The Reset Button

These days it seems that writers aren’t content just to reboot a franchise story—the new trend seems to be hitting the reset button. Last week’s Doctor Who 50^th Anniversary special was just one example of a story arc which not only affects the future of a series, but retroactively changes everything that’s come before.

For the serious fan, the reset button can lead to some serious headaches.

Here are some re-sets in my fandoms, and my Head-Scratcher Score™

On a scale of 1-5: 

1 is clever despite being mildly irritating

5 is I’ll never be able to watch or read the same way again, dammit.

Doctor Who’s 50^th Anniversary Special

(if you haven’t seen it yet, “Spoilers!”)

 Ask almost any Whovian, and they’ll tell you Steven Moffat, the current show-runner, has some major cojones when it comes to reconfiguring the world of Doctor Who. But he really stepped in it with some fans by rewriting the modern Doctor’s most defining moment. I won’t claim to be an expert on Classic Who, so I’ll stick to modern Doc-lore. Since the show was revived in 2005, his defining trait has been his guilt over ending the Time War by destroying not only the Daleks but also his home world of Gallifrey in the process. But Moffat’s anniversary special rewrote that history, so that now the planet’s merely hidden, possibly in a painting (you have to love SF sometimes).

And the Doctor’s overwhelming guilt—that drives not only his personality development but has also guided every choice he’s made since then? Suffice it to say it will be hard to re-watch without thinking about this conundrum.

Head Scratcher Score: 3

Upsetting, but I can get past it, especially if it means re-watching the David Tennant years.

Star Trek: The New Movies

Like Moffat, J.J. Abrams had time travel in his arsenal, so resetting the world of Trek was as easy as sending classic-Spock out into space with some vaguely named “red matter” and opening up a temporal rift which changed Kirk’s destiny, and that of the rest of his crew along with it. To me, the most engaging part of this story was watching a Kirk who grew up aimless and angry over losing his father still manage to blunder into his destiny. 

If, like me, you adore classic Star Trek, it will probably creep into your brain when you re-watch an episode featuring the planet Vulcan “oh, hey, everything’s different now, so that (sort of) never happened”...but this move was still such a brilliant way to reboot the franchise. I’m not too sure, though, about the moment in the second new film when new-Spock rings up old-Spock for advice about Khan. It seemed cool until I really thought about it—what’s to prevent the old-version of Spock from just giving the new one a list of People and Places to Avoid? The next movie would literally be the ship just peacefully cataloging gaseous anomalies, nowhere near any angry Klingons or troublesome Tribbles.

Head Scratcher Score: 2

This would be a 1 except for the aforementioned Advice From Past Spock interlude.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer—2.0

In 2001, Buffy changed networks—and rose from the dead. Buffy’s creator, Joss Whedon, didn’t have time travel at his disposal—but he did have magic, which witch (and Buffy’s bff) Willow employed to bring Buffy back to life...after a disturbingly long period of decay, I might add.

Buffy 2.0 reset the show in a number of ways—when Spike warned that she “came back wrong” it definitely seemed to be true. A Buffy who was willing to sleep with Spike was certainly a new version of our old heroine. But the most reset-buttony moment of this season came in episode seventeen, “Normal Again,” in which it is suggested to the audience that maybe there never were any demons, witches, or vampires. Maybe crazy Buffy had been imagining it all as part of her psychotic episodes, which she'd been having for years, locked inside a mental hospital. 

The episode ends leaving the audience to wonder—FOREVER—if Joss meant that was the real story.

Head Scratcher Score: 4

Still adore the show, but, yeah, this will bother me forever.

Twilight Love

Oh, Stephanie Meyer, you do create characters I really care about, and then you go crazy with the deus ex machina and the absurdly happy endings—and the reset button.

This button, of course, reset the entire love story of Bella and Jacob. Now, I know that clearly Meyer meant for us to root for Bella and Edward all along (TEAM JACOB FOREVER!) But the love triangle was what kept me reading those thousands of pages. Now, if I go back, I’ll know that Jacob was just drawn to Bella so he could fall in love with her baby.

Head Scratcher Score: 5

Ruined.

How do you feel about the reset button? Clever storytelling, or plot to ruin fan’s lives?

Dealbreakers

We all have our limits. A line we just won’t cross.  Or when it comes to entertainment, a character type we just can’t stand or a plot point that’s one step too far. Some folks don’t seem to mind when a series jumps the shark—for some people it can be a dealbreaker.

For me, the dealbreaker isn’t always rational. But I know it when I see it.

`     1. VH1 Here I come

As a connoisseur of the pop-culture water cooler moment (that’s what we used to call them back when people communicated by speaking—now it’s all internet memes)—I usually tune in to at least part of MTV’s VMAs. This year I got through about ten minutes. After a parade of ostensible stars who looked exactly the same age as my ninth grade students, I changed the channel. I don’t expect the pop stars to be my age, but it might be nice if some of them could legally drive.

2. Galbatorix

I like fantasy, and a friend recommend Eragon years ago. I just couldn’t get past the names, especially: Galbatorix. It sounds like Lord of the Rings crossed with late-night Cinemax. It sounds like something a teenage boy would think up. It’s irrational, but I just couldn’t go on reading it. I’m also not too sure about talking dragons. There were talking dragons in it, right?

    3. The Wolfologue

Speaking of talking dragons...Yeah, werewolves should never talk. Just, never.

For example, the movie Red Riding Hood had a promising director (Catherine Hardwicke) an interesting soundtrack including Fever Ray...and, at a crucial moment, a talking CGI werewolf.

No.

Also, at some point long about Eclipse, I think, Jacob starting having this dramatic interior wolfologue. No, no, no.

Please wait until you change back into a human, and put your pants back on, to give that dramatic monologue. Like children in ye olden times, werewolves should be seen and not heard.

     4. Teens who talk like old folks

Bad dialogue in general has caused me to put down many a book. But old-sounding teens in YA—that’s a pet peeve. I spend my days with kids. I know what they sound like. They also definitely give fewer speeches in real life. Some adolescent boys use words like they are rationed, but those guys hardly ever seem to show up in books.

    5. The ending isn’t coming until book 3 in the series. That’s okay, right?

Sure. Totally fine as long as I can have my $7.99 back.

The Snark Reflex

I had fun live tweeting the Oscars this year, along with a huge percentage of my tweeps, and all the people I follow who have never heard of me and never will. Lena Dunham, for example, was very witty, as usual. She also had a sort of hall-monitor moment which struck me as rather odd. She addressed those being snarky about Anne Hathaway as “Ladies” and urged us to save our snark for those who are are not feminists/advancing “the cause.” 

Consider those of us who were at least initially puzzled by backwards necklaces properly chastised.

There are two things happening here. First, Dunham seems to be suggesting that it’s perfectly acceptable to make snide comments about people who do not share one’s political or cultural views. This is sort of a troubling idea if you really think about it.

Second, Dunham was not the only tweeter last Sunday to break in to the general merriment to chastise the “haters” and call for a more positive commentary.

Are you kidding me?

Dear Positivity Police,

When I tweeted about the fact that Kristin Stewart might reasonably have been expected to comb her hair…to present at The Academy Awards…I wasn’t under some delusion that I was being helpful. K-Stew does not care what we think—it’s sort of her thing. Also, again, to be clear, we’re talking about the freaking Oscars, people. Not grooming=tacit permission for snark.

I guess the thing is, my thinking is that it is and should be okay for the vast majority of the world who was not invited to an opulent event for shiny, wealthy people to engage in a bit of harmless commentary. We are not talking about picking on a group of insecure eighth graders here. Does every conversation have to be positive? It seems to me that it’s all too easy to carve out a little piece of the moral high ground by tossing off a tweet telling everyone to stop the hating.

I hope none of them were being hypocritical: I hope their profiles would reveal only cheerleading and supportive emoticons.  But I also think they kind of missed the point. For myself—I was not hating. I love the Oscars. I love the beautiful dresses, but I actually kind of enjoy the weird, disaster ones even more. I like the whole schmear: the bad jokes, the terrible pre-show hosts. Doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes cry watching some random person win an Oscar for Documentary Short Film—some person I’ve never heard of and a movie I’ll never see. Because there’s something really beautiful about watching someone’s dream come true.

I’m not just one thing or the other: all snark or meanness, or all sunshine and :)’s. I say, your target’s a multi-millionaire who was recently considered pretty enough to play Snow White, go ahead and obey the snark reflex. And feel free to make fun of me for crying when that guy thanked his grandma.

jk

The movie Life of Pi is coming out in theaters soon. I won’t be a spoiler monkey but every time I see the trailer, I’m just reminded of the “jk!” moment at the end of this book. The author pulls you in to his increasingly fantastic tail, and then he pulls the rug out from under you at the very end.

Let’s call this the “jk” effect. There’s actually a lot of debate these days about whether or not adding “Lol” or a winky face at the end of an insulting sentence takes all the sting out of the words that preceded it. Kids accused of cyber-bullying are even pulling “the emoticon defense”—the premise of which is that it’s okay to say something horrible as long as you put a J after it.

This defense isn’t holding up too well in court, which is sort of comforting, I suppose. But what about the jk effect in stories? Sometimes the entire story is based on pulling the rug out from under the reader. For example, we just read Saki’s classic short story “The Open Window” in my ninth grade class, and that story is built on—literally—a jk moment. The character of Vera convincingly spins a frightening ghost story for a stranger, and sets him up to be scared nearly to death—all for her own amusement. It’s an old story, but one can very easily imagine this girl with a cell phone in her hand, Instagramming a picture of the poor dude’s face as he runs away screaming.

In YA, the jk effect might considered alongside the “To Be Continued…” effect. You’re reading, and you think you’re going to find out what happens to the MCs by the time you reach the last page, but…just kidding! Book II coming in May 2014!... ;)

Sometimes the jk is really well done: I’d cite the central relationship of City of Bones as an example of an effective one. Again, I won’t spoiler it for anyone, but I think Cassandra Clare gets a lot of mileage out of the mistaken identity, making the moment when things are straightened out that much more powerful. This one is more of a “wow” or an "I knew it!" than a “jk.” What’s the difference? It's completely subjective...but...that moment in the new Breaking Dawn film, when Jacob dismisses the events of the previous three films with one sentence? (Everything you thought you felt was because of Nessie, Bella!). That felt like a jk to me. Then again, that film is actually predicated on an even bigger jk.

A cruel jk is a major part of the plot in Will Grayson, Will Grayson, but this time it’s not the author pulling the strings, but a character. One of the Wills (the lower-case one) is devastated when he finds out that the boy he’s had an online relationship with is actually his friend Maura messing with him. The internet is probably the birthplace of the true jk moment, actually, because it’s the perfect place to have an unreal relationship. Online we all hide behind avatars and screen names, and it’s all too easy to publish a lie and call it the truth.

That one's less a jk than a betrayal—but I think worst-case scenario, an author’s jk can become a betrayal. For example, imagine if Harry Potter book 7 had ended with Harry waking up in the Dursely’s, realizing it was all a dream.

The just kidding moment is probably part of our culture at this point, though. We’re post-post modern these days: we like our superheroes jaded and nearly broken (witness the latest installments of Batman and James Bond). The true jk moment involves twisting a knife—figuratively, at least—at least a little. I’m not an emoticon expert, but if there’s a snarky smirk-face emoji, that’s probably the face of the jk. In a world of instant and constant communication, we feel collectively free to say whatever we feel at every moment. The thing is, when I was a teenager, those fleeting moments of venting weren’t posted online—they weren’t going to be accessible, in print, forever. And some things you say can’t unsay with all the smiley faces in the world.

Maybe the true test of the jk, in art or in life, is whether or not it ends with a smile (or a wow)…or a L. Once you’re in on the scam, you want to be impressed with the ingenuity it took to lure you in. Not feel like you’ve wasted your money or your time. Or like an idiot because of an imaginary tiger. (Jk? ;)