Ending it Well

Photo attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/ / CC BY 2.0

 

Undergoing a dramatic and completely involuntary lifestyle rearrangement has been a depressingly frequent occurrence in my life.  From getting torn from my hometown as a child by a particularly dramatic familial disintegration, to having my left leg shattered into a million pieces by a wild Ford Taurus, to other, less action-packed ways to have my personal status quo sent into a bottomless abyss, I’ve had to rebuild from the ground up at least seven times that I can think of off the top of my head.  As a result, I’ve spent many a worried, harried night in bed thinking about “endings.”  I’m not a fan of them.  To be more precise, I hate them with the fury of a thousand suns.  Change is not something I embrace easily to begin with, and when that change comes in the form of everything in my life that makes me feel safe or happy being completely blown up with a bloody neutron bomb, I don’t react in the best way.  I cannot stand the idea of something that you enjoy or appreciate ending.  This is probably a function of my past life experiences, an instinctual, PTSD-style reaction borne out of the traumas, disappointments, failures, and raw pain that the aforementioned “lifestyle rearrangements” have wrought.  On the other side of one of those violent shifts in my life, when I actually manage to find something that doesn’t punch me right in the soul, I grab onto it with both hands, refusing to let go, much like Charlton Heston.

So, it should come as no shock that I feel the same way about stories that I enjoy.  I always hate getting to the end.  I remember when I would watch the original Star Wars Trilogy as a child, or the Back to the Future Trilogy.  I would always get sort of sad and wistful as I would get near the end of the third entries, because it meant the adventure was almost over.  An imminent return to boring reality was imminent.  I got warm fuzzies when, at the end of the final episode of the anime series Outlaw Star, the usual “To!  Be!  Continued!” that wrapped up each entry was replaced with a hearty and winking “See!  You!  Again!” promising more adventures, even though they never came (you heard me, goddamn it, they never came).  I was, quite possibly, the only person in the universe who was not annoyed by the 378 or so endings to the film adaptation of The Return of the King, because it felt like the story would still somehow continue.  I was disappointed and vaguely sad when Sam finally closed that door.

Since endings affect me so, the way creators handle the endings to their stories (assuming they get the chance to end them) is more important to me than to most people.  Which makes it all the more galling and frustrating that, while conversing with a friend recently about quality endings to television series, the only genuinely good final episodes I could name, after thinking about it for several minutes, were the final episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, and Breaking Bad.  Which begs the question, what on Earth is wrong with all of these Hollywood writers?  Why can’t they end their stories well?  Why is it, when they get to the end of their tales, the writers either dive off the freaking Cliffs of Insanity and pull something that feels like an episode from a completely different series out of the ether, or completely drop the ball and deliver a fundamentally unsatisfying and clearly rushed and cobbled together bookend for their show?  I’ve argued, at length, that when you’re telling a continuing, serialized story, you have to at least have a vague notion of where you’re going with it, lest you end up with a tangled, nonsensical mess that drives your viewers insane with unanswered questions and dangling plotlines.  That would explain the terrible, terrible ending to a series like Lost, but the phenomenon of the disappointing final episode cannot be explained away so easily, because the final episodes of nearly every sitcom and stand-alone episodic series are equally abysmal!

So, what’s going on here?  As I just pointed out above, lousy endings to serialized stories are the easiest to explain, with creators often either not planning ahead well-enough (Lost, The X-Files, Alias), or over-planning to the point that they end up writing themselves into a corner (the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos).  Everyone needs to learn from Babylon 5 here.  J. Michael Straczynski knew precisely where he was going, even if he didn’t know every detail of how he would get there, and even had “trap doors” ready to get rid of any character cleanly in case an actor died or wanted to leave (he ended up utilizing a few of these).  As a result, B5‘s final episode, “Sleeping in Light,” which I’ve previously covered, is a perfect epilogue to the story.

Now, stand-alone dramas and sitcoms are much harder to explain.  Why does an otherwise quality show suddenly go pear-shaped in its final moments?  Laziness is the most frequent culprit with stand-alones, I suspect.  The final episode of Seinfeld, a prime example, reeks of extreme “senioritis,” as if the writing staff was staring at the clock, waiting for the last school day to end so they could just go to college and get laid, already, exclaiming, “who gives a damn what happens to these characters, no one is ever going to watch all the episodes in order!”  This is the only thing that can possibly explain why one of the greatest comedies in television history ends with a clip show and the main characters in jail.  Other times, like with How I Met Your Mother or Star Trek: Voyager, the writers seem to have had a very different set of characters in mind than the audience did, completely misunderstanding their own stories and the way their audience was reacting to them (Admiral Janeway is arguably one of the greatest villains in Star Trek history thanks to her conduct in “Endgame,” so it’s a good thing she goes down with the Borg Unicomplex).  And, of course, there’s always the horrendously unsatisfying (except to teenage viewers) “ultimate wish-fulfillment” final episode, where the writing staff appears to hand the writing chores to a Mary Sue fanfic writer, letting her make all her wildest dreams comes true (which usually means “everyone pairs up in perfect couples like they’re boarding Noah’s ark, and also gets their dream job in another city, so that there’s a reason the series is ending”).  Friends.  Friends, Friends, Friends.  Hell, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine basically did this!

But what about those other last episodes?  You know, the incredibly bizarre ones?  These are my favorite, even though they’re terrible, and basically raping your memories of the show you’ve been watching for years.  Like Quantum Leap‘s sudden turn into a goddamn Twilight Zone of disappearing Russians and quiet introspection after 96 prior episodes of happy-go-lucky adventure?  Or the family friendly Jim Henson puppet-populated sitcom Dinosaurs ending with the entire cast being left to freaking freeze to death as their entire species goes extinct?!  The stranger, out-of-place final episodes seem to be some sort of cracked, poop-flinging moment of “this is the last chance I have to write that deep and introspective character study I’ve always wanted to put out there!” as screamed by the showrunner of ALF.  Like when for absolutely no reason, St. Elsewhere ends with the entire show being revealed to have taken place inside the mind of a random autistic kid (along with a dozen other shows, since St. Elsewhere kept crossing over with other series), as if this is some grand and deep reveal.  …It was just an episodic medical drama!  It was like finding out that Larry and Balki are actually plugged into the Matrix at the end, just because!

…Sorry, I need a moment, I was picturing Bronson Pinchot fighting Morpheus.

The Bob Newhart vehicle, Newhart, did the same thing, in the greatest meta-joke of all time, by ending with the reveal that the entire series took place inside the dreams of Newhart’s character from his earlier sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show.  Blake’s 7 did this, too, but actually pulled it off, probably because it was, admittedly, a serialized story, and had the hairy, hairy balls to take the “what the hell?!” up to 11, ending with everyone dying.  Everyone.  Absolutely everyone.  The show ends with the last surviving character surrounded by enemies, slowly raising his weapon and glaring into the camera.  BAM!  Smash cut to credits over the sound of lasers firing.  Awesome, but still, what the hell, guys?!  Seriously, I have no idea why this is so common.  The “what the hell, it’s the end” instinct is the only thing that makes sense to me here.

At any rate, as we seem to be in a golden age of television at the moment, we can all hope that the showrunners and head writers out there have learned their lesson, and can give us better finishes than this.  But I’d say it’s even money that Game of Thrones ends with Boromir waking up with the Fellowship, shaking Aragorn awake and telling him he had “the strangest dream.”  But for the sake of my oh, so important “warm fuzzies,” I hope they do better.  I need some satisfying conclusions in my life!  …Now, finish the damned books before they catch up to you, George R. R.!

 

New York, NY
May 7, 2014

Please Rise

Photo attribution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeymikez/ / CC BY 2.0

 

While watching the 2014 Winter Olympics a few weeks ago, I was, as I usually am, struck by how odd a concept national anthems are.  I mean, it’s basically a leitmotif for your country, as if it were a character in a play.  The very notion is really odd, especially on this side of the 20th century.  National anthems are, despite what one might think, a fairly recent phenomenon.  They have their roots in nationalism, a concept that dates back to only the 19th century, and which doesn’t have nearly the same kind of pull now that it did just 30 years ago, in the midst of the Cold War.  Some of the anthems out there are far older than nationalism is, but were usually not written with “become my country’s theme song” in mind.  Some of them, including the American one, started out as drinking songs!

Well, while pondering the strangeness of national anthems as a thing, it suddenly occurred to me that despite the dozens, nay, hundreds of fictional nations I can name off the top of my head from science fiction and fantasy, there are only a handful of anthems that I could think of representing them.  It’s as if all of the creators were deliberately avoiding the subject, for fear of creating too strong a connection with the real world and all of its associated political hangups.  It’s just exceedingly rare to hear an anthem from a fictional nation.  So rare, in fact, that after I made this list of all of the fictional anthems I could think of off the top of my head, when I checked online for any that I was unaware of or had forgotten, I found that I was only missing a handful more, none of them especially memorable.  Let’s take a look at the ones that stuck with me…

 

Animaniacs – “The National Anthem of Anvilania”

Weren’t expecting this one, were you?  Yes, the 1990s children’s television series Animaniacs featured, as the national anthem of an anvil-themed medieval nation state, a parody of the singing style of Perry Como.  Who was last relevant as a singer in the public consciousness circa 1980.  Odd choice there, guys, but whatever.  Even as a kid only vaguely aware of who Como (fittingly styled “Perry Coma” here) was, I found the joke funny, and the “song,” such as it was, absurdistly memorable, something Animaniacs was kind of known for being.  Yes, inexplicably, you will have this stuck in your head for a while.

 

Battlestar Galactica (2003 series) – “The National Anthem of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol”

This was a great idea all around.  Bear McCreary, who composed the modern BSG score in the style of a Japanese war march/Irish folk song, very cleverly brought back the bombastic, Star Wars-style theme Stu Phillips wrote for the original 1970s BSG television series as the anthem of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.  It’s insanely out of place in the exceedingly grimdark reimagined series, which makes it all the better, considering how utterly ridiculous national anthems tend to be in degrees of bombastic-ness and levels of “never mind all the problems, sing about how awesome we are.”

 

Borat – “The National Anthem of Kazakhstan”

The potassium really is impressive.  Arguably, this shouldn’t be on here, since Kazakhstan is a real country, but the version of it from Borat might as well be on the moon for all it has in common with its real life counterpart, so this one gets to be here.  But seriously, all you need to know about this spoof of a Soviet-style anthem is that it was so popular that it was actually accidentally played as the “real” anthem of Kazakhstan when a Kazakh athlete won a gold medal at the 10th Annual Arab Shooting Championship in Kuwait in 2012.  Yeah.  That happened.  Try to watch this video without wincing in sympathy.  The really sad part?  Kazakhstan’s actual anthem is really, really good.

 

Caprica – “The National Anthem of Caprica”

Another work from Bear McCready, this one was written as the anthem of the planet Caprica in the BSG prequel series Caprica, which would later become part of the “Twelve Colonies” from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.  There’s really nothing specific to say here except that this is a lovely piece of music, and sounds completely like a 100% real anthem, and a good one, at that.

 

Final Fantasy VIII – “Cactus Jack” (The National Anthem of the Republic of Galbadia)

Nobuo Uematsu is a…  Let’s call him an “interesting” composer, fond of doing completely insane stuff like mixing the musical styles of Jimi Hendrix and Igor Stravinsky.  Best known for composing the music for nine of the fourteen main Final Fantasy video games, he wrote this one for Final Fantasy VIII‘s arrogant, war mongering Republic of Galbadia.  It sounds a bit odd filtered as it is through the old PlayStation’s MIDI synthesizer, but it doesn’t take much imagination to get an idea of what it would have sounded like played by an actual orchestra: like half of the less memorable national anthems from the real world.

 

Follow That Bird – “The Grouch Anthem”

Hehehe…  Somewhere back in 1985, a 5-year-old me is grinning like a cheshire cat.

 

The Hunger Games – “Horn of Plenty” (The National Anthem of Panem)

Arguably the best fictional national anthem I’ve ever heard, James Newton Howard’s “Horn of Plenty” for the futuristic dystopia of Panem, is perfectly fascistic, histrionic, and epic.  And you can’t help but love the anthem, and how incredibly boastful and prideful the lyrics are, even while you hate what it’s celebrating.  Which is kind of the point (see the Soviet Union’s national anthem, which worked so perfectly as an anthem that it was brought back with altered lyrics in 2000 for the modern Russian Federation, despite the unfortunate association with a horribly oppressive regime).

 

Nineteen Eighty-Four – “Oceania ‘Tis for Thee” (The National Anthem of Oceania)

On its face, this is a straightforward national anthem with all of the standard accoutrements of jingoism, over-the-top praise, and borderline silly pride.  Until you read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or watch the 1984 film adaptation this version of the anthem is from, and realize just how utterly insane it is that any song even remotely like this represents Oceania.  A single, icy piano note would probably be more appropriate.  “Blackwhite,” indeed.

 

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – “The National Anthem of the United Federation of Planets”

Speaking as a lifelong Star Trek fan, the Federation anthem was something I had wondered about for many, many years.  In my head, I always assumed it would be Jerry Goldsmith’s march from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which later became the Main Theme of Star Trek: The Next Generation), and that the people running the franchise back then might sneak it in without warning during a scene as a kind of treat for the fans.  …Instead, it finally showed up in the 1999 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Take Me Out to the Holosuite,” played before  a simulated baseball game, of all things, and it ends up being this incredibly drab, generic, lyric-less thing.  Ugh.  What a wasted opportunity, and very typical of the incredibly bland and “safe” Star Trek of the period (which DS9 usually avoided being, but clearly failed here).

 

The Empire Strikes Back – “The Imperial March” (The National Anthem of the Galactic Empire)

Yep.  This is the anthem of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars.  Darth Vader’s theme music, possibly the best-known leitmotif on the planet (which is really saying something coming from King of the Leitmotifs, John Williams), is a national anthem.  While this has never been shown on-screen, it has been very subtly hinted at in several books and video games, which have varying degrees of canonicity.  It was most blatantly hinted at in A.C. Crispin’s “The Paradise Snare,” where the exact tune is referenced as “the martial theme of the Imperial Navy.”  While the theme may sound a bit too “evil” to one’s ears to be believable as something any government would choose as their anthem (“we are the hero of our own story,” after all), there are certainly equally ominous and martial anthems out there in the real world as proof that some governments would.  The powerful, relentless triplet figure that gets into your head and never leaves is probably the best.  Anthem.  EVER.

 

New York, NY
April 7, 2014