There’s some clunkiness to Burroughs’s prose, and a casual sexism and racism that can’t be completely dismissed out of hand, but there’s some strengths to offset the weaknesses, too. Mostly I was fascinated by the way that Burroughs resisted turning his space-swashbuckling adventures into oversimplified morality plays. My general pre-reading impressions of the John Carter stories was that they were about an Earthling who allies himself with the beautiful good Martians against the monstrous, ugly, evil Martians and distinguished himself as that planet’s greatest warrior. The middle part of that assumption is a bit off, though. Carter is actually incredibly mercenary, allying himself with whomever he happens to be nearest to, until a more favorable opportunity presents itself. And the beautiful red Martians are just as capable of being cruel and greedy and stupid as the ugly green Martians, and even some of the green monsters prove themselves capable of nobility and even, pivotally, friendship. And even along the broad lines of generalities where most red Martians are more civilized and most green Martians are more barbaric, Burroughs goes out of his way to explain why that should be the case, and Carter is usually sympathetic. It’s not really earth shattering, it’s just a lot more nuanced than what I was expecting, which probably says more about how low my expectations were than anything.
The other minorly impressive element, to me, was the beginning of the second novel, which is almost completely different from the first. Most authors writing series tend to hit a lot of the same beats with every installment, which often comes across as somewhere between giving the audience what they want in the familiar trappings of the fictional world, and unrepentant laziness that lets the author pad out the length of the book with recycled material. The Gods of Mars opens with John Carter once again mysteriously transiting from Earth to Mars, but this time drops him in a completely different area of the planet, with new geographic features and new monsters right off the bat. A few familiar names of people and places get dropped in for a sense of continuity, and one of them even shows up for a stretch, but it’s in no way Princess-redux. Since I tend to enjoy genre fiction in general for the “wild riot of ideas” approach, I was happily charmed.
So speaking of coming to the end of one long story which sets up the next, last night the Buffy project reached the end of season. Although (tangent alert!) before my wife and I flipped over to the dvd, we did watch a rerun of Community, which happened to be one of the episodes that we had completely missed during the regular season. This was the “Mexican Halloween” episode, which somehow managed to combine various little weird obsessions of mine (Mexican folklore like Dia de los Muertos, craptastic 80’s genre movies like The Beastmaster and, of course, Batman) with the usual stuff that has won us over as fans of the show. It was a bit disorienting going backwards, though, and seeing the characters regressed to who they were in October as opposed to who they’d become by the season finale. I look forward to the next season and hope enough other people find it and goose the ratings so that season two doesn’t become the last one.
But (end tangent) I was talking about Buffy. When we cued up the dvd and it was already after 8:30, we were a little bit concerned that we were setting ourselves up for a late night, because in each of our vague memories of Buffy’s inaugural Big Bad Showdown, the season finale was at least a double-length episode, right? Funny enough, no; in 44 minutes (written and directed, unsurprisingly, by Joss himself) all of the following happens: Xander finally tells Buffy how he feels about her, she rejects him, he tries to fall back on Willow as a safety date and she rejects him too; Giles finishes interpreting the prophecy that indicates Buffy is going to be killed by the Master; Buffy finds out, freaks out, and quits being the Slayer in protest; Willow and Cordelia discover a bunch of vamp-stricken corpses on school grounds, which leads to Willow’s monologue about the evil having its way with their world, which puts Buffy back on the path of righteousness (good place for the episode to end, right? This is about the 22-minute mark); Buffy tells Giles she’s back on the case, he tries to talk her out of it, and she knocks him out; Buffy finds the Anointed One and goes with him to the Master’s lair; Xander finds Angel to get him to lead him to the Master so they can help Buffy; Buffy fights the Master, loses, and dies; the Master gets out of his mystic prison (33 minute mark or so!); Xander and Angel find Buffy and CPR her back to life; they head back to the high school where Giles, Jenny Calendar, Willow and Cordelia are fighting an army of vampires and a beast from the hellmouth erupting through the library floor while the master watches from the roof; Buffy gets her rematch against the Master, throws him through a skylight, impaling him on a broken piece of table and killing him, which scatters all the other monsters, and then everyone decides to go to prom and celebrate. There is this thing called decompressed storytelling which, apparently, Mr. Whedon is not a big fan of. And more power to him.
It’s really a pretty awe-inspiring piece of television. It wraps up the season’s major threat-based storyline (while leaving the Anointed off to the side for next season) and it touches on everyone’s emotional character arcs. It is, and appropriately feels like, major payoff, but if you had never seen any of the previous eleven episodes and came in just for the finale, you would totally get what was going on and what the show was about, which is no mean feat.
And yet the show ends up being about so much more! As I pointed out to my wife (when the Master has his heart pierced and goes through the most elaborate FX-heavy turning-to-dust of the entire season) the Big Bad next season is also a vampire, but after that, for a show subtitled “The Vampire Slayer”, there aren’t any more bloodsucking undead Big Bads – it goes aspiring-demon, government-created artificial demon, goddess, evil witch, primeval embodiment of evil. It becomes a show that throws away frigging Dracula in a one-shot season opener. It also keeps getting a more and more engrossing supporting cast. By the end of Season One BTVS is a great show, and we have yet to meet Spike and Dru, Oz, Tara and Dawn, Kendra and Faith, Anya, Wesley … the list goes on and on. To be fair, a lot of those characters show up in Seasons Two and Three, which are justly viewed by many as the show’s peak. So fairly early in the long view, but not there yet.
In fact, the first season finale is kind of quaintly retro, and absolutely hits some familiar beats, if you’ve seen the Kristy Swanson movie. Once again we end the story on prom night. Once again, Buffy fights evil wearing a white prom dress and a black leather jacket. I can’t really blame Joss too much for that, because it is a consummately cool image, and gets right to the heart of the dichotomies he wanted to explore with a character like Buffy in the first place. At least in the tv series, she manages to save the world without burning down the gym.
Anyway. John Carter of Mars: better than I expected! BTVS: better than I remembered! That right there is a win-win.
No comments:
Post a Comment