Television

Far Beyond the Stars 001: The Cage (TOS S0E1)

August 6, 2018 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

The day after I started watching Star Trek, the washing machine in my house backed up and flooded. It’d already been a rough week—my car died, I was struggling in school, I was having problems getting out of bed and going to work—and the weeks and months ahead didn’t promise anything better. This was two years ago, according to a tweet I sent my friend Caroline about the first episode that made air. I was bipolar and didn’t know it, an alcoholic in the middle of relapse, deeply unhappy, deeply unlucky, and generally without purpose.

Star Trek didn’t change any of this, but it did give me something to do when I couldn’t sleep or move or read. When I started watching, the appeal was pretty simple: There was a lot of it, and none of it would make me think. Two years later, I’m still watching this show in all of its permutations, practically every day, and, according to my Twitter feed, poetry, private messages and the weekend I spent listening to the cast of The Next Generation talk about being the cast of The Next Generation, I’ve spent a pretty significant portion of that time thinking about a show I never really wanted to think about.

This feels like a heavy way of introducing a project like this, an attempt to write about every Star Trek episode and film, but it feels like important context, like I’ve shed the person I was, emotionally and artistically, and need something solid to ground the person I am now. It’s been awhile since I’ve written about television or film like this, and I have no idea what shape it’ll take, whether posts will be jokey or sad or critical, whether or not anybody will read them.

What I do know is that this project will take years to finish, and given the nature of franchise television and filmmaking, may be impossible to complete. If I’m being honest, the prospect of Star Trek stretching out farther than I am capable of following is part of the appeal. Elsewhere on this site, likely in a review of a Marvel movie, there’s evidence that I used to desire narratives that had a beginning and an ending. Now I find myself fascinated with this series that will never conclude, a universe that has no fixed point at which it begins and ends. Star Trek, and other series like it, have come to function like life itself, continuing onward despite the passing of the people who make and consume it. For something like Star Trek to survive for 50 years is to assume that time and life are abundant, that from year to year there will be enough people alive and willing to lend meaning to it, making it more than images and sounds that occupy the space between commercials. This is my attempt at doing that.

And that means dealing with The Cage, Star Trek’s pilot episode which, outside of Spock, features a crew of white Americans so bland they may as well be in the commercials. Footage from this episode is later chopped up and reassembled for The Menagerie (a real fancy way of saying “cage”). Christopher Pike, a space cop who is so worn out on running the Enterprise that he idly wonders about taking up the much simpler life of an Orion slaver, ends up being more interesting in retrospect than he would have been had he carried on as the lead, though we’ll get to that later.

Something I’ve always been somewhat skeptical about when it comes to Star Trek is that it’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, entered into the series as a bold visionary of utopian futures. The United Federation of Planets is a deeply American idea of utopia, its exploratory arm pushing out into “the frontier” because, despite eradicating disease, hunger, war, and capitalism, 23^rd century humans have not discovered contentment.

Discounting the personal ambitions of the characters, this is the anxiety at the heart of Star Trek, which is clear as day when projected onto the blank screen that is Christopher Pike. Abducted by aliens and held in their zoo, he is offered an easy life in exchange for captivity. The easy life is a fraud, literal illusions spun by the Talosians, who got so bored with their own lives that they built a zoo.

Much of the tension of Roddenberry’s script is ugly in its misogyny—the Talosians, dwelling in caves after nuclear holocaust, try to gaslight Pike into having children with a woman who, the twist reveals, isn’t “beautiful” but rather gaunt and disfigured due to a crash landing—as he tries to establish Pike as a virile man of steely resolve. That the Talosians’ telepathic abilities can be blocked out by “hateful thoughts” means that Pike spends a lot of the episode delivering crude readings of lines about choking or shooting his captors. It leads to a pretty good bluff at the climax, but Pike is so flat that he feels like a man who is just punching the clock, even when his life is in danger, like he’s so busy closing on the colonization of three or four other planets that he forgot how to operate his corporeal form. Even Spock is just there, a function of the plot rather than a person.

The Cage isn’t bad, but it is rough. It’s a pilot, but pilots are, until a series really finds itself, a thesis statement for the shows that follow. I can’t buy into Star Trek’s utopia here because for all the good the United Federation of Planets eventually represents, what we’re given is limited by the cultural imagination of the time it was produced. While it’s nice that a woman is ostensibly second-in-command, by the end of the hour she and two other women are defined largely by their desire for Pike, a rigid action figure of a man who is weary of war until the Talosians force him to relive the various trials he’s faced.

Like the series premiere of Star Trek Discovery, The Cage attempts to hook it’s audience (in this instance the NBC executives who saw the show and ordered a second pilot) with sex and violence. Unlike Discovery, there’s no emotional heft to the conflict, nowhere for its energy to go. Not knowing what it means for an episode of Star Trek to “feel like Star Trek,” I mostly go into an episode hoping it passes the hour pleasantly. The Cage is too base for that, and in shedding Pike and his crew and assembling a less dour cast to man the Enterprise, Star Trek managed to expound upon its hope that humanity would survive the struggles of the 20^th century, bettering itself and contributing to the larger community beyond Earth.

Far Beyond the Stars is a never-ending series of essays about every Star Trek episode and film. You can support this ridiculous endeavor by subscribing to my Patreon, or by sending me a Ko-fi.

Hasta La Vista, Silver Screen: Arnold Schwarzenegger on The Celebrity Apprentice

October 17, 2015 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

Arnold Schwarzenegger taunts a T-1000 with the skull of one of its babies. — Arnold Schwarzenegger taunts a T-800 with the skull of one of its babies.

Sure, Donald Trump is running to be the man who brings about Idiocracy, but the National Broadcast Corporation couldn’t just let his show, Celebrity Apprentice, end gracefully, whatever “grace” looks like for a show where a sentient hair clippings sloshes the words “you’re fired” around like so much bourbon, more smug than he should be considering that he’s firing a stage magician who is actually quite secure in the knowledge that not catching a bullet in his teeth would, in fact, be better than another week of Celebrity Apprentice. To that end, NBC has hired a new host to take over until the show becomes President Trump’s preferred means of formal address: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has, to his credit, been known to publicly fire folks for their harebrained schemes as far back as 1994.

Seeing Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California and box office champion of the universe, on a television show that wasn’t initially developed for him is something of a shock: Though Celebrity Apprentice draws millions of viewers every week, judging a celebrity talent contest, regardless of how good the paycheck is, is a stunning departure from his attempted silver screen comeback. With the recent failure of Terminator: Genysis, however, a move like this had to be coming: If the revitalization of his most popular character flopped, what else could Schwarzenegger do to rehabilitate his image? Smoking cigars and chuckling with minor celebs actually isn’t a bad idea, considering what it’s done for his grotesque predecessor’s image in the popular consciousness.

I’m actually a huge fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Action Star, and think that several of his post-politics films rank among his best work. Films like The Last Stand and Sabotage deal with the realities of aging and regret with much more maturity than, say, The Expendables, and Maggie, though something of a bore, sees the Austrian Oak bust out some legit acting chops in service of a father-saves-daughter plot that can’t be solved by single-handedly toppling an entire autocratic dictatorship. All of these, it should be noted, failed without much notice. When I mention Sabotage as a movie that slipped through the cracks, people look at me with their head cocked, like a dog hearing something strange and distant. Sabotage? they ask, looking it up. It’s got, like, 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. To this I say Yeah, but, only to quickly realize the futility of liking Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2015: Politics. scandal, Batman and Robin—not only is he box office poison, but it’s hard to figure any of his recent outings as future cult favorites. So here he is on a show where his big, awkward charm will play huge with your grandparents. They’ll speak of his extramarital affairs and allegations of sexual abuse in disapproving tones before adding a Yeah, but of their own about how cool he seems in the boardroom, how affable, how nice. My, how people can change.

As a fan who was rooting for a return to form, the Celebrity Apprentice announcement was a letdown. With the exception of the heavily hyped Terminator reboot, most new Schwarzenegger films are now released in the first quarter of the year, doomed to their failure and obscurity. Justifiably, it seemed as if studios had no faith to draw money at the theater, and hosting Celebrity Apprentice suggests that he knows the same, that his name is worth something, but only if it’s attached to a sure thing. How did this happen? Scandal, yes, but there’s something…off…about Schwarzenegger’s comeback pictures, something preventing them from becoming the kind of artistic successes (yes, artistic) that attract true cult followings: A decided lack of bad-ass women to compliment Schwarzenegger’s alien grace.

It’s weird, probably, to think about Arnold Schwarzenegger films in terms of the women who fought with him or against him, but as a child I was fascinated with the Schwarzeneggerian equivalent of the Bond girl. Jamie Lee Curtis, Sharon Stone, Grace Jones, Brigitte Nielsen, Linda Hamilton—they cycled through Arnold’s movies as warriors and revolutionaries, heroes and villains. Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is both one of the great Final Girls in film and an affecting portrait of a woman dealing with unimaginable trauma. She’s an icon whose image matters as much to the Terminator franchise as the killer cyborg she’s running from. The first time I saw her in T2: Judgement Day, I thought That’s it—that’s the woman I want to be. And I still want to be Linda Hamilton. But, thinking about his late period films, I’m stuck. There are no icons here—just faces in the crowd.

Even Terminator: Genysis, with Sarah Connor recast as Game of Throne’s Emilia Clarke, seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the crucial role of women in Schwarzenegger’s best work. Updated for 2015, Connor mostly stands around and listens to her robot guardian and her maybe-lover from a potential future bicker about the fate of her womb while trying to stop a killer app from uploading, U2-style, onto every smartphone on Earth. Where the early Terminator films are about Connor and the dangers of being a woman and mother, Genysis included the character as a point of obligation—not to the franchise, per se, but to the idea of casting Just One Woman in an action film.

2015, thanks largely to Mad Max: Fury Road and its scores of women warriors, is the end of it being acceptable for women to exist in these mainstream universes as useless objects blocking our view of the beefcake parade, but the men responsible for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comeback scripts left them entirely out. The end result was the failure of Terminator: Genysis, which might, mercifully, be the end of the franchise. What’s obvious now is that Schwarzenegger needs a break, and, not to disparage the network, that’s what a stint on NBC represents. Beyond sequels for Conan (yay!) and Twins (really?), Celebrity Apprentice is the only work on Schwarzenegger’s docket for some time. When he comes back, I hope the people working on new vehicles for him reassess what, to me, is an essential part of his success. If, at the end of his television obligation, they’re unable to come up with something better than a creaky excuse for Schwarzenegger to mention his advanced age, then it’s time for him to pass the torch he used to call the Predator out with to Imperator Furiosa and the future.

Television Review: Sense8 (Season 1: 2015)

June 21, 2015 by Colette Arrand 2 Comments

When I came to this space in order to praise Jupiter Ascending, I did so with the belief that, with 10 or 12 hours to tell their ludicrous story of star-crossed love between a human-bee genetic duplicate of a murdered immortal and a space werewolf sporting an especially bad goatee Andy and Lana Wachowski would have really had something. Sense8, created by the Wachowskis and Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski, disabused me of that notion quickly, using its time and format to do little more than sketch out its interesting high-concept science fiction premise and build a world that is remarkably similar to our own.

On the surface, there’s a lot going on here, as eight people from eight radically different parts of the world and stations of life find themselves psychically linked and, it seems, randomly dropping in on each other’s lives. For the show to really work, all eight of the “senseates” need to feel like their own people, so that there’s really something to the idea that, together, they’re more than their individual qualities. The problem is that, with eight central characters, it’s hard to get most of them out of the blocks. Here’s who and what we know at the beginning of the series:

Will Gorski (Brian J. Smith): A good, white cop from Chicago.
Riley Blue (Tuppence Middleton): An up-and-coming DJ living in London; formerly of Iceland.
Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton): A trans woman from San Francisco who is a skilled computer hacker.
Lito Rodriguez (Miguel Ángel Silvestre): A superstar actor in Mexico who is in the closet about his homosexuality.
Sun Bak (Bae Doona): The daughter of a powerful Korean businessman. Skilled in kung-fu.
Wolfgang Bogdanow (Max Riemelt): An expert safecracker out of Berlin with a lot of unresolved father issues.
Kala Dandekar (Tina Desai): A pharmacist in Mumbai who is struggling with the implications of her pending arranged marriage to a man who doesn’t keep her religion.
Capheus (Aml Ameen): A Jean-Claude Van Damme-obsessed van driver from Nairobi who is desperate to purchase medicine for his mother.

Looking beyond Gorski, whose good, white cop is the default focal point of television as a medium, that’s a pretty solid foundation for a show about strangers who need to come together to solve a problem, an engaging mix of queer faces and global perspectives that serve to make Sense8 interesting until it becomes clear that, for the most part, these characters and their stories are window dressing for a presumably doomed romance between the cop and the DJ. Once the show is beyond the benefit of a doubt, one wonders what the point of having so many brief sketches of life in India or South Korea or Kenya is, as the Wachowskis and Straczynski are never able to move beyond broad stereotypes for these people and their circumstances.

Their chief achievement here is to split the atom that was Neo, the quintessential 90s action hero, who was an expert in everything because everything was loaded onto a floppy disc and downloaded directly into his brain. Split up, its more than a little disappointing that those traits are a) the point of grouping these eight people together and b) that some of these skills and character traits don’t go much father than a vague, American understanding of the world. Of course the only thing we know about the Indian woman (beyond her eventual fascination with the white criminal) is that she’s arranged to be married to someone she doesn’t love. Naturally, the kung-fu master of the group is from Asia. And yes, there is heart to the idea of a son trying to provide his mother with AIDS medication, but for an American audience whose conception of Africa is Blood Diamond and Hotel Rwanda, grisly gang violence is a more engaging backdrop. Maybe this would be excusable if the pieces on the board moved much, but as Sense8 narrows its focus to Will and Riley and the plot to capture and experiment on one or both of them, it’s clear that a multitude of queer, colored shoulders are being put to the wheel for the sake of white heteronormativity.

This is particularly underwhelming given how much The Wachowskis seem to relish a character like Lito, whose lover (Alfonso Herrera) is something of a renaissance man, a skilled chef with a passion for Diego Rivera and lucha libre. The two are walking a thin line between bliss and public shame, and when they are blackmailed by an acquaintance (Eréndira Ibarra) who becomes their live-in beard to get out of an abusive relationship with a violent ex-lover, he has to figure out whether to play the coward to protect his career and identity, or to rescue his friend from her stalker and deal with the consequences. I want to see how that storyline plays out. Similarly, there’s Nomi, who is not only trans but in a relationship with a woman (Freema Agyeman) who loves her fiercely. Nomi is the first of the senseates captured by Whispers (Terrence Mann, who has to deal with that name), an evil senseate who runs the shadowy organization that functions as the main threat to our heroes, and she is sedated and secreted away to a private, heavily armed wing of a hospital where her mother (who insists on using Nomi’s birth name) strips her of any right to medical independence, agreeing to what is essentially a lobotomy after some slick talk from the medical professionals. This deliberate violation of autonomy is a thing that really happens to trans persons every day and to see it here (or in Orange Is the New Black and Transparent) is still new, still has a capacity for horror. Nomi and Amanita are given a lot of time and backstory before it’s necessary to saddle the hacker at a computer, and the Wachowskis use that time to explore Nomi as a sexual and political person, a figure who isn’t on the spectrum between tragic and life-affirming, but who just is. Other than a sex scene that sees Lito and Will accidentally having the best orgasms of their lives together, my favorite bit of Sense8 is a flashback to Nomi and Amanita’s first Pride as a couple, where Amanita steps up to defend her girlfriend from a friend who is dressing Nomi down for being a man colonizing a woman’s space. It’s a small moment, but it manages to make both of these characters feel like people, which is something Sense8 desperately needs more of. More than that, the sequence is a bit of queer politics that isn’t aired out much in popular culture, which is still struggling to find much use for trans women (and has yet to find a purpose for trans men) beyond totemic symbols for Living Authentically by assimilating as much as possible.

Sense8 has potential, maybe more than this season lets on. In terms of science fiction concepts, this is one of the best that’s made it to series since Battlestar Galactica, which used the threat of human extinction and the promise that not every human was as he or she seemed to ramp up the drama in lieu of constant violence. The eight senseates here barely know each other beyond what skills they bring to the table, and maybe with every individual threat to them tied off they’ll have time to sit down and chat, become themselves without having to be told, over and over, how their powers work and what that means for them. As much as I enjoyed the quieter moments of the show, Sense8 was too frequently punctuated by mandatory violence and sex, meaningless sequences that suggested a real lack of ideas. Even in episodes directed by The Wachoskis or Tom Tykwer, those sequences frequently lack the visual flair or sexual energy that makes their films stand out, as if television is a language they’re still trying to learn. If nothing else, I’m curious to see if they have anything to say once they have that language figured out.

Sense8. With Aml Ameen (Capheus), Bae Doona (Sun Bak), Jamie Clayton (Nomi Marks), Tina Desai (Kala Dandekar), Tuppence Middleton (Riley Blue), Max Riemelt (Wolfgang Bogdanow), Miguel Ángel Silvestre (Lito Rodriguez), Brian J. Smith (Will Gorski), Freema Agyeman (Amanita), Terrence Mann (Whispers), Naveen Andrews (Jonas Maliki), and Daryl Hannah (Angelica Turring). Created by The Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski, with episodes directed by The Wachowskis, Tom Tykwer, James McTeigue, and Dan Glass.

Television Review: On Death Row (Season 1: 2012)

December 1, 2013 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

Clocking in at about the length of an ambitious arthouse film, it is perhaps generous to consider the act of watching the four episodes of Werner Herzog’s On Death Row “binge-watching,” but Herzog’s shortform meditation on the American justice system and its use of capital punishment is nevertheless an act of attrition. Hidden away from the world by the machinations of the prison-industrial complex, it isn’t until cameras are brought to bear on the men and women of death row that the implications of their sentence truly resonate. Articulate, impassioned, and more knowledgeable about the American justice system than the average true crime junkie, the subjects of these interviews (and those of Herzog’s companion film, Into the Abyss) are fascinating not because of the crimes they’ve been convicted of committing, but because, like many of the individuals Herzog focuses his camera on, they live in pockets of the universe too uncompromising and barbarous to be properly rationalized.

On Death Row profiles five men and women whose lives are consumed by their long wait for execution. Though Herzog is the one who conducts interviews with the convicted and those involved with the case, he never appears on camera, instead shooting his subjects in such a way that they speak directly to the viewer. Were this any other project, such a set-up might inspire pleas of innocence to a sympathetic ear. Though Herzog cannot see the case for capital punishment, his is not a forum for exoneration. “Sympathizing with your quest to have procedural injustices corrected in your case does not necessarily mean that I have to like you,” he tells James Barnes, a Florida man convicted of murdering his estranged wife. After converting to Islam, Barnes was compelled to confess to an infamous unsolved murder, which saw him sentenced to death. His conversations and letters with Herzog would later prompt Barnes to confess to two additional unsolved cases. With this revelation, however, Herzog must consider if Barnes is being truthful, or if his confessions are a ruse meant to prolong his life.

Barnes is unquestionably guilty of the two murders he’s previously confessed to, and George Rivas, the leader of the Texas Seven, a gang of inmates who led the largest jailbreak in Texas history, carries the burden of knowing that he shot and killed a police officer on Christmas Eve. His other interviewees, Linda Carty and Hank Skinner, find themselves caught in impossibly complex legal situations. Carty is a British citizen who claims to have been an undercover informant for the DEA. Skinner, on death row for the murder of his girlfriend and her two sons, was only minutes away from his execution when he received a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, who found that he could successfully sue for the right to have unused evidence from his trial tested for DNA. Joseph Garcia, one of the Texas Seven, is awaiting execution despite not having fired a shot at the slain police officer; Texas law has it that accomplices to crimes are culpable to the same degree as the perpetrators, so his sentence was the same as Rivas’. He joined the Texas Seven because he was sentenced to life in prison for a murder he claims was self-defense. His conviction to that end was so strong that he refused to take a plea bargain of fifteen years. His testimony—which involved a demonstration of his skills with a butterfly knife—could not have gone more disastrously.

The circumstances of On Death Row‘s production—Herzog’s interviews were limited to an hour, and repeat visits were permitted months apart—and Herzog’s rather blunt way of telling the inmates that his interest in their case does not indicate a wish to be friends makes the resulting intimacy of each episode something of a surprise. One senses that Rivas, despite being guilt-ridden over the murder of Officer Aubrey Hawkins, is proud of his achievements, not only his ability to coordinate a jailbreak and evade capture for so long, but in the sheer cleverness of his many heists. Skinner is a natural-born storyteller, and if one is willing to suffer his excursions into Templar history and the connectedness of all things, he has one hell of a story to tell. What the mini-series makes clear is how remarkable an interviewer Herzog is. A German national with a deliberate way of speaking, he’s able to draw from James Barnes’ twin sister a heartbreaking portrait of being raised by their father, a strict disciplinarian who forced his children to whip James when he misbehaved, which was frequently. He manages to push Skinner beyond the realm of coincidence and into the mindset of a man who has been served his last meal. The attorneys he speaks to, of course, are more than willing to talk, but he hardly allows them to use his camera as a bully pulpit. When the prosecuting attorney in the Linda Carty case warms against humanizing Carty, Herzog replies “I do not make an attempt to humanize her. She is simply a human being, period.”

When thinking of a partner for Herzog to present a TV miniseries about death row inmates, Investigation Discovery seems the least likely option. The network’s bumper, an insidious voice whispering “investigate” in a manner shrill enough to haunt dreams, is more of piece with the network’s regular offerings, shows like Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry? and I (Almost) Got Away With It. Scanning through these shows on Netflix, Herzog’s presence among them is the only thing separating something like Stalked: Someone’s Watching from John Beard’s To Entrap a Local Predator: Orange County Edition: Super Creeps; a calm, contemplative voice in a room crowded with lunatics. Investigation Discovery somewhat mitigates this by bringing in Paula Zahn as a “presenter.” This role sees her standing imperiously next to the words “ON DEATH ROW,” which are presented in an austere typeface in Herzog’s film but are bold and oppressive otherwise, fading into a grungy Photoshop filter to emulate dirt that won’t wash out. Zahn does little more here than issue the usual rhetoric about “hardened criminals” and “brutal murders,” and her presence eventually diminishes to the point that her overly simplistic case notes amount to little more than minor annoyance. The experience of these people and their account of the crimes they either confess to committing or fight vehemently against are far beyond the bounds of rote description.

This is a remarkable project which, along with Into the Abyss, comprises two four-episode seasons, one film, and, one assumes, plenty of unpublished literature. In keeping his focus on the inmates and their circumstances, Herzog is able to avoid the pitfall of much true crime programming, which is to lionize both the circumstances of the crime and the punishment meted out. Though these men and women live in cages so small that facial hair is a privilege and dreams of avocados are treasured, it is those privileges and dreams Herzog is fascinated with, that inspire him to a conclusion worthy of one of his most heralded films. Driving the same 40-mile route the Texas Department of Corrections uses to transport convicts from the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, where death row inmates are housed, to the Huntsville Unit, which contains Texas’ death house, Herzog observes “the landscape, bleak, forlorn. And yet everything there all of the sudden looked magnificent. As if entering the holy land.” It’s a strange path Herzog cuts through the world, much of it maudlin and courting insanity. He is the same as the mannequins he discovers between the Polunsky and Huntsville units, an apostle on the road to death. His subjects may not deserve the freedom they fitfully dream of, but neither do they deserve the torment of knowing when and how that road terminates.

The Problem With the Oscars Is the Oscars

March 2, 2013 by Colette Arrand 2 Comments

I knew before Seth MacFarlane was announced as the host of this year’s Academy Awards that I would not be watching the ceremony. If Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, two incredibly talented women whose shows 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation rank among my favorite of all time, couldn’t convince me to watch the Golden Globes, there’s no way MacFarlane, the creator of several shows I hate almost instinctually, could get me to tune in for the Globes’ stuffier, more overbearing sibling. But then a curious thing happened: a grinning, self-satisfied MacFarlane took to the stage and started singing about how great it was to be in a crowd with so many women whose breasts he’s seen, and the Academy Awards became more noticeably sexist than ever before. There’s been so much talk about these Academy Awards that one could be intimate with them without having watched, but, like a good cultural critic, I did. The end results were, to be kind, less than impressive. [Read more…] about The Problem With the Oscars Is the Oscars

The World Series Is a Terrible Burden

October 29, 2012 by Colette Arrand Leave a Comment

I fell asleep last night at 11:00 p.m., Game 4 of the World Series locked in a 3-3 tie. I love baseball. I love the Detroit Tigers even more. But somethings, believe it or not, are more important than sport, more important than rooting for a team. I had a job to report to in the morning. I had to greet the day at 5:00 a.m., something I hadn’t done in years. There are few things certain in baseball, but there were two options open as my head hit the pillow: either my beloved Tigers pull one off and extend the series to Game 5 and another Justin Verlander outing, or they don’t. They didn’t—a small mercy, ending a postseason that started so promisingly exciting before descending into a madness of blowouts, sweeps, and shutouts, cold bats and advantageous pitchers—and amidst the Tigers’ frustration and the Giants’ joy, soon there’ll be an article about how this year’s World Series was the lowest rated such event of all time.

After Game 1, a surprising 8-3 blowout that, in damaging the perception of Justin Verlander as an unhittable postseason juggernaut and promoting Pablo Sandoval to the position of unstoppable hitting machine, likely sealed the Tigers’ fate, one such article appeared on Sports Illustrated‘s website. It was small, a blurb, really, but then, all articles about trivial things like ratings are. The article has since been edited, but at the time of its initial release, it noted that the record established by 2012’s Game 1—The Lowest Rated Game 1 of All Time—broke the record established in 2011, which broke the record established in 2010, and so on. Tigers/Giants, Cardinals/Rangers, Giants/Rangers; what’s implied by this annual expose on the Fall Classic’s dwindling numbers is that largely nationally unknown teams end up clashing for the championship—an unexpectedly hot wild card team,the favorite sons of a town lost in “flyover country,” the titans of a city whose glory days have long-since past. Major League Baseball is often accused of rooting for teams like the New York Yankees (“east coast bias” is a common theme dominating the sports talk radio stations west of the coast), and even if it’s not true (there’s no real way for Major League Baseball to satisfy a conspiracy theorist), the logic of such theories is remarkably sound: with a team like New York in the World Series, not only do you secure a large share of the largest television market in the world, but you have, in the most important series of the year, a team the common fan likes or detests, one it’d like to see triumph or parish. Either way, so long as they’re watching.

The New York Yankees are a team that needs no introduction. Detroit and San Francisco aren’t exactly small markets, but the casual fan may not be able to name any Giants beyond Buster Posey, Kung-Fu Panda, and that bearded guy from last year’s Taco Bell commercials. The Tigers aren’t much better. They were a team so defined by the production of Verlander, newly-acquired Prince Fielder, and triple crown winner Miguel Cabrera that their efforts were regularly described as being put together by a coalition of “stars and scrubs.” The burden of the World Series is to craft and sell an effective narrative to a nation that spends 162 games uninterested in the two teams battling for the crown. Without a gigantic team—your Yankees, your Dodgers, your Phillies, your Cubs (yeah, right)—this is a terrible burden, a losing proposition. It’s little wonder each year sees the shattering of an ignoble record that was just shattered the year prior. Watching the numbers dwindle isn’t exactly like chasing Hank Aaron.

Without the easy storyline provided by baseball’s monoliths (“David vs. Goliath” or “Hogan vs. Andre,” usually), the buzzword going into the World Series is usually “momentum.” Depending on which sportscasters you listen to and what writers you read, either the Giants had it, or the Tigers, with arguments for and against either team being fairly compelling despite the idea of “momentum” meaning absolutely nothing at the beginning of a series, something rendered hokey and boring by the time the first pitch crosses the plate during Game 1. The Detroit Tigers swept the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series, often making the richest, longest-tenured team in the postseason look like a hapless single-A affiliate. The San Francisco Giants rebounded from an 0-2 start in the NLCS against the St. Louis Cardinals to advance to the World Series, the team often described as “riding a karmic wave” due to their reliance upon previous playoff non-entities like Barry Zito and Pablo Sandoval, the bullpen heroics of an otherwise struggling Tim Lincecum, and the searing bat of Marco Scutero, a late-season pickup turned postseason mascot thanks to his production and his withstanding a questionable slide by Cardinals slugger Matt Holiday.

Despite winning the World Series in 2010, the Giants, entering this year’s Fall Classic, were a team of nationally unknown quantities. Many of their heroes from 2010 are now bench and bullpen pieces. Sandoval, the hero of Game 1, was a rotund afterthought two years ago. Brian Wilson, the quirkiest character in the history of sports’ quirkiest position, watched his team from the dugout—the world’s beardiest cheerleader after undergoing Tommy Johns surgery in April. Melky Cabrera, the Giants outfielder who provided much of the team’s offensive spark through the first half of the season, watches from home, exiled from San Francisco after serving a 50-game suspension for the use of P.E.D.s and the unearthing of a conspiracy to undermine the league’s testing system. This Giants team was a resilient one, just as they’d been billed. Resiliency, however, is only a selling point when the team is reeling off come-from-behind victories or facing a team that’s easy to beat. Were the 2012 San Francisco Giants paired with the 2011 chicken-and-beer Red Sox, a nation would have cheered for its scrappy, orange-and-black underdogs.

Despite the appearances given by an 8-1 exclamation point at the end of a four game sweep against the Yankees—not to mention the fact that the Tigers hadn’t trailed a game in five straight contests, starting with Justin Verlander’s dramatic Game 5 shutout of the Oakland Athletics in the ALDS—the Tigers were anything but a herculean team. For the majority of the season, they were an underachieving franchise, a team that boasted the best pitcher, the best hitter, and the most valuable free agent acquisition, but who entered the regular season’s final month locked in struggle with the Chicago White Sox. If Detroit had anything beyond its triumvirate of stars going when the postseason started, it was their starting rotation. Beyond Verlander, Max Scherzer, Doug Fister, and Annibal Sanchez provided enviable rotation depth. The four, combined, were a Voltron capable of blistering fastballs and knee-buckling breaking pitches. There was little hint of weakness—Scherzer suffered from a strained deltoid, Verlander occasionally gave up a first inning home run, Fister had a weak first half, and Sanchez took time to adjust to his new league, team, catchers, and pitching coach, but came on strong after a few rocky starts—beyond the Tigers’ bullpen. Overcoming a 2-0 Detroit lead, with that staff, in the postseason, would be more like overcoming a 4-0 lead.

That was the narrative. That was, in addition to the promise of a free taco should anybody steal a base, what was used as the hook to this first time World Series match-up. Sports, however, rarely live up to a pre-ordained narrative. Justin Verlander was lit up in Game 1, giving up three home runs and exiting the game prematurely. Two of those home runs came against Sandoval, who etched a place in baseball history by blasting a third home run, joining the likes of Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and Albert Pujols as the only men in the history of the World Series to hit three round-trippers in a game. By the time Sandoval’s bat was on its way to Cooperstown, the Giants were on their way to a World Series title.

Beyond Sandoval, though, this World Series played in a way that’s just anemic to television ratings: small. Even Sandoval’s second home run during Game 1 was preceded by the sort of small, peculiar play that seemed to vex the tigers, as Angel Pagan hit a ground ball that struck third base and rolled lazily onto the edge of the left field grass. When Barry Zito, of all people, struck for an RBI single, a potential play at the plate was spoiled by Delmon Young turfing the ball, the Tigers’ ALCS hero reduced to a clumsy Little Leaguer on a routine throw.

Beyond Sandoval’s display of home run hitting, the series was devoid of highlights until Game 4. Games 1, 2, and 3 featured sparking defensive play by the Giants and dazzling pitching from both teams. Doug Fister, in particular, put in a particularly gutty performance during Game 2, taking a line drive to the head but remaining in the game, allowing just one run in six innings. Didn’t matter. San Fransisco’s pitching was hotter than Detroit’s. Their hitters out performed Detroit’s when the situation required them to do so. Fister’s performance? Sanchez’s? Scherzer’s? Spoiled. The Tigers struck out an astonishing 33% of the time they came to the plate, actually a little better than the Giant’s 37%, but however ridiculous the idea of a “kharmic wave” seems, the Giants were riding something during their sweep of the Tigers. How else to explain a bunt dying just before reaching the foul ground, a rare Austin Jackson error in centerfield, Verlander’s futility on the mound, the spectacular grabs that robbed Cabrera and Fielder of sharp hits when the Tigers were looking to rally from one blow or another?

But these aren’t things that sell the World Series. The slow motion camera and the cameraman who runs in a semi-crouch down the third-base line after a batter on a home run trot were not invented for games decided by bunts, pop-ups, and titan batters looking at 89 mile-per-hour fastballs. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver—more comfortable gabbing with Erin Andrews and reading trite PowerPoint presentations than watching the game—are not men given to nuance, nor is FOX the kind of network that accepts baseball as baseball. The World Series will hopefully never pause during the seventh inning stretch for a fifteen minute sound and light show promoting the year’s biggest concert, the world’s best tire, the summer’s most expensive movie, or the world’s most mediocre beer, or the season’s new TV shows but that doesn’t mean that FOX couldn’t find clever ways of slipping its stars into high profile slots—New Girl star Zooey Deschanel and The X-Factor judge Demi Lovoto singing the national anthem, Lovoto’s rendition begging the question of her expertise—or product placement at every turn. The game’s first pitch was sponsored by Budweiser. Every pitching change was brought to you by Jeanie-O’s campaign to switch America to turkey bacon. Once Angel Pagan stole a base, Taco Bell’s director of marketing was interviewed during play.

“We’ll try not to make this a commercial,” the FOX announcer said, as though Taco Bell’s director of marketing had anything to say about baseball beyond that it’d cost his company a bunch of free tacos. “America thanks you.”

Perhaps America did. After all, Sandoval’s homers aside, this was a World Series that decidedly did not live up to the mantle of being the Fall Classic. Something needed to fill the air between strikeouts, the long pauses between stunning plays, the awkward silence of Comerica Park. It’s the word “classic” that serves as the World Series’ terrible burden, the albatross around its neck. Even as Miguel Cabrera’s Game 4 home run drifted and drifted and drifted until it fell beyond the wall, the 2012 World Series had an air of finality to it, of anticlimax. That’s the way sports are sometimes, why it’s ridiculous to attempt foisting a pre-packaged narrative on it. Scripted comedy? Reality singing competitions? Those are easy. Until the World Series returns to break its record next year, New Girl and The X-Factor will air at their regularly scheduled times. Enjoy them with your free Doritos Locos Taco. Be sure to thank Angel Pagan, America.