One of the things writers don’t talk about much is the loss of your babies. Not actual babies, mind you. That would be terrible.¹ No, what I’m talking about is the experience of coming up with a really great idea, filing it away in your Idea Box to be used later, and then watching, haplessly, as somebody else uses it.

My favorite example of this happening to me is probably Demonic. Demonic was an idea that I had and then fleshed out, a serial narrative – could be television, could be comics, could be short stories or novels. It was always on the back end of my “to-do” list: a story about a demon who, for reasons of his own, had decided that Armageddon was kind of a bad bag and that wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have one?

Not a new idea, of course. Good Omens did it first. But I figured I had enough of a spin on it that my take was fresh: Darius, my demon, was an antihero rather than a lovable misfit like Gaiman/Pratchett’s Crowley. He wasn’t saving the Earth because he loved it, he was averting Armageddon because it offended his sense of pride. He didn’t bring along humans for companionship; he brought them along because he needed them to do very specific things for his Plan (always, always the capital P).² It was distinct enough that it was its own story, a sort of “what if the Doctor was really kind of a bad person but still the protagonist” idea. I rather liked it. Plus I got to have the end of the world happen in Indianapolis, because you can justify anything in a story like this and why not?

Of course, then Eric Kripke came along and created Supernatural, which has way more in common with Demonic than Good Omens did; more political intrigue among the ranks of Heaven and Hell, more brutal in tone than Omens was, and oh yes it’s another story about averting Biblical Armadeggon and maybe you can do two of them but you can’t do three, not with that many similarities. I watched with that odd combination of delight and nausea as ideas I had also occurred to the writing staff of the show: the crossroads demons, the Croatoan plague³ and hellhounds had all been on my list, among other things.

So now Demonic gets shoved into the “scavenge” box, which is my mental box of ideas other people have also had but might have something I can use later. One thing I think I’ll eventually use somewhere else is my idea for Uriel, the archangel of Death. See, of late the Death pendulum has swung back towards Death generally being an unpleasant sort of anthropomorphic concept, as Neil Gaiman’s Death has faded into the background and meaner, more sadistic Deaths have taken the forefront. Supernatural’s Death is really kind of a prick, killing off an entire restaurant of people just to have a meet-and-greet, and he just piles on with other Deaths who are kind of dicks.⁴ Pratchett’s Death in the Discworld books is really the only holdout on the “Death is probably a pleasant enough fellow” side of the equation.

So my idea was that Uriel would appear as a kindly old hippie – think Tommy Chong in his late sixties, shuffling around a hospital in a fringed brown jacket in sandals, escorting the ghosts of children on towards whatever came next. I rather liked that image; I think it’s got some oomph to it.⁵ The idea of Death as perhaps just a bit mournful, a dedicated and concientious professional doing a really, really terrible job, is one that I think works. (Pratchett’s Death comes close, but is, when you get down to it, a bit too alien to really get existentially sad about his work. He might have a bit of a depressive moment, but he always rebounds. What I’m talking about here instead is a general sense of melancholy.)

That’s how writers recycle their own unused chaff, trying to find a little wheat they can still use. Because the great secret of writing is that you are not a special flower and your ideas are not unique snowflakes; somebody else will have them if you don’t use them.

1. Also writers would talk about it all the time and write novels about it. And have. But I digress. [↩]
2. Of course, over the course of the series discovering friendship et cetera humanized by his drafted “companions” and so forth. [↩]
3. I was all NO SERIOUSLY I EVEN NAMED IT THE SAME GODDAMNED THING. That one physically hurt. [↩]
4. See also: Final Destination’s unseen Death, who really is a total asshole. [↩]
5. That is a very technical term. Oomph is quantifiable. For example, Tom Mota spraypainting the billboard in Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End is a sequence with forty-one oomph. [↩]

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–”Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!

I love (and write) science fiction, but there are a bunch of things that show up a lot in SF movies, novels that have become such a part of the furniture of the genre that nobody bothers to ask whether they make any sense. An unquestioned assumption is not necessarily something that’s implausible or impossible but something that gets plugged into stories like a widget, without any thought on the part of the writer.

For example:

Bionics: Or, as we say in the real world, prosthetics – which are, of course, becoming increasingly common and sophisticated. What they’re not doing is making anyone superhuman. Go take a look at a VA hospital (and by the way, how much of an opportunity did the people behind Bionic Woman remake miss by not making her an Iraq vet?). Nobody there is lifting cars or taking spy photos with their camera eyes; they’re lucky if they can get anything like the former abilities of the limb or body part being replaced, and even if they give an advantage in one area (as Oscar Pistorius’ legs supposedly did) it’s pretty limited. Even if you could make a bionic limb super-strong, of course, the problem is that the hand bone’s connected to the wrist bone, the wrist bone’s connected to the arm bone, and so on, and that whole chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So superhuman strength is pretty much off the menu (you could conceivably build a bionic hand with superhuman crushing power that wouldn’t stress the wrist too much, but that’s about it) unless you replace basically the whole skeletal structure, which brings us to…

Uploading, or cloning for that matter: Not that either of these things are necessarily impossible (though both involve a fair bit of handwaving, especially the copying-memories part of the latter), but neither are they any kind of ticket to immortality for the simple reason that neither an uploaded version of your mind nor a clone with all your memories is you: they are both copies of you, which will no more prevent you from dying than having children will. With that in mind, it baffles me why anyone would want to do either of these. Who would want to have an immortal or, worse, much younger copy of yourself around? How would that take the sting out of aging and death? Not to mention the fact that you would be made to suffer Robert Burns’ most terrible curse: to see ourselves as others see us. Most of us can’t stand to hear a recording of our own voices; imagine that magnified by a factor of a million and you’ll get the idea of just how annoying and uncomfortable it would be to have a simulacrum of you wandering around.

Sensors: Such an innocuous bit of technology, those machines that let Mr. Spock or whoever tell you what’s going on down on the planet. Unfortunately, nothing like them actually exists. For example, one thing people can always tell with sensors is the presence or absence of “life signs.” How do they do that? It can’t be through infrared or heartbeats, since neither of those would be detectable from space (well, infrared could be, but not individual heat signatures) – but the magical sensors usually can not only detect individual life forms but tell you what species it is! Sensors are practically the definition of the unquestioned assumption; they’re such a background element that hardly anyone bothers to think before plugging them into a story. (This goes double for tractor beams.)

Space combat: This is probably the most commonly appearing one on the list, but think about it for a minute. Actual combat mostly consists of one person trying to get to a target, and the other one trying to stop them; a fighter-interceptor trying to stop a bomber, for instance (or disabling the bomber’s fighter escort.) That works all right when your battleground is the sky, because there are a limited number of possible approaches and escape routes. But when the target is a planet that limited number increases until it approaches infinity – so it’s likely that your fighter-interceptors will simply be unable to intercept anything.

Aside from that, though, the notion of space war is equally unlikely. Even if we assume the existence of FTL travel (something that would have been on this list thirty years ago, but which writers have more recently made more of an effort to justify), it’s almost certainly going to take a lot of energy to get from star to star; what could be waiting there that would be worth the effort involved? You might argue, of course, that war pretty much always takes a lot of energy and that’s never stopped anyone, but the fact is that almost everything of value on an inhabited planet can also be found on uninhabited planets, asteroids or comets. Sure, you can come up with some other reason for an interplanetary war – an ideological difference, some genuinely unique resource, a pathological hatred of the colour blue – but by this point you’re either handwaving or actually giving the matter some thought, which means it’s no longer an unquestioned assumption.

Sol III: This is a pet peeve of mine. SF writers figured out a long time ago that aliens wouldn’t call our planet “Earth,” so you often see it referred to as “Sol III,” which sounds much more science-fictiony. The problem, of course, is that “sol” is Latin for “sun,” which means that instead of calling the planet “Earth” you’ve called it “Sun III” – so much less geocentric!

None of these are bad ideas, necessarily – except for that last one – but I’m tired of seeing them recycled over and over like so much dorm room furniture. So here’s my challenge to everyone who writes SF in novels, movies, comics or wherever: the next time you’re about to use one of these ideas, think it through – odds are good that after a few minutes’ consideration you’ll wind up with a more interesting and original story.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dynamite idea for an epic about bionic space marines I need to work on…

It’s a deceptively simple question: When exactly did ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, the series, end? To some, of course, the answer is, “It didn’t.” Dark Horse Comics has already announced a Season Nine to come after the conclusion of the comics-only Season Eight, and the same people who wrote for the TV series are clearly enjoying the upsides of writing a Buffy series with an unlimited budget and no worries about actor availability. That’s ‘Buffy’ in some form, definitely.

But to others, ‘Buffy’ ended when the series left television. Seven seasons, two networks, 144 episodes, no writing Emmys. Certainly, the facts argue in favor of that interpretation; ‘Buffy’ Season Seven features the same core cast as Season One, the same basic setting, even the same theme music. But Season One was about a teenage girl who was trying to make it through the metaphorical hell of high school while simultaneously trying to stop demons from the literal mouth of Hell, while Season Seven was about…um, a twenty-two year old woman looking for a career, and a bad guy who couldn’t do anything but make vague menacing threats, and Andrew for some damned reason. They’re set in the same place, they feature the same people, but they don’t feel like the same series when set side by side. Only because we watched the transformation as it slowly occurred does it feel seamless to us.

So when did ‘Buffy’, the show that started in 1997 on the WB, end? Did it finish on the WB as well? It’d be hard to argue that, I think; Buffy as protective big sister/single parent to Dawn, working out of the Magic Box to battle demons alongside super-witch Willow and semi-redeemed vampire Spike, feels less like Season One than Season Seven did. (Not to mention Season Five marks the breaking point where the series ceases to be about people growing up and begins to be about people who have grown up and find their life really sucks and it’s not what they thought it’d be in high school and they’d really rather go back and be teenagers again…actually, Seasons Five through Seven really suck the joy out of re-watching Seasons One through Four. “Oh, aren’t Willow and Oz so cute together?” “Yeah, they go through a painful break-up later on, and then she becomes a lesbian and falls in love with this really sweet girl…who gets shot and killed.” One of the big problems with both ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ was that neither series knew when to stop bumping off supporting characters.)

So it’s Season Four, then. Except…as much as I love Season Four (and I do; I think it’s the last good season, and it’s got some of the best comedy episodes) it’s actually a much bigger break from Season Three than Five is from Four or Six from Five. It’s a change of setting, a big change of supporting cast (gone are Angel, Cordelia, Principal Snyder, Joyce, Jonathan and Oz as regulars, and in comes Riley, Maggie Walsh, Forrest, Graham, Tara, Spike and Anya as regulars) and a change of mission, too. Buffy and her friends aren’t teenagers dealing with teenage problems anymore. They’re grown-ups, learning what it’s like to be out in the wider world.

No, I think that you can safely set aside Seasons One through Three of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as a seamless whole, an epic story about how we become adults told through a prism of sorcery, horror, kung-fu, and witty quips. All of the themes introduced in the beginning of the series (“high school is hell”, “Buffy’s friends are assets to her Slaying and not liabilities”, “your first love might seem passionate and true and the deepest you’ll ever experience, but they’re not necessarily good for you and passion isn’t enough to sustain a relationship”, “growing up means making decisions for yourself instead of listening to authority figures”, “having true friends that stick with you through thick and thin is better than being powerful”) are wrapped up in dramatic and spectacular fashion in the season finale (the commencement speaker turns into a giant demon snake, Buffy rallies together the entire high school class to defeat it, Angel walks away afterward to let her find someone who can be happy with her, Buffy tells the Watchers to sod off because she doesn’t need a Watcher anymore, and the season ends with everyone together watching the flames and then walking away hand-in-hand.) Heck, the Season Three finale even ends with the suggestion that there’s no need to worry about the Hellmouth anymore: the last line of the episode is, “Why do demons even come here anymore?” What could be more series finale than that?

‘Buffy’, as we finally saw it, is a genuinely great piece of television. But the first three seasons are the true ‘Buffy’ because they’re the execution of the central concept, a great idea turned into a magnificent series that ended just like it needed to. After that, it’s just a matter of following the character around while she lives her life, and frankly that’s not the same thing as telling a story. Buffy might keep fighting evil forever, but ‘Buffy’ ended the day she got her diploma.

The movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance” popped into my head this morning. (And you think you have problems…) Thinking about it reminded me about how back when it came out, there was a big debate ovSer the movie’s use of the “magical negro” stereotype. I remember agreeing with the people who pointed this out, but not without some reservations…after all, I pointed out, if George Lucas had cast Sidney Poitier as Obi-Wan Kenobi instead of Sir Alec Guinness, would he have automatically become a magical negro even though the script hadn’t changed?

Which, in turn, reminded me of “women in refrigerators”. The list is well-known by now among comics fans, as are some of the excuses different writers have come up with for its existence. But the fact is, the most common one (“Hey, it’s not like men have it easy either!”) is actually sorta kinda true…Steve Trevor bit the big one a couple of times, the Vision was gruesomely dismembered and revived as a pale imitation of himself in order to put a little conflict into the Scarlet Witch’s story arc, the first couple of guys who even thought about dating Ms Marvel bit it, and let’s not even get into the whole Terry Long thing. (Husband and son both bit it there…)

But that’s the thing: Only an idiot would actually try to use these as arguments against the prevalence of racism and sexism in popular culture. Even though you can say, legitimately, that the “magical negro” is simply a mentor archetype that happens to be black, and even though you can say, legitimately, that a “woman in (a) refrigerator” is simply a supporting character that gets bumped off in order to provide a little drama for the main character who happens to be female, we can all recognize that there’s still something skeezy about it all. (Well, most of us can. I know all the enlightened, wise readers here can.) So what is it? Why is it not okay?

The answer is that there are so few other roles for these characters to take that the supporting roles become disproportionate representations of the characters in popular culture. Or, to put that a little less fancy, it’s not that there are lots of black “wise mentor” characters, it’s that there are so few black heroes getting mentored. It’s not that there are so many women in comics who die, it’s that there are so few who get to go off and avenge the deaths. These things are symptoms of a far deeper, more fundamental problem in pop culture, namely a dearth of protagonists who aren’t white guys. Nobody thinks to cast a black guy in the Luke Skywalker role; he’s relegated to the Obi-Wan (or more accurately, Mace Windu) part. We’ve reached a plateau in bringing diversity into our cult fiction, where characters outside the white male “standard” are included, but almost never in a leading role. Until that changes, you’ll continue to see the same stereotypes. Because they’re not stereotypes, they’re archetypes….but they’re the only archetypes women and minorities are allowed to inhabit.

(Spoilers follow, I guess)

I finally got a chance to see Inception a couple of days ago and while I enjoyed it, there were a few things that puzzled me. Not that the movie was confusing — honestly, one of its bigger flaws was that it often seemed to feel the need to spell things out for the slower kids — but for a generally well-written movie it had some odd flaws. Or were they flaws? Well, probably, but just for fun let’s use the No-Prize method and see if we can’t find in them hints of a deeper, better story underneath the obvious one.

See, a lot of people think that the ending means the whole movie was a dream, but that’s not likely. To begin with, “it was all a dream” is no less of a cop-out just because your movie is about dreams, and if there’s room for multiple interpretations you might as well pick the one that doesn’t suck. More importantly, though, the “real world” sequences include scenes that Cobb, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, isn’t in. When was the last time you had a dream you weren’t in?

Interestingly, the scenes without him all feature Ellen Page, whose character is oddly underdeveloped and inconsistent considering how prominent she is. She’s set up heavily (Cobb remarks on how she’s a natural at manipulating dreams), has a heavily symbolic name (Ariadne) and gets a number of scenes without payoffs (for example the scene where she makes her totem, the chess piece.) But in the actual action of the movie she’s not very important, being mostly a vehicle for exposition — the “new guy” that other characters can explain things to, as well as the person who ferrets out Cobb’s backstory. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that there’s another character who plays a similar role — Saito, the one played by Ken Watanabe — and at first glance, at least, the movie would be stronger if he had the role to himself: he has an emotional investment in learning the rules of the game and understanding the plan (since he wants it to succeed) and there’s tension added if he learns about Cobb’s issues with his wife (since he has the power to reunite Cobb with his children), while Ariadne is both uninvested and undermotivated. In fact, her motivation changes several times throughout the movie: at first it’s just professional interest, then a desire to protect the other team members, and then finally (for no clear reason) she’s determined to complete the mission even at the risk of her and Cobb’s lives.

So here’s my attempt at a No-Prize: none of these things are mistakes. The whole movie that we see is a dream, but Cobb isn’t the only real person in it: Ariadne is there too (and maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt, what the hell.) She has inserted herself into Cobb’s dream because he is still stuck in limbo from his experience with his wife — when he experienced her “dying” that was her waking up, but he’s still asleep. The mission is actually to rescue him; like the fake mission explained to Cillian Murphy in the hotel room, it’s a fiction designed to make him rescue himself. That’s why she plays coy at first — the trick of getting the dreamer to do the work for you — then draws out his emotional issues, and in the end is determined to complete the mission at all cost. It also explains her name: Ariadne, after all, was the one who got Theseus out of the labyrinth.

But why was she so determined? Because Cobb has been dreaming longer than he realizes — ten years or more — which explains another motif with no apparent payoff, the hiding of his children’s faces throughout the movie. Ariadne is his daughter.

Everybody hates gratuitous resurrections, right? It’s just a fanboy thing, like bagging your comics or bickering about who would win in a Batman/Captain America fight. It just sucks that they (Marvel or DC, take your choice) continue to insult our intelligence by giving us unbelievably contrived resurrection storylines. “It wasn’t me who died! A cosmic alien impersonated me while I was in suspended animation, then blew herself up and telepathically inserted a shard of her consciousness into my clone, who then got absorbed into my mind when she died!” “No, I never died at all! Being impaled through the chest with an eight-inch-thick chunk of razor-sharp metal merely greatly inconvenienced me!” “Yeah, when I got decapitated by Wolverine? Funny story…”

Comics writers are well aware of this particular fanboy pet peeve; how could they not be? You only need to be accosted so many times at a convention by an angry fan saying, “You should never have brought back Barry Allen/Harry Osborn/Doctor Octopus because their death was so meaningful!” So they try everything they can to make sure that this time, when they kill off a character, they ain’t coming back.

They’ve long ago realized that you can’t just kill someone off in an explosion or a fall; dying off-panel is an automatic “Get Out of Kill Free” card. And they’ve figured out that exotic deaths never work, either; if Wonder Man dies of ionic energy poisoning, you can bet that somewhere down the line, somebody’s going to get the bright idea to bring him back. And who’s to say that ionic energy poisoning doesn’t just cause you to go into suspended animation, anyway?

So it’s got to be on-panel. It’s got to be a “real” cause of death. And the latest innovation: It’s gotta be gory. Sure, you might survive a gunshot wound, but are you really going to survive having your head popped like a zit by Black Adam, or ripped in half…um…also by Black Adam…or impaled on a sword? (By Deathstroke; presumably, Black Adam was busy that day.) Um…actually, the answer seems to still be “yes”. The Martian Manhunter came back after being immolated on-panel, Ronnie Raymond returned from a full-on chest stabbing, Colossus wasn’t stopped by cremation, and even perma-death poster boy Bucky showed up again as Grim-N-Gritty-Cyborg-Assassin-Bucky.

Clearly, the only solution is an editorial mandate. From now on, it’s time to take a hard line: No more gratuitous resurrections. That’s right, no matter how popular the character, no matter how unpopular the death sequence, Psylocke is not coming back from the dead! Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has sp…oh. Hmm. Maybe that’s not as fool-proof as we thought.

The truth is, there actually is a fool-proof way of stopping gratuitous resurrections in comics. It’s even simple, easily executable, and would be wildly popular with fans. Ready for it? Here it is:

STOP KILLING THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Seriously, is this really that hard to understand? There’s no way you can possibly make a death stick in a comic book; they’re fictional characters, they’ll come back as long as someone remembers them fondly enough to bring them back. And as Bucky proves, that can be an amazingly long time. Since there’s no way to make death anything more than a temporary condition in a comic-book universe, why keep deploying it? Surely it can’t be for shock value. Jaded fans no longer care about comic-book death, not when DC kills the Martian Manhunter and resurrects Barry Allen in the same crossover. Death in comics doesn’t matter anymore as much because it’s overused as because it’s impermanent. So why not just let death die for a while?

Except for the Sentry. The only possible reason to bring him back is that he’s NOT FUCKING DEAD ENOUGH.

Ever notice how sometimes, there’s a weird synchronicity at work in the things you read? I just got done reading a book about the Hollywood blacklist, and I’m now reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (not bad, but I’d still rather read a biography than a roman à clef). Both of them focused a lot on the social unrest of the 1930s, as the world headed for war, and on a society that was far less united in its opposition to Hitler and fascism than we like to mythologize. (America has a disturbing tendency to mythologize its own past, and then unfavorably compare it to the realities of the present.)

Reading the two books together have sparked an idea in my head for a comic book. And since I’m probably never going to get a chance to write it, I’ll share the idea here.

It’s the biography of Steve Rogers.

When you think about it, we really don’t know much about Steve Rogers before he became Captain America. We know he walked into a recruiting office eager to do something–anything–to help fight the Nazis. We also know that his parents were dead by then (one of the reasons he was accepted as a volunteer was that he had no family.) But beyond that, it feels almost like he wasn’t a real person until the day they gave him the Super-Soldier Serum.

But I think he must have been a very interesting person indeed. Because Steve Rogers has always been socially progressive–his attitude towards Sam Wilson might seem patronizing to modern audiences, but for someone born in 1917, Steve Rogers is pretty damned enlightened. He seems to have been working-class; there’s no real mention of an inheritance anywhere in his background, and he’s had to take jobs to make ends meet on several occasions. And he’s very strongly anti-Fascist; it’s telling that he signed up to fight against Hitler a year before the United States’ entry into the war…and was passionate enough about it that he wouldn’t take 4F for an answer.

All those things add up to a very interesting, potentially shocking, probably fascinating backstory that’s never been touched on. Namely, that Steve Rogers probably grew up in a Communist household. He might not have been a card-carrying Communist himself, but his parents almost certainly were. Because being a Communist had a different meaning during the Great Depression than it did twenty years onwards, in a Cold War America. During the 1930s, when unemployment was high and a privileged few were almost completely insulated from the Depression’s effects, lots of people joined the Communists because they believed in things like unionization, racial equality, and fighting back against the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in Europe. (Lots of prominent leftists went to help in Spain against Franco before Hitler rose to power. It was the cause celebré of its day.) The later political connotations didn’t come about until after World War II…which is part of why so many people wound up getting nailed by accusations of associating with Communists when the witch-hunts started.

Both of Steve’s parents were Irish immigrants; I see Steve Rogers’ dad as a union organizer, perhaps a dockworker or a teamster. His mother might have been a seamstress, also a highly politically charged profession (when Steve Rogers would have been born, the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was still a pretty recent memory.) The two of them probably believed solidly in the rights of the working man and woman, joined the Communist Party because many of their friends and fellow activists were members, and probably didn’t know nearly as much about Stalin as they thought they did. They might have led a fairly bohemian social life, rubbing shoulders with upper-class leftists like Hemingway or Dorothy Parker who liked to get involved with the lives of the people they were fighting for.

And by the time Steve was twenty, they were both dead. Certainly, that’s something that shouldn’t be treated lightly in any story about his life; union organizing in the ’20s and ’30s was a dangerous business. Activists could get beaten, jailed, or even discreetly murdered by hired thugs kept on the payroll. Maybe Steve’s dad died in a riot at the docks caused by paid agitators? Maybe his mother worked herself to exhaustion, eventually dying of pneumonia from trying to support the family single-handedly because Steve was too frail to get a job like his father had?

Steve’s poor physical health speaks volumes, too. It suggests malnutrition, childhood illnesses, the sort of thing that happened a lot in families too poor to afford good food and real doctors. Maybe Steve had a brother or a sister once, someone he never talks about because it’s too painful. Maybe he narrowly avoided the same fate.

The more I think about this, the more I think it would make a great story, a vibrant chronicle of pre-WWII America as seen through the eyes of a young man who would someday become its emblem. (Although he probably wouldn’t have stayed that way if he’d been around in the 50s. The HUAC would have had a field day with him. Maybe it was a good thing he stayed frozen in ice for a decade or so…) I’d love to write it. Tom Brevoort, if you’re reading this, call me!

The wonderful thing about the DVD revolution is the way that it makes it possible for just about anyone to become a film student. Videotapes began the process, of course, but their limitations meant that the really nice versions of a lot of movies were only available to someone who was willing to shell out the big bucks for a laserdisc player (and the expensive discs it played.) Once DVDs really caught on, though, science-fiction fans like myself could take an informative, exhaustive, and above all cheap trip through the history of the genre.

All of which is by way of introduction to my decision, some years back, to sit down and watch The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, and Soylent Green. I figured I might learn something about my sci-fi geek ancestors by watching what I thought of as an informal, accidental trilogy. All three of them had come out on DVD, and all three of them had come out in very reasonably-priced versions. And most importantly, all three of them had become, in their own way, pop-cultural touchstones. I didn’t know exactly why I grouped them together in my head beyond that, but I figured it would come to me as I watched them.

It actually didn’t. Perhaps it was because the project took a little longer than planned; I watched Logan’s Run in 2002, but I didn’t get around to watching The Omega Man and Soylent Green until about four years later. (In my defense, in the intervening time I bought a house, wrote a couple of books and some short stories, and watched lots of other movies. Oh, and I started a blog.) Even after I’d finally watched all three, though, the connection never gelled in my mind. I knew it was there; I was sure I was right to see them as somehow linked. But it still didn’t click as to why.

Until recently, when I read about another movie that came out not long afterwards. It’s a little cult film from a director that only did a handful of movies, a sort of avant-garde sci-fi flick that tried to graft the techniques of cinema verité into a new genre. You might have heard of it, though. It’s called Star Wars.

(pause for laughter)

(pause some more for laughter)

No? Not even a little? OK, I’ll move on. The point is, Star Wars came out only a couple of years after Logan’s Run, but the two of them look like they’re from different decades. Logan’s Run is a very technically polished science fiction film, with effects that no doubt dazzled contemporary audiences, but it’s still one of the last pre-Star Wars films, whereas Star Wars is the first post-Star Wars film. (Yes, Star Wars is a post-Star Wars film. I’ll explain.)

All three of the films in my informal trilogy share that same elusive element, that quality that changed in the watershed moment when Star Wars transformed science-fiction cinema for better and/or worse. They’re better, simply in terms of production quality, than 50s sci-fi movies like The Thing, It Conquered the World, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers…but you can see a continuum of evolution between those movies and Soylent Green, whereas something like Transformers doesn’t even look like it came from the same breeding stock. It looks more like a descendant of Star Wars…OK, a brain-damaged, atrophied descendant, but a descendant nonetheless.

I think the key is Lucas’ decision, with Star Wars, to create an immersive environment. People talk about the special effects of Star Wars as though that was the film’s great breakthrough, but it really didn’t make that many advances beyond what was already possible. (Which is not to denigrate the advances it did make–motion control cameras allowed for fluid, realistic shots of space battles that were essential to the director’s vision.) But the real change was the extra care that was taken in crafting the models, the costumes, the sets and the locations. Lucas wanted you to feel like he was shooting a documentary, not a science-fiction movie.

Previous science-fiction effects artists weren’t lazy when they didn’t take that same amount of care–they were just thinking about the effects in a different way. To them, the science-fiction genre was the genre of ideas; everything was an allegory, a representation of existing concepts. Logan’s Run was about the generation gap. Soylent Green was about overpopulation and pollution. The Omega Man was about nuclear war. Likewise, the effects were representational instead of realistic. Prior to Lucas, science-fiction was the cinema of ideas.

Actually, Star Wars is an allegory too. It’s a movie made by a cynical veteran of the 60s, with the Empire as a stand-in for a pre-Watergate Nixon administration that seemed (at the time) to be about one bad week away from dissolving Congress and declaring martial law. The only solution, according to Lucas’ actually pretty radical and highly politically-charged script, is for armed rebellion against the tyrannical government, aided by all the other races that the Powers That Be ruthlessly oppress. (Early drafts of the script contained sequences that later trickled into Return of the Jedi. The highly trained, professional soldiers with all the cool technology getting their asses kicked by natives with pointy sticks and stolen guns? Gee, what war was going on right around then?)

The problem is, Lucas made the film so immersive that nobody noticed the allegory, and the effects so beautiful that everyone judged all subsequent films by the standards he set. From now on, an important aspect of all science-fiction movies would be, “Are the effects realistic?” The cinema of ideas was replaced, in that instant, by the cinema of visceral experience. Sci-fi became all about making you feel as if you were there, recreating the documentary feel of Star Wars instead of the philosophy of it. A post-Star Wars movie was one you lived, not thought about. (Which is why, despite having intended to make a pre-Star Wars movie, Lucas made a post-Star Wars movie in the eyes of everyone who saw it. See? Makes sense now, right?)

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that every science-fiction movie made before Star Wars was a deep, insightful allegory, any more than it means that every post-Star Wars film was a brain-dead piece of eye-candy. Writers and directors still have things to say in their art, and that’s a constant in any time and any genre. But the emphasis shifted with Star Wars…and by watching Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green, you can see some of the most advanced examples of films made before that watershed moment, the apex of the cinema of ideas.

And, um…if you haven’t seen them, please don’t read the comments section. Because someone’s going to spoil the ending of Soylent Green, I guarantee it.

Everyone understands the comic-book reboot, right? A comic (or an entire line of comics) is getting too bogged down in old continuity, making it less accessible to new readers and difficult to get people to try. So, the thinking goes, let’s start everything over again! A new beginning, from square one, looking forward to a fresh start and attracting a whole new audience with its fantastically new newness! (Did we mention “new”?) The reboot is all about erasing the slate and starting fresh.

Except that by definition, it doesn’t work. Far from being the new beginning that it’s intended to be, I would suggest that by definition, a comic book reboot is inherently nostalgic…and that in fact, reboots delay any kind of “fresh and original” stories for several years.

Because as I have commented elsewhere, a comic book is more than just its main character. It sounds like a nice idea to start over at the beginning; just retell Batman’s origin, and you’re good to go, right? But setting aside that you’ve just begun a “fresh start” to a character by retelling the one story about them that probably everyone even remotely interested already knows, you’re nowhere near finished. You also need to introduce Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred, the Batcave, Robin, and every single member of the rogue’s gallery…which means a story retelling the origins of the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, Catwoman, Killer Croc, Mister Freeze, the Scarecrow, Ra’s Al-Ghul…

And where does the writer go for inspiration on every single one of these stories? They look back. They go back to the original story the character was introduced in, and they retell it. Sure, they add their own inventive spin on it. They retell it in a way tht makes sense to modern audiences, and that resonates with our time and our culture. But they retell it, nonetheless. And until they’re done retelling old stories, they can’t tell new ones.

But it gets worse. Because sometimes it’s not enough to retell the origins of characters; sometimes, specific stories and events make so much of an impact on the character’s history that they’re just not the same without that chapter in their history. The “essential” elements of Jean Grey include the Phoenix saga, her love triangle with Wolverine, and a host of other aspects that didn’t show up until years after her introduction. The death of Lightning Lad is so fundamental to the history of the Legion of Super-Heroes that it’s hard to imagine not including it in some form or another. So the “fresh start” version of the comic book has things like “the Hellfire Club story, as told by Mark Millar!” or “the Clone Saga, as told by Brian Michael Bendis!” or “the Galactus saga, as told by Warren Ellis!” And your new beginning winds up going a hundred issues without ever getting to any really new stories. It’s just a fresh coat of paint over the old ideas that made the original continuity too convoluted to begin with. (Seriously, did anyone need Ultimate Stryfe or Ultimate Onslaught?)

In some ways, a reboot is like a mild sickness that has to be gotten over before the writer can start really working on the title. Some reboots get it over with quickly–the post-Crisis Lex Luthor is so radically different from his pre-Crisis counterpart that there really isn’t a whole lot to recap–while others take longer. (*cough* Ultimate Universe *cough*) And unfortunately, as Lex Luthor shows, there’s always the danger of a relapse. The current DC editorial team seems determined to retell every single story that was ditched in the reboots, one by one if need be.

In the end, that’s the real problem with reboots; not only do they not really give the title a fresh start, they don’t really make it any more accessible. Within a year or two, the new continuity has its own backstory to wade through, and a few years after that, it’s just as convoluted and messy as the old one. (And that’s assuming Geoff “Legion of 3 Worlds” Johns doesn’t decide to try to bring back the old continuity, too.) And how does the publisher decide to deal with that? “Hey, this is too convoluted! Let’s do another reboot!” Which just dooms the series to five more years of rehashing its old plotlines. (This is why the Legion of Super-Heroes hasn’t been successful since 1985.)

So what’s the solution? It’s easy to say, but hard to do, which is probably why it’s not tried more. The solution is to make the series more accessible by writing it more accessibly. Introduce new bad guys for the heroes to fight, ones that are just as fresh to the characters and the old fans as they are to new readers. More importantly, remember the new reader when writing the story, and explain things to them as you go. Expository writing is one of the least noticed, most neglected, and hardest things for a good writer to do, but it pays off in getting new readers involved in your comic. (Or novel. Terry Pratchett, among his many other talents, is an expert at writing expository passages that explain things to new readers without boring old ones.) It takes hard work and discipline, but it’s the only real answer.

That, or make a deal with Satan. Deals with Satan always pull in the readers.

As we await the airing of the first episode of Lost’s final season, our minds naturally drift back to other, similar experiences… other times we’ve seen the final seasons and episodes of complex, episodic shows… final episodes which often sucked. Like Battlestar Galactica.

Shows like Lost and BSG (my fingers are getting tired) have a particular challenge in finding good endings because they’re not just “arc” shows with continuing storylines, they’re also “mythology” shows: a lot of the fun of watching them is getting more and more details of the backstory, details that are most often unknown to the main characters as well as the viewer. Not all arc shows, or even all SF/Fantasy shows with arcs, are mythology shows (Buffy, for instance, flirted with being one but never really was, as the mythology was both inconsistent and mostly irrelevant to the plot), but it’s hard to think of a mythology show that isn’t SF or fantasy. (Soap operas don’t count because there has to be a sense that the mythology was created before the show started, whereas the revelations in soap operas are generally retcons.)

What makes mythology shows different from others in terms of how we watch them is that we’re not just watching for the story, the characters or the performances: we watch, in large part, because we want to better understand the world the writers have created. As wiser people than me have noted, we humans have a built-in tendency to look for patterns, and we feel a kind of pleasure when we identify one we didn’t see before. The flip side of this, though, is that if something we think is a pattern turns out not to be, we can get very annoyed. This is what happened with BSG: by the end of the series finale we had all the pieces to the puzzle, but for most fans they didn’t fit together to make anything meaningful – or at least the picture they created was so far from what we expected as to have the same effect. So here are some lessons the producers of Lost could take from the final season of Battlestar Galactica:

What have you done for me lately?

Fans are fickle creatures. No matter how much we enjoyed the first five seasons, if the final season – and the final episode – aren’t satisfying, we will quickly toss you on the Junk Heap of Forgotten Pop Culture Artifacts.

Don’t marry your ending

Ronald D. Moore has said that he had the final scene of the last episode – where Head Baltar and Head Six wander around New York and watch dancing robots – planned out from the beginning. Which is great, except that after several years of making things up as he went along, that scene no longer made a lick of sense. Honestly, after all the things that came up in the series, the last message he wanted to leave us with was “hug your robots tight”?
A good example of a show that did this right was Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski made a similar comment while the show was running, saying that he already knew the ending… except that when circumstances changed (the original lead actor leaving the show) he changed the ending, making it the ending of that character’s story but not the overall series. B5 had its share of problems in its last season, but marrying the ending wasn’t one of them.

Exposition does not equal drama

Sure, fans of mythology shows want to find out the answers to all your mysteries. But those answers need to come out of drama and conflict, not just be parceled out in economy-size lumps of exposition (or worse yet, explained in post-series interviews.) We wanted to know who Head Six and Head Baltar were, but having them suddenly talk about God as if they spent weekends with him was not an interesting way to do it. We wanted to know the connection between the Colonies and present-day Earth: having a newscaster explain it was not an interesting way to do it. And so on…

Some revelations are optional, some are not

The producers of Lost have said that not every mystery raised in the show will be resolved. Well, good, but it’s important to discriminate between which mysteries the fans will accept you leaving unanswered (or otherwise defusing) and which they won’t. How do you know which is which? One clue is to look at the mysteries you yourself defined as important. For instance, BSG spent much of a season teasing us by having some characters hear bits of a mysterious tune. During the season finale, in a very well-executed and dramatic sequence, we discover that they’re actually hearing “All Along the Watchtower” – at which point the camera zooms out to a view of the whole galaxy, and zooms in to what is recognizably our Earth. Wow. So what was the significance of the song – why were they hearing it, and why that song? It’s obviously related to the mystery of the connection between the Colonies and our Earth – the equation is laid out for us visually in that sequence. So when Moore says (after the series is over) that the song didn’t have a significance… that there are just tunes that somehow reverberate through human (or Cylon) consciousness throughout time and space… we may feel just. A tad. Cheated.

Don’t give up the ’shippers

Remember what I said above about exposition not replacing conflict? This goes double for relationships between the characters. As much as we love learning about the mythology, a lot of viewers are even more invested in what happens to the characters, particularly their love lives. Don’t try to elide these issues or wrap them up too tidily. Avoid having characters fall out of airlocks or have their parentage retconned so that the writers don’t have to deal with them anymore. In improve, this is a kind of blocking called cancelling: instead of resolving the conflict that’s been raised in a scene, you come up with a reason why it just isn’t an issue. (“Oh no, a bear!” “It’s okay, he got caught in a bear trap.”) Look at the relationship between Kara/Starbuck and Lee/Apollo in BSG: on the most basic level, people wanted to know Will they wind up together? Was he her one true love, or were her feelings for him just another one of her self-destructive qualities? Not to mention her whole dying-and-coming-back-to-life thing, and the question of whether or not the Kara in the final season was the real one. So with that amount of screen time and fan speculation invested in a relationship, what you don’t do is have her disappear into thin air just when all the impediments to them being together have been removed. That’s not tragedy, it’s not irony, it’s just cancelling.

Hey. while those of you eligible are nominating Matt’s story for the Aurora Awards, why don’t you nominate that Beatles thing I did? Win-win.

Here, I’ll even set up a copypasta for you:

“Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer” By Christopher Bird (http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2009/11/10/scenes-from-an-alternate-universe-where-the-beatles-accepted-lorne-michaels-generous-offer)

See? Easy-peasy. Nominate me in “short fiction, English.”

In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’ve posted my short story “The Coldest War” (which originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction) online here. If you’re a Canadian citizen (not necessarily living in Canada) or a permanent resident, you can follow the handy-dandy links to the Aurora Awards nomination page once you’ve finished reading the story.

Last week, as you may have heard, Fox cancelled Dollhouse. Also last week, as you probably didn’t hear, whatever network aired Hank cancelled it too. Neither was a surprise: they were both solidly bottom-of-the barrel performers — Dollhouse was considered a worse bet than reruns of House to run during Sweeps Week, while Hank was frequently outperformed by its competition on Spanish-language networks. What ought to be a surprise is the reaction each received: the end of Dollhouse resulted in anguished howls that reverberated across the Internet and all the spheres of nerd-dom, while Hank‘s cancellation was received by a chorus of crickets.

The easy answer, of course, is that Dollhouse was a good show while Hank sucked. But presumably the people who were watching Hank didn’t think it sucked, and on average about twice as many people watched Hank as Dollhouse (though the two were on different nights, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair.) So our question remains: why were Dollhouse fans so much noisier about its cancellation, and about the show in general, than Hank‘s fans? The answer, I think, is in the phrasing: the people watching Hank were really just viewers, while the people watching Dollhouse were fans.

“Fan” is short for “fanatic,” of course, and the qualities that distinguish fans from viewers do have some similarities to fanaticism. Fans, in general, have a personal investment in whatever text it is they are fans of: they feel pleasure when other people recognize its quality (and pain when others criticize it), they care strongly about the narrative, they think about the text when not consuming it (sometimes to the point of wanting to be part of its creation), and they identify personally with its success or failure. All of these are similar to how one relates to, say, a political philosophy or religion.

What’s interesting is that while just about all religions or philosophies have attracted their fanatics, only certain texts have typically attracted fans: what are called (by non-fans) “genre” texts and, in general, the most marginalized and despised of those genres — science fiction, fantasy and their adjacent genres such as superheroes. That marginalization probably has something to do with the strength of fan-feeling — we define ourselves as much by what we’re not as by what we are, and shared exclusion can create a strong bond — but that’s obviously not all there is to it, or we’d be swimming in Gilligan’s Island fanfic. Another factor is probably the unreality of these genres, which provides the audience with “blank spaces” they’re invited to fill. Star Trek, for example — really the classic fan-text — provided next to no detail about its universe beyond what was absolutely necessary for the story, which led to endless speculation and discussion about just how many moons Vulcan has and what happened to Kirk’s nephew and so on. More importantly, it’s impossible to treat an SF or fantasy story as a “found object”; its unreality means someone must have written it. That may explain why I’ve never met anyone who read science fiction or fantasy fan who didn’t also want to write it, at least in passing.

For a long time mass media, and TV in particular, valued viewers over fans: a show that makes fans is, by its nature, harder for the casual viewer to get into, and therefore, all else being equal, will be watched by fewer people. But recently that trend has been reversed: with new distribution channels (particularly DVD sets) and increased competition from other media, the greater commitment that fans bring makes them worth more as consumers than simple viewers, which has led to the inclusion of fandom-generating elements such as continued stories in non-genre shows. As well, the Internet has made it much easier to connect with other fans of the same show, which has had the interesting result of creating fandoms for shows that traditionally wouldn’t have them. (The prime example of this is Mad Men, which has reached some kind of pop culture singularity where there are more people discussing it online than actually watch it.) It’s an odd and perhaps surprising phenomenon — I don’t know about you, but I threw up a little in my mouth when I learned there was such as thing as House fanfic — but it reveals just why a classic laugh-track, always-return-to-the-status-quo sitcom like Hank was such a dinosaur, and died so completely unmourned.

But, you ask, what does all this have to do with Being Erica? Okay, few of you — all right, none of you — are asking that, and probably most of you don’t even know what I’m talking about. For those among us from south of the border, Being Erica is basically My Name is Earl done as science fiction: the title character meets a mysterious “therapist,” Dr. Tom, who has her write down a list of regrets and lets her travel back in time to revisit each one, trying to make it better. Except that not only is it not called science fiction, the early promotional material insisted that it was not science fiction. I can only assume this was for the same reason that Margaret Atwood claims her books which clearly are SF aren’t: because many people, and in particular many women (the core target audience of both her books and Being Erica) simply won’t consider reading or viewing something if they think it’s SF. The result has been a tightrope walk, avoiding outright science fiction while providing fandom-inducing elements. This season has introduced a key one of those elements — a mythology, as we learn more about Dr. Tom, discover that there are other therapists like him, and that they have some sort of hierarchy — and I’m curious to see what effect this will have on the show’s already shaky ratings. In the first season Dr. Tom was really just a device, but with these added elements the show has moved clearly into the realm of the fantastic. If the conventional wisdom about women and SF is correct, it might just kill the show — but on the other hand, it could make it a show people will miss.

The call-for-requests post generated about seven emails all along the same line:

I’d really like to know how you wrote that Beatles story.

Okeydoke.