Questionable: Reversals

Cate M asked:

“What does building in a reversal mean?”



(I answered that in the comments and then thought I could do better here.)

A reversal is plot move that flips a reader/viewer’s expectation and opens up the story.

The very first scene in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series is a beautiful blonde student alone in a deserted high school hallway at night with a dark-haired boy who looks like a juvenile delinquent or worse. She’s very nervous and asks to leave, telling the boy she’s heard something, and he’s sly, moving in closer, mocking her fears. But once he’s absolutely convinced her that there’s nobody else there, she turns on him in full vamp face and rips his throat out.

That’s a reversal. The writer sets up an expectation and reverses it, which changes the scene. More important, it changes the story. That first scene says “This is a series about high school kids,” and then reverses that to say “This is a series about vampires set in a high school.” The follow up is our plucky heroine waking up in her new bedroom, packing boxes all around, ready to start a new life in a new school where there won’t be vampires like her last school . . . .

So, good reversals . . .

Have meaning. They’re not just gimmicks; the reversal itself has an impact on the reader’s perception of the story and on the story itself.

Have consequences. They change the story in permanent ways.

Make complete sense in retrospect, even more sense than the original expectation.

Are never, ever, ever Gotchas.

A Gotcha is a Bad Reversal, a fool-the-reader move in a plot that’s there to show how clever the writer is; it carries an undercurrent of “I’m smarter than you, you dummy!” Gotchas are aimed at tricking the audience, not in surprising them. They’re the writer showing off how clever he or she is, not the writer illuminating the world of the story by surprising the reader in ways that invest him or her more deeply in that world.

One of the worst Gotchas of all time was the transformation of Cordelia Chase into the Beast in Angel; the writers destroyed a much-loved character before springing the reversal, which was not illuminating but annoying and in no small way, disgusting. It was a bad reversal in almost every way, stretched across months of storytelling.

Here’s a chunk from the essay I linked that talks about a good reversal from the same writers’ room (Mutant Enemy) from the series Angel:

“Much of what makes reading or viewing enjoyable is the understanding that the reader or audience is in trusted hands, that the writers will not lie to them, make them feel stupid, or fail them in any way, so any story that relies on fooling the reader walks a very fine line. Readers want to be surprised; they don’t want to be betrayed. The brilliance of the Gotcha in “Awakening” rests on two important things: There are plenty of clues to show what’s really happening, “and the Gotcha is revealed at the end of the episode.

“Awakening” begins with the attempt to turn Angel into Angelus to get information that only the demon has. The surefire way to do this is to give Angel one moment of perfect happiness [so] they turn to a shaman who tries to put Angel into a deep dream state. But Angel disarms him—the shaman is evil of course—and reveals secret writings tattooed on the shaman’s torso (there have been stranger things in the Whedon universe) which lead them to search for a sword to kill the Beast (a little standard for ME but still possible within its boundaries), which draws them all through a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark -like maze (too on-the-nose, but I still bought it) to the sword which Connor gives up to Angel, calling him Dad and reconciling with him long enough to kill the Beast together (oh, come on ) and ending with all the Angel crew reconciled and happy, and Cordy telling Angel that she’d always loved him best and giving herself to him, at which point I hooted and said, “What is this, Angel’s wet dream?” which, by damn, it was. That is, the shaman had given Angel the dream so he could achieve his moment of perfect happiness—his friends reconciliation, his son’s love and Cordy in his bed—and as a result turn into Angelus. It was one of the most perfect Gotchas I’ve ever seen, the kind that earns my highest praise: “Why can’t Iwrite like that?”

Why was it so good? Because the first time I thought, Oh, come on, should have tipped me off that things weren’t real, should have prompted me to take what I knew of the Whedon universe and put together exactly what was happening. The clues were all there, which is why it was such a delight to be Gotcha-ed; they’d played fair. More important, they hadn’t destroyed character to get their effect. That is, they pushed the limits of credibility past the breaking point, but Angel was still intrinsically Angel and Cordy still intrinsically Cordy; like hypnotized subjects, they might be doing things they wouldn’t choose to do, but they weren’t doing things that their characters could not do. No character was harmed in the making of the “Awakening” Gotcha, so we could all return to the reality of the season without any damaging memories and with a much deeper understanding of Angel, who has Raiders fantasies.”

In that essay, I used Good Gotcha to mean Reversal, but I don’t think that’s right. A reversal isn’t a “gotcha,” it isn’t the writer crowing over the reader, it’s the writer pulling back layers that make the reader sit up and take another look at the story. The reversal does not make the reader feel stupid.

Here’s another perfect reversal, this one from Person of Interest. For non-PoI fans (and really, you should be), the two guys tied up are Fusco, one of Our Guys who’s also a cop, and Leon, a corrupt financial manager who’s ripped off a white supremacy group and who is the Person To Be Rescued This Week. The skinheads have captured Leon to torture the whereabouts of their money out of him, and nabbed Fusco, too, because Fusco was trying to protect him. A couple of minutes into this, the bad guys will bring in Our Hero, Reese. Watch this reversal unfold, and then think about how it made you feel as a viewer:

I love this scene for many, many reasons, but one of the biggest is that I never feel stupid. I expect the scene to arc, things to get tenser, I expect Reese to win (he almost always does), but when he wins because of the reversal, I’m elated. And the bit at the end, that whistle, means that the whole thing wasn’t the PoI writers being clever, this scene just complicated the story world by adding a dog (a GREAT dog) to a community full of damaged people, some of whom can only attach to the dog.

So good reversals surprise and delight the reader, change the story in sometimes small but always significant ways, and add layers to the story world.

They’re also hard as hell to write well, so good luck with that.

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