I’m out.
Last night I watched (streamed) Episode 2 of Season 3 of Fear of the Walking Dead.
To be honest, I was always tentative about the show, but it didn’t have much competition. I skipped the most recent season, Season 7, of its parent program The Walking Dead entirely. I could see the direction it was going with Negan, and they were killing off too many of the characters I’d come to care for. I don’t think I’ve been missing much. I started, I think, with Season 3, binge-watched all the previous episodes, and thought season 5 was absolutely brilliant. The exploration of the wolves-among-the-sheep morality issues was almost genius, relevant to a great deal going on today, and a useful reminder that sheep, while themselves destined to be rounded up passively for slaughter, don’t consider wolves heroes even if some of the wolves might think of themselves that way.
I get the whole grand metaphor going on here- people need a way to think about the unthinkable, a way to mentally prepare to some extent for the worst-possible-scenarios that the future might hold, but they don’t want to have to mentally deal with those scenarios in raw form. They need to mull over the issues but at a certain remove. I appreciate that, and it’s even relevant to some urban/suburban scenarios I find useful.
Enter the Zombie Apocalypse, just close enough to actual possible scenarios to act as a conduit for thought, learning and discussion, close enough for productive solutions, but removed enough from reality, enough of a fantasy element so that the existence of such discussion doesn’t actually repulse and alarm (many) people.
Unfortunately, the show seems to have pretty completely lost its way and become determined to be just unrelentingly grim and depressing. Apparently I’m not the only one to think so, ratings have plummeted and there’s word of chaos developing in production. Duh. People need hope. If there’s no apparent hope, they quit watching.
So, last night I’m watching Fear, and they kill off Travis Manawa. They didn’t go half-way with it, or leave any ambiguity. Short of a deus-ex-machina resurrection plot that would shame a soap opera, he’s very dead.
Travis was pretty much the central character of the show. He was one of the originals from the first episode on, the most moral of the characters, the only male that behaved like an adult and was unfailingly trustworthy. The other male characters either behave like spoiled kids or are morally ambiguous. He was the only one I could really identify with.
So, if Travis is gone, so am I. My feeling is that like the parent series, it was pretty much “done” anyway.
I’m guessing the series is going to go on with the main protagonists being female, and the plot will become almost all female-centric. That’s not exactly a shock in 2017, folks, practically everything is going that way, killing off or removing any main male characters that are not either stupid or evil. It’s clearly become obligatory in any screenwriting at this point to remove any possible male role models, and to have females kicking ass. That was a welcome and interesting novelty in 1979 with Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of the character Ripley in the film Alien, a role originally written as male, but now it’s been pretty much ubiquitous and routine for a long, long time. Whereas Sigourney’s Ripley worked with men as an equal, on their level, virtually everything that has copied her since has felt obliged to demean the male roles by portraying all men as incompetents or villains. After all these decades, it’s getting really, really old.
So be it. I’m out.
The problem is, it doesn’t leave much for a guy to watch on TV or movies. I have zero interest in following the new (Disney) Star Trek any further, or the new (Disney) Star Wars any further. I’ve always been ambivalent about movies made from comic books, and even when I was a kid I much preferred the new/different/better Marvel comic books over DC when I could get them, which was rarely for a long time. Pretty much the only movies of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” (Disney) that I really enjoyed were the Iron Man movies, and even those didn’t exactly get better as they went on, I have to say the first was probably the best. I’ve never been much of a “gamer”, so that kills another whole realm of movies. I used to watch trailers on Youtube and note the movies that I wanted to see. I still watch the trailers from time to time, but it’s been a long time since I bothered to even be ready to note down anything. Now it’s more just making sure I’m not missing anything worthwhile.
Apparently I’m not.
Hollywood seems completely unable to recognize a bad idea, no matter how bad it is, if it’s a reboot or contrived continuation of something that was financially successful in the past. Half of what they churn out and eighty percent of what television churns out these days is retelling of old stories, but now it all seems to be a whole lot more about a their social agenda than the story-telling, and it’s killing them off by boring their audiences into complete apathy.
Hopefully they’ll wake up soon. A decent start would be to hire really good writers and compensate them at a level comparable with other talent that is crucial to putting stuff on screen. After a while not having anything interesting to say becomes a real problem no matter the production value, no matter how good you are at saying it.
Wake me up when they wake up. Until then, I’m devoting less and less attention to all of it, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
– Robert the Wombat