Ahsoka

Start with the good:

• Charting a path to another galaxy.

• Bridging the gap from Episode VI and Mandalorian to the rise of the First Order in Episode VII.

• Bringing the animated characters of Rebels into real life.

• Dreams and memories and holograms of Anakin—a natural move, since he was Ahsoka’s master, and by this point in the timeline he’s been redeemed and died, without ever resolving his relationship to Ahsoka.

• Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera: of all the actors on the show, she’s got the most life in her eyes.

• Ray Stevenson as Baylan Skoll. Not only is the late Stevenson a commanding presence; his secret long game, whatever it is, is the only narratively compelling and unprefabricated part of the show.

• Genevieve O'Reilly as Mon Mothma, given her spectacular turn on the equally spectacular Andor—but only if she plays more than a minor role; that is, if Filoni et al have plans to continue and eventually finish that character’s arc, on this or another show, given that we don’t know her final fate.

• The general action choreography, including the space fights and (some of) the lightsaber duels. Kudos on the old school Samurai-esque solo-move kill by Ahsoka in her duel with Marrok.

Now for the middling:

• Rosario Dawson! Perfect for the role, and yet somehow she’s not quite clicked with the character. She clearly made the decision to play Ahsoka as contemplative, unemotional, patient to a fault. No spunk or flavor at all. Sometimes she, and thus the show, feels like it’s stuck in molasses. This was an unwise decision, to say the least.

• Not bringing back Zeb! Why? The hassle of a CGI character? The entire gang’s back together. Shouldn’t all of them constantly be asking one another why this old friend isn’t tagging along?

• Huyang and Chopper. Low-key or downer screen presence the both of them. Someone has got to bring some life and verge to the show, no?

• Ivanna Sakhno as Shin Hati. She’s aiming for the boiling-over-with-rage-and-desire-for-power Sith thing, but it only sometimes works. Just as often she just looks like she’s posing, and so trying too hard with nothing evident for the viewer to care about in the character’s nature or motivations.

• Lars Mikkelsen as Thrawn. I’m withholding judgment on this one until the finale airs. I read the original Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn thirty years ago, so it’s a pleasure to watch a live-action Thrawn on a bona fide Star Wars show with my sons in the year 2023. Neither Mikkelsen’s acting nor Thrawn’s depiction so far is a disappointment. But it hasn’t blown me away yet either. The show needs to make good on this guy as a—the—Big Bad of this stretch of time in the canon, a villain on a par with Vader and Palpatine and Kylo Ren and Maul. Stick the landing, people!

And the bad:

• Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine Wren is a dud. Close behind is Eman Esfandi as Ezra Bridger. Not only did these characters need to pop, their chemistry—with each other, with Ahsoka, with anyone and everyone—needed to function as the beating heart of the show. Unfortunately the opposite is the case.

• The eye-rolling hero’s welcome for C-3PO. My word. Not only does the fan service need to stop. The excuses for why neither child of Anakin Skywalker can’t find it within themselves to come join the action are getting old. Kennedy, Favreau, and Filoni made a tactical error when Solo scared them off from re-casting the Original Trilogy characters. So now we’re stuck with either bad CGI recreations of a young Mark Hamill or a stage-left fanfare appearance of Leia’s droid envoy—instead of just recasting the parts and letting these fictional characters show up and do stuff, as they unquestionably would have in such a story. Oh well.

• The sequel-to-a-show-most-viewers-haven’t-watched problem. This was the one nut needing cracking, and Filoni wasn’t up to the task. There were creative ways around this. Why not do something unexpected and actually film key scenes from Rebels in live action, with the newly cast actors? Either for flashbacks or even for a kind of mini-movie that might serve as a prologue or prelude to the show itself? How cool! Fun for the fans of Rebels, fun (and necessary) spadework for new viewers. A win win. Instead we’re deluged by exposition and vague references to the past, a past we’re made to know is Heavy and Sad because we saw melancholy faces reflecting silently about mostly unidentified things that happened on a children’s animated show that premiered almost a decade ago!

• The story itself. The real story begins to ramp up in the second half of the series, which makes the first four episodes pure build-up. This was a mistake. It’s clear to any viewer watching this show that it’s just a launching-pad, or segue, into a larger story—the real one, the “star war” against the fledgling New Republic as led by Thrawn and his imperial remnant—a story whose conclusion we’re going to have to wait years to see. Even if it culminates in a fantastic theatrical film by Filoni (I’ll be there, I always am), this series will have proved to be nothing more than a stepping stone, when it could have been an interesting stand-alone story, far more than a bridge. Perhaps the finale this Tuesday will prove me wrong, but I have my doubts.

Marvel on a budget

Why do Marvel’s productions look so bad? Why does Secret Invasion look like it was shot by numbers in about three weeks on an Atlanta backlot the size of a basketball court? Why are scenes so often in cars or indoors? Why are so many actors unknowns or newbies? Why does everyone seem sedated except Olivia Colman?

Likewise, why was Ant-Man 3 so aggressively ugly? Why were the graphics so poor? Is the studio on a budget? Is Disney siphoning money from Marvel to other IP? Is Disney’s current cost-cutting already evident in Marvel’s post-Endgame entries? Is Marvel’s aesthetic on purpose? Are the directors and cinematographers happy with the way the shows and movies look, or is the aesthetic imposed on them from on high?

Either way, where is all the money going? Consider the latest season of Jack Ryan on Amazon. Shot on multiple locations, regularly featuring wide-angled shots of gorgeous outdoor vistas, it looks and feels like a slick action movie with a visual language and a modicum of style. It’s never hazy or gooey the way Marvel (and, for that matters, Netflix) productions are. You can see everything. It’s high definition. Care has been put into the image. And into the acting and writing. Even if it’s just popcorn entertainment, there’s forethought and planning in evidence. Bezos is getting his money’s worth.

You can’t say the same for Marvel. It’s embarrassing. It’s beginning to feel like late 90s primetime television: same production quality, same writing exhaustion, same pseudo serialization. This, from a multibillion-dollar movie studio that conquered the globe over the last fifteen years. Does anyone know why? What’s going on?

I’ve stuck with the movies just for fun. And Guardians 3 was good. But last year I couldn’t bring myself to finish Moon Knight, much less try She-Hulk or Ms. Marvel. I don’t know anyone who did. I sampled Secret Invasion because (a) it’s summer and (b) Samuel L. Now I’m hooked just to see how the car wreck comes to an end.

After this, it’s Loki (potentially solid) followed by a run of shows and movies that are humdrum, eyerolling, or parody: The Marvels, Echo, Agatha, Captain America 4, Ironheart, Daredevil (again), and Thunderbolts. (Deadpool 3 doesn’t count; it’s inherited, won’t follow house style, won’t mess around with MCU canon, and will wrap up the trilogy.) Future Avengers movies keep getting delayed, contain no narrative momentum, and feature no names or actors normie audiences care about. Plus the one interesting thing about the multiverse, Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang, is unlikely to continue; I assume Majors will be replaced by another actor by year’s end.

When Kevin Feige hired Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi and James Gunn, it seemed as though Marvel’s productions would have style and panache, built on relative directorial freedom. Sometimes that came through. But in the last few years it’s become clear those were exceptions to the rule. The rule, it appears, is half-rendered sludge on a budget that will always prefer an Atlanta green screen to an actual physical location. At the very moment Tom Cruise is defying death in practical stunts on the big screen. It’s bizarre.

If there’s an explanation, I’m all ears.

Ranking drama series finales

The Ringer ran a fun piece this month, since revised, ranking the forty best series finales by TV shows of any kind—bar miniseries—since the turn of the century. Some of the choices were head-scratchers, though. Parks and Rec? Lost?? New Girl??? The Good Place???? They also included both comedies (Friends, 30 Rock) and reality/other (Nathan For You, The Hills). But the move to limit the options to the post-Sopranos prestige/peak TV era was smart. And they ranked a couple episodes usually overlooked in these debates (though they missed one big one). Overall it’s a solid list.

Here’s mine, following the conclusion to Succession Sunday night. Like many, I’ve soured on the TV hype over the last few years. Partly just because I want to spend my time doing things other than keeping up with the latest shows. But mostly because Peak TV was excellent at creating B-level series with A+ production and unreliable at creating A+ series of any kind—especially ones that made it to the end, rather than starting with a bang and ending with a whimper.

With the end of Better Call Saul last year and Succession this spring, I expect to limit my TV viewing going forward to occasional/pure-fun shows: basically, blockbusters or popcorn fare that involve cooking, spies, or galaxies far, far away. And any series that gets a lot of attention out of the gate, I’ll wait till the start of season 4 (I’m looking at you, Last of Us and House of the Dragon). If everyone still swears by it at that point, I’ll give it a look.

Having said that, the following is a list of shows I don’t regret watching, because each of them stuck the landing. Though first some criteria followed by honorable mentions.

First, I’m only ranking dramas.

Second, I’m only considering finales aired after the year 2000.

Third, I’m considering the finale in the context of the final season. No “good” finale of an otherwise dispensable or poor final season qualifies.

Fourth, while I’m not prioritizing unhappy endings, I am giving the nudge to conclusions that avoid the sitcom trap of giving everyone an (unrealistically) happy ending, because these are people we (and the writers room) love, and we can’t allow ourselves to imagine them unhappy once we say goodbye.

Fifth, I’m also (and therefore) giving the edge to finales that simultaneously (a) work as episodes of television, (b) conclude the overall story of the season/series, and (c) do not in any way swerve from the story the show was always telling, but are clearly an organic and fitting and thus (in the Aristotelian sense) necessary way of completing the story.

Full disclosure: I’ve seen whole seasons of Girls, Atlanta, Half & Catch Fire, and Deadwood, but not finished any of them. I’ve not seen more than a scene or an episode of Six Feet Under, Dexter, Sex & the City, Barry, and Ozark. I’ve always heard wonderful things about the SFU finale, as well as Deadwood’s. Perhaps one day I’ll make it to the latter; I doubt I’ll ever get around to the former.

Honorable mention: Battlestar Galactica (a wild ride, but a bit too hand-wavy even for this Christian Luddite), Mr. Robot (somehow successful, if dragged out there in the final episodes), The West Wing (good for CJ! But all around too much, even for this show), Parenthood (melodrama is as melodrama does), The Expanse (an action-packed blast, but too premature—given how much more story there was to tell), Boardwalk Empire (so good! Almost cracked my top 10), Breaking Bad (excellent, obviously, but still too happy and action-hero-ish for Walt), Mad Men (one or two seasons too late, and too enamored of its two leads to see them as the sad, artless, tragic souls they always were), Hannibal (off the deep end … and also in need of that Clarice sequel!)

Dishonorable mention: Lost + Game of Thrones (no comment necessary)

Now to the top ten … (Minor spoilers ahead, though I’ve tried to be vague.)

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10. Friday Night Lights. Unlike all that follow, this one partakes of the happy tradition of TV dramas and sitcoms giving everyone the happy ending the audience wants them to have. But because that was always the nature of this show, as a high-production soap opera about high school Texas football and the perfect marriage at its heart, this was never going to be the wrong call. Our heroes ride off into the sunset—the bright lights of Philly, that is.

9. Rectify. Somehow not on The Ringer’s list! The best TV drama of the 2010s. It ended in just the way it ran from the beginning: beautiful, ethereal, contemplative, ambiguous, honest, hopeful. This is the only show I recommend to anyone without reservation. A lovely and humane work of art.

8. Justified. Like Star Trek movies, the best Justified seasons come in evens: two, four, six, followed by five, one, three. The finale hits all the beats, while providing surprising catharsis between the star-crossed hero and villain. I’m not a re-watcher of TV shows, but I look forward to going back through this one with my kids once they’re old enough.

7. The Leftovers. Had the finale of season two been all she wrote, it would have been higher on the list. As it stands, the third season is good but unnecessary. I’ve long wanted to write something about the finale, which has something to say about religion. It’s the wrong thing, but it’s something all the same. You can’t help but cry in those final moments. And it doesn’t spoil a thing in the previous seasons. It even brings a measure of closure to both leads’ stories, along with a question mark the viewer can’t answer for himself. We just have to trust Nora’s word, too. (Or not.)

6. The Wire. Dinged for the final season going a bit haywire. But still a magnificent final two episodes. A sort of sitcom finale, except without making everyone’s ending happy. Feels epic the way the whole show was epic: a story about a city and the lives and institutions that make it endure, for all its dysfunction. And that last Irish wake…

5. The Americans. They were holding out on that U2 song. When it hits, you know why they were so patient. In a sense, this finale was “happier” than expected. But not all happy. And no corners were cut getting there. And when you realize what the leads have lost, you realize it’s not happy at all. But that final confrontation! A whole series building to one single moment in a parking garage. Marvelous performances. When The Americans was on, it was the best show around.

4. The Shield. A pitch-perfect finale with so much plot, so many storylines built into it! So brutal, so devastating. And that final scene. Haunting. An underrated show.

3. Succession. Shows four through one on this list all have perfect finales, in my view. It’s only been twenty-four hours, but Succession belongs. They stuck the landing. They knew the story they were telling. They knew the characters they were crafting. They knew how it had to happen. And they twisted the plot in just the right—and sometimes unexpected—ways, to get there. (Tom!) I wonder how this show would play for someone watching it all for the first time, binged in a week or two? Viewers have been agonizing for what feels like ages to see how it all would come to an end. And people interpreting the finale as a set-up for more seasons or even a movie have utterly misunderstood both the show and the finale. It’s done, folks! They, and we with them, were stuck in interminable infernal circles for forty episodes—and they’re still stuck. They’ve just swapped spots in hell’s musical chairs. It’s never getting better. That’s the point.

2. Better Call Saul. I’ve written about the BCS finale at length. Whether I’m right or Alan Jacobs is right (or his amended take is right), the finale couldn’t have been better. Not only were they completing Jimmy McGill’s arc, they were also bringing the entire Breaking Bad universe to a close—not to mention the excellent-but-still-slightly-missed-opportunity of the BB finale. It’s true, Jimmy-Saul gets to shine. But not because the writers couldn’t bear to see him unhappy. Because he couldn’t help himself. And whether or not he’s happy where he landed, it’s not a happy place to finish one’s days.

1. The Sopranos. This one’s been written about to death. I’ve got nothing to add. It’s still on the throne. No dispute from me. Long live the king.

Slow Horses

In adapting the novels, here’s what the show gets right:

1. Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Not only a perfect match between actor and character, a so-obvious-it’s-inspired choice given Oldman’s previous role as Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

2. The rest of the casting in season 1. Jack Lowden’s River is a would-be cross between Bond and Bourne, except he’s a bit of a doofus, self-regarding, a screw-up, and still in the service owing mainly to nepotism. The rest fit their roles perfectly, whether Kristin Scott Thomas, Christopher Chung, Saskia Reeves, Freddie Fox, or Dustin Demri-Burns. Give the casting director a raise.

3. The general atmosphere and vibe: the former within the world of the story, the latter put off by the same. Slough House is dark, dank, and cranky; Lamb is genuinely embittered and misanthropic; redeeming qualities are few and far between; you really believe this is an island for MI5’s misfit toys. The vibe thus produced is simultaneously cool (spies!) and bitterly funny (losers!), placing the audience always on the ironic edge between cheering on the slow horses and laughing at their incompetence. And it’s hard to believe when actual danger and daring-do come along and rope these has-beens and second-rates into the game.

Here’s what the show gets wrong:

1. The final episode of season 1. In the book, not only do we get to live inside Ahmed’s head as a character in his own right. For all the slow horses do to find him, much less to save him, Ahmed rescues himself. All the Lamb/River action is at Regent’s Park. The others try to track Ahmed from a deli or coffee shop. But the kidnapping and attempted execution are botched due to a combination of foolishness (Lady Di), in-fighting (the two remaining kidnappers), and shrewdness (Ahmed). The slow horses are nowhere to be seen! That is, in the book. In the show, Lamb and River and Min and Louisa speed down the highway to find Ahmed and, eventually, save him—more or less on camera! Give me a break. It’s absurd TV high jinx that lights the subtext of the show on fire. All of a sudden we’ve got real spies doing real Bond–Bourne–Jack Ryan stuff, rather than the back-ups to the back-ups accidentally stumbling upon observing some spy stuff … on their laptop screen.

2. The second season is a mess from start to finish. Marcus and Shirley are both duds—whether as written or as acted, it’s unclear. The plot of the book is so complicated that the writers attempted both to simplify it and to make it more closely connected to Lamb and the slow horses, but the result is a story impossible to follow by anyone unfamiliar with the novel and finally nonsensical on its face. I still can’t believe that the finale opts to leave both the “evil pilot mom” and the “cicadas” plot threads utterly dangling, unaddressed. Including the bald man in the action, making Roddy an action hero with his laptop, putting Lamb and Popov in the same room, flying River to the OB’s house to save the day … once again, the finale is absurd, on its own terms, while also being a denial of the whole point, ethos, and thematic heart of the show.

3. I’m also unsure about the wisdom of beginning to reveal, as soon as the season 1 finale, secrets about Lamb, the OB, Partner, and their interlocked past that might be best reserved for later. That is, the shock of some of their secrets needs time to become shocking. If we learn them more or less up front, then they’re just part of who the characters are, rather than revelations that complicate what we thought we know.

4. The second season also ups the “feel good” schmaltz a couple notches compared to the first season. It feels the need, in other words, to give the good guys a heart, rather than to keep them the losers they are. Lamb in particular basically just becomes a grand master spy, running his joes, rather than a cynical drunk who can’t spare a single second’s thought for another person’s feelings—especially if that person is someone he cares about. I hope, in the next season, they have the wisdom to drop the warmth and return to the cold the way it should be.

Out of touch

Before they premiered, I assumed that both House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power would flop. The assumption was pure projection. I couldn’t gin up an ounce of interest in either. Why? Because they were both inessential prequels produced entirely for reasons having to do with the bottom line, i.e., competing corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the service of diminishing returns from previously profitable IP. Did anyone ask for them? Are they answering some urgent question about the fantasy worlds or original stories told about them? No. HBO wanted more of that sweet sweet GRRM cash, and Bezos wanted his own GRRM, so he opted to buy the next best thing: the rights to JRRT.

Clearly I was wrong. Both shows were enormous “hits,” in the sense that millions of people watched them and, apparently, cared about what happened on them. I confess it felt a little like going through the motions, watching from the outside; the precaps and recaps, podcasts and explainers, reviews and “arguments.” Do people actually enjoy these shows, or are they playing the old hits, reliving the glory days of Peter Jackson’s films and the initial shock and awe of Benioff and Weiss’s show?

But I may be wrong, since I was wrong the first time. What the popularity of these series showed me is just how out of touch I am. It was a pleasant surprise. Once upon a time, the mere existence of these shows and their accompanying buzz would have made them irresistible to me. No more. And thank God.

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My rule with TV, as I’ve written about before, is that it either needs to be weightless fun (Top Chef, Great British, Brooklyn 99) or an A/A+ (Better Call Saul, Succession, Mare of Easttown). My students have time for C+ and B– shows. I once did too—or I thought I did: the truth is, there’s always something better to do with your time—but no longer. An episode or two of TV per week works for me. I can certainly do with less. More, and I should reconsider my priorities.

So regarding the other big franchise premiere this fall, Andor, I stayed away. I’ll eventually consider checking out HOTD or TROP if people are saying either show is genuinely A-level headed into season 4. Until then, it’s just a waste of time. But friends have been telling me that Andor is worth the time, so I finally gave it a watch this week. Some habits never die, and this childhood Star Wars fan is a sucker for more time in the galaxy.

And it’s not bad! It’s actually quite good, and getting better with each episode. A far cry from the useless, boring redundancy that was Kenobi. Some thoughts on the first eight episodes:

• True to his word, Tony Gilroy has made what appear to be four mini-movies, each made up of three episodes. I wish this had led to greater formal experimentation. What if the season actually were four movies, and edited accordingly, rather than randomly sliced and diced episodes? The opening three in particular feel random in when and how they begin and end. One more example of a filmmaker not quite understanding the television medium.

• Having said that, “movement two” (i.e., the arc spanning episodes 4-6) is magnificent, and if episode 9 delivers, then the third movement will be too. You can feel the Gilroy-ness of it all (brother Dan is writing as well). They’re in their element with the plotting, characters, and intrigue. It may well be the first successful live-action depiction of these things. Even Rogue One was beset by the dual shadow, on one hand, of Vader and the Force, and on the other, of our knowledge of the Death Star, its plans, and its eventual destruction. The mini-dramas of “BBY 5” and these heretofore unknown characters (minus Mon Mothma and Andor, only one of whose fate we know—we’ll think of her as Kim and him as Jimmy for now) have no canonical future for viewers. Their simultaneously small and large stakes create wonderful narrative tension.

• By contrast to the other Star Wars shows so far, the acting has been uniformly excellent. No comedic guest stars, no amateurs doing their damndest to make gibberish sound profound. Gilroy hiring top-notch old British guys and letting them chew scenery is just what the doctor ordered. Even smaller parts like Fiona Shaw’s adoptive mother lend gravitas that, in their absence, would make the show feel small and forced.

• The show is at its best, surprisingly, on Coruscant and inside the walls of the infinitely byzantine corridors of the immaculately white Imperial Security Bureau. (Cue Melville on the whiteness of the whale.) Kyle Soller, Alex Ferns, Denise Gough, Anton Lesser, and Genevieve O'Reilly are brilliant in their roles, and Gilroy et al give them both the words and the direction to make it all feel far more than glorified galactic dress-up. Whereas whole stretches of Kenobi felt like low-rent TV—“where’s the money???”—most of Andor makes clear exactly where the money went. Who knew Star Wars minus wizards and laser swords could be fun?

• The weakest link so far is the titular lead. Diego Luna plays Andor as a twitchy, world-weary, unsmiling Han Solo. All exposed nerve and bitter anger. That’s fine. But it drains him of any charisma. He’s supposed to be a womanizer. But who would want to go near this guy? He seems brittle and sketchy, not alluring or mysterious. Clearly he’s playing the role “correctly”—in the seventh episode, we understand why the stormtrooper stops him (however unjustly): Cassian Andor always wears a guilty look on his face, as if he’s only one step ahead of the law (which he is). His tell is his nervous constant surveillance of his own person. In that sense, Luna is doing his job. But why should we, the audience, care? We’ve got to have a reason at some point. When he vanished for a full 15-20 minutes in a later episode, I didn’t miss him at all. I wanted to stay on Coruscant with Mothma and Luthen and the rest. Make him matter, Gilroys!

• Having said that, Luna was quite impressive in episode 8, in which, from memory, Andor basically lacks a single line of dialogue, except to repeat, over and over, his own false name to judges, stormtroopers, pilots, and prison guards. The dawning realization of his situation in prison is almost feral in its raw bodily expression. The addition of Andy Serkis was a grace note in an otherwise brutal episode. If what we’ve got waiting for us in episode 9 is one long masterfully executed prison break, I’m here for it.

• The real weakness of the series so far is its opening three episodes. I understand why something like the story they sketch was necessary, but again, I think something more formally interesting could have served the show’s purposes much better. What if, for example, the show began with season 4, in media res, with the viewer as clueless about who Andor is and why he’s there as any of the other rebels? Then you fill in the back story at the necessary moments, when other characters are also learning these things for the first time, surprised when they are surprised (as when he reveals he’s a mercenary, for example), all while stretching out the suspense of the planning and undertaking of the robbery and escape. You scrape away the fat of those first 105 minutes while filling in the gaps in a much more engaging way. You also do away with some of the pro forma “yes, this is the backstory for the guy whose backstory we’re telling in this prequel” paint-by-numbers feel of the opening episodes, which surely turned many viewers away from what quickly becomes a richly suspenseful story of empire, law, bureaucracy, sedition, criminality, justice, morality, politics, and spycraft.

• I do hope Gilroy is able to make season 2. It would be a bust if the low viewership of season 1 led to premature cancellation. If season 2 really does stretch from BBY 4 to, more or less, the opening scene of Rogue One, that could be an absolute blast in the right hands—and so far, these are the right hands. Here’s hoping Kathleen Kennedy agrees.

Jimmy’s change

So far as I can tell—but I haven’t been trawling Twitter for contrarian takes—Alan Jacobs’ negative reaction to the Better Call Saul finale (spoilers herein, obviously) is the exception to the rule. The people I read loved it. Friends and family who watch it loved it. I loved it. But it’s useful to read a take against the grain. Is Alan right?

His case is simply stated. Jimmy’s volte-face in the third act of the finale is unwarranted either by the episode’s events or by the series’ narrative thrust as a whole. Who Jimmy is, deep down, has more or less always been set in stone, and that concreteness was not softened by these final episodes. Jimmy-as-Saul-as-Gene has only become more narcissistic, more reckless, more negligent, even murderous and sociopathic. Are we really supposed to believe that a single remarkable deed by Kim has the power to undo all of that, to make of Jimmy a Sydney Carton bound, selflessly, for the guillotine of a lifetime in prison?

Answer: Yes, actually. I think so. But before I defend that view, let me say why I resonate with Alan’s disappointment.

His disappointment was my disappointment with the original finale of Breaking Bad, which just about everyone else I read and know thought was perfect. It was not perfect, and for the same rationale Alan offers for BCS. Vince Gilligan loved his character too much to let him down. Though Walt had to die, though he had to be humiliated, he also had to go out in a blaze of glory. He had to earn some degree of redemption. He had to do something good, or at least something on his own terms. And thereby, all fans, not just “bad” fans, could get some measure of catharsis for watching and secretly (or not so secretly) cheering on a wicked and murderous drug dealer for five years.

Ever since that finale first aired nearly a decade ago, I’ve proposed an alternate ending. It’s only slightly different than what occurs in the final ten minutes of the episode. Walt arrives in his car, parks it where he does, walks into the building with all going according to plan. Only: when the button is pressed and the machine gun lets loose, the bullets spray wildly without hitting anybody. The plan fails. The cowboy’s last hurrah is an anticlimax. Walt doesn’t win. Instead, once the bullets are finished, the neo-Nazis look at Walter, look at Jesse, and shrug. Then they take them both outside. First they shoot Jesse, as Walter looks on. Then they shoot Walter. They dump both in an unmarked grave. Fade to black; end credits.

That’s a bleak ending, but its bleakness matches the bleakness of the show’s story. For that story is one without any happy endings. Walt doesn’t get to save his orphaned would-be son. His outlandish plan doesn’t succeed. Such plans don’t always work. He doesn’t get to pass out and pass on in the midst of the humming chemistry of a meth lab, happy in his own way, dying as he lived. He doesn’t get to set the terms of his exit from this life. That’s the way he thought he could live. But he was wrong. And the show’s writers mistook their protagonist’s self-understanding as the show’s own inner meaning. An easy error to make, but a costly one. Not just the bad fans rejoiced at the finale. Even ordinary viewers left with a sense of cathartic release: Jesse got away, the bad guys lost, and Walt redeemed himself. Good for him.

It seems to me that Alan thinks the same (whatever his actual thoughts on the BB finale) of the BCS finale. I wondered, going into the episode, whether Gilligan and Gould would be tempted by the same error: the need to make their evil lead good by the end; the desire to make things right that can’t be made right; the pull to let Saul undo, by TV magic, what can’t be undone.

I understand why one might see “Saul Gone,” the name of the series finale, as indulging that temptation. But I don’t agree, for the following four reasons.

First, there’s a lot more going on in Jimmy’s incredible courtroom speech than breaking good, for Kim’s sake. He’s putting on a performance. That performance is Heisenberg-like in its pomposity and pride. He doesn’t want seven years in a cush prison with the world thinking he was a victim. Instead, he wants the world—the feds, the judge, his future inmates, even Kim—to know that without him, Heisenberg wouldn’t have lasted a month as a free man. The real hero of Walt and Jesse and Mike and Gus’s story was Saul Goodman. He made it all possible. After all, he’s the only one still standing. Are you not impressed? Are you not entertained?

Second, so much of what the previous 61 episodes of BCS gave us, which the 62 episodes of BB did not, is that, unlike Walt, who was rotten to the core from the beginning and just needed the opportunity to show it, there was always a goodness to Jimmy intermingled with the bad. Not only certain good inclinations, but the desire to do and to be good. Granted, that desire is snuffed out by the time he’s transformed into Saul. But we have no reason to suppose that it’s gone forever, that it’s beyond recovery. Moreover, he didn’t leave Kim; she left him. It is precisely her reentry in his life that reawakens that desire once more. On the phone, she tells him to turn himself in; he scoffs and tells her to take her own medicine. She does. At great cost to her own life, possibly bringing it to an end. I find it wholly plausible, not that her extraordinary good deed converts him from pure evil to pure good, but rather that her action, like a flash of lightning, transforms the scenery before him. It shuffles the board of his potential actions. It makes possible certain decisions that he would never have considered before. He doesn’t become a martyr. But he does tell the truth.

Why? Because, third, what we know of Jimmy—again, from those prior 61 episodes—is that his moral psychology is not defined solely by greed or victory or successful schemes. An additional and irreducible element is his desire to please those he loves or reveres, even in spite of himself. (In this, too, he is different and, I think, a more complicated character than Walter White.) That’s the thing that made his relationship to Kim so complex. Together, they were bad. But in truth, while he made her worse, she made him better. She kept him from from the dark side, from truly breaking bad all the way. Only in her absence does does he do that. All his worst propensities, however much he toyed with them and leaned in their direction, he kept at bay so long as she was still around. That’s not to say such an arrangement would have lasted forever. But he always cared what she thought. Because he always truly loved her, as she did him. And what he is doing in that courtroom is trying to earn her approval, trying to see a glimmer of the love that once burned bright in her eyes. I have to say, this strikes me as absolutely and unquestionably psychologically and emotionally plausible. The man is a living image of self-sabotage in service of his insatiable desires. He never knows when to stop. Only now, he isn’t risking everything for the sake of some petty score. He’s forsaking a short time in prison for an indefinite one for the sake of the woman he never stopped loving, because the one and only thing that ever competed with his love for self and love for money was love for her. Which is to say, his need for her requited love. So he schemes one last performance for the ages. (Showtime!) And, as ever, he gets what he wants. It works—like Walt’s plan worked—except no one thinks him a hero, and the cost is a life sentence.

Fourth and last, it’s essential not to overlook what Gould shows us on the bus and in the prison. Jimmy isn’t in chains. His spirit isn’t quenched. He’s finally at rest. He’s among the people he always worked for and with and among. He always had their back, and now they’ve got his. They’re chanting his name. They’re fist-bumping him as he swaggers by. He’s not a fish out of water. He’s not suffering in squalor. He’s king of the castle. He’s come home. This is where he belongs. This is where he’s comfortable. This is where he was always meant to be, where his path always led. There’s not a trace of pain or resentment on his face. Not, again, because he’s a martyr. But because he’s accepted who he is and what he’s done, in an irresolvable combination (one that defined his life from start to finish) of chest-thumping pride, feigned performance, and quiet shame.

Nor is Kim’s visit an absolution. Their few words reflect the years and the distance between them. There’s nothing he can do to change the past, to rectify his wrongs. But behind bars, in the plain light of day, he can acknowledge who he is to the one person (apart from his brother) whose opinion he values, and she can accept that knowledge so long as he isn’t hurting anyone or inciting her to do the same. His quiet bravado (“…with good behavior…”) is a sign that he’s no Sydney Carton, nor does he imagine himself to be. He’s Jimmy. But then, Jimmy isn’t the antithesis of Saul Goodman, since Jimmy always was and always will be Slippin’ Jimmy. Kim, though, always loved Jimmy, and Jimmy always loved Kim. If what it took to see her again, to see her look at him like he was Jimmy, not Saul, one more time, was this—getting all the credit for Heisenberg’s crimes while serving time he always knew was coming down the pike—then so be it.

His whole life was a tissue of tradeoffs, anyway, cooking up some brilliant idea in the moment to get what he wanted most, without necessarily thinking of the long-term effects. He did it one last time. Who’s to say he’d regret it now anymore than he did in the past? In the time machine motif that haunts the episode like the ghosts of another Dickens tale, Jimmy wonders about regrets, his own and others. We know he always regretted losing Kim. His moment in the courtroom is his last chance to hop in his own personal time machine and make one single change. Not to alter the laws broken, the people conned, the lives ruined, the victims murdered. Not even—though he does regret it—to unwind his brother’s end.

No, the one change concerns Kim, having once lost her, seemingly forever. Once that change is made, he can live with the consequences.

NOPE, BCS, TOM, MCU

Some pop culture odds and ends…

Nope. I’ve got little to add to the Discourse here, just a few scattered thoughts. (I saw the film with friends and processed it with them; I’ve not done any online reading besides skimming—and being disappointed with—this article.) First, Daniel Kaluuya remains Jordan Peele’s not-so-secret super-weapon. What an actor. Second, it’s nothing but good for the movies that Jordan Peele productions have become events unto themselves. That’s a happy world to live in, even when Peele doesn’t quite hit the mark, as here. Third, the problem with Nope is the opposite of what ailed Us. Where Us worked at the visceral level of story and characters, it failed at the symbolic or metaphorical level. In Nope, by contrast, the allegory is what’s potent and compelling, whereas the literal narrative has gaps and questions. At times it feels like the plot does X or Y because that’s what the Meaning requires, rather than the significance arising organically from the story. When the allegory calls for the same signifier to mean two or more contrary things at once, the plot becomes unmoored. Having said that, fourth, a couple minor interpretive ventures. What’s up with that shoe? What came to my mind was the monolith in 2001, whose presence always signals a powerful evolutionary or technological shift in a group or species’ agency—and whose first appearance involves apes, tools, violence, and a jump to spaceships (re the last, the dad in the sitcom appears to be space-related in interests or profession). I wonder if, on a re-watch of Nope, mention or flashback or appearance of the shoe would similarly signal not only Gordy’s turn but also key turns in the narrative and/or Jean Jacket’s behavior. I’ll also add, mostly tongue in cheek, that when wondering aloud about the title of the film, what came to mind was Knope, as in Leslie. If Get Out (still his most successful film) was Peele’s rejoinder to the fantasies of well-meaning Obama-era white-liberal post-racism—though it understandably took on new force when someone other than Hillary was elected—perhaps Nope is a rebuttal of the same phenomenon, only applied to Hollywood instead of Washington, D.C. It’s Peele’s Nope to Poehler’s Knope.

Better Call Saul. I’ve been on the BCS bandwagon from the beginning. I’ve written about it briefly before, but mostly I’m just here to stand in awe. Like MBD, I anticipate these final episodes like each is Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Be sure to be reading what Alan Jacobs writes about it. Even DBH is in on the glories of Saul:

I became genuinely addicted, however, to Breaking Bad, which was so much better written than any of the television of my youth—and better written than just about every studio film made since the 1970’s—that it astonished me. It was the perfect balance of Dostoyevsky and Ed McBain, with just a hint of Lawrence Sanders here and Charles Portis there. I did not even mind the somewhat fantastic conclusion of the series. When, however, its sequel (or “prequel”) Better Call Saul came out, I was hesitant to watch it, fearing it would prove to be an inferior product that would only diminish my memory of the original program. But I watched. Now, in its final season, having just returned from its mid-season break, the show is dwindling down to its end over half a dozen episodes; and I am prepared to say not only that it is the better of the two programs, but that it may be the finest wholly original program ever to grace American television (or television anywhere). Like its predecessor, it is a grim portrayal of the gradual destruction of a soul, though now perhaps with somewhat greater subtlety and nuance, and with a richer range of characters. Comparisons aside, though, the quality of the writing has proved consistently astounding, and never more so than in these concluding chapters. Anyone who has followed the story—and I will give nothing away—will know that the final episode before that mid-season break was at once shocking and brilliant. It arrived in its closing minutes at a denouement (ominously announced by the slight flickering of a candle’s flame) that made perfect sense of the entire narrative of the series up to that point, and of the current season in particular, but that was (for me, at least) wholly unexpected until the moment just before it occurred. The construction of the story was so ingenious, and its moral and emotional power so unexpectedly intense, that I was left amazed. I do not know what it tells us about the current state of our culture that good writers have more or less been banished from the movie industry and have had to take their wares instead to television; but I am glad the medium as it now exists can make room for them. I also do not know what to make of the reality that there are television programs so much more competently written than most novels today. But, whatever the case, I can at least assure my three correspondents that, yes, I do watch television, even sometimes when something other than baseball is on; and that, moreover, in the case of Better Call Saul I feel positively elevated by having done so, because the program is a genuine work of finely wrought art.

I’ll add that, though Alan Sepinwall is usually reliable, his most recent recap of the show is strange, and it worries me he might know something about the final three episodes and be unintentionally telegraphing it to readers. He’s done this in the past, where he interprets an episode’s implications in ways no normal viewer would, because screeners or confidential information tugs his mind in an unpredictable direction. All that to say, he suggests over and over both (a) that this is probably our last glimpse of Gene’s future story and (b) that it provides a “happy ending” to Jimmy/Saul/Gene’s story.

A happy ending? What could that possibly mean? Deceiving and abusing an elderly woman and her loser son with a meaningless heist that could get the latter sent to jail, thereby reminding Jimmy of “the good old days” when—wait for it—theft, fraud, drugs, and murder were part of his daily life … this is a “happy ending”? Huh? The story is explicitly and intrinsically a fall narrative, a decline into moral squander and misery. The eminently wise and trustworthy writers and showrunners of BCS may or may not have more Gene in store for us. But even if we don’t return to him, his ending is as far from happy as one could possibly imagine.

The Old Man. Shows like The Old Man are more or less factory-produced for my tastes: The Honourable Woman, The Night Manager, The Americans, Fauda, even season five of Homeland—self-contained, stylish cocktails of spycraft, action, and character, realistic enough to be taken seriously, unrealistic enough to be fun. Le Carré lite, in other words. I was disappointed by the finale of TOM, however, because I thought it was a seven-episode miniseries, not the first of two seasons. I also didn’t realize Jeff Bridges’ battles with lymphoma and Covid brought production to a halt multiple times. Imagine being 70 years old, cancer in remission, Covid finally beaten, and the next day you’re hanging out a window at 70mph playing grandpa-Bourne, shooting back at the bad guys chasing you (and grandpa-driver John Lithgow). Not a bad capstone to a remarkable career.

Marvel. By my count, between May 2008 and November 2025, if Disney has its way, there will have been at least thirty-nine official “Marvel Cinematic Universe” movies. By the time the fifth and sixth Avengers films come out (six months apart) in 2025, my bet is that there will have been even more than what’s currently announced, which means the number will likely cross the threshold of forty movies in a little over seventeen years. And that’s not counting any Marvel characters produced by Sony outside of the MCU. Nor is it counting the Marvel TV shows, which in the same time span should amount to at least twenty-six in toto, which on average run two to three seasons each. So again, in less than two decades, we’re talking one hundred movie hours and hundreds of TV hours.

Now look at quality. From 2019 to the present there have been nine MCU movies. Two have been very bad (Captain Marvel and Eternals), three have been middling (Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Thor 4), and four have been solid (Avengers 4, Spider-Man 2 & 3, and Doctor Strange 2). People love the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, but they’re actually pretty forgettable; and although the final Avengers entry provided a cathartic conclusion to the previous two dozen films’ worth of story lines, it was bloated and even sort of boring in the middle act.

All that to say, that’s three and a half years of the world-bestriding Marvel Universe, the most successful film franchise of our (all?) time … and it’s a pretty mixed record, when you step back and look at it. Add in the deluge of Disney+ series and their even spottier quality, plus a narratively unclear and mostly uncompelling “multiversal” saga connecting these films to the coming ones in the next few years, and it makes sense that people are writing about Marvel’s “problem” or “crisis.”

Nevertheless, I think that sort of language overstated. Between one pole, which suggests the MCU will keep on breaking records forever, and the other pole, which suggests the MCU is about to crash, I think the correct position lies somewhere in the middle. When characters and properties that people love are featured in a Marvel movie, people will keep buying tickets; see Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Blade, etc. When people don’t care, or the movies are bad, people will start to drift away. Instead of seeing 2019 as a peak followed by a steep cliff, we should see it as the highest peak, followed by only very slowly diminishing returns, with many subsequent slightly smaller peaks, with a cliff awaiting only after 2025. At that point, unless they nail revivals of Fantastic Four and X-Men, which somehow spark another wave, a new generation, a seventh “phase,” and thus a third decade of MCU fandom and culture-wide mania, I think that’s when it all, finally, comes to an end—where “end” doesn’t mean “no more popular comic book movies” but “everyone and their mom ceases to reflexively see most MCU movies in the theater.”

Then again, the almighty Kevin Feige has been doubted before. He knew something no one else did fifteen years ago. Maybe he knows something we don’t today. But count me skeptical.

The issue with Kenobi

It’s not that it’s especially good or especially bad. It’s not that it’s revisiting a time period we’ve seen before. It’s not that it involves old characters and a fair bit of retconning.

It’s not that we’re back on Tatooine (for an episode). It’s not that we see kid Luke or kid Leia. It’s not that Hayden Christiansen is behind the mask (or in flashbacks). It’s not that the stakes are lower than usual. It’s not even that it’s serialized TV rather than a movie—though that’s close.

It’s that it feels like TV. It isn’t cinematic: in scope, in style, in ambition, in storytelling. Both its visual grammar (on the screen) and its literal grammar (on the page) are fit for the age of binging and streaming, not for a once-in-a-lifetime must-see cultural event.

There are no stunning landscapes. There is no moving music or even a memorable theme. The action is indistinguishable from other generic CGI-fests today, only somehow smaller. Even with the deep Disney pockets and the Star Wars brand, the show feels like it was made on the cheap: on soundstages, before green screens, with small crews, smaller casts (regular and extra), yet without the modest grandeur of The Mandalorian manufactured by StageCraft.

Compare with Top Gun Maverick, which for all its “legacy sequel” status is so big, so impressive, so jaw-on-the-floor awesome that it’s already the biggest hit in Tom Cruise’s 40-year career. It bends your will into submission by virtue of nothing so much as its self-confidence as pure spectacle.

By contrast, there is neither spectacle nor patience in Obi-Wan Kenobi, no pregnant pauses or non-filler geography. The editing is ho-hum. Viewers find themselves in the land of close-ups, the default setting of television cinematography. No one is winning any awards for this show.

That’s it. That’s the problem. Ewan McGregor is doing yeoman’s work, as ever. Kid Leia is cute. I didn’t mind the Anakin flashback. Nor do I mind looking to the animated series as a template here. But that template is for character, canon, and nuances of character. The visual, aural, and storytelling template is 1977—full stop.

Whether or not the finale lands the plane without eye-rolling, nostalgia bombs, or massive canon-revision—that is, even if the last episode doesn’t ruin anything in the OT and actually turns out to add a thing or two—it will still not have been worth the effort. Kennedy, Favreau, Filoni, et al have to start thinking bigger. They have to start unleashing their writers and directors while resisting, at all costs, the siren song of a Star Wars analogue to the Marvel in-house style, which is no style at all.

The worst eventuality here is not to make something bad, a la Episode II. The far greater sin is to make something boring, even forgettable. And I expect to have forgotten this series by year’s end.

Kim, breaking bad

You heard it here first. To be specific, on March 3, 2020, here’s what I wrote:

A brief comment on Better Call Saul, prompted by Alan Jacobs' post this morning:

I think the show rightly understands that Kim is, or has become, the covert protagonist of the show, and by the end, we (with the writers) will similarly come to understand that the story the show has been telling has always been about her fall. No escape, no extraction, no pull-back before the cliff: she, like Jimmy, like Mike, like Nacho, like Walter, like Jesse, like Skyler, lacks the will ultimately and decisively to will the good. They're all fallen; and in a way, they were all fallen even before the time came to choose.

In this way the so-called expanded Breaking Bad universe has made itself (unwittingly?) into a dramatic parable of original sin. Not that there is no good; not that characters do not want to do good. But they're all trapped in quicksand, and the more they struggle, the deeper they sink.

This was only three episodes into season 5; the closing moments of the eventual season finale—in which Kim not only initiated an unnecessary, risky revenge-scheme (now being played out in season 6) but also wryly double-barreled Jimmy just the way he had done in the closing moments of season 4 (“It’s all good, man!”)—signaled that the writers have known this was the destination, and the overriding theme of the show, for some time.

The present two-part final season is stretching out that slow burn to the breaking point, in peerless, masterly form as usual. In Gilligan and Gould we trust.

Personal tech update

It’s been an unplanned, unofficial Tech Week here at the blog. I’ve been meaning to write a mini-update on my tech use—continuing previous reflections like these—so now seems as good a time as any.

–I deactivated my Twitter account on Ash Wednesday, and I couldn’t be happier about the decision. It was a long time coming, but every time I came close to pulling the trigger I froze. There was always a reason to stay. Even Lent provided an escape hatch: my second book was being published right after Easter! How could I possibly hawk my wares—sorry, “promote my work in the public sphere”—if I wasn’t on Twitter? More to the point, does a writer even exist if he doesn’t have a Twitter profile? Well, it turns out he does, and is much the healthier for it. I got out pre–Elon Musk, too, which means I’ve been spared so much nonsense on the proverbial feed. For now, in any case, I’m keeping the account by reactivating then immediately deactivating it every 30 days; that may just be a sort of digital security blanket, though. Life without Twitter is good for the soul. Kempis and Bonhoeffer are right. Drop it like the bad habit that it is. Know freedom.

–I deleted my Facebook account two or three years ago, and I’ve never looked back. Good riddance.

–I’ve never had Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or any of the other nasty social media timesucks folks devote themselves to.

–For the last 3-4 years I’ve been part of a Slack for some like-minded/like-hearted Christian writers, and while the experience has been uniformly positive, I realized that it was colonizing my mind and thus my attention during the day, whether at work or at home. So, first, I set up two-factor authentication with my wife’s phone, which means I need her to give me access if I’m signed out; and, second, I began limiting my sign-ins to two or three Saturdays per month. After a few months the itch to be on and participate constantly in conversations has mostly dribbled away. Now I might jump on to answer someone’s question, but only for a few minutes, and not to “stay on” or keep up with all the conversations. I know folks for whom this isn’t an issue, but I’ve learned about myself, especially online, that it’s all or nothing. As with Twitter, I had to turn off the spout, or I would just keep on drinking until it made me sick.

–I don’t play video games, unless it’s a Mario Kart grand prix with my kiddos.

–I only occasionally use YouTube; nine times out of ten it’s to watch a movie trailer. I cannot relate to people, whether friends and students, who spend hours and hours on YouTube. I can barely watch a Zoom conversation for five minutes before needing to do something else with my time.

–I subscribe to Spotify, because it’s quality bang for your buck. I’d love to divest from it—as my friend Chris Krycho constantly abjures me to do—but I’m not sure how, should I want to have affordable, legal access to music (for myself as well as my family).

–I subscribe to Audible (along with Libby), because I gave up podcasts for audiobooks last September, a decision about which I remain ecstatic, and Audible is reasonably priced and well-stocked and convenient. If only it didn’t feed the Beast!

–I happily use Instapaper, which is the greatest app ever created. Hat tip to Alan Jacobs, from whom I learned about it in, I believe, his book Reading for Pleasure in an Age of Distraction. I’ve even paid to use the advanced version, and will do so again in the future if the company needs money to survive.

–I’ve dumbed down my iPhone as much as is in my power to do. I’ve turned off location services, the screen is in grayscale, and I’m unable to access my email (nor do I have my password memorized, so I can’t get to my inbox even if I’m tempted). I can call or text via Messages or WhatsApp. I have Audible, Spotify, and Instapaper downloaded. I use Marco Polo for friends and family who live far away. And that’s it. I aim to keep my daily phone usage to 45 minutes or so, but this year it’s been closer to 55-75 minutes on average.

–I use a MacBook Pro for work, writing, and other purposes; I don’t have an iPad or tablet of any kind. My laptop needs are minimal. I use the frumpy, clunky Office standbys: Word, Excel, PowerPoint. I’ve occasionally sampled or listened to pitches regarding the glories of alternatives to Word for writing, but honestly, for my needs, my habits, and my convenience, Word is adequate. As for internet browsing, I use Firefox and have only a few plug-ins: Feedly for an RSS reader, Instapaper, and Freedom (the second greatest app ever)—though I’ve found that I use Freedom less and less. Only when (a) I’m writing for 2-4 or more hours straight and (b) I’m finding myself distracted by the internet (but don’t need access to it); I pay to use it but may end up quitting if I find eventually that I’ve developed the ability to write without distraction for sustained periods of time.

–I’ve had a Gmail account since 2007; I daydream about deleting my Google account and signing up for some super-encrypted unsurveiled actually-private email service (again, Krycho has the recs), but so far I can’t find it within me to start from scratch and leave Gmail. We’ll see.

–I have the same dream about Amazon, which I use almost every day, order all my books from, have a Prime account with, and generally resent with secret pleasure (or enjoy with secret resentment). Divesting from Amazon seems more realistic than doing so from either Apple or Google, but then, how does anyone with a modest budget who needs oodles of books (or whatever) for their daily work purchase said books (or whatever) from any source but Amazon? That’s not a nut I’ve managed to crack just yet.

–I don’t have an Alexa or an Echo or an Apple Watch or, so far as I know, any species of the horrid genus “the internet of things.”

–In terms of TV and streaming services, currently my wife and I pay for subscriptions with … no platforms, unless I’m mistaken. At least, we are the sole proprietors of none. On our Roku we have available Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Apple+, HBO Max, and YouTubeTV. But one of these is free with our cellular service (Hulu), two of them are someone else’s account (Apple+ and YouTubeTV), and another is a byproduct of free shipping (Prime). We pay a nominal fee as part of extended family/friend groups for Netflix and HBO, and honestly we could stop tomorrow and we’d barely notice. We paid a tiny fee up front for three years of Disney+, and if we could have only one streaming service going forward, that’s what we’d keep: it has the best combination of kids, family, classic, and grown-up selections, and you can always borrow a friend’s password or pay one month’s cost to watch a favorite/new series/season before canceling once it’s over. As for time spent, across a semester I probably average 3-7 hours of TV per week. I’ve stopped watching sports altogether, and I limit shows to either (a) hands-down excellence (Better Call Saul, Atlanta, Mare of Easttown), (b) family entertainment (basically, Marvel and Star Wars), or (c) undemanding spouse-friendly fare (Superstore, Brooklyn 99, Top Chef). With less time during the school year, I actually end up watching more TV, because I’m usually wiped by the daily grind; whereas during the summer, with much more leisure time, I end up reading or doing other more meaningful things. I will watch the NBA playoffs once grades are submitted, but then, that’s nice to put on in the background, and the kids enjoy having it on, too.

–Per Andy C.’s tech-wise advice, we turn screens off on Sundays as a general rule. We keep an eye on screen time for the kids Monday through Thursday, and don’t worry about it as much on Friday and Saturday, especially since outdoor and family and friend activities should be happening on those days anyway.

–Oddly enough, I made it a goal in January of this year to watch more movies in 2022. Not only am I persuaded that, my comparison to television, film is the superior art form, and that the so-called golden age of peak TV is mostly a misnomer, I regret having lost the time—what with bustling kids and being gainfully employed—to keep up with quality movies. What time I do have to watch stuff I usually give to TV, being the less demanding medium: it’s bite size, it always resolves (or ends on a cliffhanger), and it doesn’t require committing to 2-3 hours up front. I’ve mostly not been successful this year, but I’m hoping the summer can kickstart my hopes in that area.

–If I’m honest, I find that I’ve mostly found a tolerable equilibrium with big-picture technology decisions, at least on an individual level. If you told me that, in two years, I no longer used Amazon, watched even less TV, and traded in my iPhone for a flip phone, I’d be elated. Otherwise, my goals are modest. Mainly it has to do with time allocation and distraction at work. If I begin my day with a devotional and 2-4 hours of sustained reading all prior to opening my laptop to check email, then it’s a good day. If the laptop is opened and unread mail awaits in the inbox, it’s usually a waste of a day. The screen sucks me in and the “deep work” I’d hoped to accomplish goes down the drain. That may not be how it goes for others, but that’s how it is with me.

–The only other tech-related facet of my life I’m pondering is purchasing a Kobo Elipsa (again, on the recommendation of Krycho and some other tech-wise readerly types). I’m not an especially good reader of PDFs; usually I print them out and physically annotate them. But it would be nice to have a reliable workflow with digital files, digital annotations, and searchable digital organization thereof. It would also help with e-reading—I own a 10-year old Kindle but basically never use it—not only PDFs for work but writings in the public domain, ePub versions of new books I don’t need a physical copy of (or perhaps can only get a digital version of, for example, via the library), and Instapaper-saved articles from online sources. I’ve never wanted a normal tablet for this purpose because I know I’d just be duped into browsing the web or checking Twitter or my inbox. But if Kobo is an ideal balance between a Kindle and an iPad, designed for the sole purpose for which I need it, then I may end up investing in it here in the next year or two.

Foundation

Later this month the television adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will premiere on Apple+. I had been planning on writing something about it, then doubled down on that plan when I read a piece resorting to that laziest but most common of critical terms of approval these days: the R-word. You know what it is. “Relevant.” As in, and I quote, Asimov’s story is “deeply relevant” and represents “something that feels more relevant than ever these days.” Foundation may be relevant, but if it is, it’s not because Asimov has something useful to say about our lives. Nor is it because Asimov offers us a critique of the late decadent phase of the American imperium. It’s because Asimov’s text begs to be read against itself, as an unconscious window on the late modern technocratic mind that believes itself to be the solution to decadence, when it is actually its principal symptom.

I have, or rather had, a lot more to say about that. But then Alan Jacobs beat me to the punch. He notes how, in both Asimov’s trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which were all written between 1942 and 1952, each author is “deeply invested in thinking about the ways old political orders give way to self-proclaimed Utopias; and both, also, see that the technocratic Utopia—as distinguished, I think, from the more traditional Utopias of authoritarian and totalitarian states—is a new thing in the world.”

Let me add one thing, which concerns the protagonist, Hari Seldon, and his Foundation scheme that sets the plot going. Not only is Seldon a pure projection of Asimov, or Asimov as he imagines himself and his ilk to be. The so-called science that Seldon has cracked is the science of predicting the future based on the past with perfect exactitude. And it’s the cranks who run the Empire who are fools not to believe his probabilistic calculations. I remember, when I first read the initial novel in the trilogy, thinking that Asimov was setting Seldon up to be a fool himself. I mean, imagine thinking “psychohistory” to be a legitimate empirical-mathematical enterprise in which the custodians of trillions of living souls should place their trust! But I was the foolish one. Naturally, that is exactly what Seldon-Asimov thinks world leaders should do: believe the science—in this case, the pseudo-science of technocrats tinkering with their algorithmic prediction machines. Knowing the unlikelihood of being believed, Seldon-Asimov sets in motion a series of events leading to the hoped-for future founding of a new intergalactic civilization with far less bloodshed and destruction than otherwise would have occurred (in the absence, that is, of his genius). His well-timed appearances and messages in the centuries to come are a running deus ex machina, only the god in the machine is Hermes, bringing one more message, just in the nick of time, from the omniscient Seldon-Asimov (speaking from the past). Not to put too fine a point on it, whereas the Foundation he establishes is meant to contain all the knowledge humans have amassed across the millennia, the cornerstone of the Foundation is—you guessed it—psychohistory. (It doesn’t help that every time just what the Foundation is preserving is mentioned it’s always, or almost always, the deliverances of the technical and empirical sciences, and never, or rarely, the treasures of the humanistic arts. You can be sure the gadgets of Steve Jobs reside safely in some Foundation vault; less so the works of Bach or Rembrandt.)

All that said, the book is worth a read, not least for its influence on Frank Herbert and George Lucas. And it’s still a fun, if not especially well written, yarn. And I might check out the show; it would be nice if the showrunners signaled their having grasped the unintended subtext of the story instead of buying into its ostensible prescience and relevance to the year of our Lord 2021. But I’m not holding my breath.

An action movie pet peeve

I don’t recall when it first appeared on screen, much less when it became a tired trope, but in the last 5-10 years a certain scene has become a mainstay in action movies (and TV shows). The protagonist realizes he needs the help of A Certain Someone. But either the last time he saw A Certain Someone things didn’t end well, or A Certain Someone is an unsavory character who can’t be trusted. With nowhere else to turn, though, our protagonist goes in search of ACS anyway. And when he finds him, one and only one thing happens. ACS sees him coming a mile away; the two of them fight—often quite brutally—until one submits to the other or, more commonly, the fight results in a draw; then, invariably, they look into each other’s eyes, realize the futility of their conflict, let bygones be bygones, and grab a drink.

Not only has this become an eye-rolling cliché. Most of the time it’s nonsensical. The brutality of the fight suggests unquenchable malice; the violence is bloodthirsty and aspirationally fatal. They’re trying to kill each other. Only, moments later, they’re not; all is well, since (as the plot demands) the protagonist’s needs must be met, and the two must join forces to continue his quest.

I’m the last person to suggest genre conventions are a drag. It’s just that this particular convention is stupid. We know what’s going to happen. The fight is devoid of stakes. And the ferocity of the fighting has no connection to what comes next, often mere seconds later. It’s little more than an annoyance; it’s a box to be checked by the screenwriter or writers’ room; it’s a way to kill time, the plot spinning its wheels; it’s unimaginative, and shows the filmmakers are out of ideas.

I’m looking at you, Mandalorian; and you, John Wick; and you too, Black Widow. To name only a few.

Just stop it already.

From meaningless content to doomscrolling

One of the truly essential Substack writers is Justin E. H. Smith, who is neither a journalist nor a start-up freelancer but a major academic philosopher and polymath scholar of (what always strikes me as) ten thousand interesting things. His newsletter from two Sundays ago was a typically undefinable reflection on (inter alia) memory, streaming, tense, eternity, and the internet. Here are some sample grafs that bring home one of the essay’s central points:

If this assessment sounds bleak or cynical, consider Amazon’s recent acquisition of MGM for $8.45 billion. Jeff Bezos now holds the rights to numerous treasures of twentieth-century American entertainment, not least Albert R. Broccoli’s almost boutique-style James Bond films with their iconic, mythos-incanting musical opening numbers. Bezos has explicitly stated his intention to “reimagine and redevelop that I.P. [sic] for the 21st century.” On the surface, his idea of what a “good plot” looks like would seem to make twenty-first century content scarcely different from the most archaic and deep-rooted elements of myth and lore. Thus he thinks there needs to be a heroic protagonist, a compelling antagonist, moral choices, civilizational high stakes, humor, betrayal, violence…

“I know what it takes to make a great show,” Bezos has confidently said, “this should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have these basic things in common.” The problem is that Bezos’s purpose in returning to a quasi-Proppian schema of all possible storytelling is not at all to revive the incantatory power of cliché to move us into the ritual time of storytelling. It is rather to streamline and dynamicize the finished product, exactly as if it were shipping times Bezos were seeking to perfect, rather than the timing of a hero’s escape from a pit of conventional quicksand.

And so the college freshman imagining her life as a show seems doubly sad: she turns to the closest thing we have to new narrative art in order to frame her own life and make it meaningful, but the primary instances our culture yields up to her to help with this framing are in fact only meaningless content being passed off as narrative art. It is no wonder, then, that what she will likely end up doing, after the passing and briefly stimulating thought of life itself as a TV show, is to go back to doomscrolling and vain name-checking until sleep takes over.

Do go read the whole thing; the closing section is eloquent, incisive, and damning in equal parts. Then do your duty and subscribe.

“TV" by John Updike

TV

By John Updike

As if it were a tap I turn it on,
not hot or cold but tepid infotainment,
and out it gushes, sparkling evidence
of conflict, misery, concupiscence
let loose on little leashes, in remissions
of eager advertising that envisions
on our behalf the better life contingent
upon some buy, some needful acquisition.

A sleek car takes a curve in purring rain,
a bone-white beach plays host to lotioned skin,
a diaper soothes a graying beauty’s frown,
an unguent eases sedentary pain,
false teeth are brightened, beer enhances fun,
and rinsed hair hurls its tint across the screen:
these spurts of light are drunk in by my brain,
which sickens quickly, till it thirst again.

A very special episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood

In which Daniel, now the middle child with half a dozen siblings, experiences a tiny setback that flummoxes his otherwise unqualified expectation that everything in his young life ought to go his way.

He sits down and cries—but in the chaos of a bustling household and so many other children, his mother and father are unable to pause the family's life, halt the earth's spin, and sing a song to soothe his self-esteem while ostensibly increasing his emotional intelligence.

Soon enough Daniel stops crying.

Eventually he gets up, discovers a solution to the problem on his own, and moves on.

The 11 Best Hour-Long TV Dramas of the Decade (2010–2019)

A few months back I posted this list to Twitter, but I thought I'd re-post it here, with a bit more commentary, as well as a reshuffling due to Mr. Robot's outstanding fourth season.

First, to the rules. This is a list of hour-long dramas: so no half-hour genre-exploders (Atlanta, Louie) or comedies (Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99). I'm also only thinking of TV series, with discrete seasons that tell something of a unified narrative: thus excluding miniseries (e.g. The Honourable Woman) and specialty shows (a la Sherlock or Black Mirror). Further, in order to qualify the series must have at least three seasons to its name (so The Knick falls short and both Succession and Yellowstone ran out of time before decade's end). Seasons prior to 2010, however—such as Mad Men's first three or Breaking Bad's first two—don't count for the purposes of this list. I am solely considering television seasons comprising hour-long dramatic episodes shown or streamed between 2010 and 2019.

Now to the list:

1. Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016)
2. The Americans (FX, 2013–2018)
3. Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013)
4. The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–2017)
5. Better Call Saul (AMC, 2015–)
6. Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015)
7. Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2019)
8. Mr. Robot (USA, 2015–2019)
9. Justified (FX, 2010–2015)
10. Fargo (FX, 2014–)
11. The Expanse (SyFy/Amazon, 2015–) 

Comments:

–My, that's a M-A-N-L-Y list. No apologies—one is who one is, one likes what one likes—but I'm not blind to it.

–Some shows got the cut due to waning quality in later years: I'm looking at you, The Good Wife, and you too, Orange is the New Black.

–Others were marked by high highs matched only by equally low lows: e.g. Homeland, True Detective.

–Consulting my annual lists, I was reminded of Boardwalk Empire, which is sorely underrated. The fourth season is up there for single-season masterpieces. But I'll never be able to shake Matt Zoller Seitz's comment, when he reviewed the short-lived series Boss, that the character Nucky Thompson should have been played by Kelsey Grammar. The show becomes an immediate classic in that alternate universe.

–Hannibal! A real show that really played on NBC—NBC!—for three—three!—seasons! That second season, y'all.

–You know, I never got around to watching the final season of Halt & Catch Fire. An unjustly overlooked show, beloved by none but critics. But the fact that I just never quite found myself needing to finish the story might say something. About the show, or about me, at least.

–It would be easy enough to keep the list to a clean ten and leave off The Expanse. But it just got too good in those second and third seasons, I couldn't do it.

–Were it not for Mr. Robot's second season, I might have been willing to move it up to the top five. Alas.

–Game of Thrones is so strange. Those last couple seasons were so dreadful overall (fun at times, but almost always stupidly silly), and the series was far from flawless in the first six. But the sheer narrative scope, the quality of the source material, the heft of the story and acting, the excellence (at times) of the writers' ability to juggle so much so deftly, and, man, those big moments: it still deserves much of the awe it garnered.

 –For me, at least, separating rankings by time limit and/or genre makes things so much easier than it would otherwise be. How are you supposed to compare Mad Men to Parks & Rec, or Veep to Mr. Robot? But once you sort for genre and running time, the top 10-20 dramas more or less sort themselves.

–Watch Rectify. It may well be the only TV show—given my predilections to tell people to turn their screens off, not on—that I suggest people ought to watch, and without reservation. It's that good.

With Mr. Robot till the end

The TV show Mr. Robot ends its four-season run in six days.* It began four and a half years ago, in the summer of 2015. It didn't exactly begin with a bang, but the whimper of its premiere (if I may mix metaphors) snowballed into one by its first season finale. Its seemingly omnipresent, omniscient mastermind of a creator Sam Esmail appeared to be the Next Big Thing in TV: a child of 90s cinema, he was and is Fincher and Spielberg and Soderbergh and PTA and Tarantino all—at least aspirationally—rolled into one. Eventually writer-director of every single episode—40 in total by series' end—the show is the complete vision of a self-styled auteur if ever there was one.

The second season lost much of the good will and momentum generated by the first. Sprawling, dense, literally and figuratively dark, trapped for much of its time in Elliot's mind: both critics and viewers in notable numbers dropped the show then, or so it appears from online commentary and anecdotal conversations. And although season 2 contained high points, especially in the back half of episodes, much of the criticism was justified.

I'm here to tell you, though, that not only are seasons 3 and 4 worth your time. Not only do they contain some of the most creative, entertaining, formally innovative storytelling in the medium. They might make for the two best seasons of TV in the last 3-5 years, at least for hour-long dramas.

The only comparable series in terms of back-to-back seasons during the same time frame would be Atlanta (though not an hour-long drama), Succession, The Leftovers, Better Call Saul, The Expanse, and The Americans (though its strongest run was seasons 3-4 in 2015–2016). Pound for pound, Mr. Robot is a peer to those heavyweights, and it might actually be the champ.

I realized this in the last six weeks when, on Sunday or Monday evenings, I had the choice to catch up on any number of quality shows: Watchmen, Silicon Valley, The Good Place, The Mandalorian, Jack Ryan (okay that one turned out not to be so good). And I kept finding myself, against what I felt to be better (or rather, public critical) judgment, opting for Mr. Robot: both to-breathlessly-see-what-happens-next, and for the sheer pleasure, the emotional thrill, of experiencing one more hour in Sam Esmail's world. Not one episode has let me down.

Season 1 was all world- and character-building, along with establishing the style of the series. Season 2 went inward, at times too deeply or wildly, but without ever quite losing sight of the goods or goals of the story and its characters.

But seasons 3 and 4 have been masterful as exercises in pace, plotting, tone, tension, and two different balancing acts: narrative and character arcs, on the one hand, and form and substance, on the other. I find myself, against all odds, caring about Elliot and Darlene and Mr. Robot and Angela and the rest. And the virtuosic experimentation has been exquisitely married, at each juncture, to the nature of the action and the purpose of the narrative and where we find the characters therein: whether that involve a silent episode featuring a heist and a host of isolated characters texting one another, or a multi-act stage drama bottle episode, or an "uncut" single-shot thriller—or whatever. It is beyond thrilling. It's mesmerizing. I find myself drawing closer to the screen, so captivated I'm standing, the music of Mac Quayle blasting as the odd angles of the camera dislocate the persons on screen relative to one another.

However Esmail concludes the series this Sunday,* he'll be ending the way he always envisioned: not with the external action, but with the internal drama of Elliot's soul. That's as it should be. He's set us up for more than one big surprise. But the revelations won't make or break the series. He's already made good on his promise. Mr. Robot is the real thing, and I'm with it—with him—till the end.


*Update: Unbeknownst to me, the fourth season of the show does not contain 10 episodes (like the previous three), but 13. I thought I checked this back in September, but perhaps I just assumed. Episode 9 only confirmed the assumption in its "feel" as a penultimate episode. Well then! Episode 10 certainly proved that assumption wrong. The good news: three more hours of what is still a great show.

The question for Silicon Valley

A single question has lingered over Mike Judge's Silicon Valley from the beginning. That question is whether he and his writing team—call them "the show"—believe that Richard and his unlikely crew of can-do programming losers not only can but ought to "win," and that such a win could be genuinely transformative and good for the world, or whether the system and culture of Silicon Valley are so fundamentally corrupted that even to win is to lose.

This dynamic has made the show worth watching till the end, but frustrating at times as well. It's not just whether Richard or his friends might "break bad," which the show entertained for a while. It's whether we, the audience, ought to cheer on Richard when he triumphs over the big bads of Google and Twitter and Facebook (or their stand-in "Hooli"), with his dream of a "free internet," or whether we ought to see through the self-serving rhetoric that attends every such dream.

Judge et al have given enough hints and plot turns to suggest that they know where they're headed and that the destination will be just as dark and pessimistic as the show's heart has proven to be throughout. But going on sixty hours of watching Richard blunder his way, with occasional eloquence, through one obstacle after another also suggests that the show might fall victim to the trap all TV writers fall into: coming to love their characters too much to let them lose. How can you give viewers lack of resolution, a sad and humiliating conclusion to spending time with "their friends" for so long?

I hope Judge sticks to his guns and (to mix metaphors) sticks the landing. Silicon Valley needs an ending fitting to Silicon Valley IRL. That ending should be pitch black. There is no saving it. To win is to lose. The internet is doomed: no algorithm or digital wizardry can redeem it.

Richard represents all those tech gurus who came before, a true believer before the windfall comes. Let the curtain descend on this once-idealistic CEO, awash in fame and money, sitting on the throne of an empire that continues to tyrannize us all. Whether he is smiling or weeping, that's the only honest end to this tech-start-up story, because the story is the same for all of them. Begin with hope, run the race, keep the faith—and finish with despair.

Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV

"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."

—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).

A Question for Richard Hays: Metalepsis in The Leftovers

In the finale of season 1 of the HBO show The Leftovers, Kevin Garvey reads a passage from the Bible over the body of Patti Levin, which he just buried with Rev. Matt Jamison. The whole season has culminated in this moment, which was partially the result of his own decisions, decisions sometimes made after blacking out and sleepwalking. These frightening episodes were in turn the result of dealing with the unbearable grief of losing each member of his family one by one to their own grief in the wake of The Departure (a rapture-like event a few years before)—all while serving as Chief of Police for a town that is being torn apart at the seams.

So Jamison hands Garvey a marked passage, and Garvey reads:



The passage is Job 23:8-17 (NIV). The scene is probably the most affecting—and least typical (i.e., not Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or a Gospel)—reading of Scripture I've ever witnessed on screen.

And it got me thinking about Richard Hays. Specifically, it got me thinking about his books Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). In those books Hays uses a literary device called "metalepsis" to uncover or identify allusions to passages of the Old Testament beyond what is explicitly cited in the New Testament. The idea is that, say, if a small portion of a Psalm is excerpted in a Gospel or Epistle, the author is thereby calling forth the whole Psalm itself, and that attentive readers of Scripture should pay attention to these intertextual echoes, which will expand the possible range of a text's meaning beyond what it may seem to be saying on the surface. So that, for example, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, those who know that that Psalm ends in deliverance, vindication, and praise will interpret the cry of dereliction differently than those who understand it as the despairing separation of the Son from the Father.

At last year's meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, there was a session devoted to Hays's latest book. When it came time for questions, I raised my hand. I asked whether his argument rested on authorial intention, that is, whether, if we could know for certain that the Evangelists did not intend any or most of the metaleptic allusions Hays draws attention to in his book, that would nullify his case; or whether we, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, are authorized to read the New Testament in light of the Old in ways its authors never intended. Hays assumed I hadn't read the book and that I was asking on behalf of authorial intention (i.e., he and Sarah Coakley both treated me a bit like a hostile witness, when I was anything but), but he answered the question directly, and in my view rightly: Yes, the metaleptic readings stand, apart from historical claims about authorial intention. Whatever Mark may have meant by the quotation of Psalm 22, we aren't limited by that intention, knowing what we know, which includes the entirety of the Psalm.

So back to The Leftovers. May we—should we—apply the hermeneutic principle of metalepsis to this scene's use of Scripture (and scenes like it)? What would happen if we did?

When I first watched the episode, I mistakenly thought that the famous passage from Job 19—"I know that my redeemer lives..."—followed the words cited on screen, which is what triggered the idea about metalepsis. In other words, if Job 23 were followed by words of bold hope in God, should that inform how we interpret the scene and its use of the quotation? Even granted my error, there is the wider context of the book of Job, and in particular the conclusion, in which God speaks from the storm, and Job is reduced to silence before God's absolutely unanswerable omnipotence—or, better put, his sheer divinity, his incomparable and singular God-ness. Might we interpret this scene, Garvey's story in season 1, and the whole series in light of this wider context?

It seems to me that we can, and should. But then, I'm only halfway through season 2. Job comes up again in episode 5 of that season, when Jamison is asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, and gives some trivia about Job's wife. Which suggests to me that perhaps Damon Lindelof and his fellow writers may be wise to the wider context and meaning of Job, in which case we viewers may not have to interpret against authorial intention at all.

That's a bit less fun, though it increases my respect for the show and the artists behind it. In any case, I'll let you know what I think once I finish.