The Internet cut out some time on Friday
when the storm was battering town (I was out of the house until about 6:30 or
so), so for the first time in a while, this Saturday Note is being written in
Microsoft Word instead of a Google Doc.
So that’s a fun fact for you.
I’m sorry that the Book Diary hasn’t been
updated as frequently; because of my busyness right now, which I kind of
hope will be a permanent fixture, I haven’t been reading as much. But I have
been reading in the mornings, and on lunch breaks, so expect to see some stuff
added occasionally, though mostly on weekends.
---
On Killing the Same Characters
You know it’s kind of annoying when it’s
the same characters who keep getting killed.
To be clear, I’m not talking about one
character who keeps getting killed as a kind of joke, or that’s his superpower
or something. We’re not talking about South Park’s Kenny (although to be
clear, we’re almost never talking about South Park; I don’t watch it).
We’re talking about a character who, for dramatic purposes, is killed more than
once. And it’s supposed to be dramatic every time it happens.
For instance, Supernatural was a
bit difficult to take seriously when it came to death, because so many
characters had died and come back. The two leads had come back multiple times.
Season five actually played with this surprisingly effectively though—when Sam
is told that he’s going to be possessed by Lucifer, Sam threatens to kill
himself, and Lucifer just says he’ll bring him back. Likewise, there’s an
episode that begins with Sam and Dean being killed, and the Plot consists of
their travels through the afterlife, trying to get an audience with a specific
angel while trying to avoid being brought back until they can achieve it.
But after that, it became increasingly
difficult to take death as a dramatic turn of the Plot. Part of this was
because the show was supposed to end after five seasons and then just didn’t so
the story kind of meandered along. But it was annoying when someone threatens
Sam or Dean, and we’re supposed to, y’know, care, because after all, they’ve
come back from being killed so many times. The drama just doesn’t work.
Agents of SHIELD just pulled a
variation of this with one of its recent supporting characters (some spoilers
ahead). There’s this alien robot guy, Enoch, who has been around for hundreds
of thousands of years. He becomes friends with the main characters. In season
five, in the time travel plot, at one point he sacrifices himself to save our
heroes. Except then the timeline gets rewritten, and he’s alive again. Yay! But
in the currently-airing season seven, he just got killed again,
sacrificing his life to save our heroes in a way that’s not too dissimilar,
which is played for drama again. Except… we already had this scenario go down.
It's hard to take a character death
seriously, when we’ve already gone through this exact same scenario in this
continuity. We’ve seen this character die, and we didn’t think we’d see him
again. And him popping up again was a pleasant surprise! But now he’s dying
again, and… it just doesn’t feel as strong of a dramatic point, because we’ve
already lost him once to get him back. Furthermore, the show’s provided us with
plenty of ways for him to come back—we’ve seen others of his species preserve
themselves through brain uploads. So when he’s dying, and we’re not given any
explanation as to why he doesn’t just do that… it kind of falls flat.
Another Marvel example: do you remember in
Infinity War, at the beginning, when Thanos kills Loki? And do you
remember how basically none of us believed it? Not as in, “We were so
shocked we couldn’t believe it!” It was more like, “Yeah, I refuse to believe
this isn’t some other trick.” Because Loki had died! And had a really dramatic
death scene! And to be clear, I’m not sure if we believed it in The Dark
World either, but then another death scene? Of course we didn’t buy it. We
knew that this character had a habit of cheating death. So unless you did
something extreme, like had his head ripped off and put on a spike, I don’t
think any of us would have bought it. And even then, we probably would
ask for someone to check a pulse or something.
Honestly, Loki’s death scene in Infinity
War didn’t mean anything other than the directors looking at the audience
and saying, “We don’t really care about any of the good parts of Thor:
Ragnarok.”
If you are a writer, and you have a
fakeout death scene (whether because the death is a ruse, or because the
character comes back from being dead), you can’t turn around and have that
character killed later on, or even in the next film, and expect it to play as
well. It feels cheap. And it feels like some sort of trick, like either we
don’t’ believe it, or we don’t think it’ll work as well. When death becomes a
cheap way to milk drama, then you’ve got to come up with some other dramatic
stakes for the story.
Don’t know what, precisely, but death for
the same character more than once won’t cut it.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment