The Last of Us: What It Costs To Become...

 by XdarksparkX

Originally written: July 27, 2014

The Last of Us was my 2013 Game of The Year.  I knew that before the year was over. It had that title locked down mere minutes after I pressed the Start button on the controller.  Naughty Dog impressed me and got my attention with the way they brought a cinematic flair to the Uncharted trilogy, but they made me fall in love with The Last of Us.  As of this writing, I am working on my third play-through of the game on my PlayStation 3, with the intention of having many more in the future, especially when I finally have the means to get the Remastered edition for my PlayStation 4.  For my money, The Last of Us may just be the most emotionally-engaging story the video game industry has ever seen.  If you own a PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4, do yourself a favor and pick this game up.  If you can’t procure either of these systems, I highly recommend watching a full play-through on YouTube.  This game is an experience not to be missed.

Of course, with such a superbly crafted narrative and meaty, three-dimensional characters, everyone and their mother wrote or posted editorials and opinion pieces on the symbolism and themes of the story.  One article in particular that caught my attention last year was from the gaming site Polygon, for the rather pessimistic outlook the two writers had on the game’s protagonist, Joel.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/24/4548992/the-ending-of-the-last-of-us

So what I’m going to do in part with this write up is just offer contrasting thoughts to certain pieces presented within this editorial, which will help me concentrate my thoughts on the story.  I’m also doing it this way because both parties in the piece seemed to be on the same page, and there really didn’t seem to be a yang to the yin.

**WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD**

The setup for The Last of Us is fairly simple for most to grasp quickly in today’s pop-culture climate that’s infested by The Walking Dead phenomenon.  In 2013, a mutation of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has granted it the capability to infect humans. It’s means of sustaining itself is to find a host, overtake said host, hijack their motor functions and force them to a prime space in which to complete it’s growth. When it reaches its mature state — killing the host in the process — it will release it’s spores to begin the process anew.

I’m not going to pretend that this setup is revolutionary, the whole “mass amount of people succumbing to a epidemic that turns them into uncompromising creatures of destruction, leading us to a narrative that fits to be an essay on the human condition of those who survive” schtick, but I will say that at least this very different origin fits to make the aesthetic of the infected far more unique and frightening when a shadow is cast in a dark and lifeless ruin of our world that looks just as much alien as it does human.  

 

The world beyond the walls of the Quarantine Zones is filled with nightmarish creatures wandering aimlessly about a horrific ruin, searching for a sense of purpose

...there's also those who were infected by the Cordyceps...

The Cordyceps outbreak ravages the human population, plunging the world into a desolate societal wasteland. Vegetation reclaims buildings once considered the hubs of commerce, overgrowth turning our once proudest monuments into mere ruins of a forgotten world...

A man named Joel (portrayed flawlessly by Troy Baker) finds himself caught amidst the chaos of the zero hour of the outbreak in Austin, TX with his daughter Sarah and brother Tommy.  It is this opening that first grips the player into realizing that The Last of Us is a story-driven game unlike anything we’ve seen before in video games. In a very clever stroke of narrative genius, you play the prologue partially from the perspective of Sarah, as she’s awakened in the middle of the night by her uncle calling the house and frantically telling her to get her father on the phone. Everything that descends from this moment in time feels gritty, authentic, and horrifyingly real. The Zero Hour Prologue probably connects so deep because it’s so damn honest. The entire thing: from the little bits of the escalating chaos you see (police cars flying by Joel and Sarah’s house with their sirens blaring; massive traffic jams as people attempt a midnight exodus out of the area), to the big set-piece moments (panicked citizens getting into car accidents), to the motion captured performances feel completely genuine. It fits to connect me directly to the characters and their plight because the controller resting in my hand makes me feel a weight of responsibility towards them.  This feeling only fits to completely gut-check you when tragedy inevitably strikes our fleeing family through no control of our own, setting the mood and emotional core for the entire experience.

“You have no idea what loss is...”

20 years later, Joel has taken up residence in a quarantine zone in Boston. He and his smuggling partner Tess set off to track down a stolen shipment of firearms. They come to find that it was taken by Robert, a supposed confidant of theirs. When they corner him, they discover that he sold their weapons cache to a woman named Marlene — the de-facto leader of a resistance group who calls themselves “The Fireflies”.

As she rightfully purchased them, Marlene agrees to split the cache with what Joel and Tess need, but only if they escort a young girl named Ellie (gorgeously brought to life by Ashley Johnson) to the Fireflies on the outside of the zone, because Ellie is allegedly immune to the Cordyceps infection.

Thus, against their better judgement, Joel and Tess begin their journey of taking this girl to the Firefly doctors who might be able to procure a vaccine from her condition. In classic post-apocalypse adventure fashion, road blocks repeatedly pop up that force the smugglers to carry out their obligation far longer than they anticipated.  The journey sees Joel and Ellie trek from Boston, to Pittsburgh, to Colorado and finally to Salt Lake City, where a Firefly headquarters is still in operation. The final leg of this journey sees them traverse a partially flooded highway tunnel, where both Joel and Ellie are knocked unconscious as the Fireflies find them.

When Joel comes to in the Firefly Lab, he is told by Marlene that Ellie is being prepped for surgery. What also comes to light is that because the Cordyceps infection grows all over the brain, the only way to figure out why she’s immune and to engineer a possible vaccine is to kill her. He fights his way to the operating room, bursting through the doors just in the nick of time. It is here where the main controversy of the game comes to light...

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A number of our colleagues have expressed frustration with having to "shoot the doctors" that are operating on Ellie. (I use scare quotes, because Joel will alternatively stab the lead doctor if you approach him.) I think shooting the doctors is a necessary moment in the player's relationship with the game, and couldn't simply have been another non-interactive violent cut scene. By the plot's climax, the game's designers needed to emphasize that the wants of Joel and the wants of the player are not the same. Sure, you're guiding Joel's external actions, but you have no control of his internal thinking. Forcing you to shoot the doctors — to externalize what's happening inside of Joel's brain — is the writer shouting, "Shame on you for assuming you are this man." It's a smart twist on our expectations from having played hundreds of faceless, characterless heroes in action games.
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As a preface: you didn’t have to shoot all the doctors in the Firefly operating room.  I actually only shot the surgeon who threatened me, and that was after a stand off that saw me take a slow approach towards Ellie while pointing a shotgun at his chest issued zero resolve.  As the other two doctors weren’t in my way nor attempting to stop me, I let them cower in the corner as they gazed at the lifeless body of the clownshoes who brought a scalpel to a gun fight.

I actually completely empathized with Joel, and understood most of his actions fairly well.  When the world ends, the worst of humanity comes out.  The only way to survive is to become a part of that — to understand that survival will call for you to do things that are ethically “wrong” to most, because this construct of morals and ethics becomes a completely self created, man-made hindrance when structure falls away.  It’s like what Commissioner Gordon says in The Dark Knight Rises, “There’s a point — far out there — where the structures fail you, and the rules aren’t weapons anymore, they’re shackles letting the bad guys get ahead.”  The despicable don’t play by rules of morality, and the desperate damn sure don’t worry about the ethical consequences of their actions. If you can’t accept this, your corpse will become just a stepping stone for those who can.  As the old Nietzsche quote says, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.”

I guess the biggest understanding point for me was that I too found myself slowly projecting my own protective instincts onto Ellie, with my point of empathy to Joel’s actions coming from the protectiveness I feel for my sister, who is 6 years my junior. Once I felt that Ellie was to Joel what my sister Ariel is to me, all concepts of a bigger picture and “greater good” faded away for the solitary goal of doing what was best for her. I would’ve massacred the population of a goddamn continent without the bat of an eyelash if it meant getting to her and keeping her safe in that finale.

I may not have been Joel, but I certainly understood him.

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The moment is powerful and absolutely necessary for Joel's final lie to work. And the lie, wow, it's perfect. Because we expect this man to change. We misread him, because we think the empathic Joel in the cut scenes is different than the psychopathic Joel we play as. We've been trained to do that by the lion's share of action games.

When Ellie gives Joel the photo of his dead daughter, we think we're witnessing growth, Joel is finally moving on, but what we're really seeing, in hindsight, is Joel completing the projection of his old daughter onto his new one, that Joel is digging deeper into his emotional pit.

It's a horror story, right? In the end, Joel's taken this young girl hostage and turned her into his dead child.
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For the record, the lie they are referring to is the last scene of the game. Ellie asks Joel if everything he told her about the Fireflies was true — about how they found them and discovered there were a lot of other people like Ellie who were immune and who didn’t do them a damn bit of good in producing a cure, so they simply stopped looking for one. She tells him to swear to her that it was all true. After a beat, Joel straightens himself and says, “I swear.” Her reply is a simple, “...Okay.”

Now, according to writer and creative director Neil Druckmann, it’s a love story.  That makes sense, as the old adage tells us “love is blind” and can make us do rash and sometimes selfish or stupid things in the name of that love.

I actually believe that Joel did change, because he grew to love Ellie.  Not because she was Sarah to him, but because she claimed the same innocence and bystander-status that his daughter did when she became a victim of a mindless drone who was “just following orders.”  The entire game illustrates his struggle to let himself remember what it felt like to truly care about someone, before the world made caring a deadly sin.  I feel those seeds are planted when he, Ellie and Tess are on the roof of looking towards the Capitol building in Boston.  There’s this small, somber smirk that Joel lets slip that gives us a glimpse of his fleeting compassion.  I think that essentially, that’s the story’s core: learning to open yourself up to care again after you’ve been scarred so deeply.  This negative outlook on attachment is echoed through everyone he meets, including his old friend Bill:

“Once upon a time, I had someone that I cared about. A partner… someone I had to look after, and in this world that sort of shit is good for one thing: getting you killed.”

The world has engorged itself on apathy in the wake of the outbreak, yet the entire story seems to tell us that our sympathies can endure — that life doesn’t become completely bleak unless we let it.

“After all we’ve been through. Everything that I’ve done. It can’t be for nothing.”

I also think that how you viewed Joel depended on how you played.  Yes, certain times you were forced to clear a room and leave nothing but rotting corpses in your wake, but sometimes that’s what pure survival is about: kill or be killed.  It doesn’t make him a psychopath.  I choked out or crept past about 65% of the human enemies I encountered when I could, which to me painted him as a far more calculating and intelligent survivor.  In the apocalypse, wildly firing bullets off isn’t exactly ideal when ammo is scarce (this approach proved particularly effective when I played through on the Survivor difficulty level, where ammo and supplies are almost non-existent).  While obviously not on the level of story interactivity as say, Telltale's The Walking Dead, I still feel that Naughty Dog gave us the option to craft the crisis-engaging side of Joel however we so chose for the most part.  If you wanted to go in guns blazing, letting the battle cry of “WOLVERINES!” ring out while you Matrix the entire room up, you could, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that the character was definitively one way or another because of how the individual chose to play the game.

For me, the concept was more about a really deep and dark question: after everything I’ve been through, where does the logic that this shit stain of a species known as humanity deserve a second chance to fuck Earth up again stand on it’s feet?  We had David who attempted to murder Ellie for cannibalism; we had a whole shit load of those Pittsburgh hunters who tried to murder us just for shit they may not even want or need; and we had poor Henry who had to resort to shooting his 13-year-old infected brother, before the trauma of the action proved too much for him and he resorted to taking his own life. We are beaten over the head throughout the game with the depths that humans can and will sink to just to see another sunrise.  The message of reality rang clear to me: we are not inherently good people. When the world goes to shit, we let it take us with it. Those that don’t can not and will not survive, because survival doesn’t play by house rules and will always reward those who can cast aside moral dilemmas in favor of another gasp of air.  It is a perfect reflection and companion to the words Harvey Dent spoke in The Dark Knight: “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

“Guess what, we’re shitty people, Joel. It’s been that way for a long time.”

“No, we are survivors!”

I actually paused the game when I burst through the door in the operating room, unsure of what exactly I had come to find on the other side.  In this moment, I reflected on my entire journey up until this point. When I resumed the game, I took a slow and calculated approach towards Ellie's body, holding the surgeon at gun point. Call me a cynic and selfish, but when he refused to back down despite staring down the smoking barrel of a shotgun held by a man who wants to prevent the death of a child, it was at that point that I came to the conclusion that no matter what I did at this point, we were already too far gone. Thus, I pulled the trigger, and carried the Fireflies last long-shot hope of stopping this epidemic out of the building.

I think the name The Last of Us is indicative of more than just devastated human population numbers — perhaps inciting that in the end, those of us that remain have only been able to do so because they have embraced the horror of humanity’s true nature: we are ruthless, sick, depraved killing machines — no better than the nightmare-inducing Clickers and Bloaters that wander the darkest regions of 2033...

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I enjoyed the journey with Joel to uncover his true nature. But I hope for the next game, Ellie takes center stage. After all, she has the most potential to change: a young girl with a suicidal sense of purpose, a desire to do no less than save the world. I want to be alongside her when Joel's lie is made explicit.
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I actually thought that Ellie knew that Joel was lying to her from the second it came out of his mouth.  I feel like she wouldn’t have asked that question if she thought everything he said to her in the car was true.  The expression she showed led me to believe that she didn’t buy what he was selling one bit, but that she chose not to hold it against him. She did this, because when she looked at him, she saw the words she spoke in the farmhouse within him — the supposed heartless smuggler who didn’t even want to have anything to do with her in the first place:

“Everyone I've care for has either died or left me. Everyone — fucking except for you.  So don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else, because the truth is I would just be more scared.”

In an almost poetic beauty, Joel seems to reverberate this line when he tells his lie.  And Ellie accepts him — not as a liar, but as someone who understands the fear of loneliness he faces if he makes the choice to willingly lose her.  Right before this, Joel tries to comfort Ellie’s survivor’s guilt by telling her that you always find something that makes pushing through and surviving worthwhile.  When he tells his lie, Ellie realizes at that moment, she was Joel’s reason to keep pushing on, and he hers. And maybe she also realized that unlike her, Joel had no false sense of heroism to aid him in escaping this burden — if he was going to quit surviving, it would be by suicide, and would force him to confront his own state of mind and the why of after everything he’s been through, now would be the time to decide to “opt out”.

“I struggled for a long time with surviving. And you — No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for...”

The question that flitters through my head though is why would it be assumed that Ellie has a suicidal sense of purpose?  Because of what Marlene told us?  I guess because she showed survivors guilt at the end, but honestly I felt that was more along the lines of looking for a cop-out.  Usually, survivior’s guilt tends to be fairly irrational at it’s core.  Those who suffer from it are trying to say that because of their ability to adapt, others inability to adapt, or freak circumstance that they’ve seen this day, somewhere along the line they shouldn’t have been “chosen” to survive.  Now, this logic is actually sound when it comes to Ellie’s case, but I guess the question really is: How do we know that after everything she went through, Ellie doesn’t see the world as something that’s possibly too far gone for saving, and she’s really just expressing remorse that (as far as she knows) she can’t share her gift of immunity at will in any way?

I mean, let us step back a second: when the Fireflies find Joel and Ellie, Ellie is out cold. We’re making assumptions that when Joel woke up, Ellie had come to, talked to Marlene and said “yes, take my brain”. The problem is that Ellie asks what happened when she wakes up in the backseat of the car Joel is driving away from the Firefly HQ (and thus tells his lie). So, in reality it probably went something like — bring Ellie in, keep her sedated, prep her for surgery. The assumption that the Fireflies intentions are pure simply because they want to “save humanity” is naïve, and would be ignoring the entire commentary of the 20+ hours of gritty, raw humanity we were exposed to over the course of the game.
 
So if people do whatever the hell they want to suit their desires and needs, to the point where it’s valid enough to harp this chord repeatedly with Joel, it is just as applicable to Marlene and the Fireflies? At the very least, we have to consider that for every “decent person” we would be saving with a vaccine, we would also be inherently saving humans like the two girls who maliciously lit an endangered tortoise on fire in Florida along with them. That is a mere tiny fragment of the atrocities we’ve seen humans commit in this story, and you must be accepting of them being a part of your new world order. You must also find yourself under the belief that when you establish an order of a relatively safer future, these people will actually be able to adjust themselves down from the mental space of pure survival brutality. How long will it be before the people who simply cannot come back after two decades of scraping by inevitably fall back to their old ways? Sure, we’re led to see the good in people, but you must never forget their true nature and capabilities.

The biggest problem if people start buying the Firefly propaganda without questioning it simply because their motives appear pure from a surface level, is that you ignore the writing on the wall of the subsurface commentaries throughout the game. When Joel comes to and tells them to stop prepping for the procedure on Ellie, Marlene says:

“I get it. But whatever it is you think you’re going through right now is nothing to what I have been through.”

You get that? Not only did she just trivialize a man’s care for this child who he just trekked across the entire fucking continental United States with, but she just decided to have a pissing contest about who is suffering more for this potential loss of Ellie, which is coming from a choice she is still making. Does that not tell you about her personality? If anything was made clear from the game up to this point, it’s that Druckmann knows how to write dialog, and he damn sure knows about subtleties and their place within realistic exchange. If we read into her words based upon the context of the situation, Marlene has just shown us her true colors: she is the type who will beat her chest and climb to the highest mountain just to shout “praise me, for I have suffered so that you may claim this reward!” That’s some fucked up, narcissistic, martyr-like shit right there. We must at the very least consider the possibility that Marlene is no better than Joel, if not worse. For even though she states that procuring a vaccine through these means “isn’t about her”, in the end, she would be the face that would be presenting this mythical vaccine to the masses should it be rendered. Thus, she would become the face of the Fireflies prevention of human extinction — the Cordyceps Outbreak Savior to those who still remain.

In the opening credits, there’s audio that highlights the changes over the 20 years between the prologue and main story, and it’s made quite clear that the Fireflies are persecuted in the beginning of the outbreak when the quarantine zones are constructed.  How do we know that manufacturing a cure isn’t just going to boost their ego so they can wave it around in faces of the remains of society and say, “See!? We did this!” To inflate their own self-importance?  I mean, do we honestly believe they would willingly dole out the vaccine to everyone, including the people who assaulted, tortured and murdered their family and friends?  It’s written as borderline fact by some people that it couldn’t happen any other way, as if as humans the Fireflies wouldn’t be prone to pick and choose and exercise the absolute power that they would finally claim, as if we don’t have tomes of historical recounts proving that humans are more often than not power-hungry creatures Hell bent on obtaining even the smallest shred of it anyway they can. We simply do not and cannot know what their true motives would be until the time was upon them, but frankly, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of killing a child just to find out whether or not we went and substituted one over-lording group without the means to properly rebuild for another.

“There is no other choice here!”

“Yeah... You keep telling yourself that bullshit.”

I think the dilemma that’s raised in The Last of Us is one primarily of conditioning. In so many games, our objective is to save the world through any means necessary, and if we happen to cross a few moral lines here and there, it’s justified because it’s for the alleged “greater good”. This is a game so intellectually deep and self-aware that it actually challenges the very essence of this logic, and asks us if the greater good is always such a binary equation — as if there is never any emotional attachment, moral ambiguity, or underlying feeling of betrayal that goes along with such an objective. That in order to truly understand the gravitas of this situation, we must answer for every one of our transgressions, and claim a bit of time in existential meditation on the breadth of our actions. Maybe some gamers weren’t ready to cope with this reality: we are only “good people” in almost every other narrative because we are arbitrarily labeled as such. The Last of Us ain’t no place for no heroes.

Once Upon A Time / Grimm: Which Had The Stronger First Season?

by XdarksparkX

Originally written: August 17, 2012

In the Fall of 2011, a new genre craze seemed to sweep across our television stations: that of the modernization of classic fairy-tales. Two of the “Big Four” networks rolled out programs based upon this concept, which I suppose only seems like a craze because of the notoriety of these networks, coupled with the fact that you would see a promo for one series and get it confused with the other until proper brand establishment set in.

ABC rolled out Once Upon A Time, a story about a bail bonds collector named Emma who discovers the town of Storybrooke, Maine after the son she gave up for adoption 10-years-ago named Henry shows up on her doorstep and claims he lives there, but that it is also plagued by a curse that only she can lift.  She returns him to the town, only to find out that Henry believes that all the people who live there are actually alternate reality versions of various fairy tale characters that Disney has adapted over the past 90 years.  Touted as network television’s ‘next big thing’ due to writers of LOST being involved (The question that surely arises—is that really a selling point given the fact that most people claimed it was the eventual convoluted writing of LOST after so many seasons that turned them off from the show?), Once Upon A Time was given a cushy Sunday night 8 PM time slot and a full 22 episode order (from it’s original of 13) after just two episodes had aired, though it did not pick up a second season order until 3 days before the season finale premiere.

NBC’s Grimm on the other hand, had a start up that was much more… well, grim I suppose.  Based directly upon the original works of the much darker Grimms’ Fairy Tales than the Disney inspired re-tellings of classic fables, Grimm follows the story of Detective Nick Burkhart, a Portland cop who suddenly discovers that he is a “Grimm”, a line of guardians who are supposed to keep order and balance between the likes of humanity and the fantastical creatures of the Grimm brother’s tales, who disguise themselves as everyday citizens (usually, only a Grimm can see their true form). As his job continues to call him to more bizarre and gruesome crime scenes, Nick starts to realize just how big the population of these creatures is in our world. NBC only seemed to promote Grimm after ABC started running Once Upon A Time’s hype packages and bumps, leading to the initial brand confusion I mentioned earlier.  It was given a Friday night slot, a virtual ratings death-sentence for most original dramas, but allegedly had a 22-episode order from the get go and was renewed two months before Once Upon A Time got its second season extension. Rather odd faith in a series (or the show runners) from NBC given the horrific timeslot it was forced to overcome, but I digress.

With Grimm’s return having snuck up on me by premiering on August 13th (much earlier than most fall serial shows), I figured now would be the ideal time to sit down and hammer out my comparison piece on how both shows executed their initial season’s story arcs and character developments.

[OBVIOUS WARNING SHOULD BE OBVIOUS:]

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR BOTH FIRST SEASONS ARE PRESENT THROUGHOUT.

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

MAIN NARRATIVE ARCS

ONCE:

Okay, so I know that it’s obvious that the Emma/Henry/Snow White/Prince Charming/Regina storyline is the primary one given the copious amount of exposition and centric episodes they force us to drudge through before they give someone else the chance to shine in Once, I just wish it didn’t feel like they were trying to force their characters down my throat. Even after they had planted the seed with them and given them their first centric episode, they got secondary visits of some kind extremely quickly whereas there were other more interesting characters around (LOST had the same problem though, Jack or Kate would get two centric episodes before someone like say Jin & Sun or Michael got their first).  Perhaps series creators and writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz thought that it would be easier for the viewer to follow along if done this way, but really, it came off as I mentioned.  In the same breath, I will say that the critical story node—both our introduction to it via in medias res in the Pilot, and the eventual intertwining of characters stories and their roles into it during the finale arc was extremely enjoyable (Episode 20: “The Stranger” is easily my favorite from this arc). I always worry when show’s attempt to do that, because it becomes a very haphazard Jenga construction when you try to tie various characters into such a critical plot thread—one false move and it collapses in spectacular fashion.  Once succeeded in this regard with minimal damage done to the structure, which should keep the viewer who prides themselves on logical thinking fairly happy.

+          +          +

GRIMM:
Grimm had a little bit of a problem with this.  They started out with the usual cadence, but after the introductory arc of the first four episodes or so, they went so far down the path of establishing what being a Grimm meant and what the existence actually entailed that I admittedly forgot about the primary antagonistic group for a third of the season.  Nick’s superior officer Captain Renard and the pretense under which he was introduced basically faded away over time as it became more apparent that his agenda had to do with using Nick and not so much Nick’s swift and immediate demise.  The Reapers are basically forgotten until they appear once in and regain their prominence in the finale arc. Still, it really tightened up in the latter third of the season, progressing prior arcs like Juliette and Nick’s relationship and the strains his secrecy puts on them, and introducing new ones like Nick’s partner Hank being unable to deny the fact that he has witnessed things that are not of this world, and how—even if everyone around him will deny it—he will have to mentally cope with what he saw for the rest of his life. It advanced to a satisfying cliffhanger, and an eyebrow-raising twist that will surely have people begging for more answers than the Season 2 premiere will be able to contain.

Once: A-
Grimm: B-

SUB PLOTS: SIDE CHARACTER EXPOSITION / ARCS

This really was the biggest strength of both shows in their initial season.

ONCE:

Once had an interesting way of dealing with the amount of characters Storybrooke claimed that the show runners wanted to cover.  They basically assigned a writer to certain characters (or at least, that’s how it appears when you put the central character and writers credits together through multiple episodes), so that the arcs could claim a certain continuity and flow to them. It’s a move that works in general due to the consistency in which the character’s individual arc sees—it works spectacularly if the given writers have a clear cut concept and inspiration to take the character down a compelling path, and fails epically when the person writing either lacks a true spark to really give us something different, or perhaps just doesn’t “get it”.

That said, Once was able to claim phenomenal character-centric episodes for almost all of its additional characters, starting with the excellent Jiminy Cricket-centric episode “That Still Small Voice”, written by one of my personal favorite writers for the small screen, Buffy alum Jane Espenson.  Pretty much any character that was assigned to Jane (Mr. Gold [Rumpelstiltskin], Belle, Ruby [Red Riding Hood], and the aforementioned Jiminy) was given royal treatment in their characterizations and re-imaginings, as she knocked every single one of their origins and back-stories out of the park. (Not to mention, both Ruby and Belle got upgraded to regulars for the second season.  Color me giddy.)

I took notice because of her looks, I stuck around because of her kick-ass origin.

With these characters and others such as Grumpy and the Geppetto/Pinocchio pair, Once seemed to always strike a perfect balance between the established pop-culture knowledge and recurring traits of the characters, taking them to a much more interpersonal and subtext ridden place, slowly evolving them over time, adding a dash of maturity, with the occasional claim-of -ownership twist for good measure to create stories that should be the prime examples of what Once intends to be.  Suffice to say, those aforementioned character are easily my current favorites on the show given their psychological depth and excellent progressions of their origins.  Even the weaker sub plot arcs like Cinderella don’t bring down what the show was achieving at its peak when it was handling the residents of Storybrooke with a stroke of creative flair and narrative intrigue.

+          +          +

GRIMM:

Grimm was no slouch here either.  Monroe is simply one of the best comic-relief characters on television right now.  He's a Blutbad (werewolf) who runs into Nick in the Pilot episode when Nick mistakenly assumes him to be the suspect in the disappearance case he's investigating.  After the misunderstanding is cleared up, the two discuss the history of the Grimms and Wesen, Monroe amazed to meet a Grimm in person (and live to tell the tale, it seems most Grimms that proceeded Nick killed first and asked questions never).  The arc he and Nick subsequently go through felt both believable and surprisingly satisfying when you witness the eventual dynamic and mutual respect the characters grow to have for each other.  With obvious implications that he and Nick’s budding friendship is going to be catalytic in more ways than one as the series progresses, you really couldn’t ask for more out of a “buddy cop movie” type of partnership.

[L-R: Monroe, Nick]
“Last time I protected someone for you, it was not exactly a pleasant experience. How is that guy by the way? Were they able to sew his arm back on?”

Even though he was pretty much relegated to being “the contrast of Nick’s life, primarily through the direct character contrast between him and Monroe” for a majority of the season, the arc that they started up roughly 15 episodes in that slowly began dragging Hank into the world of Grimms and Wesen was very well done.  I also thoroughly enjoy Juliette’s character, and the slow burn the writers are using so that we as a viewer fall for her more and more as time goes on in the same vein Nick did is a beloved display of patience and care of viewer investment on the writers part.  It’s also something that scares the hell out of me, mainly because I’ve seen it used as a setup for something truly horrific to befall the character in question. I can recall one particular instance where I felt this type of interest and elation at seeing where the writers would take a side-character’s growth and watching them evolve through various arcs: Amy Acker in the Buffy spin-off Angel as Winifred Burkle, and those of you who watched the entire series know exactly what that sick bastard Joss Whedon did to THAT character after we had fallen ass-over-teakettle for her.  (It doesn’t help that one of the show’s creators, David Greenwalt, is a former Buffy/Angel producer.  Fucking Whedon, he’s made me into the most paranoid bastard whenever I start liking characters.  Partially related side-note: Amy Acker had guest roles in both shows, so that makes them both winners to some extent in my book regardless of the letter-grade outcomes).

I know what you’re thinking of pulling with this character, Greenwalt.

Don't you fucking dare...

The only problem I can find with the Grimm gang is a bit too often it became obvious that they were more tools for Nick to use rather than actually their own characters at times. Rosalee (a young woman who comes into the show about halfway through the season and winds up running her brother’s spice shop after he’s murdered) became the convenient mythical spell remedy guru; Monroe was the go-to guy for creature-of-the-week exposition (the show even mentions this point in a bit of slight meta-humor, when after the umpteenth time of being asked if he knew about a certain type of Wesen, Monroe turns to Nick and says “what am I, your personal Grimmopedia?”); Nick and Hank’s co-worker Sergeant Wu was the snarky bastard who you were just waiting for something to happen to.  Mainly because he would be oblivious to it until the effects took hold, and when they did it would allow Nick and company to have an up-close and easily containable victim of the otherworldly ailment, because you knew there would be no reason to give him all this screen time if he wasn’t going to contribute to the supernatural side of the show in SOME way.  The Scooby Gang from Buffy evolved into that slowly over time, whereas it just kind of quickly became that in Grimm.  Slightly predictable in that sense, and that’s really the one thing that knocks it down a peg.

Once: A-
Grimm: B+

THE PRIMARY ANTAGONISTS

However, if the Sub-Plots and Side Character Arcs were the universal strength between the shows, then Primary Antagonists Arcs were the precise antithesis; the yin to that yang.

ONCE:

This is really primarily a point because of Once Upon A Time’s unbelievable failure in this department. I won’t beat around the bush here: The Evil Queen’s origin arc made her the LAMEST primary antagonist the show could have.

I don’t give two shits if the guys who write her narrative arc are the sole reason the show even exists in the first place, they are being upstaged and shown how you do this shit right on an international stage by people they’ve hired on who can write FAR better tragic back-stories with far more logical psychological progression for characters who are conflicted by their circumstances.  Jane Espenson ALONE completely decimated their attempts to make the Evil Queen sympathetic with her fantastic arcs for Mr. Gold and Ruby.  This bothers me because these same two men are the ones who are credited with writing the fantastic Grumpy-centric episode, “Dreamy”.  It’s an absolute mind-numbing conundrum how they could manage to botch their PRIMARY ANTAGONIST, while giving a second-tier side character such a phenomenal tragedy-based origin.

And the crazy thing is, I called this from the outset.  I’ve been ranting about this since the second episode in.

That’s right, I’ve had a problem with Regina/The Evil Queen since her first centric episode “The Thing You Love Most”.  In it, we find out the price she paid in order to have The Dark Curse (aka “LOST Smoke Monster II: Purple Electric Boogaloo”) befall the Enchanted Realm and send all of its residents to Storybrooke—or “A Land Without Magic” as they put it.  She kills her father—stabs him with a knife no less, so it’s not like she went about this in an impersonal way—but tries to give this “I’m so heartbroken over doing this, don’t you viewers pity my choices?” face.  No, because YOU STILL MADE THE CHOICE YOU SO RESENT.  Call me when the well-being of something of legitimately innocent (no, your moral compass does NOT count as currency here) is somehow involved in whether or not you commit your next despicable act, on the road mind you to doing something you admit is going to destroy everyone’s happiness.  If NO ONE was happy, and their happiness was taken away due to say a balancing act by the world or something for Charming bringing Snow back from the dead with the kiss (thereby making Snow White’s happy ending the lone in-your-face exception), then MAYBE I could see her logic path of wanting to be a Queen who does right by her people, but is conflicted due to the cost of the curse and what it could bring about (doubtful, but still). Alas, it wasn’t.  The entire desire to curse the Enchanted Realm was based on a pathetic and pitiful warpath of vengeance directed towards a girl who—within the most skewed outlook—“wronged” her.

With all due respect Your Highness, you’re as stupid as your outfit is superfluous.

I blame Magneto for the seething hatred I have for this character.  No, I seriously do.  I feel that thanks to Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men films, he is one of the best anti-villain characters around that you can easily reference so that people are able to quickly grasp why exactly you have a problem with a villain who does horrible acts with flighty motives.  The fact that he does what he does not because he wants to be “evil” or a dick, but because of the outlook that his back-story caused that makes him believe that what he’s doing is right is the freaking blueprint for how to write a believable antagonist.  It’s a basic rule of thumb in good literature: unless your antagonist is meant to be a manifestation of pure evil, there has to be a thread of connection or understanding from the audience to the antagonist (even in the slightest of terms).  The primary way to do this, the antagonist MUST have either a strong conviction (usually to the point of delusion) to what they’re doing, with the cause of delusion being something the audience can easily accept or understand; or they must become who they are by sheer circumstance.  This is especially true when you have a show like this that claims a copious amount of compelling characters getting tragic origins that allow us to understand their psyche (again, the fact that they did this perfectly in the Grumpy episode continues to baffle my mind). They didn’t do any of this with the Evil Queen, she garners zero connection or understanding due to the sheer logical fallacy from which her motives are derived.

The killer was, it only got worse from there.

She falls for the Genie (who she eventually turns into her Magic Mirror), “frames” him (ha! puns...) for the murder of her husband that SHE committed (once again using the “it hurts me soo badd” face behind the affected character’s back, before whirling around and acting cold and heartless to one of the few people to truly give two shits about her), and has nothing but contempt in her eyes when he’s begging for a reason as to why she did it. And then comes the episode centric to her hate for Snow, “The Stable Boy”.

Once upon a time, before the Queen (sans “Evil” prefix) gained her claim to royalty, she was a young girl named Regina and deeply in love with a stable boy named Daniel.  For reasons likely of ye olde political bullshit (like “you’re supposed to marry for power, you kitchen-dwelling baby-oven”), her mother wants to force her into marrying Snow White’s father King Leopold, after Regina saves the young girl from her runaway horse.  Regina’s mother Cora does not approve of Daniel (obviously).  She is also a callous, emotionally bankrupt, magically inclined BITCH who manipulates people as if it was her God-given ability.

Despite this disapproval, Regina runs to Daniel to tell him that they should run away together and never look back. It’s a classic Romeo & Juliet tale… until they decided to start making out in the stable that little Snow White happens to wander into.  Regina gives chase to the fleeing youth and explains that she doesn’t love Snow’s father, she loves Daniel. After some convincing, Snow White understands and is happy for Regina because she found “twuu wuvv”, and agrees to keep this a secret.

Of course, Cora comes into the picture, and manipulates the naive little girl into revealing the true reason for Regina’s unhappiness, with promises of nothing but concern and love for Regina’s well-being (because that’s what master manipulators do. Adults fall for that shit, what hope does a wide-eyed child who thinks the world is a decent place have?)  She then proceeds to stop Regina and Daniel just before they can sneak off into the night from the stables in their runaway attempt.  Cora once again flexes her manipulation muscle and says “you can go if you like Regina”, and then goes over to Daniel and says “always do what’s best for your children”. What she actually means by that is RIP OUT THE HEART OF THE BOY YOUR DAUGHTER LOVES IF YOU DON’T APPROVE!  Of course, with her only reason for running now maggot food, Regina bends to her mother’s will and marries Leopold.

And who is the obvious basis of hatred after reading that? Why, the CHILD of course. Never mind that you just watched your own mother input Back-Back-Low Punch for the Heart Rip Fatality, no, clearly the child who was tricked by the manipulating adult is the one to blame.

You call it malicious intent, everyone with active brain cells calls it childhood naiveté.

A child.  She chose to hold a grudge against a looks-about-8-years-of-age child because her mother is a sadistic bitch.  A sadistic bitch who’s dancing around with your lover’s HEART IN HER HAND saying “nanny-nanny-boo-boo / no-happiness-for-youu / he’s-nothing-more-than-horse-poo” and the first thing you do is clench your fist, turn away and say “curse you, hopefully little child”? NO! Fuck you MOM for being a controlling, batshit crazy, festering sore of human existence!  For that amazing bout of stupid alone Regina should go die in a ditch. She can be with Daniel, and we won’t have to endure any more “bawwing” from this dumb broad.  Win all the way around.

The sad thing is, Regina is actually a pretty good antagonist in Storybrooke (like, teeth grindingly annoying in the way an antagonist is supposed to be), but not even that can save her from the completely inept reasoning behind why they are all in Storybrooke in the first place, and the abhorrent acts she commits to see the curse through so she can extract vengeance on a young woman who possessed the naiveté of a little girl when she was... 
a little girl. Fail, fail, fail.

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GRIMM:
That whole rant has taken a lot out of me, and with Grimm the real problem is both the lack of a consistent threat from the alleged Primary Antagonists, and the aforementioned disappearance of them from the main arc in the middle of the season.  The Reapers (supposedly fearsome people who hunt Grimms down) finally run into Nick in one of the last episodes of the season and get properly dispatched in the span of a fifteen minute fight scene, with Nick barely batting an eyelash.  Legitimate threat my ass, Nick actually trolls the guy who sent them by sending their heads back in a box. BAMF point for the Grimm, but a Fail point for the Reaper Keeper.

I’m surprised Nick didn’t go for the ultimate troll attempt and have the note say “All your base are belong to us.”

I can’t really include Captain Renard yet because his motives are unclear and he has yet to actually directly “antagonize” our protagonist, lest we count the few BS missions he sent Adelaide on.  Really, the only thing that keeps this section above water for Grimm is the Hexenbiest Adelaide. She first attempted to take out Nick’s Aunt Marie (who passed the knowledge of the Grimms and her stash of miscellany down to him) early in the season, and then successfully cursed Juliette in the finale arc before Nick finally stripped the crazy witch of her powers.

Once: F
Grimm: D+


SECONDARY ANTAGONISTS

ONCE:
Now that I think about it, Once didn’t really seem to have any secondary antagonists (well, none worthy of legitimate mention that weren’t mere one-episode bumps in the road in Storybrooke). One could argue a case for Mr. Gold, but it’s hard for me to label him a straight antagonist, maybe because his phenomenal back-story didn’t do much in the way of making him an easily dis-likeable antagonistic, but more a pity worthy figure of tragedy. I’d probably prefer to give him the label of tritagonist before I gave him one of antagonist.  Still, I guess given his actions overall being primarily shady, including those in the finale, I’ll count him, which bumps the grade up a tick.

“I’m a difficult man to love...”

Not when Jane Espenson writes your back-story...

Other than that, there where occasional ones in the Enchanted Realm, like The Blind Witch and Maleficent, but they were both fleeting bits with little to no actual use in the overall story (Maleficent was basically relegated to the role of “Conveniently Deadly Storage Locker / Last Level Boss Battle” for the season finale episode “A Land Without Magic”). Funny how the lack of secondary antagonists worked out, because more of them could’ve helped take my mind off of the abhorrent primary antagonist they kept trying to shove down my throat as if she had legitimate motives.

+          +          +

GRIMM:
As for Grimm, this was obviously one of it’s initial strengths given the fact that each episode was more often than not about a fabled creature from the pages of Grimms’ Fairy Tales stepping out of line in a hostile manner and giving Nick shit when he eventually tracked them down.  The creature variety, coupled with the solid arcs they were given and the lack of ham-fisting the exposition each required is what really allowed me the fun curiosity of wondering which character would be Nick find himself at odds with in the subsequent episode (This basically worked in stark contrast to Once, where it was “who will be the protagonist in the flashback” as opposed to “who will be the antagonist of the week”).  The only problem was the fact that they actually started overshadowing the Primary Antagonists a bit too much in the middle of the season as previously stated, to the point where it almost felt like the episodes had a cadence akin to an episode of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers than a major network primetime serial drama.  However, this feeling for me only lasted an episode or two, at which point they put the wheels in motion for the finale arc, and the symptoms vanished rather quickly.  The obvious note of “it also helps that Nick doesn’t know anything about them, so learning along with him helps the audience connect to him” aside, they handled it just about as best they could with minor slip ups or falters.

Once: C+
Grimm: B

OVERALL GRADES—SEASON ONE

Once: B- 

(A-; A-; F; C+)
[It shined brilliantly in certain categories, but completely failing in a critical area drags the overall grade down.  I guess the use of the catchphrase “From the writers of LOST” had a bit of karma attached to it.]

Grimm: B

(B-; B+; D+; B)
[A solid opening season with a good, yet somewhat predictable cadence that did well in establishing the universe, with a fantastic finale arc that gave us an intriguing cliff hanger to keep us wanting more.]

I am unsure if I will do this article again for Season 2 of the shows, but I will say that both are off to a very good start despite their initial flaws and failings, and I am very interested to see where both shows go with the introductory phase out of the equation.

Grimm’s second season currently airs Mondays at 10/9c on NBC.

Once Upon A Time’s second season starts Sunday, September 30th at 8/7c on ABC.
(Dates and times are accurate as of this writing [8/17/2012])

Theme Park Thoughts: Harry Potter & The Forbidden Journey

For a while now I've been trying to get some of my more vocal friends to contribute to the site, mainly due to my terrible back log of content that can never find its way from the "in progress" queue to the desired finished state as fast as I would like. A recent discussion with one of my best friends, Blizz, was sparked by a frequent topic of ours -- theme parks. In particular, the rants and narrative analysis I wanted to do on some of their attractions as part of the Theme Park Thoughts series. Luckily, Blizz's affinity for completed works far outweighs my own, and he has graciously allowed me to share his phenomenal narrative-based rant on a ride we both consider to be one of the best attractions of all-time: Harry Potter & The Forbidden Journey. Enjoy.

+          +          +

by Blizz

Originally written: June 3rd, 2012

Let me be clear, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is one of the best rides I’ve ever been on. It also follows one of the most moronic plotlines ever conceived.

You could ask me why I’m freely choosing to pick on a ride that I actually think is one of the best attractions in the world, when I could just as easily take pot shots at some defenseless idiot of a ride, like Curse of DarKastle at Busch Gardens Williamsburg.  And I still might.  But it’s the fact that Forbidden Journey is so well-known and so beloved that makes its complete and utter disregard for the story it’s telling all the more inexplicable.

This review is my last-ditch attempt to understand why J.K. Rowling was such a stickler for details with every aspect of the Wizarding World…except when it came to its marquee attraction.  Maybe she was stuck in a daydream (presumably one vividly depicting all the fun people wouldn’t have on Pottermore), or maybe she figured whatever team was working on this could…I don’t know…do it themselves?

Whatever it was, something went wrong.

But enough intro, let’s get to the ride.

Prior to riding, we get a tour of many parts of the castle – we start first in the dungeons, then move into the greenhouse, and finally reach Dumbledore’s office, where the headmaster at last introduces us to our roles in this little adventure.  We’re muggles, apparently – the first ever to tour the castle.

And here, from the very first premise of the ride itself, my bullshit meters start going crazy.

If you think about what we’re being told here for even the slightest amount of time, your mind will explode with so many questions that this plot (already) deserves to be scrapped.  We’re talking the-Wizarding-World-has-experienced-society-shattering-changes-and-someone-better-tell-me-what-the-hell-they-are-before-my-brain-hemmorages type problems.

Doesn’t anyone remember the International Statue of Wizarding Secrecy?  You know, the law exists to ensure that the Wizarding World is safely hidden from the muggle world.  I know I sound like a huge fanboy here, citing wizard-law, but really, this is isn’t a technicality.  It’s more like the fundamental basis of the Harry Potter universe.  The wizarding world is a secret.  Period.

There are big penalties for even the slightest infraction of this law – in a lot of cases, people’s wands are confiscated, which is kind of like removing your ability to be a contributing member of society.

So just what the fuck has happened that we’re suddenly giving everyday muggles tours of wizarding schools?  Was there great societal upheaval?  Has the Ministry of Magic completely collapsed now that anarchy reigns?  Does that mean Cornelius Fudge is rotting in Azkaban?  Are there riots in major muggle cities now that 7 billion people now know that there’s a sizable population that can do everything from erase their memories to turn them into tea kettles on a whim?  Is no one going to let me know if the resulting wide-spread mania is resulting in calls for World War III?

So, since it’s physically fucking impossible to even begin to sort out this alternate universe that Universal’s created, I’m going to have to go with the cleanest solution I can conjure up.  There’s no societal upheaval, there are no huge changes to the way the Wizarding World operates in the books and movies.  And that means...Dumbledore is a lunatic.

And I really think that’s a bold choice on the part of both Universal and J.K. Rowling.  You’d expect that they’d take the easy route and just have a completely sane Dumbledore give us a simple plotline.  Instead we get all this interesting subtext!  And let’s face it, no other ride sports a preshow where you’re literally unsure of whether or not the authority figure is too nuts to make it to the safety instructions before he blows his brains out in front of everyone.  You’ve got to hand it to the guy, this is the biggest screw-you to the man ever conceived.  You know, if the man was everyone you know and love.

Well I guess there WERE a few times where he KIND OF screwed everyone over...

And considering the conga line you’re walking in, it looks like Dumbledore’s not just making an exception to the rule.  He’s got the Ford fucking assembly line going here, mass producing treason. What an asshole.

Finally, feeling crushed and dumbfounded, we’re allowed to make our way into the next preshow, where Harry, Ron, and Hermione sneak in to tell us that we’re headed straight for a boring lecture telling us all about Wizarding history which, after the complete catastrophe that was the last preshow, I’d actually be pretty damn interested in.  But the trio assure me I’ll have a more fun if I follow them and go get burned alive, smashed, and eaten – I mean…go watch a game of Quidditch.

I haven’t even the slightest idea why Harry wants to be a part of Dumbledore’s batshit plan to watch the world burn, and I certainly can’t figure out why he’d risk the likely inhuman punishment that surely follows from derailing the first ever tour of Hogwarts just so guests can watch him play sports.  Does that make Harry strangely a narcissistic jackass?  I mean…possibly.  Still, considering there were no universe-shattering revelations in this scene, I leave feeling like I got off scot free.

So we wander aimlessly around random rooms in the castle, because son-of-a-bitch Harry told us to meet him in the Room of Requirement (you know, that hidden magical room that only a few people know about?), but neglected to give us any directions to get there.  Thanks, Harry.  As I’m forced to remember all too often, I’m a muggle, meaning that my experience in navigating foreign castles with shifting staircases is pretty close to nil.

As a result, we go completely out of our way and  stumble through the Gryffindor Common Room before finally doubling back to find the Room of Req.  There we find some magic benches that Hermione has enchanted to fly.  She smiles and says a spell I don’t recognize, and then the theme music whisks us off into the ride.

Suddenly we’re at the top of the astronomy tower.  As if to confirm that this isn’t going to be the shortest ride ever, Ron conveniently points out the obvious:  “Hermione did it!  They’re flying!”

We head out towards the Quidditch pitch until Hagrid stops us by the bridge, holding up some large broken shackles.  “Haven’t seen the dragon, have yeh?”

So…I guess Hagrid’s breaking the law again, and got another dragon, this time a full grown one, which he’s been keeping in secret on school premises.  I find this a little hard to believe, since he couldn’t keep a baby secret for more than 5 minutes after it hatched.  At least this blind spot is consistent with Hagrid’s character, but I’m also sure I heard one of the paintings say “Did you hear?  Hagrid’s lost the dragon again,” on my way through the queue line.  So, does everyone know about clearly illegal animal freely roaming the grounds?  Did all the third years pool their money together to buy a Hungarian Horntail as a class pet?  For reference, this thing is thirty feet tall and wants to murder everything in sight.

 Just to be sure, everyone's ok with this murder-machine living right next door, right?

We’re chased around by this fire-breathing ball of death until we fall face first into the Forbidden Forest.  Flashes of lightning tell us that it’s time to be afraid.  I briefly ponder how all these flashes can penetrate the thick layers upon layers of leaves that block out all sunlight (especially when I didn’t see any lightning in the actual sky ten seconds ago). Maybe the forest generates its own internal weather patterns that only exist below the canopy?  But I digress, and the ride reminds me that I have bigger problems by promptly spitting in my face.

For once, that’s actually not me being dramatic – a spider the size of a Toyota Tundra bursts out of the forest and spits in my face.  The other spiders in the forest start following suit, and pretty soon I’m just living out a nightmare I probably have every five nights anyway.

This is leaving me pretty nervous over the status of our heroes.  Harry and Ron are nowhere to be found.  Were they burned off-screen by the dragon while we weren’t looking?  Were they torn apart by these aracontulas while I was blinded by spider-spit?  Surely they wouldn’t leave us for dead…it’s their fault we’re in this mess anyway, so just where the hell are they?

Luckily, Hermione’s here (…huh?) to lead us out of the forest.  Yeah…she’s there…standing right in the middle of this spider-lair making not even the slightest attempt to conceal herself.  That’s ok, though, since the spiders are crawling all around her, ignoring her presence completely.  How did she even know we were here, considering we were all the way across school grounds when we ran into trouble?  More perplexing:  How did she even get here?  She then calmly delivers the biggest understatement she can manage:  “The forest isn’t safe!”

So anyway, we escape the woods, dodge the Whomping Willow, and head to the Quidditch Pitch.  Though, considering our escorts have probably been dismembered over the course of the last two scenes, I’m not really sure why we we’re still going.

We get there and…son of a bitch…

Harry’s perfectly unscathed.  And what’s worse, over the last three or four scenes, it’s immediately apparent that he’s been ignoring our imminent death to play sports.  As if to rub it all in, he turns back to us and says:  “Where’ve you been?”

Where’ve I been!?  Where’ve YOU been, you dick?

No wonder.

Is this the same Harry Potter I read about?  This guy reminds me more of a complete sociopath than anything else.  Seriously, there’s no way that Harry simply didn’t notice we were gone.  There’s no way he didn’t notice that that disappearance coincided EXACTLY with the moment we were attacked by a vicious dragon.  The only explanation is that he intentionally left us behind because we were holding him up on his way to his precious Quidditch match.  Holy Christ, what happened to that “saving people” thing? 

He says, “The snitch, follow me!”  The ride says we should, but I have a suspicion that we’re all only doing this because we want to catch this guy and wring his neck.

We really only have time to hear Draco Malfoy spout some generic trash-talking line about Harry’s mother before the plot, once and for all, collapses completely.

And it happens with one line.

“Dementors!”

Thanks, Ron.

This one word leaves me feeling so insulted on so many levels, that I feel I need to freeze our progression right here, right now.

I’m going to start by noting that the dialogue in this ride has almost completely fallen apart at this point.  There are almost no lines that last more than three words, and we’re inhabiting some sort of weird, Scooby-Doo type universe where all the characters only exist to state the skull-numbingly obvious.

“The Dragon!” --  “Dementors!” -- “They’re flying!” along with about twenty variations of the phrase “Look out!” comprise the entirety of the script.  I know it’s a ride, not a movie, but seriously – it’s not too hard to put actual characters into a ride, instead of a collection of sounding boards.  Here, let’s use an example from my personal favorite dark ride, The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman.

ORIGINAL VERSION

J. Jonah:  My SCOOP! My beautiful SCOOP…!

[Doc Ock misses Spiderman and hits a theater sign with his levitation cannon.]

Spiderman:  Woa!  Doc, your aim’s worse than your haircut!

Ock:  Well it’s good enough for your sitting-duck friends! [Blasts the SCOOP.] Have a nice trip!

[SCOOP rises up into the NYC skyline.]

Spiderman:  Hey, wait for me!  You’re not insured for this!

HP-altered Version

J. Jonah:  It isn’t safe out there!

[Ock misses theater sign]

Spiderman:  Woa!  You missed.

Ock:  I can still catch your friends. [Hits SCOOP.] I got you!

[SCOOP rises]

Spiderman:  You’re flying!

[Spiderman watches SCOOP rise, but neglects to follow.  He takes out his camera to take pictures for Bugle, realizing that it’s both inconvenient to pursue it and that he needs some shots to get his paycheck tomorrow.  Oh, Mary Jane’s calling.  He’ll catch up with the plot later.]

You see what happens when you take a pretty good scene and strip it down to a narration?  And on top of it, add characters acting completely out of character?  It sounds stupid as hell, doesn’t it?

Ok, now let’s get to the bigger issue here.  Dementors.  Their presence and the reaction to it is so insane and baffling that they deserve a few paragraphs of commentary, just to themselves.

First off, everyone knows muggles can’t see dementors right?  Like, that’s the one creature that JKR went out of her way to mention was invisible to non-magic folk.  And this ride already took such pains to call us muggles…I’m just left dumbfounded.

Why the fuck are they here?  They have no reason to be.  There are no dark wizards on the loose.  Even if they were acting rogue, how did they get onto the school grounds?  Did Dumbledore think it was a good idea to let them in on the same day that he let muggles into the school for the first time?  Is he trying to kill us?  This is starting to look increasingly likely, and I’m forced to wonder why the most logical solution for every plothole so far has been that Dumbledore is a cackling maniac.

You really ARE a scumbag...

And why is no one reacting to this?  A horde of SOUL-SUCKING MONSTERS has descended onto the playing field and is KILLING ATHLETES RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE SPECTATORS.  If your response is anything below the level of “HOLY SHIT” then you have some serious issues.  The most we hear is “Dementors!” and maybe an “Oh no!”?

What kind of screwed up alternate Hogwarts did we fall into?  There’s no connection between any of the events that have transpired so far.  Want proof?  Tell me, if this plotline was presented to you ENTIRELY IN REVERSE, would it make any less sense?

No, of course not, because this whole thing is one big montage.  It’s like we’re riding Jimmy Neutron’s Nicktoon Blast or something.

Ok, now that I’ve got this all off my chest…let’s continue.  Somehow we fall into what I believe is the Chamber of Secrets and have to dodge the dementors we shouldn’t be able to see but can anyway.  Harry’s gone missing again.  No surprises there.  Finally, when things finally look their bleakest, Harry’s forced to finally do a good deed and save us all by Expecto Patronum-ing all the dementors.

“Follow me!” he says.  Then, suddenly, the tunnel starts caving in, for what reason I don’t know.  In any case, this is the script’s last chance to make an impression on me and it does a marvelous job, as Harry shouts out such memorable lines as “It’s caving in!” and “Watch out!” And who could forget the part when he said “We have to get out, quick!”  Pure gold, all of it.

So after escaping Wild Arctic’s finale, we immediately fly to the great hall, where Harry’s being held up by the entire Gryffindor team, snitch-in-hand.  “Thanks everybody!  You were brilliant!”

I mean, I guess I was pretty—Hey wait.  Wait.  When did you catch that snitch Harry,  huh?  I don’t think you caught it in the game – it was interrupted by dementors.  The only time you could’ve gotten it was…oh no.  You piece of crap.

The only explanation is that Harry went back to get it while we were in the Chamber running from dementors.  Seriously?  He abandoned us AGAIN for sports?  What kind of a person does that?  Oh my GOD this is insane.

This is the ONLY argument for not killing him right now, on the spot.

Dumbledore says I’m welcome back “anytime,” but it’s Harry’s betrayal I’m still reeling from when my feet touch the ground again.  Wow.

So what’s the end result?  Well, contrary to everything you’ve read, this is, as I stated from the beginning, actually one of the best rides in the world.  It’s succeeds with flying colors in every area EXCEPT the plot, so I should to acknowledge it’s better than just about every other dark ride on the planet (ahem, except Spidey).  But I mean…come on.  How hard is it really to think up a plot that isn’t so completely at odds with common sense, when you have the author on board?

Oh well.  I guess there’s nothing more I can do.  Nothing, I suppose, besides frantically re-reading the entire Potter series, starting with the assumption that Harry really is in love with his own celebrity, while Dumbledore spends the majority of his time plotting unique and grisly ends for each of the supporting characters.  I expect interesting results.