My shows are killing me
Mar. 14th, 2006 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI'm sorry I haven't posted much of anything lately except stupid stuff. No usage posts in ages, no movies, no reviews, no nothin' except mostly vids. I am just really struggling. Someone actually said to me that now that the date of my sister's death was past, I should be on a better track. Yeah. That actually makes it all better. I've been thinking a lot lately about things, and it finally hit me, the one thing I was never able to explain to people, who think this is just about grief or loss and that you get over it with time -- that it's PTSD, and that goes away a lot harder, if ever. I don't think most people know what it's like to watch someone die in especially gruesome circumstances, let alone someone who is literally part of you, shares your DNA and was born with you. So, yeah, it's kind of lingering trauma. But I never really get the chance to explain that to people.
Making things worse, weirdly, are my TV shows. See, I've always liked dark and dramatic and gloomy and people die and you can't expect that everything will come up roses. I mean, I live for that kind of thing in a lot of ways. But since sis_r died, I've found my ability to suck that up is declining to a point where I'm going to be forced to stop watching the stuff I love in favor of crap like SGA or the awful procedurals because the lead characters never die and you don't get confronted by reminders of what you've been through in your own life over and over. Thank god for Numb3rs or I might have accidentally downed that whole bottle of Atavan by now. Between the finale of BSG and the past two eps of 24, I'm about ready to throw in the towel. I know they're just shows, but they hurt. I'm invested in these people overcoming adversity, but the relentless death and sacrifice and loss and suffering is just getting under my skin in a pernicious way that I'm not sure I can keep coming back for. That they are both excellently written and acted works makes it even harder. If they were cheestastic and predictable, it might be a bit easier. I have no idea what to expect when Veronica Mars finally returns, but I'm scared of the possibilities.
I have not been one of the disgruntled fans this season that I see all around me. I've mostly kept my yap shut for the whole season not because I've been too unhappy to post in general (though that's been a constant), but because the stuff that seems to morally outrage people hasn't disappointed me at all. I can totally see other people's points and often find myself nodding my head, yet those things haven't bothered me. In most cases, for me, this show rocks like a rocking thing. Threads have been dropped that I wish hadn't (particularly Lee's dark night of the soul story, which I would very much have liked to see more of), and the Gaius worship gives me the blues in fandom, and boy did I hate Slutty!Drunk!Starbuck in that scene with her and Anders and Lee in the finale, but... most of the time, yeah, I've been okay.
But two big issues have come to tarnish this that I thought were being solved only to rear their ugly heads in the finale in a way that leaves me with a lingering dissatisfaction and a lot of heartache. One is something from earlier in the season: When Adama asks Sharon why the cylons want to exterminate the humans, she reminds him of his words questioning whether humans should survive. And he doesn't take issue with this, and neither do the showrunners seem to question this supposition. I have been bothered for a long time about the cylons' apparent need for a "final solution" with no explanation nor underlying reasoning. Revenge makes sense only for the initial attack; but to expend that much energy tracking the ragtag elements of the human race that they've successfully decimated, and then some, really doesn't make sense. Nor does the whole half cylon-half human baby. We keep hearing of this plan of god's from Six, something that I find increasingly tiresome in her breathy pronouncements, but there has been no forward momentum on it, and the lingering tease of the child is annoying. If the single purpose of the cylons was this child and the procreation of their race, I could almost understand it, but clearly the cylons want to exterminate humans, so why... create a hybrid race? Since the story is clearly following a Nazi ideal (and now we have the occupation of europe and the reannexation of the Sudentenland and all of that, with the hint of concentration camps coming), I expect this to go somewhere, but it isn't, and the human storyline is only getting grimmer and grimmer with no sense of a good vs. evil battle of wills. This is just evil kicking the ass of not necessarily good, but certainly not evil until good is wiped out... for some unspecified purpose.
And so the ongoing futility of the fight of the humans resonates to some degree, but its continuing, worsening futility is killing my soul. Yes, I know. It's just a show. Blah blah. But it's death on a continual, ceaseless continuum that appears to have absolutely no hope of stopping. I adored Download -- I thought, finally, that they had found the one thing I am so dissatisfied with (this pointless genocide that serves no purpose) in the show and brought it to life and that the story was now going to go in a more complex and emotional direction that I could find hope and drama in. That no one ever questioned Sharon's pronouncement to Adama, that he seemed to take it as an acceptable answer, has perturbed me for a long time. Downloaded seemed to me to finally be questioning the cylons' sense of purpose. Evil for evil's sake has always been a very, very unsatisfying conceit to me. I used to constantly look at, say, a character like Sauron and think, well, dude, if you wipe out pretty much everyone except you and your henchmen, you're gonna get really bored with your wiped-out universe with just you in it. The whole "wipe everyone out" thing annoys me in its blinkered stupidity. And the cylons just seem to be more of the same in this respect. With only 12 models, what can they hope to achieve in a universe devoid of anyone but them? There's no sense in this holocaust (not that there ever is, mind you, in the lunatic hatred of people for other people).
So, here I find myself in a weird quandary. I love the darkness of the story, I love the fight, but the hopelessness is getting me so down that I wanted to climb in bed after I watched Lay Down Your Burdens Pt. 2 and never get out. That suddenly no one seems able to stand up to cowardly, weaselly, spineless, self-absorbed, clearly insane Baltar, even when in the past they seemed able to put the president in the brig, doesn't work for me. That they are so short-sighted they probably deserve what they've gotten bothers me. But that the groundwork we saw for some kind of change, for some development of conscience in the cylons, in Downloaded has been apparently completely negated confuses and disappoints and depresses me. I don't see much hope for humanity. And weirdly, it wasn't the ending of the ep that bothered me so much, but rather the nuclear explosion on Cloud 9 and the loss of life in that. It seems as if BSG has just become about who's gonna die next. I've had a little too much of that lately in my own life to welcome it in my entertainment as if it's... well, entertainment. If in fact Six and Sharon are really setting things up for change, well, then, maybe I'll jump back into the bosom of the show. I don't know. I'm sure that after the 7-month frackin' wait, I'll want to see what they come up with, but I don't know. I could be in a different place emotionally in 7 months. But that fact that over and over, NO one seems to learn and change in this show, that it's simply a death toll, is turning out to be destructive to my psyche. I never thought I'd say this, but I just can't take the grimness without some sense that there's a tiny sliver of hope. And Moore and Co. haven't given me that at all.
I think I might be able to handle the relentless death and death and even more death on BSG if it wasn't followed by a hefty chaser of everyone is going to die on 24. I could kind of handle the fact that both Michelle and Palmer were killed in the season opener because it set up such an intense storyline. But then every week it feels like someone else is getting offed. I think I'd have lost it completely if that poor kid Derek had really been killed, but just the fact that he came so close was really not good for me. But in the past weeks, we've had most of CTU topped, culminating in Edgar's terrible death, and this week we get the poor security guard with family and Lynn who yeah, was a jackass but he did save Jack's life before (and Derek's), and worst of all, my beloved Tony.
I've gotten to a point where I tune in half as much for Jack's hijinx as I do for Chloe's bitching, but more than both of them, to get a glimpse of my Tony. And I had hoped, based on some comments the producers made about how they could sustain the show and ways they could go in a different direction, that Tony might be a viable character they could use if they did. I love him. I adore him. And they killed him off, right on the heels of Edgar and the other guys and it is just too much. I know from being an LFN fan that this is how Surnow, Cochran, and Loceff like to stick it to us fans. But how many people have to get capped for our "entertainment"? Tony's death hit me so hard last night I couldn't sleep. He's just a character. On a thriller-action show. I know. And yet I have invested a lot of time in this series, sticking with it when it got bad, rejoicing when it found its legs again... And yeah, I know, death happens all around (especially in really bad terrorist situations...) I know that all too well. But I can't cope with it happening every single week (this week on 24! Another character you love dies horribly!), no matter what the thriller theme. I'm not sure why they think this is an attractant for an audience.
Most people honestly aren't like me -- I know only a handful of people outside fandom who like dark movies and noble deaths and really gloomy TV shows. Even within fandom, I think more people prefer shows like SGA or Supernatural where you know no one important will ever die. That's generally how things are, and I find it so weird to think that I am moving in that direction. I just don't enjoy turning on this show I like where every freaking week someone I love dies. Yes, it adds resonance -- the first time. Maybe even the second. But by the 5th or 6th time, it's just deadening and soul crushing. 24 isn't reality. They have realistic aspects, but we all know how outlandish it is. To keep pounding us every week with the loss and sacrifice of characters we've invested our hearts and minds in is a wrong turn, I think. Gah. Just gah.
I'm sure people who haven't been dealing with their own losses probably think I'm nuts. To be this uptight about mere characters is... sure, I know, silly. But they represent something for me, a world where people's problems are worse than my own, but where they have the possibility of righting the very things I could never fix in my own life. Humanity has to have some hope that they can survive the terrible things thrown at them by evil, the superagents of CTU have to be able to hurt the bad guys and save the good guys. I couldn't help my mom or my sister or my friends. I couldn't save their lives or ease their suffering. And to have to watch people who can't rise above those same inabilities, week after week, watching them go through much of what I've felt and endured recently, just feels like rubbing salt in wounds. I know I'm being a doof, but... I'm a tired, emotionally bruised doof who's going to have to start filtering her entertainments for the first time ever.
Making things worse, weirdly, are my TV shows. See, I've always liked dark and dramatic and gloomy and people die and you can't expect that everything will come up roses. I mean, I live for that kind of thing in a lot of ways. But since sis_r died, I've found my ability to suck that up is declining to a point where I'm going to be forced to stop watching the stuff I love in favor of crap like SGA or the awful procedurals because the lead characters never die and you don't get confronted by reminders of what you've been through in your own life over and over. Thank god for Numb3rs or I might have accidentally downed that whole bottle of Atavan by now. Between the finale of BSG and the past two eps of 24, I'm about ready to throw in the towel. I know they're just shows, but they hurt. I'm invested in these people overcoming adversity, but the relentless death and sacrifice and loss and suffering is just getting under my skin in a pernicious way that I'm not sure I can keep coming back for. That they are both excellently written and acted works makes it even harder. If they were cheestastic and predictable, it might be a bit easier. I have no idea what to expect when Veronica Mars finally returns, but I'm scared of the possibilities.
I have not been one of the disgruntled fans this season that I see all around me. I've mostly kept my yap shut for the whole season not because I've been too unhappy to post in general (though that's been a constant), but because the stuff that seems to morally outrage people hasn't disappointed me at all. I can totally see other people's points and often find myself nodding my head, yet those things haven't bothered me. In most cases, for me, this show rocks like a rocking thing. Threads have been dropped that I wish hadn't (particularly Lee's dark night of the soul story, which I would very much have liked to see more of), and the Gaius worship gives me the blues in fandom, and boy did I hate Slutty!Drunk!Starbuck in that scene with her and Anders and Lee in the finale, but... most of the time, yeah, I've been okay.
But two big issues have come to tarnish this that I thought were being solved only to rear their ugly heads in the finale in a way that leaves me with a lingering dissatisfaction and a lot of heartache. One is something from earlier in the season: When Adama asks Sharon why the cylons want to exterminate the humans, she reminds him of his words questioning whether humans should survive. And he doesn't take issue with this, and neither do the showrunners seem to question this supposition. I have been bothered for a long time about the cylons' apparent need for a "final solution" with no explanation nor underlying reasoning. Revenge makes sense only for the initial attack; but to expend that much energy tracking the ragtag elements of the human race that they've successfully decimated, and then some, really doesn't make sense. Nor does the whole half cylon-half human baby. We keep hearing of this plan of god's from Six, something that I find increasingly tiresome in her breathy pronouncements, but there has been no forward momentum on it, and the lingering tease of the child is annoying. If the single purpose of the cylons was this child and the procreation of their race, I could almost understand it, but clearly the cylons want to exterminate humans, so why... create a hybrid race? Since the story is clearly following a Nazi ideal (and now we have the occupation of europe and the reannexation of the Sudentenland and all of that, with the hint of concentration camps coming), I expect this to go somewhere, but it isn't, and the human storyline is only getting grimmer and grimmer with no sense of a good vs. evil battle of wills. This is just evil kicking the ass of not necessarily good, but certainly not evil until good is wiped out... for some unspecified purpose.
And so the ongoing futility of the fight of the humans resonates to some degree, but its continuing, worsening futility is killing my soul. Yes, I know. It's just a show. Blah blah. But it's death on a continual, ceaseless continuum that appears to have absolutely no hope of stopping. I adored Download -- I thought, finally, that they had found the one thing I am so dissatisfied with (this pointless genocide that serves no purpose) in the show and brought it to life and that the story was now going to go in a more complex and emotional direction that I could find hope and drama in. That no one ever questioned Sharon's pronouncement to Adama, that he seemed to take it as an acceptable answer, has perturbed me for a long time. Downloaded seemed to me to finally be questioning the cylons' sense of purpose. Evil for evil's sake has always been a very, very unsatisfying conceit to me. I used to constantly look at, say, a character like Sauron and think, well, dude, if you wipe out pretty much everyone except you and your henchmen, you're gonna get really bored with your wiped-out universe with just you in it. The whole "wipe everyone out" thing annoys me in its blinkered stupidity. And the cylons just seem to be more of the same in this respect. With only 12 models, what can they hope to achieve in a universe devoid of anyone but them? There's no sense in this holocaust (not that there ever is, mind you, in the lunatic hatred of people for other people).
So, here I find myself in a weird quandary. I love the darkness of the story, I love the fight, but the hopelessness is getting me so down that I wanted to climb in bed after I watched Lay Down Your Burdens Pt. 2 and never get out. That suddenly no one seems able to stand up to cowardly, weaselly, spineless, self-absorbed, clearly insane Baltar, even when in the past they seemed able to put the president in the brig, doesn't work for me. That they are so short-sighted they probably deserve what they've gotten bothers me. But that the groundwork we saw for some kind of change, for some development of conscience in the cylons, in Downloaded has been apparently completely negated confuses and disappoints and depresses me. I don't see much hope for humanity. And weirdly, it wasn't the ending of the ep that bothered me so much, but rather the nuclear explosion on Cloud 9 and the loss of life in that. It seems as if BSG has just become about who's gonna die next. I've had a little too much of that lately in my own life to welcome it in my entertainment as if it's... well, entertainment. If in fact Six and Sharon are really setting things up for change, well, then, maybe I'll jump back into the bosom of the show. I don't know. I'm sure that after the 7-month frackin' wait, I'll want to see what they come up with, but I don't know. I could be in a different place emotionally in 7 months. But that fact that over and over, NO one seems to learn and change in this show, that it's simply a death toll, is turning out to be destructive to my psyche. I never thought I'd say this, but I just can't take the grimness without some sense that there's a tiny sliver of hope. And Moore and Co. haven't given me that at all.
I think I might be able to handle the relentless death and death and even more death on BSG if it wasn't followed by a hefty chaser of everyone is going to die on 24. I could kind of handle the fact that both Michelle and Palmer were killed in the season opener because it set up such an intense storyline. But then every week it feels like someone else is getting offed. I think I'd have lost it completely if that poor kid Derek had really been killed, but just the fact that he came so close was really not good for me. But in the past weeks, we've had most of CTU topped, culminating in Edgar's terrible death, and this week we get the poor security guard with family and Lynn who yeah, was a jackass but he did save Jack's life before (and Derek's), and worst of all, my beloved Tony.
I've gotten to a point where I tune in half as much for Jack's hijinx as I do for Chloe's bitching, but more than both of them, to get a glimpse of my Tony. And I had hoped, based on some comments the producers made about how they could sustain the show and ways they could go in a different direction, that Tony might be a viable character they could use if they did. I love him. I adore him. And they killed him off, right on the heels of Edgar and the other guys and it is just too much. I know from being an LFN fan that this is how Surnow, Cochran, and Loceff like to stick it to us fans. But how many people have to get capped for our "entertainment"? Tony's death hit me so hard last night I couldn't sleep. He's just a character. On a thriller-action show. I know. And yet I have invested a lot of time in this series, sticking with it when it got bad, rejoicing when it found its legs again... And yeah, I know, death happens all around (especially in really bad terrorist situations...) I know that all too well. But I can't cope with it happening every single week (this week on 24! Another character you love dies horribly!), no matter what the thriller theme. I'm not sure why they think this is an attractant for an audience.
Most people honestly aren't like me -- I know only a handful of people outside fandom who like dark movies and noble deaths and really gloomy TV shows. Even within fandom, I think more people prefer shows like SGA or Supernatural where you know no one important will ever die. That's generally how things are, and I find it so weird to think that I am moving in that direction. I just don't enjoy turning on this show I like where every freaking week someone I love dies. Yes, it adds resonance -- the first time. Maybe even the second. But by the 5th or 6th time, it's just deadening and soul crushing. 24 isn't reality. They have realistic aspects, but we all know how outlandish it is. To keep pounding us every week with the loss and sacrifice of characters we've invested our hearts and minds in is a wrong turn, I think. Gah. Just gah.
I'm sure people who haven't been dealing with their own losses probably think I'm nuts. To be this uptight about mere characters is... sure, I know, silly. But they represent something for me, a world where people's problems are worse than my own, but where they have the possibility of righting the very things I could never fix in my own life. Humanity has to have some hope that they can survive the terrible things thrown at them by evil, the superagents of CTU have to be able to hurt the bad guys and save the good guys. I couldn't help my mom or my sister or my friends. I couldn't save their lives or ease their suffering. And to have to watch people who can't rise above those same inabilities, week after week, watching them go through much of what I've felt and endured recently, just feels like rubbing salt in wounds. I know I'm being a doof, but... I'm a tired, emotionally bruised doof who's going to have to start filtering her entertainments for the first time ever.
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Date: 2006-03-14 11:23 pm (UTC)I loved downloaded, after the burnout of week after week of "watch humans fuck up their situation in a new way this week." And the finale seemed to have nothing to do with the interesting direction suggested by Downloaded. Which I found very disappointing.
I suppose they want to get the story back onto a united by fighting against the One Enemy storyline for next year, but it felt cheaply done to me, like an over convenient trick.
I had exactly the same problem with Balthar - the fact that no one was able to stand up to him - it was out of character for the captain and way too convenient. And I think you have an excellent point about evil for evil's sake. Gets kind of boring as a plot point.
If you are in the mood, you should post the BSG comments over at TATF. We're having a little conversation about it, amidst the major flurry of people trying to finish the new chapter for Three Deep.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-14 11:59 pm (UTC)Yes, "cheap" and "trick" are exactly the right words.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-15 03:10 am (UTC)You are absolutely right -- that's what's bothering me, the disconnect between the hope of Downloaded and the finale. It's as if they didn't exist in the same universe and while I loved much of the finale, it's just too much for me right now. They offered me something that I needed, and then they just kinda took it away.