The Full Lid
24th April 2020
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Welcome, my friends, to The Full Lid, your every week at 5 p.m. chunk of pop culture enthusiasm (spoilers, obvs), career notes, reviews and anything else that I've enjoyed this week. Think of it as email... but good.
QUICK PSA: We touch on, but do not directly address THAT *gestures at world situation* this week.
You'll also find interstitial sections between the bigger stories. This week, its video essays by pop culture writers whose work I admire. They're good folks, doing good work, in a similar vein to this.
Onward!
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Contents
Pressing Continue
Black Ghost
Red Valley
Signal Boost
Signing Off, Playing Out
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MY EMOTIONS! MY CONFUSED, JOYFUL, FRIGHTENED EMOTIONS!
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Leverage is one of my all time favorite TV shows. Left to right, it's the story of Elliot Spencer (Christian Kane), Sophie Deveraux (Gina Bellman), Nate Ford (Tim Hutton), Parker (Beth Riesgraf) and Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge). Again, left to right, they are a Hitter, a Grifter, a Mastermind, a Thief, and a Hacker.
Four criminals, one honest man, and an opportunity to do some good, redressing wrongs both personal and global. Leverage ran for five years, is joyous from start to finish and on streaming services now. Go see it. See The Rashomon Job, a perfect hour of TV.
Editor's note: Also check out The Pod Job, a Leverage watch-along podcast.
It's being revived! This year! I am very excited! Also a little worried. And that got me thinking not just about Leverage but about continuity, what it means, why we love it, why its so often said to have stifled creativity, and what happens in a year where everything seems up for negotiation.
So! Let's go steal some continuity!
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Do do DO DO DOOOOOOO! Do da DOO DOO!
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Leverage touches on five different forms of continuity. The first is temporal: the show first finished in 2012. Lots has changed. If nothing else, stop and think, for just a second about what Hardison can do with 5G. Or Chaos’ awful YouTube channel. Or the fact that James Sterling is now a British reality TV star, or...
This is the second type of continuity the show embodies: the wishes and hopes of fans. There is a Leverage season 6 in every fan’s head. AO3 is rife with tributes, there are countless aggregations of plots, story seeds, dream castings.
The problem arises when those wistful 'what ifs' run into the real world . Babylon 5 famously had to delay an episode years because a fan submitted an entirely different script with the same opening premise, to give but one example. Horrifyingly, that happened before the last two iterations of the Internet and I shudder to think what due diligence needs to be done these days. Buy your clearance lawyers a muffin basket, folks. Make it a big one.
Then there's the issue of discontinuity, of what you want to or can change when you bring something back. This is an issue re-litigated by Doctor Who fans since the TARDIS was actually woven into the Bayeux Tapestry. Not in an episode, but right after the Battle of Hastings. The prospect here is not quite impossible, but certainly a Glen-Rieder level safe to crack. Namely, how do you what you did before, without the resources that were available then but with the added benefit of time and experience?
In Leverage's case, the fundamental core of the show could be summed up as "five hyper competent, mildly failed humans do their best to make things right for the underdogs and each other". A premise compelling enough to generate spin-offs, like the one in South Korea last year.
Leverage's finale debuted on Christmas Day eight years ago. The world has changed a lot since then: banks being shored up on the taxpayer dime, corrupt politicians, white supremacist groups running wild, mega-corporations being offered vast bailouts they don't need, and...
Cheap laugh? Yes. Angry, aware laugh that's about to punch you in the neck nine, ten times? That's every episode of Leverage.
The flip side of that legal issue is what happens when the Leverage continuation we receive doesn't match the one we've spent eight years building in our heads. Co-writer and creator John Rogers has already assured fans that their beloved OT3 (Hacker! Hitter! Thief! They may cuddle!) remains very much intact and that’s great. What’s more interesting is the inevitable deviation the extant show will take from the bespoke versions of the show playing in everyone’s minds, keeping the foundation at least as similar to veteran fans as it is approachable to new ones.
With four cast members returning and functionally the entire backstage band back together, there’s certainly a very good chance of that. The major change is Tim Hutton not returning (there are depressing reasons why) and being replaced, it seems, by Noah Wyle.
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Wyle is a fascinating actor, a man whose time on The Librarians played like an extended audition reel for Doctor Who with all the charm and occasional narrative friction that suggests. But he’s also able to play cold-eyed, mildly frenetic and heroic as his time on ER demonstrated. As the new element in a beloved show, Wyle's performance is likely to set the tone, at least at first. Given one of Leverage's best seasons involved the team coming to terms with working with someone new, my doubts are superficial at best.
The playful, fun energy of adapting to something new in a familiar setting? The third type of continuity!
Serial fiction is almost unique in that it encourages long term emotional engagement. In fact, it renders it basically compulsory. I was at Destination Star Trek last year and the lines for each cast member’s autograph were colossal for this exact reason. This is an art form we are uniquely equipped to love and that is uniquely designed to make us love it. That love, when it curdles (and part of it always does) is one of the most toxic substances on Earth.
When it doesn’t curdle? Well... the Doctor will see you now.
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Emily Cook is an actual active duty superhuman. A Doctor Who Magazine writer, Cook has been organizing global, twitter-driven synchronized watches of various Doctor Who episodes. Not only that, but she’s persuaded forerunners and writers to provide extra material that throws their work into different lights:
All new. All different, All familiar. All something that fans, sheltering in place, could feel united in their love of. Or, in some cases, in discussing how much it annoys them.
This is what Doctor Who does. This is what any long form fiction does: gives us the foundation of our own personal pyramid of needs. This is a story that’s always been told so seeing it told again, in a time where nothing else feels certain, feels certain. Comforting. Safe.
Continuous.
Doctor Who's most recent season finale is the perfect example. This is continuity as toolbox, as canvas, not as locked gate. This is fiction and its topography re-imagined not as battlefield, but workshop. The exact sort of evolution of fiction that AO3's Hugo win signaled and I, for one, welcome our frequently horny on main overlords. Because when more people play, more people have FUN and fun, more than ever, is what matters.
Want an example? Here you go:
That's the hashtag for The Magnus Archives fanfic/art community based around the idea that two villainous (well, I say villainous...) characters are in fact terrible immortal'ish old men who are desperately in love and frequently get divorced. As the actor (THAT FEELS SO WEIRD TO TYPE) who played one of these men I am incredibly happy to see such a rich, vibrant community spring up around an interpretation of this body of work. Especially as it nestles so cleverly inside canon. Continuity as toolbox, continuity as sandbox. Continuity as incubator for creatives to learn their trades. |
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Then there's continuity of the intellectual property kind. In Leverage’s case, we have the thematic sibling? spin-off? show in Korea (in a neat reversal of The Good Doctor selling to the US) where a different team of (mostly) reformed criminals do (mostly) good. I’ve not seen it (and desperately want to) but the word ‘CROSSOVER?!” Is definitely popping up in my brain a LOT right now.
Even if we don’t get Elliot and his Korean counterpart bonding with their dog (they may... have a dog in the Korean show. They DEFINITELY have a dog in the show in my head), the show exists and is viable and DIFFERENT. Likewise, Rogers has confirmed the show's streaming numbers made a sequel possible.
Now, the cynical view of this is that by revising extant IP the only thing you’re doing is serving capitalism, selling back to us the content we already willingly consume. When it means several hundred talented creatives get the shot they’ve long deserved and the opportunity to work on a beloved franchise and the residuals that come with it? Cool. I’m a freelancer. I like when freelancers get paid. I’m old fashioned that way.
But Banquo’s family name is ‘capitalism’ so let’s take a look at that side of IP continuity. And to do it, we bust out the nightmarish hell lens of the western comics industry; a business constructed like someone signed a deal with Mephistopheles with an 'X' rather than their name.
Right now, western comics are an absolute mess. I don’t have the space here to go into detail but the only supplier shut down for a month, every retailer is in trouble, every company is trying to help and one of the largest ones has decided the best way to do that is to use retailers to ship to other retailers. But maybe not international ones.
See? Nightmare. Actual nightmare. Just the SUMMARY is a nightmare.
DC are the company who are using other retailers. They’re also the company releasing seven books digitally, one a day, every week.
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It’s an interesting idea, repurposing material from the DC Giants books sold exclusively in Walmart (did I mention actual NIGHTMARE?). The intention here is to simultaneously ensure retailers have new material when they reopen and readers have weekly content until then.
As Jim Lee puts it:
‘In the meantime, we will have properly stoked and protected the demand for comics, keeping fans interested in our characters and stories.’
On the one hand, yeah I totally see that. On the other? Saving the industry with a weekly recycled concept Batman title isn’t exactly a triumph of imagination. But it is what it is, and like I said above, anything that gets freelancers paid, I’m there for. Especially if it leads to better things, and keeps the industry literally fed in the meantime.
Finally and perhaps most assuredly, is continuity as compass, as something to steer by. 2020 is a period of time where so much is changing we're all having to constantly reassess where we stand. It's difficult at best, horrifying at ... middling and every other Tuesday. But in genre, even if nowhere else, continuity's mixture of clarity and fluidity leads all of us to an opportunity for something not just unquestionably good, but good for everyone.
Canon is what we make it. The topographical landscape of fiction isn't flat. Now more than before, everyone has the right amount of land and almost everyone is willing to trade and negotiate. Stories aren't just currency, they're tools, survival kits, memorials, coping mechanisms, manifestos, promises and consensual hallucinations. Stories are where we all stand, and we're all, at last, able to stand anywhere.
We all, at last, have... leverage.
- The Leverage reboot is tentatively scheduled to film in June/July of this year.
- The first season of the South Korean Leverage has concluded. I am desperate to see it. If you can hook me up, get in touch.
- Doctor Who returns at Christmas and that is surely going to be an incredibly weird experience.
- DC Daily Firsts are about to finish their first week. Guess what WE'RE talking about next Friday?!
- The Magnus Archives is emotionally destroying its longterm audience every Thursday. Their Patreon is here and if you've never listened, it's an experience unlike any other. Start at the beginning. Come say hello when you meet Peter.
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What's So Great About: Untitled Goose Game
Next-level perceptive and gleeful video essays.
Now I want to go cause problems on purpose.
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Laura Dominguez has a problem. Actually Laura has a half dozen problems and has decided that her low level alcoholism and ongoing refusal to process grief are the smallest ones. (Spoiler, they are not.)
Laura is a reporter working in the city of Creighton. She covers the crime beat because, essentially, no one else wants to. Creighton is going through urban renewal, everyone wants the city to be new, not safe and the only thing standing in their way is the Black Ghost, Creighton’s resident superhero and two-fisted man of mystery whose tie is always sharp and fists always hard.
Laura Dominguez is there when he dies, and that's when the trouble really starts.
Alex Segura and Monica Gallagher have created a brutal city to play in. Creighton sits on the border between Gotham and hell, a violent landscape where arch-criminal Barnabus owns every gang, the newspapers don’t care, the police shoot first (especially at a woman of color wearing a mask) and no one and nothing is safe. Especially Laura, a woman who never met a bottle she didn’t like or a righteous cause she wasn’t ready to bleed for.
There’s a vast amount to enjoy here but one of the most fun elements is the contrast between the art and the story. The book moves like a boxer, light on its feet, and punches way above it’s weight, just like Laura usually manages to. That’s in stark contrast to George Kambadais’ energetic, friendly and open artwork. That artwork, especially coupled with Marco Finnegan’s initial layouts for the first part and Ellie Wright’s colour throughout, gives you a sense of both versions of Creighton. The shiny, well presented and corrupt one everyone wants. The grimy, dangerous, raucous one everyone lives in. Laura, especially when she takes on the mantle we all know she will, walks through both worlds with the same clenched fists and righteous fury. Brilliantly, she also does so in a deeply human and often very funny way. One of my favourite scenes involves her suiting up for the first time and then having to go back to her apartment twice because she forgot things.
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Like her mask.
This isn’t so much Black Mask Day One as it’s Laura Dominguez Day Zero and you won’t find a more fundamentally relatable leading lady anywhere else in comics right now. She screws up, endlessly, she gets back up, endlessly. She has a heart a mile wide and absolutely no idea what she’s doing. She does it anyway and the small cast of characters who gather to help her are the exact people she needs: terrified, resolute, outnumbered and going nowhere.
This is Neo-Eisner noir with the same exuberant page layout and wry style. It is SO much fun from top to bottom. Creighton, whether its hero wants to admit it or not, is in safe hands. And with this book, so are you. Go get it.
The Black Ghost Season 1 is a Comixology original, available now.
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Implicitly Pretentious: Knives Out's Sharp Structure
This head-first dive into Knives Out is next level good.
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Editor's note: Spoilers abound. As mentioned last week, season one of Red Valley is under two and a half hours long. Having marathoned it this week, I strongly encourage you to do the same before reading further.
Warren Godby is doing fine. He’s got a loving wife, a job he’s finding his way around and an understanding boss. Warren’s an accountant, and his job is to work out where all the money’s going. A lot of it seems to be going to Red Valley. No one seems to want to tell him why.
Well, no one but Gordon Porlock. Gordon knows things. Gordon has recordings. Gordon, to quote Mike Doughty, knows the names of men at the hangar. And Gordon wants Warren’s help.
Red Valley is a show that unfolds. At first, it's a crumpled shirt collar conspiracy with a copy of Edge of Darkness on Blu-ray it hasn’t had time to watch yet. It’s fun, it’s very funny for a British Office loving audience, it’s cheerfully grim.
And in the moment where Warren coughs and doesn’t answer his wife’s questions about his pills, its mask slips.
Because Red Valley is also the secret history of the development of cryonic technology, and prices paid for that. A later episode is full of voice memos from the scientists involved: how happy they are, how excited they are when the other staff start to arrive. How tired they are of other people and of work with no end. What happens when the subjects they’re working on start dying. The show is unflinching, clever, dark stuff that takes a piece of SF you’ve never thought to look at under the microscope and shows just how it was made and how many people died to finish it.
The show isn’t done, either moving or changing genre. Because next? It gets FUNNY.
Seriously funny. Laugh out loud funny and at the same time goes darker than you could hope to be ready for. Warren, confused and worried by what he’s finding, isn’t able to settle. So he goes back to his childhood home, showing us the audience a little about his family and what they did. We also find out a little about Warren did and this, I’d argue, is where the direction and writing are at their strongest. Jonathan Williams’ script trusts you in the exact way Warren (who he also plays) does not. What drove Warren away is right there, it’s just no one says it out loud. Because small towns don’t.
The horror, spreading like condensed milk in coffee, hits you around the same time as the best Pingu joke of the century. Both will take your breath away. Director Alan Mandel, who also plays Gordon Porlock is superb throughout but again this episode is a standout. Second hand game stores have never felt so threatening. Neither has Warren.
Well... mostly.
As the show enters it’s endgame we get a magnificently rubbish road trip as Warren and Gordon set off to discover the truth. What follows is weird, sweet, endearing and familiar to anyone who has ever been a nerd in a car with another nerd. Its familiar, it’s safe, is reassuring. An emotional reset after the difficult discoveries of Warren's return home.
The final episode of the season deals ace after ace, leaving you breathless and as unable to process the events as Warren and Gordon. You get every answer, you realize a card has been in your pocket all along and you get a colossal, monstrous performance from Alexander Broad. Broad’s character is exuberantly violent, joyously brutal and really REALLY loves cheesecake. He’s hilarious and terrifying and in the same room as everyone you’ve become fond of over the last few episodes, especially Mandel's wonderfully nerdy, sincere Gordon. Again, Williams’ script is as funny as it is disturbing. Putting you right there in the room with Warren, Gordon, the monstrous truth and the cheesecake.
But there is yet another ace. The ending puts everything you've heard in context and in doing so sets up another story, one that you’re now perfectly equipped to enter. Rather like a hypersleep patient, waking up on schedule.
Red Valley season one is six episodes long and available now. It's startlingly brilliant, do check it out.
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Mark Kermode's Cult Film Corner: Clerks
Behold, a mildly-worrying piece of my origin story! The Mark and Lard Graveyard Shift was one of those pieces of art that happens when no one notices. It taught me about music, poetry, literature and through these regular appearances by future Godfather of BBC Film Understanding Mark Kermode, cinema. Tragically the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers one is lost to the mists of time.
But this will more than do:)
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Signal Boost
- Music for the Climb, an EP of music by the musical genius behind Tin Can Audio, David Devereux, is available for pre-order now. Here's a charming little video about how David works at home...
- Have small ones to entertain at home? Check this out.
- My old SFX ReaderBlogger (Rogger? No. NO. Definitely not that.) John Cooper has a fabulous comic for you to read.
- The always fantastic Unofficial Hugo Book Club have found a deeply lovely new spot on the Coode Street Podcast they'd like to share with you.
- Are you a writer who cooks? @PENAmerica would love to chat to you!
- Knightmare! The castle of a generation of UK nerd's dreams! Now the best Tomb Raider level we desperately need!
- ROBOT DINOSAUR FICTION RETURNS!
- Jen Williams, whose books you should buy and whom you should hire to write stuff good for you, has discovered my new favorite Jonathan Frakes video. And that is a competitive field, my friends.
- Charlotte Geater is a poet, cultural writer, podcast enthusiast and all around bad-ass creative. Find their pay-what-you-want poetry here.
- My friend Brendon Connelly is a fiercely talented writer, game designer and puzzle creator. He's also a massive Nancy Drew fan and as Ms Drew turns 90 this year, Brendon has a trailhead for you to bookmark. One that, on the 28th, will begin to lead to mystery...
- Adam Szym's horror comic Little Visitor is not for the faint of heart. If you're a horror fan, it's fiercely good.
- Continuing the spirit of continuity and the weird things it does at times like this, here's an excellent X-Men fan comic that's got a lot of deserving attention.
- Escape Artists' own Scott Campbell recommends horror podcast Old Gods of Appalachia.
- Tonya R. Moore's new one, Ode to the Multiverse, is out now.
- Preorders are now open for Lizbeth Campbell's The Vanished Queen. She describes it as "a political fantasy that asks hard questions about how to be good when living with evil. Plus sword fights." PLUS. SWORD FIGHTS. Get on that, folks.
- My buddy writer, actor, director and all-around creative genius Chris Brosnahan has the Shakespeare's Birthday content you need right now.
That's this week's Signal Boost, folks. If you have a project you'd like to see here, get in touch or keep an eye on my Twitter account for contribution calls.
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Signing Off / Playing Out
Welcome to the weekend, folks! I hope you have a relaxing time, do things you want to and can do and most importantly take time for yourself. Marathon not sprint, own oxygen mask first, and so on.
(clears through in podcaster ad voice)
And whether you're running a sprint OR a marathon, you should know podcasts will help pass the time, and the Escape Artists Podcast Network has your back Over 2400 free short stories covering science fiction, fantasy, horror and YA and counting, we've got the stories if you've got the time.
As ever, the Team KennerStuart Instagram is active as are the Twitters. Also I'm reading weekly bedtime stories on Wednesdays around 10 p.m. BST. Check them out on Twitch.
This work is produced for free. If you like what you read please consider dropping something in the tip jar. Thank you :).
Playing us out this week is the Westworld version of C.R.E.A.M. because it's a brilliant example of the show's incredibly odd, genre-defying tone.
Stay safe, folks, and see you next week, 'cause this?
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is a Full Lid.
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