Fringe Was a Rare Show of Its Era That Stuck the Landing

 Fringe was never the massive hit that creator J J Abram's previous show, Lost was. Lost had people gossiping about it between every episode, holding a coveted space among TV shows that would later be occupied by Game of Thrones, and I'm not sure any other show has really reached that level of saturation since GoT's finale in 2019.

In a lot of ways, Fringe had some things working against it. The parallels with The X-Files, perhaps not a water-cooler show (in part because it wasn't as serialized as shows of the 2000s were) but one that was a pop-culture phenomenon, were pretty obvious. And to be frank, I think that some of the show's early case-of-the-week mysteries were underwhelming, and in the case of its second episode, with the bizarre accelerated pregnancies, felt like too much of a "these sci-fi writers don't know anything about science" leap.

Basically, I think this is a show that's well worth watching, and while the first season felt better on a re-watch, it really isn't until the latter part of the show's second season (the episode "Peter" in particular) that the show starts to feel really, really cool.

As discussed on this blog previously, Fringe takes some utterly wild swings, and while I still look fondly upon the show's later seasons, I don't think any quite match the fun and exciting potential of its first massive world-shifting twist.

I guess we should do a spoiler cut.

The Paradoxes at the Culmination of Fringe

 As I'm on the cusp of the conclusion of Fringe's final season (I think I have two episodes left, but those episodes, if memory serves, as basically a two-part finale) I'm finding it interesting to see how the show has shifted its shape. It began pretty strictly as a case-of-the-week sci-fi procedural, but as I've talked about before, the show always seemed to enjoy a more serialized form of storytelling, right at a time around 2010 when television in general was trending toward tighter serialization.

There are a number of ways in which the show has really transformed itself, and while this doesn't fully push the cases of the week out of the picture until the final season, the writers clearly also liked essentially turning a lot of those cases of the week into retroactive set-ups for later pay-offs.

Let's get into the specifics behind a spoiler cut:

Fringe's Short, Final Season is Almost a Different Show

 By the end of Fringe's fourth season, the audience is used to big shifts. First, we're introduced to the alternate universe, where other versions of familiar characters have lived different lives and often wound up with significantly different personalities (not to mention all the fun details about how life is similar but different to our universe, like the fact that heavier-than-air air vehicles never really took off so everyone still travels in giant blimps). Next, we're introduced to a timeline in which Peter was never rescued by the Observer September when he and Walter fell into Reiden Lake.

That's spoilery-enough, so let's put a cut here:

Fringe's Amber Season

 Yeah, I know that I'm making a lot of posts about a show that ended over eleven years ago, but it has honestly been a delight to revisit it. If memory serves, the show also manages to stick the landing in a way that other genre shows that were its contemporaries didn't manage so well (though I'm not there yet).

I'm not done with the show's fourth season, which I believe is also its last full-length season (though season five I believe has 13 episodes, which is honestly kind of normal for shows in this streaming, high-budget era we live in now).

Fringe, as I've written about in previous posts, is a show that undergoes massive changes, reinventing its world and premise and characters in fascinating and audacious ways.

Again, I wrote about this before, but I think that the show's fourth season is a particularly interesting place to talk about this. And for that, just to be safe, I'm going to put a spoiler cut here.

The Shifting Reality of Fringe

 Given how much I've been binging this show in the past week, I must like it. (My roommate decided to give it another try but bounced off of it after the fourth episode - a little surprising given that I feel that that Observer-centric one is the first really good episode of the show.)

I wrote in my last post about the way that Fringe transforms, at least partially, from a pretty self-contained case-of-the-week kind of show into something significantly more serialized in the latter part of the second season. It's not a total transformation - even now that I'm two episodes into season four, we're getting some of those kinds of plots - but the show transforms in other ways that I think are notable.

I figure I'll still do a spoiler cut here, despite the show having concluded I think over ten years ago now.

Fringe and Tracking the Transition from Episodic to Serialized Television

 My early adulthood was, even during this era, called the Golden Age of Television. It was a period in which the medium ascended in quality (and budget) and there was a lot more serious consideration of TV shows as an art from to rival cinema. Indeed, as movies began playing it safer, with more and more franchise-focused projects (I will defend the MCU as being an original experiment in blockbuster movie-making that everyone just tried to copy, though even I have gotten kind of tired of it in the post-Endgame stretch these past 5 years,) we got TV shows that were becoming the place for talented actors to showcase their skills, allowing for gradual and thorough character development over time.

While the shows that were seen as "high art" usually starred villainous protagonists and antiheroes like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, the era also saw more ambitious genre shows. Lost, for example, was the big Water Cooler show, with Game of Thrones probably taking that spot over shortly after Lost ended (or did they overlap?)

Anyway, the format of television shows for much of their lifespan was episodic: you'd have a premise with a regular cast of characters, and each episode (each week) they'd be dealing with some new challenge or conflict. Many shows were structured in such a way to encourage this kind of storytelling. Police procedurals, medical procedurals, and fantasy/sci-fi "monster of the week" shows are all built around having some kind of mystery to solve. In most cases, the mystery is resolved by the end of the episode, and the characters reset to their starting positions, essentially, in a happy equilibrium, before the next episode challenges them.

Now, on a practical level, this style of storytelling could be very helpful when the show went into syndication: if the plot of each episode is self-contained, then you don't need to watch the episodes in order. You could hop into a season four episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, and then watch a season six episode next, and you should be able to follow both relatively easily.

The Simpsons, hardly a procedural, at least used to make something of a joke about this zero continuity structure: in one infamous episode, milquetoast elementary school principle Seymour Skinner is revealed to actually be an imposter who stole the identity of his sergeant back in Vietnam after the real Skinner supposedly died. However, when the real Skinner is finally released from a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp, the false Skinner, actually named Armin Tanzarian, is ousted from his job and the community struggles to adjust. But, by the end of the episode, basically just because the town feels weird about this change, a judge rules that Tanzarian will now be considered the real Skinner, that the actual Skinner is banished from the town, and that no one shall mention it again under penalty of torture.

Still, even in the 1990s, the idea of recognizing some continuity over the course of a series wasn't entirely out of the question. Star Trek TNG had, for example, the ongoing conflict of Worf with the Duras clan, as well as Picard's struggles to reckon with his PTSD after being briefly assimilated by the Borg. Notably, Deep Space Nine, the Star Trek show that slightly overlapped with TNG, eventually put a lot of its focus on the overall arc of the Dominion War, an arc that took, if memory serves, over half the series' length, starting in full in season four.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which straddled the turn of the millennium, had an interesting approach: most episodes told a self-contained story, but each season had its Big Bad who had to be dealt with in the season finale. While the villainous threats didn't tend to last more than one season (except Spike, who gradually evolves from a villain to an ally) the ongoing weight of the events that transpire does take its toll on the characters.

But I think it was in the late 2000s/early 2010s that we started to see shows really go full-serialized. Some shows probably should have done so earlier: I remember watching Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's post-Firefly TV project before he directed the Avengers and before the world discovered that he's apparently a piece of shit, and feeling infuriated that the show was so slow for any long-term plot to finally take effect.

So, it was around this time period that Fringe came out. Premiering four years after Lost did, it was J.J. Abram's next big thing (while I have no reason to think that Abrams is a bad human being, I have grown very skeptical of him as an artist, starting around Star Trek Into Darkness, as I feel that he largely just re-creates the movies that he loved from the 1980s without contributing any real new ideas). Like Lost, though, I think Abrams' involvement in the show was only at the outset.

To start, the show was very much in the vein of The X-Files - a group of investigators who looked into paranormal events, though while the X-Files lived more in the land of cryptids, UFOs, and conspiracy theories, Fringe focused more on "fringe science," the kind of weird experimentation that went on in secret during the Cold War, this time under the storm cloud that was the War on Terror. There's a lot of victims in this show who are randomly selected but deliberately targeted, much as terrorists will pick unlucky civilians to die in their attacks.

The show starts off with (though it's a throughline) a lot of Body Horror, but to begin with, most episodes are your classic case-of-the-week structures. Yes, there's an ongoing plot in which central protagonist Olivia Dunham has a lingering phantom of her dead lover's memories in her mind, the after-effect of a mad experiment intended to help her recover some of his memories while he was comatose and dying from a strange synthetic toxin.

Season one does introduce David Robert Jones and the ZFT terrorist organization as primary threats, but it only touches on these guys in some episdoes.

Where things really transition, though, is about halfway or two thirds of the way through season two. After a story hinted at but never fully confirmed gets its full episode-long flashback, the plot begins to laser-focus on what will be pretty central to the whole series, which is the alternate universe.

Spoilers from here on, I guess?

Fringe's First Season is Better Than I Remembered

 It's interesting, having now re-watched the first season of Fringe, that my opinion of the show has grown in the revisiting. I had always recalled the show's first season, which uses the oft-successful formula of mostly episodic stories peppered with hints at the overall arc plot, to be the show's weakest. If that remains my assessment upon watching subsequent seasons, it must be a fine show indeed.

In fact, I think it's only the first few episodes, where the show wrestles with establishing its characters and tone, that feel weak in that same way.

One thing in particular I remember feeling when watching it originally was that I thought Anna Torv's performance in the first season (maybe first season and a half) was strangely wooden, only to realize later that this was a choice to reflect the conditioning that Olivia did not remember receiving in childhood. By the time I finished the series, I was convinced that Torv is actually a really gifted actor, but I remember that it took a season or two for me to feel that way. Strangely, upon a revisit, I don't actually know why early 20's-Dan felt so critical of her performance. Seems fine to me now.

The show also was the first in which I saw Jared Harris play a brilliantly intelligent recurring villain - an archetype he has played in a number of other shows, The Expanse being the one that comes to mind most.

Knowing the eventual trajectory of the show, I do wonder how much the creators really had mapped out - for example, I know what the Observer is (and I do love the reveal at the end of Inner Child, where what seemed to be a pure standalone episode suddenly links into one of the grander mysteries).

The show's case-of-the-week stories are a bit hit-or-miss, and to be certain, this is not sci-fi for people who know much about science (I didn't study any real science in college, but being the son of a science professor, admittedly one of computer science, I've caught several things that feel very much like the kind of sci-fi a screenwriting major would come up with and not pass it by any kind of scientist consultant).

It's also notable that some of the secondary characters - like Broyles, Astrid, and Charlie - don't get a whole ton of development. I think that's probably a reasonable choice just in terms of giving the show the chance to focus on its core trio (though even Peter feels a little underexposed) though it also feels notable that this means focusing on three white characters.

Actually, I think this might have been the show that first exposed me to Lance Reddick (I also watched the Wire. Fun fact, his characters' last names in these two shows are, together, the name of my oldest friend). Reddick is more or less just tasked with being the classic bald black chief character, but I always like seeing him and am still sad that he died last year.

The show uses a lot of body horror to demonstrate the stakes of its crises, but I find myself most intrigued by plots that are more conceptually unusual than simply gruesome. Luckily, the arc-plots tend more toward that direction, as each of the characters slowly peels back the mysteries of their past, the unknown connection Olivia shares with Walter. Indeed, a really interesting reveal involving the letter Y on a typewriter is then doubly subverted (though I wonder if it'll turn out that my initial interpretation of that twist is actually true - the joys of watching a show you mostly remember but not all of. Weirdly similar to Walter and his relationship with the experiments he was doing in the 70s.)

Anyway, especially during a time when disappearing into a long narrative feels like a necessary break from a frightening reality, it's been really good to come back to this show.

Revisiting Fringe

 For the first time since the show aired, I decided to revisit Fringe. Co-created by JJ Abrams after the massive success of Lost (and while Lost was still on the air,) the show premiered shortly after I finished watching through the entirety (well, up to that point, not counting the revival season) of The X-Files.

The show, like the X-Files, is about paranormal investigations, but while its antecedent centered government conspiracies and aliens (even if many of the case-of-the-week stories weren't really about aliens at all) Fringe sort of reinvented what kind of show it was several times over its run.

I got that first season on DVD, though ironically, as I remember it, the first season is probably its weakest, grasping vaguely at what kind of story arc it wanted to tell.

One amusing thing I've realized is that Anna Torv, the show's lead (though it's nearly a co-equal trio of her with John Noble and Joshua Jackson) is 8 years older than I am, and thus, in the 16 years since the show premiered, when I first saw it, she's 8 years older than I am but now the season-one version of her is 8 years younger.

I don't know - I have a weird fixation on ages.

The basic premise is that there are strange events, not precisely paranormal, more like weird science experiments with deadly consequences, and FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Torv) is swept into investigating them. In order to solve the pilot episode's mystery, which turns in such a way to threaten the life of her romantic partner, also an FBI agent (and apparently played by Torv's actual then-husband). She needs the help of brilliant scientist Walter Bishop (Noble) and has to wrangle Walter's son Peter (Jackson) in order to get Walter out of the mental institution in which he has spent the last 17 years.

After this first case (which ultimately ends with the discovery that Olivia's boyfriend is actually part of some mysterious conspiracy, and his death - which, if memory serves, doesn't ultimately come to anything as the show finds more interesting arc-plots to get into) the three of them wind up making a pretty good unit for some case-of-the-week shenanigans.

The second episode is one that, on my first watch, frustrated me with some leaps in logic. The show is ostensibly science fiction, and while it's far from hard sci-fi, there are some elements that I don't buy as much as the weird stuff from the pilot. Maybe I'm just being nitpicky, but the episode starts with a woman (who looked familiar, so I looked it up and I found out it was Betty Gilpin before she was famous) goes from having sex with a guy to becoming pregnant, her belly swelling, dying in labor, and the baby then rapidly growing into a full-grown adult who then dies of old age. This... this violates the conservation of matter and energy. Like, she doesn't suddenly eat a lot. Where did this baby get the mass to grow to such a size?

I know, I know, it's all kooky sci-fi, but this frustrated me then and it frustrated me today. In a sense, I think it's just that the far-out-ness of the sci-fi doesn't go far enough at this stage for me to believe it.

Part of my motivation to return to this show was thinking about its aesthetic. Admittedly, there's more of the cool stuff in later seasons (in particular, there's a thing that I believe starts in the second season in which people communicate via a typewriter that is somehow linked to an alternate universe). But beyond the aesthetic, I've found myself drawn more to paranormal stories since playing the game Control last year (and delving head-first into the works of Remedy Studios - if you read my gaming blog, Altoholism, you'll see how much I've gotten into the weeds on their stuff). Fringe goes to some crazy places over its run, and I actually think this kind of thing in a later season might be sold better - something about drawing energy from some other universe or something to justify this growth. But the show simply says there's something weird with the pituitary gland. Not really enough.

It's also striking how much sexism plays a role in the pilot and the second episode. Characters that we're supposed to like and respect (well, to be fair, one of them we're supposed to find kind of a dick at this point, but I know he becomes more likable later on) call Dunham "honey" in a professional environment. There's also something rather de rigeur about the way that women are murdered in the second episode. (I don't know what an operating room would look like if this happened in real life, but the doctors make no effort to resuscitate the Betty Gilpin character after her heart stops beating, immediately moving to perform an emergency C-section. Maybe that's just triage, but in our post-Roe world - and who the fuck knows what is coming after that - it was a disturbing moment that I don't think the show meant to be any more disturbing than "look at this crazy sci-fi medical crisis!")

One thing that sits over the pilot in particular is the feeling of the War on Terror. The crisis that starts the whole thing off is a plane from Germany in which all the passengers and crew have been essentially melted by some kind of synthetic pathogen. It's extremely nasty, and a reminder that network TV can get away with surprisingly gory content. But the very fact that it's something horrifying happening on an airplane means that it's all Homeland Security and suspicions about Middle Easterners. The show premiered when George W. Bush was still president, about two months before the 2008 election, and it's really strange sixteen years later flashing back to that era (I wouldn't say that I feel nostalgic for it, but it was a very different set of anxieties than what we have now).

Knowing some of the crazy twists the story goes through, I find myself wondering to what extent they had any of that figured out by this point. If memory serves, The Pattern (a term they use for the increased frequency of paranormal events) kind of stops being much of a concern, and indeed, I think even the definitely-evil megacorp that is Massive Dynamic plays a less sinister role later in the show. (The show also relocates primarily to New York at some point from Boston, which is sad for me as a Bostonian.)

Anyway, if I have further insights on a re-watch, I'll share them.

Feeling Trapped

 I wish I could say I can't believe we're here again.

The first election I voted in was 20 years ago, when John Kerry challenged George W. Bush for the White House after Bush failed to prevent 9/11 and got us into two wars that would last twenty years. It was a deeply disappointing moment to see Bush win re-election, the first time that I felt I was really, truly, not aligned with the majority of my countrymen.

2016 was a shock in part because we weren't taking him seriously. The Obama years, though they had been less impressive than the original 2008 campaign promised, had nevertheless felt like a period in which I could go outside the country and not feel ashamed. And Obama himself was still popular, despite the setbacks and disappointments.

The following years were one of deep angst and shame, and ultimately culminated in the Covid pandemic, something that would likely have happened no matter who was in the White House, but which was horribly mismanaged in this country. But 2020 felt like we were finally let up for a breath of air. These past four years, now rapidly coming to a close, have been mired in the residue of the previous administration, but at least there was a feeling that there was something truly powerful pushing back against it.

Now, though?

He's promised his supporters that they won't need to vote in the next election. He's promising that the responsiveness a democracy owes to its citizens will be a thing of the past.

And people voted for that.

We were let out into the light, still bleeding, still wrapped in barbed wire. And now, it almost feels like this respite was only there to make the pain of what is to come all the more brutal.

These forces, these grand things in such a massive country, are kind of incomprehensible. There is, of course, always a pendulum swing, but during my adult life - honestly, for my entire life, born as I was during the second term of the Reagan administration - it has felt like there's mostly a ratcheting that squeezes us further and further toward cruelty, toward a world that seeks domination rather than reconciliation.

Where will we be ten years from now? I have all manner of nightmare scenarios running in my head. And I feel powerless to affect what will happen. We're at the whims of forces larger than ourselves.

I'm not here to lend advice. I'm deep in the depths, struggling to get my head above water in all of this darkness.

My grandparents took my father and fled Hungary after the failed 1956 revolution against the Communist regime. My grandfather had always had ambitions to come to America after he narrowly survived the Holocaust - like every survivor, luck seemed the primary method of survival. The failure of the revolution and the Soviet-backed crackdown that followed led my grandparents to finally commit to this escape.

America, for all of its flaws, is supposed to be the beacon of freedom. I don't know if we'll still be that. Last time, the institutions remained resilient to efforts to subvert them, but they'll need to be more resilient this time.

I'm just one guy. One struggling writer. My words are not going to move masses.

So, for what it's worth, here's my survival strategy, such as it is: I'm going to focus on what's in front of me. I have a baby nephew. I have friends I love dearly. I have art and storytelling.

Is that enough from me? Is that enough from a citizen of a country whose character is in peril? I don't know.

Rings of Power: A Show I Want to Be Better Than It Is

 I just finished the second season of Rings of Power.

Given the narrowness of what HBO is legally allowed to adapt - the appendices of the Lord of the Rings but not the Silmarillion or, you know, the Lord of the Rings (or the Hobbit) - there's a lot that the show needs to kind of make up and not draw directly from Tolkien, while attempted not to contradict what he wrote.

Consider, for example, that in Tolkien's canon, the Wizards (or Istari, a word that I assume gets bastardized into Wizard gradually) don't actually come to Middle Earth until the Third Age, after Sauron's initial defeat (or initial defeat as Dark Lord). Here, the show has wizards showing up in the Second Age primarily, I think, because if you made a Lord of the Rings TV show, you'd have people missing the presence of Wizards.

Adaptation of long-running stories can pose a big challenge. I've noted how Apple TV's Foundation series runs into this problem - in Asmiov's original stories, they function something like an anthology, with a new cast of characters every century or so, the actions of the previous era now being fully ingrained in the history of how the Foundation itself evolved from a bunch of nerdy archivists into a kind of Holy Church of Technology and beyond. The sole point of continuity is the holographic recordings of Hari Seldon, who are there to basically let all the air out of the tension tires in the first couple stories by saying that what looked like a mortal crisis for the Foundation was actually all accounted for, and that pattern being beautifully and panic-inducingly subverted with the introduction of the Mule.

The Apple show contrives to freeze its characters in cryogenic stasis so that it can have a continual cast. (Actually, they come up with a brilliant way to justify keeping the same actors, especially the amazing Lee Pace, with the whole "genetic dynasty" of Emperor clones - something utterly foreign to the original books, where the Emperor is barely a presence in the story.)

With the history of the Rings of Power, in Tolkien's lore, the rings exist over the course of many generations. The truth of their darkness and corruption isn't really understood until they've been fully incorporated into the various cultures of Middle Earth.

Galadriel is introduced as our primary protagonist, and the show's makers have a bit of an out - when you have Elves who never die of old age, you can portray ages passing by without having to introduce a whole new cast of characters.

It does mean, though, that you will need to do so with your human characters, and to a lesser extent, your dwarves and proto-Hobbits. Rings of Power decided that Elendil and Isildur and all the Numenorian characters had to be part of the plot from the start, and as such, the timeline has been compressed significantly.

While the Nine Rings of Men have not yet been distributed (and I've been thinking for a while that that one kid is going to be one of the Nazgul eventually,) the whole idea of them is that they basically prevented their wearers from aging. It's a whole thing in Tolkien that humans' shorter lives were actually a gift from God (Eru, but I think quite explicitly the same God that Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in). Sauron's power over humans is that he's gotten them to fear death, and by offering them a way to stave it off indefinitely, he's convinced them of the power of the rings.

Of course, by avoiding natural death, over time the human ring-bearers' souls become twisted into wraiths, and their bodies, while never technically "dying," are reduced to shadow-stuff that doesn't even properly exist on this plane of existence. Hence Ring-Wraiths.

In my mind, these people might have even started out as noble rulers who really thought they were doing the right thing - similarly to how Sauron believes that he's the only one who can fix the world after the chaos that his old master Morgoth inflicted upon it. Sauron's fatal flaw is that he isn't willing to let anyone else do the fixing, so convinced he is of his own unique capacity.

But the compressed timeline doesn't allow for this transformation. At this stage of the show, basically everyone knows that A: Sauron's back and B: the rings he's offering are bad news. And this is before he even forged the One Ring.

It's a shame, because I think the story of "hey, Celebrimbor, a genuinely good person who is the greatest craftsman of our age, made these miraculous magic rings, and they're making everything awesome!" and only later going "oh crap, there's some dark influence that is working its way through these rings that we've been using for centuries" makes Sauron feel more clever, cunning, and insidious.

It's also frustrating because I think there are a lot of people doing really good work on this show. I think a lot of the cast do a good job with what they're given - it's just that what they're given is... not great. (I also think some of the Elves don't really look right for elves - specifically Gil-Galad and Elrond. Tough when your predecessor is Hugo Weaving, who I think actually is an elf, or at least some other kind of supernatural being).

But beyond the larger-picture choices, I also think there are moments that feel... stagey? The climax of the season has Galadriel and Sauron cross swords while Eregion is being utterly destroyed by orcs... sorry, uruks. Sauron, of course, is a master of illusion. He begins in his elvish "Annatar" guise, and throws her when he takes on his previous human Halbrand look (er, spoilers for season one, I guess).

(Actually, I will give some credit to Charlie Vickers, because he changes his performance enough between Halbrand and Annatar that when he first appeared this season in this corrupted-Maia-pretending-to-be-a-good-Maia-pretending-to-be-an-elf form I wasn't sure if they had recast the part.)

And, look, yes, they've established that Galadriel has some super-weird feelings about all of this, because she clearly was developing a crush on Halbrand before she knew what he was. But this moment, where they pause in the fighting for her to feel really conflicted before crossing swords once more. And then it happens again, and again, and again. Sauron appears as Galadriel herself, and then as Celebrimbor, after going all Vlad the Impaler on the real one. I think we only needed, at absolute most, one moment of hesitation when he transforms into Halbrand, and then the rest should have been badass elf-warrior just fighting tooth and nail against, admittedly, a creature far more powerful than she is.

The show's decision to really spend time with Sauron, give him a recognizably human (or elf) face, is one that I actually think is pretty interesting. Tolkien, notably, never showed him at all - the burning eye being more of a metaphor for what was essentially a disembodied presence and voice. Peter Jackson made that burning eye literal, but it showed that whatever form Sauron had once taken, now he was utterly unrecognizable as anything remotely human-like.

Here, though, this doesn't contradict canon. Annatar was a form that Sauron took when giving out the Rings of Power, and it's specifically because Sauron was imprisoned in Numenor when the ocean swallowed it up (er... spoilers?) all Atlantis-style, that Sauron's body was destroyed so thoroughly that he could never take on "a fair form" again.

I mean, I suspect they're going to delay that as long as they can to let Charlie Vickers still show up on screen. But given what we've seen, I'm not even convinced they'll actually follow through with that (was his "time as a prisoner in Numenor" just that brief period in which he was essentially in the drunk tank?)

Still, I do find it interesting that Tolkien's world is one in which, usually, other-planar beings will just, like, hang out with the humanoid races. Gandalf is basically an angel (I'm not going to focus very much on The Stranger's plot this season) but gets high with Bilbo in his backyard (yes, I know "Pipe Weed" is meant to be tobacco, but honestly I think it's more wholesome this way).

Tolkien's view of good and evil is somewhat black and white - though the good are often plagued by the stain of evil, like how Boromir is tempted by the ring, despite being an altogether good guy. But he also wrote about how Sauron really believed himself to be the good guy in all of this (as most villains do).

I don't know that this show really gets that nuance. Sauron, much like Adar (who seems less fully committed to evil but never really goes far enough in the other direction to convince me that redemption was possible for him,) frequently gestures toward some complexity, some regret, some faint glimmer of the goodness that he once possessed, but then has mustache-twirling moments of brutal and short-sighted villainy, like instantly murdering the orc he'd gotten to betray and assassinate Adar simply for telling him that they'd need to retreat. Sauron is triumphant here - he got his army and destroyed one of the elves' great bastions. He just didn't get Galadriel on his side after thinking that perhaps he had.

And, I don't know. It's a bit high school.

Sauron, I'm sure, really wants all of Middle Earth to be on their knees with gratitude for the excellent work he's doing restoring order and all that. And I can even see that he might have invested a lot of hopes in making Galadriel his queen.

But this is mister long-term-scheming, isn't it? Just as his Ring ploy ought to be a long game, I could also imagine that his attempts to seduce Galdriel to his side would also be a long game. Sure, it's a foregone conclusion that she will resist the call (and diminish, and go into the west) but I almost feel like we could recontextualize that moment in which Frodo offers her the One Ring as Sauron's final, extreme long-con to try to take Galadriel for himself, making her into the Dark Lord. Like the extremely toxic ex you thought you'd never hear from again dropping you a line fifteen years after you last spoke with them.

The thing that's so frustrating is that there really is some good stuff in this show. In the season's prologue, in which we see Adar initially betray Sauron and set his uruk brethren to utterly pincushion his old Jack Lowden incarnation (funny story, the two shows I watched with my sister and brother in law while I was helping take care of my nephew were this and Slow Horses,) I love that while that body died, the seeping essence of Sauron dripped down into caverns below and gradually rebuilt a body by feeding on vermin.

The roiling mass of spiky ooze that Sauron is in that state is super-cool. It reminds you that, while the form he takes in most of the show checks all the boxes for being relatably human(oid), the actual truth is that he's something utterly inhuman and alien, like a Shoggoth from the Mountains of Madness more than some attractive young man (speaking of Charlie Vickers and Jack Lowden, I'm definitely starting to feel a little horrified that these actors at peak "attractive full-grown man" phase are both younger than I am. How dare they? Anyone born after the mid-1980s is just a little kid, and you can't convince me otherwise.)

So, while we're at it:

I wish I were more invested in the Stranger's story. I don't know that it would have made it any better to learn that this guy was actually not Gandalf, but it also didn't feel terribly exciting to have what felt like the most obvious answer confirmed after a whole two seasons (Ciaran Hinds better not be Saruman, though, because Saruman showed no signs of corruption until the beginning of Lord of the Rings. We're meant to believe that even through The Hobbit, Saruman was nothing but a wise, good, benevolent figure. My guess is he's one of the Blue Wizards, but if so, where's the other one?)

I wish the Numenor story was better. Ar Pharazon is obviously a villain, but he feels kind of lost amidst the various people supporting him. In the canon, Numenor tries to invade I want to say Valinor (the land of the Valar) and essentially, the Valar are at a loss for what to do because humanity are literally God's favorite creation, so they pray for Him to intervene, and He goes full Atlantis/Great Flood on them. Yes, Pharazon is now pushing this anti-religious agenda, which could lead to this blasphemous invasion attempt, but it's also kind of weird because Tolkien's world doesn't really have religion per se - the existence of God and the Valar and the Maiar doesn't really need interpretation by a clergy.

And finally, I wish we'd gotten a slightly clearer idea of just what Celebrimbor thought he was doing all season. "Annatar" appears to him in the fire of his forge, and it's clear that Celebrimbor ought to think this is a messenger from one of the Valar. But I don't feel like we ever get a sense of whether the other elves in his employ have any idea who this guy is, other than the fact that he's really working a lot with the master.

Anyway, like the first season, there's a big of joy just hanging out in a fantasy world. But I just feel like this show could be better than it is, and with only a few tweaks.

My Era Avuncular

 This blog is mostly about my writing and my reaction to various pieces of writing (often in the form of scripts used to create films and TV). But it's also a personal blog, so I thought I'd mark a joyous event.

As of one week ago, my sister gave birth to a baby boy. Thus, I'm Uncle Dan!

There's a weird little asterisk here: I was actually already an uncle. A couple years after my mother died, I met my half-brother, who had been given up for adoption when my mom was young and not in a position to raise a baby. This being the early 70s, open adoptions were not a thing, so she, sadly, never heard anything about him afterward. Then, in 2019, my half-brother reached out to us, and I've gotten to know him, and he was at my sister's wedding. He has four girls, the oldest of whom is going off to college, so I've actually been an uncle since I was 20 or so, but didn't know it until about 5 years ago.

However, while I'm very happy to have developed a relationship with my half-brother, it's a very different relationship than the one I have with my sister that I actually grew up with. We're close - I officiated her wedding earlier this year. And I've been invited (/requested) to come over and help her and my brother-in-law in this early period of taking care of the baby.

While I don't know if I'll ever be a dad (there are some important prerequisites I'd need to achieve before that point, chief amongst them being a partner with which to raise a child) it is a moment that really throws my identity into a sharper relief. I've seen younger cousins born and grown up, and my eldest cousin's daughters are both adults now, so on a certain level I'm aware of the passing of generations, but here I'm really confronted with the idea that this is someone who will look up to me, potentially as a role model and certainly as a representative of an older generation.

I remember being bombarded with think-pieces and not a small amount of resentment toward my Millennial generation during my early adulthood - a hack-writer industry that has moved on to Gen Z and seems primed to go after Gen Alpha, of which I think my nephew will be one of the youngest members (if generations are typically 15-year periods, and Millennials were 81-95, that would put Gen Z as 96-2010, and thus Gen Alpha will be 2011-2024 - I realize Baby Boomers break this by being a 20-year generation from 46-65). It's funny to think that to him, we Millennials will probably only take shape as the middle-aged parental generation, and his shock will be seeing us becoming the old fogeys (in my mind, my high school friends' parents are all still in their 50s because that's usually the last time I saw them, even with the very obvious evidence of my father being in his 70s).

At this stage, my nephew's primary concerns are very simple - being held, getting fed, sleeping, and pooping. I don't know that we'll see much of a change in that during the month I'll be visiting, but I'm still eager to form a connection with him, even if he won't really remember these specific days when he's older.

I dream of all the stories and works of art I want to share with him, but I'm trying not to put the cart before the horse - it'll be like a decade minimum before I can run a game of D&D for him (probably a little longer than that). And I don't know if that will interest him!

I wrote on this blog seven years ago about losing my mother. I know she would be really happy to meet her grandson. But, if a journal can chronicle the depths of sadness and loss, it can equally mark the moments of joy and hope.

Ode to a Honda Accord

 Tomorrow, I'm going to be purchasing a new car and leaving behind my old one. It's time to make the change, and I'm excited not only to have a hybrid car with much better fuel efficiency (especially as someone who primarily drives in the city) but also to have many of the modern amenities that cars have had for the last decade plus, like a back-up camera, and the ability to connect my phone to play music or podcasts over the car's speakers.

But there's a feeling of nostalgia and even grief in getting rid of my old car.

That car is a 2003 Honda Accord. When my family purchased it, my sister had recently gone off to college, and given how well we liked her then-new Civic (which we had taken on a road trip to LA for her to go off to college), my mother decided to replace her old '91 Mercury Sable station wagon (the slightly fancier version of the Ford Taurus ones anyone who grew up in the '90s would be familiar with) with the Accord. There was an expectation, though: I'm two years younger than my sister, and so my own college journey was coming up, and so I think the plan was always for me to take the car when I needed it.

I wound up going to school in New York, so it wouldn't be until 2008, when I moved to Los Angeles, that I actually took the car, driving it across country with my best friend.

We got the car in the fall of 2002, so it's nearly 22 years old. It still runs, though it has accumulated a lot of problems over the years that have seemed more trouble than they were worth to fix. For example, the "moon roof," a window in the roof that could be opened with the press of a button, stopped working probably over a decade ago, and there's a gasket around it that's partially popped out that I couldn't even get fixed at a Honda dealership because they apparently don't make that part anymore. The sole remaining key is its "valet key" because the actual metal key part of the primary keys snapped out of their plastic shells, making the "key" really more of a remote fob.

It's really an odd thing: the car is somewhat fancier for its era than the one I'm getting. It has a leather interior (a dubiously wise option for a sunny, warm city) and what was then a very fancy six-CD changer. Funnily enough, it was made in what I like to refer to an "interregnum" between the time of cassette decks and the time of built-in auxiliary ports. My dad tried to instal an Aux input but it would just drain the battery. If you're too young to remember, you used to be able to buy a fake audio cassette that had a wire coming out of it, which you could plug into a portable CD player or an iPod. With only a CD player, I don't really have an option to listen to anything from an external source.

Living in LA has not been kind to the superficial structure of the car. Especially after living in an apartment where one of the three of us has to park on the street at any given time, and where I find myself usually drawing the short straw, it has meant countless dings and scratches as people bump into the car. In 2014 I also got into a 5-car accident (not my fault - it was stop-and-go traffic and both the person behind me and the person in the next lane over were rushing to fill the gap behind me, speeding up to do so while I was coming to a stop because, you know, traffic, and the rear-most car slammed into the car behind me, which then slammed into me, pushing me into the car in front of me - and so on until 5 or maybe even 6 cars were affected. It was some real insanity). Also, a year or two ago when we got a hurricane in Los Angeles, I had parked beneath a tree that I had parked underneath many times, but which this time deposited a bunch of strange goo (I assume some kind of sap) that then hardened when the sun came out and peeled up a bunch of patches of paint.

The air conditioning has broken three times, and I have had it repaired twice, but this most recent time felt like a sign it was time to get a new car.

But I really feel a need to pay my respects. I have something of an animist view of things - it's hard for me not to anthropomorphize objects and ascribe feelings to them. This car is like an old reliable friend - even if it struggles, it always gets me where I need to go (except the time that the gear-shifter broke the exact same time my catalytic converter was stolen - on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, no less!) And we've been through a lot - as I said before, the summer after I graduated from college, my best friend and I drove out to Los Angeles, and it was probably the most fun I've had on a road trip (no offense to my family - two years later I drove with my sister in her Civic when she moved to New York, but there was a folding bike poking into the back of the passenger seat the whole way, so it had its downsides.)

And I'm not here to advertise for a giant corporation, but man were early-2000s Hondas good. My sister's Civic, my Accord, and my Dad's 2005 Accord all lasted the better part of two decades. And my car still runs! But it's getting to that point where it feels more cost-effective (and frankly, just preferable for comfort reasons) to get a new car.

I think the emotional attachment to the car is also because it was my mother's. As I've written about on this blog, my mom died in 2017 after a year-and-a-half-long battle with a rare cancer. Very nearly seven years on, I still grapple with the grief. I suppose that you never really get used to the idea. And it's this odd thing where it's not like she died when I was very young - I was 31 - but nevertheless I had this expectation that I would have her around for a lot longer.

The car has been mine a lot longer than it was ever hers. But she'd drive me to high school in it. It's the car that I took my driver's license exam in. I guess it's just another reminder that the world she inhabited is one that is continuing to slip into the past, one that will be looked back on through the haze of memory and then, later, second-hand stories. It's hard for me to imagine my mother joining all the relatives I never got to meet, like my namesake great grandfather Daniel Ring, who died not long before I was born. The world is going to look a little different - I'm going to be driving around in a Toyota Corolla Hybrid, not my old blue Honda Accord.

And yes, it's ultimately just a machine. A piece of equipment to help me get around in our modern world.

I'm not a guy who typically refers to his car by a name. But I'm also a fantasy writer, so I like naming things. Long ago, in part thanks to its blue color (and one of the minor tragedies here is that Toyota basically only sells greyscale cars now, so my new one will be silver,) I decided to call it River.

So, so long, River. You've been a really good car.

Furiosa

 So, I think I need to give George Miller credit once again. What seems like a bad idea - a spin-off prequel to a legacy sequel - wound up being a genuinely good and entertaining movie.

When I first saw the teaser trailers for Fury Road back in 2015 (or possibly even late 2014) I didn't understand why one of my friends was so hyped about it. I hadn't seen any of the Mad Max movies (the at-that-point last of them, Beyond Thunderdome, came out a year before I was born, and thus thirty years before Fury Road) and so it felt like just another example of Hollywood digging up some property that would appeal to Gen Xers feeling nostalgic (notably two of the trailers before Furiosa was for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Twisters, which feel very much like  "these don't need to happen" kind of movies).

But, Fury Road was amazing, and got better with a rewatch.

Ever since the Star Wars prequels, I've been very skeptical of the idea of prequels. And inherently, there are going to be some aspects of the format that send up warning lights.

But I think Furiosa avoids many of the pitfalls - it doesn't concern itself with explaining every little detail about Fury Road. Immortan Joe is already a wasteland warlord with an army of zealous War Boys who are willing to destroy themselves to prove worthy of him, and while he and his allied kingdom of the Bullet Farm and Gastown are central to the plot, the winking nods are minimal, and new characters are introduced that fit pretty seamlessly into the implied backstory for Furiosa from the original movie.

Anya-Taylor Joy, admittedly, has to do a tough job, which is to bring something new to the character while also creating a believable continuity with Charlize Theron's portrayal. I think she does fine, if not mind-blowing work here. Furiosa is tough as nails from the start, and I think I might need to digest the movie a bit more to really map out her character arc.

While these movies are full of violence and heroes who sometimes do pretty ruthless things, the ongoing theme seems to be the need to make a place for compassion. Furiosa finds someone even when she is swept into Immortan Joe's forces who shows her some kindness and respect, and while his lack of presence in Fury Road gives a pretty strong hint that he won't make it to the end of the movie, Praetorian Jack (played by Tom Burke) helps her to create a place of selflessness and compassion that will ultimately lead her to the liberation of the women in Fury Road. Somewhere, somehow, you need to find a person to trust, and to be vulnerable with. The relationship is not explicitly romantic, but there's definitely love.

The show-stealing performance, though, belongs to Chris Hemsworth, playing the movie's headlining wasteland warlord, Dementus. Hemsworth gets to be Australian for once, and plays a monster of the wastes who dabbles in religious iconography (he's first introduced wearing a robe made out of a parachute that makes him look like Jesus) but is ultimately also kind of an ill-adapted leader for these times. When he hears of the Citadel (from a Warboy with a bolt in his skull who thinks that he's died gone to Valhalla,) his on-a-whim attempt to conquer it by force is such an unmitigated disaster that it's no surprise he won't be a problem still by the time of Fury Road.

To borrow D&D terms, while Immortan Joe is lawful evil, building an empire that does, you know, function and work, just in a horrible, oppressive way, Dementus is chaotic evil, ill-suited to forethought and the ramifications of his actions. He's unpredictable - he manages to succeed in infiltrating Gastown by having his men just kill his own allies - but in the long term, his choices leave him with problems he doesn't know how to solve.

Still, what's interesting about Dementus is that, unlike Immortan Joe - whom one sort of gets the impression was always bad - we get some indication that Dementus might not have been such a monster before his family was killed. We don't know how it happened, but he mentions having had children, and keeps one of their toys, a little teddy-bear, on him at all times.

And thus, his relationship with Furiosa is twisted - while she has never forgotten her own mother, even after she is taken by Dementus and her mother killed - he seems to retain this weird paternal affection for her, engaging in some kind of emotional transference. Ultimately, this gives him the desire to instill his worldview in Furiosa, to abandon all hope and embrace the brutality and cruelty of the wastes. He wants to see that validated by giving it to her.

What I find very heartening is that Furiosa as a movie is structurally very different from Fury Road. It would have been easy to simply give her some other feature-length action sequence, but this movie takes more time to sit in the quiet times, and to see her grow from a child into the Imperator that she in in Fury Road. By giving her a quest for vengeance against Dementus, there's a compelling, ongoing plot that makes the movie feel substantial without making it feel like her arc is fully complete (and thus making room for the other movie).

I don't know if this movie gets quite as many points for innovation - there are definitely some awesome, jaw-dropper moments of action, but perhaps not as many as in Fury Road. But I think if we're giving Fury Road an A, this is getting an A- or a B+ at the worst.

Finally Saw The Road Warrior

 With plans to go see Furiosa a week from now for my birthday, I figured I'd go back and watch one of the original movies, and among them, chose to see the one that is generally considered the best. I've "seen" the original Mad Max, though this was on mute in a bar while socializing, so it doesn't really count. The Road Warrior was reputed to be where the series really developed its post-apocalyptic setting and aesthetic, and that certainly seems to be on display.

I know this movie is beloved by many, but I came away from the experience thinking quite resolutely that Fury Road is the better film. With the glut of legacy sequels coming out of Hollywood these days, Fury Road was a rare case where the artistic intent and integrity was fully maintained (it didn't hurt that it had the same director, but we've seen cases of brilliant filmmakers returning to their popular franchises and not really sticking the landing, such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

I think a few things benefit Fury Road (a movie that, shockingly to my millennial mind, is already nearly a decade old) such as improvements on special effects, a seemingly larger budget, and a George Miller who I think has continued evolving as a person.

It's hard not to notice that Lord Humungus, and particularly his primary war dog Wez are kind of gross homophobic caricatures. The movie has a very 1982 attitude toward homosexuals, which boils down to "violent thrill-killers and perverts." In the early part of the movie, Wez travels everywhere with what is plainly his lover, a man with long blonde hair, and when this lover is killed as Wez ducks the Feral Child's razor-sharp metal boomerang (the movie is very Australian) it hits this (as far as I know) unnamed man, filling an already psychotically violent character with a particular rage. There's a lot of BDSM imagery with Humungus' gang, and, well... the movie was not exactly ahead of its time on these issues.

The plot is simple, which clearly serves this franchise well. Max encounters a man with an ultralight helicopter and, as tends to happen in the wastes, gets into a violent confrontation that the "Gyro Captain" (that's gyro like gyroscope, not the delicious Greek pita sandwich) in which the Captain offers to take Max to a settlement where a group of people have been able to refine gasoline. They travel there and discover that a gang of raiders (the Humungus) have been attacking the place, trying to steal its resources. Max witnesses some of the residents trying to flee, only to be caught by the raiders and subjected to rape and murder. Max attempts to take a survivor back to the settlement in the hopes of earning some fuel for his troubles, but the man dies, and so instead he has to prove himself by helping to fight off another raid.

The leader of the settlement, Pappagallo, has been planning an evacuation, where they're going to go north to a place that is supposedly less violent and dangerous. To get his car back with some fuel, Max offers to bring back a truck that he had found on the road, giving us one of the big car-chase setpieces as he brings it back to the settlement. With his car returned, despite making a connection with these people, he decides to head off on his own - only for Wez to catch up with him and wreck his car (the fact that both here and in Fury Road we see Max's V8 Interceptor destroyed really reinforces the hazy approach to continuity). While Max escapes getting killed, his dog doesn't, and it's the Gyro Captain who rescues him and takes him back to the settlement.

And that brings us to the climactic set piece - Max drives the truck with the fuel (supposedly) while the other residents escape riding in the opposite direction. There's a giant fight on the highway in which characters who we like even if we don't have names for them get killed, but ultimately it all ends when Lord Humungus drives straight into the truck while Wez is on its hood, smashing both remaining headliner villains to smithereens.

Again, we can see how Immortan Joe of Fury Road feels like an evolution of Lord Humungus. The latter wears a steel hockey mask at all times, but is otherwise clad in skimpy fetish gear. But we see a shot of the back of his head, where his hair seems to have fallen out and he's got weird, pulsing veins. We never see his face, but what little hair is left is stringy. He also has a vague German accent, and notably pulls a german pistol with a scope from a box that has an S.S. skull symbol in it, suggesting that perhaps he's got some connection to Naziism, or at least likes the aesthetics. But the way he hides his face (and we never see it) suggests perhaps some freaking deformity. It's never 100% confirmed that nuclear war has happened - in fact, it almost seems as if the "wasteland" where the story takes place is not necessarily how the rest of the world looks (though given that the epilogue tells of how the residents of the settlement become the first of the Great Northern Tribe, one has to imagine there's pretty broad societal collapse).

As with Fury Road, Max's experience amounts to essentially a couple of really tough days in a life full of tough days, and while the supporting characters go on to evidently live in peace and start to rebuild society, they don't see Max again.

Given how uniquely non-stop Fury Road is, it was a little surprising to me how little of the movie was car chases - which is not to say that it doesn't have its fair share. In fact, there are some big aesthetic parallels - both Fury Road and Road Warrior largely involve fighting atop a giant truck being swarmed by an army of evil raiders.

I do think that an interesting contrast between the two movies is that Immortan Joe feels like he commands significantly more power. He's a member of a triad of local warlords, and probably the most powerful of the three, with a fortified settlement of his own. Lord Humungus has a big gang, but it's not clear if the gang really has a permanent home at all, and instead seem to be just parked near the refinery for most of the movie.

I don't think this is a flaw - the stakes are still high even if the whole thing is just on a smaller scale. But I do think that while this movie takes things much farther into the post-apocalyptic world (the original movie arguably not being post-apocalyptic at all, and just scuzzy and crime-ridden the same way that The Warriors portrays 1970s New York) by the time we get to Fury Road it feels like the old world has been so completely swept away that something else is emerging to take its place.

Max's lesson in this movie, if he can be said to have one, is learning to accept help and partnership - exactly the thing whose breakdown has allowed this anarchic wasteland to exist. That Pappagallo and his people are even attempting to rebuild something resembling a society tells us they're the good guys, while Lord Humungus seems in it for the short-term gain of raiding the place and taking what they've produced.

I haven't seen Beyond Thunderdome, but skipping ahead to Fury Road, it feels like we're now looking at the next steps: Immortan Joe has, in a way, rebuilt society, but he's carrying over the worst aspects of the civilization that came before - exploitation, demagoguery, and patriarchy. We can hope, perhaps, that at the end of that movie, Furiosa will arise as a just ruler who will actually work to cultivate and uplift the people who depend on her. I don't think we get as much of an epilogue in Fury Road, but my general sense is that, for all their desolation and violence, these movies are ultimately optimistic, showing humanity climbing their way back from the abyss. It's just that not everyone is going to make it, and Max's tragedy is that he can't really walk into that better world to come.

Chani and Dune Part Two (and Beyond)

 There are a number of adaptational changes that Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies make. I think the general consensus is that these changes are largely wise (I wish we'd gotten a bit more of the Spacing Guild, whose entire appearance in the two existing movies, as far as I can tell, are just some dudes in space suits in that early scene in the first movie when the Emperor's Herald shows up, but I also think explaining Guild Navigators as a thing is... well, it's a lot).

Probably the most welcome change is that of the character of Chani, played in these movies by Zendaya. In fact, really we're just talking about her role in the second movie, as she's something of a non-entity in the first one (which makes sense given that she's only literally in the story near the very end - most of her appearances are in Paul's prophetic visions in which she sort of represents Arrakis and the Fremen people, a bit like how Jamis, being the "friend" who teaches Paul the Fremen ways, does so by dueling him to the death).

Chani, in part two, is the voice of skepticism among the Fremen, and fleshes out this group of people as not being just a single hive mind. It's a difficult needle to thread - she's simultaneously the Fremen woman who falls in love with Paul while also the most vocal doubter of his divine nature.

It could be easy to see these two roles as being somewhat contradictory, and maybe better separated out into different characters. But I think that the film somehow makes this work, perhaps because her closeness with Paul allows her to see his humanity - both in an attractive, comforting way, and also in a manner that gives her too much specificity to his character and personality to let her believe he's this more abstract idea of a prophesied messiah.

The movie ends with Chani leaving the palace in Arrakeen on worm-back, leaving Paul after he has demanded Irulan's hand in marriage and sent the Fremen up to bring their jihad to the stars.

What's great is how this functions as a one-two punch to her faith in Paul. While the marriage is of course purely for political convenience - to legitimize Paul's seizure of the imperial throne by making himself a reasonable heir to Shaddam IV - it's nevertheless a reminder that Paul, despite learning the Fremen ways and living the Fremen life, is ultimately a creature of this imperial ruling class, where a bond that should represent a genuine emotional connection and life commitment is merely another maneuver in the grand political chess game.

And, on top of that, he's enabled the most destructive aspects of her culture, knowing full well the death and destruction that it will unleash. She has fought long and hard for her peoples' independence, but what they're going to get is not just freedom from tyrannical overlords, but to become the tyrannical overlords. Paul understands this entirely, but it doesn't stop him from letting it happen.

I know Frank Herbert considered Paul to be a villain, but as written he's more of an anti-hero - the text of the book makes it seem pretty clear that what he does is the lesser of evils, and ultimately all intended to save the human race from extinction. Granted, perhaps we're meant to wonder if Paul's prescience is really all that infallible, and if perhaps he's actually just seeing what he wants to see that will lead him to power. But at least in my single reading of the book, I didn't see a lot of evidence for that interpretation.

But regardless of whether Paul's good intentions outweigh the evils he unleashes, from Chani's perspective, it lays bare the lengths to which Paul will go.

The interesting question, then, is where we go from here.

In the books, Chani plays a similar role that Jessica did for Leto, in that she's Paul's wife in all but name. Paul never has a child with Irulan, and the empress-consort is left politically neutered and emotionally shunned, while Chani is the mother of Paul's children and given the reverence that her lover's position would typically be due.

In the movie, Paul claims that he's foreseen that Chani will have a change of heart, and return to him in time. I wonder, though: is that just a nod to the inevitability of their reunion given how things must go in the future stories?

Again, the book's version of Chani never abandons Paul, and is loyal to the end. But this one is horrified by the things that he winds up doing.

Now just think about what her son winds up doing.

While his rise to power comes with a jihad across the cosmos that kills billions, Paul is still looked upon as a benevolent, messianic figure. But it turns out that this is basically because, at least according to Leto II, his son, Paul isn't willing to go quite far enough.

Leto II is the God Emperor of Dune. At the end of Children of Dune, he allows the Sandtrout (a kind of early phase of the sandworm life cycle - one that I'm not sure totally makes sense as the species seems to subsist entirely on cannibalism, which is not thermodynamically sustainable) to form a kind of exoskeleton over his body, eventually transforming him into a human-sandworm hybrid that rules the Imperium for millennia.

Unlike Paul, Leto II becomes an utterly cruel despot - and he does so consciously and intentionally, with a sort of end goal of weaning humanity from the very idea of divine saviors. By the time he's done, the legacy of the Atreides is as being the worst villains known to humanity.

And yeah, that's Chani's son.

That being said, Villeneuve has said that his ambition is to adapt up through Dune Messiah, the second book in the series, considering it the end of Paul's arc. Paul's children are certainly part of that story, but they don't become central to them until Children of Dune.

So, I kind of wonder what will happen with Chani in the now fairly likely Dune Part Three, and if it will conform or diverge from the books.

How Dune Messiah Might Fit into Villeneuve's Adaptation Series

 With Dune part Two now out in theaters, the adaptation of Frank Herbert's original novel is complete. Whereas David Lynch's 1984 adaptation had to cram the entire novel into a single movie, to its detriment, the somewhat abrupt end to Villeneuve's first movie allows the second one to breathe and really dwell on Paul Atreides' struggles to survive in the desert, learn the ways of the Fremen people, and wrestle with the idea that, in order to achieve his heroic journey, he must co-opt an indigenous culture, breed fanaticism amongst them, and unleash a genocidal conquest across the stars.

Herbert supposedly wrote Dune Messiah in part to make sure his intent with the original story hit home - many read the first novel as a classic heroic journey and seemed not to understand the monstrousness of what Paul and his mother achieved in converting the Fremen to their cause.

Dune Messiah takes place decades after the original story. At this point, Paul is emperor and Arrakis and the Fremen people have become the center of power in the Imperium. The Harkonnens are no more - except, of course, for the fact that Paul and his mother and sister are, as revealed in the first book, are actually Harkonnens as well, given Jessica's parentage.

It's notable, I think, that there's a reasonable interpretation that Paul's father Leto was genuinely a good person through-and-through. Sure, there's also a way to look at him as being just really good at PR (I actually think there are parallels with the character of Miquella in the video game Elden Ring, where it's not clear if he's just a good guy or just really good at convincing people he is) but if we think of Leto as where Paul's goodness comes from, we must recognize that even though Jessica and Paul are both sympathetic characters in their own way, they have that killer instinct - that cruel Harkonnen instinct - within them.

Still, Paul is haunted by the horrors he has unleashed, even as he justifies them as the lesser of all the potential evils that might befall humanity. But it's clear that he wants nothing more than to leave that life.

Dune Part Two compresses time a bit - in the book, Alia is a toddler (though with her ancestral memories, she's far from your typical toddler, having the intellectual background of a wise elder) by the end of the story. Though clearly far younger than Paul, by the time of the second book, she's a full adult. Anya Taylor-Joy's casting in part two is interesting, then: while we see her in person only in a dream-like vision of an Arrakis that has returned to its watery, fertile climate, it's a minimal appearance that seems to portend future prominence in a part three.

Still, I wonder about the challenges of making such a distant sequel. Admittedly, in the Dune universe, the ruling class use Spice to prolong their lives (it's sometimes referred to as the "geriatric spice") and so they look far younger than they are (this is part of the reason I sort of forgive the fact that Rebecca Ferguson is only twelve years older than Timothee Chalamet, even if it's probably just classically Hollywood gender weirdness - they also both happen to be right for the roles individually). But we haven't really had that concept established in these movies - Emperor Shaddam is played by 80-year-old Christopher Walken, while the 72-year-old Emperor in the novel is described as looking like he's in his early 30s.

I can understand the choice to just cast older actors to play that older generation, but I also wonder if that means that they would need to re-cast Paul, Chani, and any other characters of their generation (other than Alia, for the aforementioned reasons).

I doubt they'd do that - Chalamet and Zendaya's performances, particularly the latter in the second film, are pretty central to the success of the series so far.

Still, I think both parts of the Villeneuve adaptation have benefitted from Chalamet's boyish appearance (the guy is in his late 20s now and might be in his 30s by the time they get the next movie filming) but I think Dune Messiah as a story really needs a weathered, weary Paul Atreides to work, dramatically. Messiah is all about how the potential horrors of being the figurehead of a genocidal theocracy have been made fully manifest, just as horrifically as he had feared. At one point (I think it's in this book,) Paul, accessing what is in his time profoundly ancient history through his ancestral recall, compares himself to Hitler, and finds himself to be responsible for orders of magnitude more suffering and death.

It's a bummer of a story, and arguably not as elegant of a plot as its predecessor or even the follow-up, Children of Dune. (I tried reading God Emperor of Dune, and while I find it conceptually interesting, I just could not get into it in the same way.) And honestly, I think Villeneuve's adaptational choices - making Chani the voice of skepticism, who recognizes the evil that is coming with Paul's rise (and the sense of dread you feel when Paul tells the Fremen to bring his enemies "to paradise,") - hit the thematic notes that Herbert felt weren't clear enough in his first novel. In other words, I think that these two parts make a pretty complete story.

But we'll see. I've been very impressed with Villeneuve's sci-fi movies - I have far less love for Blade Runner than a lot of (largely older, like elder Gen Xer) people do, but I thought his sequel told an interesting story well. And I thought Arrival was fantastic. And he's done a terrific job with Dune so far, so clearly he's the person to trust to do the next part.

In Dune Part Two, Heroic Destiny is the Villain

 It's funny that the aesthetics of the novel Dune were so inspirational to George Lucas in the creation of Star Wars when you consider the profound differences in their attitude toward heroism.

Both prominently feature a desert world (one that Star Wars admittedly has to keep coming up with excuses to return to given that it's theoretically meant to be a total backwater,) melee combat despite the futuristic setting, giant space-empires (Dune's is not technically a galactic empire, as it's theoretically a universal empire - it's the human empire but in a universe in which there are no aliens, depending on what the hell those sand worms are,) and a grand political struggle and war that the protagonist gets swept into.

But while George Lucas more or less set out to make in Luke Skywalker the prototypical hero to be admired and aspire to be like, Frank Herbert's Paul Atreides is more of a deeply conflicted anti-hero.

A simple reading of the first novel in the Dune series (known simply as Dune) might leave you with the impression that Paul is a rather classical hero, coming as he does from a noble family that actually seems to be noble in both senses of the word, coming to a new world in which his family is betrayed and he must learn the ways of this new world to both survive and get justice for his father's death.

Spoilers for Dune Part Two, parts of the rest of the Dune series, and, weirdly, Little Women, ahead: