History is a funny but weighty thing

There's a lot that goes into the very concept of history. You'll hear all kinds of aphorisms about it as a concept, such as "history is written by the winners"; an assertion that suggests that the way things are remembered is determined by those who are in control. The modern Republican party is very eager to (pun intended) whitewash many things out of the historical record, thus creating a common wisdom that will work against the idea of what actually happened. Both of these approaches play into my favorite Orwell quote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." Humans are creatures of habit. If something becomes "tradition", then it will tend to stay that way and, just as importantly, be thought of as if it were always that way. This is why the modern discipline of historiography exists (and why the politics of base motivations is almost always awful.)

House of the Dragon, as just one element of A Song of Ice and Fire (neither of which are actual elements for the non-alchemically-inclined among you), is suffused with history. George R. R. Martin began writing the novels because he was inspired by the history he'd read about the power games between the city-states of medieval Italy and other locales of that period. In many, many cases, the idea that "truth is stranger than fiction" is quite accurate. Yes, they really did do things like that back then and so neither Game of Thrones nor House has shied away from presenting the realpolitik of the Middle Ages. After the latest episode of House, a friend mentioned that he was almost repelled by the idea that Viserys was being encouraged to marry a 12-year-old. But that's what happened among the upper classes of earlier times. Marriage was a contract for money and power. Women were the property exchanged in said contracts. Families were sometimes outraged at the emotional attachments of their children, not just because the prospective spouses were seen as beneath them, but because emotion often forestalled the opportunity for the family to gain more money and prestige. This is that "family loyalty" that Tyrion always struggled with in GoT. But, pick up most books about medieval Europe and you'll get a ton of this, if you hadn't already seen or read enough examples in the earlier show or Martin's books. And that's something to consider when watching House.

There's no arguing that the second episode was better, overall, than the first. Pilots are often difficult because they spend a lot of time setting up a story rather than progressing one. It's world-building instead of storytelling. In this latest episode, we got a lot more of the latter, as the various factions displayed more texture and some of the essential personal conflicts were introduced. We have Daemon's outrage at being replaced mixing with his love for his brother and loyalty to his house (and the realization that he'll be deemed a traitor for the rest of time if he fails; there's that history thing again.) We have Rhaenyra's frustration with being treated like a dilettante or a placeholder just waiting to be returned to the status of property, now compounded by the realization that her father is going to marry her best friend in order to produce an heir to replace her. We have the scheming of houses Velaryon and Hightower to affect those events and more. And we have some guy who likes feeding people to the crabs. (Everybody's gotta have a hobby.) This is all better and more interesting that watching the rich laugh at the death and dismemberment of those sworn to serve them, certainly. But it's also pretty typical of what the previous show was and it still lacks anyone that could even vaguely be considered compelling.

Again, Martin developed ASoIaF with a strong sense of history(!) In the same way that Ridley Scott discovered that test audiences wouldn't believe that gladiators pitched products from the floor of the arena just like modern commercials, Martin knew that there was plenty of material about stuff that actually happened to inspire a fantasy series where it could take place and people could feel comfortable about being one step removed from it. But House, so far, isn't removed enough from what we've seen before. It's a step forward in some respects in that there are no obvious "bad guys" like the Lannisters or the White Walkers. But one of the best parts about having the Lannisters be the "bad guys" was how interesting and entrancing their central figures- Tyrion, Jaime, Cersei, Tywin -all happened to be. Tyrion was never a "bad guy." Jaime was but then became a nominal "good guy." Cersei and Tywin stayed "bad guys" the whole way through, but you always really wanted to see all of them on the screen because they were almost always going to do something interesting. There is no one like that who has yet appeared in House. Due credit to actors like Milly Alcock as young Rhaenyra and Paddy Considine as the eternally self-conscious king, Viserys, but those people just aren't that interesting. Perhaps it's a matter of the characters in GoT being already familiar with the game (win or die) and given roles that emphasize that knowledge? But then you'd expect people like Otto Hightower (Rhys Ilfans) and Corlys Velaryon (Steve Touissant) to fill roles other than "person who looks at everyone like a dog just pissed on the rug" and "performative but still subdued outrage every time I don't get what I want", respectively. (One could easily imagine Corlys kicking the dirt every time he gets told that Viserys won't do anything about the Stepstones.)

The basic plot is still missing some of the heroic themes of GoT, which is always going to be a bit harder to sell in Western storytelling (see: Joseph Campbell.) But I'd actually appreciate a step away from that, if only everything happening in House right now didn't feel so... tired. It still feels like we've seen it all before because, in a way, we really have. I might be more subject to the bias of someone who's been repeatedly exposed to precisely this story in Martin's canon (How much more interested would I have been in a story rooted in the commoners' perception of the world around like, say, Dunk and Egg? Very.) But we've all been exposed to it, to one degree or another, if we watched GoT. How much better or different can it get than what's gone before (minus the last two seasons, at least)? It seems odd to say this, since this kind of Machiavellian competition stuff is usually right in my wheelhouse of interest. But, so far, I can't say that there's a whole lot of draw to Sunday nights outside of morbid curiosity. We'll see how long it lasts or if it changes.

Rehashed plots with dull characters may not be the best approach

Those of you who've been reading for a while (all three of you) may remember when I was regularly writing about Game of Thrones. It was, for the first five seasons at least, one of the best shows on TV at the time. It takes some real talent- writing, acting, producing -to make a series of that quality for that long and that's why, in the somewhat-pre-streaming era, GoT became what most are referring to now as a cultural touchstone. It's one of the last series where people were gathering around the water coolers (you know, when people used to go into offices?) to talk about the Sunday night episode that had just dropped. The Battle of the Blackwater. The Red Wedding. The duel between The Mountain and The Red Viper. How hot the sexposition scenes were. All that. That's a more difficult scenario in this, the age where entire seasons can be consumed in a day, but there are still shows that have a bit of a culture-wide thread by dint of both their restrained production (weekly episodes) and the high quality of their acting, writing, direction, and overall production, like Better Call Saul. The first spinoff from GoT, House of the Dragon, has set itself in that first mode, repeating GoT's Sunday night schedule, but is lacking significantly in the latter aspect.

The first Damocletian sword hovering over the series may, in fact, be its connection to GoT. I'm not sure there's a parallel in television history where a show of that quality took such a nosedive in not just its last season, but its last three seasons. The capper, of course, was the final couple episodes where it was more than evident that the producers and writers were really eager to say goodbye to Westeros before HBO could try to throw more money at them. Of course, one could look at the mother series and think that another factor that torpedoed it was the lack of George R. R. Martin's plotting. Once the story had moved past his books, it was David Benioff and D. B. Weiss with an outline and no one to tell them they were wrong. House does not have that problem because it not only is following Martin's "novel", Fire and Blood, but also has him directly involved in its production (perhaps to forestall a downturn in quality? Hard to say.) But part of the issue may be the story itself. I refer to the book as a "novel" because my brief experience with it found it to be more like a fictional documentary in book form. Martin and some collaborators had already produced The World of Ice and Fire; a coffee table-style tome that was something of an encyclopedia about the world that contains Westeros and Essos. Said tome contained a great deal of detail on the "Dance of the Dragons" which is the general term for this period in House Targaryen's history. Then he produced Fire and Blood, which goes into even more detail on said period. I got about 30-some pages into the latter before realizing that I was just rereading the same history (not story, really) in even more detail and put it down, never to be opened again so far. Just like with Star Wars, if you're doing a reboot, tell me it's a reboot. Don't try to sell me on something new before handing me the same thing I've already seen or read.

And, of course, a lot of people will say something similar (or already have) about House. It very much is back-to-basics Game of Thrones. In a sharp turn away from the pointless action scenes and rather brusque storytelling of the final couple seasons of the mother show, the showrunners for House have decided to invest heavily in the action-by-discussion method that produced the often-wonderful political machinations and storylines of the first series. The problem with that is two-fold: 1. Doing that in the first episode produces a pace that likely has already alienated some viewers. 2. You really need compelling characters to sell that approach, especially in the first episode. What made the later seasons of GoT still somewhat must-watch TV were the characters; most of whom were introduced in that first episode in 2011. House had precisely zero of that kind of character in its opener. There was no witty but rueful Tyrion or menacing but conflicted Jaime or earnest but frustrated Arya. In fact, almost none of the characters presented in last night's opening episode had any personality at all. They were just inhabiting roles to move the plot along because the script said to do that. The only exception was Matt Smith as Prince Daemon. His personality just happens to be "arrogant dipshit", which isn't really a selling point, but there it is. At least he's something other than a dilettante or a mannequin, which really defined the rest of the cast. I mean, perhaps it's a compliment to the veracity of their characters that most of them are so accustomed to being above all of humanity that they didn't actually display any humanity for the entire hour? I'm all about characters that are appealing because of their lack of emotion (witness the comic version of V in V for Vendetta as opposed to the Hollywoodized and stereotypical film version), but they normally have to be a bit more dynamic than anyone was in the first episode of House.

To break up the tedium of discussions about stuff we already know and tittering about what someone is wearing to the joust, the producers decided to continue in the GoT vein but even more over the top, as it were. Not only did we have the obligatory orgy scene, but were handed a feast of blood and violence that was even more gratuitous than anything this side of the nearest direct-to-video/Amazon streaming slasher flick. We already knew that the queen was going to die in childbirth (even if you hadn't already read Martin's histories, it was obvious that she was there to present the "difficult birth" scene from the moment she appeared on screen.) Exactly how many minutes of Emma (Sian Brooke) screaming from her pool of blood did they think was necessary to get that across? For that matter, how many skulls needed to be split open to demonstrate that jousts were violent contests? One probably would've been enough, but not for Ryan Condal and Martin, apparently. Those were the moments of "action" that were supposed to provide respite from the sneers and muttering of the Targaryen (and hangers-on) family, but all they really were was a different form of tedium. I used to do a "Lines of the week" feature for each episode of GoT. I can't think of a single moment from last night that was clever enough to jot down as being memorable.

Pilots are tough. Opening a series with all of the baggage that Westeros still carries is an even steeper hill to climb. But the showrunners did themselves no favors with this beginning. We've really (in some cases, literally; pun intended) seen it all before and it wasn't nearly as interesting as it was the first time. I'll keep watching for another episode or two, but if the writing doesn't improve quickly, my disdain will be overwhelming and it will have nothing to do with the stink of a dragon.

Getting crime to pay

We haven't seen much that's been particularly inspiring at the Michigan Theater in recent days, when we've been seeing things at all. Yesterday's offering was also not something that would have ordinarily jumped out at me, but when faced with few or no choices, you take what's there. That, of course, is also one of the central themes of Emily the Criminal. The film is the first feature-length effort as either writer or director for John Patton Ford and it's a pretty solid starting point if he's choosing to make a career out of this whole cinematic thing. The choice of career is also the quandary of the central character of the story, Emily, played by Aubrey Plaza, formerly of comedic fame in stand-up and Parks and Recreation. It's a story about contemporary LA, the economic difficulties faced by much of the modern generation, and the sacrifices one is willing to or is forced to make to overcome those difficulties. It's a pretty straightforward scenario, as Emily, an artist weighed down with tens of thousands in student debt, gets a tip from a co-worker that leads her to a credit card fraud scheme that brings immediate, albeit risky, returns. Seeing it first as an amusing distraction and then later as a real opportunity for cash, she gets in deep with both the scheme and its co-owner, Youcef (Theo Rossi.) We can see where this is going a long time before it gets there.

Emily is a fully-realized character and Plaza plays her well. It's not difficult to either believe or understand why a woman with a history of impulsive behavior and unwise choices might choose to participate in the venture. Those poor choices also persist and make her life more difficult than it already is, which is saying something, even if she's not immediately impoverished as so many others in our society are. The film is also rather pointed with its social commentary, not only in reference to the obvious things like the onerous weight of student loans that accumulate interest faster than payments can reduce the original amount, but also to the social disdain that people Emily might once have considered peers express toward her and her co-workers as they bring food to company gatherings. It does get a bit heavy-handed in spots, like when her boss points out that she's an independent contractor and, therefore, has no ground to stand on when he reduces her hours. He points out that she can't go complain to the shop steward because she's an IC. I'm not sure how many people that might watch the film even know what a shop steward is, given the reduction in organized labor in this country, so pointing out that she, like so many other workers, simply has no rights was probably sufficient. In the end, Emily continues to make what she feels are the only reasonable choices available to her and we begin to realize that her situation is not too far from a certain irascible chemistry teacher,,,

After we got home from the film, we sat down to watch the final episode of Better Call Saul. I have often said that The Wire is the best thing ever put on TV, but that Breaking Bad is a very close second. BCS has been very close to its progenitor in quality and not simply because it takes place within the same setting and involves many of the same characters. Unlike BB, where showrunner, Vince Gilligan, went into it with the idea that he was going to tell the story of a lead character who becomes a lead villain in the audience's eyes, I think his approach to Saul, along with co-runner, Peter Gould, was a bit more textured. Since it was a prequel, the act of building drama is sometimes more complicated, especially in a post-Game of Thrones world, where you know that anything life-threatening to lead characters that have appeared in later times isn't actually that dire. That doesn't keep the story from being interesting. It just means that you have to use different approaches to keep the audience really riveted to what might happen to our (anti)hero.

But I think the other advantage that Saul/Jimmy as a character had is that, unlike the force of nature that Walter White became, Jimmy often remained sympathetic even while he was engaging in acts that ranged from petty to downright awful. Sure, he was Slippin' Jimmy, scamming people out of their money because he couldn't be bothered to earn an honest living. But he was also James McGill, partner to Kim Wexler (the truly excellent and underrated Rhea Seehorn) and showed a genuine concern for the well-being of others, even if it only sometimes appeared when he realized that what he'd done had real consequences for others. He'd go through his period of recrimination and anguish and self-doubt... and then he'd be right back at it because that's who he was. In a genuinely impressive summation, all of those themes came to the fore in this final episode, including the acknowledgment that he was, even after all he'd done, still a really likeable guy, as displayed by the respect and affection shown by the other inmates in his final destination. Like Emily, I think Jimmy was a fully-realized character; an actual human being with all of the foibles and bad choices and sentimental strengths and failings that inhabit all of us, to one degree or another. That made the series eminently watchable and sets a very high bar for any storyteller to aspire to. Whether it pays off or not, the pursuit of the goal may be the most important thing.

Milestones past

Back in the early 1990s, the comic industry went through something of a boom cycle. There were enough creators that were eager to escape the work-for-hire dungeons of the big two (Marvel and DC) and enough smaller companies that had been doing largely licensed fare (Dark Horse, etc.) to prove that it was viable to work outside the two colossi. The general feeling was that the only way to do "good" comics was to do "new" comics. The trigger event for much of this, of course, was the departure of some of the biggest artist names in the industry from Marvel to form Image Comics. Around the same time, former Marvel editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, had found some investors to help him put together Valiant Comics, who picked up a lot of old Gold Key properties from the 1960s, like Solar and Magnus, Robot Fighter. Dark Horse soon followed suit with their first venture into superheroes and their Comics' Greatest World (headlined by Frank Miller's X) and smaller companies like Malibu also recruited veterans like Steve Gerber into their Ultraverse. It was that highly-competitive environment in which Denys Cowan and Dwayne McDuffie, long-time veterans of mostly Marvel books, decided to launch Milestone Comics, which is the subject of HBO's new documentary, Milestone Generations.

Denys, DC publisher Jenette Kahn, and Dwayne

I knew Denys and Dwayne very casually back then because Milestone was set up as an independent studio that happened to have a distribution deal with DC. But because they were independent both editorially and style-wise (or so they thought), they often showed up in the "small press" area of the larger comic shows, which is where we were with our Fifth Panel Comics. At one Motor City show, we had booths right next to each other. We were known for regularly having music playing at our booth, which I tried to vary on the regular so that everyone could find something they liked (I, of course, generally like all of it.) At one point, it was Dwayne who looked over and said: "Alright, who's the James Brown fan?" when the godfather had started belting out "Cold Sweat." Yeah, that was me. Those were good days because there were so many people trying to do something different with any number of motivations toward that difference. In Shooter's case, he was trying to directly challenge the powers-that-were by showing them how he could do a shared universe experience "better" (He was later fired by his investors in the same way, and for many of the same reasons, that he'd been removed from Marvel.) In Dark Horse's case, it was an attempt to do superheroes in the "more realistic" DH style. (They folded quickly and went back to doing their usual fare.) In our case, it was mostly an attempt to carve out a space where we could do our own thing, as well as be part of the movement that was shifting away from brightly-colored spandex as the main theme of the industry. (We, of course, didn't even have color in our books, except for a couple covers.) But Milestone wanted to stay in that vein of providing heroes for kids (and some adults.) They just wanted to make those heroes look more like the people that were often reading them and speak to their lived and living experience.

The documentary is pretty thorough in examining a lot of the motivation for and the creation of the company and the "Dakotaverse"; their nickname for their universe based on the metropolis where the first books were largely based. It also covers a lot of the later activity of the company, after they had shut down the comics division a couple years after the mid-90s market crash, and gone exclusively into licensing and the production of a cartoon based on Static, one of their first books and the best seller among them. Denys is pretty open about the difficulties that they faced but isn't bitter about it. Having worked in the industry for so long and having done so as a person of color, he was aware of how the world works. Plus, in my experience, Denys was the quiet one among the creative founders, while Dwayne was far more outspoken. The most salient issue for them, of course, was the fact that they wanted to actively engage issues like racism, homophobia, and teenage sex. As one might expect in Puritan America, it was the last one that was the tipping point for DC, in which they adamantly objected to a cover depicting Static in an embrace with his girlfriend with a couple condoms on the floor next to them. Milestone, despite being editorially independent, eventually conceded to DC's demands for an outer cardstock cover that would hide a lot of the artwork once word came back from distributors and outlets that that would also be objectionable to them. This, of course, is an industry that has had any number of problems with religious types and helicopter parents objecting when they discovered that comics aren't just for kids. But in this case, it wasn't blowback from the street. It was internal and Denys suspects that it was, in fact, driven by DC and it was easy for stores and distributors to follow along, not just because it was sex (just FYI: as in any other entertainment medium, sex sells in comics) but because it was Black sex.

Most of those at Milestone expressed the opinion in the film that I remember hearing back then, in which low sales were a consequence of people not wanting to buy "comics for Blacks", as if stories about Black characters were somehow exclusive to those who shared their skin tones, while White characters were for Whites. Here is where we veer into the usual absurdity of racism, often the unconscious type, in which there is irrefutably an impact from people not being willing to identify with others simply as human, regardless of identity. I think that's a fair focus for the film to take because it can't be denied that that was part of the cause of their demise in the comics world. But all of the detail I spelled out above is also pertinent. When the industry imploded because of the collapse of the speculator bubble (Newsflash, kids: If they're printing 20 million copies of a book, it's probably not going to be "collectible", which usually implies scarcity.), it took down multiple companies, including Valiant and Malibu, countless stores, one of the two major nationwide distributors (Capital City), and led Marvel into Chapter 11. So, yes, there were external factors having nothing to do with money that led to their demise. But money had a lot to do with it, too. On top of that, there were some internal factors because, in some cases, the books just weren't that great.

I liked Denys' artwork and I appreciated Dwayne's writing, but neither of those were really industry leaders. Would I have gone out of my way for a Cowan or McDuffie book because I knew they were on it, like I would an Alan Moore or a Jill Thompson? Probably not. I was interested in Hardware and Icon and Blood Syndicate and Static because I wanted to see those stories from their perspective. I wanted to see "different" superheroes from the usual pablum that was often dished out. But did I save those comics for last in the weekly pile because I was most looking forward to them? No. They were solid, but not earthshattering. And many of the later books, like Xombi, were more obtuse than insightful, especially for a monthly serial. So while I can see their argument that being identified as "Black" superheroes and not actually being able to tell the stories that they thought might resonate with the largely older audience of the time (which Marvel had recognized in the 60s and DC still refused to comprehend in the 90s) were both confining and probably had an impact on their success, I still think there was a lot more going on that the film didn't really cover. I do, however, appreciate the several minutes at the end talking about how Denys is still in the mix and still trying to lead new faces into the industry (Dwayne, sadly, passed away over a decade ago) and Milestone is the company that he's still using to do that. It's both a more diverse and still positive voice that could really add to the tableau if given a shot.