Entry tags:
Syfy Nightflyers & bad character choice dramatic irony
Nightflyers (which ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
waxjism continued to watch even though according to doesthedogdie.com it wasn't free of i.e. offscreen rabbit death and then a whole bunch of humans dying (not that the latter would have put me off necessarily)) seems to be the same type of tragic narrative as le Carré's The Looking Glass War (which I talked about here), kind of like a fictional longread exposé.
It's the detailed, in-depth itemized timeline of all the fuckups involved in one massive clusterfuck of a situation.
The thing is, this kind of suspense depends on a type of dramatic irony - where you just have to watch people make bad choices and then watch all the consequences hit them - that's one of my biggest narrative squicks. But sometimes I don't mind it, because the effect varies widely with
This sort of tragedy is designed to allow you to appreciate just how many individual people had to make their own independently incredibly stupid choices (and hopefully with a degree of background to allow you to understand why they have each done so) in order for the clusterfuck to take place. There are all sorts of points where all that was needed was for one of these people to, one of these times, make the normal/smart/cautious/legal/responsible choice in order to have diverted this runaway train of disaster, but unfortunately for all the people involved, a person with just the right blind spot/ignorance/bias/altered state of mind/character flaw was there in that hot seat at every point in this massive chain of causality.
But sometimes, like in Looking Glass War, the suspense isn't as trying to sit through (so: isn't as intense?). This might have to do with pacing, or with how close the narration is to the characters. Too close and the weight of expectation from the inexorable overall plot leads to impatience and, usually, consequently getting so exasperated with the characters that I just want them to go away. Too far, and the understanding of why the disastrous choices get made gets lost.
In Looking Glass War, there was enough of a view into each of the players for a bit of empathy. The ones responsible for the greatest and most pivotal fuckups were detailed enough to understand even though the looming disaster was also obvious all along. At the same time the narrator was an omniscient third-person narrator whose palpable distance from the characters apparently acted like a kind of safety valve that prevented my irritation from reaching the critical point (for me, it's "All these characters couldn't be making worse choices if they all WANTED everything to go up in flames! Why should I keep going with more concern for the outcome than they can apparently muster?") However sad the ending, that distance kept it at a remove so it didn't affect me the way those normally would. (Of course, that's not a universal fix. And people often don't want their audience to have that kind of distance from emotional engagement with their characters.)
I can see how the plot in Nightflyers might have been bearable for me if it were simply less detailed. After all, I've read similar science fiction stories, some as long as novellas. Too much granularity and too much focus on the people making the painfully bad choices is basically unwatchable, which is why I wouldn't watch this (it's not unwatchable forwaxjism and she's watching with headphones on at the other end of the sofa, so unless I distract myself with something else I get about two thirds of what's going on with the subtitles). Actually, interestingly, this is about the same watching experience, emotionally, as the first few episodes of Netflix's completely terrible Lost in Space reboot last year: getting so exasperated that I start to dislike all the characters and hope for maximum disaster to either end my suffering or at least punish them.
waxjism continued to watch even though according to doesthedogdie.com it wasn't free of i.e. offscreen rabbit death and then a whole bunch of humans dying (not that the latter would have put me off necessarily)) seems to be the same type of tragic narrative as le Carré's The Looking Glass War (which I talked about here), kind of like a fictional longread exposé.It's the detailed, in-depth itemized timeline of all the fuckups involved in one massive clusterfuck of a situation.
The thing is, this kind of suspense depends on a type of dramatic irony - where you just have to watch people make bad choices and then watch all the consequences hit them - that's one of my biggest narrative squicks. But sometimes I don't mind it, because the effect varies widely with
This sort of tragedy is designed to allow you to appreciate just how many individual people had to make their own independently incredibly stupid choices (and hopefully with a degree of background to allow you to understand why they have each done so) in order for the clusterfuck to take place. There are all sorts of points where all that was needed was for one of these people to, one of these times, make the normal/smart/cautious/legal/responsible choice in order to have diverted this runaway train of disaster, but unfortunately for all the people involved, a person with just the right blind spot/ignorance/bias/altered state of mind/character flaw was there in that hot seat at every point in this massive chain of causality.
But sometimes, like in Looking Glass War, the suspense isn't as trying to sit through (so: isn't as intense?). This might have to do with pacing, or with how close the narration is to the characters. Too close and the weight of expectation from the inexorable overall plot leads to impatience and, usually, consequently getting so exasperated with the characters that I just want them to go away. Too far, and the understanding of why the disastrous choices get made gets lost.
In Looking Glass War, there was enough of a view into each of the players for a bit of empathy. The ones responsible for the greatest and most pivotal fuckups were detailed enough to understand even though the looming disaster was also obvious all along. At the same time the narrator was an omniscient third-person narrator whose palpable distance from the characters apparently acted like a kind of safety valve that prevented my irritation from reaching the critical point (for me, it's "All these characters couldn't be making worse choices if they all WANTED everything to go up in flames! Why should I keep going with more concern for the outcome than they can apparently muster?") However sad the ending, that distance kept it at a remove so it didn't affect me the way those normally would. (Of course, that's not a universal fix. And people often don't want their audience to have that kind of distance from emotional engagement with their characters.)
I can see how the plot in Nightflyers might have been bearable for me if it were simply less detailed. After all, I've read similar science fiction stories, some as long as novellas. Too much granularity and too much focus on the people making the painfully bad choices is basically unwatchable, which is why I wouldn't watch this (it's not unwatchable for
waxjism and she's watching with headphones on at the other end of the sofa, so unless I distract myself with something else I get about two thirds of what's going on with the subtitles). Actually, interestingly, this is about the same watching experience, emotionally, as the first few episodes of Netflix's completely terrible Lost in Space reboot last year: getting so exasperated that I start to dislike all the characters and hope for maximum disaster to either end my suffering or at least punish them.
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(PS hi I saw you comment on... I think something on metaquotes, and recognised your username from fic that I downloaded years ago when I didn't have home internet yet and so DLed all the fic at the library and brought it home (on a floppy disc!) to read; anyways, that's why I am randomly here.)
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I didn't see that bit; I guess I was lucky in which third I picked up.
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Yeah, it sounds like you may not have caught that very first bit, which had a big hairy bloke stalking this woman around the spaceship. I was going berserk trying to recognise him until I remembered that IMDB exists. It was Angus Sampson, and since I know him from Thank God You're Here, it was a jarring difference.
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👀
eta: and, I mean, am not positive where/if I've saved the earlier versions.