Television: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

I've seen quite a bit of important/interesting television the past few days. Now I want to talk about them.

I'd talk about Kings, but the damn thing is two episodes in. Let's wait until I have more to say about it, shall we?

DOLLHOUSE: OKAY, HERE'S THE BIT YOU'VE BEEN BEGGING FOR

Remember when you heard that Joss Whedon was making another TV series? Remember all the expectations and preconceived notions you had about it? Remember how you thought of how much you loved Buffy, Angel, and Firefly?

The disappointment with the first episode of Dollhouse is pretty well-known. It promises a formulaic "mission of the week" style show, as glossy and lifeless as the mindless Dolls it employs -- more CSI: Miami than Firefly.

While increasing numbers gave up or cried betrayal with each episode, I insisted it was getting better. Each subsequent episode had a bit more personality, more focus on the non-dolls, more overarching plot. Still, it was an episodic "mission of the week" show.

With Episode 6, "Man on the Street," we're finally given the show we deserve. The promos promised the usual bits to make sure we watch: "Things will never be the same" in "an episode you'll never forget" and the like. Turns out the promos did not lie. There aren't any "mission of the week"-style proceedings. Instead, there's lots of Tahmoh Penikett, the cuddliest superhuman on television (except maybe Greg Grunberg). Patton Oswalt as a billionaire entrepreneur in a role with a surprising amount of poignancy. People find out things and expectations are blown apart. It's good television.

My knee-jerk reaction is to say that something like this should have been the first episode, but I know better than to listen to my knees (see: my piece on Battlestar Galactica below).

Whedon has deemed the first seven episodes as "The Seven Pilots," meaning that each one has to sell the challenging premise of the show to keep people watching. However, this episode is a break in the formula of the other episodes; it almost needs rigid structure of the previous episodes to qualify it. With an established formula, the break in this episode is all the more powerful.

Better yet, with each new episode we watch the show come alive and display more personality -- just like the dolls.

Clever move, Joss. Why did I ever doubt you?

BREAKING BAD: METH-HEAD IN THE MIDDLE

Five episodes in, and I already know what Breaking Bad is about.

It's about the human body.

Walter White lives a relatively healthy life style. He doesn't smoke, nor does he drink very much. He's depicted eating veggie bacon for breakfast. Despite all this, Walter has lung cancer, an atrocity of the body where cells just rapidly grow without rhyme or reason, an unfortunate glitch in the body's programming. Cells meaninglessly dividing to no end whatsoever.

His wife, Skyler, is pregnant. Cells are rapidly growing in her as well, but these cells are focused, meaningful: They make up a human being.

Their teenaged son, Walter Jr., has Cerebral Palsy. His mind is as sound as a teenager's can be, but his body requires the use of crutches.

Walter's brother-in-law, Hank, is a DEA agent -- a job that requires the control of the substances that people put in their bodies. He's bald and carries a huge beer gut, but is more vigorous than the milquetoast Walter, who is thin and has a full head of hair.

Jesse Pinkman is a stoner burnout who poisons his body with various kinds of smoke and booze. His body is ruined, his brain can never truly recover.

Together, Walter and Jesse cook crystal meth, that awful drug that makes your teeth fall out and sucks away the very joie de vivre from its users. Walter, being a Chemistry genius, creates the purest, most potent form of crystal meth.

When they kill a man, Walter decides that the best method of disposing of the body is dissolving it with hydrofluoric acid, which can eat through glass and metal. Jesse, in preparing to lug the corpse up the stairs, tries to convince himself it's only a piece of meat.

The disposal juxtaposed with flashbacks of Walter in his younger days trying to figure out the elements that make up the human body, only to come up short by a fraction of a percent.

Bodies in a state of destruction creating something that destroys other bodies.

Is AMC the new HBO?

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SORRY, YOU WERE ALL WRONG

It's weird to think of the praise being heaped a show called Battlestar Galactica, considering but a few years ago the brand was known for being a cheesy cash-in on the Star Wars craze. Admit it.

The reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, however was something completely different. More than just a space opera, it was politically relevant and full of wonderful grays to make us question our characters at every move and, more importantly, make the characters question themselves. It asked hard questions about human nature and even the nature of God(s) while giving us military intrigue and the occasional space battle.

Now it's over.

Eschewing vagueness (okay, mostly), Ronald Moore and his writers brought us everything we could want in a Battlestar Galactica finale.

We have a definitive final battle with the Cylons -- a last-ditch effort for the crew of the Galactica and for the ship herself. And it's exciting. More than a space opera adventure trope, the big final battle felt exactly that: big and final. Much of the series was spent on outrunning Cylon forces and dealing with human politics on the run. The brilliant final space battle was the show's gift to us for sticking with them for four seasons. Because so rarely did it happen, it had maximum impact on the viewer. This was going to be it.

And, most importantly of all, we were given an ending.

Spaceships being a trope of speculative fiction, I always figured that the best way to subvert audience expectation would be to have the fleet arrive at Earth in our past. I imagined our reluctant heroes crash landing in one of the Thirteen American Colonies or enslaving the Hebrews in Egypt and giving the Greeks the names that have become myth -- Apollo, Athena, Hera -- those fearful gods that were so unmistakably human in their actions. Made sense.

Then they found Earth a desolate, smoking ruin, uninhabitable due to radiation. They had created their own Cylons and died for it. A brilliant twist in the quest for Earth. If Battlestar Galactica had ended there, it would have been truly cemented as the ballsiest show on television. On a medium known for being just filler necessitated by the need for commercials, Battlestar Galactica would have been remembered as a miserable, nihilistic thing: the tragedy of living in a world without the simplicity of The Force.

Ronald Moore had other plans for us, however.

He gave us a concrete ending: they find Earth, the real Earth, a fresh, unsullied planet where the indigenous humanoids haven't even developed a proper language yet. Pretty much the ending I predicted. It was not making me feel vindicated, but disappointed. I wanted my expectations subverted.

I didn't have enough faith, it seems.

For a moment, I thought I was being given what I feared: a Chariots of the Gods? ending where the Stone Age Spacemen use their technology to help advance the Earth humans -- an explanation for our existence today.

That's what they did. Sort of. Our heroes decide to shed all semblance of technology and start anew -- a tabula rasa for humanity. They disperse around the globe and send their spaceships into the Sun.

This whole thing ends perfectly: a nice little crane shot of William Adama looking out over creation.

But it's not over.

150,000 years later, the world is as we know it today. What we spent the whole series believing were the delusional manifestations of Cylon Number Six and Gaius Baltar are revealed to be something else and, Greek Chorus-style, muse about the nature of the supernatural deity and the trajectory of humanity. If humanity keeps creating artificial intelligence only to have it blow up in our faces and decimate us, what is the point of this never-ending cycle? Will this iteration of humanity break the cycle? We're only in the early stages of artificial intelligence, after all -- not quite near the technological singularity yet. What comes next? And what of God (who apparently doesn't appreciate that name) what are Its plans? An important question, as characters have been talking about The One God since the first episode. Why hasn't He/She/It/They broken the cycle? Is it even possible? Where are our answers?

It's an awkward epilogue to the series, more important conceptually than it is well-executed. But fuck it, I don't care about execution. I care about ideas. That's what Science Fiction is bloody about.

As a conceptual device, the epilogue is a brilliant move -- after seemingly answering all our questions, the show reveals that the big questions remain.

Imagine the series ending with the lovely crane shot of William Adama, having achieved his goal of finding humanity a home. It's a false ending. It concludes the characters, but not the story. It is a space opera ending for a show that is only ostensibly a space opera. It's the bloody Ewoks dancing around a fire, celebrating the love -- yub nub!

It's the perfect conclusion for William Adama, the black-and-white steadfast Captain of Humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if the original series' Adama had the same characterization. Like Rorschach, he's a simple character whose significance is qualified by his situation. When he's faced with betrayal, moral grays, and failure, he falls apart. He gets drunk and sputters on the floor of his quarters. For him to accomplish his main goal and then to sit and relax in his newly found Promised Land is the happy ending for him. From there, we know he lives out his days quietly in Paradise.

If I were given that ending and nothing else, I'd be sorely disappointed, with nothing to say about such a neat and tidy -- not to mention utterly, deceptively false -- ending. I'd think "What a nice ending. I'm going to watch The Prisoner now."

Salon's Laura Miller has this to say in her criticism of the ending:

They were racing around in a spaceship fleeing killer robots, yes, but the ambiguity of their circumstances made them so much more like us than 99 percent of the people on television. It made them seem so real. When they got their answers, they became finally and irrevocably fictional.

I agree... to an extent. They get their answers, yes, making them fictional (once the whole thing turns out to be a take on Creation, they kind of have to be -- they've served their purpose) but we don't get our answers.

Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, Helo, Athena, Hera, Tyrol, Baltar, Six, Tigh -- they're not the main characters of the story. The human race is.

Hence, the importance of the epilogue. Humanity is thriving, for now... but on what path are they headed? What is its destiny? It's a mystery.

It's not a question you can glean from the ending of the main narrative. What we get from that is the Spacemen landed on Earth... and made us! How wonderful. The End. Fade to credits.

No. It's not the end. It's a false ending.

They gave birth to us, but what happens next? We're still around. The story continues, the ending unknown.

The epilogue puts a firm question mark over the face of humanity -- a move perfectly in tune with the rest of Battlestar Galactica.