Well, uh, that wasn't very good.
The original wasn't high art by any means and all too often ended up being high camp in low taste (it was, after all a naziploitation/sci-fi/WWII/Holocaust allegory. From space.) but it had the odd moment of effect here and there. This . . .doesn't. Nothing that happens within the pilot manages to have any blow-away plot moments on its own terms (which, when you consider that's supposed to be one of the hooks of the damn thing in the first place--bearing in mind that I was 8 or so when it first ran and it hasn't aged terribly well now but you were given enough time to absorb the story and the scope of it and just when you had a handle on how bad the Visitors are, the alien bitchqueen eats a damn guinea pig.) or really entices you to go further. All the cards are alrady on the table at the end of the first hour and my gut feeling is "Yeah? And? So? What?"
It looks and plays like every other post-BSG show out there, and frankly, after BSG, Secret Invasion and the like, I'm totally burned out on quasi-religious alien/robot sleeper agents. Done with that shit.
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It did seem a bit too... I don't know, comfortable? By hitting all the familiar notes, they ended up with a first-episode resolution that includes outing the Visitors as evil (except for the archetypal Noble Traitor), the formation of a human resistance including at least two primary cast members, and the revelation of willing or semi-willing human collaborators. It would've been nice to have a bit more ambiguity.
On a more macro level, I'd say pacing has been a major problem for most of the new "genre" shows: if it's not rushing too quickly like V, it's dragging its heels a la Flashforward. Not quite sure if this is a new problem per se but it's certainly become abundantly self-evident this season...
It seemed really empty is what it seemed like. In the old miniseries you had a larger canvas and a little larger scope to cover the effect of the Visitor's arrival and the slow burn of their plot against Earth. In this, one minute they're there and then we jump ahead three months and everyone's already in place. It doesn't help, of course, that the characters are so atrociously thinly drawn that it's hard to care much what happens to whom.
A lot has been made about the supposed political bent of the show, but really, not much has been made of the fact that the show, frankly, sucks.
I'd been on the fence about the series until I found out they'd be going on hiatus after the fourth episode, through to Spring 2010. So I guess I should thank the network for making that decision for me. :)
You're not missing much by leaving the whole mess alone. If THE PRISONER hadn't been so dreadful, this would have taken the cake for Most Incompetent Remake of 2009.
I haven't had a chance to watch "The Prisoner" yet, but I'm definitely looking forward to discussing it with you: you made comparisons to the originals when reviewing both "V" and "The Prisoner", and I'm wondering whether that lack of context - having never seen the original "V", and with a decidedly negative opinion regarding the original "Prisoner" - will give me a different perspective on the same series.
For me, it's not so much a question of whether the remake lives up to the original but whether the remake works on its own terms. With "V", it's safe to say the answer's no: the first two episodes were far too slow and generic to hold my interest...
Well, as ridiculous and dated as the original "V" was, it worked--whether we know it or not, the story of people rising up to combat insidious fascim works, because it resonates with us. It's not accident that the 2 things everyone remembers from the original are the alien bitch-queen devouring a live guinea pig and the Holocaust survior teaching the kids to graffiti the Vistors' propaganda with a red "V." Despite the passage of time and the layers of irony that have been piled on to SF, sometimes the old stuff works and works for a reason. A reason that doesn't involve wingnutty theories about mind control via flu shots.
Likewise "The Prisoner." Despite what people who disagree with me (otherwise known as "people who are wrong") say about the dated effects and the 60's-ness of it all, it works in a timeless fashion in a strange, storybook quality (which it directly references from time to time) that the new one doesn't obsessed as it is with The Post 9/11 Climate blah blah blah.
You missed nothing not watching the last two except for the utter dimwittery of the "OMG the V's are going to control us with THE FLU VACCINE!" b/s they did in the last episode. It's sort of like Secret Invasion in that it's not very good, slow and plodding and who really gives a damn.
I suppose a few duds for every successful remake is par for the course - though the merits of calling BSG "successful" depends entirely on how fair you're inclined to judge it based on where it started and where it ended...
With V specifically, I think the main problem was a combination of unimaginative storylines and less-than-compelling acting: Morena Baccarin telegraphs Anna's villainy far too much, I'm not inclined to give a damned about yet another annoying teenager screwing things up out of habit, and the whole Fifth Column bit... meh. Seen it all before, far too recently to appreciate yet another spin around the old block.
Actually, I finally did get around to seeing the "Prisoner" remake... or rather, I should say I saw the first two episodes and lost interest. You're right that it wasn't very entertaining, but not, I think, for the reasons you mentioned.
I'd say my problem with the remake stems from the fact that it's too similar to the original, in the sense that I didn't find Caviezel's Six any more sympathetic or engaging as McGoohan's. (Prettier, sure, but that's about it.) It's the reverse of "Y: The Last Man", in a sense: the mystery isn't supposed to be the hook, we're not watching/reading to see what killed all the men or what the Village really is. It's the person at the heart of the story (Yorick, Six) that matters.
But Vaughan knows how to construct likeable characters - aside from McKellen's Two, there's not much going on in that department. And even McKellen's constrained by the fact that he's at his best with a proper sparring partner - Patrick Stewart, Christopher Lee, Clive Owen and so on, actors of a high caliber. Caviezel didn't really have that going on for him.
Well, you know where I fall on that measure. I think BSG would have been stronger on the whole with a little pre-planning, but that ship's long since sailed and sank.
Well, I find her villainy telegraphed but not extravagant enough, but it's all relative, I suppose. And yeah, there's not really any character I thought was worth investing anything in, so I have bland aliens fighting walking cliches with stuff clumsily ripped from today's headlines, and ultimately, I found myself wondering why I should give a shit.
Congratulations on having the foresight to stop at 2. I sat through all 6 and desperately wish I had that 1/4th of a day back. I don't really think in the original that were supposed to sympathize or even much like No. 6 as much as see him as an archetype--he's the lone individual struggling against a collectivist apparatus (the Harrison Bergeron kind of collective, not the Ayn Rand kind) It's made plain through the original that his backstory doesn't matter too much (it's frequently contradicted through the episodes) and really, it doesn't even matter why he resigned--it's just the immediate point of conflict.
New Prisoner has no character either, but it's not in the service of anything. He has no strong convictions, and isn't meant to be an exemplar of a larger idea . . .he's nothing but a milquetoast. And his lack of character drives the lack of conflict in the series and engendered my lack of giving much of a damn. It's not really about anything, is it?
Agreed. You know, the whole fourth season still gets me angry whenever I talk about it, but I suppose that's as much a sign of how deeply the show could affect its viewers as anything.
Couldn't think of any reasons myself...
But even an archetype needs to be sympathetic to some extent - even if the reason for the conflict doesn't matter, you still have to want the side he represents to emerge triumphant. Intellectually, the original "Prisoner" might have made that point... but emotionally? It left me utterly cold.
As for NuPrisoner... it seemed to me like the creators found themselve caught between wanting to follow the basic formula of the original (individuality vs. conformity/authority, with a hefty dose of paranoia thrown in) but it got sidelined by all those bizarre subplots about the taxi driver and the fake brother. Which, I gather, didn't amount to much either...
Or a sign of just how incredibly wrong-headed things ultimately became.
Us and most everyone else. I sure hope it's running on vapors now, because that last bit with the Bliss in the last episode was just hilariously stupid and any show that would demand a scene like that be taken seriously deserves to die a death.
Does it? There's probably no telling exactly how McGoohan meant us to take all this or how we react to no. 6 (in fact, over his body of work he pretty much plays a hardass most all the time) so it may just be that as his one note. I would argue though that his lack of a past or a "softer side" as such is make us identify with as a "type" more than a "character," perhaps, but again, this is all guesswork.
I think they just saw that Lost made gobs of money and The Prisoner was a name with some credibility and tried to join the thing together to frankly wretched effect. The problem with upsetting the Individual/Society conflict (so much so that no. 6 chooses to join the Society at the end of it) by adding alliances and a backstory and all sorts of red herrings and subplots is the overall point gets occluded.
Indeed. The only way I can try to be okay with it is to look at SF in television as a genre in development, and if BSG fixed a lot of problems I'd had with, say, Star Trek and Star Wars, then maybe the next big project will learn the right lessons from BSG.
Considering they've taken it off the schedule after only four episodes, I'm not sure the network has any more confidence in it than we ever did...
It may just be a matter of preference - I tend to find round characters more interesting than flat ones, at least in scenarios where I'm expected to be invested in an ideological quandary (and for all its ambiguity, I do think "The Prisoner" is very heavily slanted to favor Six over whatever the Village represents, as their sinister methods seem to overshadow any possible justification they might have).
The whole thing was just horribly overcomplicated and uninteresting. Again, I do think there's room for a remake of "The Prisoner" that's a bit less abstract, but this last one wasn't it. Although it is interesting that, as you point out, the overall narrative is now such that Number Six does succumb to the Representation of the Collective at the end... which means the whole message of the series has changed to one that, perhaps, promotes conformity and "accepting your fate", as it were. Slightly anachronistic, no?
I'm sure I said this somewhere before sometime, but every "revolutionary" moment is a response to and reaction against the one before it. They all built on that which came before. :)
It's supposed to be coming back for "retooling," which makes me think of the original TV series, wherein they "retooled" it near the end by killing off 2/3rds of the cast and shuffling it as fast as possible to cancellation, so it's not as if "V" has great luck with changes of mind, if you listen to history.
Well, as I said in one of the later episode recaps, The Prisoner is basically The Individual against Society, which means you're dealing in archetypes, really--it's the lone individual against a faceless entity that wants to gobble up all that makes him "him" and leave him nothing. That kind of archetypal conflict, to me, means the characters are destined to be a bit opaque--you can't add too much without over egging the pudding.
Which was one of the things that pissed me off. One of the things that gives The Prisoner it's force (besides the fact that it's ideal viewing for folks who are pissed off at the world) is that it says to those who choose not to conform that it is right and natural to resist, to hold on to one's individuality and integrity. That the remake turns this into "you must give yourself over to the group, ultimately, it's just a question of how rough you want to make it on yourself" is as destructive a moral as telling a child Santa Claus got trapped in their chimney and died on Christmas Eve. :) What possible god or satisfaction comes from a resolution like that?
Of course, the relative success of every "revolution" depends entirely on what you're responding to: I'd hate for the future creators of SF television to look at BSG and say "Oh, so that's what was missing: we need more religion!"
Retooling after only four episodes? Wow. That's not going off the rails, that's rocketing off the rails into the Grand Canyon.
But doesn't that conflict require that the Individual be defined in greater detail than the homogenous Society around him, the better to set him apart from Them?
I hate to invoke the invoked-ad-nauseum, but it certainly makes more sense if you look at it in a post-9/11 context: be like everyone else or be a terrorist. Not the most subtle message, and one that's... I hesitate to say "dated", but certainly a message that's been well and truly hammered home by now.
Well, you can always count on them to learn the wrong lesson for sure, so . . .yeah. V has some of BSG's thud-brained religion, so we're already seeing some things carried forward even though they really shouldn't.
I'd love it if it were a well-deserved bullet in the eyes. My barometer for "remakes that shouldn't have been mooted EVER" used to be Knight Rider and yet the current mania for remakes means I keep having new exemplars of What Not To Do. It's scary.
Not necessarily, or at least in the terms the original series trafficked in--No. 6 was more interesting basically because the rest of the Villagers were colourless, lifeless automatons mostly, so it wasn't necessary to go in with too great a depth to draw the lines of conflict.
But how do you thread that into a tapestry wherein the conflict is "the individual vs. society?" You could frame it in the sense of "in a totalitarian society, being an individual is itself a subversive dangerous act," but then you're equating your nominal hero with a terrorist and there's no way that's gonna fly on the tube . . .
Delightful. That'd be the last nail in the coffin for me, I suppose.
We do seem to be stuck in a rather cannibalistic trend right now. Of course, some projects may have more merit than others - I'm actually expecting Jackie Earle Haley to do quite well as the new Freddy Krueger (and the original really hasn't aged that well).
I always thought that was true of him too, though, at least to the extent that he wasn't necessarily any more profound or interesting than them - just different, the only man walking right when everyone else walks left.
Not in mainstream American television, at any rate. Had the remake been British as well... might've turned out a bit differently, perhaps?
Thankfully I have the good sense to stay way from Caprica, which is apparently full of that stuff, and is apparently getting hellaciously awful ratings, which proves my point about the BSG finale poisoning the well, I think.
Yeah, and even stuff that's supposedly "new" like Avatar, is pretty much a potted rehash of various other story elements gathered together and reheated to one extent or the other. That's not necessarily a knock (as Star Wars was a collection of familiar tropes recombined to something else) it's just . . .not as successfully recombinant lately.
And that was pretty much it. He's not necessarily smarter than the Village masters--he's frequently outmaneuvered and outwitted. If he has an advantage it's his iron will and his ability to be unpredictable to them that gives him any kind of edge.
It couldn't have been much worse, that's for sure. I still can't get over how eyeball-deflatingly awful it was.
Not necessarily - even if you take it on its own merits, outside the BSG context, it's pretty much Dynasty in Space. That alone is grounds for avoiding it like the plague.
It might be these most recent recombinations aren't producing anything we haven't seen before: post-colonial racial metaphors in particular have just been done to death in this day and age, and "Avatar" doesn't really offer anything beyond that.
All of which is fine in the context of the plot conflict, but I think that's a poor way to define a character.
Oh, I'm sure there'll be plenty of face-palming failures coming our way this year. So at least it'll have company. :)
Wow! Dynasty in Space? That is so totally NOT what I want from a SF show! I realise there's this effort, borne out of the low self-esteem most SF creators have that we must disguise our work as much as possible but . . .really, guys?
Well, it offers fetish fuel for a small segment of the population. I have more than a few things to say about Avatar, believe you me. Watch this space for future developments. :)
Very true, but some people have floated the idea that McGoohan's "character" is actually a singular thing across all his roles, which would explain why it's so thinly drawn but . . .I don't know if McCaveiziel really acquitted himself any better ultimately since he came off such a milksop . . .
There's still "V" returning, so . . .yeah. It'll be great to see how that falls apart even more than the first 4 episodes fell apart.
It has an audience, and I respect that, but speaking as someone who was strongly appreciative of "Battlestar Galactica"? Not what I'm looking for. At all.
My flesh is crawling at the thought that Rule 34 is already in effect and there are terabytes of blue Andrew Lloyd Webber rejects "connecting their USBs" floating about on the Net...
I remember reading somewhere that many McGoohan fans believed "The Prisoner" was actually a follow-up to a previous series of his, and that he was playing the same character - a theory that seems to have received pseudo-canonical approval from the creators. So that absent sense of "history" might also have contributed to its failure...
I'm tempted to ask how much worse it could possibly get, and then I remember we're talking about an ABC series. It can always get worse. :)
Yeah. io9 Posted something about the fact that it was "becoming the best SF show on TV" and I was amazed that someone could be that mistaken.
Best not to think about it. :)
Yeah. One of the fan theories that floats around The Prisoner is that it's the continuaton the previous series, Danger Man, but McGoohan denied that pretty much all his life, so . . .yeah. There are some similarities, but those similarities would go for any super-spy archetype . . .
I'm grinding my teeth and hoping that they've fixed the problems from the first 4 eps. Failing that, I have the Matt Smith Dr. Who series to look forward to next month . . .
That probably says more about SF on TV these days than "Caprica" itself. After all, what's it competing against? "V"? "Fringe"? "Flashforward"?
Too late. Please excuse me while I get my Sulfuric Acid Shampoo. :)
That, and Tom Welling's reign of Dumb 'n' Pretty continues with a tenth season of "Smallville". If it weren't for Rome getting a movie I'd have no faith in humanity at all.
Yeah, and that's like being up against "Knight Rider" and "Street Hawk" or something. :)
I'm very sorry. :)
Yeah, I'm kinda thinking we're back to another fallow season for SF TV, and well, maybe that's OK for awhile until we get better ideas . . .
Now, see, if I had to turn that showdown into a Thunderdome match, the only way it could sell would be by giving it the tagline "Two shows enter. Neither leave." :)
Or at least until whatever marijuana those writers are smoking wears off, and we can get a story that doesn't get us started on Magical Destinies and Chosen Ones and God's Will. (Saw the 2000 "Dune" miniseries a few days ago, and do I have something to say about that? Why yes I do. :))
I like the cut of your jib. Throw in Master Blaster and you have a deal, Mrs. Kingston-Gabai.
I have GOT to see this run-down of the 2000 Dune. You must write this. If you don't something sleeps inside us . . .and seldom awakens. THE SLEEPER MUST AWAKEN.
Sure. But don't come crying to me when you find out it's just Bendis sitting on Jeph Loeb's shoulders. ;)
It's up. Enjoy - feedback is, as always, welcome. :D
Well, that's about what I expected, really. :)
I'm reading it now! Comments surely to follow!
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