I emerged from the fourth season of the BBC’s once awesome Sherlock in a kind of incoherent rage at what successful writers get away with when they are, apparently, deemed too big to fail. I’m not the only one, of course. There was a nice skewering of the show’s degeneration from cerebral mystery to James Bond-lite action film in the Guardian and the program’s principal show runner, Steven Moffat, has been drawing feminist flak since season two, so rather than go after elements of the show itself (and spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it in the process) I want to step back from Sherlock and focus on a troubling element I’ve seen in a lot of recent storytelling: the disastrous pursuit of surprise.
I’m talking about plot twists, and I’ll start by saying yes, I love them. There are few more compelling feelings than reading a book or watching a TV show and suddenly thinking “Wait! This isn’t what I thought it was at all! Everything I thought I knew about this story was wrong! The good guys are the bad guys (or vice versa). Up is down and black is white and I can’t wait to see how this works out!!!”
If it works out.
And there’s the rub. There’s nothing more satisfying than being taken off guard by a plot twist only to find that the story now actually makes more sense. Things I had half noticed but not processed suddenly become telling—they might even have been clues I might have grasped if I’d known how to read them, and as we move to the end of the story everything seems clearer, sharper and more intense because it has morphed unexpectedly but coherently into something I hadn’t seen coming.
And then there’s Sherlock. Or Doctor Who. Or any number of other non-Moffat books and TV shows where the delight in twists seems an end in itself. “They won’t see this coming!” you can sense the writers crowing gleefully as they draft in assassin wives and maximum security prisons (which somehow aren’t) and characters returning from the dead, all justified by a scattering of faux science, a little psychosis, and (most importantly) some swift transitions which go by so fast that you aren’t supposed to have time to sit up and say “excuse me?” Lately it seems that I find myself looking up in the final pages or minutes of a show with David Byrne singing in my head “Well, how did I get here?”
How indeed?
It’s not new, of course, this flagrant use of smoke-and-mirrors plotting and nonsense resolutions. Think of that great study in audience abuse, Lost, which began with a plane crash and then added twist upon twist, surprise after surprise, always dangling the possibility of everything coming together and making sense in next week’s episode. It never did. The script heaped up implausibilities and non sequiturs until nothing could finally account for what the show had actually been about. Lost was an object lesson in the financial reality of television whose job is to keep viewers hooked for as long as possible, and then, when they (and the advertisers) have lost interest, vanish, whether the story is wrapped up or not.
So we get extended and increasingly incoherent narrative arcs that leave fans scratching their heads (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?) because we are doing what readers are hardwired to do. We try to find coherence, unity, and meaning whether there is any or not. We assume that the ending was somehow planned from the beginning, though we should know by now that that is not how television is made. TV—unless it’s conceived as a self-contained mini-season—doesn’t begin with a macro idea which they then break into as many episodes or seasons as they have to fill. Generally, they start small and add to the end, extending and extending with no final end game in sight. We shouldn’t be surprised that it doesn’t finally make sense. All those plot twists and surprises we thought were complex revelations of some master plan were just new bits tacked on, each one taking the story in a direction no one (including the writers) had foreseen when they penned Episode 1.
The grand example of all this misdirection might be the original Twin Peaks, a surreal masterpiece masquerading as a detective story. It was lush and strange and unlike anything I had seen on television before but it seemed to work like a conventional murder mystery and the burning question—Who killed Laura Palmer?—seemed, for a while, to be on everyone’s lips. And then we got into Season 2 and gradually we lost faith in the idea that that question would ever be answered in a way that was satisfactory, that all the twists and revelations were a kind of postmodern collage and not an unconventionally told but ultimately linear narrative with an answer at the end. Still, the journey was almost worth it.
And let’s be honest, it’s hard to write plots which surprise and redirect but still deliver the solution or resolution which the genre demands in a way which feels both plausible and satisfying. As unconventional TV mysteries go, Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective is a good example of one that did, all its meta constructs finally falling away in a Freudian reveal about the writer at the heart of the story. But it’s rare to pull off such a feat, and writers don’t get enough credit for it. They are praised for character, for sentence-level phrasing, but not so much for building the kind of intricately clever plotting where all those twists and reveals lock together like the wheels of a great German clock.
I’m not sure if the problem is the much touted demise of critical thinking, of big picture analysis, or of our shortened attention spans, but too much narrative art seems to think that it doesn’t matter if the whole doesn’t make sense so long as the moment-to-moment stuff keeps us on the edge of our seats. It does matter, if only because if we realize that the solutions and revelations don’t really stand up to scrutiny, then what’s the point of watching at all? The twist in a tale can be potent when it’s earned and part of a larger narrative design, but when it’s just a flash bomb, a distraction from the lack of substance in the story, it derails the whole plot, setting everything off down some new track like a hastily thrown point on a railway line. As a model railway enthusiast I know all too well that twists in the track, turn outs, and sudden shifts in direction might make for an interesting-looking layout—but unless they are done extremely well, they tend to leave you with a derailed locomotive and a string of cars smashing on the floor.
A.J. Hartley is the bestselling author of a dozen novels including Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows and the upcoming Cathedrals of Glass: A Planet of Blood and Ice (To The Stars Media) and the YA fantasy adventures Steeplejack and Firebrand from Tor Teen. As Andrew James Hartley, he is also UNC Charlotte’s Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare, specializing in performance theory and practice, and is the author of various scholarly books and articles from the world’s best academic publishers including Palgrave and Cambridge University Press. He is an honorary fellow of the University of Central Lancashire, UK.
“The Cylons Have A Plan” and someday they’re gonna share it with the writers. Season 3 of BSG went well off the rails, but they managed to (mostly) rerail it by the end of season 4.
Babylon 5 is, IMHO, the exemplar of how to do it right.
My theory of Lost is that it was entirely metafictional. Most genre TV winks at the audience and does self-referential bits, but Lost was on another level — to me the only way it makes sense is that the island represents storytelling itself — the World of Story — as a magic kingdom you probably do not want to get lost in. A few characters, who had a need to see themselves as heroes, immediately began plotting, scheming, adventuring and so forth. Characters in the background often looked on shaking their heads at the foolishness. Ordinary life is better than an adventure story full of pain, misery, danger and loss.
That’s my reading and I’m sticking to it.
The Cylons’ Plan is very well explained in the eponymous movie:
Step 1: kill all humans.
Step 2: If some are left, repeat step 1 until there aren’t.
No, it wasn’t as subtle as we would think from the introduction of every episode.
Also, as incoherent as it seemed, the ending from that show was basically the only possible one considering what we knew from the very first episode. Which doesn’t mean it was very good…
Yes, yes, yes! My thoughts exactly. This is what I feel since the end of Sherlock – season 4 and I´ve probably thought of this even during season 3. To be fair, for first two seasons I loved it. That moment when Sherlock deduces code to Irene Adler´s phone was amazing.
I think the dangerous thing for writers is that pulling off one of these tricks feels so good. It´s like an addiction. When I was a kid, I tried to write a sort of Harry Potter fanfic as a present to my best friend, and I managed to kill off my favorite character and brought him back in like ten chapters – very Reichenbach-fallish style. The look on her face when she told me she did not see that coming! I wanted to write nothing else for the rest of my life! – So, in a way, I completely understand Moffat. But, after what he´s done to Sherlock, I also hate him a little.
For me, it boils down to laziness on the writer’s AND the audience’s part. As long the audience is distracted by the “oooooh, shiny” surprise bits, the successful and arrogant writers like Moffat can toss out bits of shiny nonsense instead of coherent plots and characters.
The sad thing is that Moffat’s earlier work shows he can do better.
And, before Twin Peaks, the same problem was with X-Files. By the time they got to Season 4, they’d pretty much strained the viewers’ patience to the breaking point, and everyone was ready for some kind of payoff–and we never got one. Instead, they just kept spinning out story-arcs that were left hanging, and dropping red-herrings everywhere that were just ignored.
Even earlier, there was Dark Shadows. It’s been a long time, but I can remember how they’d cut away from storylines right in the middle of some development and somehow never get back to them,
There was also Heroes, though at least they can blame the writer’s strike for some of it. It also had a problem similar to the love of plot twists: an inability to let go of a character.
I honestly don’t know how people have put up with this for like 15 years now.
And yes, to echo everyone else:
Babylon 5 is the greatest example of a television plot ever created.
But Buffy, Star Trek, Angel, Firefly, Stargate SG1 and Farscape were all great too, and I think the 1990s have the greater claim to “Golden Age of Television” for that reason. For every Westworld, the current age of TV produces a dozen shows that go nowhere, say nothing, and basically add nothing to our understanding of the world – they inspire no loyalty, don’t have conventions, or people re-watching them yearly on Box Sets – if we are to judge the quality of a TV show, surely the show that spawns entire encyclopedias, academic interest, die-hard fans, and worlds that you could tell endless stories in, are the standard by which to judge. And by that standard, current TV is a failure. What recently has been even one tenth as fun or awe inspiring in it’s setting as Farscape?
The first two seasons worked well because the writers grounded their stories in the Conan Doyle originals – extrapolating how those characters and situations would play out in our time. The Season 3 revelation of Mary as a black ops assassin was the first indication to me that things were going in the wrong direction.
I feel much the same way after reading 5000 pages of Game of Thrones…no resolution, no point to killing (or not) characters, no tunnel in sight, much less a light at the end of it…I can’t see spending any more money on clothing descriptions and character lists. It’s just more and more of a crapsack world with no redeeming social commentary.
Your mileage may vary.
Basically, what @9 Big K said:
The first two seasons worked well because the writers grounded their stories in the Conan Doyle originals – extrapolating how those characters and situations would play out in our time.
100% agree. Series 1 and 2 were great, and series 3 and 4 became too self-indulgent. I agree with A.J. Hartley that a twist for twist’s sake is lazy and aggravating to me as a viewer. I don’t always have to have a twist to be interested in a story.
I have similar thoughts about J.K. Rowling’s recent forays into the Wizarding World… but that’s a whole other can of worms.
I don’t think the ending of The Prisoner made sense either!
Totally agree on the twist (and its brother the cliffhanger) plague. And now that @11 mentions Harry Potter, I always thoroughly disliked (and I’m still surprised it didn’t draw more criticism) the twist <SPOILER ALERT> with Mad Eye Moody. We get to know and love the character and it turns out that it is an impostor the whole time. And we are supposed to believe that he is that good at impersonation that any warm feelings his charade instilled have to carry over to the real Mad Eye as if we really knew him! It ruined that whole book for me.
@@@@@ 1 & 8–Agree on Babylon 5. And isn’t it true that one of the reasons for that is that the first four seasons of Babylon 5 really had been thought through in advance as a whole by one writer?
Couldn’t agree more; about most of the shows mentioned in fact, but Sherlock especially.
@14/Saavik: J. Michael Straczynski wrote 92 of the 110 episodes across all five seasons of Babylon 5, but more importantly he had the whole story planned out with a proper beginning, middle, and end before the pilot even aired. It’s almost unfair to compare other arc-based shows to it because B5 remains unique in that the producers actually allowed it to run as many episodes as required to complete the original vision (even if they almost cancelled the fifth season).
It is much easier to develop plot lines properly when you not only know where the story is going to end up but also exactly how many screen minutes are available to get there; it also helps immensely to not be required to add filler or gin up interest in ways that may not really match the story you want to tell. However, it seems to me that the economics of TV almost inevitably lead to the kind of writing gimmicks lamented here. Shows still default to 42-minute episodes over 13- or 22-episode blocks, and producers are loathe to commit to a season when the audience is unknown—or worse, agree to a (popular) show that tells a complete story in a few episodes and then stops. Feature films seem to be increasingly affected by this need for plot and characterization gimmicks too, as the big studios seem ever more reliant on generating buzz for new installments of tentpole franchises.
I keep hoping that the ways in which TV distribution has been changing over the last couple decades will lead to more acceptance of shows where the lengths of episodes and seasons vary according to the needs of the story, i.e. allow the writers to properly develop stories that happen to be televised rather than simply providing content for TV shows.
Thanks for the discussion, folks. The B5 commentary is especially interesting. I also think that Star Trek TNG pulled off a couple of well crafted twisty episodes in the “what’s going here?” mode, like the one when Riker was in the play (State of Mind, I think it was called). That’s a single ep instance, of course, rather than a larger series arc but it worked well because the surprises were carefully worked out to make the ep coherent. I was disappointed to see Person of Interest stumble a little in this regard after a couple of seasons, but it came back, I thought. Oh and I agree that X Files suffered from the same overly complex mythology toward the end. Some shows–and I’d include Sherlock, though I’m now thinking Agents of Shield too, just work better when they stick to what are almost stand alone episodes (or cases, in this case) rather than getting preoccupied with some macro narrative which gets made up as it goes along. Perhaps that’s why I preferred Buffy to Angel or Doll House, which too quickly turned to the twisty big picture.
Thanks for the comments! I am kicking myself for not adding a last line about it being too bad some of those derailed railway cars had been bound for Baker St…
Agreed. Hi, Drew. Where’s AC Doyle when you need him? Glad to know you are still doing so well.
3. Athreeren: BSG’s ending was biblical. Considering how much Mormon cosmology permeates the series (God lives on Kolob, which became Kobol in the series; Satan himself showed up in the original series and Apollo and Starbuck had to become “angels” to defeat him), it’s not surprising that the humans ended up in a new Eden. It may lead to another cycle of destruction, encoded in armageddon/apocalypse legends, but it’s a new beginning.
Even the Cain and Abel story makes more sense with another set of humans. He runs away from supposedly the only family on earth and finds another tribe where he marries and has a new family. Then there’s the Nephilim, human/angel hybrids, and so on…
YES! Thank you sir!
One of the real tricks of “arc” storytelling is knowing when to stop.
The writers of Castle failed to resist that temptation, much to the detriment of the last several seasons of the show. When they were writing light procedurals with clever banter, interesting (but mostly self-contained) puzzles, and amusing pop-culture riffs, they did very well. But they insisted in creating an increasingly complicated, top-heavy, and ultimately unwieldy Evil Mastermind Conspiracy around the murder of Detective Beckett’s mother, and spinning out the threads of that conspiracy to utterly unsustainable lengths for fear that making the leads a happily married couple would ruin the chemistry. (They had evidently watched too much Moonlighting and not enough Hart to Hart back in the day.)
Of all the problems of the second season of Twin Peaks, the identity of Laura’s killer was not one of them, nor was it a twist. Lynch and Frost had known who the killer was from the start but, as you said, the show was a surreal soap opera wrapped up as a murder mystery – the identity of the killer was the macguffin, not the end goal. In fact, when the execs forced the writers to show their hand early, the series plummeted because many viewers thought it was The End, and everything else was just keeping the show on life support to make a money grab.
True, the creators being busy on other projects didn’t help either, but imagine if you had to keep interest in BSG after they found an habitable planet and killed all the Cylons. Very few writers could pull that off on a TV show schedule from the ’90s.
On B5: agree completely. And MJS also had many ‘character traps’ ready in case an actor left or became unavailable, so that others could pick up their role in the story. He even left a chance for Talia to come back if the actress ever changed her mind. That’s how you plan an arc story while leaving enough flexibility to work around the realities of the business.
@21 RE: Knowing when to stop — that was also an issue with Supernatural, which basically finished its story at the end of S5, but then kept going for another 7 years and counting. It’s kind of found its footing over time, but the first few seasons after S5 were pretty dire …
Yes! This!
I am so very tired of TV shows that allegedly have twisty who-can-you-trust plots, and if you actually look at them, turn out to be just a kitchen sink with more and more nonstandard appliances bolted onto it to make it look like something more.
Sherlock is a recent (and sad, since the first two seasons were great) examplar of this ilk, but in US TV, there’s Blindspot, Quantico, The Blacklist, and How to Get Away with Murder. And Timeless is threatening to be as well, with the Big Evil Conspiracy Over Centuries, but at least that one can be watched as an action-adventure series.
What I find really annoying about a lot of TV writing lately is that the writers seem to think that surprise is the only important thing in storytelling. If you’ve surprised the audience, you’ve won — even if the surprise only comes about because you didn’t set it up at all, there were no clues, and the surprise came out of nowhere. A good surprise twist makes you want to go back and rewatch the whole series because it makes you see things in a new light. It essentially becomes an entirely new series because of what you now know. The random surprises actually decrease the pleasure of a rewatch because there’s nothing to look for, no satisfaction in seeing how it was put together. You know all those pieces that seem to be setting up something are ultimately meaningless.
The writers of Once Upon a Time are really, really bad about this. They’ll have laid out Chekhov’s Arsenal, then resolve the situation with some magical device ex machina that was never set up or with some bit of new information via flashback that’s actually only new to the viewers, since the characters had to have known it all along (as it happened in their past), but it’s treated like new information. But at least they don’t really let the surprise twists derail their plots because as soon as they spring their surprise, they see a squirrel, lose interest in what they just did, and go racing off after the next plot, so that the huge surprise twist has no consequences or real impact on their characters. This is the show that brought a character back from the dead, and no one really reacted. It changed nothing.
I’m so glad to see all the praise for B5. Definitely one of my most favored shows. Steven Moffat’s writing seems to be getting sloppy over the past few years. It seems more like he think he can put doggy-doo on a plate and get away with it (which he has). I agree that the fault can be laid at the feet of both writers and audience. It seems everything is about shock factor more than anything these days. Even Doctor Who is more about having a twist just because (I still haven’t gotten over the nonsense of the 50 anniversary episode, what a let down). It just seems like audiences are being taken for granted these days.
So hopefully J. Michael Straczynski can come through with a new B5 script!
I just have to mention the TV show 12 Monkeys as a recent example of when the showrunners seem to know what they are doing and apparently plotting everything out in advance. So far (after two seasons) things that were cryptic and mysterious at the start of season 1 have been brought to light, plot twists (really big ones) have been resolved or twisted even further, new twists put in motion, and (naturally, because it’s Amercian TV) new threats and enemies appeared on the horizon. It’s weird and dark and mysterious but I haven’t once felt that the writers are just toying with me or that they just fumble the plots.
With Doctor Who, badly resolved plots have always been a problem. Russell T Davies did it as well. He was great at thinking up characters and plots and themes, and blowing them up into Huge Drama!!! toward the end of the seasons, but he sucked at actually tying things together at the end. A lot of things were just kind of hand-waved.
Love B5! JMS created something that will be watched for quite a long time. The fall of the Earth Alliance really resonates after this last election.
The other trope I really hate is how in TV shows every new villain has to soooo much worse than the last one.
How about a series where Sherlock is bested and confused by the 13 year old girl who lives down the street that he catches shoplifting at the local bodega? She tricks him into letting him go by claiming hardship, he sees her drive by with her parents sneering at him, and the rest of the series is them one upping each other. (like Jack’s nemesis Kaylie Hooper in 30 Rock) I’d much rather watch that than another “This killer is sooo much worsty worst than last killer!”
Obligatory Plot Twist: She’s really Moriarty’s daughter. Or Sherlock’s daughter. Or both! (dun dun duuuuuun)
I think Agents of SHIELD is getting it right this season. Two half-season arcs with enough twists to keep it interesting, clear endings in sight, but with a big, season-long plot as well.
Like first-season Sherlock, actually. Self-contained stories within a bigger plot.
@29 – I was thinking the same thing as I read this article! AoS has been knocking it out of the park lately in terms of satisfying story developments. Having smaller arcs that wrap up within 6 or 8 episodes help the audience trust that it’s not all twists and surprises; they do intend to give us answers in the near future. Surprising developments are usually dealt with within an episode or two, rather than dragging it out over a whole season. And the reveal as to who the real big bad of this current arc is was fabulous! Totally surprising, as I’d come to trust that character so much, but in hindsight it makes perfect sense, given what we’ve seen from this person in the past.
*SHERLOCK SPOILERS*
I think we also need to note that focusing so exclusively on shock and surprise twists means that all the writers’ weaknesses tend to go uncorrected. In the case of Sherlock, we are left with a vision of modern London as a place where:
1) Almost everyone is white, and almost none of the others is of any importance to the story.
2) Foreigners are dangerous and suspect. When Mary suddenly shot Sherlock, he deduced that she was from some other country. When she suddenly became again a faithful wife and a mother, she was referred to as “that English woman.”
3) Women are either unimportant or dependant on their relationship to men. The woman who built her own sex-worker business is a pawn for Moriarty and is caught because she is so besotted with Sherlock that she uses his name as her phone code. Mrs. Hudson, who at first appears to have built a life and a form of financial support for herself, reveals that her money comes from having endured the abuse of her drug lord husband long enough to become his widow and presumably his heir. Humiliated by being manipulated into admitting she is in love with Sherlock, Molly just drinks and “shags” somebody she doesn’t love so she can go back to being Sherlock’s cheerful little helper. Mary, who spent most of her adult life as a paid assassin and to the end thought of her fellow assassins as family, says being a wife is the only meaningful life (she seems to ignore the existence of her child) and ends by being a beyond-the-dead motherly, advice-giving figure for Sherlock and John.
4) LGBTQ* references are used as jokes or indications of moral degeneracy. Every admirable character is straight, while every non-straight character is pathetic or despicable. Euros is apparently pansexual as she doesn’t even notice the sex/gender of the guard she rapes and mutilates. Moriarty is coded as sexually attracted to Sherlock. The male innkeepers who are clearly a couple are untrustworthy and tell lies that almost lead to another character being driven to suicide. Uncle Rudi isn’t given the dignity of a trans identity, but is mocked as a cross-dresser. Harry, never even shown, is a lesbian who can’t maintain her marriage and is an alcoholic. Irene, who says she is gay, betrays her country. To emphasize the “non-homo” relationship between Sherlock and John – after drawing in a large LGBTQ* audience by three seasons of hinting at such a relationship – the final episode makes a grotesque mockery of the Three Garridebs moment from the ACD story where Watson says he see Holmes’ deep love for him and feels that justifies all of his own sacrifices for Holmes.
5) Government is all-seeing and operates without oversight from its citizens. The gentle ACD exaggeration of Mycroft being the British government becomes almost literal as both British and American governments are presented as all-powerful and controlling of almost every aspect of life.
In fact, in focusing on plot twists to the exclusion of every other consideration, Sherlock accidentally becomes a fun, beautifully filmed, beautifully orchestrated, beautifully acted vision of the kind of London desired by sexist, racist, anti-gay nationalists.
One of the things I liked about Stargate SG-1 was that they set up a galaxy of possibilities to play around with. The early seasons were full of one-offs based on the premise of going through the gate and seeing what happens. I thought it was too bad that they moved away from that setup, although I didn’t hate their ongoing plot lines either.
The best twists, for me, are the ones the audience figures out 30 seconds before the reveal. Of course it’s impossible to do this for everyone every time, but I remember vividly the few times it worked out that way for me.
It’s all fine and dandy to raise the stakes, Mofftiss, but you have to honor your bets.
Mr. Robot is a show that does the plot twist very well. The surprise/plot twists in both seasons made me re-watch previous episodes, and although there is an overarching story arch, we get a lot of character development.
Battlestar Galactica was not incoherent, though knowing where they were going from the start would probably have improved on how smoothly they got there. The ending was still good. I never expected a scientific explanation for the Messengers; Head Six said she was an angel as early as Season 2.
@14. The much-maligned fifth season of Babylon 5 was also part of the plotting from the beginning, not just the first four.
@34. Most of the twists in Mr. Robot have not impressed me in their execution. They need to make Elliot less passive.
I’ve just finished watching S4 of Sherlock last night with my son. We both complained throughout the final episode of how ludicrous the “twists” were. They were just throwing out new ideas to keep the audience off balance. Nothing justified by anything in the context of the story universe. Moffat is probably the key sinner in doing this, he’s done the same thing for the past several seasons of Doctor Who. It would be nice to see someone at the BBC have the courage to demand proper editing or just simply fire him. Both Sherlock and Doctor Who would do better without him with his current arrogant approach to writing.
I complained to a friend the other day that most of my favorite shows are half-seasons, and then realized the shows were probably better written because they didn’t need to stretch the season arc across 22 episodes(ugh quantico) and/or because the writers knew where they were going from the beginning of the season.
Re: the greediness of tv executives; I highly respect shows that end when the story has ended. Orphan Black is full of twists large and small, but they’re committed to ending the series after this season. On the other hand, Arrow was renewed for a sixth season, even though as we all know, Oliver Queen only spends five years on the island (and the show hasn’t worked since season three anyway…)
@13 re: Harry Potter; I definitely agree with the problem of Harry transferring his friendship/trust on to the real Mad-Eye after almost being killed by the imposter. The twist was fine, but it was sloppily handled in the subsequent books. Also, I know it’s a meme now, but I’ve always wondered why Fred and George never noticed Peter Pettigrew’s name on the map. I know they were probably just using it to to avoid adults, but really? They never ever noticed that their little brother was often in the company of a person no one met at Hogwarts?
Sheri Tepper’s The Family Tree had a great twist that was both shocking and earned and changed everything that went before. For TV, the much-discussed recent anime Yuri!! on Ice has a twist towards the end that changes how you see everything and makes little inconsistencies make sense. But my favorite TV for doing this (and it’s great sf on top of it) is an anime called From the New World, with a twist that is planned from the beginning because it gives everything meaning before and after.
That perfectly describes Moffat’s show running. Whiz! Bang! Flash! And when it’s all over, and you actually think about it, it has plot holes and lacks logic.
I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who since I was 9, and yet at this point, I’m starting to feel like I can’t be bothered to watch because I get so frustrated.
@26 I actually think Moffatt really tightened his game up in that last season of Dr Who (Season 9). After a *really* ordinary season arc in Season 8, Season 9 was an overall interesting season which wrapped up tightly with a twist ending that wrapped up what had come before and made sense of it. And including the *spoiler* which appeared in the very first episode of the season in such a logical way was a really nice touch.
Are you kidding? The most recent full season of DW was the worst by a very long way. The last two seasons were bad, but the multipart finale of the last but one, and the last season have been a whole new leap in being bad.
Well, Sherlock only had a couple of good episodes; I was surprised to get that many: It rode on a name gone public domain, flash, and style.
And I don’t require quantum-powered plot twists with subnets of tunneling wormhole plots — just a good story and great creationism.
Other than that, I agree.
@27 – re: 12 Monkeys – I’m glad someone else sees this too. It’s one of the few sci-fi shows, since ‘Babylon 5’ that really feels like it’s being properly plotted. I haven’t felt cheated yet and there’s been a good number of satisfying plot twists.
‘Continuum’ also stands out as a show where the ending it came to was very satisfying without ever feeling forced – felt like it was what the writers always had planned.
I think what drives the reliance on surprise is the need, if not demand, that each season top the last season. If each year has to be bigger, better, more exciting, a shocking twist is an easy way to that. For that matter, movies series have dealt with this for decades. For all the faults of the traditional 20-something episode TV season at least it eliminates the temptation to engage in the sort of one-upmanship. The need to fill all those episodes makes that impossible. Maybe we need to send a message to producers that it’s OK not to try to top yourself every year.
Agreeing. It has bothered me for some years that many TV-shows and movies (and books) seem to feel they have to prove something from season to season, part to part, as if they feel a constant urge to top what they did previously, only to top it again and again and again, be continuously bigger and better until they have blown the thing so big and complicated they don’t know the beginning or end of it. I think many good things have suffered greatly because of this mania. Paradoxically, many of them are the things I love the most – the best example of it (IMHO) “The Pretender”, which resumes to be my all-time favourite TV-show. They made so many twists and loops and secret-reveals that finally there was practically no sense to it whatsoever (I still adore it). Hoopmanjh @23 mentioned “Supernatural” and Yonni @37 “Arrow” – again, I love both series, “Supernatural” almost as much as “The Pretender”, but I have to admit I enjoyed the earlier seasons a lot more. In “Supernatural”, things got so big they literally had to bring God into play. I know they planned the 11th season to be the last one and go out with a bang, but finally didn’t. I am real happy they have downsized things now a bit, it feels more, how to say, personal again. And I was a bigger fan of eg “Arrow” and “Vikings” when things were simpler and more intimate (though the latter has excuse due to historical precedence, I suppose), nevertheless, I have kept watching both.
I hope the writers realise that not everything has to be over-the-top big reveal as long as the story remains strong and true to itself.
I’d like to point out that both Orphan Black (mentioned by Yonni @37) and Continuum (mentioned by ixoy @43) are Canadian productions. Canadian tv shows seem much less concerned about keeping the series going, the creators and show-runners are more willing to end the show on a completed arc. Flashpoint, Orphan Black, and X Company are all excellent dramas, and they all ended/will be ending on the show-runners’ decisions. (Actually, I’m not sure if X Company is available in the US, but it’s really good, Evelyne Brochu, who plays Delphine in Orphan Black is the lead in it.)
This is why I use “chris carter”as a verb. (“Westworld — do they know where they’re going, or are they chris cartering us?”)
It’s great to see all of the B5 love. JMS did a great job overall, and I think it’s held up well.
The world needs more of that and less of BSG (especially S5) and Lost. Those two were nasty slogs broken by the occasional dirt sandwich.
If someone mentioned Damages, I missed it. I thought the twists and turns of each season’s plots were wonderful. It also rewards people who pay attention. If you play with your phone instead, you’ll have no idea what’s going on, ever. I like shows that don’t assume I’m an idiot needing to be spoon fed.
I’ve given up on Blacklist after last season’s big surprise, possibly one of the worst plot developments since Dallas brought that guy back from the dead because it was all a dream. Nor do I have hope that George R.R. Martin can resolve his series since he only seems to be able to kill off people. Lost did teach me one thing: abandon ship!
The best twist I’ve seen on TV in a long time came in the season finale of NBC’s The Good Place. It precisely meets the definition of making everything that came before make more sense. The season is only thirteen half hour episodes, all on Hulu, and hands down one of the best single seasons of a show I’ve seen in a long time.