It's Fine. I've Seen Worse.

So the scuttlebutt is that Game of Thrones is going to botch the landing tonight. And I have feelings about that, mostly surprise that I really don't. The truth is that while I understand folks' frustration, as far as unsatisfying television turns go Game of Thrones wouldn't make my list. For me it's still watchable. Maybe not as good as it could have been, but still a decent way to kill time on a Sunday night. Here's what would make my list of good shows that went to crap fast though. 

Lost

Is it as bad as Lost? 'Cause it's not as bad as Lost.

So the first season of Lost is good but unremarkable, Survivor but if Survivor actually had writers. The second season though is nuts. It was the middle of the writer's strike and whoever was left threw spaghetti on the wall. There were some interesting moments but as a whole, the show was an incoherent mess.

Then the back half of the third season managed to pull a minor miracle and actually explain all the weird stuff that happened. The island is actually a temporal anomaly.  The fourth and fifth seasons were about exploring a place where time doesn't work the way you think it does.

The sixth season pretty much junked every interesting thing that was happening in the show by that point just to answer a bunch a fan questions and theories that had long since stopped being relevant when the writers had a clear answer to shut everybody up.

Time Travel is a hell of a drug.

Heroes

The first season of Heroes is tight. Everything and I means everything that happens gets tied to the main plot. The second season also got tied up in the writers strike but it's just rushed. There are still a lot of good ideas in there they just aren't executed well, the third on the other hand, oh boy.

Mostly it's the character inconsistencies that bother me. Everybody got hit with it but the worst is Mohinder.

He's the series smart guy. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's bad. But Mohinder doesn't act rashly... until he injects himself with untested drugs so the writers have an excuse to turn him into the fly.

Once Upon A Time

I ...

....

Uhh

I don't hate Once.

I kept coming back to it but every season there would be at least one big thing that turned me off.  But there are two big ones.

The first was in season 3B when they brought back Rumplestiltskin. Season 3A is his redemption arc. Really to be honest most of season 2 is that as well. And his arc in season two is his slow realization and acceptance that he can't be the good guy. At least he can't be a straight hero which is what he wants. His death speech is all about accepting that and doing something worthwhile anyway and it was the best closure that character was ever going to get.

And they undid it in three episodes flat.

Season 5 was essentially the story mandating the Emma Swan turn evil for no other reason than the script said.  Which in my mind is actually worse because it undermines the redemption arcs of the villains having their magic being the source of all their problems when the show always hinted there was something else there. It retroactivley ruined almost everything that was good about that show. Specifically it makes previously interesting villains boring if all of their motivations could be boiled down to magic made me do it.

Andromeda

I don't know why but I never really gravitated to Star Trek as a kid but I did watch a lot of stuff that was, "Star Trek" adjacent. And Andromeda is basically a grittier Star Trek where The Federation has fallen and instead of being a naval crew comprised of the best officers in the sector, the cast is a bunch of ragtags brought together by chance and the promise of a big score.

Part of what made Andromeda interesting was that most of the crew were self-interested. They all had relationships with one another but at the end of the day, they all had secrets and ulterior motivations for staying on the ship. This ain't about the power of friendship and they all knew that.

Specifically Tyr. whose defining characteristic was that "Tyr only does what's good for Tyr".  The characters understood it. The audience understood it. Evidently, the writers didn't understand it.

Season 3 turned him into a cackling bad guy.  And I hated it so much. To be fair a lot of season 3 doesn't bring it up so it's watchable. The actor just isn't there after his character's sudden but inevitable betrayal. But in the series finale, he comes back basically as a Disney villain and I hated it so much.

Colbeck's War on Social Studies

So, Colbeck's war on social studies is something I find infuriating, largely because districts, schools, and teachers, have to make value judgments in the material they elect to pass on to students and value judgments are a key part of political judgments.

Colbeck's not wrong to point that out and pull away the curtain.  I disagree with which way the needle swings and I'll get to that but if he just dropped the mic at the assertion that what kids are taught in schools over time can affect their political ideologies as adults and as such we need to be cautious as to preserve their right to choose what they would believe nobody would argue. 

But then I start reading about the things he actually doesn't like.

What Are Core (Democratic) Values

There are the rules and then there are the rules. What's more important than respecting a dead piece of paper, or even the system of is government it created is respecting the revolutionary ideas that it represented. Those ideas are the legacy of the founding fathers that we pass on to our posterity.

Those are core democratic values, the slow forward march against the rule of a dictator who could bar the doors of parliament and disband his country's legislature at whim. Those values did not start nor did they end with a single document least of all not one written by the United States but rather centuries of ongoing ever continuing debate about what constitutes the freedom, what constitutes power and the relation between the two and from where they derive.

And That is a civics class.



Or if you want to get fancy a political philosophy class.

Let's Talk About Equality


So Colbeck and to be fair much of the Republican party feels the government should not be responsible for equality of outcomes. I disagree but that is not the point. That is a larger and longer discussion. The point is that Colbeck is wary of the implications of the word equality and as a result wants to narrow the context of its use.

And I hate it.

When politicians argue over equality they are arguing over what seems to me to be implications of the ideal and this is no different. If we are all created equal does mean we should be all afforded by birth the same, rights, protections,  privileges, obligations and opportunities under the law. If that is the case we have a long way to go on that score. 

What does equality under the law actually mean?