Narcos

This came out in, what, 2015, maybe 2016 I think (no I can't be bothered to look it up what do you think this is, a reputable blog or something?), anyway breaking news, really securing my rep as a writer and critic on the cutting edge of the scene. It’s a kind of docu-drama I guess, a fictionalized re-enactment of key moments in the life of Colombian 70s-80s cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

First off, let me confess I only watched this because I kind of liked Boyd Holbrook’s performance in “Logan” and I’m kind of burnt out on any and all things Disney (Am I going to watch the next Marvel D+ series coming out next month? Oh you bet I am). Or serialized shows generally that aim to just go on forever, like the Simpsons, shows that exist only to go on existing.

It’s nice to have a show that has a definitive endpoint in mind. 

Second off, great mustache work all round. Really, hats off to the mustache wrangler. Amazing stuff. Everybody rocking the 80s porn ‘stache, the pencil, the handlebar, the horseshoe, the Miami Vice stubble, you name it. First-class follicles.

Third off, watching this is almost exactly like watching the old “Unsolved Mysteries” TV show from the 80s, which might be a deliberate nod given the time period, look it up on YouTube if you don’t know what I’m talking about, anyway where Robert Stack would narrate a re-enactment of some crime or mystery or other. Narcos has almost the same format, stretched into 10-episode seasons: Boyd Holbrook does a bit of serious narrating, cut to 5-minute re-enactment of the life of Pablo Escobar, cut to archive news footage from the period, rinse and repeat.

Especially in the first half of season one, this gives the show a kind of jerky stop-and-start pace, with the years just racing by, pausing only for three lines of dialog between Pablo (hands on hips, joint in mouth) and his cousin Gustavo (hands on hips, cigarette in mouth, hunter cap on head).

Boyd is a DEA agent, Pedro Pascal his partner, and the two are ostensibly main characters but they don’t do much other than angrily swear to take down Escobar about twice per episode. That’s on the powdery side of thin for characterization, and gets old pretty quick, particularly when you realize these boys have been sniffing too much of their own product and ain’t got a hope in hell of actually catching the man—it’s all just so much hot air.

The show is set almost exclusively in Colombia, so on the one hand it provides a look at America’s War on Drugs from the outside, as it were, from the viewpoints of both the drug dealers and the government that had to deal with them. I think this format lets the USA off a little lightly, okay a little very extremely lightly, as the market whose combination of ravenous, insatiable appetite for cocaine and flailing, desperate attempts to squash the consumption of cocaine helped create people like Escobar.

It's also good though to move away from the US as the center of all creation and see how all the flailing affected people in the country it all started in, caught in the crossfire, kind of double victims here, of drug lords empowered by American money and pawns in a war waged with American money, victims of the consequences of both America's hypocritical love and hate of drugs. The insights into the internal workings of Colombia's politics and attempts to deal with Escobar wound up being the most interesting part of the show.

Loki Episode 6

Haha, hoho, here’s what I said at the end of my review of last week’s episode:

“In many ways then, with only one episode left and having only barely scratched the surface of its premise, this is starting to feel like Marvel’s version of Netflix’s “Jupiter’s Legacy”, an entire season whose raison d'être is setting up either a sequel or some other piece of the MCU.”

Boy, when I am right, I am right.

The whole thing did indeed turn out to have been an exercise in scene-setting, shuffling pieces into position and revealing the MCU’s next Big Bad:

Some Guy.

Yes, yes, I know, comic book fans tell me he’s supposedly “Kang the Conqueror” who is apparently not related to Kodos haha still killing it with the Simpsons references 20 years later, but within the context of the show itself, he’s Some Guy. He does no conquering, kanglish or otherwise. If you know nothing about the character, just as I don't, then there is nothing within show itself to make the reveal anything other than a baffling non-event.

We spent six weeks building up to Loki and Other Loki meeting:

Some Guy.

The two journey to the castle at the End of Time, and meet Some Guy. They sit down across a table from Some Guy and for the next 15 minutes he explains what exactly the TVA is and why he created it. To whit: If you have infinite (or nearly infinite) universes, then the bell curve and normal distribution of human experience says you will always have universes in which a ruthless, ambitious conqueror will arise and seek to dominate all of reality. The only way to prevent this from happening is to have only one universe, where said conqueror does NOT arise, and ruthlessly eliminate all other realities.

Some Guy then gives the two Lokis a choice: Let him live and go back to their lives in the one and only reality, or they can kill him, in which case multiple realities will emerge, and the law of probability says a power-crazed dictator will arise again. Boy Loki wants to let Some Guy live, revenge-crazed Girl Loki wants him dead, they fight, because the only people in the MCU who can threaten superheroes are other superheroes, Boy Loki sems to win Girl Loki over with the power of luuurve, but doesn’t really. She kills Some Guy, thus spawning the creation of multiple realities, a conclusion that everyone who knew the titles of the upcoming Spider-Man and Doctor Strange movies was already expecting. Credits end with the announcement of season 2.

How to evaluate this then: As an episode, as a series, as part one of a larger story?

As an episode it is, quite frankly, one of the worst cases of tell-don’t-show I’ve witnessed in recent televisual entertainment. It’s mostly Some Guy sitting at a desk and telling his life story, only cutting away to inconsequential scenes with other characters every once in a while to obscure the fact that it’s mostly Some Guy sitting at a desk and telling his life story.

As the end of the series, it’s a startlingly dull climax. I know comic book fans are losing their minds over the introduction of Kang the Conqueror into the MCU, but for those of us unfamiliar with his kangic conquering, he’s just Some Guy. Yay, the MCU is finally going to feature Some Guy. By which I mean the Big Bad has been absent the entire series so the only thing we’ve seen him do is sit at a desk and tell his life story. Which by my reckoning is not, though I may be made of sterner stuff than the average television viewer, especially big, nor bad.

The basic concept, I dig, a sort of Darwinistic survival-of-the-most-ruthless multiverse in which wiping out other realities becomes not evil, but a simple matter of self-defense. Free will must be limited in order to ensure there is any free will at all. That’s an interesting moral dilemma, which is a shame, as we’re only introduced to it about 10 minutes before the end of the season.

As a result, it’s not a dilemma we’ve seen dramatized in any way shape or form on our screen. We’re just told that this dilemma exists. One revenge-crazed person gives it precisely zero thought and kills the guy preventing it from happening anyway. So the climax doesn’t even really work as the climax to the season.

As part one of a larger story? Hm. Television shows with story arcs that span multiple seasons are nothing new, so I suppose in hindsight it was maybe unfair of me to criticize the show for lack of direction and clarity, but this is the Internet so there’s no way in hell I’ll admit to that. Double down, my friends, always double down.

In all seriousness (okay, in a modicum of seriousness), one would not fault, say, “The Fellowship of the Ring” for not getting even halfway to Mordor, or to use more recent examples, season one of “Game of Thrones” for not giving us a winner to the thronic game, or season one of “The Witcher” for not resolving everything about Geralt and his adoptive daughter, Ciri. 

Taking the analogy further, one does not get angry at a chapter for not concluding the story, nor irritated with a paragraph for not ending the chapter, nor disappointed with a sentence for not ending a paragraph. 

I suppose the difference is framing and expectation—the way a storyteller begins to tell their story determines the boundaries we set on that nebulous concept of a "story", and sets our expectations for how much story we will get, and at what pace or speed. If you begin watching in the expectation the show will deliver an ending, at least to this particular arc if not the Lokis’ whole story, in six weeks’ time, then finding it was all just piddling about before the story actually gets going will feel like a bit of bait and switch.

In retrospect I find it renders the whole season rather hollow. It was all a bit of screwing around, stalling for time until the cliffhanger so that Marvel could reveal:

Some Guy.

Bad enough that the titular main character, Boy Loki, has been reduced to second fiddle tagging along with other, more interesting characters, but then even his more interesting Girl Loki self is revealed to also have been no more than a prop, a way of maneuvering this fictional universe into position to reveal:

Some Guy.

I’ve found this to be a trap some longer-running shows seem to fall into. “Vikings” didn’t seem to be about anything, just stuff happening to a bunch of Vikings (the Siege of Paris storyline being the one exception, and a standout because of it). I tried watching Netflix’s “Travelers” recently too and it had the same problem—time travelers from a “12 Monkeys”-ish dark future travel to our time to change our future/their past, and just, kind of, do stuff. They seem to accomplish their main mission halfway through the first season, but then the show just keeps going for another two and a half seasons as far as I can tell. Stuff keeps happening. Not stuff with any greater direction or point, just. Stuff.

You know what? I don’t buy it anymore. Maybe this makes me the old man being angry at the cloud, two Simpsons references in one post I'm just killing it here, but no, I don't buy it anymore.

An entertaining story should have some kind of point to it. A satisfying, entertaining story should not rely on half a dozen other bits of future, unreleased entertainment in order to be entertaining. Yes, season one of “Game of Thrones” was setup for the quasi-Wars-of-the-Roses style Lannisters versus Starks battle, “The Witcher” was setup for Geralt reuniting with Ciri, but they delivered clear conclusions to their mini-arcs. Likewise, “Dune” ends with Paul becoming emperor, “Star Wars” with the Death Star blowing up, or even “Phantom Menace” with the trade route taxation or whatever tf it was getting worked out. 

Entertainment can be part of a larger property yet still deliver a satisfying arc that has a definite conclusion.

It should not, in other words, be a six-hour intro for:

Some Guy.

But here we are.

Loki Episode 5

Having exhausted all possible criticism, I find myself forced to choose between either repeating myself or actually being nice about the show.

Having exhausted all possible criticism, I find myself forced to choose between either repeating myself or actually being nice about the show.

Having … okay, well you get the joke.

Instead of recapping the show, let’s talk about what’s really important here: Me. 

And my opinions. 

To whit, my main trouble with the show is its kind of flabby structure, sort of aimless meandering between plot points without clear conflicts or objectives that would provide tension and suspense, favoring instead to keep the audience in a state of perpetual bewilderment in the hopes that people enjoy being outsmarted by their entertainment choices.

Even as a mystery I find it unfulfilling, as the show presents not one mystery, but a kind of series of Russian matryoshka nesting doll mysteries, in which mysteries are presented and then immediately solved in the next episode, only for another one to be presented.

This most recent episode was a case in point. When we left off last week, it was suddenly revealed that getting dematerialized by the time cops of the TVA doesn’t actually kill you—Boy Loki is supposedly disintegrated, only to wake up in a post-apocalyptic New York and find himself facing four different incarnations of himself: Homemade cosplay Loki (Richard E Grant), kid Loki (not Richard E Grant), black Loki with a hammer (still not Richard E Grant) and literally an alligator Loki (could be Richard E Grant, who knows, the man has a formidable range). So we are left with two mysteries: Where or when is this? Who are these other guys and what are they doing there?

Well we get our answers in the first ten minutes or so: It’s the “Void” at the end of time, which we didn’t know was a thing until we were suddenly introduced to it just now so there’s not much you can say to it except “oh, huh, okay”. It’s the place where everything the baddies at the TVA want banished is transported to, so that whoever it is can’t muck up the timeline anymore (being at the end of time, and all). The end of time apparently involves a beastie that’s kind of a cross between the balrog and the smoke monster from “Lost” that devours everything, which is also not a thing we were aware existed until just now. Eliciting another rousing, “oh, neat, I guess” from the audience.

The other Lokis are all, like our main Loki, “variants” that somehow accidentally changed the canonical timeline, got caught and packed off to the Void. What are they doing? Not a lot. Hanging out in an underground nuclear shelter, basically. Quite how they managed to find our Loki whilst evading an all-devouring smoke monster is a bit of a mystery, but whatever keeps the plot going I guess.

My point being, all the questions you had at the end of last week have now been answered. Since none of the answers have any grounding in anything that’s come before, you’re just left with a kind of dull acceptance. Sure. Why not.

During the meanwhilst, Girl Loki captures TVA Judge Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and demands to know what’s really going on with the TVA—who is in charge? Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) appears to change sides, but doesn’t really. Cornered and desperate, Girl Loki disintegrates herself rather than allow herself to be captured by Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw)—supposedly in the hopes that this will enable her to find Boy Loki, though she would have no reason to suspect disintegration does anything other than what it says on the tin, unless she’s read the script.

She meets up with Mobius (Owen Wilson) and then with Boy Loki and his merry men (viz himself, himself as a kid, himself, and himself as an alligator). There follows the one stretch of the show that’s actually pretty good, including some humorous bits between Mobius and Old Loki about whether or not the alligator is really a Loki (“Well, he’s green,” observes Old Loki, “although he could be lying.”) There’s also a nice quiet bit between Boy Loki and Girl Loki as they contemplate the future and what will happen should they win.

So I’ll give the show two points: One, the structure for this episode is clear and dramatic, the struggle to subdue or kill the smoke monster and escape the Void. Two, it really nails the character bits when it isn’t trying to push the plot from twist to twist. Owen x Tom has been gold from the get-go (though the sudden shift from hostility to best friends has been a bit sudden, but we’ll let that slide and assume a lot of time has passed off-camera), and here both Owen x Richard and Tom x Sophia are amusing and, dare I say it, even a bit touching. Though the beats between Tom and Sophia probably should have come in episode 3 and thus feel like a rehash. But I’ll take what I can get.

We end on a climax that is a bit of a repeat of the climax to the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, in which our heroes join hands in the midst of purplish-black CGI smoke and use the power of friendship (or twu rub in this case, perhaps?) to make some glowing fireworks, find the emotional fortitude to overcome the enemy, and then triumph. The smoke dissipates, revealing a portal to a castle at the end of time and, presumably, the lair of who- or whatever is behind the TVA.

It’s a serviceable cliffhanger, I suppose, and probably the only one the writers could have gone with, since “Who really runs the TVA?” is the only mystery left unexplored. It’s not a particularly compelling one to me, as we weren’t even aware that was a mystery until last episode, so we’ve had all of 40 minutes buildup to it, and while we’re on the subject, from a structural standpoint not introducing your villain until the very last episode of the series feels like an extremely odd choice.

We are left with a main character who sort of staggers through the story, repeating the same beats, constantly bewildered, never exercising any real agency. It’s Girl Loki’s story, and the show would probably have been a thousand times better if it hadn’t been bogged down by the need to focus on a character (viz Tom Hiddle starring as Boy Loki) who isn’t all that central to the story, really.

In many ways then, with only one episode left and having only barely scratched the surface of its premise, this is starting to feel like Marvel’s version of the Netflix flop “Jupiter’s Legacy”, an entire season whose raison d'être is setting up either a sequel or some other piece of the MCU.

I know Marvel is addicted to trying to interconnect anything and everything so people feel obliged to watch every bit of product the content manufacturing machine churns out, but this is the first time I’ve felt that was the only reason for one of their properties to exist.

Loki Episode 4

Let us begin, as the show itself does, with a quick recap of the story so far:

Avengers Assemble Loki (Tom) breaks the MCU continuity and picks up the magic Tesseract stone during Avengers Endgame, thus escaping Thor 2 and 3 as well as Avengers Infinity War but not escaping a black-clad SWAT team from the Kafka/Gilliamesque Time Variance Authority (TVA) time cops who Don’t Approve of That Sort of Thing.

Tomki is saved from callous and disinterested disintegration at the last minute, by TVA Agent Mobius (Wowen Wilson), who needs his help to track down another MCU canon-unfriendly Loki.

This they then do.

Said Loki turns out to be… dun Dun DUN… a GURL (Sophia).

Sophki and Tomki escape the TVA by fleeing across time and space to a purple-grey moon called Lamentis where, in a refreshing break from the SF trope of things crashing into planets, a planet is about to crash into them. 

This it then does.

Cue cliffhanger ending.

While the back and forth between Owen and Tom has been fun to watch, thanks mainly to both actors’ ability not to overplay their hands and let the vulnerability and humanity of the characters shine through, I’ve found the plot a bit shapeless and meandering, probably because the writers’ instincts seem to be to treat the narrative like a mystery that must be kept from the audience, rather than a superhero action flick where all is on display.

Given that Disney-Marvel-Pixar-Lucasfilm is three quarters of the entertainment world these days, I think it’s great that shows like Wandavision and Loki are starting to experiment with the boundaries and possibilities of the superhero genre. However. I think mysteries have their own conventions. To put it as stupidly and crudely as I can (and I am exceptionally stupid and crude), in act one you set up the mystery, act two allow your protagonist to follow the clues and decode the mystery, then in act three reveal and confront the antagonist.

This they have not done.

Instead of being upfront with the mystery or conflict or issue it is trying to resolve, each episode of Loki answers one mystery, only to immediately set up a new and completely different mystery, meaning I don’t feel there’s any forward momentum or progress being made. Instead, we get a similar set of plot points and near-copies of various scenes cycling around and around like the show is its own little time loop.

So as we open on the doomed moon, Sylvie (Girlki) gives us her sad, touching flashback origin story (which probably could have fit into episode 3 instead of the pointless toing and froing), in which we confirm that the TVA are actually the bad guys, not poor Sylvie. Boyki is touched. They hold hands. And Wowen appears at the 11^th hour to rescue Tom. Again.

On a side note, I think the show breaks its own rules in order to get the couple (does falling in love with yourself count as narcissism if it’s technically a different person, or incest? Hm) out of a jam, as the whole point of going to an impending apocalypse was that, since everyone is about to die, non-canon people can do literally anything without affecting the timeline. Here, we are told that two gods of mischief potentially making a bit of mischief beneath the sheets, wink wink, would create a “Nexus event” though quite how—since they were 2 seconds away from a fiery death—I do not pretend to understand.

In any event Loki is captured, again, and interrogated by Mobius, again. Tom reveals Loki’s bad-boy brashness is a cover for his insecurities, again (actually for about the third time so far, I think). Tom also tries to convince Owen that he’s working for the bad guys. Mobius goes to talk to his boss, Judge Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and that’s too good a name not to spell out in full), again. She informs him Tom and Sophia are scheduled for execution.

Which seems like another one of these pointless scenes to me. Instead of saving people you intend to kill from certain death, you could, and I apologize if my reasoning here is a little complex but bear with me, you could—you know. Just. Not.

Anyway, the chat with his boss is enough to raise Owen’s suspicions, so he decides to do a bit of snooping.

This he then does.

With astonishing speed Owen discovers his entire life is a lie. He saves Tom only he doesn’t—instead Own gets caught and disintegrated by Renslayer’s goons. OR DOES HE? 

That’s the trouble with killing off characters in a show entirely built around time travel, particularly a post Endgame Marvel show about time travel: We all know the show is going to cheat. Sure, sure, show, Owen Wilson is dead. Sure, we believe you.

So the net effect of this sequence is to subtract one Owen from the show, but Tommy and Sylvie are still destined for the chop. They are brought before the Time Keepers, the supposed leaders of the TVA, break free thanks to an oddly useless bit of help from one of the time cops now sympathetic to Sylvie (earlier Nice Cop breaks Sylvie out of prison, only to put her straight back in again, only to throw her a weapon at the dramatically appropriate moment), and a rather awkward stick fight breaks out.

In the fight, one of the Time Keepers gets their heads knocked off, revealing they are actually a brainless android. “But who created the TVA?” cries Tom. Ooh a new mystery, how lovely, how delightful not to know who the antagonist is two thirds of the way through the series. Certainly this has never happened before in a Marvel show and certainly not Wandavision.

Anyway, Tom is about to confess his feelings for Sylvie, again, when he gets disintegrated. OR DOES HE?

No. No he doesn’t.

Cut to a mid-credits scene that I nearly missed because none of the first three episodes had ones (yes, very sneaky, fuck you too show), where Tom awakes in a post-apocalyptic New York and finds himself face-to-face with Comic Book Loki (Richard Grant), Kid Loki and His Pet Alligator Loki Complete With Horned Crown and Hammer Loki Or Something Look I Don’t Know He Was On Screen For Like Two Seconds. Another mystery. Great.

It may be that when all of this is over and the final shape is revealed everything in this show will turn out to be perfectly placed and paced and all fit together as seamlessly as Tom Cruise and his Motorcycle, but the actual process of sitting through it is just a tad frustrating. Unless audiences have been conditioned to spend the entire time not quite understanding what the fuck is going on.

The mid-credits scene is a pretty good encapsulation of my beef with the show. No warning or foreshadowing or set up we were going to have a mid-credits scene. No hint that being disintegrated by the TVA means anything other than being wiped out of existence. Not even a whisper as to who all these other Lokis are and what they’re doing hanging out in the ruins of a New York City. You’re just presented with a series of baffling moments and expected to be happy because this show thinks that pulling the rug from under your audience and going “TADAAA!” is somehow synonymous with good TV.

There’s a danger in playing too much to the audience’s reaction, I think. As someone much smarter than me once remarked—and I won’t credit them because nobody likes a smarty pants—it’s the difference between Olympic wresting and WWF wresting. Olympic wresting can get the audience on their feet, but that’s not its sole objective. Whereas the only reason anybody in WWF does anything is to get a reaction. Now call me an elitist snob or whatever you will (it’s okay it’s the Internet I can’t hear you) but I for one do not think it’s healthy if all your entertainment is as hollow as professional wrestling.  

The phrase ‘subverting expectations’ has much to answer for. Our current Lost/Game of Thrones/Rise of Skywalker fetish for keeping people guessing at every point in the story means the audience is reduced to vegetative spectating, a kind of lumpen potateriat.

Even a mystery, I think, has to be clear about what the friggin mystery actually is. Be clear about what is unclear. We in the audience have to know what it is that we don’t know, so that we can look forward to knowing. Suspense requires anticipation. I can’t anticipate this show because I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen from moment to moment. So there’s no suspense. I have no idea what mysteries are going to be solved because I don’t even know what the mysteries are.

Ah, makes me want to get a stiff drink and watch Mad Max again.

This I then did.