Author: Kevin Watterson

La Brea premiere runs to mystery, leaves characters behind

My dearest readers,

This blog began as a way to chronicle the wandering path I’m taking to replace the emptiness in my life after Lost. I’ve written about shows that were nothing like it but still provided season after season of entertainment. Some finished on a high note (Person of Interest) and others on very, very low notes (Game of Thrones) and some fizzled out (Revenge). These shows are fun if nothing else. 

But the shows that really catch my eye are the ones with the most potential to really be “The Next Lost”. Take Manifest as an example. It was supposed to be TNL but I turned vehemently against it. Flash Forward and The Event contended but really just because they aired near Lost’s final season. Neither was great and both failed to get a second season. Fox’s short-lived Terra Nova was the show I felt had the best chance to be TNL. It turned out to be only meh but had the same foundation as Lost: Characters out of place in a distinct and unknown world.

NBC’s new fall drama La Brea shares it as well. Which is why after watching the pilot twice I am so frustrated. Like so many other failed network dramas, La Brea runs right past its characters and into the arms of what it thinks is a tremendous mystery. That gets the formula backwards. Any show looking to be TNL has to embrace its characters and let them walk us to the mystery. 

Here’s all the reasons La Brea didn’t do that.

The pilot episode sped through an entire day. The episode began in the morning and ended at night, but I don’t feel like I saw a day’s worth of action. Here’s the timeline:

Morning—Eve is stuck in L.A. traffic near Curson & Wilshire while driving her daughter, Izzy, and son, Josh, to school. A massive sinkhole opens, swallowing every person and building for blocks in all directions. Josh falls in, Eve rushes back to save him only to suffer the same fate. Eve later wakes up in the sinkhole, we don’t know how long she was out.

Afternoon—Eve and Josh re-unite among the ruins of what fell into the hole and dozens of other people who the outside world thinks are casualties of the disaster. 

Late afternoon—A pack of wild animals attacks the camp, leaving Josh gravely wounded. We know it’s late afternoon because Marybeth, a cop in the outside world, tells Ty, a psychiatrist struggling with suicidal thoughts, it’s going to be dark soon.

Night—Eve, Ty and Sam, a Navy SEAL-turned-surgeon, find an ambulance with the medical supplies they hope will save Josh’s life.

Am I the only one who finds this a big miss? These are strangers in a strange land who went through a horrible trauma and La Brea gave us almost nothing about what that must have been like for them. It’s a missed storytelling opportunity, but also it’s bad episode construction. The writer and director did a poor job establishing the size of the hole’s world and how long it would take to move across it. Did Eve spend three hours or 30 minutes walking from where she woke up to where she found Josh? They were at camp (which is what this main area will become) for several hours before the animal attack. What did they do? We got a few scenes of them searching for supplies, but not nearly enough to indicate this took all day.  

An almost laughable reveal about the hole’s location. Like most viewers I picked up pretty early that falling through the hole sent the victims back in time. As the episode crept toward its finish with no real movement in that direction I figured they’d hold it off until a later week. Wrong! Eve is standing by the ambulance and happens to notice the outline of the Hollywood hills painted on its back door exactly matches the hills she’s staring at. Putting two and two together she tells Ty and Sam she thinks they’re still in Los Angeles. 

Oh. Set aside the fact that the Hollywood hills may have geographically changed since pre-historic times. What a joke of a way to tell your story. To my previous point, the show could have had the characters spend their first day in the hole facing a drama/adventure/obstacle that led to them realizing where they are in a heart-stopping way. That would have been compelling. Instead they made it an aha moment inspired by some painting on an ambulance. You’ve got to be kidding me. 

The hole wasn’t a character. For a show set in an alternate world to be compelling, the world itself has to be its own character. It has to have the same presence the lead characters have. It has to be put under a microscope and revealed the same way a character is. No sign we’re going to get that here. 

The least interesting ending you can imagine. A saber-toothed tiger (or something like it) emerges from the jungle. That’s it. That’s the tweet. Eve, Ty and Sam are probably in danger but the screen fades to black before we find out what happens. Not that we are even interested because there was already a wild animal attack earlier. I can’t picture why any writer, producer or network exec thought the threat of a second animal attack would make us tune in for week two. 

That is four reasons the show will fail and I haven’t even gotten to the world remaining in Los Angeles. Eve’s estranged husband, Gavin, crashed out of the military (literally) and has some visions. Shockingly, those visions prove prescient when he happens to dig a hole exactly where Eve lost her wedding ring when she woke up in the sink hole thousands or millions of years ago. Fate, I guess. Yawn. We also have the government on hand to build a tent city in a matter of hours and you know it’s keeping all kinds of secrets. Original. 

La Brea has enough characters to give each one their own episode and explore who they are and why they’re acting the way they are in their new life. But based on the pilot I don’t see it happening. At one point, one of the survivors says to another, “Maybe we’re just in an episode of Lost.”

Buddy, I knew episodes of Lost. And you’re in no episode of Lost.

Sincerely,

The Wandering Lostie

Superman and Lois premiere finally gives us a good Clark Kent

I always maintain you can’t have a great Superman without a good Clark Kent. It’s why the Christopher Reeve movies succeeded and the Henry Cavill ones didn’t. That’s not Cavill’s fault. The Christopher Nolan/David Goyer story all but wrote Clark out of the script to focus on a more brooding and uncertain Superman—an error on both points.

So I was not excited to see The CW was coming out with a new show called “Superman and Lois”. Superman and Lois? Great. Here we go again.

I could not, and let me repeat myself for emphases here, COULD NOT have been more wrong. This premiere was fan*uckingtastic.

<p value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">For starters, it didn’t dwell on the origin story. Kansas via Krypton. <a href="https://thewanderinglostie.com/2013/06/16/superman-man-of-steel-review/&quot; data-type="URL" data-id="https://thewanderinglostie.com/2013/06/16/superman-man-of-steel-review/&quot; target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">We know</a>. I was thrilled to see them treat it with a quick voiceover before moving on to the hero’s entry as he saved a nuclear plant from sure disaster. But even that wasn’t a warmed-over version of it’s a bird it’s a plane it’s Superman. They chose to make it functional by establishing that Superman and his father-in-law have their own professional relationship and he’s in on the secret identity and the emergency at the nuclear plant was plot hatched by an unknown enemy. Bing bang boom this premier is firing on all cylinders. Let’s get back to Clark.For starters, it didn’t dwell on the origin story. Kansas via Krypton. We know. I was thrilled to see them treat it with a quick voiceover before moving on to the hero’s entry as he saved a nuclear plant from sure disaster. But even that wasn’t a warmed-over version of it’s a bird it’s a plane it’s Superman. They chose to make it functional by establishing that Superman and his father-in-law have their own professional relationship and he’s in on the secret identity and the emergency at the nuclear plant was plot hatched by an unknown enemy. Bing bang boom this premier is firing on all cylinders. Let’s get back to Clark.

Reeve’s Kent, and Brandon Routh’s to an extent, was hesitant and awkward because he’s a small-town Kansas boy with a fast-paced job in the big city. S&L gives Tyler Hoechlin’s Clark a different set of challenges: Parenting, a dual relationship with his father-in-law (hell, a father-in-law to begin with) and saving the family farm. Plus the usual bit about saving the world.

That’s a significant departure from the norm for fans who aren’t plugged into DC’s television universe. But I love it because it ensures this version of Clark Kent will remain a key character throughout the series. The premiere gives us a heavy dose of Clark having to choose between his role as a parent to his twin boys and his responsibility to be the world’s Superman. More importantly, we see him work through those choices as Clark. Love it.

When he chooses his family—which the premiere hints hasn’t happened often—he’ll disappoint the world. When he chooses his family he may literally be leaving people to die. That’s an impossible choice and gives the show plenty of ways to use it for exploring its characters.

The premiere laid the groundwork for three other storylines to expect in season one:
Jon and Jordan’s experience. The show deftly lays out Lois and Clark’s twin sons having completely different personalities. Jon is a budding jock about to quarterback his high school football team as a freshman; Jordan struggles with social anxiety. And then the boys find out their dad is Superman. At first I thought they butchered the reveal scene because Clark handled it very poorly, but then I thought about it from the opposite angle: What if Superman had to reveal to the boys that he was their father? He would no doubt handle it well and they’d be awed. But Clark was not prepared to tell his kids the secret and ended up doing it with no consideration for how they might react. But it’s not like he didn’t try. We saw multiple scenes with him convincing Lois they should never tell them in case one developed powers and the other one didn’t. That was the only way Clark could see it unfold, which blinded him to everything else. The kids started to come around later in the episode but it’s a great example of how the series will give us Clark-centric arcs. A+
Superman’s enemy. We don’t get much in this episode, and I’m okay with that. They lay the groundwork for a character who hates him the way great enemies do. The premiere seemed to heavy up in other places so I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a very enemy-centric episode coming up soon.
What happens in Kansas. I haven’t talked much about Lois so far because she is mostly along for the ride in episode one. That’s kind of disappointing, but they crammed so much introduction into 64 minutes that something had to give. We do however have an emerging storyline with a stereotypical greedy capitalist buying out The Daily Planet and the Smallville bank, which will give Lois something to dig her teeth into. Like the main enemy, I expect we’ll soon see an episode with Lois taking a more active role.

This is all such a wonderful change from the dark and dour tone set by the recent Superman movies (Man of Steel, Batman vs Superman). But wait, doesn’t that mean S&L will run into the same “dark Superman” problem? No, because this show isn’t sidelining Clark Kent and has better surrounding characters. Every character in S&L is immediately more relatable than anyone in those silver screen mistakes except Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent but he’s Kevin Coster and so dreamy even as he gets older. How does he do that?

Maybe it’s unfair to compare the way Superman is adapted across mediums. I’m going to though. Big screen or small, deep characters driving engaging stories is the way to people’s hearts. That’s exactly what we have with Superman and Lois.

Lost: 10 years after the journey

10 years ago tonight Jack Shephard laid down in the bamboo and closed his eyes. 10 years since I sat stunned in my TV chair thinking that’s it? Really??? It was about their journey??? I was not happy.

Little did I know on Sunday, May 23, 2010, the events that would affect the course of my journey were already in motion.

The next morning my bus broke down, which had never happened in the six prior years of my #buslife. Then our replacement bus broke down. 2-for-2. Did everything fall apart when Desmond pulled the plug??? When the third bus finally picked us up I half expected to see Hugo Reyes behind the wheel of my trusted route 53. Wouldn’t that have been a hoot.

I finally got to work at my job leading comms for the Republican caucus in the Minnesota House of Representatives. The legislative session ended the week prior with a budget stalemate and a brewing electoral battle over Obamacare. We intended that to shape the coming campaign season, and boy did it ever.

We rode a wave to historic electoral success in the Legislature but fell just short of claiming the governor’s race. Had we done so, the next two years would have been an incredible high. Instead they were probably the most challenging, frustrating years of my career. Halfway through the next election—2012—I knew I was ready to walk away.

Maybe I would have stayed if things went our way that year. But as Miles Straume said, “Whatever happened, happened.” We got our asses kicked. My time was up. A new chapter of my journey was about to begin, 899 days after the Lost finale.

Other than not politics I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my career then. I never wanted to be a political lifer and with nothing but political experience on my resume at age 32 I knew the longer I stayed in the harder it would be to break out. I can only wonder how different my life would be today if I’d taken any of the opportunities I had over the next few months to stay in that world.

To be honest with you, I was not very good at being unemployed. Public relations and communications was the logical next step, so I spent months doing the lazy thing and applying for online listings at companies or industries I thought would be fun. Sports, aviation, business. PR agencies didn’t really strike my interest, but most of the locals had something I applied for at some point. Online listings funnel your resume into a soulless void of online tracking systems. I’m not sure anyone has ever gotten a job that way. The real way to find a job is to network. I am terrible at networking. In fact, I basically don’t do it. People. Ugh.

Except at some point in the mid-2000s I fell in love with online communities. There I could network my ass off from the place I was most comfortable: Behind the keyboard. Everyone else was behind the keyboard, too, so I didn’t have to feign interest in small talk. Or talk at all. I was here for it when social media emerged, and I joined Twitter on September 25, 2007, some 972 days before the Lost finale.

That one little act, so insignificant at the time, altered my journey perhaps more than any other.

Twitter and I fit hand and glove. You couldn’t write more than two sentences in a tweet and most of my thoughts aren’t more than two sentences long anyway. Social media’s rise coincided with my rising position within the caucus. By the time Lost ended I was not only the caucus media director, my tweeting was getting me interviewed on TV and invited to speak on panels. My stupid little profile icon even got me recognized when one lawmaker ran up to me in the Retiring Room to ask, “Are you Kwatt from Twitter?”

Sure am. Do you remember the campaign brochure that popped up in your district, the one designed to look exactly like your local newspaper but was full of reasons to vote against you? That was me, too. Turns out I sort of invented fake news. Sorry. But I digress…

By the fall of 2013 I wasn’t sure I’d ever work again. Then one afternoon an email popped up from a Twitter friend who was writing a story profiling prominent local Twitter users. She wanted to include me. Sure! That’d be pretty cool. So she sent me her list of questions.

I was doing some light freelance work at the time and found myself in the southeast corner of Minnesota one Tuesday. With a few hours to kill between meetings I set up in a local coffee shop and started on my responses for the article. When it came to “What do you do for work?” I paused.

Should I put that I don’t have a job? Naw, that would be cheeky. Wait. You idiot. This is going to get published. Treat it like an advertisement—for yourself. Yeah! So that’s exactly what I did. “Kevin Watterson, age 32, currently looking for a PR job. Previously did PR and communications in the state Legislature.”

Months passed and I forgot about the article. It finally appeared on January 1, 2014. A few weeks later, Kathy Jalivay came across it. Kathy was the head of PR at a marketing agency in St. Paul and just so happened to be looking for someone looking for a PR job. On February 12, 2014, I joined her at Aimclear. I was unknowingly familiar with the office: I stood outside of it every night for the last six years waiting for the route 53 bus to take me home. It was 1,362 days after the Lost finale.

My journey through Aimclear was fantastic. I met awesome people and learned more than I could have ever hoped. At one point I was the Twitter voice of Firestone auto care, handing out coupons for a discount oil change to people who posted the best #roadtrip pics and making the best tire puns. Clients came, clients went. Some were more fun than others. Such is agency life.

My journey rolled on outside of work for those five years, too. I became an uncle. I got some things right, I messed up others. I traveled. Even took my first winter vacation, having been tied to the Legislature from January through May for all those years.

Then in January 2018, Uber called. They needed someone to cover social media while one of their OGs was on sabbatical. They already had one Aimclearian and wanted another. I landed in San Francisco and walked in the door at Uber for the first time on February 13, 2018. It was 2,824 days after the Lost finale.

They must have liked what they saw because by June 1 I was living in San Francisco full-time (2,932 days) and on March 4, 2019, I badged in as an official Uber employee (3,208). My longtime goal of moving to California was complete.

That’s where I remain. Things are good. Once I got settled I decided to live a life that would make my 14-year-old self jealous. So I set a personal record by attending 41 baseball games last year, 29 of which were just down the street at Oracle Park. It’s the Giants, but the Dodgers visit nine times a year and LA is a short flight away. I lounge by the pool for hours reading books. I watch TV whenever I want. I go see the ocean at least once a month, although that’s been hampered by this f*cking virus. Sometimes I walk outside and stare across the bay just to see mountains. I’m from Iowa, so yeah the Oakland hills count as mountains. I spoil my nieces (kids love scratch off lottery tickets, btw). I even own three pairs of Air Jordans just to display on my shelves. Take that, 14-year-old Kevin.

I can’t predict where my journey will go from here anymore than I could have predicted it would lead me here. Maybe in another 10 years I’ll be somewhere else, making 39-year-old Kevin insanely jealous.

It has been 3,654 days since the Lost finale. I get it now.

Review: For All Mankind Not For Anyone

First we were like why is Apple making a Walkman then we were like why is Apple making a phone then we were like why is Apple making a watch now we’re like why is Apple making a television show. After watching the first two episodes of “For All Mankind” I’m still not sure about that last one. 

Several things can make a television show boring. Uninteresting characters, flat storylines, weak dialogue. No single one of those makes Mankind boring, but they all play some part. Instead the show comes up short because it’s alt-history with no stakes. 

For All Mankind takes place in a universe where the Soviets put the first man on the moon. That’s…it. First man, surface of moon. Congrats. The story begins shortly before and takes place mostly after this…after America lost the race to the moon. By like a month. Oh yeah, we got there. Buzz and Neil put Eagle down on the Sea of Tranquility and all that but the soundbite. 

Who thought that was alt enough to make alt-history out of??? For All Mankind gives us no “So what?” to make us care why history didn’t unfold the way we know it did. The only consequence so far to losing the space race has been the ouster of the head of the space program. Whoopee. Am I supposed to be enthralled by Richard Nixon’s quest for a fall guy? 

I’m not. Not even a little bit.

Compare this to The Man in the High Castle. That show has stakes: The end of our country. Japan and Nazi Germany control what used to be the United States of America. That’s alt-history. What happened matters intensely to the characters and in fact the entire world around them. What happened in For All Mankind barely even matters to the people it happened to because the Apollo space program continues undeterred. Wait, sorry, one mopey astronaut had to do desk duty for a while before they let him fly on Apollo 15. My deepest apologies.

No, this show is a dud. 

How this could have been compelling? Here are some ways For All Mankind could have higher stakes:

  • Losing the race to the moon causes scientific investment to flee the U.S. and flow into Soviet Russia, which props up communism in ways no one thought possible. The motherland soars on the international stage. 
  • Developing countries follow the Soviet Union’s lead, emulating the communist dream that took man to the heavens.
  • America’s standing in the world wanes and its morale at home tanks as its people no longer believe it can achieve great things. 
  • Our collective belief in capitalism suffers, here and around the world. 

Slowly but surely all those things could begin to shape a way for viewers to envision a very different modern world. Then we would have something to care about. When I watch High Castle I feel something. When I watch For All Mankind, I don’t. 

Was this all just about the Starks? Game of Thrones finale, part 2

It is canon here at The Wandering Lostie that a series finale will always show you the true story its writers intended to tell. The End revealed Lost was about the journey its characters took together, not numbers or mysteries or any of that. Fringe gave us touching closure to the relationship between Walter and Peter that we didn’t always realize carried the series. The Americans stripped away the Cold War to bare the painful difficulty its two central characters are forever destined to face together.

I am struggling to come to grips with the Game of Thrones finale through that lens. “The Iron Throne” was an unequivocal win for the Stark family. Bran rules the six kingdoms and Sansa the seventh—their ancestral home. Arya is sailing her own course and Jon is with the people he feels most comfortable with in the place he feels most comfortable. All their enemies are vanquished.

But can anyone really believe this show was always supposed to be about the Starks? Am I to believe that the Lannisters, the Targaryens and the White Walkers all entered this saga to support a journey of change for this one family?

I suppose looking at it this way strips out too much of the nuance that necessarily makes up eight seasons of television. They weren’t “just the Lannisters” because Jamie and Cersei died in the penultimate episode anymore than Dany was a bit player because she died one-third of the way through the finale. But if Game of Thrones was truly about them, wouldn’t they have figured more prominently in the ultimate ending?

My view of the series heading into the final season was we had tow primary storylines: The battle for the Iron Throne and the threat from the White Walkers. They traveled mostly on their own until starting to bend in the same direction during season seven. Season eight, I reasoned, must be when they finally and epically collide.

Wronnnnnnnnnng. They dispensed with the Night King halfway through the season, and I was okay with that. Let’s go ahead and have Dany and Cersei throw down for the throne with Jon there to step in if things go really wrong. The way that unfolded felt anti-climactic. Dany and Cersei never got closer than staring at each other at the edge of Kings Landing…two episodes before the finale. When the real fight came, Cersei died without any of her trademark scheming or maneuvering to even try countering Dany’s attack. The full impact of her death even felt muted because we were so thrown by Dany burning an innocent city alive.

That brought us to the finale where Dany’s fate was addressed decisively fast. Jon’s fatal stab pivoted the finale’s big reveal from “Would it be Dany or Jon?” to “Which Stark will rule Westeros?”

Which is where it lost me. Game of Thrones was never about which Stark sits on the Iron Throne because it was never a foregone conclusion that it would even be a Stark. For that to be how the series ended, and to have that ending decided entirely based on a speech from Tyrion, doesn’t mesh with how the story was told for the prior seven seasons.