End of the year post:
1. I've migrated my teaching thoughts to a different, semi-anonymous blog. Check out facebook for that info if you're interested.
2. I'm going to keep this blog going, as a personal, living with my parents in Oklahoma in one of my childhood bedrooms, and hey-I-watch-a-lot-of-TV type blog. I have a lot of thoughts about things I'd like to write about, and not a lot of ideas about what's really worth putting out there. It seems like personal blogs often end up being more of a diary, which might not be the worst thing in the world, but also seems a bit navel-gazing. Still. I'd like a place where I can write about TV and life without feeling like it should be super researched (which tends to be my go-to with writing).
Towards the end of the semester, I caught up on Parenthood and Supernatural. Few things are as satisfying as getting caught up on that last one - it's just so daunting, with all the episodes, and the drama, and the occasional foray into talking dogs. But, it's ride or die at this point with those boys - I need to track down this season's eps and then I am totally living in the present.
I am, in fact, up to the present on The Vampire Diaries and, from where I'm sitting, it's still solid. I'm an easy mark for the Damon/Elena love drama and you can't beat Bonnie in the other dimension alone, decorating that Christmas tree in an empty parking lot, with the flashbacks to happier, pre-vampire times, and the newest, twin-merging villain is, for a reason I can't figure out, more disturbing than anything I've seen on this show. Maybe because he's a legit sociopath, without a redeeming love, or injury, or redemption arc. So far, he's an honest-to-goodness asshole, but without feeling flat or one-dimensional.
Also - the main point of this post - I watched the first season of The 100 and I dig it. The first few episodes feel kind of cheesy and derivative - part of that is the by-now very familiar Vancouver outdoorsy locations, part is the rotating Vancouver actors, and part is the obvious influence/homage/ripoff of Battlestar Galactica and, to an extent, Lost. But. At about episode 4, the show starts to hit its stride.
Bear with me for a moment on this one: I was watching The 100 right as the report on the CIA's use of torture came out and the show was surprisingly resonant with that cultural moment. A lot of TV shows deal with torture - as Eric Deggans points out here, TV has primed us for thinking that torture works, especially when Kiefer Sutherland is trying to save the world from a ticking time bomb. The 100, however, foregrounds the fact that torture actually doesn't necessarily work, because people either get pissed or just will say anything to make the pain stop. The show is not super sophisticated in its delivery of that message - one of the grounders is being tortured into giving up info on his people, but that info is only forthcoming when the torture stops and the Ark-survivors show some kindness and mercy. But what made it stand out to me is that our sympathies are not necessarily with the survivors, despite the fact that the whole premise of the show is based on following their return to Earth. Yes, we go along with them as they leave the Ark, return to Earth, and try to make a go of it, 100 years post-apocalypse. But whereas BSG put us right with the survivors as they were attacked by an invading force (and thus walks us slowly through the questions of us and them that tend to structure moments of violence), The 100 shows us people who were destroyed by their own hands. We don't know why the war or the nuclear attacks happened, or who was to blame; the survivors don't even seem to be carrying any internal divisions based on that blame. So, they aren't a ragged group of "innocent victims" who attack the Grounders out of feelings of revenge. Rather, they are a multi-national group of English-speaking people who, because of imminent threats to basic biological survival, have to return to the place they themselves destroyed. Thus, when these Ark-people do return, they are the invading force; contrary to their assumptions, there are humans (the Grounders) who have survived and continue to survive on Earth, humans who, quite understandably, react to these people from space with anger, suspicious, and violence, which the Ark-people instigate as much as the Grounders do. In fact, the band of survivors from space justify their own violence, not through an ethical imperative or righteous revenge, but with a much more base appeal: kill or be killed. To them, it's a question of basic, bare-bones survival, despite the fact that there is evidence to suggest a more peaceful route is possible.
So by the time we get to the torture scene midway through the first season, our sympathies are already divided between the protagonists of the story (Finn and all the other teen hotties from the Ark) and the Grounders (in their more mature, physically-perfect glory) and these divided sympathies make those torture scenes seem gratuitous and more about ego and power than truth and justice. What made this stand out even more to me was the fact that, as I finished the torture episode, BBC America just happened to be playing the BSG episode in which Kara torture Leoben. While BSG does an excellent job of twisting up the definitions of friend and enemy to such an extent that no strict delineation holds, at this Kara/Leoben point in the narrative, our sympathies are still fully with the humans as they struggle to find the skin-job cylons hiding in their midst. Here, it seems like a perfect example of the ticking time bomb against which torture so often achieves its justification and even later, after so much of the clear right and wrong disappears, these humans are still the ostensible heroes of the narrative, and the narrative structure still conditions us to go along with their actions, even when they seem ill-advised. With The 100, however, the "heroes" of the story - even the sainted leader Finn - jump straight to torture without doing much work to make us believe they are in the right. So, yes, The 100 is another post-apocalyptic teen drama, but with a critical spin on questions of war, survival, and otherness that took me by surprise; I respect the fact that it didn't try to make torture palatable by encouraging me to sympathize with the perpetrators, nor did it suggest that only the truly evil would use torture. Instead, torture is used by these kind of messed up people, with whom I can kind of identify and thus critically engage, but without so much identification that I emotionally cave to their unethical action. Maybe these thoughts will change with Season 2 (which I haven't seem), but for now, it has me.
I also started American Horror Story: Coven. I'll talk about that later - only one episode in, but I can't mainline it the way I do some many shows. It has to come in small doses.
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