My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

(Those waiting for the next page in Al’Rashad: my host migrated my IP over the weekend and it’s created some technical issues with uploading images. Rest assured Top Men are working on the problem and the page will be up as soon as possible.)

I’ve been thinking about the traditional heel/face (bad guy/good guy) dichotomy in pro wrestling for some time now. It’s interesting because it tends to be rare that a truly popular face, one the crowds will cheer like mad, starts out a face and then remains a face until they are a megastar. There are a few who did it that way (Ricky Steamboat and Rey Mysterio being the most notable). But more common is for a wrestler who is not over with the crowds to spend some time as a heel and build up a following in that manner.

There are reasons, of course. The hardcore fans love a good heel because then they can cheer for the guy all the little kids boo. (This has never been more true than when the company is headed up by a truly over face in their prime, a la Hulk Hogan or John Cena.) Heels get to be snarky and clever and sarcastic. Heels drive storylines – faces, like superheroes in comic books, are reactive elements in the story rather than proactive. Heels get to cheat, and cheating is the easiest and most satisfying way to get a crowd reaction. And if you’re a good wrestler at all – if you understand the skill of making moves look realistic, both on the giving and receiving end, and if you understand how to pace and build a match – in many ways you get more opportunities to build your craft as a heel. Thus, a very common progression for most wrestlers is to vary between the two – spend time as a heel, then time as a face, and revert back and so forth.

But the real reason most wrestlers who build a following start doing it when they’re heels because faces are the people the fans want to cheer, and it’s not easy at all to tell a crowd to cheer somebody. The Rock, Randy Orton, and John Cena (just to name a few) all started out as basically vanilla faces that the WWF/WWE tried to get the fans to cheer, and all failed miserably to draw a reaction until they were converted into heels.

But the WWE’s current problem in this regard started with Steve Austin back in 1996 or 1997, because Steve Austin was over as a heel and then was converted into a face – except he wasn’t. He was a heel who happened to get cheers and who continued to act like a heel: he would cheerfully cheat and swear and be a bad person generally and this was all sort of awesome. But then the Rock started doing the same thing, because he was mega-over as a heel and it just sort of stuck.

And on some level this is understandable, because if you get over as a heel doing a specific thing, you’re not going to want to mess with that just because you’ve become so popular that now you have to be a face by default. But now it often seems like the WWE’s top faces are just heels who happen to get cheers rather than boos. CM Punk, for example, is still basically a dickhead. Randy Orton just beats people up for the hell of it. And John Cena, who is supposed to be the WWE equivalent of Superman, now seems to spend more time beating up and humilating non-wrestlers in a distinctly creepy way than beating up baddie wrestlers.

It’s a problem, because wrestlers have to come up with new ways to get boos and if it is suddenly cool for the good guys to beat up and humiliate or emasculate helpless people, then they need to up their ante. (Daniel Bryan was on the verge of turning face by default but seems to have pulled back from that by maxing out his dickishness to an amazing degree.) But this leads me to wonder: is there something faces can do to proactively get cheers?

The only thing I can think of is the rescue. Fans always mark out for one face coming to rescue another, probably because it hits that six-year-old inside of us (or, in the case of Cena kids – and admit it, even if you don’t like Cena, Cena kids are awesome – outside of us) who wants Batman to show up whenever Luthor is menacing Superman with Kryptonite and beat Luthor up Bat-style. But is there anything else? I am genuinely stumped here.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I’m not a movie guy.  I’m the guy who would watch Avengers at home, alone, on my 36″ TV if I didn’t have to wait four months to do it.  So I mostly only read movie reviews to see if some movie that actively annoys me is being panned.  Usually movies that annoy me are the ones that air too many obnoxious commercials, but in this case it’s Men in Black 3, which is a completely unecessary sequel to a completely unecessary sequel.

So I’m reading the MIB 3 review on Time.com and I come across this passage:

The average moviegoer is well educated in the particulars of time travel. Even if your high school curriculum didn’t include any H.G. Wells, thanks to Back to the Future, Terminator and dozens of other films, just about everyone knows how it works. Why don’t the fleet of screenwriters who cooked up this script? They have J wake up the morning after the bloodbath at the Chinese restaurant to a world already missing K. This makes no sense. Boris hasgone back in time, but given that he hasn’t found or killed young K yet, old K ought to be alive, well and doing that “sort of surly Elvis” thing he does in contemporary Manhattan. Instead he’s dead and gone, and at headquarters, only the boss and former paramour, O (Emma Thompson, 53 and playing 65 or so, every actress’s dream) even remembers old K.1

It says something about our society’s perception of time that the reviewer apparently thinks Back to the Future makes perfect sense and this plot does not.  Let’s be honest, most time travel stories are completely illogical poppcycock,2 but in general we do not care as long as we’re satisfied that the story follows certain rules we’ve come to expect, which I have given snazzy names because why the hell not:

1. Brown’s Law: A time traveler is capable of preventing events he has already witnessed, but it is extremely dangerous (in some nebulous, end-of-the-universe, don’t-cross-the-streams kind of way) and should be avoided.3
2. Connor’s Berth: The effects of a time traveler’s changes to the timestream are synchronized with the timeframe from which he departed.  That is, if I go back in time and a week after I arrive I prevent your conception, you have a week from my time of departure to send somebody to stop me before you cease to exist.
3. McFly’s Confidence: Time travelers are “immune” from the effects of changing history (even when the changes directly affect their own lives) and retain full knowledge of whatever nonexistent timelines they’ve witnessed.
4. Guinan’s Exception: “Stationary” observers are only “immune” to changes in history through extraordinary circumstances, like being a special kind of alien or standing next  to the Guardian of Forever.
5. Simpson’s Razor: The only changes a time traveler must concern himself with are the ones he can perceive; he needs only to make additional changes that restore history “close enough” to his personal satisfaction.
6. Beckett’s Mandate: The morality of altering the timeline is subjective and ultimately determined by the sympathies of the audience, represented within the story by the will of  “God, time, fate, or whatever.”4

So yes, the setup of Men In Black 3 apparently breaks several of these rules, but the rules are arbitrary to begin with–they have no logical basis and aren’t rigorously applied even in the stories that purportedly follow them.  As long as the good guy needs to fix time, the bad guys are trying to stop him, and the viewer isn’t completely lost, everything else is just gravy.  This is why so many Star Trek time travel episodes suck–not because they don’t play by the rules, but because the writers confuse themselves, give up, and end with an explosion that puts everything back to normal.5  In the end the only rule is to tell a good story, although I am dubious that the 10,000th variant of “Let’s go back in time to the late 1960s!” can do that.

1. If you’re wondering why I read Time’s movie reviews, it’s for the elitist attitude.  “Oh, your average mouth-breather at least saw an  Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but my school could afford actual books by H.G. Wells!” [↩]
2. The Bill & Ted duology being a notable exception that follows Novikov’s self-consistency principle. [↩]
3. Incidentally, Thunderbolts #174 recently broached the subject of what the danger actually is, which was quite satisfying. [↩]
4. You might say “But the audience wanted Sam to save his dad!” but we really didn’t because that would fundamentally alter Sam’s history, and thus Sam as a character.  Similarly, Sam can’t fix Al’s past until the series is over and we don’t need Al to be a lovable creep anymore. [↩]
5. Jim’s Law of Time Travel clearly states that if you think your time travel story is so confusing that you decide to have a character point out how confusing it is,  you probably  should not be writing a time travel story. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Black Mage: Does Thomas Mulcair have a good shot of winning the next Canadian election? Is it a better/worse shot than any of the other NDP contenders?

I would say yes and I don’t know, respectively. I think Mulcair is perhaps better positioned to leech votes from the centre than any other of the NDP candidates were and he’ll protect the new Quebec base, but the fact that he is from Quebec will be at least a slight negative in the West because they get incredibly pissy about that. I think on balance he was the best choice, not because he of geography or politics, but because he’s a political gut-punch fighter, and that’s what going to be necessary until the next election. But the NDP bench was really deep this time around (due in large part to Jack Layton making sure that it would be), so Mulcair is just the best of a strong lot.

supergp: If you were going to write a big comic crossover event, what would your premise be?

Old DC: Probably something involving most of the major heroes being mind-controlled with Starro or whatever and a few stragglers left to save the day. Probably including Empress, Major Disaster, and Geist the Twilight Man as some of the rebel fringe. (Yes, I know both MD and Geist were supposedly killed in Infinite Crisis. My answer to that is simple: “nuh-uh.”)

New DC: Something that brings back the old DC.

Marvel: Victor Von Doom. Infinity Gauntlet. *drops mic*

JDR: Can you compare Canada to some country(ies) that aren’t the USA?

Well, we’re colder than Botswana, freer than Yemen, less blonde than Sweden, better at parking than Italy, have less Japanese people than Japan, have better McDonald’s than Australia, less jiggly at most times than Brazil, less shaky than Djibouti, less class-riddled than England, have more Tamils working as line cooks than Sri Lanka (seriously, in Toronto Tamils fill the same role that the various Central American immigrants do in American kitchens; one of my former roommates, a sous chef and thoroughly white dude, spoke decent Tamil), easier to pronounce than Kyrgyzstan, less desert-y than the Western Sahara, and our French bears only a slight resemblance to France’s French. How’s that?

Greg Morrow: What is the most important difference between the constitutional laws of Canada and the United States? Not the procedural stuff about how the legislature is constituted, but the substantive stuff about civil rights and limited government power.

Probably the existence of s.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the limitations clause. (Which, for the uninitiated, allows the government to pass laws which limit individual rights, so long as those laws are relatively specific and enumerated and that the limitation is justifiable in a free and democratic society.) It prevents a lot of “this absolute principle is clashing with that other absolute principle” confusion that arises whenever rights collide with other rights, which actually happens just about all the time. Of course, I know more than a few Constititional scholars who absolutely loathe the existence of s.1, so who knows.

Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?

It’s not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap.

You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, clearly having aged in real time from the end of the show, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn’t be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss.

And that’s when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn’t quite understand it, suddenly they’re working together to do something he can’t quite understand. The three of them are now leaping together, and every time she reminds him of what’s been happening so he doesn’t lose track. She’s working with slightly more advanced technology than Sam is, but even her advances aren’t enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she has enlisted Sam’s help. Two Leapers, working in tandem across multiple times, can pull it off. There’s no other way.

What has happened? Thanks to the interference of the second Leaper (who is much younger than Sam), Sam has traveled into her timeline. This leaper dies much, much later than Sam will – a century or more later – and this means she and Sam, together, can effect the events necessary for a future Leaper to leap backwards and give her the technology she so desperately needs to return Sam home. And so the present changes the future changes the past changes the present…

…because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, that Married… With Children is 25 years old today makes me feel very old indeed.