It’ll be easier if you have Netflix and Watch Instantly. If not, it’s still worth it if you can do it for free.
Get yourself a stopwatch. Optionally, pour yourself a few shots of tequila or, if you prefer, vodka. Then, start watching Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
Time how long you get into it before your hand involuntarily snatches the remote and turns it off. If you think slamming a few shots will improve your resolve, feel free. I doubt it will help.
I was sober and I made it 5 minutes.
Trust me, you’ll be glad you tried. It’ll be like the getting a red badge of courage for sitting through horrible animation.
I find it kind of surprising that 214 people would admit to attending a school called “Ashley Sugar-Notch.”
It’s for real, too. Drive on I80 through Pennsylvania and you’ll see a sign proudly proclaiming that the next exit will take you to a place called Ashley Sugar Notch.
My frustration with Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition is well known among my role playing friends. It’s a system that I’ve come to actively hate, that provides such little support for its DMs that it’s borderline hostile to them. It’s not much better to its players, but most decent DMs transfer the impact of stupid rules onto themselves to keep the game fun. At least, that’s what I’ve always done.
Now’s not the time for a comprehensive rundown of what makes 3rd Edition (and its better but worse 3.5 patch) such a problem. But there’s a really nasty strand of system-within-a-system rules that need a swift kick to the crotch: Sundering, Tripping, Disarming and Grappling, I’m calling you out.
These rules represent a classic How Not To Build A System situation. They work not only off of a different set of combat statistics, they also work independently of each other. They all work in roughly the same way as each other, but they all use different feats and skills that do little or nothing to help the others. What’s that mean to an average player. It means if I, as a DM, build an NPC who’s really good at grappling, unless you’ve made your character good at it as well, I’m going to succeed. I.E. I can build an NPC good at nothing save screwing the party over. Whee!
Any of the skills above are really hard for a player to pull off at all without a special feat. Want to disarm? Well, someone’s getting a free attack on you for trying…unless you take a feat. Ok, if you stop there, things aren’t too bad. But then you can start taking feats to give bonuses to disarming checks. So now, when I try to disarm from you, not only has the in-game failsafe (that free attack) been removed, but you get bonuses to pull it off. Now, we’ve created a separate progression path to become good at Disarming, one where a mediocre fighter can be very, very good at something, even against a much better fighter. Put another way, D&D has given a cheap way for characters to be made more dangerous than people who should be better than them. Game balance, have a nice nap.
It gets worse.
The repercussions of all of these rules within rules are nasty and debilitating. If you disarm with a bare hand, winning a disarm check means you now hold your opponent’s weapon. And since you’ve put some skills into being better at this, there is now no effective way for the opponent to get his weapon back. Since most characters – PC and NPC – tend to have a favored weapon, one they’ve been built around using, the effect is more than just delaying or slightly weakening them. They’ve been effectively removed from the fight.
It’s even more of a mess when you start looking at things like tripping and grappling. Now only can you give bonus points to tripping and only to tripping, you can take feats that allow you to get extra, free attacks if you successfully trip. So a character built to trip not only has an easier time to tripping, but gets a bunch of free damage out of it too. All for the price of a handful of feats. Bonus: D&D inexplicably makes getting back up not only burn a valuable move action, but also provokes another free attack to anyone within range. So if you stat a character out for tripping, surround a target, then knock them down, you’ve set that character up to be the target of 5 or 6 free attacks. I know. I’ve used this technique myself. The same can be said of grappling, which prevents a character from doing much of anything without rolling a successful grapple check; a check that, once again, one character is likely statted out to win the majority of the time.
These rules are bad news no matter who uses them. I’ve used them as a DM and unfairly trashed people with them, and I’ve had players use them and unbalance otherwise well built encounters. There are creatures in the monster manual who are only difficult to fight because they engage in this kind of side-rule-system combat.
They’re rules that could be softened relatively easily, too. Why make getting up both take a move action and provoke free attacks? Why not give a tripped character the choice: get up fast but get hit, or get up slow and be safe? And with grappling, why not just have it immobilize a character and give a negative to their attacks instead of taking them out of the fight and subjecting them to free crushing damage? And why in Cthulu’s name would you give anyone a system that trivializes the breaking of powerful, magic weapons?
4th Edition has clarified and simplified a lot of these rules, which is good. A few weeks ago, when I was researching how grappling rules work, I found an article written by one of the game’s designers. The rules were so complicated that the designer of the system had to edit and strike-through at least a third of what he had written to correct it. If that’s not the mark of an insane rule system, I don’t know what is.
I’ve been thinking a bit about the different ways platforms handle html and web content recently. Probably because I’m right in the middle of working on my company’s Customer Center and struggling to shift from the work I’ve done recently in PHP to the ASP.Net platform my company uses.
PHP supports a model that’s a lot closer to the way I think, though I don’t know if it’s actually a good model. You create your page, include other pages to fill in chunks of that page (like loading the header and footer) and, when needed, slap in some code amidst the page itself to dynamically load pieces. If you need a person’s name to appear in the top of the page when they’ve logged in, you can just put in the function call to getUserName(); and whatever that function returns gets put into the page. It’s a very procedural way of thinking through your page, and it’s comfortable.
ASP.Net – the default way, not their newer Model-View-Controller pattern – does things in this weird hybrid way that’s a totally uncomfortable way of thinking. You still create your base page – index.aspx or whatever – and into that page you can stick includes for other code and you can also call a templated header/footer file like you would in PHP. But the implementation is oddly circular. In an effort to avoid a separate header and footer file, ASP.Net uses Master Pages. Unlike PHP, you don’t get to say, on the page itself, “Stick the header here, then do this other stuff, then stick the footer here.”
Instead you build a Master Page that you lay out like a normal page, except that where the content would go, you put an asp:contentplaceholder tag. Then, at the top of the actual page, when you’re declaring the namespace for the page and where the code file lies, you say, essentially “Use this Master Page” which tells ASP.Net to take everything you wrote on the actual page and shove it into the place where the contentplaceholder tag is sitting. It makes a sort of sense, but it forces you to think about the page layout from two different directions, and to build your actual code in a way that doesn’t map to the way the page will look when it’s done.
This isn’t helped by the fact that additional included code is done using User Controls, that feel like another type of file just to have a different type of file. I guess it’s comfortable if you need a certain amount of forced abstraction, but it makes for pages that are really hard to pick apart. Nor does the ASP.Net model of separating the HTML part of the page from the code itself help with the clarity. They’ve got a fancy term for it – Code Behind – but it just means more time figuring out what’s loading and in what order.
PHP’s model certainly does not reward clarity, nor does it punish obscurity, but my experience with ASP.Net is that it enforces a certain opacity that isn’t good for development. The model works – I’ve used it for years and gotten good work done with it – but it’s uncomfortable.
But is it wrong? Is PHP’s procedurally minded comfort just a crutch? And is Model-View-Controller, which I haven’t delved into yet, a help or is it just another flawed abstraction that confuses as much as it clarifies? The whole nature of web development is coming up with ways of building templates that we can easily shove different things into as we need. What works for you? Anything? Nothing?
I’ve never been much good at short form fiction. This is partly because I don’t come up with many ideas that fit into a short form, but that’s a symptom of a larger issue, I think. The thing is, I just don’t get much of a buzz out of shorter stories. Whatever it is that makes people get all giddy from short fiction is something I apparently lack.
Beyond it being a really good time, one of the things I love about running role playing games (you know, like Dungeons and Dragons and all that other nerdy tabletop stuff) is that it’s this great, abstracted storytelling style that works as a mirror to my more serious writing. You don’t have to worry about language or grammar. The subtleties of plot development are less important. Nothing that happens is recorded verbatim, so minor missteps are easy to wash away or simply forget. What you’re left with is the broad narrative structure, some character development and a lot of big emotions. It’s a great way of learning about yourself as a storyteller.
I’m coming to the end of a major section of a campaign we’ve been running for a while, and over the past few weeks I’ve felt this really significant shift in it. Things were kind of working, but I was struggling to build and sustain momentum. It had been a long time since we’d played these characters and while nothing I was doing was wrong, it wasn’t taking on a life of its own. Then, about four weeks ago, it went from feeling like pushing a boulder uphill to trying desperately to keep up with it as it barreled down the other side.
That feeling of frustration, of things technically, intellectually working without the spark of life is basically what I feel, in some form or another, when I do anything short form. Things work, I like the ideas, and maybe I even really like the story. But it never has its own momentum. It’s always me turning the gears and stepping on the pedal. In a shorter story, there’s never time for all that potential energy to turn suddenly kinetic.
What changed in my campaign? Nothing, exactly. I just reached critical mass with everything we’d built to that point. At some point in a long story, if you’re doing things right, you cross this threshold. To that point, you’re running around, establishing the setting, introducing characters, building subplots and moving pieces into place. It’s a lot of work, and even when things work, there’s still this sense of things moving only where they’re pushed. Then you hit a point where everything is connected in just the right way, where any change in the web causes vibrations throughout the rest. If something happens in this plot, the things it does to this character over here, on the other side of the map, forces them into action. That cascades out to three other things, and before you know it the whole damn structure is shaking.
At that point, you’re not pushing things anymore. They’re pushing you. Whereas before you needed to get things carefully in place, orchestrating the whole situation, now all you need to do is pick up a rock and throw it. You aim for the place where it’ll do the most damage, and then hold on tight.
If you’ve ever watched Babylon 5, you can see what I mean. Up through the end of season 2 it’s good. At times, it’s really good. But somewhere in the middle of season 3, things go insane. No one in the story can move without knocking ten other things over. Every single story impacts on the rest. That’s what you get with a carefully planned, long form story. You get to reach critical mass, and the whole way you tell the story changes. You’re still writing the thing, but it starts feeling more like aiming a fire hose than pumping water out of a well. It’s pretty incredible.
Do I need to roll a 20 sided die to realize that? Nah, not really. But seeing the whole campaign take on a fatalistic life of its own is a nice, clear distillation of where my interests and instincts lead me as a writer. The rush I feel when all the guns are in place and I can start pulling triggers has a lot to do with why I feel so compelled to write. It’s something I notice when I write, but separated from struggling over word choice it’s easier to see that, yeah, what I really want to work on is stuff where I have enough room to build a story that takes on a life of its own.
I didn’t go to college for anything writing related, but with all the drinking and swearing and unruly behavior that comes with gaming, it’s kind of the same thing
I’ve been on the internet a long time. I started messing around on a network service called Delphi in 1995. My first job two years later was as tech support for a local Internet Service Provider. I met my wife and two of my best friends on an IRC server run by SciFi channel, and met another of my closest friends writing (I hesitate to admit, and beg you to remember I was 18 at the time) fanfiction. I’ve seen communities come and go, some brushing past some kind of perfection before flaming out.
That IRC server that Scifi ran – first called Icarus, then Events – was, for most of my life, the best community I ever found. You don’t get friends and love out of an IRC community unless it’s something special. Until last year, I was convinced I’d never find anything close again. That moment of perfect beauty came and went. So it goes.
It took the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression to change that. Let it never be said that the subprime mortgage industry was all bad.
I came to Planet Money like many people did: through This American Life’s fantastic “Giant Pool of Money.” I came because the only way to hold back the horror of those early days of the crisis was to stay informed. Information made my mood darker, but it also held the panic at bay. My wife can attest to how raw my nerves were; I don’t know exactly what had me so spooked, but I was very, very scared. Planet Money was my life preserver.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: To find another community as special as the one I found back on Icarus. In the past year I’ve made real friends. It’s been a while since that’s happened online. Not just net friends, either. They’ve come to mean enough to me that me and Erin flew to New Orleans just to have the chance to meet some of them. That thing I thought was just a life preserver turned out to be a boat, and I wasn’t alone in it.
Though Planet Money is a great show run by great people, there is one person who deserves much of the credit for the community the show built: Laura Conaway. Which is why I am absolutely crushed to learn that, as of today, she’s moving on to other things.
Like I said, this is not my first time to the dance. I’ve seen great work done, work that built a deserved readership but that never built a community. Blogs written by keen but distant minds, films shot by brilliant but reclusive souls and music performed from afar. And I’ve seen great work tainted by disdain for its audience. Great work married to a personal accessibility is rare, and should be treasured. For the past year, Laura Conaway of Planet Money worked to make its blog not only fantastically informative, but inclusive of all of its readers.
I was lucky enough to work with Laura during her time on Planet Money, first on a debate with another read and later on a development project that was some of the most fun coding I’ve ever done. Most of the fun of it was getting to work with Laura herself, who is such a rare mix of smart and personable that I wish everyone could have had that chance.
Back when Laura was still on the podcast itself, she used to say that this was our recession, they were just reporting it. It’s a sentiment I hope does not leave the show with her. If it does, the show will be less for it, even if the reporting stays as strong. It’s hard to do great work. It’s harder to build a community around it that’s more than an aggregation of listeners. Laura succeeded, and she did so in a very, very short time.
I say none of this to sell short the hard work of Adam Davidson, Alex Blumberg, Caitlin Kennney, Chana Jaffe-Walt or David Kestembaum, nor any of the great interns who served at Planet Money over the past year. I wish only to point out the rare gift Laura gave to their show, a gift I hope survives beyond her tenure.
As for Laura, I can only hope that her destination is bigger, brighter and better than her point of departure. She deserves it.
Raise a glass, folks. It’s the end of the tour.
P.S. Did you know that an elegy is a type of poem? I thought it was just a style of music. The things you learn in the midst of sad news.
Before Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, everything in the Gundam franchise had been put together by Tomino Yoshiyuki. Much as Gene Roddenberry was the heart and soul of Star Trek, Gundam was all Tomino. I think there are two points at which the franchises made vastly different choices over how to continue, and I think those decisions have a lot to do with Gundam being the superior franchise.
The first is in how the franchises grew beyond the direct control of their creators, which for Gundam began with 0080: War in the Pocket. The second was its decision that the spirit of Gundam was more important than its continuity and began producing alternate universe versions of its themes, starting in 1994 with G Gundam. The first choice, to open the universe to different creative talents, made the second possible. So where did Gundam get it right where Star Trek failed?
Star Trek grew away from Roddenberry awkwardly, simultaneously locking him out of creative decisions while straitjacketing themselves into a limited conception of the “Roddenberry Vision.” It led ultimately to a string of too-similar shows that were never allowed to push the concept past its high water mark in the early 90’s. Like a religion tied more to its rituals than its spirit, Star Trek became an increasingly empty series of rote repetitions of the same concept.
Gundam, on the other hand, was not as extreme in either direction. Tomino never entirely stopped producing Gundam shows, and Sunrise never felt so tied to some abstract, limiting conception of what his vision was as to let their franchise stagnate. Interestingly, I feel that Gundam managed to stay truer to its roots than Star Trek precisely by being willing to go off the map when they had to. Imagine a Star Trek series as different in form as G Gundam was to everything that had preceded it that still managed to wrestle with the moral dilemmas that made Trek what it was.
All of that began with 0080. The first full Gundam OAV, War in the Pocket did something that I have to imagine sounded crazy at the time. It told a sympathetic story of Zeon soldiers fighting the the Earth Alliance during the One Year War. It also avoided the kind of scope that marked the previous Gundam series’ and film; instead, we follow a young boy, Alfred, on a neutral colony as he befriends an undercover Zeon pilot. Bernie, the pilot, has come to the boy’s home on Side 6 to destroy an experimental Earth prototype. What follows is more coming of age tale than war story, closer to The Red Badge of Courage than Star Wars. Alfred develops a sort of hero worship for Bernie and his comrades and comes face to face with the daily tragedies of war.
0080 is an odd bird, and if you’ve seen any Gundam prior to it you may find yourself fidgeting through the first three episodes of this six part OAV. Like I said, it’s small and intimate, and you’ll see little battle until the end. By the time the battle comes, you’ll almost wish it hadn’t as the war takes a terrible toll on the characters. It’s the kind of small, slice of life story that would have made the Star Trek universe so much richer had it been allowed. The demands of an epic, 50 episode war story leaves little time to see how the average person – or even average soldier – deals with life in the world. War in the Pocket gives us just that. It’s a story of characters at the mercy of larger forced, forced into combat when bloodshed is the last thing they want.
There’s a battle near the end, where Bernie’s unit makes its assault on the prototype’s military installation, that’s brutal to watch. Character after character is cut down mercilessly in a mission that has lost all meaning in the face of the relationship that’s formed between Bernie and Alfred. What follows that battle hurts as much for its inevitability as the actual deaths that the series’ conclusion gives us.
War in the Pocket is canny in how it ties into the mainline Gundam story without ever getting directly wrapped up in it. The prototype under construction is codenamed the “Alex” and serves as an intended replacement to Amuro Ray’s RX-78. Though the project fails to go into production before the end of the One Year War, the technology used serves as a link – retconned though it may be – to the Gundams we see in Zeta. It gives the impression of a realistic, ongoing attempt by the Earth Military to stay technologically ahead of its enemy. Like actual military research, not everything under development becomes reality.
It took me time to come to grips with how I felt about War in the Pocket, but the more I think about this OAV the more I like it. It’s small and quiet and painful. It’s one of the most effective tragedies in the franchise, perhaps the most effective. While Tomino was always good at giving his audiences depressing, nihilistic conclusions, he never quite nailed tragedy. Unlike the endings to Zeta and Char’s Counterattack, War in the Pocket’s characters do not meet their doom because life sucks. They are trapped by their own decisions and by a remorseless system that has no interest in small, human needs. Bernie goes into battle that final, fateful time because to choose any other way would be a betrayal of self. True tragedy only emerges from characters given the choice between change they cannot stomach and continuing on to their doom. War in the Pocket navigates this tricky narrative landmine perfectly.
I don’t know if I’d recommend War in the Pocket to someone who hasn’t seen Gundam, because I simply do not know how it would play. On one hand, it’s an identifiable, human story regardless of knowledge of the world. On the other hand, it’s an extension of themes developed in the ten years of Gundam’s existence to that point; whether it stands on its own or not isn’t a question I can answer. I saw it very late into my Gundam experience – just months ago, in fact – and cant’ separate my feelings on it from my broader feelings on the franchise.
I can say this: War in the Pocket is an amazing piece of work, and the first step Gundam would take in taking a great concept and turning it into something that could be healthy 30 years after its creation. If only Star Trek had done the same.
It might be hard to accept, but it needs to be said. Dollhouse’s failure is not the fault of Fox. This time, we have to blame Joss Whedon.
After watching Fox rake Firefly over the coals, I know it seems natural to point fingers at them as Dollhouse has struggled with with a poor time slot, increasingly common preemptions and an early, lengthy production shutdown. Firefly was a classic show right out of the gate. Its treatment as a failed property so early in its run was absurd, made worse by Fox’s meddling with the airing order of episodes and – yes – regular preemptions. Its run was cut unceremoniously short halfway through its first season. It was a travesty; Firefly started great and got better as it went. What could have been a healthy SF franchise died because executives didn’t understand what they had.
On the surface, the problems with Dollhouse sound familiar. Without knowing what’s going on behind the scenes, I can’t discount executive meddling as a drag on the show. There’s a clear difference, though, between Firefly and Dollhouse.
Dollhouse is a far worse show, by almost any measure, than Firefly.
It has a great premise, I agree. Occasionally, when they find the right story to tell within the premise, it really works, too. The unaired episode, Epitaph One, is ironically the best of the lot, and it shows that the premise Dollhouse is far from an unworkable idea. It’s got some amazing actors running around in it, too. Olivia Williams, (Adelle DeWitt), Enver Gjokaj (Victor), Dichan Lachman (Sierra), Harry Lennix (Boyd Langton) and Reed Diamond (Laurence Dominic) have all put in noteworthy performances. The ingredients are there. Even with every bit of executive meddling Firefly faced, there’s enough raw material to pull from to put together something worth everyone’s time.
A premise is not a show, nor are the raw materials of good storytelling guarantee of creating something memorable. Dollhouse is troubled by problems deeper than network interference. What bothers me is that, judging by his interviews and statements, Joss Whedon is either unaware or in denial about his show’s weaknesses. With Dollhouse a near lock for cancellation at the end of its 13 episode second season, it’s fair to ask why this show didn’t succeed, despite a miraculous and probably undeserved renewal after its troubled first season.
Misplaced Faith – I love Eliza Dushku. She’s sexy and tough and full of charisma. I fell for her as Faith and was impressed by how well she handled some of the tougher material for that character. Watch “Five by Five” and “Sanctuary” in Angel’s first season for Eliza at her best. But when I hear Joss claim it was her ability to play any role that inspired him to create Dollhouse, I question his judgment. While strong in some areas, Dollhouse has put her weaknesses center stage. Worse,we’ve twice seen better actors play the exact same character as her within the same episode: Season one’s “Gray Hour” and season two’s “Belle Chose.” If you were concerned about her ability to be the center of a show that demands she convincingly play different people every week, you were sure of it after those episodes.
Broken Dolls – One of the worst things you can do to a group of characters who are supposed to be experts is to give them only stories where they screw things up. Yet Dollhouse’s primary plot device is to have the Actives malfunction in the middle of a mission. We’re three episodes into season 2 and we’re still without a successful engagement. It strains credulity that anyone would hire these people when malfunctions result in things like kidnapped babies and homicide. (Having worked in many corporations I’d argue that it does not strain credulity that these people still have their jobs. Look how long Ken Lewis kept his position at Bank of America). It’s also boring to see the same device used over and over again. Joss has been a canny writer in his other shows, able to turn cliches on their heads every episode. Here, we just get the cliche.
Inertial Dampeners – What do you do with your miraculous renewal after ending a season with the introduction of a great antagonist, followed by an un-aired episode that turns the premise of your show on its head? Go back to the status quo, right? For reasons I do not understand, Joss Whedon opened a season that needed an immediate ratings boost with three stand-alone malfunctioning Actives plots in a row. This is where my disappointment with Joss – and my annoyance with his apologists – becomes acute. By rights, your show should have been canceled. Yet, rather than open with a barn burner of a season premier, we get Echo pretending to marry an arms dealer to help take him down. This was followed up by imprinting Echo to think she was the mother of a newborn. Then a serial killer story. Yes, Friday night is a death slot. Yes it can be hard to pull ratings up. But it’s nearly impossible to hold an audience when you tread narrative water for most of a month. With your show on the bubble, there’s no excuse for not going all out. Nothing in season two has been bad, but not bad is not enough when your existence is on the line.
Ignoring History – I realize that Fox’s decision not to show “Epitaph One” made things difficult for Joss and his writers. For those who saw it, a troublesome premise suddenly made sense. Coming into season 2, Joss made comments that the premier would feature new scenes in the bleak future of “Epitah One” to get the rest of the audience up to speed. When this was dropped due to concerns of creating an overly complex opener, I got worried. Without seeing where this technology was going to lead, Dollhouse can seem small and uninvolving. Now, three episodes in, I’m wondering if we’re going to see that future acknowledged at all before the lights go out. I worry that this has created two, separate but equally unsatisfied, groups of fans. On one side, you have those who haven’t seen “Epithaph One” and feel, as I did last season, that the premise is intriguing but pointless. On the other, those who have seen it and are wondering when the hell it’s going to have an impact on the show itself. Ignoring his most provocative episode, for any reason, is not helping Joss’ show.
A better time slot, a more consistent schedule and better advertising might pull in more first time viewers. But of the shows that have aired, how many would compel them to keep watching? Of the first season’s thirteen episodes, I can only think of six: “Man on the Street”, “Needs”, “Spy in the House of Love”, “Briar Rose” and “Omega.” If someone watched it on DVD, you can add “Epitaph One” to the list. That’s half, and all of them in latter half of the season. Of the second season’s three episodes, I doubt any would turn a casual viewer into a fan.
It’s not Fox’s fault that Joss Whedon has had trouble getting a handle on his own premise, nor is it their fault that he started season 2 with a run of episodes resembling the least favorite of the previous season. Like every other working writer, Joss Whedon is not infallible. He’s fantastic and funny, and he’s created three of the most beloved series’ of the last decade. He’s no slouch. But that doesn’t make every failure someone else’s fault. Dollhouse has been an interesting piece of work and, on the balance, I’m glad to have seen it. It still could be a lot better.
I hope that the second half of season 2 is as good as people are saying. Sadly, it’s too late. I fear Joss missed his shot.
At the least, let’s give Fox the credit they deserve for giving it to him.
It’s too bad most cliffhangers suck, because I really do love them.
I can’t entirely blame the people who use them badly. The term itself refers to the kind of cliffhangers I hate, where we cut away with a character in imminent danger then cut back to see them rescued without an extra scratch. I get why they became so popular in old serial films. Any kind of suspenseful, what-the-hell-will-happen-next ending is likely to pack the seats for the resolution. If every single episode ends with one, maybe you’ll keep making each installment as must see as the last.
Like half of the Star Trek season finales that ended with a giant OMG only for the Enterprise to come back next season and solve the whole problem in the teaser, a bad cliffhanger only reveals itself in its resolution. It buys you some time with your audience. Cliffhangers, both good and bad, work. At least, they work until the audience catches on that you’re cheating.
I think Annie Wilkes in Misery said it best:
Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn’t cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DIDN’T GET OUT OF THE COCK – A – DOODIE CAR!
So if the difference between a good cliffhanger and a bad one are in the resolution, what is that difference? Leaving aside cheats like Rocketman’s retconned leap from the car, there are still a heap of really terrible cliffhanger resolutions sloshing around out there. Especially on television.
My feeling on cliffhangers has always been this: The “What will happen next?!” suspense is nice, but that alone is not worth the cliffhanger. That moment in The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds”, where Riker orders the Enterprise to fire of the Borg ship carrying Locutus-ized Picard is awesome. If you happened to see it when it originally aired, you probably spent all summer freaking out over what would happen next. It was a damn good feeling. But when you got back, here’s what you got: The Enterprise fires…and the super-cannon does nothing. At all. Sure, the explanation is fair. Picard’s knowledge of the weapon when he became Locutus prompted the Borg to prepare for the attack. It was logical.
It also sucked.
A really good cliffhanger is one not where we cut away before the pivotal moment, but where we cut away after. We don’t have to know we’ve passed the pivotal moment, or even what that moment means. We could cut away after Riker says “Fire!”, provided that act – the act of firing on Picard’s ship – set in motion something irrevocable. If the next season opened with the Enterprise damaging the Borg ship and killing Picard, yet not actually destroying the ship itself, imagine the intense episode we’d have gotten as Riker must continue to fight knowing that he has failed to end the threat, instead only killing his own captain?
A cliffhanger that convinces your audience to be even more excited by the next has to change something. It doesn’t need to be what the audience expects to change, but if all you’ve done is made people wait for things to snap back to the status quo, you haven’t played fair. Putting your heroes in danger for a cliffhanger doesn’t require their deaths when you return, provided their rescue costs something. There are only so many costless, clever escapes an audience can take before they stop feeling the suspense.
In fact, if you play fair, you can get away with a cliffhanger pretty much as often as you want. Code Geass ended almost half of its episodes in cliffhangers. They never got old, either, because every single one changed the series. Instead, since they let every cliffhanger push the series forward, the effect was more of an escalation; every one had you more anxious, because you knew how much getting out of the last one cost.
Guy Gavriel Kay and George R. R. Martin do much the same thing, ending chapter after chapter in a nail-biter of a scene. But since they never cheat, nor do they allow their heroes to escape them all unscathed, each successive cliffhanger ratchets the tension further. So their books are really, really good.
Use cliffhangers. Use them liberally. But try to forget how they were used when the term was coined.
