Legend of Korra, Season 4

 Book Four of Legend of Korra is called Balance.

I remember watching the second season and thinking "wow, this is a plot that feels like it should be the final season," given the high-mystical elements at play. Season three was ultimately just a better story (and I think generally considered the high watermark of the series) but also felt tied into the Avatar mythos enough (though in a very different way) that it felt fitting as the send-off to the series (Zaheer is also a fantastic villain).

So there's a part of me that felt a bit underwhelmed by the plot of season four. On the other hand, while it does end with a giant mech battle that devastates Republic City a lot worse than Unalaq/Vaatu's assault actually did, the story is, in a lot of ways, really much smaller in scale. Spirits, and even philosophical points of view, aren't really the focus here. In a lot of ways, actually, the crisis of season four is a mirror to the plot of Avatar: the Last Airbender - though in the original series it was the Fire Nation that threatened the world, in this case it's a sort of misguided (though also just morally bankrupt) Earth Empire that poses the threat (this also completes the villain collection, with at least one main villain of each elemental bending type, as our bad guy is an earthbender, and a metalbender.)

The Dune Trailer

 Here it is!

The movie looks good. I'm a little skeptical about the choice of music (I don't recognize the song, but I guess I'm always just a little skeptical of songs with lyrics in trailers or scoring this sort of movie.)

The beats we see here are all exciting to behold - I love the image of ancient Greek soldiers when discussing the Atreides family - the Atreides trace their house back to Atreus of classical myth (Atreus is the father of Agamemnon,) despite the fact that this far in the future, humans don't even remember Earth is their planet of origin (though given other details, like how the first use of "atomics" was by "House Washington," it's surprising they don't have a better idea of it.)

In the Dune future, the existence of personal force fields has made firearms obsolete, and people are forced to fight with bladed weapons again. We get some pretty cool shots of this style of fighting, which is faster and more frenzied than it's been rendered in the past.

We also start with the famous scene from the beginning of the books - Paul's trial with the Gom Jabbar, in which the leader of the Bene Gesserit (the all-female order that has been bred and trained to have mental and physical capacities that make them practically psychic, and who are the not-so-secret background manipulators of culture and politics in the cosmos) holds a poisoned needle to his neck while he is forced to place his hand in a box-like device that inflicts incredible pain upon him. The point of the test is to determine whether Paul is "human" or "animal," knowing that an animal doesn't think rationally and will just react to the pain, while the human, knowing the danger, will take the pain over the certainty of death.

We get a bit of Duncan Idaho, played by Jason Momoa, the dashing, rugged hero and loyal servant of House Atreides, as well as some glimpses of Paul's father Leto (Oscar Isaac,) Stilgar, the leader of a group of the planet's indigenous Fremen (Javier Bardem,) the Beast Rabban, the member of rival House Harkonnen whose mismanagement of Arrakis was part of the ploy to lure the Atreides there, as well as Chani (Zendaya,) the Fremen woman whom Paul sees in visions before he's even come to Arrakis, and Doctor Yueh (Chen Chang,) whose ultimate role is... spoilers.

But the real money shot is the reveal of the giant Sandworm - the massive monsters who live on Arrakis, and, unbeknownst to most of the universe, is the source of the Spice that allows for interstellar, intergalactic society to exist.

This movie is, I believe, meant to be part one of two, as there's a lot of plot to the original Dune novel (and it divides rather neatly into two parts.) The downfall of House Atreides is pretty much shown by the trailer, when Duncan Idaho refers to Paul as Duke, but given how classic this story is, I don't think spoilers are something people are going to worry too much about.

One thing I think is interesting is that Paul (who's Timothée Chalamet, btw) refers to the upcoming war as a "Crusade," which I think is a very deliberate choice. In the book, what he sees coming is referred to as a Jihad, which fits somewhat with the Fremen's Bedouin/Arabic-inspired culture. However, in the intervening decades, the word Jihad has become pretty loaded here in the west, associated more with terrorism than medieval holy wars. While western culture has often treated crusades as a good thing (Batman's the "Caped Crusader") the truth is that it's really just the Christian equivalent of Jihad. There's a sort of smug cultural superiority in using Crusade as a positive and Jihad as a negative, and I think it's a good choice of words - especially complex given that, as we know, the Jihad/Crusade is eventually waged in Paul's name.

While Paul is a hero we sympathize and root for, especially in the first book, the series ultimately shows that even with the best intentions, the damage he inflicts on the universe (even if the alternative was worse) is utterly horrific. Indeed, much of Paul's journey is not exactly becoming a hero, but reckoning with the fact that he's going to be so important and powerful that all of human history is going to be shaped by his actions, including entire worlds wiped out, religions extinguished, cultures vanished, and staggeringly enormous numbers of lives lost. Frank Herbert's message is that that much power concentrated in one person invariably creates a monster, even if that person genuinely wants to do good.

Legend of Korra - Books 2 and 3

 While set within the same world as Avatar: the Last Airbender, the Legend of Korra changes up the overall structure. Aang's entire journey is about confronting the Fire Nation and stopping their genocidal, imperial conquest, and while the roles in that fight (particularly the role that Zuko, who is introduced as the show's primary villain, plays) shift, and the focus of each season is on a different part of the world (with plenty of stand-alone episodes as well, something Korra can't really afford with its shorter seasons) it's still ultimately building to that fight with Firelord Ozai - a character who's less of a person than an embodiment of that will to power that he and his father and grandfather (maybe great-grandfather? I can't recall how many generations back Sozin was) possessed that has made a fascistic conqueror out of a nation that, in other ages, had been just another facet of the elemental quadrarchy that defined this world.

Korra, structurally, is a lot more like another classic show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though despite the fact that Korra is probably supposed to be around Buffy's age, and the younger targeted audience means there's no explicit talk of sex (and definitely less graphic violence) in a lot of ways, Korra's stories feel a bit more like that of a young adult.

But structurally, Korra ditches the single building conflict for a series of one-season villains, whose plots are wrapped up by the end of the season - though the repercussions of those plots are certainly still felt in later seasons.

I've just watched seasons two and three. As with ATLA (and the more recent spiritual successor, set in a different world but with a similar tone and storytelling style and much of the same creative team, the Dragon Prince,) the seasons are organized by "book," with season two as "Spirits" and three as "Change." (If I recall correctly, season one is "Air," which does complete the cycle that the original series started with, though Air is a more important element in season three, which we'll get to.)

Let's get into it, spoilers abound:

Legend of Korra Season One - Politics of Republic City

 The very premise of Avatar: the Last Airbender suggested an eternal cycle, and a structure by which you could have new adventures. In the original show, Aang has visions of past avatars - such as Kyoshi and Roku - who serve as guides to him, even as they are, in a way, also his past selves.

But as is often the case with fantasy, the world of Avatar seems mostly stagnant in The Last Airbender - our flashbacks of Sozin during Roku's time show a Fire Nation that isn't really that different than the "modern" one we see 100 years on. There's a bit of fun in the third season when Aang is using some very outdated slang (remember that he's actually 100 years older than he looks) while they're undercover in the Fire Nation. It's true that the Fire Nation does seem to have some kind of industrialization going on, but to what extent that's a new development versus a feature of their culture is sort of left to your imagination.

In Legend of Korra, the world has profoundly changed, and the technological level of Republic City is explicitly meant to evoke early-20th-century New York - with cars, airplanes (though to be fair that's a bit of a reveal toward the end of the season) and radio.

With that 20th Century feel, though also comes a change in politics.

Obviously, claiming that the 20th Century was more politically revolutionary than the previous ones is a little disingenuous - while the 20th saw the competing forces of fascism, communism, and capitalist liberalism, the 19th of course also saw the rise of nationalism and socialism, and the 18th saw, well, you know, the American Revolution. Political change is a constant.

But the big bad of Korra's first season definitely uses the 20th century tools of politics - propaganda, rallies, symbolism, and mass media.

Amon and his Equalists have an agenda that, while extreme, seems based on some genuine grievance. One element of the world of Avatar is that some people are just born lucky, getting the power to magically manipulate one of the four elements, giving them both the obvious supernatural power, but also a leg up economically - if you can shoot fire from your fists, you'll probably be pretty welcome in a factory that might require that fire to drive its machinery.

And we see in the first episode that bending gangs exist - using their elemental bending abilities to intimidate non-benders into paying them protection money.

It's actually one of the big problems in any setting in which magical powers are granted to some but not all, earned not by their own work or study, but by sheer luck, which is that you inevitably create two classes of people.

Now, we do get some clear examples of how this impediment is not universal - the richest man in the city is Hiroshi Sato, whose Future Industries provide the city with cars and other fancy technology, and he (and his daughter Asami, who's one of the core cast members of the series) have no elemental powers at all.

Still, between a police force (yes, founded by the fan-favorite Toph Beifong from the original series) that uses magical metal-bending to overpower civilians and gangs that use their powers to intimidate, you can hardly blame people from being attracted to a guy who wants to take power away from these super-powered people.

At the same time, Amon just screams villain, always wearing a mask, so I was actually sort of surprised that they didn't subvert things.

Ultimately, it's revealed that Amon is the worst kind of villain - he's a hypocrite. Being a waterbender himself, Amon is just using these injustices as a path to power.

This series of course came out before our current political moment. While the U.S. prior to 2016 certainly had its problems, nowadays everything feels like a political minefield of problematic messages.

You could read Amon in different ways: the "law and order" reading, which I find a lot more problematic, is the notion that movements toward equality are all just mislead masses being manipulated by some disingenuous leader or conspiracy. One of the most common tactics to oppose civil rights movements in America has been to invent some evil ulterior motive, given that opposing the stated motive (which tends to be just "please let us enjoy the rights that this country promises") is an immoral position to stand upon.

At the same time, you could also read Amon as someone who has chosen a scapegoat minority (while not uncommon, Benders are, I think supposed to be less common than non-benders) and cultivate bigotry toward said group in order to score a political following.

Of course, this latter reading, while it makes the Equalists more vile villains (and thus makes it easier for us to root for heroes fighting them) also breaks down a little when you see how benders are, in fact, quite privileged in Republic City society.

The truth is that we don't really know what kind of class divisions would occur in a world where people had supernatural powers, because, well, what makes them supernatural is that they don't exist in nature, i.e., this reality.

The politics of Legend of Korra are thus a bit muddled. While some might cry "it's just a kid's show," in some ways I think that makes getting the politics right all the more important. Now, what politics are "right" is naturally a matter of political opinion, but I'll just say that I think generally promoting tolerance of people who are different from you ought to be one of those easily-agreed-upon values. For what it's worth, especially given the anti-imperialism message of the first series, I assume that the writing crew for Korra (which has many of the same people) has their heart in the right place.

One of the consequences of making your setting more reminiscent of the modern world is that modern ideas about authority, class, and politics start to become more relevant. I think that's extremely fertile, but also behooves the writers to be careful about the message they're delivering.

All of this is also, of course, going on as the backdrop of a story about a teenager who is trying to make her way in this new environment. Korra herself gets swept into politics, becoming an agent of the state for a time before breaking off to do her own thing.

I suspect the choice to have Korra be older than Aang was during his series is a conscious one - coming five years after the first show, they probably expected to have many kids who grew up on the original tuning in as an older audience. As such, it makes sense for Korra to be both older to be more relatable to that audience, but also to deal with more complex issues (not to say that ATLA was without its clever nuances.)

The Legend of Korra

 Newly added to Netflix, the sequel series/spin-off of Avatar: the Last Airbender tells the story of Aang's successor as Avatar, the headstrong Water Tribe girl, Korra.

I've now watched the first episode, and immediately I'm eager to see more. This is the familiar world of elemental benders, but several decades on, in a world profoundly changed by the events of the original series.

Naturally, that means that there are ATLA spoilers abound here, and they won't be hidden behind a cut.

The Legend of Korra's intro is narrated by Tenzin, the son of Aang and Katara, who has grown up to be the world's Airbending master. What we find is that the end of the 100-year war saw the creation of the United Republic of Nations, with the Fire Nation and its colonies in the Earth Kingdom unifying into a diverse and multicultural whole where members of all the four original peoples can live as equals.

At the center of this republic is the capital, Republic City, founded by Aang and Zuko to be the shining example to the rest of the world of peace and cooperation.

After Aang's death, the White Lotus gathers to find the new Avatar among the Water Tribes, and when the sages of the White Lotus arrive at a particular hut at the south pole, it's immediately obvious that Korra, who looks to be about two when they find her, must be the Avatar, as she immediately displays a prodigious capability with Water, Fire, and Earthbending.

Growing into her teen years, Korra demonstrates mastery of the physical aspects of Firebending while her instructors - including an elderly Katara - watch. Yearning to move forward with her training, she eagerly anticipates Tenzin's arrival from Republic City, but even as he arrives (with kids and pregnant wife in tow,) he explains that complicated matters in Republic City call him away, and he informs Korra that her training will have to wait.

Impatient and headstrong, Korra stows away on a ship to the city, and arrives there along with her Polar Bear Dog, Naga (wouldn't be an Avatar sequel without delightful hybrid animal companions.)

Republic City is a sight to behold - essentially an East-Asian-flavored New York City from the 1920s, complete with steampunk amenities like airships, it's clear that in the 60-or-so years since the original series, Fire Nation technology has been broadly adopted, such that there are now cars and skyscrapers.

Korra explores the city, but discovers that not everything is as perfect as it seems from afar - there is poverty, organized crime, and political unrest, with some non-benders resenting the power that benders have over them (which, you know, not an unreasonable concern.) Playing the hero, Korra beats up some members of the "Triple Threat Triads," (a gang employing what appears to be squads of Earthbenders, Waterbenders, and Firebenders) only to find that the destruction caused by her superheroics are also cause to land her in jail as well.

Korra winds up arrested and questioned by Lin Beifong - Toph's daughter - before Tenzin comes to bail her out. While initially Tenzin intends to send her back to the South Pole, Korra convinces him to let her stay in the city, continue her training, and help him bring balance to the city and work toward achieving his father's dreams for what could be.

Immediately, I've found that the show seems to strike a great balance between familiarity and novelty - I could imagine some complaining at how much things are linked to the characters of the original show, but given that this is meant to be a sort of inter-generational story, I think I'm happy to acknowledge the lasting impact of the original show's ensemble.

The idea of a fantasy world developing modern technology is 100% up my alley, and I'm really excited to see this magical world existing alongside a more modern world (with not only new technology, but also potentially new philosophical and political ideas.)

While we're clearly still waiting to meet more of an ensemble, Korra is immediately likable, and also comes with some clear character flaws that have already driven conflict and obstacles. She seems to be older than Aang was in his series, which I imagine might come with more mature (teenage, rather than pre-teen) style stories.

Anyway, it's not like it's been a huge amount of time since I saw the original show (though 2020 seems to be a real decade of a year) but it's fun to return to this world, tone, and storytelling style.

Dark and What Paradise Might Be

I've always found it interesting that there's a huge distinction in the assumptions of Eastern versus Western religions regarding our fate after death. And before I get into this: huge caveat to anything I say is that I'm just some white dude who I guarantee you does not understand all the nuances of religions like Buddhism or Hinduism (and this argument is really more on the Buddhist side of things, again, something can't claim any expertise in.) But if you look at Western religious traditions, even dating back to Ancient Egypt (which is not strictly-speaking Western, but was a culture that had enough influence on Western thought that it's worth mentioning,) there is an underlying existential angst. Death is the great evil to be feared. And death, it's assumed, takes the form of some kind of endless darkness - an extinction or annihilation of the consciousness, of memories, of everything that made us what we are.

In Ancient Egyptian religion, the journey to the underworld saw your soul being evaluated, and only those who were unburdened by sin and evil were allowed to persist. The others are fed to a chthonic crocodile, with no life to go on beyond this one. In Christianity, salvation is the defeat of death - Jesus is supposed to grand us eternal life, and while the interpretation of the alternative has often been another sort of eternity, but one of suffering and pain in hell, you could also interpret Jesus' gift to humanity being simply the ability to persist, never perishing entirely, allowed to live on forever.

And so it's funny that, for all the parallels between Christianity and Buddhism, it seems like there's an opposite goal. In Eastern religion, or perhaps more specifically Indian ones (again, I'm ignorant here, and just writing this as a ramp up to talk about a German TV show) the baseline assumption that is made is that we all are reincarnated when we die - that our consciousness and soul is placed in another body, ignorant of our past lives, but still judged and punished accordingly. Buddhism identifies the cycle of reincarnation as a wheel of endless suffering - that all of existence is suffering. Therefore, the goal, it would seem, is to no longer exist, which Buddhism (if, again, my interpretation is correct) seeks to achieve through Enlightenment.

(Now, I'm pretty sure that there are very different interpretations of Nirvana - perhaps not so much an existential extinction as much as a transcendence of individualist identity and ego, which I have to say sounds infinitely better to me.)

One of the things about time travel narratives is that it can mimic both the idea of endless cycles and also existential annihilation. Indeed, while one might fear that death brings with it an existential erasure, at the very least we believe that our past existence is not undone (though from a solipsitic perspective, if you cannot exist to remember your past, does it even exist?)

Let's talk Dark.

Mid-20th Century Americana in Season Two of Umbrella Academy

Having finished Dark, a show that wove a meticulous and deadly serious, heartbreakingly bleak (even if there's a note of... not exactly hope, but a kind of redemption - I should write a post about it) time travel narrative, jumping into the brightly-colored, over-the-top Umbrella Academy is a nice sort of palette cleanser - some ice cream after a fancy dinner.

Umbrella Academy's first season left me with the following impression: this is fun, enjoyable, and also something I can't imagine ever becoming part of my canon of favorite shows. The show explodes with style - the art direction and overall tone is a dizzying thrill ride - but it never felt like it was saying anything that profound, its themes of adult imposter syndrome and the way that parents leave us scarred always seemed to serve the true purpose - which is the stylistic flourish.

But that can be fun, and the show, for all its flaws, was entertaining.

I'm now two episodes into the second season, and I can't say it's all that different. Interestingly, the sort of mid-century (which is going to become an outdated term in about ten or twenty years) aesthetic the show played with - especially in its evil "Commission" - now becomes not just style, but setting, as the dysfunctional Hargreeves family escapes the Vanya-induced apocalypse that they just sort of failed to prevent in the end of the first season by voiping back in time to the 1960s.

The various characters get scattered to different times that range from 1960 to 1963 in Dallas, with Number Five emerging the latest, just in time to see the Soviet army driving tanks down the road and fighting the US Army. We get one cool shot of each of the Hargreeves using their powers to fight the invaders (including, horrifically, Allison using her "rumor" to explode three dudes' heads, which feels like a serious upgrade over simple mind control) only for an older Hazel to appear and inform them that there are nukes heading for the city, so Number Five has got to come with him.

They pop in 10 days earlier, prior to the Kennedy assassination (one that, given a newspaper that reads "Kennedy Declares War on USSR" suggests was thwarted). So we once again have a ticking clock to prevent another apocalyptic event.

Naturally, the show is hinting strongly that they'll wind up stopping Oswald from killing Kennedy, only for this to result in nuclear war, though I wonder if that's a red herring.

While the others are trapped in 1960s Dallas for as many as three years, Number Five shows up only ten days before his original arrival, which means we have some catching up to do.

Luther is working as muscle for none other than Jack Ruby, the mobster who shot Oswald after he was arrested (and I believe died shortly thereafter as well, which has really fueled the conspiracy theories).

Diego is in an insane asylum after he tried to kill Lee Harvey Oswald shortly after he figured out when he was.

Allison is married, and to a charismatic civil rights activist named Raymond Chestnut, who is trying to organize a demonstration in Dallas to coincide with the presidential visit to draw Kennedy's attention to the evils of segregation. Clearly this plotline was written prior to the George Floyd killing and the protests that have followed (and the brutal crackdown on those protests that continues as I write this,) but it remains to be seen if this plot works well or feels tone deaf given the current national mood.

Klaus is still haunted by Ben, and essentially has Ben's ghost anchored to him everywhere he goes. And it appears that in this time, he's become some kind of hippie guru cult leader (a little ahead of schedule, if my understanding on 1960s culture is accurate,) apparently with some friends in high places.

Finally, Vanya gets hit by a car and loses her memory, living with a family outside the city, where she's formed a bond with Sissy, the woman who hit her with the car, that seems to be leading somewhere romantic (though likely to be hard to pursue in the 1960s).

So once again, Five has to reassemble his siblings. In the meantime, however, a trio of never-speaking killers from the Commission known only as The Swedes is coming after them. And in the meantime, the Hargreeves begin to suspect that their father, still very much alive in the 1960s, has something to do with the assassination.

Yeah, it's another time travel show, but dear lord could it not be any more different from Dark. While I really liked Dark (despite not liking the third season as much as the previous ones, it was like the first two were A-'s and the last was a B/B+ - nothing to be ashamed of) I think this is the perfect palette cleanser, and actually helps to show how the time-travel subgenre of sci-fi can really come in profoundly different shapes and sizes.

Partway Through Dark's Third Season, An Already Complex Narrative Gets Trickier

If you watch a show like Dark, you've made a deal with the creators of the show - you'll do your best to follow, and they promise that it will all make sense in the end. I haven't finished the series, but the third and final season takes the difficulty slider and kicks it up to 11.

One of the oddest things about Time Travel narratives is the notion of cycles. Instinctively, we want to put things in a certain order. If we see an older and a younger version of a character (as we do frequently in Dark, often interacting with one another) there are certain instincts that are hard to fight:

I'm going to just use character names here, which means it's spoiler time.

Why Are Time Travel Stories So Often Depressing?

I've been obsessed with time travel narratives ever since I was a kid, watching Back to the Future and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. But it's an extraordinarily tricky trope to really pull off, and so writers will often avoid it given the thorniness of its philosophical implications.

Naturally, what inspired this post is my recent watchthrough (I'm one episode into the third and final season) of Dark, Netflix's teutonic time travel television show. One of my favorite movies is 12 Monkeys, which is itself removed from the giddiness of Back to the Future or the exploits of Theodore Logan and William S. Preston. Fringe, the less popular but ultimately more satisfying Bad Robot project that followed Lost, delved into its own time-travel and alternate-universes (and alternate history on top of that - as a separate thing from alternate universes) in a way that was ultimately quite bittersweet at best.

I was thinking, though, about how things seem to get more dire and serious the more seriously you take the rules of time travel.

Of course, the "rules" of time travel are little more than our own theories on a hypothetical scenario. In the massive finale to what had come of the MCU so far (obviously they're not stopping the movies, but the "first era" of them is firmly over,) Avengers Endgame, they have fun by making fun of people who claim to understand how time travel works because of the movies they've seen.

Einstein showed us (though I leave it to the reader to decide if you understand it) that time and space are related, and that our terrestrial notions of things like simultaneity are actually just false on large scales - depending on your reference point, events occurring in the universe don't have to happen in the same order they do if you're standing somewhere else, as long as there's no causal relationship between those events.

Basically, the universe is profoundly weirder than it looks from a human perspective. A great analogy comes, if I remember correctly, from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, where he explains that a lion understands Newtonian physics on an instinctive level, because it helps her hunt her prey. But none of us have an innate understanding of relativity, or of quantum physics, because it's just not relevant at the scale at which our brains evolved.

I don't know if time travel as conceived of in science fiction is possible. It seems likely it isn't, if for the very fact that nowhere in history do we have any confirmed examples of travelers arriving from the future. It's a lack of evidence, rather than evidence against, but it leaves the likelihood low.

And yet, there's something very compelling about the notion of returning to earlier times. Indeed, it's rare (though not unheard of) for a time travel narrative to include multiple futures at different points. Typically, we see various points in history - in Dark, for example, we get 1986, 1953, 1921, and 1888 - but we tend to just get one view of the future - 2052 in Dark's case.

Narratively, the future tends to be terrible, and this sets up a motivation for our protagonist to fix it.

But many narratives avoid the future entirely. From a writer's perspective, this can make things easier because you don't have to worry about extrapolating what will occur any number of years, decades, centuries from now (for example, in our current state, I wonder if a decade from now America will be a fascistic hellscape or will have grown and fixed some of the problems that our current "leadership" has caused.)

As I see it, time travel narratives often come in two scales - the personal and the historical. We can actually look to Bill and Ted and Back to the Future as examples for these.

Bill and Ted ludicrously decide to kidnap various historical figures so that they can pass their history class and go on to be the founders of a future utopia (one of the rare cases of a good future in a time travel story.)

Despite their meddling seeming to potentially change the course of history, the narrative is more about the amusing fish-out-of-water nature both of these two doofy teens from San Dimas in other historical eras as well as these figures of history going to a (then-) modern mall before safely being plopped back in their own times, apparently never thinking to share their memory of this experience with anyone.

Time travel of this historical scale can lead to major repercussions - consider the alternate history book the Guns of the South (written by my dad's college roommate, actually) in which apartheidists from 1980s South Africa go back in time and give the Confederates AK-47s so that they'll win the war and not pressure South Africa to end apartheid. The entire history of the US is changed, but the time travel element of this story (as far as I understand) is more of a jumping-off point than an ongoing element of the story.

Either way, the stakes are less personal than global in this case.

Back to the Future, however, gives us a narrower, personal story. Marty McFly goes back to the 50s and inadvertently prevents his parents from getting together. Not only is his own existence at stake (though by what mechanism the ticking clock is ticking is, I think intentionally, a question that remains ignored) but he's basically creating the grandfather paradox.

But Back to the Future is far from depressing - it's a rollicking good time and a lot of fun (though as many have pointed out, how 1980s is it that the movie basically has a white kid invent rock and roll? I know it's more complicated than that, but still). So what of my thesis?

Dark is, perhaps in true German fashion, pretty depressing (they warn you about it in the title).

While the mechanism of the plot becomes more and more the show's focus over time - you could watch the first episode and not realize that it was even a time-travel show, but by the point I'm at, that's the whole thing - there is some thematic poignancy to be found in the use of time travel.

The 33-year cycle that the show (at least at first) uses to separate its time periods is sort of the perfect period of time for human nostalgia. When we are introduced to the world in 2019 (the show started in 2017, setting itself slightly in the future, which starts to look inaccurate once people are in the middle of 2020 with no masks on) we have a generation of adults with teenaged kids, but as we hop back to 1986 (my birth year, which is sort of a trip for me watching the show) we see those very same adults as the teenagers they once were.

Filled with trauma or peaceful happiness, our childhoods are crucially important to the way that we identify ourselves. Upsetting the way that works is a way to make a person feel untethered to their own self. (BIG SPOILER FOR SEASON ONE) So when one of our main characters discovers that his late father was actually his friend's little brother, having been lost in the 80s and getting back to 2019 the long way, it throws everything he thought he knew about himself into turmoil (not to mention the fact that the friend he's in love with is actually his aunt).

Invariably, the world when we are young appears simpler than it turns out to be - even a precocious kid who prides themself on having a nuanced view of the world will find that there are deeper problems and deeper complexities as they grow older (hell, the same is true for adults. I don't think I was quite aware how deeply rotten our police are as an institution until this year).

There's something melancholy about the idea of going back to the past, even as we yearn to do so. For example, I have a lot of nostalgia for the 1990s - a sort of triumphant period for our country, the decade after the Cold War ended but before 9/11, when it seemed obvious that progress would continue unabated (we had three Star Trek shows during that time, folks). Coming back as an adult would force me to confront some of the less pleasant aspects of that time, including rolling back the progress we've made as a culture in certain aspects, such as in fighting homophobia.

I also think that we sometimes forget the hardships we endured. Even if I have nostalgia for the 90s, I also remember that as a kid I was pretty unhappy a lot, feeling picked on in school and having a hard time establishing a real identity for myself.

Indeed, there might be bad things that we don't fully remember about that time, like parents who, over time, learned to be kinder and more empathetic, being reset to old ways.

And here is where the speculative-fiction type of existential angst - the fear of erasing yourself from the timeline, for example - meets a more real, more real-life version. By visiting the past, would we not then be forced to confront the notion that the past we imagined we came from was not as we remember it? Sure, we might not discover our father to be the gawky kid who goes to the same school we do, but in a similar way, we might find that the memory around which we built our identity is a false one.

There's a thing I heard about neurology, which is that every time we access a memory in our brains, we rewire the neural connections that are the recording of that memory, so each time we think of it, we are rewriting it. The consequence, then, is that the more we remember something, the less likely our memory is accurate. And if that's not a mindfuck, I don't know what is.

The truth is that the memories we have are only a copy that exists in the present. Time travel, then, suggests not simply recalling what it was like to be there, but to have the ability to form new memories from the same "master copy," aka actual reality.

So we have both an extremely appealing possibility (before we even get into the idea of fixing things that "went wrong" by changing the course of time) but also a terrifying notion that we might reveal our own memories to be false, the foundation of our identities and our sense of reality shown to be faulty.

Again, this is before we even get into the idea of whether time is a fixed course or if it can be bent (and the paradoxes that occur as a result.) In 2017, my mother died of cancer and a friend from college who was very important to me killed herself. If I had the capability, I'd try to prevent either from occurring (I'd hope that I could just go to my mom a few years earlier and say "hey, it's future me, get a hysterectomy asap") and obviously I'd also feel some responsibility to prevent larger disasters that go beyond my personal life's scope. And the potential obstacles to such tactics - an unchangeable timeline in which these tragic events are now simply foreknown - or just the unseen consequences of meddling with how things happen - worse thing happening despite good intentions - have the potential for angst.

Dark deals with all of these things.

Dark Season 3 Changes the Rules

Having bowled my way through the second season, I'm now on Dark's final season, and boy have things changed.

This is a very twisty, very complex show, and so I really think you'll be best off if you watch it yourself before reading spoileriffic content. I'm one episode into the third season, and the show has just jumped exponentially in complexity.

Let's go over it past the spoiler cut, shall we?

Dark is as Complicated as a Time Travel Story Needs to Be

Where to begin, when writing about Time Travel?

For instance, you could say that Dark begins with the disappearance of Mikkel Nielsen in 2019. But that's only the first event from our (and the show's) perspective. Because we are, currently, in roughly that time period (though holy crap does 2019 feel like a totally different world from 2020) and that's around when this show came out, it makes sense that that's our "normative year."

Such a concept is important when thinking about time travel.

One of the first stories that got me fascinated by time travel was Back to the Future, a rather silly but clever comedy about a modern kid going back in time 30 years and seeing what his small town was like when his parents were his age.

I was born in 1986, and Back to the Future came out in 1985, meaning "modern" was, at the time, 1985. In the second movie in the Back to the Future trilogy, Marty McFly goes forward in time to 2015, imagining a world with flying cars (no) and hoverboards (no... at least not in that way) and, well, just a very late-80s/early-90s version of what "futuristic" looked like. When 2015 came about, we all had a good laugh at the way that the future looked, but in the same way, any speculation about the future tends to wind up looking a bit silly. After all, even as meticulously put together 2001: A Space Odyssey was, there were some very clear errors made in making its predictions.

Another thing that is really kind of profound is the way that the "baseline, modern" timeframe in time travel stories ages. I mean, I wasn't alive yet, but was Huey Lewis and the News really the "cool music for cool teenagers" in 1985?

But I'm getting off-track here.

At least at this point in the first season (I've got one episode to go,) there are three key time periods. The way that time travel works in this world is that there's a sort of portal that takes people through 33-year cycles. I'm not sure if, had you left from 2011 instead, for example, that you'd wind up in 1978, or if the 3 periods that the show focuses on are particularly important, but we see people travel from 2019 to 1986, and then also to 1953.

It's interesting to note that Dark's Winden is a bit like Back to the Future's Hill Valley - a small town where people stick around. It's sort of odd, and maybe the consequence of having a more urban, or at least suburban upbringing, but I don't think any of my friends still live in the town I grew up in, and I don't believe any of my friends' parents grew up there either, so this sort of small-town sticking-around is a bit foreign to me.

Narratively, though, it helps, and boy do we need the help. Essentially, the show focuses on the Nielsen, Doppler, Tiedelmann, and Kahnwald families (can you tell it's set in Germany?) Because of its decades-spanning nature, we see old folks in 2019 who are children in the 1950s, raising their kids in the 1980s.

Of course, because this is a show about time travel, things get more complicated than that - with things like children and adults in the same time period who are actually the same person.

The disorienting nature of time travel lends the show some dramatic and horrifying moments as well, such as when an adult man assaults a child with a rock believing that far in the future, that child will be responsible for the death of his son.

This is definitely a show that encourages note-taking, or at least following along with a list of characters. Sometimes, the actual identity of its characters can be a spoiler, but just having a cast list with names can help sort out who is related to whom.

Structurally, time travel poses a very tricky problem for writers to work through, but it also gives us a lens to look at the way we perceive the past and each other. For example, a police officer who has become sort of cynical and rough around the edges in the 1980s, and is largely an antagonistic presence for the teenaged version of a character we know from 2019, appears as a diligent and disciplined young officer in the 1950s. Which version of this character is the real him? It's both.

And really, I think that the thing that's so mind-bending about stories like this is that it exposes how the way that we perceive time is itself sort of misleading.

Remember, in Back to the Future, the "present" is 1985. And when they made that movie, a future like 2015 felt totally in flux. But from our perspective in the future, the 30 years that passed between those times now feels locked in place, an immutable block of time.

It's one of the great philosophical questions (and also one for physics). Is the future any different from the past? Is the present unique in any way? And to be fair, my (layman's) understanding of quantum physics suggests that at a profoundly small scale, the universe is not deterministic, with probabilities that aren't actually resolved into binary "yes" or "no"s until we force them to do so.

One of the obvious questions raised by time travel narratives is whether there is such a thing as free will. Looser works like Back to the Future suggest that you can absolutely change the past, but that this will cause existentially terrifying consequences, but that on the other hand, if you get things close enough, things will snap back.

At least so far, Dark seems to exist in a world of stable time loops - essentially, any change you wright in the past was always part of it - that's what makes it the past. But this also suggests, then, that you are fated to do various things a certain way, whether you want to or not.

Frankly, I've always had trouble with the concept of free will on a metaphysical level. We do make decisions based on our personalities (which are determined by experience and to an extent genetics) and our stimuli. If we are to make "free" decisions, what, then, determines those decisions? If you argue that we do it based on our own moral character or what have you, isn't that just saying your personality? And if it's free of any influence at all, how is that not just random? Randomness doesn't seem like free will. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics doesn't sound "free" to me. Instead, I think that free will is an illusion born of our ignorance of how we will, in fact, act in the moment.

But just because things are illusory doesn't mean that they're worthless. Consider that solid matter is really just incredibly tiny specks of stuff held together in electrical fields. The actual parts of an atom that are matter are a profoundly small part of the whole, yet we see something like a block of metal and think of it as solid matter through and through.

In a sense, the illusion of free will is one factor that contributes to our exercise of will.

To move back to Dark, one thing that is really interesting to me is the way that time freezes certain things. Consider, for example, that you could explain the way that time travel works to a person. You might then travel back into the past and meet them, and any progress you've made in explaining the way it works hasn't even happened yet.

There's a moment in the show that is the exact kind of crazy time travel stuff I love, where someone from our time approaches a clock-maker in 1953 and shows him a book on time travel - that the clock-maker will write some time in the next 33 years, with a picture of his older self on the back cover.

This sort of "stable" time travel, in which changes to the past were always part of that past, allows for ontological loops - I don't think that the clock-maker plagiarizes himself, but it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility for the way this show works.

The show does clearly have a villain - or at least someone who appears quite villainous - and his ultimate aims remain mysterious. But there are also questions about the nature of reality and the existence of God.

Time travel is probably not possible, at least not in the way that we've imagined it fictionally. But true mastery over time does seem like it would be the ultimate superpower. One does almost wonder if the ultimate mystery of creation is the the universe is self-created.

And this has been thoughts after 2 in the morning.

Dark

I've been, very slowly, getting into the Netflix show Dark, which you might recognize from the screensaver on the PS4 or other similar device Netflix app.

There's a lot to take in, and I don't know that I'll be able to give even my usual brief rundown on the premise, but here goes:

The show takes place in a small (fictional) town in Germany called Winden. Seemingly well-off, the town naturally has its fair share of dark secrets and underlying problems. The thing that sets the plot off is the disappearance of a kid named Mikkel, whose father Ulrich is a police officer.

Something about the kid's disappearance is related to this odd cave that seems to lead under the soon-to-be-decommissioned nuclear power plant.

There's something mysterious, something sinister, and something vaguely sci-fi-y that's suggested by the end of the first episode, but the big reveal is a couple episodes later, when we discover that Mikkel, while alive and unharmed, has traveled back to the mid-1980s.

The show appears to be constructed very elaborately, as a good time-travel story ought to, and I have not gotten any sort of handle on how exactly everything is connected.

There are a lot of characters, and I suspect that as the show goes on, the relationships between them will grow more complex as the twistiness of time travel becomes part of the narrative.

Being an American at a Time Like This

I wrote a post with the same title on the day that the current president was inaugurated. Sadly, many of the fears that I hoped were paranoia have been vindicated. We're currently awaiting an election a few months away that provides a sort of negative hope - not that things will suddenly become great, but that they'll become less terrible.

A deadly disease rampages through our country as a result of a politicized culture-war narrative that seeks to downplay the gravity of the situation. Health, and basic survival have become a binary political issue. Because we are for protecting our neighbors by wearing masks outside, the other side chooses to be against it. While the rest of the world appears to be recovering from this deadly pandemic, our country sees record-breaking new cases, and a national leadership that feels it is knowing that fact, not the fact itself, that is the greater threat to us.

Today is the 244th anniversary of our nation's Declaration of Independence. We are always in a cycle of reckoning with this country's history. In early June, a restless and pent-up energy saw the beginning of massive protests against the impunity with which our law enforcement agencies kill unarmed people of color. There has come a certain cultural understanding, it seems, that this problem is deep-rooted. After all, the very man who wrote "All men are created equal" participated in the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Some, nay most, of our founding fathers were hypocrites - that's just an undeniable fact. A nation born to the ideal of liberty that contained within it the legally recognized practice of chattel slavery.

Progress has certainly been made, though it has always been paid for with blood. Another Jefferson quote is that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Unfortunately, this quote is often embraced by fascistic death cultists who fail to see that they are, in fact, the tyrants.

I have a deep love, and a sort of painful faith in America. My grandparents on my father's side were Jewish Hungarians who still lived there during World War II. The Nazis took them, and both of them lost their first spouses. My grandfather lost his first son, who was then only a small child, I believe only 1 or 2, when the Nazis murdered him. While my grandparents were profoundly lucky to survive the Holocaust, the Communist regime that took over was another authoritarian police state.

After the failed revolution of 1956, my grandparents risked everything to get out of the country with my dad, and two years waiting in Austria, they came to America.

And when they got here, they lived the American dream, working hard and saving up so that my Dad could go to a good college and eventually wind up a respected college professor at a leading international institution.

This country allowed my dad's family to dig their way out of the most dreadful situation and emerge with prosperity, safety, and peace. When he was sent at gunpoint to freeze and die in Russia as part of a forced-labor battalion, I doubt my grandfather expected he'd die peacefully at age 90 in a warm bed in Massachusetts.

America is, on paper, a champion for many things I hold dearly. The notion that all people are equal under the law, that the government serves at the peoples' pleasure, and that there are rights that the government cannot take away from you.

What I have come to understand, however, is that in practice the country has always been at best a partial success. It has failed people of color, particularly black and indigenous people. The impunity with which the police commit violence against these groups in particular (though not exclusively limited to them) is the very sort of practice that characterized the tyranny that my grandparents came here to escape.

When I think about how I grew up - when the worst things the cops would do is call your parents if you got in trouble - it's remarkable the kind of mirror-reality that my black countrymen know.

For all our groundbreaking ideas of liberty and equality, I don't feel that America spent all that much time at any point in history actually leading in that category. There is a cult of greed and white supremacy that is at times overt and yet often subtle and insidious, and it has always held the country back from fulfilling its promise.

That, really, is what I believe in. I have faith in the promise of America. It's one we continually, heartbreakingly fail.

There is some hyper-optimistic hope that in our current era, when the cult is at its most overt, that we will finally be able to exorcise its influence on us. I'm skeptical it will be that easy, and I have my doubts that we're even en route to a successful confrontation at all.

It is hard to be overtly patriotic, though I've felt that way since the Bush administration turned hyper-patriotism into a jingoistic cultural signifier for warmongering (at least that's when I first felt the symbolism was tainted) and this holiday, which is a celebration of this messy, self-contradicting but also beautiful country's birth, comes with some asterisks.

For the last three years, of course, it has also taken on a personal note of grief. Three years ago yesterday, my mother died of cancer. While I still hold, somewhat obsessively, that the 3rd is my day to grieve, she died only half an hour before midnight, and so officially her date of death is the 4th. My mom, who was not an immigrant, and had ancestors going back to the Mayflower, had pride in America, but that pride meant that she could not tolerate those who abused it - those like Bush, or our current unmentionable abomination. By the time he came into office, my mom was in the last few months of her life, and I think was, rightfully, more concerned with her own existential questions and the way she wanted to spend the last time she had with her loved ones.

I think now about how many people in this country are in a similar state, but even worse, because while my Mom had about a year and a half to prepare, and her disease did not prevent her from being close to us, the people dying of Covid-19 are forced to do so in isolation. It's heartbreaking that we, this country that prides itself on being so great, the greatest country on Earth, as we seem to hold as a national creed, has failed so miserably to handle this crisis.

If I celebrate this holiday and this country, I do so as a yearning hope that we will, one day, live up to the standard we set for ourselves 244 years ago.

The Dragon Prince

Well, well, I guess I'm just on a kid's fantasy cartoon series binge.

I'd heard some good things about the Dragon Prince and, having finished Avatar: The Last Airbender (which was fantastic, and ended in a very satisfying way) I decided to check it out - only realizing then that some of the same people were behind it.

It's funny, I think that my fascination with fantasy as a genre (other than Star Wars) was really born more during my teen years, reading Lord of the Rings my freshman year of high school and then getting into Stephen King's Dark Tower when I was a senior. (I guess I shouldn't count out my growing up in the midst of the Disney renaissance that started with The Little Mermaid in '89, which might have been the first movie I saw in theaters.) But the point is, I think I've often discounted children's fantasy when thinking of my influences, looking more to folks like Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin - namely authors who write dark and violent fantasy stories.

Immediately, the nature of the Dragon Prince's world bears some resemblance to that of Avatar - rather than four elements, we learn of six primal sources of magic - the Sun, Moon, Sky, Earth, Stars, and Ocean. Way back, the land of Xandia was unified, but a human invented a new form of magic - Dark Magic - that so terrified the Dragons and the Elves that they forcibly drove all humans west, and a thousand-year-long conflict began. Most recently, humans struck down the Dragon King and, it's said, destroyed the egg containing the Dragon Prince. (No spoilers, but do consider the name of the show.)

So you have a world where there are humans on one side who fear and hate the elves for banishing them, and the elves who fear and hate the humans for their dark magic and dragon-killing.

To start, we're introduced to Callum and Ezran, the two princes of the human kingdom of Katolis. Callum is older, but is only the king's stepson, with his younger half-brother the heir apparent. Callum is bad at standard princely stuff like sword-fighting and horse-riding, but has an artistic talent and a fascination with magic. Ezran is a benignly mischievous little kid who has a silly little color-changing toad-thing named Bait that he seems to get along better with than other kids. Their mom seems to have died at some point, and King Harrow seems to struggle to be a good father to Callum, despite having no blood relation to him.

Meanwhile, a group of Moonshadow Elves have come to Katolis to assassinate the king as retribution for the death of the Dragon King and the destruction of the Dragon Prince. Among them is the young Rayla, who is skilled, but clearly inexperienced and not hardened to the violence expected of her. We're introduced to her chasing down a human soldier who saw their band, but when she has the young man at her mercy, she cannot follow through to deal the killing blow. Her moment of hesitation/mercy is what gives the humans the chance to prepare.

At the castle, Harrow's closest advisor is Viren, who is a mage and also the father of Soren and Claudia. The former is Callum's fencing trainer (and a bit of a dumb jock, but at least in the first season fairly good-natured) and the latter is following in her father's footsteps, learning magic, and is also Callum's crush.

Over the course of the first few episodes, Rayla breaks into the castle and tries to go kill Prince Ezran, even though she's conflicted about doing so, but as she chases Callum and Ezran, they discover that, in Viren's secret dungeon/laboratory, the egg of the Dragon Prince is actually intact. In an effort to stop the war, Rayla, Callum, and Ezran (with Bait) decide to go and return the egg, hoping that this will end the war.

Overall, I've enjoyed the show. It has a lot of the humor and humanity of Avatar, not to mention beautiful artistic design and worldbuilding.

There are two major flaws, as I see it, having watched through the first season this evening.

First, as apparent from that previous sentence, is that it goes so damn quickly. The first season is only 9 episodes long. While we can perhaps be grateful for no "filler" episodes, the best shows use those stand-alone stories to flesh out characters and allow them to develop. One of ATLA's best qualities was the believable way in which the characters evolved over time. For instance, (Spoilers for Avatar: the Last Airbender to follow:) Prince Zuko's transformation from "the main villain" in the first couple episodes to one of the show's most likable heroes happened organically and even had time for that heroic transformation to hit a major relapse, which made the arc so satisfying. I'm still getting to know the main characters by the end of season one with the Dragon Prince, given how quickly the plot flies by.

Second, and I think they might have addressed this in subsequent seasons, but the animation is distracting. The show is CGI, but it is shaded and the framerate is adjusted to make it appear as if it is hand-animated. While this often works fine, there are moments where there's a particular turn or angle that creates this kind of uncanny valley for animation.

I suppose a third complaint I might register is that I'm waiting for a bit more nuance. Clearly, the show is focusing on the way that people on both sides of an issue can have their perceptions of "the enemy" warped. But as we see Viren (and to an extent, his kids, particularly Claudia) perform some seriously spooky magic, I'm hoping to discover more complex motivations. While Zuko was a fantastic anti-villain/redeemed hero, his father and the series' main antagonist Fire Lord Ozai never seemed to have any redeemable qualities. In the case of Viren, it would be easy for him to simply be the ambitious, power-hungry manipulator, but I'm hoping we'll get a more complex character out of him.

There are, of course, two more seasons of the show on Netflix, so I'm sure some of these issues might be addressed. But I do want to see more character development - and really just more time to let the characters assert themselves, thus making future transformations something to be invested in.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Well, it's another late-to-the-party entry.

I've now got two episodes left of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the wildly popular Nickelodeon cartoon that came out in the late aughts. The show is essentially a western-made anime, with a Japanese-inspired art style but produced in America.

The premise: the show is set in a world divided into four primary cultures, based on the four elements: the Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, Water Tribes, and Air Nomads. The peoples of these cultures can practice a mystical art known as "bending," in which they can manipulate their given element magically as a sort of martial art. In each generation, there is an individual known as the Avatar, who has the ability to master all four kinds of bending. But 100 years ago, the Avatar disappeared, and in that time, the Fire Nation has launched a global war of conquest against the other three cultures.

The show begins with two teenagers from the Southern Water Tribe (the Water Tribes live at the poles of this world,) a pair of siblings named Katara and Sokka, come across a boy frozen in ice with a massive six-legged bison. Opening the iceberg, they revive the boy and his creature, who is revealed to be Aang, the Avatar, and the last survivor of the Air Nomads after the Fire Nation wiped them out.

The show follows Aang and his companions as they journey across the world, each learning and growing more powerful as they prepare to face down the Fire Lord and end the war that threatens the world.

The early episodes of the show are fairly episodic, largely focusing on Aang, Katara, and Sokka traveling across the world to get north, where Aang hopes to learn waterbending from the Northern Water Tribe (aside from Katara, who is still a beginner at this point, the Southern tribe's waterbenders have all been killed) while they are pursued by Prince Zuko, the badly scarred son of the Fire Lord, and Zuko's amazingly cool uncle, Iroh.

The focus on Zuko and Iroh is actually one of the first things that jumps out as interesting about the show. Zuko, when introduced, is the embodiment of the aggression and cruelty of the Fire Nation, but his humanity, which is nurtured by his uncle, begins to show through as the early episodes go on. Zuko's role in the series transforms over time, and his internal struggle is one of the primary sources of drama in the series.

As an adult watching the series, (it came out while I was in my last years of college, so I never would have seen it as a kid) it did take a few episodes for me to adjust to the tone of the show, which was particularly simplistic to begin with. However, over time, the show introduces more nuanced and complex ideas about anything from abuse to nationalism to ableism to war crimes. For a kid's show, the background is actually profoundly dark, and while there's no Game of Thrones-like graphic violence (the show is intended for kids, after all,) the psychological scarring of war and other forms of violence are omnipresent throughout.

It's also a really interestingly realized fantasy world, using color-coded artistic design to give you a sense of how central its four elements play into it, while still allowing for variation and distinct subcultures to form within its established world-structure.

Like many "young people have to save the world" kinds of shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the one that jumps to mind,) there's a major theme of having the dual pressures of having all the normal challenges of growing up on top of the pressure to do what no one else in the world can do. That being said, the show thankfully does not get bogged down in what I like to call "high school bullshit" - the show acknowledges the lower-stakes issues of teen (or pre-teen) hormones but never lets those overshadow the life-and-death issues.

One thing I appreciate about the show is the character Roku. The Avatar is reincarnated when they die, and the reincarnations do a rotation of world's four cultures. Periodically, Aang can commune with the spirits of his past lives, and the one he tends to see most frequently is his immediate predecessor, Roku, who was from the Fire Nation. Even while the Fire Nation is on its fascistic, imperialistic war of conquest, we're reminded that their people are also just people, and have the capacity for good in them.

I have two episodes left in the series, having made it halfway through the four-part finale. I'm very curious to check out the Legend of Korra, which is set in the same world, but follows Aang's successor, a girl from the Water Tribes, and is said to be on par with the original show in terms of quality.

Again, Late to the Party, but: Atlanta

I might have met Donald Glover my freshman year of college. He was a senior when I was first there, but we were in a department with less than 300 students total, so while I don't actually remember if I specifically met him, it's possible. There, that's my celebrity brag, such as it is, as well as noting my jealousy for the success of a fellow Tisch alum (likewise, Rachel Bloom, though she was in a different department.)

I became aware of him as the celebrity he has become when I got into Community. While the entire cast of the show was fantastic (even Chevy Chase was mostly good, despite the sense I get that he hated being there) Glover's Troy Barnes was probably my favorite, with his combination of childlike naivete, absurd logical leaps, and underlying optimism and heart. Glover's comic timing was also on-point.

As Community was dying a slow death following the year Dan Harmon was (actually pretty appropriately) fired, Glover quit the show to pursue other projects, and he became something of a superstar - the guy got to be Lando Calrissien and nailed it, even if Solo itself was kind of the epitome of a well-made but ultimately pointless prequel. Then, there's his music, including the song currently stuck in my head, Redbone.

Glover's next TV project after Community was Atlanta, a show that defies definition. While I might be four years late, I've finally finished the first season, which... again, it's hard to really describe.

Ostensibly, it's about Earn, an Ivy-League dropout who has come home to Atlanta and struggles to provide for his daughter Lottie and ex-girlfriend Van. After his cousin Alfred starts to make it big as a rapper, Earn nudges his way into being Alfred's ("Paper Boi's") manager. The fourth regular cast member is Darius, Alfred's stoner roommate who might actually be some kind of mystical prophet.

The show changes format and tone frequently - one early episode focuses on Van and her dinner with an old friend that has them discussing the uncomfortable intersection of money, romance, gender relations, and race, while another has Darius convince Earn to invest a ton of his money in some very bizarre series of trades that won't pay off for months (I'm given to understand that this comes back in the second season) that feels a lot like that quest chain in Ocarina of Time you need to go through to get the Biggoron's Sword, or another episode that ends with a shooting at a club and a shot of club-goers getting hit with a literally invisible car.

The show is a half-hour comedy... sort of? But there's a stream-of-consciousness element to it that again, defies definition. One episode is a Charlie-Rose-like talk show on some sort of alternate-universe BET, complete with fake commercials (my favorite being one in which a guy buys an Arizona Ice T at a convenience store and gets charged 1.49, only for both the customer and the cashier to express shared confusion, given that it literally says 99 cents on the can).

There are times when the show feels like a character-based, grounded story about what it's like to be black in America, and other times when it feels like an episode of Welcome to Night Vale.

When talking about it before its premiere, Glover described the show as Twin Peaks about rappers. I don't know that the show creates the same sort of unified setting-as-character, but it's possible that instead, it's just taking the entire country or world as its surreal land of weirdos that don't make sense.

There's another season for me to watch, and I'm curious/scared to see the infamous Teddy Perkins episode. But the show is one of those pieces that sits with you, and forces you to figure out what exactly it is that you're watching, which I tend to like.

Looking Back at Community

With its recent availability on Netflix, Community has been somewhat more in the public consciousness than it had been recently. Starting in 2009, the show was the creation of Dan Harmon, who I'd previously known from Channel 101, a website where people would compete with short-length webseries (also where I first encountered the Lonely Island, before they took over SNL with their Digital Shorts.)

I started watching Community a bit into its first season, and I came to really love the show. The humor was just my style, and I loved the way that it had the fun of being subversively playing with TV show conventions while still having a really beautiful core of loving one another despite all how extremely weird we all are. The show got a reputation for its pop-culture parodies and references, such as its famous paintball episodes (which helped propel the Russo Brothers to helm Marvel's biggest Avengers movies) but I always felt its emotional honesty amidst all the ridiculous silliness was its greatest strength.

I grew up with shows like Seinfeld, and another beloved hit from my early adulthood was Arrested Development, which both mined humor from deconstructing the idea of a sitcom in making its cast full of unlikeable, awful people. But in Community, I feel there was something of a reconstruction, avoiding the cloying sentimentality of Reagan-era 1980s sitcoms that Seinfeld had revolutionarily rejected with its "no hugging, no learning" ethos, but still giving us characters we could feel emotionally attached to.

People always talk about high-concept episodes like the first paintball action-movie pastiche, Modern Warfare, but my favorite might be Mixology Certification, in which a night at a bar for Troy's 21st birthday and the alcohol consumed leads to the study group learning a lot of things about themselves, most not exactly flattering.

Behind the scenes, Community is an oddly mixed bag. On one hand, most of the cast, to this day, remains in touch and they seem to still be friends. On the other, Harmon and Chevy Chase, the famous ringer who played Pierce Hawthorne for four seasons, famously detested one another. When Harmon was fired after the third season, the general impression was that NBC had bet on Chase's star power, though as Harmon eventually revealed, it had been because he had sexually harassed one of the show's writers, Meagan Ganz. That Harmon was the one who brought this to public attention, and Ganz's public acceptance of his apology, helped Harmon's career survive the scandal, but it does leave an uncomfortable shadow on the show's history.

Never a ratings juggernaut, the show struggled a bit to survive Harmon's firing, and after the fourth season, Chevy Chase quit. Through lobbying by star Joel McHale, Harmon was re-hired for a fifth season, but midway through, Donald Glover, probably the biggest breakout star of the show (though other alums have had quite a bit of success since then, like Alison Brie's starring role on GLOW) quit the show. With new cast members rotating in, the show was still good, but had lost some of its early season magic.

Still, it's the sort of thing that time has a way of smoothing out. I'm in the middle of a re-watch and I'm curious to see how the latter seasons hold up. The early ones absolutely do.

One of the great strengths of the show is its setting. Like many of my favorite sitcoms (or, in the cast of Welcome to Night Vale, podcasts,) Community takes its setting - Greendale Community College - and makes it a character in its own right. Greendale is relentlessly crappy, underperforming, a total joke, but also kind of lovely. Regularly, the absurdity of the classes that they offer (I particularly love when a professor climbs a ladder, and the camera follows him up to see that, high up on the blackboard is written the class's name: "Ladders," which he underlines, eliciting a round of applause by the excited students) and the Dean's many, many absurd school events (like an Oktoberfest Pop-and-lock-athon) make it clear that the place is desperately trying to be a great place, despite its inescapable crappiness. And isn't that just like all of us?

And that setting is embodied by an ever-expanding cast of characters, like sketchy weirdo Star-Burns (played by veteran comedy writer Dino Stamatopoulos) or perpetually freaked-out Gareth, or ancient agent of chaos, Leonard.

It makes me feel painfully old to realize that this show started eleven years ago (and has been over for five) but rewatching it has felt like meeting up with a friend I haven't seen in a while. Indeed, the show seems to touch some deep reality about friendship in a way few other pieces of art have.

Anyway, I like Community.

A Song of Ice and Fire versus Game of Thrones

Though it feels like a decade ago, Game of Thrones, the massive HBO phenomenon, ended last year in a way that left, I think, a fair number of people unsatisfied. Partially, I think it's in how quickly things are settled, the baffling notion that Bran, of all people, seems to the characters to be the "obvious" choice to become king, and the penultimate heartbreaking and a bit out-of-left-field descent into murderous madness of Daenerys.

Oh, by the way, spoilers for a show that ended a year ago and everyone was talking about.

Game of Thrones exploded into public consciousness in 2011, bringing movie-level production quality to television with a fantasy series that was not afraid to be unrelentingly hard-R with nudity and graphic violence. And the show helped to popularize the series of books upon which it was based, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, already a titan within the genre, but not in the mainstream.

The first of his books, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, and the fifth in a planned series of seven game out in 2011, just a few months after the show premiered.

In the nine years since A Dance with Dragons, the subsequent book, the Winds of Winter, has yet to come out. As such, once the show caught up with the books, it was forced to push forward and effectively "adapt" Martin's outline rather than actual books.

The show ultimately brought the plots that had been started in the books to a conclusion, and I'm relatively confident that some of the major story beats - including Daenerys' transformation (or, arguably, reveal) as a dangerous villain - were part of the plan.

I'm not really here to talk about the relative merits of the show versus the book - I think the show was very good for most of its run, and it's a bit of a shame that the shaky ending has killed a lot of the enthusiasm for the property as a whole.

Instead, what I'm kind of fascinated by is the amount of detail found in the books.

Despite getting ten hours per season to tell its story, it's clear that just about every screen adaptation of a book requires cutting things down. I recently listened to a Quinn's Ideas YouTube video/podcast episode about the connections to Lovecraft found in A Song of Ice and Fire, and one of the commenters made a really good point: that Martin overwhelms the reader with detail so that major hints are buried among other details.

Martin's (as far as I know unnamed) world is profoundly dense with history and details in a way someone who had only watched the show - or even who had only read through the books for the main plot - might not realize.

On its surface, A Song of Ice and Fire is a low-magic fantasy setting. While the supernatural certianly exists, it's something the the average person never deals with. The introduction of dragons at the end of the first book, or the looming threat of the undead, are the major supernatural elements of the story, while most of the courtly intrigue and conflicts between Lannisters and Starks involves no magic whatsoever.

But Martin's world is absolutely filled with odd magical elements. Not just that, but also a suggestion that many other strange things are going on in the background.

Here's an example that is pointed out in the video referenced above:

The Ironborn's connections to Cthulhu are pretty obvious if you know anything about that most iconic figure from Lovecraft's works. Their house words of "What is dead may never die" are a pretty clear reference to the Necronomicon quote from Call of Cthulhu: "What is dead may eternal lie, but with strange aeons, even death may die." That, and their house sigil is the kraken, which pretty accurately describes Cthulhu's head. And they worship the "drowned god," which makes sense given Cthulhu lies at the bottom of the ocean in his deathly sleep.

But another point they make is that this could explain the size of Harrenhall, the massive castle that seems to curse anyone occupying it. Harrenhall is the largest castle in Westeros, and has a super spooky vibe given that the guy who built it was burned alive by dragons despite building it to be this impregnable citadel.

But, as the commenters point out, Harren, who built the castle, was an Ironborn king, and it seems possible that he was trying to re-create his drowned god's city on the surface. If we assume the drowned god is basically Cthulhu, then he presumably lives in some terrifying, R'lyeh-like city - a city of utterly massive size and strange angles that don't seem to make sense with a human understanding of geometry. Is that really what Harrenhall is? And is it possible that this is the source of the curse - not just Harren's death, but its connection to a Lovecraftian deity?

It's remarkable how much posthumous characters play a big role in A Song of Ice and Fire. Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark - confirmed in the show to be Jon Snow's actual parents - both have numerous stories surrounding them that flesh them out as a character. For instance, there's a masked knight at a tournament (I believe the one in which Jaime swears his fealty to Aerys) in which a "knight of the Laughing Tree" shows up, and it's subtly hinted that this knight was actually Lyanna, competing in disguise because she was a woman.

The point is, the books are just dripping with massive amounts of detail that would never be economical to fit into any screen adaptation.

To me, it also explains why it would be so hard for Martin to finish his books - we're expecting him to wrap up the 20 or so character plots that we're thinking about, while he's got about a hundred going on in the background.

Great though the show was in its early seasons, I do now wonder if it was wise to start the adaptation before the books were complete. I wonder if Martin, not as distracted by the demands of fame and the reactions to the show, would have had an easier time keeping up with the books.

But I also think that, even if you've watched the show, it's probably worth reading the books anyway, given the massive trove of stories contained within.

Dune, and Good's Capacity for Evil

I'll confess I've started writing and abandoned a number of posts about Dune for the past few weeks after seeing Vanity Fair's photos of the cast in costume for Denis Villeneuve's upcoming adaptation of the seminal science fiction (maybe science fantasy) opus by Frank Herbert.

Dune is immense, both in that it's a rather long book, itself the first entry in a six-part series (Herbert died before he could bring it to a conclusion, though given the scale of the narrative the only true "conclusion" would be the ending that the protagonists are trying to prevent, namely the extinction of humanity) and in that the broad scope of its themes incorporates all of human society, projected essentially indefinitely into the future.

I'm going to avoid summarizing it at all, because it's a very complex story and premise, and I don't want to get bogged down in the many details one needs to fully understand the scope of the story. Suffice it to say - it's on a grand scale. The fourth book (which I haven't actually read - I've only read the first three) takes place over the course of 3,500 years.

At the core of Dune is an examination of the creation of myth, and the dirty truth about messianic saviors.

Western culture is obsessed with saviors (I don't mean to say that other cultures aren't, but it's the one that I'm most familiar with and the one Herbert belonged to) - we can see that especially in religion. Figures like Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed are all larger-than-life, paragons of virtue that those who follow them seek to emulate. While the Jewish tradition awaits a messianic figure to reestablish the Kingdom of Israel and rebuilding of the Temple (something that has been a lot more politically complicated since the founding of the modern State of Israel) and Christianity awaits a second coming of Christ, the expectation is always for perfection - that the arrival of this figure would mean a perfect vindication of religious beliefs and a utopian future to follow.

History's greatest villains, of course, have typically framed their arrival in the same way - through loyalty and faith in the tyrant, they promise an ideal transformation of civilization. To those who are not under such a zealous sway, the loyalty that people show to such people can be baffling and infuriating. Of course, this creates a tribalistic divide that often leads to bloodshed - after all, if you've embraced someone as a paragon of perfect virtue, wouldn't any opposition to that person then, inherently, be a rejection of virtue (aka Evil?)

Whatever skeptical interpretations of someone like Jesus you might believe in - for example, that he's a fictional character invented by Greek philosophers to spread their worldview - from the text, at least, Jesus seems to have the right ethics if you're a lefty-liberal who believes in non-violence, helping the poor, and standing up to the rich and powerful. So why, then, is there this divide in a culture that was, not long ago, pretty uniformly Christian?

That's more than I can answer here, but let's look at the fictionalized example of Paul Atreides.

As a head of state, member of the nobility, and military leader, Paul shares more with the story of Mohammed - which I'll just come out and say I cannot speak as intelligently about as I live in a culture where Islam is a minority religion, and a mistrusted and feared one at that, so I don't have a lot of cultural context to speak about Islam directly. Still, Paul, and his Atreides family, is introduced as a clearly upstanding one within the context of Dune's broader social order.

Paul's father, Leto, is a skilled politician in that he has managed to secure the loyalty of his people not through threats of violence, but by generally providing for them and keeping them safe. When the Atreides are sent to Arrakis to take over the crucially important planet's Spice mining operations, he makes an effort to reach out to the indigenous Fremen people and learn about their culture to better rule that world.

That being said, it's strongly suggested that Leto does this as a political tactic - things are easier and safer for him when people genuinely like him, and so he goes out of his way to be likable - such as when he orders a bunch of spice miners to abandon their expensive mobile facility rather than risk losing them to a Sandworm attack (of course, the precious spice would have been lost anyway, so it's not as if there was any big sacrifice to this move.) This act of heroism helped ingratiate him to Liet-Kynes, the de facto leader of the Fremen people.

One could accuse him of cynicism, but it would take the tone of complaints I remember Romney making after Obama beat him in 2012 - claiming that the poor had voted for Obama because of "gifts" he had given them in terms of beneficial policies. Is it cynical to give your people what they want? Or to treat your people with empathy?

Though Leto is liked, Paul, in escaping a coup that kills his father and most of his supporters, comes to hide out with the Fremen and winds up living up to prophecies of a messianic savior in their culture. These prophecies, of course, were manufactured by the Bene Gesserit, an all-female organization that his mother belongs to, but nevertheless, he meets their criteria, and when it comes time for Paul to lead the Fremen in liberating Arrakis from the evil Harkonnens, the prophecy is fulfilled.

Paul kills off the last of the Harkonnens (except not really, as it's revealed that his mother, Jessica, is actually the daughter of Vladimir Harkonnen, meaning Paul is just as much a Harkonnen as the villainous Feyd Rautha he fights in a duel at the end of the first book) and forces the Emperor to wed his daughter to him, thus making him heir to the Imperial throne.

Paul, who has fought back against evil plotters who sought to control him or kill him, has raised up a long-oppressed people, and promises to bring a better world to the Imperium. And it would seem that all of that is going to be wonderful and good.

Except.

Paul, in his time with the Fremen, undergoes a ritual with a drug related to the Spice that grants him prescience. He can see the future, whether through some kind of perfect awareness and ability to calculate how society will act (he's been raised by his father to be a Mentat, which are the human computers that have replaced digital ones after the long-ago Butlerian Jihad) or if he's gotten some mystical precognition is left deliberately fuzzy, but he can see the consequences of his actions.

And the horrible thing is that, while what he has done has, ultimately, been good for the universe, there's still going to be billions of deaths as a result. The Fremen, their faith vindicated by Paul's victory, go out into the universe to spread faith in "Muad'dib," but as mentioned before, those who are so zealous in their faith can see skepticism as sacrilige, and even before they do it, Paul can foresee the murderous jihad that the Fremen will wage against the rest of humanity.

Worse still, he has to let them do it, and even encourage and order them to do so, because the prescience he is granted shows him every branching path the future might take, and that means a narrower and narrower path of what he must do to prevent the extinction of humanity.

The story of Jesus is one of profound self-sacrifice and nonviolence. Jesus gives himself up to be executed in one of the most horrifying and gruesome ways that humans have invented (the word "excruciating" essentially means the kind of pain one would feel being crucified) as a message to stand up to the powerful and not fear death. But others have, in Jesus's name, had people killed and tortured in similarly horrific ways. Wars have been waged in his name, and people have even fought over differences in interpretation of his message (very subtle ones, too.)

It's hard to say what the world would be like now if it hadn't been for the rise of Christianity. There were several other nascent religions arising in the Roman Empire at the time that Christianity became prominent. Had Constantine chosen, say, Mithraism instead, which was a soldier's religion that involved being baptized in blood by having a bull slaughtered over you, might we have descended into a horrific fascist nightmare (you know, more than we have in this timeline?) The problem with such narratives, of course, is that people can defend all manner of terrible things by claiming some "ends justify the means" mentality, such as when a taxi driver tried to argue that black people were better off for having been enslaved and brought to America (which... ooh boy that was an awkward conversation, though I'm glad I had the presence of mind to tell him he was wrong.)

And yet, when the scale is arbitrarily large - a universe colonized by humanity where a planet of billions being slain is not going to cause all of civilization to collapse, and where the longterm goals are in the "how far can we imagine in the future" range - moral questions do become a complex thing.

Paul Atreides goes through a classic hero's journey, and yet Herbert insists on questioning and undercutting the very notion of heroes. Eventually, Paul's son Leto II undergoes a transformation into something inhuman and becomes the God-Emperor, the most brutal tyrant humanity has ever - and if he succeeds, will ever - seen. Leto II's goal is to wean humanity off of this desire for a savior, and even as his 3,500-year plan comes to fruition, he has his doubts that his goals were all worth the pain, suffering, and death that he inflicted.

It's natural to bring up Star Wars when talking about Dune. The high fantasy-like feel of Dune's futuristic feudalism is an obvious point of comparison with Star Wars, not to mention a prominent desert planet and a galactic empire (though Dune's claims to be universal.) The original trilogy had a much easier hero to embrace - Luke is never in it for his own power. He wants to fight to free the Galaxy, but he's not in it to become the new Emperor - he wants to leave the political power to others, and just throw off the oppression of the Empire and redeem his father.

Ironically, the sequel series (which I think was primarily for Disney to capitalize on having acquired one of the most profitable film franchises of all time) manages to introduce some of the complicated issues that Dune deals with. Luke, for instance, has to grapple with the fact his own messianic reputation led to the overconfidence that failed his nephew and undid all the good that he and his friends had accomplished in their youth.

Even though you can read the first Dune novel as a purely heroic story of good triumphing over evil, doing so would mean ignoring the core of its themes - that humanity is messier than such things, and the greatest good can wind up inflicting terrible evils.

There's also stuff about capitalism, environmentalism, and transhumanism, but those are all subjects I can't fit in this post.

The Mandalorian, Elemental Storytelling, and Exposition

I'm a little over halfway (I think) into The Mandalorian's short first season. Something of a flagship release for Disney Plus, you can tell that cash was poured into this show by the truckload, boasting artistic direction and cinematography that rivals the massive-budgeted films (though it's probably helped by not having quite as many massive space battles, given the smaller scale.)

The show has been pretty universally popular, despite how polarizing the sequel trilogy was. Why is that?

My sense is that it's because it taps into something deep, elemental, and mythic about what makes Star Wars appealing in the first place.

We've become accustomed to twisty, complex plots, particularly given the influence of J.J. Abrams, who certainly had other claims to fame before it, but is probably became really prominent in Hollywood after creating Lost, a show that was famous for its, well, complex and convoluted plot (I'd note, however, that the show was really more the product of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof's leadership, and it's been really interesting to see how Lindelof in particular seems to have learned a lot of lessons from that project, delivering much more satisfying conclusions in The Leftovers - which I haven't seen all of - and the Watchmen miniseries - which I have.)

Lucas himself wrote far more complicated stories with the Star Wars prequels, and, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the complications did not really ring satisfying the way the original movies did.

This all leads to a very difficult question: What is Star Wars?

There are a lot of answers to that: a blockbuster franchise made to sell toys, a distillation of various global cultural influences into an American melting pot of a mythos, an examination of heroism and villainy, a rallying cry to make baby boomers feel better about themselves after the terrible trauma of Vietnam (the war itself or the fact we lost, depending on who you ask,) or Lucas' Tarantino-esque desire to remake his favorite movies all at once.

Star Wars ran away with our imaginations, and thousands of artists and creators have contributed to the broad canon of this fictional universe. That means that yes, every single weird-looking alien in the Mos Eisely cantina scene from the original movie has a name and some sort of backstory.

And it also means that a bit part - Boba Fett, the bounty hunter from Empire Strikes Back and a bit of Return of the Jedi - has had an entire culture around him invented and detailed, entirely based on the iconic design of his badass armor.

I've often semi-joked that the fantasy genre is for audiences who like exposition. I mean, which nerds among us didn't get chills up their spines when we first saw the Fellowship of the Ring and heard Cate Blanchette detailing the history of the creation of the One Ring? Usually, the rule for writing is to try to make exposition invisible - you need people to know the facts so they can understand what's going on, but you want to show, rather than telling. But fantasy is a genre where you can often get away with telling, usually because the exposition is giving you such unusual, otherworldly information that the very idea of it is interesting in and of itself.

But, if you can do that subtly, without calling attention to your exposition with, say, a giant scrolling wall of text at the beginning of your movie, and still get across the big fantasy ideas, you might be onto something huge.

Indeed, despite starting with a scrolling wall of text, the first movie's very first shot is a fantastic example of showing rather than telling. We see a spaceship rush by, lasers blasting back at whatever is pursuing it. And then we see the tip of the ship that's chasing it. And then more of it. And more. And more. And more. There's a principle in comedy where you can do a running gag long enough where it's funny, then stops being funny, and then becomes funny again. This effectively does the opposite. The Star Destroyer is huge, and then it's comically huge, and then it's menacingly huge before we finally see the end of it. And with that, you get a sense of the oppressive scale of this galactic empire, and you're immediately on board with the rebellion seconds into the movie proper.

The first movie is also intriguing to watch in a vacuum, pretending you don't know everything you found out in the subsequent ten films. Things are left extremely vague - what does the rebellion look like? What came before the empire? Hell, who even leads the empire? (We don't see the Emperor until the second movie, and until it got special-editioned, we didn't even have Iam McDiarmid in the role until Jedi.) Given what we find out later on, it's kind of shocking how much Grand Moff Tarkin seems to be Vader's superior, which expanded universe sources have had to work had to justify.

The movies have tended to focus in on the Skywalker saga - following Anakin and Luke, and then Ben. And while you can bet your ass I wanted Jedi force powers as a kid (ok, honestly, I'd still like them) one element of the series that always seemed to resonate was the dangerous outskirts of the Galaxy. Yes, there's a whole futuristic civilization there, but we're introduced to Luke on Tatooine, which is portrayed as some mixture of small-town America, the Wild West, and Arrakis from Dune. The lawless frontier, while seemingly not that important to the larger-scale conflicts with the fascistic Empire and its remnants later on, is also where Star Wars seems to be most comfortable.

So, the Mandalorian chooses that as its setting.

And, borrowing a tone and storytelling style from the Spaghetti westerns that inspired much of Star Wars' western feel (particularly adapting the scumminess of it into Star Wars' "used future" aesthetic,) the Mandalorian is far more concerned with showing than telling. Indeed, the main characters, at least early in the season, don't have names. There's the eponymous Mandalorian (Mando for short) and The Child. One of the core members of the cast is a Henson-made puppet who never speaks. And Mando is fairly terse himself.

What that allows is for storytelling that is primarily visual, or at least non-verbal. And I don't know what it is, but for some reason that style of cinematic storytelling is always very impressive.

Indeed, it makes me think of a number of critically-acclaimed action movies that have come out within the last ten years. Mad Max Fury Road, as an example. That's a story in which you could watch it without knowing english and still probably get it.

Now, where I'm at, the show is starting to hint at deeper and more complex plots, but for the time being, it's rather simple - bounty hunter has a moral crisis and finds himself on the run from his colleagues. But the show is just a pleasure to look at, with a fantastic score aping Ennio Morricone by Ludwig Gorranson. I almost worry about the show getting bogged down in complicated and convoluted character dynamics as it goes on, because right now it's so pure.

And that, to me, is what makes Star Wars so resonant. I've sometimes thought that Americans are always looking for the most iconic, mythic, and quintessential expression of something in our art, and Star Wars hits something very close to that core. It's as if we're trying to best represent the actual shadow puppet in Plato's cave.

Even though its premise and plot are quite different from other Star Wars stories we've seen, the Mandalorian (so far) seems to be resonating with that purity that the original movie so effectively achieved.