Past the terrible twos, Badlands kinda grows up

I'm a week behind on Into the Badlands, since season 3 began last week and we're a few hours from episode 2 hitting the screen. Episode 1 of the new season was your standard re-start, laying out the storylines: Widow and Moon's efforts to solidify control of the Badlands; Tilda and the Iron Rabbits being the ultimate outsiders, even to the people they're trying to help; Sunny trying to keep Henry alive even while discovering he's infected with The Gift; and the arrival of The Pilgrim. And, oh, yeah. MK, Prince of Angst, is still around, too.

From a general perspective, I appreciate the fact that they've maintained the wider world introduced last season. Even in a post-apocalyptic scenario, there's still a lot of land and a lot of surviving people out there. In that vein, I appreciate that they've taken care to demonstrate that the natural societal outgrowths and reactions are still present, even in a much-transformed society. The baronial war between The Widow and Chau is displacing, injuring, and orphaning a lot of people. Showing Lydia turning the former isolationist/pacifist religion into a refugee center is a smart turn in that respect. It's a demonstration of the fact that the writers have a larger vision, such that even when society has broken down from our perspective and then breaks down again with the world that is the Badlands, people will still try to band together and recreate the structures necessary to get it moving again.

The arrival of The Pilgrim introduces another of my favorite societal manifestations: religion. While it's possible to see MK's experiences at the monastery as a manifestation of religion, it's also possible to interpret that as a philosophical institution. While traditional kung fu monasteries in film that practice both control and exploitation of their arts have a grounding in Buddhism, my perspective on Buddhism has always been one of philosophy, rather than religion. Religion is a belief in a higher power. Buddhism is a belief in a higher state of being from within oneself. There's no debate about The Pilgrim in this case, however, as he simply announces himself as a "messiah" when his two acolytes use their Gift to slaughter one of Chau's border outposts. Fanatical devotion dropped into a world of opportunists (like Bajie) and cynical politics (the barony system) is always a good springboard. The meta question beyond that is: Now that The Pilgrim is exploiting the breach in the wall around the Badlands, I wonder if we'll see any further explanation for how that wall was built, why it was built, and what's so important inside the Badlands that needed to be protected? Is it just the Widow's oil or something more?

Speaking of The Gift, that angle is starting to lose its luster. At first, we had an instance that seemed like it was unique: MK was a potential threat all by himself. Then we discover that there's a whole monastery of people who've trained themselves to restrain it and are actively pursuing those few who also possess it. Now, we know that not only has The Pilgrim recruited at least two people to serve him that are Gifted, but... sigh... baby Henry is also Gifted, because why wouldn't the son of Han and Leia become the greatest user of the dark side of the Force? Coincidence? No. Henry already carries emotional importance to Sunny, who's a killer trying to protect an infant in a dangerous world (Lone Wolf and Cub, FTW), and to the audience, many of whom will naturally gravitate toward a child and the story connection leading back to the tragedy of Veil from the last two seasons. Did we really need the magic powers to be part of that storyline, too?

Speaking of Bajie, while we're on the somewhat negative side of things, do we really need this kind of "troublemaker" character here? Isn't there enough trouble already? The writers have constructed a pretty ruthless world and yet this self-interested con man has somehow escaped being impaled all this time, despite constantly being captured or enslaved in one fashion or another? Sonny has shown that he's willing to chase down a teenager and execute him for daring to try to hunt him down. After all the contemptible shit that Bajie has pulled, both last season and in this very episode, you're telling me that Sonny wouldn't have just eviscerated him by now? I get that he's one of the gateways to actual knowledge about the wider world, even as he decries the mystical city of Azra for not responding to his radio signal at the end of last season, but that screams "device" to me. He's a bridge out of tedious exposition for the writers, since he can conveniently fill in gaps in the other characters' knowledge while also serving to create new subplots because his deviousness and desire to cheat the system are simply uncontrollable. It's a facade and it's an annoying one; usually cloaked in some kind of comedic trappings, but neither Nick Frost nor the writers have apparently figured out how to do comedy in this dangerous world, so it comes off more as something that needs to be endured, rather than enjoyed.

On the acting front, I think Emily Beecham is growing into her role as the Widow, as there were far fewer "Camera closeup because I'm a badass" moments. But certain idiosyncrasies, like continually preaching her vision of a "better world" while continuing to farm poppies to make money to create that better world are disconcerting. We all have our crutches and if this is the way the writers are working her "end justifies the means" angle in the broad view, I'm OK with it. It's just one of those things that kind of makes you stop and scratch your head when she goes off on a tirade about being different from the other barons. Similarly, there's nothing as jarring for me in the whole series than watching her fighting in ridiculously spiked heels. Yes, they're already doing fantastic feats and there are psychic powers (MK and others) involved, so suspension of disbelief is already a thing. But nothing breaks that suspension more easily for me than watching an accomplished martial artist engage in combat wearing high heels. It's just ridiculous. No one with any choice to make whatsoever would subject themselves to that. Most martial arts are about balance. The arts displayed in Badlands, while fanciful, also involve feats of body control and balance. Both of those are made more difficult while being forced forward onto your toes.

Nathaniel Moon's return is welcome, since Sherman Augustus is an actor with some gravitas and the complexity of his character creates some interesting possibilities. Similarly, Tilda's Iron Rabbits angle has depth. She's trying to make up for the depredations of her mother, but at the same time gets rejected by those she's nominally helping because of the attention she might bring. There's a tenuous dividing line between doing things because they're right and doing them because you're seeking revenge. The two overlap frequently and I think building that kind of inner conflict in Tilda that manifests in how others treat her is a smart turn for a character that could easily have been lost among the other more prominent storylines.

The contrast to that is MK. While I've never been a particular fan of the character and his surrounding story, since it reminds me way too much of a River Tam thing, a la Firefly (the incredible power within this one person in the whole world (or galaxy) might destroy it!), the turn it took last season really only made it worse. Now we not only know that the Gift is about as common as red hair, removing any kind of suspense or trepidation about its presence, but MK doesn't even have the Gift anymore, so he's free to sulk not only about being the prize prisoner of the Widow, but also about the fact that he's not even worth it any longer. That's a recipe for teenage angst if I've ever seen one and the character plays right into it. I'm not sure why recent writers, especially for AMC shows, seem to think that young people being involved in their shows simply demands a healthy dose of teenage pouting about everything that's going wrong in their lives (see: Carl in The Walking Dead for its first 4 or 5 seasons.) I mean, sure, we've all been there as teenagers and many of us even live with some that do the same thing on a regular basis, but this is the one aspect of realism for characters that I could probably do without. At this point, in Badlands, it qualifies as an annoying distraction taking us away from the far more interesting people doing things elsewhere.

I started watching Badlands in kind of morbidly curious "How are they going to make this work?" manner and I'm still kind of there. I'm not compelled to sit down in front of the TV every Sunday in the same I am Game of Thrones or Better Call Saul. But I am interested in some of the directions they're moving (Pilgrim, Tilda), so I think I'm going to keep up with it on an episode-by-episode basis, especially once I move at least some of this writing over to a new site in the next couple weeks. So, stay tuned and all that.

Excursion to somewhere

I've been DVRing Into the Badlands (And Legion. And Taboo. And a couple other things. Maybe I'll get to them, at some point, but Orange is the New Black starts in a couple weeks...) ItB was something I was watching in the same way I used to watch The Walking Dead: I was interested in where they were going to take it, more in a clinical sense than from an "I'm really entertained by this!" perspective. They'd combined two relatively disparate elements: a post-apocalyptic setting and Hong Kong-style martial arts. I'm a mild fan of the latter and a huge fan of the former, so I was willing to watch the 6-episode first season... and then kinda forgot about it until the second season started appearing on the DVR a couple months ago. So I sat down and binged it over the past few days and had two reactions: 1. I'm more intrigued by the setting, as they fleshed out the world considerably. 2. I'm still not ready to plant myself in front of it every Sunday night.

On 1, as I noted in my post about the premiere episode last year, the setting was redolent of an old RPG known as Gamma World that I used to run campaigns with as a kid. The Badlands is a totally restructured society that still clings to some parts of the old technology (oil), but rejects others (guns), lacks more (computers), and treats others as something bordering on magic (the items surrounding the legendary city of Azra.) Gamma World was like that, too, in which some members of society remembered the old technology or had learned to adapt it to their world, while others would be completely mystified by it (think Donald Trump's attachment to Twitter and confusion at the concept of press releases and you'll be on the right track.)

How does that work again?

Season 2 expanded upon pretty much everything as they went along; showing the less organized world outside the Badlands (and the massive wall that separates the two), as well as the various factions present there: miners, smugglers, the monastery, etc. The mine of the first couple episodes showed some of that "past world as mystery" flavor, with people being rewarded for digging up detritus from our world. But the monastery was the big story outside of the politics and not just because MK spent a good chunk of the season effectively imprisoned there. The abbots appear to be constraining the emergence of mutations like MK's. This again hearkens back to Gamma World, where mutation among people, animals, and plants was the order of the day because of the radiation left as the aftereffect of the disaster that created the setting. There is no such radiation in the world of ItB. So is this a "natural human progression toward higher power" approach or something different?

And that question kind of leads into point 2: Why is ItB still not compelling TV? There are a number of answers to that question.

I'm not sure 'penetrating gaze' is the right phrase here.

1. Acting. I don't think anyone has done a particularly poor job, where you're wondering why the producers had to settle for this or that person. In fact, I think Madeleine Mantock did quite well as Veil in season 2 and Marton Csokas continued to be interesting to watch as Quinn, even if he was chewing the scenery a bit as his character became more desperate/deranged in the later episodes. By the same token, I don't find anyone's performance particularly gripping, either. There are no Don Drapers or Walter Whites among the cast, where you're just waiting for that person to come back on camera. Unfortunately, one of the weaker roles has been Emily Beecham as Minerva/The Widow. She has a ton of screen time, but often seems to use it to "be acting", rather than be Minerva. Of course, she's often not helped by...

Day in the life.

2. The writing. I don't have an objection to the plot, but some of the pacing and dialogue is still pretty weak. Beecham was repeatedly subject to this, as the writers seemed to think that being a strong and/or ominous presence meant her having to look into the camera and deliver a line like "They'll see what happens when *I* get involved.", accompanied by a slow pan in and rising music. It's melodrama in TV production 101 and it's pretty dated. People don't remember setup lines. They're goofy and people usually mock them. People remember lines that are delivered in the course of an action other than staring at the camera/audience. If you want ominous delivery, think: "I find your lack of faith...disturbing." or "I am the one who knocks!" Both of those instances are memorable and lacked what we used to call a posing panel in comics: where everyone stands and looks menacingly at the camera, serving no purpose to the story, but just filling pages and/or giving the artist something to sett at conventions. There are much better ways of closing a scene.

Dance, pigeon! Dance!

3. The overuse of "bullet time." That's the technique made famous by the Wachowski Brothers in The Matrix. I'm using it as a euphemism for the proliferation of slow motion backflips that seem to be present in every action scene of every episode. The producers seem to think that the only style of fighting possible is not only kung fu (normal for many HK-style films) but kung fu with as large an amount of Olympic floor exercises as can be executed. Having practiced a sword art, I can't tell if there's any particular style being employed there, as most of those combats still tend to be edge-on-edge clatterfests. There is a point where style overwhelms rationality in some of it, as well, like when Sunny meet Silver Moon and ends up walking away with his sword that has multiple gold rings drilled into the top of the blade. No sword-wielder in his right mind would do such a thing, as there's way too much chance of it catching on armor, bone, or someone else's weapon and disarming you at the worst possible moment (pretty much all of them.) That's me being pretty technical about it, but it's also a measure of a larger problem, in that the fights became so repetitive that my absorption in the story pretty much disappeared and I began tuning out of them except to notice technical details like that insane setup on that sword.

Yeah. No way, man.

And if I'm getting bored by the fight scenes, pretty soon it leads me to asking myself: Where are they going with this? I liked the semi-resolution that introduced Azra as a reality, rather than just a legend. Combine that with the image on the medallion and the book apparently matching up with a cover of n old copy of Wired and it creates a mix of possibilities, some of which may be shockingly disappointing to our characters and some of which may be interesting to us, the audience. On the other hand, Sunny's situation went from purely linear to Lone Wolf and Cub. Sunny is now the ultimate ronin, ex-regent for the most powerful baron in the Badlands, trusted by no one, and now seeking to raise his son in a gentler manner than the savage world around him would have it. That's not exactly the most original approach and it leaves me wondering if the presence of the baby is intended as a humanizing element for a man who already demonstrated a distinct streak of humanity for a killer with 404 (not found?) victims (and, honestly, many more than that by now.)

Overall, I'm not disappointed. I'm just kind of keeping my clinical distance for now. I'll definitely watch the opener next season and see what they've developed in the new production. AMC apparently has faith, since it went from 6 episodes in season one to 10 in season two and a reported 15 for the confirmed season three. AMC's shows often develop into things like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead (even though I've parted ways with the latter.) But they also sometimes linger on without direction like Hell on Wheels. Here's hoping for more good than bad(lands.)

Into the bad(writer)lands

Yes, I am going to write about Into the Badlands. Yes, that is a picture of Darryl from The Walking Dead leading off the post because the intent, despite the title, isn't to talk about how bad the writing was on Into the Badlands because it wasn't, overall. I actually found the show to be pretty interesting, if a little shallow but it was a first episode so, whatevs.

No, the moment that really stuck out to me through two hours of TV was one that many people probably coasted past because they either a) didn't know, b) didn't care, or c) thought that what was being portrayed was accurate. That moment was the one where Darryl's new friends, Dwight and Sherry, use insulin to "save" the third new friend, Tina, who's apparently in some form of distress (obviously, a diabetic.)

Now. I've been a diabetic for 40 of my 45 years, so this stuff is as natural as breathing to me. I never begrudge anyone their lack of knowledge of the condition (Tangent: People refer to it as a disease. There is no disease. There's no bacteria or viral agent involved. There may have been when it first emerged, but that's only a theory. It's a condition like having any other body part that doesn't work properly; in my case, the pancreas. /tangent) I've had emergency room residents not know how to respond to various situations (e.g. attempting to treat me for drastically high blood sugar when mine tested within normal limits not 10 seconds earlier) so, despite the prevalence of both type 1 (my type; permanent) and type 2 (can be at least partially alleviated) diabetes in the body public and the social consciousness in recent years, there's still a fair amount of confusion out there about what the condition entails and how to treat its rougher moments.

That being said, there's zero excuse for writing it into your screenplay and not performing the most basic research so that you not only portray the condition accurately for the sake of your story, but also don't mislead your audience into making a potentially fatal mistake if they encounter someone having a problem in the real world.

Left to right: Darryl, Tina, Sherry, Dwight

Darryl escapes from his new "friends" and swipes their infantry duffel bag (which they've stuffed a cocked and loaded crossbow into; Raise your hand everyone who thinks that's a smart idea?) A few minutes later he discovers that the other item in the bag is a small cooler, clearly labeled "Insulin" (this is akin to labeling your bag full of shells "Ammo" so you don't forget; again, WTF?) Darryl, being the morally consistent type in this our semi-civilization, returns with the cooler to the trio so that he doesn't deprive whichever of them needs the drug that's keeping them alive (whether that's a favor or a curse in this our semi-civilization, I'll leave to the viewer to decide.) Now, despite Tina seemingly functioning normally to this point, a few minutes later she's impaired and clearly suffering the effects of hypoglycemia (aka low blood sugar.) "Hypo" means low, as in the body has a calorie deficit and the person afflicted will have muscle spasms, lose motor control, and possibly lose consciousness as the body desperately searches for energy. You know what causes hypoglycemia in diabetics? Insulin. You know what the worst possible response to hypoglycemia is? Injecting someone with insulin. And, yet, that's exactly what Sherry does in order to "save" Tina at a crisis point in the script. What Sherry did there is effectively poison her friend, since Tina's state of semi-consciousness would typically continue to a complete loss of consciousness, seizures and, if it persists long enough, death.

If Tina was suffering from advanced hyperglycemia (aka high blood sugar), she would have been showing effects from it long before the point where she stumbles and collapses and, if she was in the state where she's unable to function, one small injection of insulin isn't really going to help her, since she's probably well on the way to the shutdown of several bodily systems (kidneys, heart, etc.) and the resulting coma and eventual death that follow (also known as the way all diabetics used to die before the synthesis of insulin in the early 20th century.) That injection certainly isn't going to snap her out of her problematic state, so it's pretty safe to assume that writer Heather Bellson figured she'd just take that moment that diabetics have in public sometimes (hypoglycemia) and decided that they must be taking this drug in order to keep those from happening; a misinterpretation that could have been cleared up with five minutes of reading between two pages of Wikipedia. This is writer/producer/director fail.

I mention this not just because it's colossally stupid, but it's also potentially dangerous. Just spinning a struck-by-lightning scenario here: What if the next time someone's suffering from hypoglycemia and unable to respond and someone decides that the solution is to jab them with an insulin syringe, just like they've seen on TV? And I ask this not to do a Helen Lovejoy, but because I've been in the situation where I've been fading out and people have asked me: "Do you need insulin?" Thankfully, I've been aware enough to refuse, but Bellson, director Jeff January, and the producers have just reinforced that idea to the largest single audience in America.

This is the expression of confused dismay that I was wearing.

But the reason I think it's mostly writer fail is not just because of that ridiculous error that, again, could have been resolved with very basic research. It's also the loaded crossbow in the bag thing, where anything (say, a cooler?) could have knocked against the trigger and shot someone in the ass or worse (Sure, Sherry may be a little dim, but if they've survived this long, some sense must be evident.) And the clearly marked cooler, as if the people carrying it need to be reminded of what they're carrying (this is to say nothing of the fact that, in the Georgia heat for an extended period of time, the cooler would have done exactly zero for a drug that needs to remain at room temperature or below to remain effective; they might as well have been shooting her up with water, at that point.) Furthermore, who in the world lets anyone get as close as Tina did to a corpse, almost knowing that they're going to be active? Seriously, in TWD America, who does that anymore?

But the crossbow had to be loaded to get the last-minute shot off to save Darryl and the cooler had to be labeled so that Darryl could immediately make his moral decision and go back for the trio. And Tina, apparently, had to die to lend pseudo-weight to the episode and ensure that Sherry and Dwight could rob Darryl again and escape, since they couldn't cram three people on his bike. It's just a series of writer shortcuts that, yes, sometimes are left to fortuitous circumstance (i.e. that's why people are heroes, because they're able to do heroic stuff that wouldn't otherwise happen (aka fiction)) but in other cases are just papering over a story that really doesn't work. This episode was one of those. It was only reinforced when we shifted to the other storyline and found Abraham muttering ridiculous lines like: "A man can tell." when Sasha confronted him with the fact that she may not want to get horizontal with him. My girlfriend snorted in disdain at that line for the same reason I did: we know that Abraham has a high opinion of himself and his own capabilities, but that line means we've crossed the point from confident to idiot and an otherwise fairly moving sequence of him coming to grips with his own anger and frustration at his impotence in the world at large is diminished.

This whole episode was doubly frustrating because Darryl remains one of the more interesting and complex characters in the show and yet here he's reduced to placeholder for a contrived crisis so that the show could introduce another set of "bad guys" that may or may not be worse than the Wolves. In short, this is how trying to cram too much into one episode can often lead you down a path that doesn't make sense for either characters, story entire (Seriously, who lets someone get that close to a corpse? Who?), audience, or basic science.

And now a few words from our other show...

Hm... I liked it, for the most part? I thought they did a decent job of introducing setting and characters while still avoiding exposition dumps. They kept a certain level of mysticism which is important for a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff where people speak of far-off lands that may or may not exist. I always found that to be essential when running games of Gamma World, for example (nerd moment.) I did appreciate the fact that they avoided a lot of the usual "badass" symbology (for example, Baron Quinn's house symbol is an armadillo, rather than something ferocious, like a dragon) since different symbols grow into contexts that may not always be apparent, which means there's some depth and thought given to the story and just how long this state of affairs may have been extant. I thought the sword work was good and exciting, although if they're deriving most of it from Japanese origins, as seems to be the case, there's still way too much edge on edge contact (do that with two katanas and you'll end up with your blades stuck together.)

On the technical aspects, I thought the dialogue was a little pedestrian. Why use: "You're every bit as good as they say you are."? We already know that about Sunny. We've seen it. That's a superfluous line and doesn't do anything to enmesh the Widow in the story. If, instead, she'd said: "Good to see that all the rumors were true.", the audience would still know what she was talking about and it would be apparent that she lives in that world, instead of just reading scripts in it. I thought some of the set pieces were a little too kitschy. That final fight in the town felt a little improbable because here was the Widow, apparent enemy of Quinn, rolling right into town with several of her Clippers and sitting there watching the fight without any apprehension whatsoever, even as her car gets pierced multiple times. Perhaps there's more to that because of what she mentioned about Sunny not being able to touch her because she's a baron, but it still felt like a scene that was supported on more artifice than it should have been.

Speaking of which, Martin Csokas, as Quinn is kind of a weird mesh of two recent Hollywood figures that ran plantations. He looks like Michael Fassbender as Edwin Epps in 12 Years a Slave, but he acts more like Leonardo DiCaprio, who played Calvin J. Candie in Djanjo Unchained. It left me wondering if they'd consciously aimed for that kind of derivation when considering what a post-apoc poppy plantation owner with what is, in essence, both a slave workforce and a slave army, might look and act like and how the audience might be able to identify with him. OTOH, Daniel Wu was kind of wooden. This is his first major venture into American film or TV and it's not like there's a ton of difference in how the industries operate or how audiences react between China and the US, but acting styles are different. I know much more about Japanese cinema and I could see how Wu's reactions (or lack thereof) might play better in a culture that's generally more reserved than the American one. It may just have been the contrast between Wu's seeming diffidence and everyone else emoting pretty regularly. Regardless, I'll certainly watch next week and see where they take it.