And I’m happy I did, because it’s a fun show, something of an X-Files descendent but the central pair are twenty-something brothers rather than co-ed FBI partners. They get a suitably mythic origin story in the first part of the pilot (their mother is killed by some kind of monster when they’re very little, their dad then dedicates his life to avenging that murder and trains himself and his sons to be monster-hunters, the younger brother walks away from that life when he’s 18, but when he’s 22 big brother shows up on his doorstep because their father is missing and one thing leads to another and they’re on the road looking for dad and hunting monsters together again) and basically get to traipse around in a sweet old car listening to badass old dinosaur metal and getting in adventures which take their inspiration from ancient myths, urban legends and everything in between that goes bump in the night. The actors playing Sam and Dean have good chemistry and it’s generally pleasant enough as brain candy.
So over this past weekend, since I spent a lot of time trying to lay still and let the Filgrastim do its thing, I watched a few more episodes of the show. And I finally hit my first real dud, eight eps along. (Spoiler Alert, for an episode first broadcast in the fall of 2005!)
The episode started off pretty strong, too, with a very high creep factor due mainly to my own personal hang-ups. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a phobia, but I really dislike the feel of bugs crawling on me and have a very deep and abiding dread of actually being bitten by an insect or arachnid. I think giant centipedes are the most terrifying creatures in existence – just typing that now gave me the jibblies. Thus an episode entitled “Bugs” which leads off with a construction worker falling in a pit and subsequently being swarmed by beetles that proceed to crawl in his ears and eat most of his brain, um, how do I put this: AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
One thing which I’m coming to respect about Supernatural is that it’s nicely action-oriented. Sam and Dean always have a plan once they figure out exactly what’s going on. Most tv shows that follow this formula let the storylines unfold in the same way: investigation, then showdown, and some of the variation comes in how the two are balanced. So another kind of show, like X-Files, might have the investigators discover some weird occurrence, slowly rule out any mundane explanations, come upon a paranormal explanation that fits the facts, do more research to figure out how one is supposed to deal with that kind of paranormal problem, and then finally implement the solution at the last moment. Whereas Supernatural has Sam and Dean roll into town pretty sure that something non-mundane is going down, and quickly narrow down the possibilities. And once they settle if it’s a ghost or a werewolf, they know if they need to find the ghost’s physical remains and do a ceremonial cremation, or go hunting with silver bullets. Which saves a lot of time and lets them get right down the showdown, giving those action sequences a little more time to breathe. Nothing wrong with one approach or the other, and like I said, I respect that Supernatural is fully committed to the approach it’s chosen.
Here’s the thing about me as a viewer of high-concept genre entertainment like Supernatural: I contain multitudes. Part of me is watching just for the fun I can derive from the entertainment itself. But part of me is constantly picking apart the storytelling techniques, the choices the showmakers have made, and not just because I’m an unrepentant English major, and not just because everything I can analyze makes for potential blog-fodder, either.
There’s also the roleplayer in me, the guy who runs games for his friends and plays in games run by his friends, and that part of me can’t help but watch episodic storytelling on tv and pick it apart to find the moving parts that might translate into episodic collaborative storytelling around the gaming table. Especially when the connection between the tv series and the roleplaying game has been explicitly drawn by someone starting a new game using the licensed game materials associated with the show. (I told you the fact that it was my gaming group that got me into the show would be increasingly relevant.)
See, the thing is, the writer of an episode of a television series has to fill forty-two minutes of screen time every week, but they have the total control necessary to do so any way they choose. If their inspiration happens to be the urban legend about alligators in the sewers, the writer can create an elaborate mystery with twists and turns that slowly draws the protagonists towards the payoff of blazing gunslingers versus albino reptilian monstrosity. Or the writer could come up with thirty-seven minutes of bantering dialogue and then have the protagonists stumble into the final scene purely by accident, literally falling through an open manhole or whatnot.
Roleplaying games are a bit different, as I’ve vented before. The person who comes up with the scenario idea and runs the game and controls the environment has virtually no control over one critical element: the protagonists of the story, in the persons of the other players. It’s possible the players will just want to sit around jawing in-character for most of the night, and the sudden and unexpected appearance of a third-act explosion of violence will be welcomed. But it’s more likely that players are looking for something a little more structured, that gives them a little more to do. But it’s a fine line to walk, between planning every possible contingency in advance, and giving the players a feeling (however illusory) of control and free will.
So it’s generally advisable to overprepare if you’re planning to run an RPG. Give the players a lead to follow or a puzzle to solve, which will lead to another stepping stone in the story, and another, and so on until the climax. The more stepping stones comprising the path of the plot, the more likely it is to still feel developed and satisfying even if your players take shortcuts, show no interest in possibilities you dangle in front of them, or generally betray your vision in a way that fictional characters rarely do for their authors. And if your players are good but slow, you can always drop a few steps yourself and they’ll be none the wiser, whereas if they rush through too fast it’s much harder to come up with delaying tactics on the fly.
For what it’s worth, this improvisatory nature of storytelling via roleplaying games is really the guts of the appeal, in my book. Because there’s a certain expectation that the clock in the game is always ticking. One of my favorite Stephen King books is Misery, which like many of King’s stories is about a writer, and at one point the writer reminisces about working on a novel of his own and painting the protagonist into a corner, where the protag anti-hero had killed a man in a dark and somewhat crowded movie theater, and needed to hide the evidence/body, but without anyone seeing him. The writer had stumped himself and spent days, maybe weeks thinking it over until he hit on the solution: the anti-hero started a fire in the theater. Smoke and flames and everyone running out screaming, and the anti-hero carried the dead man out, which no one batted an eye at because they thought it was someone carrying an unconscious friend, if they even noticed amidst the chaos. That’s good stuff, but a good roleplaying game can create those kind of nearly impossible situations and then demand that an answer be forthcoming immediately. You certainly aren’t supposed to call time out for two weeks on a roleplaying game while you figure out what to do next. And if you can’t think of something fast enough, the person running the game should have the cops show up and allow all the other logical consequences to play out, which can change the entire story. It’s living in a story where not everything is clean and you hang on the edge by your wits, or some other grievously tortured metaphor. That is the really good stuff.
Right, so, tv shows and storytelling mechanics. Assuming you’re not watching the Super Friends (where the giant computer says “There’s trouble on Volcano Island!” and the Super Friends go to Volcano Island and beat up Lava Lord and the whole story takes ten minutes) you can usually pick up some good beats in the A leads to B leads to C pattern. So this was point number two in favor of “Bugs”, which had a lot of moving parts in its storyline, with red herrings, suspects that become allies, and so on. Parts of it were handled well, parts of it were kind of groan-worthy, particularly the reveal kicking off the third act, which explicated the episode’s previous shenanigans as the manifestation of an ancient Native American curse. Again, just so we’re clear here, the shenanigans were not ghostly scalphunters or bison-shaped storm clouds snorting lightning or anything remotely (or stereotypically) Native American, but carnivorous beetles and poisonous spiders, all of which seems a bit more Egyptian plagues, but whatever.
The point is, this placed our protagonists Sam and Dean in a narratively compelling corner as Sam asks “How do we break the curse?” and Dean replies “You don’t break a curse, you get out of its way.” Apparently the plot-mandated slaughtered Injuns had sworn that no white man would ever live on the cursed land, which put the developer’s family in danger for doing just that. And of course the developer refuses to leave his house when Sam and Dean show up predicting death by insect swarm around midnight. When the tidal wave of flying bugs crests over the treeline, it’s too late to run, so Sam and Dean and the family hole up inside the house to wait out the plague of murderous Indian-curse-fulfilling bugs. It’s been established earlier in the episode (by a token Native American wiseman, of course) that the curse manifests every year for six nights, starting on the spring equinox, because the historical slaughter lasted the same duration. So when day breaks to end the sixth night, which is the night the developer’s house gets attacked, the curse will have run its course until next spring.
Still, six hours (give or take) is a long time to hold off fourteen trillion death-crazed bugs. And I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out how they were going to get out of it. Again, partly this was as a pure entertainment-seeking audience member, and partly as a roleplaying enthusiast who had every intention of noting the plot convolutions in order to rip them off in a game at a later date.
The climax unfolded, to my mind, much the same way that a roleplaying game would – the writer/game master/ cold uncaring universe continuously escalates the danger, while the main characters/players try to win the scenario, by surviving it. The killer swarm approaches, and the characters take shelter in the house. Once inside, they improvise a plan of defense, stuffing towels in the gaps under doors and grabbing a can of bug spray from under the kitchen sink (mainly to use in tandem with a Zippo as an improvised blowtorch). The swarm makes its way into the house anyway, though, breaking windows with a million tiny impacts and stressing the chimney flue with sheer weight. So the characters retreat upstairs. The bugs follow. The characters go up to the attic which has the virtues of a relatively tight door seal and no windows (or fireplaces). But of course some of the insects are flying termites, who set to chewing through the roof. There’s an attempt to reinforce the roof, which fails. Soon the attic is full of deadly bugs.
Now at the point where the reinforcing the roof has failed and Dean has run out of bugspray fuel for his blowtorch and the characters are all huddled in the corner screaming and brushing insects off their limbs and out of their hairs in constant thrashing motions, I was starting to feel some misgivings about the episode’s willingness to play by the rules. The previous deaths shown took almost no time at all. A few hundred carnivorous beetles killed a man in the time it took his coworker to run to the truck and come back with a rope. A few dozen spiders killed a woman in the time it took her to run out of the shower and collapse in the middle of her bedroom floor. The climax featured approximately nineteen billion times as many bugs, which should have made short work of five humans in no time at all. Still, that’s almost a horror trope in and of itself, where the potential victim who knows what they are up against survives longer than the ignorant victim, just ‘cause. The important thing, it seemed to me, was how Sam and Dean were going to outsmart a 170-year-old Native American curse once they had run out of places to hide and other delaying tactics.
And the answer was … they were saved by the bell. The morning bell of sunrise, that is. The night ends, the megaswarm stops being animated by the undying rage of slaughtered aboriginals, the insects all fly away, and everyone survives. OK, on the one hand, that is a lame and passive ending. But on the other hand, it is a total cheat. The retreat into and up through the levels of the house took maybe ten or fifteen minutes of show time which was edited in a way that did not seem to compress in any extra hours. Sam and Dean show up on the doorstep at midnight, fight and flee for a quarter of an hour, and then the dawn arrives. Basically the writer ran out of ideas for how the brothers could combat the bugs and just typed “and then sunrise breaks the curse” even though it defies all logical reckoning of the passage of time. That is really irksome and anti-entertaining and terrible, and if something like that happened in a game the players would just about revolt, and rightfully so.
Don’t get me wrong, I can forgive a good show one or two bad outings, so I will stick with Supernatural for a while because I do think it has more going on in its favor than marks against. But when something really rankles me, it feels good to get it out.
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