My Love/Hate Relationship with Once Upon a Time -- the Love

The series Once Upon a Time in many ways seems like it was created just for me. It's a fun mash-up of fairy tales that juxtaposes these elements with the real, modern world, which is right up the alley of someone who writes contemporary fantasy that plays with fairy tale elements. I actually have a love/hate relationship with this series. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I hate to love it. Sometimes I love to hate it. When it's good, it's outstanding. When it's bad, it's so absolutely atrocious that I can't believe people aren't being fired for writing that crap (and the failures are about 95 percent the writing -- the casting and acting are responsible for a lot of what's good about the series).

I was recently rewatching some of the earlier episodes to prepare for this weekend's premiere, and while the series later goes off a cliff, develops one of the worst Mary Sues ever created by supposedly professional writers, and has a moral sensibility that makes A Game of Thrones look like Sunday school, the pilot is one of the most wonderful bits of television ever, and the first season, for the most part, is fun and full of potential.

Spoilers for the whole series may lie ahead

The concept alone is so brilliant and unique that it would be impossible to file the serial numbers off and use it as a jumping-off point for a story that fixes the later faults. The residents of the fairy tale world have been brought to a modern small town in Maine by a curse, where time hasn't moved for 28 years and they have no memory or awareness of their true selves. Enter the one person to escape the curse: the infant daughter of Snow White, who's grown up in our world, entirely unaware of her real heritage. So we have a tough, cynical Disney princess who doesn't know she's a princess and isn't ready to accept her identity, surrounded by fairy tale characters who don't know they're fairy tale characters -- except for the Evil Queen, who's not at all happy that the one person who can break her curse is in town. And then there's the backstory of how all this came to be, told in flashbacks in the fairy tale realm, bringing the old tales to life with some twists, and not necessarily told chronologically, so it's like fitting together pieces of a puzzle.

The concept has so many of my personal "yes, please!" story elements it's not even funny. We have fleshed-out fairy tales, where the archetypes are turned into actual characters and there's a lot more plot. We have fun twists on fairy tales -- the story isn't quite what you thought it was, while it still respects the spirit of the original tales. We have juxtapositions between the magical and the ordinary. We have fairy tale elements moved into the real world. We have secret/hidden identities. And there's non-linear storytelling (something I'd love to try but don't yet have a good idea for).

Not that the season is entirely perfect. There are a few obvious filler episodes. There are some incidents of Idiot Plotting, where the plot only works because some of the characters act like total idiots in a very out-of-character way. We get the first hints of the later moral wonkiness when Regina, the Evil Queen, is shown to be forcing the Huntsman to basically be her sex toy, since she ripped out his heart and can control him through it, and she's ordering him into her bedroom. I can't think of a way that isn't rape, and yet the writers don't see it that way and still don't understand the fuss about it. And when the reason the Evil Queen really hates Snow White is revealed, it's a big case of "Seriously? That's it?" I suppose that the very concept of the curse is mostly plot device because it makes no sense if you think about it. It has to be one of the dumbest revenge schemes ever (until the fourth season, when we see an even dumber one). We didn't know it at the time, but these minor flaws were harbingers of what lay ahead.

Of the good: I absolutely loved the twist about Prince Charming's true identity and the way it was revealed. The show has become dependent on Big!Shocking!Twists! (sometimes in lieu of actual pacing and development), but that was a twist and a shock that worked. In a flashback, we saw our Prince Charming acting like a total jerk. I figured that we were probably going to see him learn A Valuable Lesson that would show how he came to be the good man we know, but then a second later he was killed. And then we met the guy we know of as Prince Charming and learned that the prince was really a poor farmer's son who was adopted by the king. Now his twin, the one the farmer kept, has to step into the role of the prince in order for the kingdom to fulfill a treaty. The death of the prince was a huge shock, but then the revelation that our prince wasn't really a prince was a fun twist on the story.

Another fun bit of fairy tale fleshing out was the way Snow White became a badass bandit after being driven out of the palace by the Evil Queen. She didn't run into the dwarfs until later, so instead of immediately becoming a housekeeper, like in the story, she learned to survive in the woods, became an expert tracker and archer, and robbed the Evil Queen's carriages (is it robbery if all that stuff is rightfully hers?). She was good friends with Red Riding Hood, who turned out to be a werewolf, so she was also the Big, Bad Wolf, and Granny was a tough old broad good with a crossbow (or knitting needles). There were a lot of strong female characters who weren't the usual "strong female characters" (who are usually more like Rambo in drag).

I also enjoyed seeing the parallels between the fairy tale stories and the way these people's lives were going in our world. Hansel and Gretel were homeless kids hiding out in an abandoned house and shoplifting candy from the drugstore. Jiminy Cricket is the town psychiatrist. Cinderella is a hotel maid.

The season finale was another one of those near-perfect hours of television. After a whole season of Emma, our heroine, going toe-to-toe with the Evil Queen, with the deck heavily stacked against her, everything came to a head, and it was all about faith, love, belief, and just desserts.

And then season two happened, but that's another story ...

Doctor Who Returns

I suppose as a good geek (even if I am stealthy about it), I need to talk about the Doctor Who season premiere. Oddly, though, I don't have a lot to say. I haven't really been feeling it for the past year, and I can't tell you why. There's nothing I can point to and say I dislike. I just don't care quite as much as I used to.

Then again, there is the possibility that what I have is a more normal state of caring, downgraded slightly from a state of rabid obsession.

I wonder if it has something to do with easier access making it feel less special. Before last season, I didn't get BBCAmerica on my cable service. The episodes were available OnDemand, usually the next day, but if I wanted to see it live, I had to depend on other people, who sometimes used other means to obtain the episodes. I frequently got together with friends to watch, and premieres and finales were usually special occasions. Now that I can just turn on the TV when it comes on, maybe there's less of a sense of anticipation and excitement.

Anyway, it's hard to talk about a two-parter after seeing only the first part. It feels like the whole episode was setup for a big conclusion.

But there were fun things. Making an entrance on a tank while playing electric guitar in medieval England gets bonus style points. There was lots of continuity. And I think we're going to get some fun with time travel in the way this plays out. I'm a big fan of time travel as a real story element rather than just being a means of getting to the location where the story will take place -- all that wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. And I do love the fact that they based an entire episode (or more) on a hypothetical question asked in the classic series.

Hmm, now maybe I have talked myself into getting excited. I ought to rewatch the episode OnDemand.

For the rest of the week, be prepared for some ranting about Once Upon a Time. I've been rewatching previous seasons and veering wildly between swooning and wanting to throw things at the writers.

The Return of Continuum

The new (and final) season of Continuum starts tonight, in the post-prime time slot on SyFy (10 Central).

For those who haven't seen it, this is a series about the ramifications of time travel -- can you change the future by changing the past, and what are the ramifications of that? It's about a cop in a dystopian, corporate-controlled future who gets caught in the wave when a group of terrorist sets off a device to send them back in time so they can change the past and create a different future. She just wants to get home to her husband and son, but doing that will require finding a way to travel in time, and that requires catching the terrorists. The other issue is that if anything is changed, it might change the future so she might not have a husband or son to go back to, so she has to be very, very careful how she goes about things.

And it gets more complicated from there.

Her primary ally in all this is the genius kid she knows will grow up to be the architect of their future -- a kind of unholy mix of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who runs the corporation that seems to control all technology. He's certainly good now (though with some issues), but whether or not his future self is good is rather ambiguous. It's also ambiguous whether his future actions suggest that he remembers these events, so that they've already happened.

It's kind of headspinning, but in a good way. I'm a sucker for time travel stories that actually play with the nature of time and traveling in time as a plot device (as opposed to the "travel to a place/time where our adventure will happen" stories). The original Terminator film is one of my all-time favorite movies. I'm less enamored of the sequels, though I did like the TV series. I love Connie Willis's time travel novels, which get into chaos theory and whether the timeline is self-correcting so that it's impossible to mess things up without something else happening to set everything right. The SyFy web site has a decent Continuum 101 page to refresh yourself, though I'm not sure this is a series you could just dive into at this point.

I'll be watching tonight because my future self sent me a reminder, which means she watched it, which means if I don't watch it I could be creating a paradoxical split timestream, and that never works out well.

Incidentally, I'm sure this series will come up at FenCon this year, since our theme is time travel, and there are lots of panels about time travel books, movies, and TV.

The Stealth Science Fiction Series

I was late to the game with Person of Interest, due to a scheduling conflict. I was always out when it was on, and at the time it wasn't available on demand, and though I was intrigued, I didn't really think of setting the VCR for it since I hadn't ever seen it (yeah, I'm behind the times and don't have a DVR, but I do have plans to correct that). I caught episodes, usually during reruns, on weeks when I had a break from the activity on that night, and then picked up the series for real during the second season. By then, the science fiction elements were really coming out.

Last weekend, I finally got to see the earlier episodes via the WGN marathon, and wow, they really did manage to sneak a science fiction series onto the procedural-heavy CBS under the guise of a procedural. In the first season, this looked like another good-guy vigilante series along the lines of The Equalizer or Leverage, where there are good guys with some advantage that allows them to intervene on behalf of ordinary people. We knew the good guys were getting information from a surveillance-oriented supercomputer, but otherwise the plots were all about the intervention of the week.

And then once they were entrenched, things started to change. Yes, they were still doing that intervention thing, but the computer became more important, and issues of artificial intelligence and what counts as a "being" came to the forefront. By the end of the latest season, the series was full-on science fiction, about a war between two intelligent -- sentient, even -- supercomputers who had very different ideas about how to carry out the task of protecting humanity. One still saw individuals as important and even seemed to have some affection for its human colleagues, and the other wanted perfection for all, at all costs.

They'd never have been able to sell that storyline up front, and I think the show is the better for it because they were able to start with a focus on the human characters and gradually build the science fiction elements as the characters themselves became more aware of what was really going on. Now that they've gone all-in on the concept, there's no telling where this could go. Are we seeing the birth of something like the Skynet system from The Terminator? Will the battle of machines go global? It's all rather riveting, and definitely worth watching if you like a dash of science fiction in your crimebusting.

Plus, possibly the most awesome dog on television, a former police/military dog with a taste for first editions and played by a dog who seems to take more pleasure in his work than any human actor (seriously, there is sheer glee all over that dog in all his scenes. That dog loves his work).

The Stealth Geek in Good Company

I'm not sure I can be called a stealth geek anymore since I've been outed by being included on this list of inspiring real-life geeks. Then again, I think most of these ladies would be considered good examples of stealth geeks. We don't fit the "geek girl" stereotype (which I think is mostly a media construct, anyway) but still retain all that inner geekiness.

Follow-up: The Heirs to Firefly

They've announced that both of the Not!Firefly shows, Dark Matter and Killjoys, have been renewed, so I guess they'll live longer than the real thing did.

What did I end up thinking about them after seeing the first season of both?

Dark Matter had an intriguing premise and a lot of promise, but I often found it frustrating. The episodes themselves weren't all that great, to be honest. The plots were usually killing time until they got to the big twist or revelation at the end of the episode, and that was what kept me watching. Usually the revelation was a big enough "oh my!" to have me anxiously waiting for the next episode to see how it would play out.

Only a few of the characters managed to emerge from the shadows of their Firefly predecessors. And there were a few episodes that you could map pretty easily to Firefly episodes.

One of the things I found frustrating about the premise of a group of people waking with no memories of who they were was how we ended up learning about them. I was hoping for more of them running into people and situations where they were known and having to piece it together from there, or them doing any kind of investigation, but for the most part, they were just told. A facial recognition search gave their identities (for the most part). Some memories were recovered with a technobabble solution. There were only a few cases where there were twists that came about through action.

And then there's the ill-advised attempt to fit a romantic plot into the mix. They never did much with it, never showed the relationship enough for us to be at all invested in it so that we'd care whether or not the latest revelation would throw a monkey wrench in it. What we learned about those people should have made us desperately concerned about what it would do to them, and instead it was kind of a non-event. We never saw what they were getting out of the relationship, never saw it as something they needed that was helping them or changing them. When it stopped (if it did -- it was vague enough to make it hard to tell), it didn't seem to change anything for either of them or for the dynamic.

It's a show I'll keep watching because I'm intrigued by the questions and answers, but the actual episodes aren't that much fun.

Killjoys, on the other hand, feels more like the rightful Heir to Firefly. It's more of a tone and feel than a direct mapping. The world feels rough and lived in, and the characters have a real sense of history with each other. The episodes on their own were fun and exciting.

Again, relationships were a weak spot. I'm not sure why they felt the need to hook up two of the leads so soon, and it was a pretty bland, nothing relationship, other than the serious fallout that resulted, which they then got over pretty quickly. It's hard to tell if what they really have going is a potential triangle, or if that's just something it's easy to read into it based on standard TV patterns. I guess they wanted to quickly intensify the relationship between the two characters without a history with each other, and sex was an easy way to do it.

TV writers so seldom get romance right, though. That's probably going to be my gripe with 99 percent of TV series.

The finale of this one launched it into a potentially interesting direction, and I'm along for the ride.

Not!Firefly

I've really missed Sci Fi (now SyFy) Fridays. I don't know how long they've been showing wrestling in that spot, but it seems like forever since the golden age of three (or more) solid hours of science fiction programming on Friday nights. Usually, there was at least one Stargate show, often two (SG-1 and Atlantis), sometimes Battlestar Galactica, sometimes Doctor Who. And for a brief time they showed the entire series of Firefly in the pre-prime time slot. I'd settle on the sofa with a pizza at six and watch all night.

And now it's back. They've moved wrestling to another night (it still doesn't belong on the network, but I guess if it helps pay the bills and keep the other stuff on, I can live with it), so we have three hours of science fiction shows on Friday night. And, wonder of wonders, two of those actually involve spaceships, something SyFy has avoided for a long time while they've focused on shows that were more "paranormal" than science fiction. I like a lot of the paranormal stuff, but I also enjoy spaceship shows.

The first hour is devoted to the returning Defiance, which is sort of a post-apocalyptic Western with aliens on earth. The next two hours are new shows that both fall into the category of Not!Firefly. Otherwise known as "we loved Firefly, so we wrote fanfic and then filed off the serial numbers and added a twist or two." I can hardly criticize, as my very first attempt at writing was Star Wars mental fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. In my defense, I was twelve. And I didn't get a TV development deal out of it. But hey, I liked (loved, obsessed over) Firefly, so a couple of hours of Almost, but Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Firefly (Really! It's Totally Different!) is fine with me.

So, the first hour of Not!Firefly Night is Killjoys, which has only had one episode so far. Basically, Not!Inara is the captain, except her mystical special training seems to have been as a ninja-like assassin instead of as a courtesan, and it seems like Not!Simon is her first officer, only he's a thief instead of a doctor, and Not!Simon and Not!Mal are brothers, and they're all bounty hunters instead of smugglers. The world is very, very Firefly. We even have the evil corporation that seems to be in charge of everything. I liked the pilot, although the weak link is Not!Mal, who has none of Mal's personality or charm. Maybe he'll warm up as they go along.

Then the next round of Not!Firefly is Dark Matter, where they barely bothered filing the serial numbers off the characters, though they're in a totally different situation. It's basically Firefly Alt-Universe fanfic with the character names changed. A group of people wakes up from some kind of cryosleep on a spaceship, with no memory of who they are, why they're there, or where they're going, but they do seem to each have some kind of skill that comes to them without any memory of having learned it or having used it. The woman who just falls into the captain role is Not!Zoe. Then there's Not!Simon and Not!Jayne. There's a young girl who's a blend of Kaylee and River, and RivLee is so obvious in her origins that I can't even put the Not! in there. I'm thinking that the Asian swordsman is maybe a gender-flipped Not!Inara (for the mystic exoticness, not so much for being a courtesan, though who knows?), and then we have Not!Book. The only slight twist is a rather snarky android with homicidal tendencies, who did not appear in Firefly (unless maybe she's our Not!Mal). We don't learn any of the characters' names until the very end of the pilot, and they refer to each other by numbers that I can't keep straight, which doesn't help my tendency to refer to them by their Firefly character names.

I was a little ho-hum on this one, mostly amusing myself by mapping all the Firefly parallels, until the very end of the episode and we learned who they were, and that intrigued me enough that I immediately watched the next episode (I was watching OnDemand). I'm kind of a sucker for "blank slate" stories, the idea of what would you be if you didn't know who you were, and I have a feeling that the identities we learned about may not be that straightforward (I have theories, based on the obvious Firefly 2.0 situation, but we shall see if I'm right).

It's not Firefly, nowhere near the same level of writing or acting, and I wouldn't recommend that they re-run the real deal in that pre-prime time slot because the newcomers would suffer in comparison, but if you have the original memorized and want something new that kind of scratches a similar itch, check these out.