Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 220

Episode 14 “River of Time” by Courtney Norris & Anderson Mackenzie, Episode 15 “Destiny” by Phil Klemmer & Chris Fedak, Episode 16 “Legendary” by Phil Klemmer & Marc Guggenheim: Crisis, Gotcha, Climax, Anti-Climax

The last three episodes of the first season of Legends of Tomorrow are: Episode 14: “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?,” Episode 15: “Now THAT’S a Climax,” Episode 16: “Oh, Yeah, We Still Have To Kill Vandal Savage.”

I think the reason this series made me so nuts when I finally watched the first season this year is that it had huge potential. When it was on its game, as it is in “Destiny,” it’s just terrific. Unfortunately, it was rarely on its game because it had too many team members, too many of those team members were annoying, the writers kept trying to make two blocks of wood the Greatest Love Story Ever Told, the crap crowded out the good stuff (Sara, Mick, Snart), Vandal Savage was a cartoon, and Rip Hunter was the Worst Team Leader Ever. Also, no plot and that damn reveal in Episode 14 that made me insane with rage. How do you fix a series story like this? Kill it with fire.

Well, no, we want to keep Sara, Mick, and Snart. And the time travel premise. And . . . Yeah, it’s worth saving for a second season.

But first we have to clean up this one.

1-14 “River of Time”

Warning: There may be swearing in the discussion of this episode.

I think the best way to start is to quote the Wikipedia summary:

“Upon the revelation that the Leviathan was technology from the distant future, proving Savage has manipulated time, Rip believes the Time Masters will finally ratify his mission and sets course for the Vanishing Point. Jefferson fixes the damaged time drive, but is exposed to time radiation which ages him prematurely. Stein is forced to send him back to 2016 in the jump ship to reverse the process. Carter, now named Scythian Torvil, is kept prisoner while Kendra tries to restore his memories, causing a rift between her and Ray which effectively ends their relationship. Savage tries to manipulate some of the team members, allowing him to escape his cell. Just as Savage is about to kill Kendra, Scythian regains his memories as Carter and saves her, but is stabbed by Savage before Kendra knocks the latter unconscious. The team arrives at the Vanishing Point, where the Time Masters reveal that they have been working with Savage, who is to be sent back to 2166 to carry on with his plan while Rip and his team are put under arrest.”

Yeah. The Time Masters have been working with Savage the entire time. And here’s the part that’s going to send the showrunners to storytelling hell: The Time Masters manipulated the Legends so that the things they do make Savage stronger and safer. Put another way, the reason that the Legends are such idiots and Rip Hunter is the Worst Team Leader Ever is that the Time Masters stripped them of their free will in the beginning and have been using them like puppets ever since. Put another way, we don’t really know these people because they’ve never made any decisions on their own. Put another way, the writers are trying to handwave away the IDIOTIC things these characters did by saying, “Oh, that was the Time Masters.”

Put another way, they just threw the whole season down a garbage disposal and set it to “pulverize.”

You do not do this to readers or viewers. This is a Gotcha: “We knew this all the time and we were playing you, HA!” Yeah, screw you guys, I’ll never trust you or your narratives again. Listen, a storyteller is not the antagonist of his or her readers/viewers, we’re PARTNERS. The story teller puts the narrative on the page or screen and the readers/viewers participate, invest in characters and read meaning into the events based on their own worldviews and experiences. The reason stories are powerful is because we enter into them, trusting the storyteller will lead us on a journey that will transform us.

The Legends writers just yelled “Psych!” and laughed at us. And then said, “Seriously, here’s what’s going on. No, wait, where are you going?” We have a great episode next. Hello?”

Dickheads.

One other thing about this episode:

Savage plays Psych 101 games with the crew and escapes his cell, finally facing Snart and his cold gun. I’ve quoted this dialogue before, but it’s important so:

Look at that exchange. You have your main antagonist, an immortal madman, raging through your heroes’ ship, He comes up against one of the team. And what does he do?

He declaims the most ridiculous dialogue in the history of modern TV.

And what does our anti-hero do?

Emphasize how ridiculous the antagonist by mocking him.

I love this exchange because it’s classic Snart, but what it does to the antagonist is just dumb. He should be striking fear in our hearts, and instead we’re pointing and laughing at him. Among all the crimes this series committed, making Savage a cartoon was probably the worst. A story cannot stand without a strong antagonist.

And then there’s the part where Sara confronts Rip and says, “Vandal Savage says you’d sell out the team to save your family,” and Rip says “He’s not wrong.” Rip Hunter, Worst Team Leader Ever.

Also flashbacks, ten thousand flashbacks.

But back to the big problem: The writers are trying to tell us that it doesn’t matter that Savage is a string of pop beads because it turns out that the real antagonist is the Time Masters. The problem is, we didn’t know that. If we’d known that at say, the first turning point, this would have been a much more interesting story: The Legends (rogue Time Masters) vs the Time Masters (the corrupt establishment) so that every move the Legends made would have to be second-guessed, they’d have to find a way out from under the Time Masters control, they’d be taking out Savage as a Time Master pawn so it would have been okay that he was a scenery chewer because he was just a game piece. All of which goes back to a basic tenet of storytelling: Suspense is much more powerful than Surprise. The guy who jumps out and goes “Boo!” is a shock for a second; knowing there’s a guy who’s going to jump out and shout boo, and not knowing where he is or when he’s going to jump, can result in story-long suspense that builds to that breaking point called a climax.

So at the end of this clusterRip of an episode, the Time Master’s army boards the Waverider and takes almost everybody prisoner. They miss Jax, who’s heading back to 2016 because that will somehow reverse some kind of time poisoning he has, and Snart and Sara because when Snart heard heavy boots boarding the ship, he didn’t say, “We must fight!” he said, “We need to find someplace to hide” and showed Sara a trapdoor he’d found the first day on the ship. My kind of hero, the smart kind.

If you want to know what this season could have been, look at the great episode we got once the Legends found out they were being played:

1-15 “Destiny”

When last we left Snart and Sara, aka two of the three effective members of the team, they were hiding in the floor as the Time Masters captured the rest of the team. Sara says, “We go rescue them,” Snart says, “They’re dead, we escape while there’s still time.” Sara refuses and Snart pulls his gun on her and threatens shoot her, which the Snart at the beginning of the season would have done without batting an eye. She defies him, telling him he’s not the same cold-hearted bastard he was before, but she’s not begging, she’s going straight for the jugular. It’s Snart’s crisis turning point, and while I was sure he wasn’t going to shoot Sara, I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t get in the jump ship and leave. Then the phone rings and it’s Gideon (why is the ship’s computer calling on the phone?) with a plan. “This is a bad plan,” Snart says later as they’re putting devices on the Time Master’s fleet in the Vanishing Point’s hanger. “It’s Gideon’s plan,” Sara says. “You’re not helping your argument,” Snart says, and then they run back to the ship because . . .

The rest of the team is imprisoned in plexiglass cases that make them look like museum exhibits. Time Minions drag Mick away to be brainwashed and tortured back into Chronos, more minions come for Kendra who manages to defeat both of them while turning her back on the door (honest to god, Kendra) so the next wave of minions knocks her down and drags her off. Well, this is depressing. The Time Master orders everyone killed, but somebody attacks the base (that would be Sara in the Waverider) and then Snart shows up (“Somebody here order up a rescue?”) and takes out the guards. But then Chronos comes in, newly brainwashed and faces Snart. “Kill him,” the Time Master says, and Mick turns and shoots him instead, and then goes over and steps on the guy’s head like a watermelon (off camera, satisfying but not gross). The team escapes, and as the Time Fleet tries to follow them, Sara triggers the devices which make all the ship computers sing “Love Will Keep Us Together” like drunk barflies, grounding the ships. And back on the ship, Mick tells Ray that he withstood the brainwashing because the team wouldn’t survive without him.

So we have Snart’s character arc finalized, Mick’s emancipation from the Time Masters made clear along with his allegiance to the team, the team working together in a great escape, followed by Snart making the closest thing he’s going to get to a pass at Sara after he’s apologized for threatening to shoot her–“I’ve been thinking about what the future might hold for me. And you. And me and you”–followed by Sara saying, “You want to steal a kiss from me, Leonard? You better be one hell of a thief.” Considering the reason he’s on the ship is because he’s a master thief, this is not so much a rejection as it is an invitation, porcupine style.

The key piece of info Rip took away from his meeting with the Time Masters is that the only place free will is possible is the Vanishing Point, which is also where the Oculus (the thingy that makes it possibly for the Time Masters to control time and destiny, try to keep up). So clearly, they’re gonna have to go back and blow up the Oculus.

No, really. That makes sense. A lot of great stuff happens–this is a good episode of TV–and then they reach the Oculus which has a failsafe device that prevents it from being rigged to explode.

Here’s Ray deciding to sacrifice himself instead of finding a rock to prop up the failsafe device, only to be knocked out and replaced by Mick, who decides to sacrifice himself instead of finding a rock to prop up the failsafe device, only to be knocked out and replaced by Snart, who decides to sacrifice himself instead of finding a rock to prop up the failsafe device . . .

But at least we got this:

Sue me, I’m a romance novelist. I needed that kiss even if they killed him immediately after it.

Which they do: in the next two minutes, Sara drags Mick to safely, the Head Time Master comes running in at the last minute yelling, “Stop that,” which shows you just what jokes the Time Masters are, and Snart snarls “There are no strings on me,” and dies in a flash of white light to save his team and the future.

Okay, they gave him a great death, but from a storyteling standpoint, that was annoying. You have three excellent characters that could carry a whole show, you do not kill one of them. I know it was in Miller’s contract that he’d leave at the end of the season, but back up the money truck, don’t take out one leg of your three-legged story stool.

Back on the Waverider, having destroyed the Time Masters and everything to do with them, the team is dealing with Snart’s death. Mick says he wants to kill somebody, and Ray points out that Vandal Savage is still alive and has Kendra captive. Mick says, “He’ll do nicely,” which leads to the last anti-climactic episode . . .

Episode 16: “Legendary”

They go to kill Vandal Savage and make a plan where they need to kill him at three different places in three different times while he’s standing next to a meteorite SIMULTANEOUSLY because they still don’t understand time travel, or at least they haven’t explained it to me. This is Rip’s plan, so of course it involves dividing the team . . .

Yadda yadda yadda, they kill Vandal Savage. There’s some other stuff, the team members check in with their loved ones and then they assemble on the rooftop where they started and Rip invites them to join him as the last guardians of the timeline since the Time Masters are kaput. The Hawks say no because they want to start their lives again and fly off, and Mick says, “Every time they do that, I get hungry for chicken.” Never change, Mick. (One thing: Mick goes back to Snart in a time before they got on the Waverider to say good-bye and tells him that he may not think he’s a hero, but he is one to Mick, which leaves the old hostile Snart frowning and perplexed. I’m wondering if that’s the Snart that’s going to be part of the antagonist team next time, and if that little bit of interaction won’t pay off then.)

So they’re all ready to go, but then somebody appears from the future and tells them not to get back on the ship; if they do, they’ll die.

Pretty sure that in the second season premiere, they’ll get back on that ship.

How I’d Fix This:

Reveal the Time Masters have obliterated free will at the first turning point. Make the Time Masters the antagonists for the entire season. Have the team on the run, finding out how to subvert the Oculus, trying to put down Savage since he’s the point man for the Time Masters, until finally they get to the Vanishing Point and blow up the Oculus, freeing everybody. Do not kill Snart.

New Season: Get rid of the Hawks (done) and Rip as leader. Put Sara in charge with Mick as second-in-command. Keep Stein and Jax because they’ve stopped bickering and because Jax is now a time ship mechanic, very useful. Tell Ray he can stay as long as he doesn’t fall in love with anybody because these doomed loves–Anna, Felicity, Kendra–are just depressing. Make Ray Mick’s new partner. Establish some rules for time travel and stop handwaving. Get a strong antagonist. Embrace the absurdity that is Legends of Tomorrow. Plot the whole season. Bring back Snart.

What I learned from this:

• No gotchas. I already knew that, but it bears repeating: NO GOTCHAS. Play fair with the reader, giving him or her all the information that your PoV character has. And whatever you do, don’t have your characters doing inexplicably dumb things that you intend to give a reason for at the third turning point; your readers will loathe them by then and you won’t get them back. (See the Cordelia Beast plot on Angel, the first half of the first season of Agents of Shield, and Legends.)

• Write your first draft and then identify your strongest characters; yes, you can strengthen others, but the ones you make strong instinctively are the ones you’re most interested in. Rip was pretty clearly intended to be the protagonist here, but the juice was Sara, Snart, and Mick. I’d had Dag planned as Nick’s right hand guy, but I have infinitely more fun with Rab. Rab’s moving up the character list.

• No Hawks.

The post Episode 14 “River of Time” by Courtney Norris & Anderson Mackenzie, Episode 15 “Destiny” by Phil Klemmer & Chris Fedak, Episode 16 “Legendary” by Phil Klemmer & Marc Guggenheim: Crisis, Gotcha, Climax, Anti-Climax appeared first on Argh Ink.

Cherry Saturday 12-3-2016

Today is National Roof Over Your Head Day, which is one of those absurd holidays I would normally make fun of except that having a roof over your head is so important and so many people don’t.

So if you have a safe place to live, be thankful. And if you have the time or the money, these people could use your help:

The post Cherry Saturday 12-3-2016 appeared first on Argh Ink.

Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch, Episode 11 “The Magnificent Eight” by Greg Berlanti & Marc Guggenheim, Episode 12 “Last Refuge” by Chris Fedak & Matthew Maala, Episode 13 “Leviathon” by Sarah Nicole Jones & Ray Utarnachitt: Let’s Talk About That Third Act

One of the aspects of storytelling that makes teams popular is the fun you can have with them once the characters are established and the team is really working as a team. If you’ve written the characters as strong, contrasting individuals, putting them together in different pairings in different situations can create some great expectations (see Ray and Mick in a Russian prison, for example) and surprising reversals. And once the team has finally bonded, sending them out against a powerful adversary is more than fun, it’s like watching a Rube Goldberg machine in action, the individual moves of the team as exciting as the final outcome of them working together.

Yep, that’s a Legends plot.

The key, though, is that they work together. The plot can be convoluted, but even the fun parts have to move the story. Another problem: most often in team stories the team bonds by the midpoint, which throws the “let’s have fun” into the third act. The third act has to burn off the subplot and character growth so that the crisis/third turning point leaves the team beaten and broken (in spirit if not as a team) before they come back to defeat or be destroyed by the antagonist. In other words, you’re supposed to pick up speed in the third act, not start dicking around, so all of that fun stuff has to be in direct service to the plot.

In the next two Season One episodes, the team has bonded (although still not sure about Mick), the characters are developed and bouncing off each other, and they’re up against one-off villains they can defeat by the end of the hour. All they have to do is stop dicking around and move toward that goal of saving the future . . .

1-11 “The Magnificent Eight”

The team is on the run from the Hunters, sent by the Time Masters to kill them, so Rip finds them a place in the timeline where they can hide until he can figure out what to do (Worst Team Leader Ever): The American West. The show gets full points from me for sending the eight of them into town in slow motion like a badass gang from the old movies, but I’m not sure how “let’s hide” moves the plot. Rip tells them not to attract attention to themselves but there’s a bar and . . .

The writers have a good time in the bar. Mick challenges Sara to a drinking contest and she leaves him passed out on the bar. Stein plays poker, wins, and almost gets shot by the loser except that Snart shoots first (Stein: “You shot him!” Snart: “You’re welcome.”) It’s all fun and games until it turns out that the guy Snart shot is part of the gang terrorizing the town, and now they’ve got to defeat that gang and save the town. There’s a whole thing with Jonah Hex explaining that Rip left a town to be destroyed by a similar gang, which means of course that Rip must now face down the leader of the gang in a high noon shoot out to do penance. Or something. And where’s Kendra? Oh, meeting with her former self from this time period and finding out that her love with Ray is doomed. (This stuff is a tragic waste of Anna Deavere Smith.) Meanwhile Stein saves the life of a small boy named H. G. Wells.

What was the plot again? Right the Hunters are chasing them so they have to lie low so they can defeat Vandal Savage. For how long are they hiding? What’s the plan to defeat the Hunters? How does Savage figure into this? What about the future?

Here’s the key to having a good time with a team: You still have to tell a story. Every scene still has to move that story. As much fun as this episode is, most of it is dumb (Ray announcing his name is John Wayne, Stein suggesting to the Wells boy that he call himself “H.G.,” Kendra’s living flashback) and the penutimate conflict of Rip shooting the gang leader and saving the town gets overrun as an anti-climax when the Hunters show up (because the team has made so much noise in the timeline) and there’s a fight in the street that could have been played to Yakkity Sax. So the townspeople see a flying man on fire and another man in a robot suit, also flying, and a woman turn into a hawk goddess because THAT’s not going to screw with the timeline, and you realize that the writers don’t give a damn about the aberrations in the timeline until they need them for the plot. Even Snart, who also doesn’t give a damn about history, asks if Rip doesn’t have one of those flashing thingies that wipes people memories, and Rip handwaves it away by saying people will figure out explanations in their own minds because the truth is so unbelievable. Oh-kay.

1-12 “Last Refuge”

Our Gang defeating the Hunters has made the Time Masters up their game. They’ve sent their ultimate assassin, the Pilgrim, after the team this time, and she’s not going to bother with killing them in the now; she’s going back to the past to off them as children. Whatever you think of her plan, it’s a great way to get back story into the now of the story while getting to see teenage Mick make a pass at teenage Sara and get slapped for his troubles.

But the fun in this is undercut first by the Pilgrim’s inexplicable choices. She’s goes after Mick and Sara as teenagers (why?) after Snart and Stein and Jax as newborns (much smarter and much easier to kill), and Ray as an adult. You want this to be fun, get them all as teenagers and put them in storage room on the ship together. You want this to be smart, collect all the babies (Sara and Kendra go after baby Snart–“Look for the one with horns” Sara tells Kendra–but then they’re both overwhelmed by how cute Snart is as a baby in spite of his dastardly future). So the Pilgrim’s methods are .. . inefficient, plus why is she so slow that when they follow her, they get there first? And so inept that they can always defeat her? She’s the greatest the Time Masters have to offer?

Time Masters: Worst Cult Leaders Ever, which helps explain Rip.

Never mind, we’re going to the orphanage/foster home where the Time Masters stash children so they can be trained and grow up to be Time Masters. There’s a lot of fun stuff with Rip’s foster mother running everybody with an iron hand, Mick has a heart-to-heart with his teenage self, in hopes that he won’t be the idiot that Mick in this timeline was (and there’s some evidence that works), and then the Pilgrim kidnaps the team’s loved ones–Stein’s wife, Snart’s sister, Jax’s dad, Sara’s dad–and threatens to kill them if the team doesn’t surrender to them. Rip makes a deal: he’ll turn over his younger self to her to kill which will wipe him out of the timeline and which will mean that the rest of the team never becomes a team because he won’t be around to recruit them, and their loved ones will never have been kidnapped . . . or something.

This is actually a good plan. Why didn’t the Pilgrim think of that first if she’s their top executioner? She takes the deal, they all meet in an abandoned airline hanger, Rip sends his cheeky, cockney grade school self to meet her, Young Rip does an innocent, eye-batting “Did I do something wrong, miss?” and then stabs her, giving the others a chance to all attack her at once and leave her a grease spot on the floor of the hanger. This show would have been 100% better if Young Rip had been in charge the whole time. And probably 100% shorter because he’s actually effective. The foster home mother raised a real badass and then the Time Masters made him into a wimp and kept him instead of his smart, effective wife.

This show is full of idiots.

Back on the ship, the Legends say good-bye to their loved ones and younger selves and return them to their places in the timeline after giving them amnesia pills (which would have been a great move back in the old West since the town wasn’t that damn large) and . . .

Remember the main plot?. Defeating Savage? I understand that they have to save their younger selves, I understand the Time Masters are an antagonist in Rip’s subplot, but they’ve been insisting all season that Savage is the big story, the main antagonist. Now as the plot is supposed to speed up toward the crisis point, they’re fighting the Time Masters instead. Yeah, there’s a big reveal coming up on that one shortly which makes me want to nuke the writers’ room because they probably think that explains everything, but we’re watching this for the first time, and as much fun as these episodes are, and they really are fun for the most part, they’re not going anywhere. I completely understand dodging the Savage plot, it’s awful, but that’s your plot, people. FIX IT, don’t duck it or your readers/viewers will get confused and annoyed.

1-13 “Leviathon”

Rip decides that they’ll just have to take Savage out of the picture right before he kills Rip’s family. YA’THINK? The team travels to London, 2166, where they kidnap Savage’s daughter because she has a bracelet from Egypt that will enable them to kill Savage despite his immortality (you’d think he’d put that somewhere safe, like the center of the earth). They show her that her father is evil and what he will do, and she turns on a dime, which I found suspicious, but then it’s Snart showing her the facts, so I’ll allow it. She turns over the bracelet, they melt it over Carter’s mace (don’t ask) and they attack Savage, who is now attended by a brainwashed Carter. Kendra has him down and is about to pound him into non-immortal nuggets with her magic mace when Savage tells her that if she kills him, Carter will remain a mindless drone.

Let’s recap here:

• Carter already has the personality of a block of wood, so it’s really hard to tell “mindless Carter” from “serious regular Carter.”

• Carter has been MIA since the pilot, so we have no attachment to him. In fact, when he shows up, my reaction was, “No, not him. Bleah.”

• Carter is immortal, so if Kendra takes him out, too, they’ll reincarnate again.

• The future of the entire world is at stake.

Kendra refuses to kill Savage so she can possibly save Carter from being a mindless drone in this timeline because she loves him SO MUCH so the fact that she’s been shacking up with Ray for over two years is . . .

That’s when I started to hate Kendra. Why the rest of the team is even speaking to her at this point is beyond me, let alone Rip, whose wife and child are going to die because Kendra couldn’t wait to the next incarnation to be with the block of wood she loves but can’t remember most of the time. This is such a dumb move, it wasn’t even balanced out by Ray reversing his Atom suit to grow to gigantic size to fight an equally gigantic robot that Savage built to . . . god knows why, it’s the most inefficient weapon ever made. “I’ll build a giant robot that can shoot fire and STOMP ON PEOPLE.”

They imprison Savage on board the Waverider in spite of Snart pointing out that this is a DUMB IDEA. Snart, Sara, or Mick would have killed Savage without hesitation, but all the big decisions fall to Kendra, who used to be a barista. The big robot fight was kinda fun, but the idiocy in the plot shows the strain of writers who know they have three more episodes to go, and they can’t kill the bad guy until the end.

And besides they have this amazing reveal coming in the next episode at the crisis point! (That grinding sound in the background in my teeth.)

How I’d fix the third act:

Oh, god.

• Somehow make each one of the episodes move the plot closer to capturing Savage by having him involved with the Hunters and the Pilgrim.

• Make the Hunters and the Pilgrim efficient (also idiots: the Time Masters).

• Plot this so that the Legends and Savage do real damage to each other, so that they’re both more determined to win. I think the actor playing Savage was Not Good, but Savage never changed because of anything that happened in the plot; he was always the same cartoon; nothing the Legends did ever bothered him because he knew he’d come back again.

It’s just a terrible plot in general, and it really creaks in this third act. This act has to push the conflict to the crisis point when all is lost, but the legends are exactly where they were at the beginning, the only people who have really changed are Snart and Mick. Sara’s still a badass, Stein and Jax are still sniping, Ray is still insecure (and having Kendra refuse to save the future to save Big Block of Wood is not helping), and Rip is still the Worst Team Leader Ever. If this was the Mick and Snart show, that would be okay, you don’t have to arc your supporting characters (although it’s nice), but since this is Rip’s story and he hasn’t learned a damned thing, there’s no sense of rising tension, no sense of things coming to a breaking point, it’s your basic string of pearls plot, but the pearls are plastic and they’re pop beads. Which means that the only real way to fix this mess is to start over from the beginning, plan a strong plot arc with escalating conflict, build to the crisis/breaking point, and then stage the obligatory scene between the protag and the antag . . .

Short answer: It’s too late to fix this mess. Get out and start a new season/story.

Pictured above: The Legends crew searching desperately for a plot line.

What I Learned From This For Nita’s Story:

Plot the damn thing.

The post Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch, Episode 11 “The Magnificent Eight” by Greg Berlanti & Marc Guggenheim, Episode 12 “Last Refuge” by Chris Fedak & Matthew Maala, Episode 13 “Leviathon” by Sarah Nicole Jones & Ray Utarnachitt: Let’s Talk About That Third Act appeared first on Argh Ink.

Episode 11 “The Magnificent Eight” by Greg Berlanti & Marc Guggenheim, Episode 12 “Last Refuge” by Chris Fedak & Matthew Maala, Episode 13 “Leviathon” by Sarah Nicole Jones & Ray Utarnachitt: Let’s Talk About That Third Act

One of the aspects of storytelling that makes teams popular is the fun you can have with them once the characters are established and the team is really working as a team. If you’ve written the characters as strong, contrasting individuals, putting them together in different pairings in different situations can create some great expectations (see Ray and Mick in a Russian prison, for example) and surprising reversals. And once the team has finally bonded, sending them out against a powerful adversary is more than fun, it’s like watching a Rube Goldberg machine in action, the individual moves of the team as exciting as the final outcome of them working together.

Yep, that’s a Legends plot.

The key, though, is that they work together. The plot can be convoluted, but even the fun parts have to move the story. Another problem: most often in team stories the team bonds by the midpoint, which throws the “let’s have fun” into the third act. The third act has to burn off the subplot and character growth so that the crisis/third turning point leaves the team beaten and broken (in spirit if not as a team) before they come back to defeat or be destroyed by the antagonist. In other words, you’re supposed to pick up speed in the third act, not start dicking around, so all of that fun stuff has to be in direct service to the plot.

In the next two Season One episodes, the team has bonded (although still not sure about Mick), the characters are developed and bouncing off each other, and they’re up against one-off villains they can defeat by the end of the hour. All they have to do is stop dicking around and move toward that goal of saving the future . . .

1-11 “The Magnificent Eight”

The team is on the run from the Hunters, sent by the Time Masters to kill them, so Rip finds them a place in the timeline where they can hide until he can figure out what to do (Worst Team Leader Ever): The American West. The show gets full points from me for sending the eight of them into town in slow motion like a badass gang from the old movies, but I’m not sure how “let’s hide” moves the plot. Rip tells them not to attract attention to themselves but there’s a bar and . . .

The writers have a good time in the bar. Mick challenges Sara to a drinking contest and she leaves him passed out on the bar. Stein plays poker, wins, and almost gets shot by the loser except that Snart shoots first (Stein: “You shot him!” Snart: “You’re welcome.”) It’s all fun and games until it turns out that the guy Snart shot is part of the gang terrorizing the town, and now they’ve got to defeat that gang and save the town. There’s a whole thing with Jonah Hex explaining that Rip left a town to be destroyed by a similar gang, which means of course that Rip must now face down the leader of the gang in a high noon shoot out to do penance. Or something. And where’s Kendra? Oh, meeting with her former self from this time period and finding out that her love with Ray is doomed. (This stuff is a tragic waste of Anna Deavere Smith.) Meanwhile Stein saves the life of a small boy named H. G. Wells.

What was the plot again? Right the Hunters are chasing them so they have to lie low so they can defeat Vandal Savage. For how long are they hiding? What’s the plan to defeat the Hunters? How does Savage figure into this? What about the future?

Here’s the key to having a good time with a team: You still have to tell a story. Every scene still has to move that story. As much fun as this episode is, most of it is dumb (Ray announcing his name is John Wayne, Stein suggesting to the Wells boy that he call himself “H.G.,” Kendra’s living flashback) and the penutimate conflict of Rip shooting the gang leader and saving the town gets overrun as an anti-climax when the Hunters show up (because the team has made so much noise in the timeline) and there’s a fight in the street that could have been played to Yakkity Sax. So the townspeople see a flying man on fire and another man in a robot suit, also flying, and a woman turn into a hawk goddess because THAT’s not going to screw with the timeline, and you realize that the writers don’t give a damn about the aberrations in the timeline until they need them for the plot. Even Snart, who also doesn’t give a damn about history, asks if Rip doesn’t have one of those flashing thingies that wipes people memories, and Rip handwaves it away by saying people will figure out explanations in their own minds because the truth is so unbelievable. Oh-kay.

1-12 “Last Refuge”

Our Gang defeating the Hunters has made the Time Masters up their game. They’ve sent their ultimate assassin, the Pilgrim, after the team this time, and she’s not going to bother with killing them in the now; she’s going back to the past to off them as children. Whatever you think of her plan, it’s a great way to get back story into the now of the story while getting to see teenage Mick make a pass at teenage Sara and get slapped for his troubles.

But the fun in this is undercut first by the Pilgrim’s inexplicable choices. She’s goes after Mick and Sara as teenagers (why?) after Snart and Stein and Jax as newborns (much smarter and much easier to kill), and Ray as an adult. You want this to be fun, get them all as teenagers and put them in storage room on the ship together. You want this to be smart, collect all the babies (Sara and Kendra go after baby Snart–“Look for the one with horns” Sara tells Kendra–but then they’re both overwhelmed by how cute Snart is as a baby in spite of his dastardly future). So the Pilgrim’s methods are .. . inefficient, plus why is she so slow that when they follow her, they get there first? And so inept that they can always defeat her? She’s the greatest the Time Masters have to offer?

Time Masters: Worst Cult Leaders Ever, which helps explain Rip.

Never mind, we’re going to the orphanage/foster home where the Time Masters stash children so they can be trained and grow up to be Time Masters. There’s a lot of fun stuff with Rip’s foster mother running everybody with an iron hand, Mick has a heart-to-heart with his teenage self, in hopes that he won’t be the idiot that Mick in this timeline was (and there’s some evidence that works), and then the Pilgrim kidnaps the team’s loved ones–Stein’s wife, Snart’s sister, Jax’s dad, Sara’s dad–and threatens to kill them if the team doesn’t surrender to them. Rip makes a deal: he’ll turn over his younger self to her to kill which will wipe him out of the timeline and which will mean that the rest of the team never becomes a team because he won’t be around to recruit them, and their loved ones will never have been kidnapped . . . or something.

This is actually a good plan. Why didn’t the Pilgrim think of that first if she’s their top executioner? She takes the deal, they all meet in an abandoned airline hanger, Rip sends his cheeky, cockney grade school self to meet her, Young Rip does an innocent, eye-batting “Did I do something wrong, miss?” and then stabs her, giving the others a chance to all attack her at once and leave her a grease spot on the floor of the hanger. This show would have been 100% better if Young Rip had been in charge the whole time. And probably 100% shorter because he’s actually effective. The foster home mother raised a real badass and then the Time Masters made him into a wimp and kept him instead of his smart, effective wife.

This show is full of idiots.

Back on the ship, the Legends say good-bye to their loved ones and younger selves and return them to their places in the timeline after giving them amnesia pills (which would have been a great move back in the old West since the town wasn’t that damn large) and . . .

Remember the main plot?. Defeating Savage? I understand that they have to save their younger selves, I understand the Time Masters are an antagonist in Rip’s subplot, but they’ve been insisting all season that Savage is the big story, the main antagonist. Now as the plot is supposed to speed up toward the crisis point, they’re fighting the Time Masters instead. Yeah, there’s a big reveal coming up on that one shortly which makes me want to nuke the writers’ room because they probably think that explains everything, but we’re watching this for the first time, and as much fun as these episodes are, and they really are fun for the most part, they’re not going anywhere. I completely understand dodging the Savage plot, it’s awful, but that’s your plot, people. FIX IT, don’t duck it or your readers/viewers will get confused and annoyed.

1-13 “Leviathon”

Rip decides that they’ll just have to take Savage out of the picture right before he kills Rip’s family. YA’THINK? The team travels to London, 2166, where they kidnap Savage’s daughter because she has a bracelet from Egypt that will enable them to kill Savage despite his immortality (you’d think he’d put that somewhere safe, like the center of the earth). They show her that her father is evil and what he will do, and she turns on a dime, which I found suspicious, but then it’s Snart showing her the facts, so I’ll allow it. She turns over the bracelet, they melt it over Carter’s mace (don’t ask) and they attack Savage, who is now attended by a brainwashed Carter. Kendra has him down and is about to pound him into non-immortal nuggets with her magic mace when Savage tells her that if she kills him, Carter will remain a mindless drone.

Let’s recap here:

• Carter already has the personality of a block of wood, so it’s really hard to tell “mindless Carter” from “serious regular Carter.”

• Carter has been MIA since the pilot, so we have no attachment to him. In fact, when he shows up, my reaction was, “No, not him. Bleah.”

• Carter is immortal, so if Kendra takes him out, too, they’ll reincarnate again.

• The future of the entire world is at stake.

Kendra refuses to kill Savage so she can possibly save Carter from being a mindless drone in this timeline because she loves him SO MUCH so the fact that she’s been shacking up with Ray for over two years is . . .

That’s when I started to hate Kendra. Why the rest of the team is even speaking to her at this point is beyond me, let alone Rip, whose wife and child are going to die because Kendra couldn’t wait to the next incarnation to be with the block of wood she loves but can’t remember most of the time. This is such a dumb move, it wasn’t even balanced out by Ray reversing his Atom suit to grow to gigantic size to fight an equally gigantic robot that Savage built to . . . god knows why, it’s the most inefficient weapon ever made. “I’ll build a giant robot that can shoot fire and STOMP ON PEOPLE.”

They imprison Savage on board the Waverider in spite of Snart pointing out that this is a DUMB IDEA. Snart, Sara, or Mick would have killed Savage without hesitation, but all the big decisions fall to Kendra, who used to be a barista. The big robot fight was kinda fun, but the idiocy in the plot shows the strain of writers who know they have three more episodes to go, and they can’t kill the bad guy until the end.

And besides they have this amazing reveal coming in the next episode at the crisis point! (That grinding sound in the background in my teeth.)

How I’d fix the third act:

Oh, god.

• Somehow make each one of the episodes move the plot closer to capturing Savage by having him involved with the Hunters and the Pilgrim.

• Make the Hunters and the Pilgrim efficient (also idiots: the Time Masters).

• Plot this so that the Legends and Savage do real damage to each other, so that they’re both more determined to win. I think the actor playing Savage was Not Good, but Savage never changed because of anything that happened in the plot; he was always the same cartoon; nothing the Legends did ever bothered him because he knew he’d come back again.

It’s just a terrible plot in general, and it really creaks in this third act. This act has to push the conflict to the crisis point when all is lost, but the legends are exactly where they were at the beginning, the only people who have really changed are Snart and Mick. Sara’s still a badass, Stein and Jax are still sniping, Ray is still insecure (and having Kendra refuse to save the future to save Big Block of Wood is not helping), and Rip is still the Worst Team Leader Ever. If this was the Mick and Snart show, that would be okay, you don’t have to arc your supporting characters (although it’s nice), but since this is Rip’s story and he hasn’t learned a damned thing, there’s no sense of rising tension, no sense of things coming to a breaking point, it’s your basic string of pearls plot, but the pearls are plastic and they’re pop beads. Which means that the only real way to fix this mess is to start over from the beginning, plan a strong plot arc with escalating conflict, build to the crisis/breaking point, and then stage the obligatory scene between the protag and the antag . . .

Short answer: It’s too late to fix this mess. Get out and start a new season/story.

Pictured above: The Legends crew searching desperately for a plot line.

What I Learned From This For Nita’s Story:

Plot the damn thing.

The post Episode 11 “The Magnificent Eight” by Greg Berlanti & Marc Guggenheim, Episode 12 “Last Refuge” by Chris Fedak & Matthew Maala, Episode 13 “Leviathon” by Sarah Nicole Jones & Ray Utarnachitt: Let’s Talk About That Third Act appeared first on Argh Ink.

Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch Intermission: Plotting A Team Story

If you think of a TV season as a novel, the episodes as chapters, you can take apart a season and see where the plot stumbled and where it hit its marks. After “Marooned,” Legends had completed six episodes of a sixteen-episode season and it was way past time for a turning point.

And now we pause for a diagram about story acts and turning points:

The four act structure means dividing a story in four increasingly shorter parts (or five or whatever) to build in turning points to continually make the story new, arc the characters, and escalate the stakes and the pacing.

So a four act plot is:

Act One:

Introduce the protagonist and the conflict.

Show the protagonist fighting the good fight as you introduce new characters and subplots.

Write a First Turning Point that makes the story new, the stakes higher, the fight harder.

Begin Act Two by showing the characters adapting to the new reality created by the turning point, still fighting the good fight and being changed by it, becoming a team.

Develop characters and subplots while increasing the tension in the main plot struggle.

Write a Mid Turning Point that makes the story new again, the stakes even higher, the fight even harder.

And so on until you get to the Last Turning Point which is the Climax, where the plot turns out of conflict and into stability. Later for that, let’s look at the first half (nine episodes) of Legends now.

The beginning of Legends introduces all the characters and gives them a mission: find and kill Vandal Savage before he can conquer and ruin the earth.

But then the story becomes a string of pearls plot, dragged down by static relationships.

A string of pearls plot is one in which each conflict event returns the characters to where they were before. So they try to kill Savage in Norway and it doesn’t work, so they go back to the ship and decide to try to kill Savage in Russia and it doesn’t work, so they go back to the ship and decide to kill Savage in Oregon, and it doesn’ work . . .

The annoying thing about this is that the reason it doesn’t work, even though they actually do kill him most of the time, is that he’s immortal. They know this. They know if they kill him, he’ll just be born again in another time. And since they’re killing him in the past, they’re not stopping him in the future. I know I keep saying that Rip Hunter is the Worst Team Leader Ever, but I’m even annoyed with Sara and Snart for this mess: Somebody should have said, “Our problem is his immortality. Let’s figure out what to do about that.”

Instead they do a string of Savage murders, propped up by some of the deadliest relationships ever put on screen. The Hawks are by far the worst, followed by Ray and Kendra, following by Stein and Jax yapping at each other. Buried in all of that are Sara, Snart, and Mick who are doing good work on the smaller tasks and missing the Big Picture. By the time they reach the midpoint of the story, they should know things about Savage they didn’t know before, they should have injured him in ways that make him angrier and increased their conflict with him, they should have been injured in ways that make them more focused and more of a team.

Some but not enough of that happens. Look at this plot:

Act One

1-1 & 1-2 “Pilot:” Rip kidnaps eight people and tells them they’re a team, they fight and talk about their feelings while taking a nuclear weapon away from Vandal Savage in Norway. Because.

1-3 “Blood Ties:” Still in Norway, Rip splits up the team and doesn’t listen to anybody again, and everybody argues. Carter dies. They learn only Kendra can kill Savage permanently, which they forget in most episodes.

1-4 “White Knights” & 1-5 “Fail-Safe:” Rip splits the team up, but they form alliances anyway: Snart, Sara, and Mick doing a coordinated theft from the Pentagon, Snart and Ray tag-teaming the physicist, Mick and Ray saving each other in prison, Snart talking Sara out of killing Stein, Kendra helping Jax get into the prison; the bonds are tentative but they’re forming, none of them with Rip. All of this is for nothing because even with the team being a lot more effective in the individual parts of the plan, when they blow up Savage it’s meaningless because Kendra didn’t stick a knife in his heart, so he’s gonna come back.

1-6 Star City 2046: The team works together to help Oliver Queen, most of them not quite sure why; Mick decides to leave the team and Snart knocks him out to drag him back onboard the ship. Savage has nothing to do with this story, and I’m not even sure why it’s in here since the only important thing that happens is that Snart pressgangs Mick back onto the team when he wants off.

That’s the first six episodes of a sixteen episode/chapter story. Definitely time for a turning point, an event that will swing the story around in a new direction and make the stake higher and the conflict more intense.

1-7 Marooned: The team is suckered into a time pirate trap and work together until one of them betrays the rest. They battle the pirates together and win, and then have to decide together what to do about the traitor, discussing it soberly and maturely.



I think it’s interesting that the first time the team acts like a team, they’re all looking at Snart. This team needs an effective leader; if Snart says he’ll handle it, he’ll handle it; he solves the Mick problem and they move on.

So what does that turning point mean?

They were betrayed as a team, they responded as a team, Snart flat-out tells Mick he betrayed the team so even he feels a part of something now. The fight with the pirates and Mick’s betrayal is the crucible that forges the first real team bonds, but it also makes them a little nervous around Snart. Because he’ll handle them if they screw up, too.

So they go into Act Two sadder but wiser about team relationships, but no wiser about Savage. Their team character arc is moving but their main plot is a joke. Imagine if they’d made progress in each of those seven episodes, learned something so that each time they faced Savage again they got closer, did him more damage, found some way to inhibit his regeneration, anything so that there was a sense of forward movement in the plot instead of each episode starting with “Where in the world is Vandal Savage?” You build the forward movement in a plot incrementally, so they don’t need to defeat him each time, they just need to learn more each time, move the game pieces closer to the finish line.

ACT TWO

Episode 8: “Night of the Hawk”

A lot of this episode is fun because Vandal Savage finally does something interesting: he turns a trio of 50’s era teenagers into giant fanged ravens in an effort to build a bird army to fight the Hawks. This seems like overkill since the Hawks have the survival skills of parakeets, but at least Savage has a plan. So we get a fifties horror movie complete with an asylum with a restricted wing, Space Ranger Stein as a psychiatrist and a small but lovely subplot about lesbian nurses (that would be Sara and Lindsey). Also Ray and Kendra go undercover as a married couple. In 1958. Nine years before the Loving decision. I’m sure nobody will notice. Stein loves the time period, calling it idyllic, and Jax and Sara remind him that’s because he’s white, male, and straight. Meanwhile Rip and Snart are FBI agents come to investigate the slasher murders. They’re still bickering, all of them, but they’re working efficiently together. Jax gets a date with the Peggy Sue whose boyfriend disappeared (turned into a giant fanged raven), Ray and Kendra move into their ranch house and dance, Sara shuts down a lecherous doctor who’s harassing a nurse, who appreciates it (that would be Lindsey). And wouldn’t you know it, Vandal Savage is not only the head doctor at the mental hospital, he’s Ray and Kendra’s neighbor across the street. The coincidence is strong in this one. Also, everybody’s a little edgy around Snart. Lindsey kisses Sara.

Then Jax gets turned into a giant fanged raven and Snart refuses to kill him, and Stein creates a giant-fanged-raven serum that cures him. Stein calls Snart a hero and Jax tells him that now he understands he was just protecting the team. Snart throws up in his mouth a little (I may have read that between the lines.) Oh, and they don’t kill Savage because Kendra is terrible at killing people, not only losing the knife to Savage but needing to be rescued when he turns it on her.

Then Chronos boards the ship, kidnapping Snart and forcing Rip, Jax, and Stein to abandon Sara, Ray, and Kendra in 1958. With Savage.

That’s bad.

What have we learned from this episode that moves the plot forward and will help the team against Savage next time?

[Crickets.]

Well, points for giant fanged ravens anyway.

Episode 9: “Left Behind”

Chronos sabotages the Waverider and leaves with Snart as a captive. Rip fixes the sabotage by rebooting Gideon (“Have you tried turning it off and on?”) but the ship crashes into the temporal zone. Yeah, I don’t know what that means, either. Meanwhile, Sara, Ray, and Kendra are stuck in the fifties. Ray rigs up a time beacon so the rest of the team can find them, and it blows up. Sara blows up, too: She’s sure the rest of the team is dead and she’s leaving.

Two years later, Ray gives Kendra the time beacon to destroy before he proposes, but it activates instead. The Waverider comes back for them. Kendra’s thrilled, Ray’s hurt she’s thrilled. She’s a black woman from the 21st century, Ray, why would she want to stay in the freaking fifties? They go to find Sara who’s back in Nanda Parbat with the League of Assassins, which is fine because Rip knows all about the League, he did his master’s thesis on it. (REALLY? There’s more handwaving in this show than a Broadway musical.) In Nanda Parbat, Sara attacks them and imprisons them to be executed shortly.

Now the only team member who isn’t in imminent danger of dying is the missing Snart, who wakes up somewhere ship-like cuffed to a metal bar. He asks Chronos what the hell is going on; Chronos takes off his helmet and its Mick. For once, Snark is speechless. (There’s a mini-flashback of Snark firing on Mick and deliberately missing.) Mick says the Time Masters found him and took him to a place out of time, the Vanishing Point, where he spent “lifetimes” being brainwashed and trained to work for them as a bounty hunter. His plan is to kill the team and then take Snart back home so he can kill Snart’s little sister Lisa over and over again in front of him. Yeah, Mick’s in a bad place.



Back in Nanda Parbat, Kendra and Sara fight as champions for their groups and Sara remembers who she is. Which is good because Cronos attacks. Back on the ship, Snart manages to get his freeze gun and fires on his cuffs, freezing them and his hand. When he still can’t break the cuffs, he smashes his frozen hand into flesh cubes. There’s screaming. The League releases the crew and they defeat Chronos just as Snart staggers in and shouts, “Don’t kill him!” They take Mick back to the ship and put him in the brig where he swears he’ll kill all of them and Gideon grows Snart a new hand, a brand new kind of handwaving (I know, I know).

What have we learned from this episode that moves the plot forward and will help the team against Savage next time?

The team’s separation gives them each the opportunity to choose joining the team, this time in full knowledge of what they’re getting into, they find out Snart didn’t kill Mick so they trust him, and the team together decides to rehabilitate Mick instead of executing him because he’s part of the team.

Go, team.

No, really, that will help move the plot because they’ll stop dicking around with their personal beefs and get serious.

Plus there’s only one mini-flashback as Snart remembers firing past Mick instead of at him. I’ll allow it.

Episode 10 – “Progeny”

The team travels to a dystopian future where they refuse to kill a child who will unleash a terrible virus that wipes out most of the world’s population and enables Vandal Savage to conquer everyone because the world has been weakened by the disease. They don’t do it because killing a child would be wrong (and those billions of other kids who are going to die because they don’t kill this one?). Also, Ray and Kendra discuss the relationship (LONG FLASHBACK WITH HAWKS), Mick’s in the brig enraged, Snart and Sara are efficient as they help Rip kidnap the monster child, Ray has a meltdown over a child he didn’t know he had, Kendra has another FLASHBACK, Gideon tells them that kidnapping the kid hasn’t changed the future, Sara tells Mick that Snart saved him and Mick snarls, Rip takes the kid and leaves the ship, Kendra has another FLASHBACK, Ray finds out he didn’t have a kid after all, Rip wimps out and doesn’t kill the monster child. Sara confronts Snart about Mick–“Stop being an ass and go deal with him”–and Snart goes. “People seem to think we should have a heart to heart,” he tells Mick. “We don’t have hearts,” Mick says. “Where does that leave us?” Snart offers him a fight to the death. Mick says yes, and . . .

Then for some reason the writers cut to Ray and Kendra discussing their relationship. They’re not just boring, they’re IN THE WAY. Vandal tells the monster child to kill his father. WHO CARES? The monster child kills his father early and Savage releases the virus early. Well, that’s just great.

Meanwhile Mick and Snart beat the hell out of each other and Mick puts Snart on his back. “Kill me,” Snart says, “That’s what you want.” “I don’t know what I want,” Mick says. So much for therapy, just beat the crap out of each other and bond again. And anyway, it doesn’t matter, Mick says; since he didn’t bring the team in, the Time Masters will send out four killers to kill them all, mercenaries called The Hunters. He gives the assembled team the details and then says, “Run.”

What have we learned from this episode that moves the plot forward and will help the team against Savage next time?

The really big leap forward: Mick’s had decades (centuries?) as time maater bounty hunter, so now he’s the MVP on the team: he knows everything about the Time Masters and time ships and the time stream and the Vanishing Point, in fact, now we don’t need Rip.

Another small but important move: When Sara talks to Snart about Mick and says, “What are your feelings?” Snart says, “About you?” which is almost talking about the relationship they don’t have. Sara says, “About Mick,” so that’s their entire relationship conversation: Two words. Ray and Kendra, listen and learn. That’s important because what Snart is going to do in the penultimate episode is crucial to the main plot and it needs to be incrementally set up. Turns out Captain Canary is part of the main plot after all.

And, finally, the entire team’s back together again, everybody choosing to be there with full knowledge and free will.

The next two episodes don’t do much to advance the Savage plot, which I think is why they’re pretty good stories. Here’s my theory about that:

When somebody attacks the team, they make a plan, work together, and defeat the bad guys; they’re efficient and effective.

When they chase Vandal Savage, they’re idiots.

So the good news is, they’re under attack in the next two episodes. The bad news is, after that they go back to chasing Savage.

Next up:

Act Three which is where the team moves into higher stakes conflicts (a lot of people are trying to kill them to stop them) and find out new information that makes everybody want to kill the writers slowly with dull spoons. At this point the team is well enough established that the writers can have a lot of fun with characters not named Kendra or Rip, which they do in the first two, “The Magnificent Eight” and “Last Refuge.” Then they go back to fighting Savage, but let’s just enjoy the fun stuff first.

The post Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch Intermission: Plotting A Team Story appeared first on Argh Ink.

Intermission: Plotting A Team Story

If you think of a TV season as a novel, the episodes as chapters, you can take apart a season and see where the plot stumbled and where it hit its marks. After “Marooned,” Legends had completed six episodes of a sixteen-episode season and it was way past time for a turning point.

And now we pause for a diagram about story acts and turning points:

The four act structure means dividing a story in four increasingly shorter parts (or five or whatever) to build in turning points to continually make the story new, arc the characters, and escalate the stakes and the pacing.

So a four act plot is:

Act One:

Introduce the protagonist and the conflict.

Show the protagonist fighting the good fight as you introduce new characters and subplots.

Write a First Turning Point that makes the story new, the stakes higher, the fight harder.

Begin Act Two by showing the characters adapting to the new reality created by the turning point, still fighting the good fight and being changed by it, becoming a team.

Develop characters and subplots while increasing the tension in the main plot struggle.

Write a Mid Turning Point that makes the story new again, the stakes even higher, the fight even harder.

And so on until you get to the Last Turning Point which is the Climax, where the plot turns out of conflict and into stability. Later for that, let’s look at the first half (nine episodes) of Legends now.

The beginning of Legends introduces all the characters and gives them a mission: find and kill Vandal Savage before he can conquer and ruin the earth.

But then the story becomes a string of pearls plot, dragged down by static relationships.

A string of pearls plot is one in which each conflict event returns the characters to where they were before. So they try to kill Savage in Norway and it doesn’t work, so they go back to the ship and decide to try to kill Savage in Russia and it doesn’t work, so they go back to the ship and decide to kill Savage in Oregon, and it doesn’ work . . .

The annoying thing about this is that the reason it doesn’t work, even though they actually do kill him most of the time, is that he’s immortal. They know this. They know if they kill him, he’ll just be born again in another time. And since they’re killing him in the past, they’re not stopping him in the future. I know I keep saying that Rip Hunter is the Worst Team Leader Ever, but I’m even annoyed with Sara and Snart for this mess: Somebody should have said, “Our problem is his immortality. Let’s figure out what to do about that.”

Instead they do a string of Savage murders, propped up by some of the deadliest relationships ever put on screen. The Hawks are by far the worst, followed by Ray and Kendra, following by Stein and Jax yapping at each other. Buried in all of that are Sara, Snart, and Mick who are doing good work on the smaller tasks and missing the Big Picture. By the time they reach the midpoint of the story, they should know things about Savage they didn’t know before, they should have injured him in ways that make him angrier and increased their conflict with him, they should have been injured in ways that make them more focused and more of a team.

Some but not enough of that happens. Look at this plot:

Act One

1-1 & 1-2 “Pilot:” Rip kidnaps eight people and tells them they’re a team, they fight and talk about their feelings while taking a nuclear weapon away from Vandal Savage in Norway. Because.

1-3 “Blood Ties:” Still in Norway, Rip splits up the team and doesn’t listen to anybody again, and everybody argues. Carter dies. They learn only Kendra can kill Savage permanently, which they forget in most episodes.

1-4 “White Knights” & 1-5 “Fail-Safe:” Rip splits the team up, but they form alliances anyway: Snart, Sara, and Mick doing a coordinated theft from the Pentagon, Snart and Ray tag-teaming the physicist, Mick and Ray saving each other in prison, Snart talking Sara out of killing Stein, Kendra helping Jax get into the prison; the bonds are tentative but they’re forming, none of them with Rip. All of this is for nothing because even with the team being a lot more effective in the individual parts of the plan, when they blow up Savage it’s meaningless because Kendra didn’t stick a knife in his heart, so he’s gonna come back.

1-6 Star City 2046: The team works together to help Oliver Queen, most of them not quite sure why; Mick decides to leave the team and Snart knocks him out to drag him back onboard the ship. Savage has nothing to do with this story, and I’m not even sure why it’s in here since the only important thing that happens is that Snart pressgangs Mick back onto the team when he wants off.

That’s the first six episodes of a sixteen episode/chapter story. Definitely time for a turning point, an event that will swing the story around in a new direction and make the stake higher and the conflict more intense.

1-7 Marooned: The team is suckered into a time pirate trap and work together until one of them betrays the rest. They battle the pirates together and win, and then have to decide together what to do about the traitor, discussing it soberly and maturely.



I think it’s interesting that the first time the team acts like a team, they’re all looking at Snart. This team needs an effective leader; if Snart says he’ll handle it, he’ll handle it; he solves the Mick problem and they move on.

So what does that turning point mean?

They were betrayed as a team, they responded as a team, Snart flat-out tells Mick he betrayed the team so even he feels a part of something now. The fight with the pirates and Mick’s betrayal is the crucible that forges the first real team bonds, but it also makes them a little nervous around Snart. Because he’ll handle them if they screw up, too.

So they go into Act Two sadder but wiser about team relationships, but no wiser about Savage. Their team character arc is moving but their main plot is a joke. Imagine if they’d made progress in each of those seven episodes, learned something so that each time they faced Savage again they got closer, did him more damage, found some way to inhibit his regeneration, anything so that there was a sense of forward movement in the plot instead of each episode starting with “Where in the world is Vandal Savage?” You build the forward movement in a plot incrementally, so they don’t need to defeat him each time, they just need to learn more each time, move the game pieces closer to the finish line.

ACT TWO

Episode 8: “Night of the Hawk”

A lot of this episode is fun because Vandal Savage finally does something interesting: he turns a trio of 50’s era teenagers into giant fanged ravens in an effort to build a bird army to fight the Hawks. This seems like overkill since the Hawks have the survival skills of parakeets, but at least Savage has a plan. So we get a fifties horror movie complete with an asylum with a restricted wing, Space Ranger Stein as a psychiatrist and a small but lovely subplot about lesbian nurses (that would be Sara and Lindsey). Also Ray and Kendra go undercover as a married couple. In 1958. Nine years before the Loving decision. I’m sure nobody will notice. Stein loves the time period, calling it idyllic, and Jax and Sara remind him that’s because he’s white, male, and straight. Meanwhile Rip and Snart are FBI agents come to investigate the slasher murders. They’re still bickering, all of them, but they’re working efficiently together. Jax gets a date with the Peggy Sue whose boyfriend disappeared (turned into a giant fanged raven), Ray and Kendra move into their ranch house and dance, Sara shuts down a lecherous doctor who’s harassing a nurse, who appreciates it (that would be Lindsey). And wouldn’t you know it, Vandal Savage is not only the head doctor at the mental hospital, he’s Ray and Kendra’s neighbor across the street. The coincidence is strong in this one. Also, everybody’s a little edgy around Snart. Lindsey kisses Sara.

Then Jax gets turned into a giant fanged raven and Snart refuses to kill him, and Stein creates a giant-fanged-raven serum that cures him. Stein calls Snart a hero and Jax tells him that now he understands he was just protecting the team. Snart throws up in his mouth a little (I may have read that between the lines.) Oh, and they don’t kill Savage because Kendra is terrible at killing people, not only losing the knife to Savage but needing to be rescued when he turns it on her.

Then Chronos boards the ship, kidnapping Snart and forcing Rip, Jax, and Stein to abandon Sara, Ray, and Kendra in 1958. With Savage.

That’s bad.

What have we learned from this episode that moves the plot forward and will help the team against Savage next time?

[Crickets.]

Well, points for giant fanged ravens anyway.

Episode 9: “Left Behind”

Chronos sabotages the Waverider and leaves with Snart as a captive. Rip fixes the sabotage by rebooting Gideon (“Have you tried turning it off and on?”) but the ship crashes into the temporal zone. Yeah, I don’t know what that means, either. Meanwhile, Sara, Ray, and Kendra are stuck in the fifties. Ray rigs up a time beacon so the rest of the team can find them, and it blows up. Sara blows up, too: She’s sure the rest of the team is dead and she’s leaving.

Two years later, Ray gives Kendra the time beacon to destroy before he proposes, but it activates instead. The Waverider comes back for them. Kendra’s thrilled, Ray’s hurt she’s thrilled. She’s a black woman from the 21st century, Ray, why would she want to stay in the freaking fifties? They go to find Sara who’s back in Nanda Parbat with the League of Assassins, which is fine because Rip knows all about the League, he did his master’s thesis on it. (REALLY? There’s more handwaving in this show than a Broadway musical.) In Nanda Parbat, Sara attacks them and imprisons them to be executed shortly.

Now the only team member who isn’t in imminent danger of dying is the missing Snart, who wakes up somewhere ship-like cuffed to a metal bar. He asks Chronos what the hell is going on; Chronos takes off his helmet and its Mick. For once, Snark is speechless. (There’s a mini-flashback of Snark firing on Mick and deliberately missing.) Mick says the Time Masters found him and took him to a place out of time, the Vanishing Point, where he spent “lifetimes” being brainwashed and trained to work for them as a bounty hunter. His plan is to kill the team and then take Snart back home so he can kill Snart’s little sister Lisa over and over again in front of him. Yeah, Mick’s in a bad place.



Back in Nanda Parbat, Kendra and Sara fight as champions for their groups and Sara remembers who she is. Which is good because Cronos attacks. Back on the ship, Snart manages to get his freeze gun and fires on his cuffs, freezing them and his hand. When he still can’t break the cuffs, he smashes his frozen hand into flesh cubes. There’s screaming. The League releases the crew and they defeat Chronos just as Snart staggers in and shouts, “Don’t kill him!” They take Mick back to the ship and put him in the brig where he swears he’ll kill all of them and Gideon grows Snart a new hand, a brand new kind of handwaving (I know, I know).

What have we learned from this episode that moves the plot forward and will help the team against Savage next time?

The team’s separation gives them each the opportunity to choose joining the team, this time in full knowledge of what they’re getting into, they find out Snart didn’t kill Mick so they trust him, and the team together decides to rehabilitate Mick instead of executing him because he’s part of the team.

Go, team.

No, really, that will help move the plot because they’ll stop dicking around with their personal beefs and get serious.

Plus there’s only one mini-flashback as Snart remembers firing past Mick instead of at him. I’ll allow it.

Episode 10 – “Progeny”

The team travels to a dystopian future where they refuse to kill a child who will unleash a terrible virus that wipes out most of the world’s population and enables Vandal Savage to conquer everyone because the world has been weakened by the disease. They don’t do it because killing a child would be wrong (and those billions of other kids who are going to die because they don’t kill this one?). Also, Ray and Kendra discuss the relationship (LONG FLASHBACK WITH HAWKS), Mick’s in the brig enraged, Snart and Sara are efficient as they help Rip kidnap the monster child, Ray has a meltdown over a child he didn’t know he had, Kendra has another FLASHBACK, Gideon tells them that kidnapping the kid hasn’t changed the future, Sara tells Mick that Snart saved him and Mick snarls, Rip takes the kid and leaves the ship, Kendra has another FLASHBACK, Ray finds out he didn’t have a kid after all, Rip wimps out and doesn’t kill the monster child. Sara confronts Snart about Mick–“Stop being an ass and go deal with him”–and Snart goes. “People seem to think we should have a heart to heart,” he tells Mick. “We don’t have hearts,” Mick says. “Where does that leave us?” Snart offers him a fight to the death. Mick says yes, and . . .

Then for some reason the writers cut to Ray and Kendra discussing their relationship. They’re not just boring, they’re IN THE WAY. Vandal tells the monster child to kill his father. WHO CARES? The monster child kills his father early and Savage releases the virus early. Well, that’s just great.

Meanwhile Mick and Snart beat the hell out of each other and Mick puts Snart on his back. “Kill me,” Snart says, “That’s what you want.” “I don’t know what I want,” Mick says. So much for therapy, just beat the crap out of each other and bond again. And anyway, it doesn’t matter, Mick says; since he didn’t bring the team in, the Time Masters will send out four killers to kill them all, mercenaries called The Hunters. He gives the assembled team the details and then says, “Run.”

What have we learned from this episode that moves the plot forward and will help the team against Savage next time?

The really big leap forward: Mick’s had decades (centuries?) as time maater bounty hunter, so now he’s the MVP on the team: he knows everything about the Time Masters and time ships and the time stream and the Vanishing Point, in fact, now we don’t need Rip.

Another small but important move: When Sara talks to Snart about Mick and says, “What are your feelings?” Snart says, “About you?” which is almost talking about the relationship they don’t have. Sara says, “About Mick,” so that’s their entire relationship conversation: Two words. Ray and Kendra, listen and learn. That’s important because what Snart is going to do in the penultimate episode is crucial to the main plot and it needs to be incrementally set up. Turns out Captain Canary is part of the main plot after all.

And, finally, the entire team’s back together again, everybody choosing to be there with full knowledge and free will.

The next two episodes don’t do much to advance the Savage plot, which I think is why they’re pretty good stories. Here’s my theory about that:

When somebody attacks the team, they make a plan, work together, and defeat the bad guys; they’re efficient and effective.

When they chase Vandal Savage, they’re idiots.

So the good news is, they’re under attack in the next two episodes. The bad news is, after that they go back to chasing Savage.

Next up:

Act Three which is where the team moves into higher stakes conflicts (a lot of people are trying to kill them to stop them) and find out new information that makes everybody want to kill the writers slowly with dull spoons. At this point the team is well enough established that the writers can have a lot of fun with characters not named Kendra or Rip, which they do in the first two, “The Magnificent Eight” and “Last Refuge.” Then they go back to fighting Savage, but let’s just enjoy the fun stuff first.

The post Intermission: Plotting A Team Story appeared first on Argh Ink.

Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch: Episode 7 “Marooned” by Anderson Mackenzie & Phil Klemmer

The Legends team did pretty well in Russia, and they were coming together nicely when they crash-landed in 2065, and Mick wanted to stay, and Snart pressganged him back onto the ship. That’s going to be a test of character-in-action in this episode as the two most dangerous team members face a break in their long-term partnership that endangers the entire team–

Oh, look, a flashback.

Flashbacks are the wirehangers of linear storytelling because they kill story momentum. And since “Marooned” is an episode with interesting things happening for individual character arcs, relationship arcs, plot arcs, and general good storytelling, the flashbacks here qualify as First Degree Murder, perpetrated by the memories of Rip Hunter, Worst Team Leader Ever.

I refuse to discuss the flashbacks in this episode because they are there to deepen our sympathy for Rip in losing his brilliant but chipper wife, but were evidently written by a bunch of guys who thought that a woman infinitely brighter than the man she loved resigning the job she loved so he could have it was a good idea. “No, no, dear, you be a Time Master and I’ll give birth and sit around waiting for you and then be fridged by Vandal Savage so you can feel motivating guilt in the now of the story.” I’m a little bitter about Rip’s back story. There’s also a plot point where Rip saves the day by copying the move his wife made in the flashback, which just underscores that the Wrong Person Is In Charge.

But on to the main storyline of the episode which is great, featuring team bonding and partnership evolution and all kinds of good stuff IN ACTION. Be still, my story wonk heart.

The story opens with Rip repeatedly watching a hologram of his dead wife and child, his wife telling him that things are bad and she just wants to know that he’s all right. Turns out that Rip’s been holed up in the ship’s library doing that for a week. Worst Team Leader Ever. This foreshadows all the freaking flashbacks that are going to kneecap this episode. One important bit of information (that never comes up again in future episodes) is that Gideon, the ship’s computer, needs a software update.

Then we cut to Sara and Snart playing gin while Mick rages, still furious with Snart, made worse by time-ship cabin fever. He stomps off as the timeship Acheron sends a distress signal from deep space, which is Rip’s chance to get a software update. Sara and Snart point out that this could be a trap, but Rip overrules them: they need the update from the Acheron’s computer to find Savage, and everything is probably fine.

(It’s a trap.)

Snart tries to connect with Mick again–“Anything to steal on that ship?”–and Mick shuts him down. Rip, Mick, Jax, and Martin go out to the Acheron on the jump ship, Rip splitting his team up once again, although at least this time it makes sense since they’re just going for a computer update and somebody has to stay on the ship since they’re in space. Bonus: On board the jumpship, Martin shares his childhood dreams of being a Space Ranger. Then Gideon tells Rip (now it tells him?) that there’s something wrong on the Acheron, so Rip tells Martin to stay behind on the jump ship, splitting the team again. Martin says, “Break out the emergency gear. Space Ranger . . . has a job . . . to do.” And suddenly I love Professor Martin Stein. (That he’s played by Victor Garber does not hurt.)

FLASHBACK

Yes, really. It’s not enough to split up the team, let’s split the narrative, too.

Rip, Jax, and Snart join the Acheron and find out it’s been taken over by Time Pirates who are looking for a Time Master.

TIME PIRATES! IN DEEP SPACE! YES!!!

An annoyed Mick says, “Do I look like a Time Master to you?” and the head pirate, Valor, says, “You look like the kind of man who’d throw his grandmother out of an airlock.” Head Pirate Valor is clearly a keen judge of character. Rip says he’s that not a Time Master, either, and Head Pirate Valor laughs because everybody knows who the great Rip Hunter is. (Really? Is there another one? Because this guy is the Worst Team Leader Ever.) Rip explains that he’s trying to save the universe so he and Head Pirate are on the same side. Head Pirate Valor says, “That little slogan should come with its own shovel.” I love Head Pirate Valor.

And now I’m having fun because this is good stuff: Real conflict, in action, moving fast, and the dialogue is part of the conflict, sharp and equally fast. And that’s even before I remember that Sara and Snart are back on the ship and Space Ranger Stein is suiting up in the jump ship because even if they argue and bitch a lot, I’m pretty sure they’re all going to be in the nobody-hits-my-brother-but-me camp.

For right now, unaware that disaster looms on the Acheron, Ray is flirting with Kendra which is annoying, and Sara is trying to warn Snart that Mick’s going to be trouble, which is important but still not team-like. Then Head Pirate Valor calls in and tells Ray to surrender the ship, threatening to kill Rip. I’m okay with that, but Rip turns out to have a code word that makes the Waverider fire on the Acheron, which Snart objects to because Mick is on that ship.

Meanwhile, Space Ranger Stein boards the Acheron secretly . . .

Head Pirate Valor puts a hole in the side of the Waverider that slowly disables the life support systems, and Sara and Snart run to fix it while the Acheron tries to fire again, but the weapons system has been taken offline–SPACE RANGER STEIN FOR THE WIN!–and Rip sends another code word to the ship. Rip is being . . . effective. Huh.

Snart and Sara can only partially fix the hole in the hull, so Gideon seals off that bulkhead, trapping them on the wrong side of the bulkhead doors, which means that it’s getting cold in there, what with deep space leaking in. I would assume the oxygen is also leaking out, so I have no idea what they’re breathing, but the writers aren’t worried about it so I’ll just go with “some kind of air.”

Rip ends up in the brig with the captain of the Acheron, who bitches Rip out. Normally, I’d be for this, but if she’d been a good captain, the pirates wouldn’t have escaped from the brig, captured her ship, and lured the Waverider crew in to be captured, so really, lady, you’re nobody to talk. And then, just as I’m starting to feel sympthetic for Rip . . .

FLASHBACK.

I don’t know what it says about Rip’s wife that getting bitched out by the Acheron’s captain triggers her memory, but it’s not good. Of course, if I’d been married to Rip Hunter, I’d have killed him in his sleep, so I really can’t criticize.

Then we’re back with Sara and Snart, freezing to death. Snart asks Sara what it’s like to die since she did that once, and she says it’s lonely: “I mean, I don’t like you, but at least I’m not dying alone.” Snart says that the closest he ever came to dying was his first day in juvie when somebody pulled a shiv on him and Mick saved him. “He’s been standing up for me ever since.”

So Sara and Snart are talking about things that happened to them, not how they feel, but their quiet conversation as they huddle together for warmth tells you more about how they feel than the ten thousand words the Hawks have squandered on each other. Especially strong are the things Snart isn’t saying about Mick, his story communicating how crucial his partnership with Mick is to him. This is the way to do dialogue.

Back on the ship, Martin mugs a pirate and takes his beret: “That’ll teach you to mess with a nuclear physicist.” I love Space Ranger Stein.

Ray suits up and goes into deep space to fix the hole in the hull from the outside, bantering with Kendra about who’s in charge, while Snart and Sara slowly freeze to death.

Back in the brig on the Acheron, Mick and Rip snipe at each other, Jax tries to come between them, and Rip makes the ENORMOUS mistake of telling Mick that the only reason he recruited him was because he and Snart were a package deal, telling him he has the IQ of meat. Because alienating the strongest member of the boarding crew, DIVIDING the boarding crew, is a great move right now. Rip Hunter, WORST TEAM LEADER EVER. Mick bangs on the door and offers to parlay with the pirates. “I may have the IQ of meat, but I know how to cut a deal.”

Mick makes a deal with Valor to help him board the Waverider in exchange for Valor taking him back to 2016 at the exact moment Rip recruited them so he can say no, which would keep Snart from going, too. He’s mad at Snart, but he wants the partnership back and he’s willing to betray everybody else to get it. Go, team.

Ray continues fixing the hull but his oxygen level is dropping, which makes him talk slower as he starts to pass out, which does not make him any more interesting.

Back in the hold, Snart has (between the scene changes) given Sara his coat. (I love it that it’s between the scene changes, no big deal made of it because Snart wouldn’t have made a big deal of it). They huddle together for warmth, and Snart starts talking about regrets, his big one not leaving Mick in 2065 as he wanted. Sara asks, “Why didn’t you?” and Snart says, “Without me to keep him in check . . . Mick can be a scary guy.” “Agreed,” Sara says. “Hate to break it to you, but even if we make it out of here alive, you’re still going to have a problem on your hands. I’ve seen enough to know that Mick’s in a dark place. And he’s not coming back.” Snart doesn’t answer, but that may be because it’s too cold even for Captain Cold.

Back in the Acheron brig, Rip is talking about failing to save his family again, which leads to

FLASHBACK.

(Jesus wept.)

Ray finishes the hull while Kendra tries to keep him awake by asking him inane questions, making Ray’s near-death experience tedious and boring. Ray passes out and drifts off into space, which would be bad except he drifts into the airlock somehow. No idea how. Still he’s dead so Kendra has to do TV CPR by smacking him in the chest. He comes back to life, which is no surprise to anybody.

More good news: Ray has repaired the hull so Sara and Snart aren’t freezing to death anymore. Gideon tells them it’s received a message from the Acheron that Mick has escaped and is coming back. Snart says, “Told ya. Those pirates picked the wrong guy to mess with.”

That line is so much sadder than Ray almost dying that the two things should not have happened in the same five minutes.

Mick boards the Waverider with the pirates and faces Snart, Sara, Kendra, and Ray, which is the first time those four have looked like a team. “Boys,” Mick says to the pirates, “the ship’s all yours.”

If you’ve been following the Snart-Mick subplot, you’d think this would be the low point. You’d be wrong because the writers are savage with this story, but this is pretty damn bad.

Snart: What are you doing, Mick?

Mick: Getting us home. Are you in?

Snart: (walks toward him until he’s halfway between the two groups and boots up his cold gun): Yeah. Time to choose a side, I guess.

He looks at the Waverider team and then at Mick and the pirates.

Snart: Chosen.

He fires on Mick and the pirates.

You know what I love about this, aside from the fact that I really wasn’t completely sure which way he’d go? It dramatizes the big split in the midway point of this subplot. They don’t talk about it, Snart just fires. Nothing else this show does in the first season is as good as the Snart-Mick story, with the possible exception of the Sara/Snart stuff.

And then there’s fighting:

Big fight on the Waverider, Mick and the pirates against the Snart, Sara, Kendra, and Ray.

Back on the Acheron, Space Ranger Stein releases Rip and the others from the brig on the Acheron. Big Fight on the Acheron.

Back on the Waverider, the team is kicking pirate minion butt.

Back on the Acheron, Rip faces down Valor.

Back on the Waverider, Ray and Kendra smack around some pirates, and Sara and Mick meet as Mick tries to steal the time drive. She says, “Step away from it, Mick.” He says, “Tell you what, Blondie. Walk away and I won’t kill you.” (For Mick, that’s like “I love you.”) Sara attacks and they fight.

Back on the Acheron, Rip beats up Valor.

Back on the Waverider, Mick shoots Sara in the arm, which shows he REALLY likes her because he’d have killed anybody else.

Back on the Acheron, Rip uses his wife’s plan to suck the pirates out into space.

Back on the Waverider, Snart shows up in the engine room to face Mick. Before they can kill each other, Gideon announces that the pirates on the Acheron have been sucked into space and those on the Waverider have been defeated. Mick’s plan is done; Valor can’t take him back to 2016 now. Mick looks up at his former partner and says, “What are you going to do, Snart?”

I love this subplot with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. It’s about two people who need each other desperately and who are irretrievably broken, and it’s all been done in action, the little bit of dialogue used to advance it oblique, shadowing the emotion under the surface. The conflict is great because I want both sides to survive, but they’re caught in a crucible and only one can win. It’s just great writing.

Then there’s some anti-climax:

The captain of the Acheron gives Rip the computer update he needs, telling him to head for Oregon in 1958.

FLASHBACK.

(That banging sound is my head against the TV screen.)

Kendra kisses Ray. I don’t care.

And then back to the real story: There’s a team meeting, and for the first time in the entire series, they’re behaving like a team as they try to figure out what to do with Mick. They’re all serious, they’re all focused on the same problem, they’re all trying to find a way to solve it together. “Why don’t we just drop him back in 2016?” Ray says. “Because my sister lives in 2016,” Snart says. “And your sister,” he says, looking at Sara. “And your wife,” he says, looking at Martin. “I’ll handle it.” “By ‘handle it,’ you mean murder,” Martin says. “I said, I’ll handle it,” Snart says.

The last scene is Snart dragging Mick through a night-dark wilderness somewhere. He kicks him awake.

Mick: I told you that’d be the last time you hit me.

Snart: (booting up his cold gun): You were right.

Mick: That the plan? Take me out in the middle of nowhere, where no one can find the body?

Snart: I wish there were some other way, Mick. But you’re dangerous. A liability to the team.

Mick: Team! You and I were a team. What happened to you?

Snart: People change.

Mick: You think you’re some kind of hero. But deep down you’re still the same punk kid I saved in juvie. You haven’t got the guts. You want to kill me? Kill me. Only one of us is walking out of here alive.

Snart (tears in his eyes): You’re right.

He fires.

And that’s the end which is good because that’s pretty much a mic drop. It’s a huge help that Purcell and Miller are such good actors, but the writing here is equally good, spare and intense, finally putting into words everything that’s been building through the first act of the story, finally making it explicit that Mick thinks Snart has switched teams, that the people on the Waverider ARE a team. The characters say only what absolutely has to be said, Mick in a rage and Snart in hell because he knows what he has to do. It’s practically Old Yeller.

How I’d Fix This Episode:

Cut the flashbacks. Ray and Kendra are a little boring but not dealbreakers, but those flashbacks make my teeth hurt.

What I Learned From This For Nita’s Story:

Pay attention to the supporting characters and layer in those subplots.

So far Button and Mort are just along for the ride; they both have issues but no real conflict. That means I can use those issues to make subplots so that they’re as real and rounded as Nick and Nita. Dag has a romantic subplot that’s fairly standard, but I think he and Daphne are more interesting than Ray and Kendra (for one thing, he’s a demon), so I’m okay running a standard romance on that one.

Keep the emotion under the dialogue, not the subject of it.

There’s always a moment, I think, where emotions have to be directly addressed, but not at length and only when they’ve been ripped out of the characters by the action. Otherwise, discussing feelings just reduces them to words and makes them banal. We don’t understand emotions, we feel them, and we should do the same thing experiencing story. At some point, both Nita and Nick are going to have to say what they feel, but only when they’ve been pushed to the limit at a point where they’re forced to.

Build the team by giving them not just a common enemy, but a common enemy who attacks them.

I knew a common antagonist was a great uniter, but until I watched this episode it never dawned on me that the way to make a character a common antagonist was to have him or her attack the entire team and force them to work together to save themselves. Before this episode, the action was initiated by Rip and the team followed along bitching, a kind of violent field trip. This time, they’re forced to pick a side, be a team, and a lot of the juvenile stuff just went away. So I can see Nita, who feels like she’s in charge of the island, and Nick, who has a Master of the Universe complex (understandable since he’s about to become the Devil) not grasping the idea of teamwork until its thrust upon them.

Good writing makes any idea work.

So I have to write good. Check.

NEXT: We take an intermission on watching episodes to talk about That Subplot and episodic plot structure in general

The post Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch: Episode 7 “Marooned” by Anderson Mackenzie & Phil Klemmer appeared first on Argh Ink.

Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch: Episode 4 “White Knights” by Sarah Nicole Jones & Phil Klemmer, and Episode 5 “Fail-Safe” by Beth Schwartz & Grainne Godfree

This double episode is a good team story that’s mostly a lot of fun, but before we get into why, let’s talk about plot and subplot in team stories.

Team stories are naturals for subplots because the supporting characters of the team (assuming the team leader is the protagonist) are naturals for protagonists of smaller plots that support the main conflict. The key is “support the main plot.” The main plot of Legends is about saving family, changing the past and future, risking everything for an outcome that’s worth dying for. So any subplot should echo that to reinforce it, reverse it to act as a foil or contrast, or play off of it in some other way that enhances and deepens it. Let’s look at those potential subplots, taking one team member at a time.

The Hawk: Carter’s dead and that makes Kendra sad even though her memory is spotty on the whole endless-love-through-time thing. She could be an echo to Rip, mercilessly pursuing Savage through time to kill him before he can kill Carter, but she just doesn’t have the oomph. She’s lovely and she’s sweet and she’s sad, but the only strong emotion she sells is when she hawks out and starts slashing Pentagon guards as a savage demi-goddess, and even then she just looks like she’s having a spot of bad PMS. Kendra just doesn’t have the passion to support a subplot at this point, and since we’re on episode four, it’s getting late in the game to start one. (Unfortunately she starts one later.)

Then there’s Martin and Jax, still bitching at each other about who’s in charge. This could actually be a subplot if it had anything to do with the main plot, but it doesn’t because their arguing never stops them from becoming Firestorm and fighting the good fight. They’re annoyed with each other, but they have the same goal–to fight the bad guys–so instead of having a compelling conflict that echoes the main conflict, they’re just those annoying guys who bitch at each other in the background until they come through and save the day, which is a real shame because the actors deserve better.

Which brings us to Ray. He has a navel-gazing internal conflict that does not make a subplot, it just makes him alternately endearing and annoying and an excellent foil for Snart and Mick, who calls him “Haircut.” There is hope for Ray in Episode Five because he becomes a supporting figure in somebody else’s escalating subplot. Unfortunately, shortly after that he becomes a major character in Kendra’s stolid subplot, which circles the drain endlessly. Ray cannot catch a break.

Like Ray, Sara’s subplot is mostly internal—she has that blood lust problem that overwhelms her sometimes when she’s fighting—but Sara has so much control that I never really buy this as a problem or even a complication.

[image error]And then there are the wild cards of the team. Snart and Mick start a subplot here that is so much better than the main plot that I’d like a supercut of season one that’s just them. These loners formed a team of two a long time ago, Snart’s cold, calculating, emotionless intellect balancing Mick’s hot temper and animal nature, each providing the other support and connection. They are bonded in a way nobody else on the team is, trusting each other completely. But traveling through time begins to change Snart; through his interactions with Sara, he becomes more human. And it changes Mick; because of his frustration and anger, he becomes more out of control, even more of an animal. It’s not that Sara or the mission comes between them, it’s that they evolve away from each other, and their efforts to hold onto the partnership that’s so important to both of them leads them to try to drag the other person over to their new way of thinking. That struggle builds their conflict into a subplot that threatens to overwhelm the main plot because it’s so much more interesting.

That subplot begins in the two Russia episodes we’re looking at here, when the pressures of the action of the story drive Mick to defy Snart to save Ray, and Snart to leave Mick to save Sara. It doesn’t break the team, but it puts a crack in their bond, one that steadily widens in each subsequent episode of the story until at the point of no return in their story, they become enemies, the rest of their subplot completing a strong character arc for Snart and an astonishing one for Mick. (The character Mick most reminds me of is Fusco on Person of Interest, whose first appearance as a murderous thug doesn’t begin to hint at the layers he’ll achieve.) I didn’t care if Rip saved his family, but if Snart and Mick hadn’t managed to connect again at the end of the season, I’d have been seriously upset. This is the plot I’m invested in.

And this is why I get so frustrated with this series: all the discussion of feelings and the flashbacks smother the stuff that’s working beautifully here and could work beautifully in the main plot. The Snart/Mick subplot echoes Rip’s main plot because when they lose each other, they lose their most important human connections just as Rip did when his family died, and the fallout from that fuels their travels across time trying to right the wrongs they feel have been done to them and that they’ve done to each other in much the same way that Rip travels across time trying to kill Savage. “You took something from me,” both plots say, “And I’m going to get it back or get vengeance for it.” This subplot shows what the main plot could have been with a stronger, better written protagonist and antagonist.

I know, get over it, Jenny, it is what it is. Back to this post’s episodes.

We’re looking at a double episode set mostly in Russia, and once again, the MVPs in these episodes are Mick, Snart, and Sara, with a side helping of Ray not being annoying. Also not annoying: Martin going solo and doing his damnedest to survive in a situation that’s way out of his league. Without Jax to patronize, Martin is great. And in fairness to Jax, without Martin to whine about, Jax is also terrific, making smart decisions back on the ship. That means that six of the team are doing good work here, while Kendra and Rip are still annoying and Carter is still dead. You know what’s a good size for a team? Six.

Episode 4, “White Knights,” starts in the eighties with the team breaking into the Pentagon where Snart dazzles a woman in uniform and lifts her key card and her wallet, handing the card off to Sara, looking good in similar uniform, who uses the card to steal the file they need which she can do because Mick creates a diversion. This is Leverage, the Time Traveling Team: Three efficient, active people working together to get a document that will allow them to exploit a weakness of the antagonist. We like these people. We want to see them work together more. If something happened to destroy this team, we’d be upset. (Hint: We’re gonna be upset.)

Then Stein and Jax accidentally shut down the power system while arguing, and Kendra goes insane bird woman on the guards. Back on the ship, everybody bitches at each other. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

But the good news is that they’ve learned that Savage is in Cold War Russia. The bad news is that Chronos is following them, Ray quotes Top Gun, and they crash land. But nobody’s making an exposition speech and we’re staying in the now of the story, so I’m liking this a lot. Then Rip brings out ingestible translators so they can all speak Russian—“I’m speaking Russian, aren’t I?” Ray says, delighted. “Now you’re annoying in multiple languages,” Snart says—and they head out to the Russian opera. Ray tries to pick up a beautiful Russian physicist who shuts him down; Snart smiles at her and gets an invitation back to her place and a kiss. That’s fun. Not as much fun: back on the ship, Kendra whines about being a crazed demi-goddess and Sara tries to help her, although at least Sara’s idea of helping is kicking her ass. (Also good: an annoyed Sara calling her “Big Bird.”) Rip takes Mick out to fight Chronos and meets the Head Time Master for a lot of annoying expository dialogue, which a so-much-smarter-than-he-looks Mick points out is all lies: the guy’s going to try to kill them. I vote for Mick taking care of the lying Time Master and the story going back to Russia so Snart can get more action with the physicist (action is always better than dialogue).

But no, we’re back at the Soviet lab, where Stein goes against orders to steal a thermal core (because nobody listens to Rip, Worst Team Leader Ever), and Eagle Scout Ray makes Snart try to save the Soviet physicist who pulls a gun on him while a creepy Soviet officer knocks Ray out. For once the antagonists are deadlier than the exposition. Mick rescues Snart but then gets captured along with Stein and Ray while Snart steals the thermal core in a very nice action sequence, staying beautifully silent while he does so. Then Rip pulls everybody not captured back to the ship to talk to them again. Argh.

Sara and Snart point out that if Rip had just sent the whole team in, they wouldn’t be in this mess and vote for more action, less speech. Rip makes a speech explaining that Stein, Mick and Ray are now in a high security prison that it’s impossible to break out of and the first of this two-episode story ends on a cliffhanger, except that Wentworth Miller has four seasons of Prison Break under his belt, so no need to worry.

Episode 5, “Fail-Safe,” opens with Stein in prison under psychological attack by Savage, who tells Stein he learned about torture from Joseph Stalin. (Vandal, bragging about your famous friends is a form of performance anxiety. It makes you look flaccid. Stop that.) Gideon, the ship’s computer, tries to exposite all over the crew until Snart tells it to shut up and get to the point. Sara says they need to go to the Bratva, Snart approves, action ensues. There’s a lot of stuff going on, but it’s all about breaking the good guys out of prison and stopping Savage from making a Russian Firestorm, so it all works, and even the annoying members of the team are effective.

Plus there are a lot of great small moments in here, like Rip facing down the brutish head of the Bratva, and when it looks like the brute is going to attack, calling Snart in to fight for him; Snart says no and Rip has to fight a guy twice his size, pretty much getting his ass kicked while Sara’s outside fighting six Bratva guards, and Snart watches. I wondered at that point whether the writers weren’t as annoyed with Rip as I was, it was that much fun.

In fact, it’s pretty clear at this point that Sara, Snart, and Mick get all the good stuff. I think it might be intrinsic in their characters; they’re not physicists or time masters or tortured reincarnated goddesses, they’re killers and thieves, so they’re task-oriented, not theory expositors. They lay back snarking until there’s a problem and then they act, and they’d rather fight the Bratva than discuss their feelings. Not only that, the other characters improve when they interact with the Killer/Klepto/Pyro team:

• Ray’s earnestness can be wearing, but put him in a Russian prison with Mick, and it’s a Disney film about a puppy and a pit bull in the Russian pound.

• Rip is a pain in the ass, but put him together with Sara or Snart, and then watch while they alternately ignore him or slap him up side the head. Sara tends to push him to action while Snart just likes watching him twist in the wind, but Rip is always better value when he’s with one of them.

• Martin and Jax don’t wrangle as much when Sara becomes the third in the group because she doesn’t have time for that crap and because she keeps the action moving; she also tends to connect with Jax since they’re close to the same age and to affectionately tease Martin as a grumpy grandpa, making that team dynamic fun.

•Not even Sara can make Kendra fun, and Mick and Snart avoid her like the plague, which is interesting all in its own.

So the team is forming those needed interrelated bonds, they’re just forming them through the three most action-oriented team members. Hmmm, action. Maybe that’s key? ARGH.

But back to our story. Finally provoked to act by Sara and Snart, Rip sends them in for the rescue, first pulling Sara aside to tell her to kill Martin if she can’t get him free from the Russians. Worst Team Leader Ever.

Fortunately, Snart knows what a putz Rip is, and he argues with Sara, telling her not to kill Martin in a good sharp scene. The strongest parts of the rest of this episode are the intense interactions between Sara and Snart, and between Mick and Ray, about concrete actions in the now, not about exposition or back story. Snart talks Sara out of killing Stein, and Mick refuses to leave Ray because Ray took a beating for him. Meanwhile Rip sits around waiting for Sara to kill Stein until Jax and Kendra convince him to let them help. After that, it’s all action all the time and the good guys win, blowing up Vandal Savage.

Who is immortal.

It’s like they’re missing the point here

The Rip vs Savage main plotline is always going to be a loser for so many reasons, but since this episode focuses on a clear goal and antagonist, it rises above the awful premise. In particular, it’s full of character and important relationship developments demonstrated in action that begin to evolve into that legitimately important Mick-Snart subplot that’s really fun here in its early stages because of two new relationships that we get to see the start of (and therefore invest in):

• Mick and Ray: Mick’s not happy about being stuck aboard a timeship and wants off. He’s not a team kind of guy, and now his partner is connecting with others on the team, and it’s making him tense. So he stays detached from Ray when they end up in prison together, ignoring him while he’s getting beat up in the prison yard. But then Ray distracts the guard about to torture Mick and takes that beating for him and Mick recognizes a debt. He defies his partner Snart to save Ray, and he begins a tentative bond, not just because Ray took the beating but because Mick has been watching Ray in action, bumbling most of the time but steadfast and true. Mick thinks Ray’s a schmuck, but now he’s Mick’s schmuck.

• Snart and Sara: After Snart watched Sara dance and beat up bikers in the seventies, he began flirting with her as only he would do: distantly but intensely with eye contact and body language and without any emotion whatsoever; he’s the coldest Hot Guy in the history of the CW. By the fifth episode they’ve seen each other in action enough to respect each other even when they disagree and know each other well enough to correct each other’s courses. That would be enough to make them the natural leaders of the team, but Snart adds character growth to the mix: his loyalty to Sara is much newer than his bond with Mick, but the man he’s evolving into is much more Sara’s partner than Mick’s now. And since Lotz and Miller have strong screen chemistry, their bond is also romantic in the least romantic way possible: they’re two emotionally damaged porcupines thinking about possibly maybe probably not mating someday after they’ve saved the world and are done playing gin but definitely never discussing their feelings about it. The romantic aspect of their relationship is subtle, communicated in body language and small details in action, and yet it’s one of the most intense relationships on TV; infinitely more powerful than all that “We’re destined to be together if Vandal Savage would just stop killing us so let’s discuss it a lot” Hawk Love that doesn’t work at all. Okay, I’m a romance novelist so I’d be all over this anyway, but this is a terrific subplot within a subplot.

And yet both of these relationships are secondary to the Mick/Snart partnership. It’s fun to watch Mick bond with Ray, really fun to watch Snart flirt/not flirt with Sara, but the emotional heft is in the conflict between Cold and Heatwave, and the tension is in waiting for them to explode. (Okay, there’s a lot of tension waiting for Sara and Snart to explode, too.)

How I’d fix this episode:

Rip would get laryngitis, and Sara and Snart would take over the mission.

Okay, the truth is, I like this double episode, so I’d cut the exposition and the whining and leave everything else.

What I learned from this that will help with Nita’s story:

Build inner team relationships through action subplots.

A team is the sum of its parts, and the team’s bond is the sum of its inter-relationships, so using the most compelling of those relationships as subplots not only intensifies the main plot–there’s a lot more to lose if you have a special bond with your teammate–it provides a chance for variation in the kind of stories that can be told and spurs character arc. The Snart/Mick partnership is the strongest relationship on the team, the Sara/Snart dynamic is the most fun to watch, but the Mick/Ray stuff is also great, plus it’s another indication that Mick is going to be more than just dumb muscle and a smart mouth. So I need to look beyond the Nita/Nick relationship to see Mort and Rab, Button and Max, Mammon and Vince, and all the other connections that form and pull the team together.

In a story with multiple major characters, start the character arcs with simple basic characters and then arc them through the action of the story and through the relationships the character forms. In a single protagonist story, you can hit the ground running with a complex character, but in a single-protagonist-with-a-team story, you need to sketch in the team as quickly as possible, differentiating them as much as possible. I used to do one rewrite at the end where I went through and read the story from the point of view of every significant supporting character, checking to make sure they were alive and acting like themselves whenever they appeared. I think maybe I have to do that at the end of the first draft instead, maybe approaching them the way an actor would: I’m portraying this character, and this character has to do certain things; how can I make this interesting and new and distinctive so my character is alive on the screen page without unbalancing or derailing the story? For Nita, that means finding out who Mort and Button are, who Dag and Rab are, who Mammon and Max and Sequins are, and then pulling the team from them.

Develop those relationships through action and body language, not through talking about feelings. Seeing Lotz and Miller doing the small physical things that sell a relationship arc was a reminder to put that body language on the page in little details, in particular repeated moments that show that they’re developing a pattern together (the card games, Sandra Bullock’s “Beets, beets, beets!” in Three Weeks Notice, etc.), but also in the small acts that show they know and understand each other. Mick and Ray sell their really-not-a-friendship the same way.

We’re skipping Episode 6 “Star City 2046” by Marc Guggenheim & Ray Utarnachitt

If you’re an Arrow fan, this is fun. If you’re not, you’re just left wondering why these guys with arrows are fighting guys with guns, why they have an underground lair, and why Sara is so invested in saving Oliver Queen’s ancient ass (he was her sister’s boyfriend, she slept with him on his yacht which was blown up by Malcolm Merlyn. after which she ended up a lab rat/slave to a mad scientist until Oliver blew up his ship, at which point she was rescued by the daughter of the head of the League of Assassins with whom she fell in love and was trained by the League and worked with them killing people until she came home to screw up Oliver’s life again and fight beside him only to be killed by Oliver’s little sister who was under hypnosis by Malcolm Merlyn, and then dug up by her own sister and Oliver’s regretful little sister and taken back to the League of Assassins who put her in the Lazarus Pit and raised her from the dead, only she came back from the dead a crazed killer driven by blood lust, which she’s now trying to keep under control as she travels through time making eye contact with Leonard Snart and cleaning up after the Worst Team Leader Ever. You’re welcome.)

Meanwhile, after being trapped on the Waverider, the only place he can’t set anything on fire, Mick loves the lawlessness of 2046 and goes a little nuts; as Sara says later, it’s like Disneyland for him. So after the team saves the city and puts the Green Arrow back into action, Mick refuses to leave. The Snart who boarded the Waverider in the beginning would have probably joined him, but the evolving Snart can’t leave Sara and the team and can’t leave Mick, either, so he knocks him cold and drags him back on the ship.

This will have Consequences, but for once, they’re integral to the story, evoke excellent reversals, and arc not just the characters of Mick and Snart but stresses their crucial subplot to the breaking point. So there’s that.

Next: Time Pirates. So. Much. Fun. Except for the endless back story that pretty much demonstrates that Rip Hunter has always been the Worst Team Leader Ever, and which is therefore unnecessary because We Knew That. Also forging team bonds under pressure.

Also, here’s Caity Lotz on that body language that launched a thousand ‘shippers:

The post Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch: Episode 4 “White Knights” by Sarah Nicole Jones & Phil Klemmer, and Episode 5 “Fail-Safe” by Beth Schwartz & Grainne Godfree appeared first on Argh Ink.

Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch: Episodes 1 and 2: “Pilot” by Greg Berlanti & Marc Guggenheim & Andrew Kreisberg & Phil Klemmer

I don’t know when I decided I wanted to write a team story, but it was probably somewhere during my first watch of Leverage. And then the Nita story came along and it was clearly a team story in tandem with a romance, and I realized that I didn’t know how to write teams, and then I started watching Legends of Tomorrow . . .

The thing about Legends is that its flaws are so egregious that I can easily see what not to do, but once I peel those things away, its successes are so beautifully done that I can see how they work in contrast. So while I’ll be bashing the show a lot in these posts, I’m pretty sure I’ll always love the things it does brilliantly. It turns out, it’s well worth watching if you know what to look for.

So let’s start with the pilot. It’s mostly awful.

A team story is a lot like a regular story.

A regular classic linear story needs a strong protagonist with a clear goal opposed by a powerful antagonist who shapes the narrative by pushing back.

A team story needs a strong protagonist who assembles of team of people with complementary skills specific to achieving his goal which is opposed by a powerful antagonist who shapes the narrative by pushing back.

So Nate Ford convinces a grifter, a hitter, a hacker and a thief to go after the man who tried to kill four of them because he thought they were insignificant, and sticks with the team to go after other powerful people who prey on those they think are insignificant.

And Harold Finch finds a shattered government agent and invites him to share his sense of purpose, saving those the government thinks are insignificant, adding to that team as new skills are needed with people who share his sense that no life is insignificant.

And then there’s Rip Hunter, who wants to kill an immortal madman named Vandal Savage to prevent him killing Rip’s wife and child in the future.

This would probably work if it were a single-protagonist one-off story, but as a serialized team story, it’s horrible. Rip’s going to recruit a bunch of people to mess with history and kill somebody none of them know in order to prevent the deaths of people they don’t know because it affects him personally. It’s not that you can’t assemble a team for a one-time act of vengeance—Murder on the Orient Express does that pretty well—it’s that the team members have to share the leader’s sense of purpose and Rip doesn’t have one, he just wants his family back. This story is kneecapped from the beginning.

Okay, so we have a premise problem. We’re stuck with it, move on. Let’s look at how to open a team story.

The requirements for a good story opening are pretty simple: give us a protagonist we care about who has a goal he or she cares about and that therefore we do, too, so we have a reason to keep reading/watching. For the beginning of a team story, give us a leader we care about who assembles a team that we care about who have a mission they care about and that therefore we care about, too.

So we start with Rip Hunter (actually we start with a guy with an evil mustache, chewing burning scenery as he shoots a woman and child, but that’s so cartoonishly awful that I’m trying to block it out), standing in the middle of a dark auditorium yelling at a bunch of people we can’t see to convince them to help him stop some guy named Vandal Savage. Then we see him showing up in different places and zapping different people with some kind of flashy thing. And then we see all eight of those people waking up on an urban rooftop at night, where Rip tells them, “Of all the people I could have chosen, I chose you eight,” as if that makes kidnapping them something they should be grateful for. They’re not.

Dumbest way to assemble a team ever.

Now Rip has to motivate his kidnap victims, so he shows them the future in which their city and the world will burn unless they stop Savage, the immortal madman destined to conquer the earth. (I’d stop here and discuss how dumb a goal conquering the Earth is, but let’s just roll with that, we have bigger fish to dissect.) Rip explains that he knows this because he’s a Time Master (which should not be confused with a Time Lord) who can travel through time in his time ship, the Waverider (which should not be confused with a Tardis), making sure that time happens the way it’s supposed to because bad guys keep trying to mess with the timeline for selfish reasons. And that’s why Rip has assembled this team to mess with the timeline to stop Vandal Savage so he can get his family back regardless of the damage it has on the future after that.

Yes, my brain started to hurt about then, too. And there are questions somebody should have asked. Like if he needs a team, why doesn’t he ask other Time Masters instead of assembling this crew of weirdos and criminals who have no idea what he’s talking about? If Vandal Savage is immortal, just how are they going to stop him? And what plan does he have that requires these people and their particular skills?

Yeah, he never explains any of that. The eight people respond in varying ways to his call to adventure, but there’s a strong sense that they all sign on because the story says they have to, not because they want to, and Rip doesn’t seem to particularly care if they want to, he just wants them to sign up. Worse than that, there’s no pattern to their skill sets, and some of them don’t have skills at all. Look at this line-up:

The Hawks, Carter and Kendra, are reincarnated Egyptian winged demi-gods who are caught in an immortal triangle with Vandal Savage who loves Kendra who loves Carter who hates Vandal and so they battle through time, dying and being reincarnated to fight again. The score so far is 206 to 0, advantage Vandal. I’m supposed to find that tragic and it makes me laugh every time. He’s killed you TWO HUNDRED AND SIX TIMES? You guys are losers. Also Kendra is not happy about finding out that she’s a hawk demi-goddess because she’s a barista, damn it (you’d think demi-goddess would be a step up) and Carter is basically stalking her, telling her that they’re destined to be together even though she can’t remember him and patronizing her like it’s the third century BC. Definitely the black hole of the series, the Hawks talk endlessly about destiny and their relationship and generate the sexual heat of plywood: they may be bonded by destiny, but they’re still big blocks of wood. However, they have the same antagonist as Rip, so they sign on.

Ray Palmer is a genius billionaire who invented the Atom Suit. He’s a former Eagle Scout with confidence and relationship issues who just wants to be pals with everybody and who REALLY wants to be a hero. He’s pleasantly goofy in the beginning and then becomes annoying for awhile because a genius billionaire who looks like Brandon Routh constantly struggling with insecurity can be very wearing. He loves the idea of being a legend, so he signs up, too.

Professor Martin Stein, genius physicist, and Jefferson “Jax” Jackson, pretty smart garage mechanic, get kidnapped together because, thanks to a particle accelerator explosion, when they clasp hands they combine to form Firestorm, a nuclear superhero. Their problem is a power struggle—Stein keeps patronizing Jax, bossing him around and treating him like a child, and Jax is fed up. Stein wants to go with Rip because he’s a physicist and time travel would be astonishing; Jax doesn’t want to go because he’s twenty and he doesn’t want to die. They’re a package deal, so Stein drugs Jax and has him carried on board, pretty much making Jax’s point that Stein is unreasonable. Also, no sense of shared purpose.

Then there’s Sara Lance, a trained assassin whose back story is ridiculously convoluted, including dying and being raised from the dead with a blood lust problem. Sara is the first one of the bunch to actually have a toehold on that sense of purpose the team is missing: she’s killed a lot of people, she has trouble not killing in the heat of battle now, and there’s an undercurrent there that she wants to save people to make up for it. She definitely wants to save the city Rip shows her burning in the future because it’s her city. She joins for reasons that could make her a good team member.

Finally there’s Captain Cold and Heatwave, two amoral and possibly demented thieves. Leonard Snart carries a gun that freezes things and Mick Rory has a gun that’s a flame thrower, and they’re also excellent at picking pockets and locks, stealing things, and beating people up. On the plus side, these are useful skills. On the minus side, they have a problem with authority and they think Rip’s an idiot. They join up for the lamest of all possible reasons—it’s easier to steal stuff in the past before electronic locks and alarms—and they have absolutely no interest in saving Rip’s family or the future or becoming legends. Mick sums up their sense of purpose succinctly: “We hate work and we love money.” They’re gonna be a problem.

So we have a team leader with a narrow goal and no sense of purpose who kidnaps wildly different people with skill sets that do not complement each other and who do not share motivation or a sense of purpose and brings them on board a time ship to . . .

This next part is where my brain cells actively started to die. Rip’s a Time Master so he knows that screwing with time can have disastrous effects. Therefore he knows that the only time he can kill Savage to have the least impact on the timeline is right before he murders Rip’s family. After that the future is screwed, but hey, Rip’s family lives and that’s all he cares about. So what’s his plan throughout the first season? Travel to the seventies, travel to the fifties, travel to the eighties, travel to the ancient Egypt, pinballing through time and yelling at his team because they’re damaging the timeline in spite of the fact that he’s the one who carried them there for the direct purpose of changing the timeline and any idiot would know that turning these quarreling nutjobs lose on history would lead to screw-ups of massive proportions..

This makes no sense. The team he’s assembled makes no sense. Their skill sets make no sense. You want to know why this pilot is so bad? NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE.

Okay, we’re stuck with that. Moving on . . . Rip’s assembled these people, let’s watch him build them into a team through action so they can see each other’s skills and respect them, beginning to bond into a unit. That’s always the fun part of the beginning of a team story anyway.

Rip lands them in 1975 so they can talk to a Vandal Savage expert and immediately splits the team into two parts, telling Sara, Snart, and Mick they’re not getting off the ship with everybody else because he doesn’t need them on this mission. Rip Hunter, Worst Team Leader Ever. Snart says, “Meaning you don’t need anybody killed, maimed, or robbed,” which is the first skills summary given, and the first time that Sara’s put in a group with Snart and Mick. By telling them to stay on the ship because he doesn’t need their skills, Rip has neatly made them outsiders, inviting them to band together in opposition to the rest of the team. Thank god, they take him up on it, they’re going to be the closest thing to a real team this show has.

The rest of the team—minus Jax who’s still mad about being roofied—goes out into 1975 New Orleans which could have been a lot of fun except the guy they go to see is the elderly son of the Hawks in one of their previous incarnations, and he just wants to deliver exposition about them and Vandal Savage. There are flashbacks. Then the twenty-something Hawks bond with the sixty-something son they didn’t know they had. It’s supposed to be touching, but it’s excruciating instead. Why? We don’t care. There’s nothing about these people that is interesting. They talk about ideas, they don’t do anything. They talk about emotions, but they don’t demonstrate any. And Rip is stuck in Obnoxious Didactic Jerk mode so you just want to Mick to show up and slap him (because Sara and Snart would probably need a reason but Mick would do it just for fun).

Meanwhile, back on the ship, the three people who have been told they’re not currently necessary are bored. Sara suggests they go “get weird in the seventies,” Snart and Mick are all for it. They leave Jax on the ship because he’s . . . underage? He’s twenty, why are they treating him like he’s twelve? Never mind. In the next ridiculous scene, they hit a biker bar and shortly thereafter there’s a bar fight. It may be ridiculous, but it’s also the best thing in the pilot, because we finally get to see the very early beginnings of three people connecting as a team:

• Sara takes the lead when she suggests the bar, and Snart and Mick agree.

• At the bar, Mick hits the juke box, Sara asks Snart to dance and he refuses, but he offers to hold her beer, telling her he’ll watch.

• Sara dances and gets harassed, tells Snart, “I’ve got this,” and wipes the floor with the harasser while Snart exchanges a look of approval with Mick.

• The harasser’s pals gang up on Sara, she asks for help, and Snart and Mick both go; big bar fight ensues with Mick saying, “I love the seventies” as they clear the place.

(I posted the video for this scene before, but here’s the link again.)

Here’s why this is the solid team intro Rip should have created for the whole team:

• There’s a leader the team agrees to follow, first because they share the same problem (they’re bored) and they like her solution (“Let’s go get drunk”), and then later because they recognize how competent she is, all shown through action, not through Sara saying, “I’m the leader.”

• The team shows their respect for the leader; in this case by not rushing to her rescue, in part because they’re not rescuers but also because she says, “I’ve got this” and they believe her–extra credit for not assuming a woman can’t take care of herself–without ever saying “We respect you, Sara.”

• The leader shows she respects her team, that she’s first among equals not their boss. So Sara’s strong enough to ask for help and confident in Snart and Mick’s ability to help her, which shows she thinks they’re more than the meathead muscle Rip has dismissed them as; in turn they support her when she asks, but it’s not a rescue, they don’t push her aside to save her, they join her as part of the team.

• All of this is demonstrated through action that makes the team stronger because fighting a common adversary binds people together in a common cause. Nobody announces anything. Nobody flashes back. There’s a problem in the now, they come together to solve it, they’re a team.

Meanwhile Rip, Ray, Stein, the Hawks, and the Hawk’s elderly son are still discussing one of the two hundred and six times Vandal Savage killed the Hawks, none of them finding that as funny as I do, and it’s all exchanges of information without any conflict because there’s no antagonist. The scenes with the Hawks are supposed to be the great love story at the center of the first season, but I find them alternately boring and ludicrous (honest to god, TWO HUNDRED AND SIX TIMES????), included mainly to set up the Vandal Savage back story. If this were my novel, the things with feathers would be on the cutting room floor.

Rip, Ray, Stein, and the Hawk Three try to go back to the ship, but they’re attacked by Darth Vader Lite, heretoafter known as Chronos, bounty hunter for the Time Masters who are mad at Rip for stealing his ship, something he chose not to mention to the eight people he kidnapped and also to the audience. Putz. They’d be in big trouble except that Killer-Klepto-Pyro show up and hit Chronos with their stolen car—“We go out for one lousy drink and you pick a fight with Boba Fett”—which gives everybody time to get to the ship, demonstrating that Rip has created two teams, one that talks and one that acts.

Son of Hawks is mortally wounded, living just long enough to explain another clue—the biggest danger to this mission isn’t Chronos, it’s dialogue poisoning—and then he dies, leaving the Hawks mourning for somebody they met an hour ago because “He was our son.” Then Rip bitches at the team until Kendra punches him, the first interesting thing she’s done in the story. Rip admits he lied and Sara punches him. The show is suddenly fun. Then Rip tells them he lied about them becoming legends, too, and Mick suggests they kill him. If only. More dialogue ensues, and Rip remembers his wife and child in a flashback.

This is a superhero show on the CW: It’s supposed to be hitting and kissing, not explaining and remembering.

 

Also, Important Character Tip: Something is not sad because a character says it is, it has to touch the heart of the reader/viewer, too. We don’t know Rip’s wife and child, we just see them die. That’s awful but it’s not sad, they’re just figures in the dark. The Hawk’s elderly son was fated to die later that day anyway, they just moved up the timeline a little; they just met him; and he’s basically an exposition fairy, not a character. None of these people or these events is emotionally involving.

So the big takeaway here for me in introducing a story team (for those of you skimming this ridiculously long post):

• Start with a leader who demonstrates that she deserves to be followed because she has a goal the reader/viewer can believe in,


• Show characters respecting the leader and choosing to follow her.

• Show characters discovering common ground and and supporting one another as a first step in recognizing themselves as a team, and


• Show the newly formed team in action, working together well and showcasing their skills.

The end of the episode tries to fix the mess that came before by showing some of the relationships evolving through dialogue. Kendra, for some reason, tells Carter it’s okay to call her by her demi-goddess name. Jax, for some reason, tells Stein it’s okay that he drugged him. Ray has a pessimistic moment about his lousy destiny as a non-Legend, and Sara tells him to snap out of it, insisting that they can change their fates. Snart agrees. Why they don’t vote to make Sara the captain immediately is beyond me. They all assemble so Rip can give another lecture about time, the team agrees to stay, and the final scene is Vandal Savage doing an evil monologue, looking and sounding like The Most Interesting Man in the World’s younger, dumber brother.

Part Two of the pilot is better because they finally do things as a team. Rip is still a lousy leader: he tries to assert his authority—“I’d like to remind you that I’m in charge”—and Snart takes it away from him—“I remember, I just don’t care.” Snart demonstrates his competence by stealing the identification they need to get into a terrorist auction of nuclear weapons in Norway that Savage is attending. Stein bullshits them past a questioning guard, and Mick approves. There’s a moment when a real antagonist shows up—Damian Dahrk appearing from out of nowhere but always welcome as a Big Bad–and then Savage shows up as a Lesser Bad and sucks all the air out of the room with ham acting, turning the rest of the terrorists against our Killer-Klepto-Pyro team and Professor Stein, which means Our Gang is vastly outnumbered which is good for dramatic tension. (This also gives Snart the opportunity to nod at Sara and Stein and say to Mick, “Let’s get Ginger and the Professor and get out of here,” which works on several levels, not the least of which is making Rip Gilligan.) Then the rest of Rip’s crew shows up and pretty much undercut any tension in the fight since they have two flying demi-gods (air support), a guy in an invincible atom suit (bullet-proof and invisible), and Nuclear Man. Carter faces Savage, his immortal enemy, who says, “Prince Khufu, always the fashion plate.” (Vandal, we need to work on your sinister dialogue; that just sounds bitchy.) Firestorm saves the day, but the team has still screwed up because now Savage knows they’ve come through time to chase him. Oh, well.

Rip, the Worst Team Leader Ever, yells at the team. Ray has lost a part of his suit, Sara gets it back, taking out a bunch of evil lab techs while stoned (it’s the seventies). Ray screws up the theft that Snart and Mick had planned, Snart and Ray fix the screw-up, but then Savage shows up and says, “I’m grateful for another chance to kill you” with his mouth full of scenery. Martin tries to steal something from his younger self, thereby meeting himself in the past and screwing up his own timeline.

Meanwhile, the Hawks discuss their relationship. Endlessly. With flashbacks. Other stuff happens and then Savage kills Carter again. (TWO HUNDRED AND SEVEN.) A non-touching death scene ensues—the guy reincarnates, get over it—and then Savage stabs Kendra, which is not as painful as his dialogue. There’s more dialogue, an entirely unearned spot of mourning for Carter, and one final outcome: Savage has now pissed off all of them. At least they have a slim stake in the fight now: They’ve all met Vandal Savage, and they don’t like him.

At this point, there are three team members who are efficient, focused, and always achieve their objectives: Sara, Snart, and Mick. My recommendation for speed watching Season One is to fast forward until you see any one of those three faces, then watch. Anything you’re missing probably doesn’t make sense anyway.

How I’d fix this pilot:

Get rid of everybody but Sara, Snart, Mick, Ray, Stein, and Jax. Rip can kidnap them aboard the time ship, but then he dies and they have to figure out the rest of it on their own as Chronos chases them across history. And all six of them go to the bar where Ray gets knocked out right away trying to rescue Sara (probably by Sara), Jax kicks racist ass, and Stein analyzes the velocity of the sucker punch, all while Snart watches and Mick plays “Muskrat Love” on the jukebox.

What I learned from this that will help with Nita’s story:

Nita has to show she’s the natural leader (see Sara Lance and Leonard Snart).

I think she does that when she finds out about Joey and ask questions, and then gets out of the car and Mort and Button follow her. So everybody who said the first scene takes too long to get to that point was right, that’s where the good stuff is. I just have to sharpen that.

Mort and Button have to respect her and choose to follow her because of what she does.

Nita has to be smart and get the scene to a place where they want to follow her because they agree with her actions. And like Snart and Rory in the bar scene, they have to respect her enough to let her handle things on her own once she gets in the bar. Button has to move from trying to stop her from getting out of the car to supporting her.

Nita has to show she respects Mort and Button by asking for help when she needs it.

One of the most unpleasant things about Rip as a leader is his Master of the Universe schtick. One of the most attractive things about Sara as a leader is her willingness to ask for help from teammates she respects. If I want to telegraph the Nita team in the first and third scenes (Nita’s PoV scenes), I need to not only show Nita in charge, but show her respecting and relying on Mort and Button.

We need to see Nita, Mort, and Button in action together, even if it’s just to foreshadow the team they’ll be. In this case, “in action” means doing things, not necessarily beating people up; I am not the CW.

And then do the same thing with Nick, Dag, and Rab in the second scene which is getting a huge rewrite.

Also “Love Will Keep Us Together” should be on the jukebox in Hell Bar.

Note: We’re skipping Episode Three, “Blood Ties” by Marc Guggenheim & Chris Fedak.

This episode starts with a flashback to ancient Egypt. All flashbacks in this show to ancient Egypt are so bad they’ll make your teeth hurt; this time it’s Rip announcing to Savage that he’s there to kill him. That’s dumb, Rip, just kill him. Then Rip flashes forward to the present, where he insults Mick, pissing off Snart, and then later drowns in self-pity while Sara makes a plan. Meanwhile Kendra is dying so Ray shrinks down to do a fantastic voyage thing in her blood stream to earn Stein’s respect because Stein was his professor a long time ago and doesn’t remember him. Nobody remembers Ray, the rich, handsome genius, it’s very sad.

Rip decides to rob the bank that holds Savage’s money, telling Sara, Snart, and Mick they can’t come along because who needs a team of experienced bank robbers to do a bank heist? Worst Team Leader Ever. Sara goes with him anyway, and at the bank, she points out that the place is full of professional killers, Rip tells her she’s overreacting, and then everybody tries to kill them. Sara takes everybody out, reactivating the blood lust that being raised from the dead created in her (that was on Arrow, try to keep up) and this episode is just a dog’s breakfast at this point. Sara is distraught because she’s a blood-thirsty monster; Ray is distraught because he’s incapacitated by self-doubt and back story and nobody remembers him, Kendra is screaming about Carter in her sleep (he’s dead, he’ll be reincarnated, moving on . . .), dear god, somebody bring in Snart and Mick.

Oh, good, here come Snart and Mick, not distraught in the least, convincing Jax to take a trip to 1975 Central City so they can steal an emerald and change Snart’s past. That’s fun but nothing to do with the story. The bad guy Sara and Rip kidnapped does a dumb monologue so Rip hits him; then Rip yells back story at Sara, then there’s a secret immortality cult bathed in red light with Savage talking about how he was buds with Jack the Ripper, and then the team shows up to rescue them and Rip stabs Savage, who is still immortal . . . really, dog’s breakfast.

One of the biggest problems—there are so many–with this episode is that it’s mostly exposition and back story, almost all told in dialogue. The one piece of back story that works dramatically is Snart, traveling back to his childhood, meeting his pre-school self, telling him not to let anybody hurt him and to look out for himself, leaving the emerald he stole so that his father won’t steal it and go to prison and come out an abusive son of a bitch. It’s back story dramatized in the now of the story instead of as a flashback–that is, the story doesn’t stop to show something that happened in the past, this is the the present and Snart time travels back in the now of the story to create something new–and it helps that Wentworth Miller can act, so it’s a solid scene that tells an emotionally compelling story that develop Snart’s character. The problem is that Snart’s early character arc is not a subplot in the Vandal Savage story, although it does foreshadow one. This part is infinitely more compelling and better acted than all the Savage Hawks, but if you dropped this scene sequence from the plot, nothing would change in the main narrative. If you’re going to spend this much time on a secondary story, you have to make it a secondary story, not just “here’s something interesting about the best character in this story who unfortunately is not the lead.”

So really, we can skip this episode.

Next: Sara, Snart, and Mick rob the Pentagon, Snart kisses a Russian who tries to kill him, Mick bonds with Ray in prison, Martin and Jax are reunited, and Rip talks endlessly while Kendra tries to find a purpose in her story, any purpose, and feels very sad. And I talk about supporting characters and subplots in team stories.

The post Legends of Tomorrow Binge Watch: Episodes 1 and 2: “Pilot” by Greg Berlanti & Marc Guggenheim & Andrew Kreisberg & Phil Klemmer appeared first on Argh Ink.

Binge Watch Begins Tomorrow, Gravy Tonight

So after writing and rewriting and watching and rewatching season one of Legends of Tomorrow and writing and rewriting some more, I’ve discovered that buried within the dreck that is much of the season is a brilliant subplot, real insights into team building, and some great character work. All of which leads me to extend the watch to two weeks (and to amend the original table of contents post here).

Then I put the Thanksgiving gravy on to reduce, fell asleep and almost burned the house down, so I’m going out for canned gravy now. It’s been that kind of week, nothing has turned out as planned, but everything is fixable. I’m not allowing comments on this post because it’s just admin; go back to the original post to talk about any of this. Or anything at all. (This post will disappear in about three days, never to be seen again.)

The post Binge Watch Begins Tomorrow, Gravy Tonight appeared first on Argh Ink.