Sense8: Bright Shapes, No Container
This is supposed to be about Episodes 5 & 6, but I got so caught up in trying to figure out what the overall plan is here that I didn’t take notes when I watched them again. So you get my thoughts on 5 & 6 tomorrow or Sunday. Here’s what I think about the plotting:
What I am coming to realize, as I watch these episodes for the third and fourth time, is that there’s no structure here. It’s not just that there’s no classic linear structure–protagonist is thrown out of a stable life, battles the antagonist, wins or loses–it’s that there’s no structure, period. Taking the first half (six episodes) of the series as an anthology that sets up the Eight vs. Whispers in the back end, you still have eight stories that are bleeding plot.
A patterned structure or an anthology structure is a perfectly fine way to structure story because it gives what any reader/viewer needs: the sense that there’s somebody in control and that everything they’re seeing will make sense. So if you want to do an anthology of stories about eight people who are slowly drawn together into a larger narrative, that’s great, as long as you have eight stories. Just giving information about eight people is not telling story, it’s set-up. And by Hour Six in a twelve-hour series, we should be way past set-up and into story. Still the characters are so good that I probably would have stayed for six hours of set-up without all this bitching if there really had been eight stories there. Instead, we got one character sketch of a damaged woman, two great protagonists with no antagonist, three great protagonists with antagonists that arrive late but are wonderful, one great protagonist with a weak antagonist but a terrific romance plot and one great protagonist with a great antagonist and therefore a great story. One out of eight in the first episode, five out of eight by the end of the sixth hour. That’s not good.
Riley: Riley’s not just sad, she’s damaged, hanging on by her fingernails, buffeted by the men in her life: her boyfriend who drags her off to meet Nyx so he can rob him, her friend Jax who betrays her to Nyx, Nyx who tries to kill her, Will who saves her, and her father who loves her. She has no agency; she just copes with the aftermath of what both the bad and good guys lay on her. She has plenty of Trouble, but aside from the scene where Nyx tries to kill her, no Conflict, and even there, she doesn’t fight back, Will does.
The Fix: Give the woman some agency, for god’s sake, and let her fight back against Nyx throughout; it wouldn’t hurt to tie Nyx to the Sense8 main plot, either. The problem is, they WANT her without agency, they want the Damaged Flower. So Riley’s pretty much out of luck.
Will: He sees things, he meets Riley, he tries to find out what’s happening (and good for him, he’s the only one who does for a long time) and that gets him in trouble with his bosses, his partner begins to have doubts, he talks to Jonah and gets some info, he researches Nomi to see if he can find her to help her, he wakes up strapped to her gurney and sets her free, he sees Riley in the bar and they phone each other to find out if what’s happening is real . . . . It’s all over the place. Nobody is in opposition to him, and without an antagonist, there’s nothing to shape his story. I’ll watch it because it’s Will and I’m worried about him, but he has Trouble, not Conflict.
The Fix: Give him an antagonist, preferably Whispers, but if it must be a minion, get that FBI guy in there who’s working for Whispers or Jonah, Jonah is creepy as hell. Will has everything he needs for a story except for an antagonist to push against.
Sun: Sun has a great antagonist in her dickhead brother, but that doesn’t become clear until Episode Four. Then they send her to prison and she doesn’t see her brother again for a couple of episodes which means the energy drains from her story. She does have another antagonist in the sadistic woman prisoner who torments her and her friends, but since Sun can take care of her without breaking a sweat, there really is no story there. The potential for one is huge if Sun gets out and takes down her brother, but for now, she’s just resting in prison, leaving psychically whenever somebody in another country needs beat up. It’s not enough.
The Fix: Either get her out of the slammer so she can go after her brother, or keep her in there–there’s really good stuff going on in that prison–and focus on the antagonist there as a placeholder for the big picture plot.
Nomi: Nomi has conflict; that bastard Dr. Metzger is trying to lobotomize her with her mother’s approval. At first, there are just a lot of scenes with Amanita the Perfect Girlfriend and weeping in the hospital. But then in Episode Five, Nomi fights back and she gets a real story that has the bonus of segueing perfectly into the Sense8 central conflict.
The Fix: Start that earlier. Now Nomi ends up in the hospital because she falls off a motorcycle and they take a head scan; it’s just bad luck. Have her investigate what’s happening to her and tip off Whispers that way and get dragged off to the lobotomy ward; tie her plot to the main plot sooner.
Lito: Up until Episode Five, Lito has no conflict unless you count Hernando wanting to go to premieres and Daniela moving in, all of which is really Trouble and not serious Conflict. Then Joaquin shows up. Now we’ve got ourselves an antagonist and a conflict, and Lito has a real story.
The Fix: get Daniela in early and Joaquin by Episode 2.
Kala: Kala does have an antagonist: Rajan, her fiance. She doesn’t want to get married, but he’s so sweet, so charming, so in love with her, and so loved by her family, that he’s hard to leave. The problem is, she doesn’t try very hard; mostly she just looks sad and stressed. It’s not enough. The story that does work for Kala is Kala vs. the Demon, aka Kala vs. Wolfgang. She’d go through with the marriage if it weren’t for Wolfgang showing up and making her feel hot and bothered and then fall in love. He even does a great job of ruining her wedding. So the romance novel that is Kala and Wolfgang is actually good story.
The Fix: Give Kala some agency and a lot more time dealing with the demon that is Wolfgang. (You know, if you’re advertising that you’re doing gender-challenging, cutting-edge storytelling, writing two women characters without agency kind of dulls that edge.)
Capheus: Capheus started out the Good Son, but as soon as Kabaka threatens and bribes him into busing his daughter to her leukemia treatments, Capheus has an antagonist who shoves him into the path of murderous gangsters so that he bounces back and forth between murderous nutjobs like a pinball. His story really is Capheus vs. Kabaka; if he could say no to Kabaka, most of his problems would disappear, but if he says no, his mother dies. As it is, his is one of the stronger narratives.
The Fix: Get his antagonist in there earlier.
Wolfgang: And we have a winner. Wolfgang’s first scene is with his psychopathic cousin Steiner and his murderous uncle, and that’s very shortly followed by Wolfgang doing the thing that’s going to piss them (and his dead father) off the most: stealing diamonds that Steiner has cased by cracking the safe his father couldn’t and his uncle says can’t be cracked. Then they come after him and conflict ensues. That danger increases when the family goes after his best friend, Felix, and it’s complicated by the fact that he’s falling in love with Kala. As he says to her near the end when she begs him not to go fight his family, “As long as they’re alive, they’ll come after anybody I love.” And then he kisses her and goes in to fight in a great climax. It’s perfect, classic storytelling, and it’s pretty well paced throughout the series. It’s only flaw: It never intersects with the Sense8 plot, overlapping only when Lito shows up to help him defeat Steiner and Will and Kala help him in the climactic battle. Even so, it’s a great story. (Somebody’s going to read this and say, “Yes, but Wolfgang’s story is not art.” Yeah, it is, did you watch the way that was filmed and acted? It was beautiful. Violent as all hell, but beautiful, the Wachowskis at their best.)
I need to go back to watch John Sayles’ Lone Star again. That started with a lot of different people with different plots (can’t remember how many), and then slowly, inexorably, they drew together, and you began to see the pattern, but you really couldn’t see how they were all one story until the very last scene. If Sense8 had done that, I’d have forgiven a lot of the chaos that came before. As it is, the more I watch this, the more I’m realizing that this is a show made of terrific characters in often wonderful and sometimes amazing scenes, beautifully shot and beautifully acted, but with no controlling story. It’s the authority in the text thing: I get no sense that anybody is in control of this narrative. I keep thinking of the Roethke line, “The shapes a bright container can contain.” This show is full of bright shapes, but it has no container, or at least no container that enhances and embraces the shapes it holds. And that’s a crime because the shapes are marvelous.
The Fix: Give them all the same antagonist. That would be Whispers.
One way to check a plot is to imagine it from the antagonist’s POV. So Whispers lobtomizes anyone in a cluster because . . . I’m not sure. Something about hating the future, being afraid of the power they hold? I know he wants to lobotomize them, I’m just not clear on why. So okay, he gets there too late to stop Daryl from giving birth to the connection (still don’t understand that), and then she shoots herself so that he can’t find them through her. So now he has to find the eight. This is clearly part of a larger project to hunt clusters in general, so I don’t see any indication that this cluster is the One Cluster To End Them All because he doesn’t seem to pay them much attention; in fact, he seems helpless to find them until Nomi falls off her motorcycle and hits her head, which means an MRI, which sends in Dr. Metzger, who just happens to be attending at Nomi’s hospital. Does Whispers have some kind of computer program that flags him whenever a cluster MRI goes online? Do MRIs go online? Does he have surgeons ready to perform lobotomies at his order in a lot of hospitals? So now he’s got Nomi. Wouldn’t it be smarter to use Nomi as a stalking goat to draw the other seven out or at least find out who they are? Why antagonize somebody who doesn’t know who he is but who can lead him to the others? But no, he wants her brain dead so he sends in Metzger. So at this point I have an antagonist with a secret motivation who sends in a minion to kill his only lead. Terrance Mann does a terrific job of making Whispers one of the creepiest villains I’ve seen on screen, but the script kneecaps him by making him fairly dumb and fairly powerless. His big move at the end is to accidentally look into Will’s eyes, and that’s defeated by keeping poor old Will knocked out on sedatives for the rest of the climax. If you can be defeated by NoDoze, you’re not exactly a super villain.
So in the end, you’re left with a story about eight people who were chosen somehow, and yet at the climax, the Big Bad only knows three of them (two because they ended up in a hospital and the third because he accidentally looked into his eyes), plus most of the time, he’s not even there; the first half of the series is mostly Dr. Metzger threatening Nomi with lobotomy and the FBI guy telling Will to back off and siccing Will’s captain on him. By halfway through, all eight plots should at least begin to converge on the main plot, drawn together by a common antagonist, and yet six of the eight are completely detached from the Whispers-Is-Coming-For-You-With-A-Lobotomy plot, and five the eight are never directly attached to it.
Look, I don’t care what kind of structure they use. If this is an anthology series about eight different people growing to understand that they’re linked as they step forward and take control of their individual changing lives, I am so there for that. If this is a supernatural thriller about eight people who are discovering they’re linked just as a Big Bad starts taking some of them out, I’m there for that (but somebody’s gonna have to die if I’m going to believe he’s a Big Bad). The problem with Sense8 is that nobody knew what it was, they just knew they had great characters and great scenes and great ideas and went with it. It’s still immensely watchable, but it’s not good storytelling.
