"The Only Way"

 I am currently reading Burr by Gore Vidal, which is interesting to say the least because of its view of the Founding Fathers. I have some pictures to put up of last weekend still to do. But I’m happy because I can take it easy this weekend! Not only because I’m not going anywhere, but because I don’t have work as Mondaybor Day is Labor Day!

Anyhow this was prompted by this past week’s episode of Marvel’s What If…? on Disney+. So there will be some spoilers for that, though I won’t give away the episode’s ending, I think.

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“This is the Only Way!” Is it? Really?

So this week’s episode of What If…? was good, I think, but it suffered a bit because the premise didn’t work for me. The title is “What if Stephen Strange lost his heart instead of his hands?” and it’s if he was still dating Christine, and instead of losing full use of his hands in the car accident Christine died. And he pursues the mystic arts and becomes Sorcerer Supreme and the events of his storyline continued as they did in his movie, until after defeating Dormamu he decides to use the Time Stone to try to go and save Christine. It doesn’t work, and every attempt to save her life and relive that night ends in failure. He’s told, upfront, that this is a destined event, a fixed point in time, or whatever you want to call it. This is a thing that absolutely has to happen in the timeline in order for him to become Sorcerer Supreme.

Except it’s not.

We know it’s not. Because we saw his movie. We see that this is not a thing that has to happen for him to be become a powerful sorcerer. We know this for a fact.

This reminded me of Doctor Strange’s whole bit in Infinity War and Endgame, in which he tells Tony (and the audience) that he has seen millions of different possibilities and there’s only one in which they come out victorious. And again, I have trouble buying that one because we see several times throughout Infinity War that the Avengers and friends come really close to stopping or killing Thanos several times. And if they did, it’s not like he has a contingency in place to keep his plan going. It’s not like all of the almost-got-him’s are because of inherent character flaws from the heroes--in many cases it’s basically luck that Thanos survives. If Peter Quill had decided to shoot Thanos in the head instead of punch him. If Thor’s axe had gone a bit higher. And so on.

I’m also reminded of Rumpelstiltskin’s Plot in the first couple of seasons of Once Upon a Time, in which it’s revealed that the entire story was a play by him to be able to find his son again using the one method of magic possible to travel between worlds. Except as the show keeps going we keep seeing more and more methods of travelling between worlds, some of which Rump, being an immortal sorcerer who collected artifacts and travelled far and wide, would have known about. The longer the show runs, the more ridiculous it is that the only possible way Rump could think of to get back to his son was a convoluted curse that involved temporarily losing his magic and filling a town in Maine with people he despised.

My point is this: if you tell your audience that the way the Plot is happening is the only way it could have happened, you have to sell that to the audience. You have to make the audience believe that. You can’t just say “It has to be this way” and then fail to make it evident that it’s true.

Now this doesn’t apply to times when this explanation is used and it’s obvious BS. The BBC Merlin has an episode where a sleeping curse is afflicting Camelot, and the Dragon tells Merlin the only way to fix it is to kill the source of the curse, his friend Morgana. And as he struggles to keep himself awake for hours on end, and keeps failing to find some alternate solution, he eventually poisons Morgana and refuses to give Morgause the name of the poison used until she lifts the curse. And he justifies it as being the only way, and it’s dumb, but at the same time he’s called on it a lot by Morgana, who turns evil after this because of this precise occurance. And the advice to kill her in the first place is given by the Dragon, who is not always a truthful source and has reason to want Morgana dead. It’s a dumb decision, and “the only way to fix things” may be said, but it’s arguably BS in-universe as it is out.

I have a lot of other issues with this show, and with the character’s decisions in that one episode, but I don’t think it’s too egregious.

Likewise, there’s a bit in the mythological section of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in which, after Tyr has his arm torn off by Fenrir, Odin gives a not-apology, and Tyr replies that it was fated to happen so he doesn’t blame his BFF for making him lose his hand--it had to happen that way after all. And even though it’s not explicitly said, it’s very obvious that this isn’t true. Yes, the Aesir see it that way, because of their fatalistic view of life, but this entire business would have been avoided had Odin not been a raging douchebag so terrified at his upcoming demise that he gets trigger happy enough to try to kill Loki’s son Fenrir the second he lays eyes on him. Again, this reasoning is obviously BS.

If you tell your audience something, the thing that makes the entire story work, you’d better make sure the rest of the story backs it up. If the story tells us something has to happen then if we spend the rest of the story telling ourselves it could easily have happened otherwise… well, then it didn’t quite work. You should never leave a point in the story in which the audience is always asking why they didn’t just do it another way, if it can’t be answered by something like, “It’s how that character thinks/acts.” Because yeah, sometimes people don’t act in ways that are entirely logical. But if there are obvious loopholes to a situation, or if it all comes down to luck, you absolutely cannot tell us that it has to happen the way that it does.

Especially with that Doctor Strange example from What If…? because we’ve explicitly seen that it doesn’t have to happen that way.

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