Gads, they’ve done it to me again. Why do creatives do this?! It makes me want to tear my hair out (a gesture which, to paraphrase Niles Crane, becomes less significant with each passing year). Argghh.
What is this, you ask? Well, the source of today’s State of High Dudgeon (SHD) is a Netflix series titled The Umbrella Academy, which recently dropped the last episode of its fourth and final season. My youngest son introduced the series to me earlier this year, prior to the fourth season’s release, so when my wife returned from her frequent travels, I suggested we watch (in my case, re-watch) the first three seasons for her benefit, then watch the final season… after it was released.
Which, BTW, is another thing putting me into SHD (there do seem to be a great many of them nowadays, I admit, but all I should have to do is wave my hand vaguely at the world around us to illustrate, and you should get my point): we get six or eight --- maybe ten, if we’re lucky --- episodes of a ‘season,’ which all by itself is laughable when compared to the 20+ we used to get in the Goode Olde Days, and then we have to wait a year or two for ‘them’ to make another paltry six or eight episodes, by which time we’ve lost all sense of continuity with the storyline and can we be bothered to scratch our heads to recall it or should we just rewatch the damned thing? Oh my gosh, ain’t First World problems a royal pain in the patootie.
Sorry. Deep breaths, deep breaths…
Anyway. The Umbrella Academy (UA). Lots of spoilers here, including some pretty penultimate ones, so… you’ve been warned.
I mostly enjoyed the first three seasons as Youngest Son and I watched them, though kind of in a ‘guilty-pleasures’ sort of way, because UA features the most dysfunctional bunch of superheroes you’re ever likely to meet. Like, catastrophically, comically dysfunctional. Like, OMG, they’re so annoying. The world is (literally) coming to an end and they’re standing around, bickering. They’re nominally a family --- not a biological one, just a bunch of orphans with strange powers gathered together by (of course) a reclusive, enigmatic multi-billionaire who’s (of course) not really a very nice person. They’re actually not in the superhero business anymore, anyway, because they’re so dysfunctional, they all went their separate ways, and have only gotten back together as the first season begins because said multi-billionaire recently died under (of course) mysterious circumstances. Lotta tropes here.
The series is… well, adequately written, I suppose, though it gets rather sloppy at times, partly because it involves a fair amount of time travel and alternate timelines. These always provide room for a great deal of confusion unless your writers are the sharpest knives in the drawer, which, quite frankly, UA’s aren’t. I’m not saying ‘don’t use time travel at all’ in your writing, because it can be very entertaining if it’s cleverly done. (Full disclosure, I use it in my writing… and do consider myself a pretty sharp knife, at least writing-wise, he said humbly.) But one does open oneself up to some major paradoxes with time travel (i.e. plot holes) if one isn’t careful, so it isn’t something to be entered into lightly.
Turns out, our dysfunctional superheroes are attempting to stop an impending Apocalypse… not once, not twice, not… oh look, the gimmick is that they’re consistently trying to stop the end of the world. Because we (and they) finally discover in the fourth season that the cause of the impending Apocalypse is… (drum roll, please)… our dysfunctional superheroes. (Of course.) And the only way to stop this Apocalypse is… (repeat drum roll)… for our dysfunctional superheroes never to have existed. So they self-destruct, not without one or two fond remembrances and witty comments on the way out.
Now, as I recall, this has all been done before. Back in 2004, Ashton Kutcher starred in a film called The Butterfly Effect. (The Butterfly Effect is a real thing in chaos theory, dealing with how small changes in one thing can massively influence other things.) Kutcher’s character is able to go back in time and change various events in his life. The problem is, every time he does that, he initiates unintended --- mostly catastrophic --- side effects into his life and the lives of those around him. And at the climax of the film, he concludes the only way to erase all these catastrophic changes is… for him never to have been born. (Of course.)
I’m not decrying the fact that UA isn’t being particularly original. After all, as we all know, pretty much all narratives have already been done endlessly sometime in the last five thousand years or so of recorded history, and so I’ve always therefore maintained that, at least to some degree, it isn’t what’s in the story, it’s how well it’s told.
What I am decrying is this Chekhovian (or Poevian, come to that --- remember the ending of The Masque of the Red Death?) idea that, after watching characters endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune throughout the tale, why do we have to bear witness to them deciding the only way to fix the woes of the world is by dying? Or checking out? (Frodo didn’t die, but he had to skip town, telling Sam he’d been too badly wounded to remain in Middle Earth.)
I suppose all this means I’m arguing for the HEA --- the Happily-Ever-After, in writerspeak. But even there, I don’t intend the HEA must mean our protagonist gets the guy/girl/miscellaneous carbon-based unit, or wins the lottery, or forever defeats evil as we know it. Just let them… you know, savour the victory a little, maybe settle down and enjoy the fruits of their labours with quiet, fulfilling lives, and not be consigned to the flames of oblivion. Sure, the ugly ending/oblivion thing happens in life all the time… but isn’t one of the reasons we read heroic tales to at least temporarily feel that life is fair and justice will prevail? Even if it all too often isn’t?
I know I do. So gimme the HEA, please.
What is this, you ask? Well, the source of today’s State of High Dudgeon (SHD) is a Netflix series titled The Umbrella Academy, which recently dropped the last episode of its fourth and final season. My youngest son introduced the series to me earlier this year, prior to the fourth season’s release, so when my wife returned from her frequent travels, I suggested we watch (in my case, re-watch) the first three seasons for her benefit, then watch the final season… after it was released.
Which, BTW, is another thing putting me into SHD (there do seem to be a great many of them nowadays, I admit, but all I should have to do is wave my hand vaguely at the world around us to illustrate, and you should get my point): we get six or eight --- maybe ten, if we’re lucky --- episodes of a ‘season,’ which all by itself is laughable when compared to the 20+ we used to get in the Goode Olde Days, and then we have to wait a year or two for ‘them’ to make another paltry six or eight episodes, by which time we’ve lost all sense of continuity with the storyline and can we be bothered to scratch our heads to recall it or should we just rewatch the damned thing? Oh my gosh, ain’t First World problems a royal pain in the patootie.
Sorry. Deep breaths, deep breaths…
Anyway. The Umbrella Academy (UA). Lots of spoilers here, including some pretty penultimate ones, so… you’ve been warned.
I mostly enjoyed the first three seasons as Youngest Son and I watched them, though kind of in a ‘guilty-pleasures’ sort of way, because UA features the most dysfunctional bunch of superheroes you’re ever likely to meet. Like, catastrophically, comically dysfunctional. Like, OMG, they’re so annoying. The world is (literally) coming to an end and they’re standing around, bickering. They’re nominally a family --- not a biological one, just a bunch of orphans with strange powers gathered together by (of course) a reclusive, enigmatic multi-billionaire who’s (of course) not really a very nice person. They’re actually not in the superhero business anymore, anyway, because they’re so dysfunctional, they all went their separate ways, and have only gotten back together as the first season begins because said multi-billionaire recently died under (of course) mysterious circumstances. Lotta tropes here.
The series is… well, adequately written, I suppose, though it gets rather sloppy at times, partly because it involves a fair amount of time travel and alternate timelines. These always provide room for a great deal of confusion unless your writers are the sharpest knives in the drawer, which, quite frankly, UA’s aren’t. I’m not saying ‘don’t use time travel at all’ in your writing, because it can be very entertaining if it’s cleverly done. (Full disclosure, I use it in my writing… and do consider myself a pretty sharp knife, at least writing-wise, he said humbly.) But one does open oneself up to some major paradoxes with time travel (i.e. plot holes) if one isn’t careful, so it isn’t something to be entered into lightly.
Turns out, our dysfunctional superheroes are attempting to stop an impending Apocalypse… not once, not twice, not… oh look, the gimmick is that they’re consistently trying to stop the end of the world. Because we (and they) finally discover in the fourth season that the cause of the impending Apocalypse is… (drum roll, please)… our dysfunctional superheroes. (Of course.) And the only way to stop this Apocalypse is… (repeat drum roll)… for our dysfunctional superheroes never to have existed. So they self-destruct, not without one or two fond remembrances and witty comments on the way out.
Now, as I recall, this has all been done before. Back in 2004, Ashton Kutcher starred in a film called The Butterfly Effect. (The Butterfly Effect is a real thing in chaos theory, dealing with how small changes in one thing can massively influence other things.) Kutcher’s character is able to go back in time and change various events in his life. The problem is, every time he does that, he initiates unintended --- mostly catastrophic --- side effects into his life and the lives of those around him. And at the climax of the film, he concludes the only way to erase all these catastrophic changes is… for him never to have been born. (Of course.)
I’m not decrying the fact that UA isn’t being particularly original. After all, as we all know, pretty much all narratives have already been done endlessly sometime in the last five thousand years or so of recorded history, and so I’ve always therefore maintained that, at least to some degree, it isn’t what’s in the story, it’s how well it’s told.
What I am decrying is this Chekhovian (or Poevian, come to that --- remember the ending of The Masque of the Red Death?) idea that, after watching characters endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune throughout the tale, why do we have to bear witness to them deciding the only way to fix the woes of the world is by dying? Or checking out? (Frodo didn’t die, but he had to skip town, telling Sam he’d been too badly wounded to remain in Middle Earth.)
I suppose all this means I’m arguing for the HEA --- the Happily-Ever-After, in writerspeak. But even there, I don’t intend the HEA must mean our protagonist gets the guy/girl/miscellaneous carbon-based unit, or wins the lottery, or forever defeats evil as we know it. Just let them… you know, savour the victory a little, maybe settle down and enjoy the fruits of their labours with quiet, fulfilling lives, and not be consigned to the flames of oblivion. Sure, the ugly ending/oblivion thing happens in life all the time… but isn’t one of the reasons we read heroic tales to at least temporarily feel that life is fair and justice will prevail? Even if it all too often isn’t?
I know I do. So gimme the HEA, please.
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