurant’s hype. But you could also see their raves as an honest reception of the passion that Juan puts into the restaurant. Both things are simultaneously true.

“Juan Likes Rice And Chicken” is about the pursuit of perfection at the potential cost of human connection. Having now read up on “Jiro,” that theme seems directly lifted from the original documentary. And yet, “Juan” creates three entities that are wholly fictional but in whose happiness I deeply invested. You understand quickly what motivates Juan and his two sons, and both the script (written by Seth Meyers) and the direction (Rhys Thomas, Alex Buono) economically lay out motivation more often than not through what’s NOT said. Either the lens betrays the lies in a character’s eyes, or catches something when the subject isn’t aware he’s on camera. These are prideful men who are too proud to admit how much they are afraid of disappointing each other.

That’s a universal theme that goes well beyond any one form of storytelling. “Juan” transcends its subject matter by tapping into shared emotions rather than a single piece of pop culture. It’s not about Fred Armisen playing Jiro’s son Yoshikazu. Rather, he’s playing every child faced with the impossible task of making a demanding parent proud. And while Armisen excels at playing ironic detachment, here he underplays things masterfully, drawing audiences with his fearful eyes and staccato bursts of unwitting confession. The talking heads in “Juan” wonder if his character can live up to his father’s legacy. The difference here, versus other “Documentary Now” episodes? We actually WANT him to succeed. Failure wouldn’t be funny in this case. It would be heartbreaking.

The closest analogy to another episode with such surprise and emotional impact in 2016 has to be the “Bojack Horseman” episode “Fish Out Of Water.” I can’t quite put “Juan” above that episode, but the fact that I’m putting it this close attests to how powerful and surprising it is. In fact, in terms of surprise, it surpasses “Fish” entirely. Did I expect “Fish” to unfold as it did? No, but that also felt afterwards like something inevitable that fit within the context of that show as a whole. “Juan” takes what we know about “Documentary Now” and uses it against us, producing shock in a way that I’m not sure it ever can again. We know that “Documentary Now” has this gear. That makes any subsequent use of emotion welcome, but not entirely unfamiliar.

Still, it’s worth celebrating the shock. We all watch and read about and think about TV so much that it’s almost impossible to pull the rug over us at this point. We’re too smart and too cynical. “Juan Likes Chicken And Rice” is extremely smart about what makes us tick, and bypasses our cynicism in a way that brought genuine tears to my eyes on several occasions. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. I couldn’t believe how much I grew to care for this family in such a short time. Most scripted shows can produce that much pathos in an entire season of hour-long episodes. To do so almost effortless in less than half an hour is a monumental achieve, and one I’ll be revisit often in the days, months, and years to come.

#documentary now

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

The Boob Tube Dude