Seeking Ferret

The final season of the Good Fight is conceived in an apocalyptic mood. It represents the well-advertised ending of the show, but it is also advertising that it represents the ending of so much more. All of the illusions about the law that anchored The Good Wife are collapsing. As a casual aside, Eli Gold tosses out in Episode 3 that Peter Florrick has managed to find himself back in jail. It's a sort of meta-joke about the idea of closure. They're bringing back a ton of old characters, both from The Good Wife as well as earlier seasons of the Good Fight. Why? To say goodbye to them, but also... to Say Good Bye To Them. The world is ending.

Season 5 ended in a spasm of violence... as I observed at the time, the siege on Judge Wackner's court recognizably represented a literal pogrom, with Wackner (not identifiably Jewish, but played by Mandy Patinkin) and the Jewish Marissa Gold cowering in a closet as Nazis and Nazi wannabes trash his courthouse, in unambiguous parody of 1/6. This transitions into shots of violence spreading across the country on more and more screens until they're nigh uncountable. The virus of nihilism that has haunted the show from its famous opening shot, a nihilism taken to a new level in Season 5's narrative of the quiet overthrow of the court system by Judge Wackner's Courtroom 9 3/4, spreading uncontrollably.

Season 6 understands Season 5's conclusion as merely a spasm of violence, an apparent blip, another January 6th. Wackner is out of the story, Marissa has moved on with her life. The lawyers of Reddick and Associates are living upper middle class lives, not acting like they're living in a war zone.

But they ARE living in a war zone! Dozens of stories below their law office, unspecific protests wage on, increasingly violently as the season progresses. Fake grenades clearly presage real grenades to follow. A car bomb resounds above Diane's head. An assassination leads to large sections of Chicago being locked down by the police. Episode 6 ends with a dead body falling outside Diane's window. Nobody seems clear on what the protesters are protesting, whether it is right wing ('The Militia') or left wing ('Antifa') or something else. The protest isn't the point, the violence is the point. Reddick and Associates are pretending to be lawyers while the law doesn't matter.

This is something the show has feinted towards before, but I think this time it's real. There's much less cost to them swinging big because the finale is nigh. They've come up to the edge of this before, but always pulled back. This time I don't think they're pulling back.

Episode 4 is about many things, but one of the things it is about is what it's like being Jewish in the midst of massive political violence. Eli Gold stands in the bathroom next to Frank Landau- a Chicago political landmark we remember well from The Good Wife as a sometime rival and sometime ally of Peter Florrick. Suddenly a man runs in with a gun and shoots, shouting "Die, Eli Gold, you fucking Jew." Yet he shoots and kills the goyish Landau, missing Gold. Somehow this is almost worse for Eli. At the end of the episode Marissa hugs her father and sees him into a car and then quietly recites Tefilat Haderech, the prayer for a dangerous journey, as in the background protesters shout The Jews Will Not Replace Us. That chorus, along with other white supremacist anthems, recurs in subsequent episodes. Welcome to the apocalypse that is happening now.

Legal procedurals are called legal procedurals because they follow a process. And the process works because all of the principals of the show believe in the process... at its core, the law works toward justice. The Good Fight has never particularly been a show that believed in the process, which has led to many deviations from the procedural formula over the years, but at its core the show has had most of the structure of a procedural, and it has ultimately obeyed the genre rules it has threatened to violate. The characters have tested what it was like to act outside the law- Maia's flirtation with Roland Blum, some of Carmen's work, Marissa and Courtroom 9 3/4... but largely they've remained tethered to the legal system. But the end of Episode 5 shows Jay flirting with organized armed resistance, completely giving up on the law in a way you never see in shows like this, or at least, you never see it portrayed as a moral choice.

I almost can't believe it, but... the show has to be heading into absolute all out civil war as its finale, right? It's stunning, I've never seen a procedural do the things The Good Fight dares to do.

The Ms. Marvel Disney+ show is two episodes in and it's great! If you liked the comics, you'll love the way they're adapting the visual style into a live action show, and the characters are great and complicated and fun.

But it's also kind of a punch in the nose how much the show is about Kamala and her cultural background. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's great. Muslims dance in this show! And there are lots of different kinds of Muslims representing a diversity of viewpoints and attitudes and senses of identity and approaches to American life.

But "Jews danced" in Hawkeye in the sense that a character danced whose never-appearing sister had a mezuzah on her apartment door, with no acknowledgment in dialogue of any Jewish identity. And "Jews danced" in Moon Knight in the sense that the alter-ego of a Jewish character, whose Jewish identity is acknowledged in the observance of shiva for his brother and a Star of David necklace but not in any way in the dialogue, briefly dances. The alter-ego might be considered Jewish, but he never says anything to indicate such an identification.

And Ms. Marvel shows how possible it is to tell stories in the MCU where religious and ethnic identity informs characters in rich, deep ways. And I love it, I've loved every minute of it so far, but also I keep watching and thinking why couldn't the Jews also get that? I'm sick of having to do all this work just to read the faintest glimmers of Jewish identity into the MCU.

I've decided to make a rule that I can only watch Wheel of Time on my stationary bike, so I've only watched the first three episodes so far, but so far I'm really enjoying it, and I'm getting a workout. The visuals are utterly stunning, and it's just a treat to watch for that reason alone. The show sustained an impressive sense of tension for the first two full episodes, even though I know where it's all going. And they showed reasonably good judgement in how to pace out the action, making a meal of the Eye of the World's opening chapter but then speeding up the travel to Shadar Logoth, then slowing things down again as the party split up.

primeideal's posts, full of detailed commentary on the episodes, are fun reads but I don't really process the Wheel of Time like that. So I want to say more but I'm not really sure what to say.

I guess the thing I am interested in, as I watch, is the Wheel of Time as the biggest piece of metafiction I've ever read, and wondering how that element of it gets adapted. The idea of ta'veren got brought up earlier than I think it comes up in the books, which is one of the most significant metafictional ideas in the books: the idea that Rand and Mat and Perrin (and Egwene in this adaptation) are Main Characters in a metaphysical sense, the weave of the Wheel of Time literally warps around them. Anywhere they show up, they instantly become the center of the story and they suck up the people around them as supporting characters and spit them out transformed. In bad fantasy novels, this is a silly trope that we mock, in Wheel of Time it's a deliberate structural decision Jordan made. He's asking the reader why we keep telling stories about destiny and fate, how would we feel if we really lived in a world where you can feel the hand of fate pushing you. And I'm really curious how the show will commit to this structure. The idea of ta'veren has not been mentioned explicitly since the first episode, but Rand invokes a related question in episode 3. "I... I never gave much thought to the Wheel before all this. I just always done what I thought was right, then moved on to the next thing and tried to do right again. But now... I don't know. I don't know what's right. I don't know what to do. I don't know shit, really." One of the most deeply metafictional ideas Jordan explores consistently through the series is what it's like experientially to be a Main Character, what it's like to have prophecies describing your future actions, what it's like to just do what you thought was right and have the world change in response.

Along these lines, Rand is nowhere near hateable enough. Maybe give it time on this one and he'll grow into it, but I feel like the more obnoxious you find Rand, the better the Wheel of Time works as a story. Because The Wheel of Time is a story about rejecting the One True Savior narrative in a world where One True Saviors are a real thing that influences life and you can't simply pretend out of existence. Jordan rejects these savior narratives in two ways: First, by showing how terrible Rand is, so that the idea of the world resting on his shoulders seems both ridiculous and unfair, and Second, by ultimately requiring that every time Rand saves the world, he does it in coordination with a team. Paradoxically, the fact that Rand is incredibly ill-suited for his work is what enables you to sometimes root for him in this metatextual world. You are rooting for him to win in spite of the fact that he's a real piece of work.

Meanwhile, the adaptation has an extra level of baked in intertextuality by virtue of being an adaptation. I've spent episode after episode screaming at Perrin to realize he's a Wolfbrother already, but at least I know he'll figure that out sooner than later. I've also spent episode after episode screaming at Nynaeve and Lan to kiss already, but I know that I spent a lot of time screaming that while reading the books, we've probably got a long ways to go there. (I also enjoy that the TV show explicitly ships Mat/Rand, there's a pairing who deserve each other) There are reasons for this. Jordan gives you what you want, but he also signposts that he's going to give you what he wants for miles and miles before he gives it. I charitably call this part of the metafiction, Jordan writing a story for people who already know how fantasy stories work, but also sometimes Jordan is a clumsy writer doing clumsy things. And sometimes Jordan's plot is too big for him and it produces clumsy plotting as a result. In the condensed form that is the TV show, signposting and foreshadowing works differently. The TV writers can't afford to let storylines spin out indefinitely over years, and they have a different range of tools (including visual and musical cues) to foreshadow with than Jordan does. So I think sometimes when the show is trying to lead to some reveal that readers of the books already know is coming, there's a level of oversignaling that... kind of enhances the metafictionality? Like, it makes the aware viewer key into the fictionality of the characters, the way in which they are being impelled by the dictates of plot, and that reinforces the sense of ta'veren.

Yup, this was silly.

I watched the final episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier Friday morning before work. I may watch it again to digest.

It was better on the politics than I'd feared, which is not to say it was good. What the whole episode was, was unsettlingly grim. There were not a lot of good endings for characters, but more than that, there were not a lot of characters, even the ones who survived to ostensibly satisfying endings, who were able to get through the last episode without compromising themselves. Which probably is the right outcome, given the shitty political situation, but I don't think it's what the writers of the show were trying to do. It's better than what I think the writers were trying to do, honestly... sometimes the corner you've written yourself into forces you to an unexpected honesty: there's nothing all that heroic about Sam and Bucky, but the times don't always call for heroes, even when your franchise overlords are demanding you sell them.

I feel like Zemo's little coda is a great case in point. Zemo remains in the Raft, which is a less than ideal outcome for him but he seems relatively comfortable: Zemo is not a man who lives very much outside of himself, which is what made the dance scene in Madripoor so memeably funny. He manages to have the Flag Smasher super soldier killed and thereby help to uphold his political ideal of no stateless supersoldiers... But he doesn't go after John Walker, who allies with the Contessa, and who will surely find in Zemo's extracurricular bombing another raison d'etre of uncontrolled violence. So the serum and its deadly geopolitical consequences remains out there, perhaps bolstered by Zemo's efforts. And Zemo has blown his shot at future alliance with Sam or Bucky, so he will need to seek new champions if he is to continue his work. If there was something sympathetic about Zemo at the end of Civil War (and to some degree I think there was), it has been burnt out by now. Zemo is all ideology and tactics and no humanity.

At levels that require greater or less amounts of analysis to draw out, this kind of sacrifice of self is true of all of the characters. Karli Morgenthau gets some of the political outcomes she sought, at the cost of her life, but she doesn't get all of the political outcomes she sought, and also all of the people she loved are dead. Walker gets a new job but he had to admit he failed at his old one in order to earn it. Sam doesn't entirely stop a terrorist attack, and when he sides with the terrorists to publicly humiliate the GRC on television he becomes a Captain America who cannot truly be a symbol for all of America. He is forced to accept that in order to be Captain America on his own terms, he cannot be everything that Steve Rogers was.

And Sharon Carter? Surely there's something misogynistic about doing her reveal without telling her story. As the post-credits scene reminds us, she comes from a family that has long been dedicated to trying to protect others through government service. As the post-credits scene does not remind us, she has been working for evil security agencies ranging from SHIELD to the CIA her whole adult life. Is her current position as Power Broker the result of her Hydra/Civil War/Snap disillusionment with America, or is it a consequence of a deeper moral corruption that the MCU has simply never revealed? I don't know. Sharon Carter has appeared in multiple Marvel movies and TV shows, she's played the phenomenal Emily VanCamp, and we have never gotten the tiniest snippet of life story from her.


And once more, New York pays the price. Marvel Comics has long fought against its New York centered identity, launching storytelling projects like the West Coast Avengers or the Fifty States Initiative that implicitly acknowledge that by and large, the Avengers are a New York institution. Falcon and the Winter Soldier bounces all around the world, fighting battles in fake Singapore and fake Serbia, and in Tunisia and Lithuania and Latvia. There is some unserious pretense of oversight and national sovereignty- for unexplained reasons, Sam Wilson can chase the terrorists in Tunisia but cannot cross the border into Libya; for unexplained reasons, John Walker can prance around Eastern Europe punching trucks on the government dime, but if he kills a rogue super soldier he violates diplomatic protocols? In reality, for all the talk of global councils, both Sam and John Walker are unrestrained agents of American hard power. It is deeply unserious as musing on political theory, and deeply serious as a reflection of the way America has acted and continues to act as lone superpower. And then they return in the finale to New York City, this locus of Marvel's political energy that it seems to imagine as the Capital of the World. (sanguinity, if she's reading this, is by now snickering; I too sometimes imagine New York City as the Capital of the World)

In this fairy tale comic book New York, largely American? political leaders are gathered to make decisions that will largely affect the Third World. It's actually the sort of vision of America that shows like this should be arguing against. The problem isn't whether they cave to the terrorists and find a generous resolution to help those displaced by the post Blip political realignment, or continue on their hard line, punitive path. The problem is who is making the decision at all. Which is a question FATWS doesn't reach, although it comes way closer than I expected.

It is the paradox of The Flag Smashers, though. They claim to be arguing for a world without borders, because a world without borders will look out for the borderless. But they live in a world that for those with enough strength is already a borderless world, and what they really need are localities with the strength to assert their own sovereignties, and fight for the safety of their own natives, rather than paternalistic protectors from far away.



I haven't written much about Bucky because I don't have much to say. He, of all the characters in the show, got the least compromised ending, but that's because he was already compromised. Sebastian Stan gave a terrific but understated performance as a Bucky who is desperate to put himself back together but doesn't know how. At the end, he still doesn't know how, but he somehow managed a little bit of self-repair anyway. He will never not be the Winter Soldier, he will never not carry his sins with him wherever he goes. He can never entirely be a good guy, but this is a show where no one is entirely a good guy.

Have people been watching WandaVision? Isn't it fun and weird and genrebendy? Don't you have no idea whatsoever where they're going with it? Aren't you glad to be going along for the ride anyway?



I also watched Space Sweepers, the new Korean space adventure movie, this weekend on Netflix and I really enjoyed it. I loved the playful way it treated physics, with utterly nonsensical rule-of-cool space harpoon battles that were glorious. I loved the ensemble cast of badass losers bound together by their desperation, and them gradually falling in love with each other but refusing to admit it. I loved the way it took parenthood in difficult circumstances seriously. And I really loved the playful ways it used language and pidgin in particular to speak of the joyous complexity of a multicultural future where people have to constantly be aware of where they are and who they're talking to.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben Winters

It's a funny concept and often well executed, that so much of the plot of Sense and Sensibility is driven subtextually by the omnipresence and seriousness of disease in a way that could, until recently, escape a modern audience. In Winters' version, any time disease or death is threatened, Sea Monsters take the place. There's also some extra sea monster stuff to fill things out, giving the whole thing a sort of gothic steampunk feel.

The problem is there is so much unnecessary added racism, a whole subplot with Lady Middleton being a kidnapped island woman forced to marry her captor. I don't know how many times we need to say this, just because they were overtly racist back then doesn't mean we need to imitate their racism now. By the middle third of the book, I was skipping anything that featured Middletons. Which, fair enough, I sometimes do when I read the original book too. :P

Xenotech Rising by Dave Schroeder

A funny, insubstantial SFF romp about a guy who provides tech support for alien wormhole technology. If that basic premise sounds fun to you, you'll enjoy this, but it does not in any way transcend the material.



The Good Fight Season 4

The first two episodes have come out and they are funny and savage and devastating and leave you wanting so much more. Jonathan Coulton's end of Episode 2 Quarantine sing-a-long was beautiful (esp. Audra McDonald stealing the show! <3)

Episode 1 is set in an AU that deviates from the iconic opening shot of Season 1 Episode 1, with Diane processing Donald Trump's victory in the election. In Episode 4 Season 1, we see Diane jubilant as instead Hillary Clinton wins the election. Everything looks great until Diane realizes that with a Democratic woman in the White House, the #metoo movement never got off the blocks, and she is forced to represent Harvey Weinstein as a client. It is everything you expect from The Good Fight, dark humor and moral grey and a soak in the crushing absurdity of the modern news cycle.

Episode 2 returns to more typical Good Fight storytelling, with Julius discovering that being a Trump judge comes with invisible strings and Adrian and Liz coping with the mysteries of Corporate America.


Brooklyn 9-9

The early Halloween Heist episodes have a wonderfully manic energy that I love, but the last few have just been TOO FUCKING MUCH. Too many nested levels of injoke, too many obligatory references even if they're no longer funny.

Grey's Anatomy

The finale was fine, I guess, though it didn't really save the mess that was the Richard/Catherine storyline. How many times to do I need to say this, lampshading a plot problem doesn't make the plot problem go away! There's a throwaway line in the finale about how Catherine's board is unhappy that she bought a hospital to spite her husband, but like, of course they're unhappy, it's one of the most foolish things I've ever heard of. It doesn't make it any less foolish to acknowledge that in universe people also think it was foolish.

What makes it worse for me is rewatching the S9 plotline where they buy the hospital, and seeing the contrast between how seriously they took that storyline back then, and how unseriously they took it htis season. Grey's Anatomy repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce?

Also, I made another vidlet for vexercises based on a storyline from early S9.

The Scientists Dr. Yang/ Dr. Thomas

In episode two of Hunters (the new Amazon Prime show in which Al Pacino plays a Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter who mentors the young Logan Lerman in the ways of Nazi hunting), Pacino's Meyer Offerman encourages Lerman's Jonah Heidelman to recite the Mourner's Kaddish for his grandmother, who was killed by a former Auschwitz guard turned toystore owner in the previous episode.

Offerman guides Jonah into a smallish, attractively decorated New York synagogue in the early 20th century style- without a mechitza. They enter as the sha'tz is reciting the final words of Alenu, "U'sh'mo echad". This of course is the prayer that precedes the recitation of Mourner's Kaddish in the evening service, so they have timed their entrance perfectly to spend minimal time in synagogue.

Jonah and Offerman pick up siddurim and Jonah haltingly starts reciting the kaddish. He is clearly familiar with it but a little rusty, and he's not clear why he's doing this, what value it will have to him as a non-believing Jew. Then the camera looks down at the siddur and we see it is open to the correct page, with the end of Alenu at the top of the page and the Mourner's Kaddish below. Typeset in what is recognizably Artscroll house style.

Hunters is set in 1977; The now classic Artscroll Siddur was first published seven years later in 1984.


---


In the first episode of Hunters, Offerman describes to Jonah an event he recalls from Auschwitz. The same guard, we later learn, who killed Jonah's mother was a chess aficionado so annoyed that he could not beat a prisoner who was a chess champion that he would bring 32 prisoners into the woods where he had set up a life-sized chess board, arming the prisoners so that when they took a square, they would have to stab and kill the prisoner whose square they were taking.

There is no attestation that this actually happened in Auschwitz, and it has faced some criticism. The Auschwitz Museum has charged them with irresponsible storytelling, that by making up stories about what hapepned in Auschwitz, they make it easier for Holocaust deniers to argue that nothing horrible happened in Auschwitz.



But I am more bothered by the appearance of the Artscroll Siddur.


I think the reason is that, look, I've read a lot of stories about what actually happened at Auschwitz. And they are just as surreally horrific as the human chess story. So I'm not bothered by fictional atrocities here that capture the same character, as long as they're clearly done for plot reasons and not for the sake of horror. And that is clearly the case here- the show's opening credits feature a human chess match between the Nazis and the Nazi hunters, Offerman is multiple times represented as the chessmaster, the invention of the human chess game is about setting up the stakes and building the themes of the show, while maintaining a sense of the horrific proportions of the Holocaust.

On the other hand, the anachronistic Artscroll goof... as the rest of my description of the scene should make clear, the Judaism consultants on this show are quite good. There is a lot of texture to the portrayal of Jewish life and its interactions with ritual and faith, and the anachronism is a blemish I'm going to have to warn people about if I rec the show as being accurate about Jewish life.

Remains to be seen how much I'll rec the show, though. I'm through two episodes and there is a lot that is great, and also a lot that is annoyingly paced or unnecessarily gruesome or lazily constructed. But there's enough interesting stuff here, and particularly enough that feels rightly Jewish, that I'm going to keep going.

There are credits over the hot air balloon sequence in last night's The Good Place and it makes me angrier than I've been in a long time. They must hate vidders.

I have been listening to the Good Place official podcast and thinking about what would qualify as a satisfying ending to the series, with the show now five episodes from the series finale.

I think the thing I have come to a realization about is that I have always had the tacit background assumption that there is a Big Guy behind the order of the show's universe. In Jewish theology the idea of Olam Haba flows directly from the existence of the monotheistic God. If there is a unitary omnipotent and omnibenevolent being who created the universe, then it stands to reason that there is an order to the universe that results in true and just reward and punishment. And since it is just as apparent that there is much that is unjust in this world, the true justice must come in the World to Come.

Without God underpinning it, the idea of there being a Good Place and a Bad Place doesn't really make obvious sense to me. Which is why I've always felt a little uncomfortable with the way people talk about the Big Season One Twist qua Twist. I did not predict while watching the first season that it would turn out that they were in Hell being deliberately punished, but it was equally clear that this Good Place was flawed and not working the way a Good Place should, and that the point of the show was that at some point this would get worked out in some way. So talking about it as being this completely out of nowhere Twist seems to miss the whole point of the first season.

I listened to an interview with Mike Schur on the podcast in which he very clearly said that the show is not about religion, it's about ethics, though. For Schur, Michael's line in the pilot about how every world religion got about 5% of the afterlife right except for Doug Forcett is an essential worldbuilding foundation of how he thinks about the series. So I think it is unreasonable to expect the finale to bring us to any sort of Big Guy with the ability to set things right. The Good Place/Bad Place/Jeremy Bearimy universe of the show is not a theologically sound emanation of divinity, it's a (Doylistic) thought experiment about what is Good and what is Bad that is (Watsonianly) operated by incompetents who lack the Omniscience of any sort of True Judge about what is Good and what is Bad... because Mike Schur believes that the idea of there being an actual True Judge is impossible. Ethics are relative and situational and there is never one right answer to how to behave in any given situation. And Doing Good is hard and what is most important is Doing the Work and getting better.


I feel most strongly, though, that the final episodes need to address in some sort of serious metaphysical mechanics way the question of what happened 500 years ago so that nobody has gone to The Good Place since then. Without an answer to that question that actually works, a lot of the show's worldbuilding is silly. Mindy St. John becomes the only person in the past 500 years not being tortured by demons. Also, a lot of the show's jokes about Janet or Michael saying who is in the Bad Place stop being funny. At the end of episodes of the podcast, Janet says "Did you know the person who invented the paperclip is in the Bad Place, because of tax evasion?" I think there are similar jokes over the course of the show. But this is a nonsense joke given that everyone goes to The Bad Place, because the points system is broken. The person who invented the paperclip isn't in the Bad Place because of tax evasion, they're in the Bad Place because they're a person, and people who aren't Mindy St. John go to the Bad Place, every last one of them.

But deeper than that joke not working is the Problem of Janet. Which is that in this world they have built where Omniscience about True Justice is not a thing, Janet doesn't make sense. Janet is quite precisely the Babelfish of the show, the thing that by its existence proves both that God must and cannot exist. And so my stretch hope for the final 5 episodes is that we get some more grappling with what it means for the universe that Janet exists.


But mostly what I want for the finale is an ending for Chidi and Eleanor and Jason and Tahani that is, in some satisfying way, Good. I want the four of them to end up together in Eternity, whatever that Eternity looks like.

Season 17 Murder Hobo Ziva David is the best Ziva David