Tuesday, October 31, 2017

A Look at "Channel Zero: Candle Cove", pt5

Last Entry…
            That is to say this is the last one talking about “Candle Cove”.  I have talked about Creepypasta, the show as an idea, the first three episodes, the last three episodes, and even my praise and criticism of that program, today I will talk about one last thing on this subject.
            I will provide an answer to the question, “Well, if you’re so smart, what would you do?”

What I Would Have Done
            I say all this as a guy who generally does not like giving negative reviews, as I find products like "Candle Cove" to be so disappointing for their failed potential.
            Just from that starting point of strangers doing casual research on a TV show from them as a kid you could go in a hundred directions, and “Channel Zero” chose one of them, and then put in WAY TOO MUCH EXTRA STUFF.
            Let me just throw out some basic ideas, adhering as close as I can to the initial premise of the Creepypasta that started it, and then weaving it out from there to incorporate other Creepypastas, and even other aspects of internet’s toxic and insane “culture”.
 
Yeah, I am using this image again, because it looks great...
And this is foreshadowing.
Let’s Begin
            Have someone, let’s call him Jason watching a show with their kid and begins to reminisce about shows he watched as a child, mention several real and fictional shows without missing a beat (this will actually be foreshadowing).
            Jason starts to remember another show he saw as a child.  Having it right on the tip of their mind he decides to research it by creating an account on a TV show forum and posting what he recalls.  This is where you start introducing the other characters, who read the question and start recalling their time watching as kids.
            After they start posting about it the show starts to haunt them.  They look thru old school binders for crayon drawings to jog their memories.  Then they start to have haunting things happening, walking into their house and the TV is on but showing blackness and the sound of a static hiss.  They start having dreams about being kids and the puppets talk to them like they are a character in the show.  One of them has a relative that is suffering from dementia who starts to sing songs from the show.  One of them gets lost while going home and when they find their place someone else is living there.  These events start to pile.
            The group starts looking into it all more and more.  Finding old forums and youtube videos that mention TV shows like “Candle Cove” and others talking about songs from the show, but nothing solid.  (Speaking as someone who has killed hours looking up old cartoon theme songs on youtube, this sort of behavior can be really engrossing).
            They start chasing down old VHS recordings of the show to no avail.  They look for toys or puppets on Ebay.  Communicating with each other more and more, becoming friends as each of them become more and more consumed with the idea of finding this old show.

The Middle
            While their research is going on subtler things have to start showing up to indicate the haunting(?) of them by the show.  People with out of date cloths, old cars, old turn dial phones, and other indicators of being out of time start to show up.  TV’s stop looking like the big black flat rectangles, and more and more tube TV’s start showing up.  Fewer mp3 players, more CD’s and tape decks.  Everything starts to look cruddier.

I feel less at home around this junk.
            After a time one of the members of the online group stops posting on anything and the others lose contact with them.  The group makes a decision to end the long-distance nature of their friendship and, “go on an adventure”.  They all decide to meet in person and find their missing member.  Ideally, the missing member would be Jason, the person who the audience started the show with.  Emphasizing how unmoored the narrative’s reality has become.
            As the number of strange instances in their lives grows, with waking dreams, erratic moods, seeing images of static on TV’s and computer monitors (something modern monitors don’t do), the group start to doubt their own perceptions and begin to question why they are dropping everything to leave and go look for someone they have never met.  As one of the secondary characters leaves their apartment with a bag, they turn to go back home and drop the whole thing, but Janet’s place is now gone entirely, replaced with an office building.  No turning back now.
            It all seems absurd, crossing the country to help someone they only know online because they became friends recalling a TV show no one else in the world seems to remember.  When they all arrive in Jason’s town things seem askew.  The town has old architecture and a small-town feel, but Janet and the other heroes all feel a sense of familiarity to it.
            They investigate and find a woman in a local old folks’ home that is Jason’s mom, when they go to talk to her she claims she has no son.  They keep telling her that Jason is her child and is missing, but she denies it.  They blame dementia, but they suspect something else is at work.
            Janet calls their mom and asks about the show being told that she would watch a static screen as a child and then talk about a show that she made up.  Instead of an imaginary friend, she had an imaginary show.  Another member, Billy goes to call their parent but their mom doesn’t know who they are and tells them not to call back, they try their other parent to the same result, they try to call a sibling and can’t find them (this sibling should be established as younger and close to the character, not recalling the show because they had just been a baby).
            The characters have now been isolated from a world that the increasingly do not recognize.

Last Third
            The characters start to come to a realization that since they came to Jason’s town they haven’t gotten a call, text, or any internet communication from anyone but other members of the group.  When Janet tries to show the group that she contacted her mom by calling her back, Janet’s phone just tells her that the number doesn’t connect to anything.
            As they start to pool their knowledge of the show, that the puppets went on an adventure in a cave and came into contact with something called “Skin Taker” they notice that there are no lights outside the room they are in.  The room hangs in darkness, and the TV comes on and starts playing the show with their missing member appearing as a puppeteer and he begins to tell them what is wrong.
            Here is my ultimate twist.  I ultimately want the story to be about the Mandela Effect.  The characters are unstuck from their universe.  They would have just lived in the new universe, but by peeling at the broken memory of their childhood they opened a temporal scab.  They are now drifting, lost in time and space.  The TV clicks off and the room goes dark.
            A puppet show starts playing to the audience at home, with Janet as a puppeteer asking, “Where am I?”



Damn It!
            I swear to god, I wrote out that “What I would do”, hit save, and turned in my chair to see my brother stepping silently into my room.  I yelled, “Jesus Fucking Christ”.  I have not been startled that badly in years.  I stupidly primed myself to be creeped out and then BAM!  Completely innocuous thing hits at just the right time.
 
Asshole!


Anyway…
            The theme to my version is: Don’t dwell on inane shit from your childhood, it causes you to divorce from reality.  I draw on elements that only exist in the original story and extrapolate from them.  The INTERNET and communication thru it is a core plot element.  The idea of researching the show causing the problem is a core element.
            Sure, I cut in the Mandela Effect something that was not explicitly referenced in the original story.  BUT, one of the most cited instances of the Mandela Effect is childhood TV shows, things that no one else remembers.  This addition is a natural extension of the material into another internet cultural element.
            Maybe I should not be writing fan fiction about Creepypasta, but then again, “Channel Zero” does.  And with far less respect for their source material.



            I will also freely admit to drawing inspiration from the novel “Ubik”, by Phillip K Dick.  In the novel, a group of psychics are unstuck from time after surviving a bombing.  The world around them starts to devolve back thru time and some of them wither to mummies.  The idea of branching timelines is a big part of the narrative, that and making fun of consumer culture and AI, but I will leave that for another fan fiction.

In Conclusion
            I was frustrated by this show.  But having written this blathering down and distributing it to the world I feel a little better.  No longer carrying around ideas that I haven’t bothered to write down.  Hopefully, I made some sense and was mildly entertaining.
            Happy Halloween.

______________________________

            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Monday, October 30, 2017

A Look at "Channel Zero: Candle Cove", pt4

Continuing from the Other Day…
            I took a couple more days before writing this because I had more pressing things to attend to and was tired from having a life not on the internet.  Anyway, I started off by talking about Creepypasta as a thing on the internet, then wrote about “Channel Zero: Candle Cove”, then I did a rundown of the first 3 episodes of “Channel Zero: Candle Cove”, and then I did the last 3 episodes of “Channel Zero: Candle Cove”.  (I am actually getting real tired of typing out “Channel Zero: Candle Cove”).
            Today I am going to do a short little rundown of what I liked and did not like overall for the series.  The show is not nothing, which is why it is frustrating.

What I Like
            The first 5 minutes of the show are excellent.  They are so well produced that they would work as a horror short with nothing else following.  I am shocked that it has not been released onto the internet as an advertisement for the show.
            If nothing else, I recommend you watch the opening of the first episode and then turn it off, the rest of the show does not measure up.  As a starting point, it is a lot of spooky things hinting at a much larger spooky thing in the background.  It is great on its own and only pulled down by association with the rest of the show’s under developed content.
            Beyond that, the whole series is well produced.  The acting is good.  The costumes are good.  The camera work, subtle background stuff, sound, and lighting all work.  It is a well-made show.

Okay.  Maybe this costume is not that great.  But most of them are.

What I Dislike
            You can tell these guys wanted to create something akin to David Lynch’s diner scene from “Mulholland Drive” (Seriously, click the link and watch that, it is great). The problem is, everyone who tries to be David Lynch just ends up sucking at being David Lynch.  When emulating that style, often times creatives fall into a trap, making weirdness that is creepy devolves into weirdness that is just obtuse, and then ultimately the weirdness causes a complete break from what the audience can metabolize.  The weird stops being alienating and scary, instead it becomes boring.
            “Channel Zero: Candle Cove” has a lot of, "Why is this happening" that is never explained.  In some instances, such as the aforementioned David Lynch, or even movies like “Buckaroo Banzai” not explaining things and allowing the audience to take it all in and make of it what they will, that sort of thing can be a strength.  Such confidence in the material means that they are in no way talking down to the audience… Actually, no.  That isn’t true.
            When you explain nothing, allowing the audience to interpret everything, you are talking down to the audience in a different way.  Think of how directionless the show “Lost” was.  They introduced new and strange elements all the time and rarely if ever explained any of them.  They were talking down to the audience via pretentious obfuscation.  Throwing out strangeness that they had no plan or guiding ethos for, and then when the audience tried to see something in this narrative inkblot the show runners giggled and said something akin to, “do you think so?”

More like, "Lost all narrative cohesion".
I am talking shit, I thought too much of this show's acting sucked for me to bother watching more than a couple episodes.
            Yeah, well, I can tell when I am being pissed on in spite of them telling me to, “be careful of the rain”.  I know when things are strange for strange sake and when there is some kind of guiding machinations.  “Channel Zero: Candle Cove” is strange in a bad way, not in an "open to interpretation way".  It is shameless in how the tooth monster makes no sense.  It is confusing in how many characters it tosses out.  It is bloated with how much unnecessary horse shit that clutters the narrative.
            All of that though, that is the overarching issue.  There are finer things to get upset about.  Numerous little things in the narrative that are simply dwarfed by the bigger problem of not making sense.  For instance, there are a few idiot balls being juggled between several characters.  There are random romantic subplots that exist only to manufacture pathos when murder happens.  The dead ends and slow bits that could easily have been jazzed up with quicker dialogue or even some levity.  It is flawed.

Maybe My Criticism is too Strong
            You might be saying that what I am asking for can’t be done.  Adding levity would distract from the sense of dread.  The quick romantic build-up is necessary because they don’t have time for real build up.  Characters doing dumb things in a horror show is just how it is done.  You might be saying that genre conventions excuse these failings.
            Maybe you are taking an entirely different debate tactic and saying, “it was adapted from an internet ghost story, it doesn’t have to be high art.”
            To that last one I reply: get your head out of your ass.
            You do not have to forgive a show’s failings just because those failings happen elsewhere.  Telling the creators to trim the fat, punch up the dialogue, and work too make the romantic elements more human (OR JUST CUT THEM) is meaningful and specific criticism.  It makes sense and I can point to instances in which it works.
            Anything can serve as the inspiration for a great story.  As a starting point, as a theme, or even just for a scene.  “The Terminator” happened because of a literal fever dream James Cameron had about a metal skeleton wreathed in flames.  “The Haunted Mask” came about because RL Stine’s kid couldn’t get a mask off their face.  If you are making a show based on something, whether it is juxtapositions between war and sitcoms, which inspired the jarring tone shifts in “The Last House on the Left” or war and game shows which inspired “The Hunger Games”, do a good job.
            This year saw the release of “It”.  Last year “Stranger Things”.  With all the difficulties of working with young actors and drawing on much larger and more complex mythologies (Stephen King and the 80’s, respectively) these presentations of their material were able to make everything “Channel Zero: Candle Cove” wished it was.


            You are allowed to demand more from the material you watch.  Even if that material is well made, you can still ask that the flaws you see in it be corrected in future works.
            The Creepypasta that inspired “Channel Zero: Candle Cove” was 500 words. This show grafts on tooth monsters (tone breaking and out of place), a psychic powered child (in tone but adds to the clutter), and some of the most holy-shit-stupid characters I have seen in recent memory (which I guess is always in tone for horror as a genre).
            You know what this show doesn’t have?  The internet.  The thing that birthed it is not a plot element.  That strikes me as an omission that in many ways betrays the conceit of the whole venture.  But maybe that is just me.

To be Continued
            Next time, for the final entry in this look at the first season of “Channel Zero,” I will focus on “What I would have done” with the initial premise of “Candle Cove” the Creepypasta.

Part 5...

______________________________

            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

A Look at "Channel Zero: Candle Cove", pt3

The Other Day
            I have been talking about Creepypasta and the SyFy show inspired by those internet horror stories, “Channel Zero”.  More specifically I am talking about “Candle Cove” which was the first season of the show.  You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here.

More Robust Show Rundowns
            In part 2 I gave a heaping helping of episode synopsis for the “Candle Cove” TV show and a running commentary.  (My running commentary is in parentheses, and is almost entirely bitching, both about the show and the wiki rundown which leaves out shit beginning, middle, and end.)  I imagine these are a what a youtube reviewer’s initial scripts look like, but here I am, in the dark age of text.  Whatever.
            I decided to go back to Wikipedia and grab the short episode descriptions for this purpose and after going thru episodes 1, 2, and 3 I found the whole blog getting far too long.  This is the continuation of that.  Episodes 4, 5, and 6 presented with my complaining (and the rare compliment) running alongside of it.  Let’s get back to it.



Episode 4
            Mike’s daughter, Lily reveals herself to be a manifestation of Mike’s dead twin brother, Eddie.  Lily promises to send Mike "where he belongs".  (Why?  Why is the little girl Eddie?  Is she possessed?  How did she get to the town?  Psychic teleport?  This is stupid.)
            Fulfilling Eddie's wish, Mike breaks into the morgue with the help of Jessica and burns Eddie's skeletal remains.  (Why the wishes of a murderous psychic dickhead are being fulfilled, I have no idea, we all do stupid things in the name of family.)
            Jessica and Mike are shown to have been childhood sweethearts when they were young.  (No one cares.  This detail is a lazy short cut to build emotional report, a sturdy build in much the way a pump tent is a sturdy house.  Also, if you have ever watched any horror story ever then this emotional depth being revealed telegraphs Jessica’s death from a mile away.  Lame.)
            Acting Sheriff Amy, one of the party guests present when Mike initially brought up the topic of “Candle Cove” (that is to say the puppet show) investigates the strange behavior of some kids and after a confusing encounter with Mrs. Booth at school.  Amy finds the children playing pirate in the gymnasium. Acting on a hunch, Amy searches Mrs. Booth's home and finds Candle Cove props in the woman’s basement, and eventually discovers the body of Daphne.  (I clearly remember thinking, “bang up police work, all this evidence is inadmissible”.)
            Meanwhile, Jessica returns home to discover several children masked in Candle Cove costumes.  After she draws her husband’s gun to defend herself, they begin stabbing her.  Rather than fight back with the gun, Jessica makes a pathetic attempt to run away, falls into a kiddy pool, and is stabbed to death.  (I was… let’s say “frustrated” by this death, as I find a cadre of knife wielding attackers worthy of being shot regardless of their status as children; maybe that is just me.  Beyond that, I found it kind of silly.)



            Mike’s daughter Lily regains consciousness as herself rather than as a manifestation of Eddie.  (Still stupid, and I would further point out that the involvement of the daughter mostly serves as a digression into wasting more time.  Mike’s family, aside from his Mom and brother, serve no function in the story and could have been cut for brevity.)
            (I don’t know where it happens but Sheriff Amy has a love interest, goes home with that love interest, and presumably has sex with that target of her affections, who is a fellow cop.  This subplot is not mentioned in the recap.  I understand why it was left out, as it adds nothing.  I mention it only because it takes up space in my mind, and now knowledge of its existence will take up space in yours.)


Episode 5
            Mike discovers an extra tooth breaking through his gum, a trait that his twin Eddie had as a child, but which Mike had never previously suffered.  (Shrug.)
            Sheriff Amy tells Mike about Jessica's murder and she agrees to let Jessica’s husband, Gary out of custody to help him search Mrs. Booth's property.  Gary discovers some teeth left on a fence post outside and Mike realizes that the Candle Cove props found in the basement are fake.  (Mike’s ability to judge the authenticity of puppet show props is not explained.  Maybe he had a creepy puppet phase at some point in his life.)
            Mike receives a phone call from Booth instructing him to meet her alone at an abandoned diner.  Once there, Mike witnesses Booth in the skeleton costume, the same one he had seen and followed in previous episodes.  Mrs. Booth has been controlling children into helping her commit murders.  (For some reason, there is a monster made out of teeth that Ms. Booth has been feeding teeth she takes from the children, it doesn’t come up in this scene, but I feel the need to underline the strange stupidity of it.  The symbolism of the teeth is obtuse to the point where I have no idea what it means and no idea why they went with it beyond, “It’s spooky”.)
            Later, Booth goes to Marla's house and tells Mike and Marla how Eddie used his psychic powers to cure/control a condition Booth suffered from which caused her seizures.  It was Eddie who created Candle Cove, not her.  (Presumably Eddie did it thru mental projection, though the “Why a pirate puppet show?” part is NEVER explained.  And I don’t know about you, but I feel that warrants an explanation.)

Just going to use this picture from Yesterday again.
            Booth killed her own son as a sacrifice for Eddie to increase his power and welcomes Eddie's return through Mike.  That night at a motel, the tooth creature lures Lily away.
            As Mike attempts to extract his extra tooth, Candle Cove begins playing on the television, featuring a frightened Lily.
            (I should also note that random instances of dreams and giant puppets show up to be creepy and then leave without accomplishing anything.  They foreshadow nothing, I guess they just had a bunch of ideas and didn’t know what to do with it all, so they just kept throwing random shit out there.)


Episode 6
            Amy and Gary search for the children suspects and Gary is able to reclaim his own children from Candle Cove's control.
            Mike's wife, Erica, demands that he tell her where their daughter Lily is.  But, Mike is convinced that he's the only one who can save Lily.  Mike takes Erica to the site of the murders and loses consciousness, entering Eddie's parallel world filled with strange rooms and monsters.  (Let me be clear, the show was off the rails back in episode 4, at this point the train of logic is flying thru the air without cause, reason, or trajectory.  PARRALEL DIMENSION?  What even the hell are they talking about?  This was never explored previously and they totally could have.  This does not work.)
            When Mike finally comes face to face with his brother, Eddie agrees to let Lily leave the dimension (Is this her soul?  Body?  Things are a little unclear.), but Lily can only go if Mike agrees to stay forever.  Lily returns to reality by crawling through a TV and is greeted by her mother.
            Marla goes to the woods where she is attacked by Mrs. Booth.  Marla is rescued at the last minute by Amy, who shoots Booth and Marla finishes off the old school teacher by stabbing her in the skull a hook.  (Nothing wrong with this, a fit mother killing an unfit mother with the help of a law enforcement official.  I would say “symbolism” but there really isn’t any.  It is just what should happen in a situation like this.)

Honestly, as a character, Amy is the most level headed and direct.
The actress does a good job and I enjoyed her side of the story.
I kind of wish she was given more to do.
            Meanwhile in the parallel dimension, created by the psychic ghost of a murdered 10-year-old twin who likes pirate themed puppets and has extra teeth… (See how this stuff is piling on?)  Mike convinces Eddie to stay for one more instance of the card game War that they played as kids but could never finish.  That might have something to do with the game of War being garbage).  This delay tactic distracts Eddie’s exit from the Parallel Dimension.  Eddie plans to leave Mike trapped there while taking over Mike’s body and going out into the world.  (What he plans to do after that is a big question mark.  I am guessing that a 10-year old in an adult body would just go get some McDonald’s first and then play it all by ear.)
            Mike’s plan is a success though, as this delay is long enough for Marla to return to the woods, find Mike’s body, and suffocate her son’s unconscious form before Eddie can possess it.
            Unable to break free of his world, Eddie is forced to remain with Mike in the parallel dimension along with Skin Taker, a monster Eddie created to act as jailer to Mike (I think). (The tooth monster remains unexplained, and could very well have been unrelated to the incident, perhaps just a mutant wandering onto the edge of town from a nearby nuclear accident… Strangely, in the Parallel Dimension, there is a different monster there, Skin Taker, which they address directly while they DO NOT MENTION the tooth creature.  Makes no sense.)

This is also glimpsed several times and it is never explained.
A lot of spooky for the sake of spooky.

Okay, that is Enough Now
            Alright, I have now given a rundown of each episode in the series and am set to blather out some meek complaints for the next entry in this series.  I hope this is proving to be entertaining to read, because it is actually pretty tiring to write this much about a TV show I didn’t really care for.

Part 4...

______________________________
            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

A Look at "Channel Zero: Candle Cove", pt2

The Other Day
            I have been talking about Creepypasta and the SyFy show inspired by those internet horror stories, “Channel Zero”.  More specifically I am talking about “Candle Cove” which was the first season of the show.  You can read part 1 here.

A More Robust Show Rundown
            In part 1 I gave the most abbreviated two sentence rundown of the show’s overall plot that I could, straight from Wikipedia.  The thing is, to understand the issues the show has you have to know what happens and why (or a lack of “why”).
            I decided to go back to Wikipedia and grab the short episode descriptions… Well, mostly, I edited them significantly because “Brevity” is an entry no TV show cataloging Wikipedia editor ever bothered to read.  Then I decided to shoot brevity in the face myself because I wanted this blog to be more readable then just a dry rundown of the facts like I am writing a police report, fingers banging out the circumstances that led up to the crime of my time being wasted.  (My running commentary is in parentheses, and is almost entirely bitching, both about the show and the wiki rundown which leaves out shit beginning, middle, and end.)
            This is the last chance to turn back before SPOILERS for the entire 6-episode season are spilled out all over the place.  A complete accounting of the events of the show is taken.  If you plan to watch the show you should stop here (it is not an irredeemable show, I kind of complain more about things than most people do, I attribute this to my ability to pay attention and think)… I mean, stop for now, please do come back to read this, I have far too few readers as is… Though in that case you can skip the plot synopsis for each episode if you just watched them…
            You know, do whatever you want.  We’re all adults here.

Episode 1
            The show begins with the single best scene in the entire series.  Child psychologist, Mike Painter is giving a televised interview.  As the interview progresses numerous strange otherworldly things begin to creep into view before revealing that the interview has all been a dream.  (Everyone in the audience allows their butt muscles to relax at this revelation and the show continues, hopes and expectations for the remaining episodes having been set to unreasonably high levels).
            Mike returns to his home town in Ohio nearly thirty years after an unknown serial killer murdered five local children.  Among the victims was Mike’s twin brother, Eddie, whose body was never found.  Mike’s mother, Marla, still lives in the area.
            (I am going to note this now because I feel it is an important element to the character of Mike that is hinted at thru all the episodes and at one point shown graphically in a flashback.  Mike has attempted suicide in the past.  I don’t recall which episode the flashback occurred, kind of a funny thing about flashbacks is that they can kind of go anywhere in the narrative and still make sense.  Oddly, what I consider to be a potent scene and strong characterization is NOT MENTIONED in the entire recap of the series on Wikipedia.)
            Mike reconnects with friends Jessica and Gary who is the town's sheriff.  Jessica and Gary are married and have children.  Mike meets the couple’s daughter, Katie.
            Over dinner with some other friends, Mike mentions Candle Cove, a children's TV show involving puppet pirates.  Each of the guests remembers watching the show around the time of the murders, until it mysteriously went off the air.  All of them remember Candle Cove as being disturbing.  Katie tells Mike that she's seen the Candle Cove show recently.  (Seeing the clips, I have no idea how this shoddily made product could hold the eyes of children without evil forces being at work.  Considering the show was the whole point of the original Creepypasta it being so lame is an odd choice.  I don’t know why they cut corners here.)


            The next day Katie goes missing and Mike is under suspicion.  Through discussion with Katie's brother, Dane, Mike realizes where he can find Katie.  While searching, Mike follows a figure dressed as a skeleton who resembles one of the characters from Candle Cove.
            Mike discovers Katie alive in the woods where the original murders took place.  He carries Katie back to her family, unaware she has left two of her teeth behind to be claimed by an eerie creature, whose skin is entirely made up of teeth.  (No, this thing is never explained.  I don’t think anyone ever says, “Tooth monster” out loud.  It is entirely uncommented on.  I have no idea why.)
            Marla tells Mike that when he and his brother were watching Candle Cove as children, they were actually watching static on the television.  (HEY!  It is the only thing from the source material.)

Episode 2
            Gary and Jessica are awoken by their son, Dane’s screams after Katie stabs the boy with a hook.  Afraid for the safety of one child and the mental health of the other, Gary allows Mike, in his capacity as a psychologist to talk to Katie at the hospital alone in order to discover what happened.
            Gary remains suspicious of Mike.  (I can kind of see why Gary is suspicious, Mike shows up and weird things start happening.  That raises eyebrows.  But maybe Gary should look for evidence rather than just being a dick about the whole thing.)
            Meanwhile, Marla visits a television station to ask about Candle Cove. The technician remembers the program and shows Marla a fan-made recreation but tells her no tapes of the original show exist as it was impossible to record.  (This is a red herring.  I don’t even know why it is Marla looking for this stuff.  She never saw the show, she is a neutral 3rd party.  What is the point of this?)
            Mike finds more links to the Candle Cove imagery in Katie's drawing and uses it as a clue to visit an abandoned cement factory with his mother.  At the factory Mike follows a mysterious figure into the facility alone and discovers the decomposed remains of his brother, Eddie in an improvised altar.  (Honestly, this is all pretty cool.  Like I have said, the show is not nothing, it is just that it is less as a whole than the sum of its parts.)


            That night, Mike confesses to Marla that he killed Eddie as a child and buried his body, but that Eddie’s body had been moved before the police dug up the grave site.  Upset, Marla stabs Mike in the arm.  (Like you do?)
            The next day Gary comes to the house and asks Mike to come with him to the police station for questioning.  However, along the way Mike realizes that Gary is taking him somewhere else.  (Honestly, I was expecting a small-town sheriff to be better at discreetly taking a suspect to a remote location for “questions”.  Gary’s too much of a dick for this to be his first police brutality rodeo.)

Episode 3
            Gary takes Mike to an empty house he had wanted to buy and handcuffs Mike to a chair.  Tim and Daphne (other people whose family members had been victims 30 years ago, there are kind of too many characters in this show and not enough time to give them all a setup, build up, and pay off) arrive at the house where they all interrogate Mike about the murders of their family members, believing him responsible.
            Flashbacks reveal that Candle Cove inspired Eddie to kill Tim's bully brother, Gene, using mind-control.  Eddie compelled Gene to walk off the edge of a cliff.  Eddie continued killing other children in a similar way before Mike stopped the murders by stabbing Eddie with a hook.  (If you have recently seen the latest “It” adaptation, Gene comes off as almost a non-threat of a character compared to the bullies in “It”.  Gene is a violent asshole, sure, but not bad enough that forcing him to commit suicide feels in anyway cathartic or natural to the story.  I feel like my position on this requires more explanation.  I am not going to give it because this is already too long.)
            In present day, the others doubt Mike's story and Tim shoots Mike in the shoulder to torture the “truth” out of him.  Marla, Jessica, and deputy Amy arrive at the house as Tim and Daphne run away.  Seeing Mike's condition, Amy takes Gary into custody.

This is the tooth monster.  He shows up randomly and with no substantial impact.  Weird for weird's sake.
            A group of kids end up killing Tim as he walks home.
            Later, Daphne visits Mrs. Booth, her former teacher, who also lost a son in the murders. After explaining what happened with Mike at the house, Booth murders Daphne with an ice hook and returns to host a group of children watching Candle Cove on her television.
            Mike's daughter, Lily, inexplicably arrives alone at Marla's house, even though she lives miles away with her mom.  (I do not know why Mike’s family is brought into this, the story has too many unnecessary moving parts).

To be Continued…
            I wasn’t kidding when I said those Wikipedia rundowns are long.  I touched them up, but heavens to Betsy these things push up the word count.  Really it is necessary to get the full rundown in order to understand all the strange BS that makes up this series.  My next entry in the series will be the rundowns of episodes 4, 5, and 6.  After that I will get into complaints, compliments, and then my own take on the source material.

Part 3...

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Sunday, October 22, 2017

A Look at "Channel Zero: Candle Cove", pt1

Introduction
            Last year the new horror anthology series “Channel Zero” premiered on the Sy-Fy channel with a great deal of promotion.  I was hyped.  My brother is a horror fan, I am a science fiction fan.  We were set to watch.
            The premise of the show was to take inspiration from Creepypasta internet horror stories and to run with the premise each story put forth.  I talked about Creepypasta as a concept yesterday, so check that out if you want a sort of primer.
            Since most Creepypasta stories are a couple thousand words, the idea that 6 hours of material could be made from such a small sampling meant that creative license would have to be taken and I wondered if they would try to weave ideas from several stories together into a larger mythos.  Like the pulp writers of old they could make a large and incredibly silly modern horror mythology based around internet boogeymen.


            The first season was dubbed "Channel Zero: Candle Cove".  To start this, there will be numerous SPOILERS throughout, and while I can say that most of it is worth watching, in hindsight I can only recommend that if you are going to watch this show for its good elements (and there are good elements) you mitigate your expectations because there is a high chaff to wheat ratio, there is a lot of stupid unclear crap mucking it up.  Not that you would know that, this six-episode season has comically high reviews.

Candle Cove: The Source Material
            The starting point of this season was the Creepypasta (a word I am getting tired of writing), of the same name.  “Candle Cove” was written by web comic creator Kris Straub as a horror parody of shows like “Lidsville” (which was his stated inspiration).
            You can read the entire “Candle Cove” story in 5 minutes HERE.  But if you don’t have time for such indulgences I will provide a synopsis.
            The story is presented as a web message board exchange between several people remembering a puppet television show from their youth, the twist is that they were all watching a screen filled with static.
            I am not sure, but I think the puppet episode of Angel might have also drawn inspiration from this little story.



The Show in Brief
            Being a 6-hour miniseries “Channel Zero: Candle Cove” falls into an uncanny valley of sorts.  I could explain it somewhat satisfyingly in 2 sentences or 12 paragraphs, but any amount between those two extremes is going to feel unsatisfying.  Since most of what I like about the show are elements not directly related to the story, but more about the production value, the images, and the tone the two-sentence summary is not going to get across any of the things I enjoyed.

Seriously, this show has super high reviews.
Even the one negative review on Rotten Tomatoes was a "B-".

            This is a feeling show.  Not a thinking show.  Ideally you want both, but either will do I suppose.  To that end I am going to have to give a meatier explanation of it.  But let’s start out with something simple that will prime you for what I find strange and frustrating.
            Here is the 2-sentence synopsis they have on Wikipedia, “A child psychologist returns to his hometown to determine if his brother's disappearance is somehow connected to a series of similar incidents and a bizarre children's television show that aired at the same time.”
            Already the synopsis sounds like something WHOLLY different from the thing that inspired it.  There is no mention of message boards or puppets, more importantly there are elements in that blurb, a brother, child psychology, and similar incidents related to child disappearances that are NOWHERE in the source material.
            I am going to give a fuller explanation of my issues, but right there is the first sign of something going wrong, the short bit of info about the show could not possibly be used to describe the original story.  At all.  Which means there wasn’t just additions to the source material, but that this story is going off in a totally different direction.
            Which I guess could have worked.
            I guess.

Here is the trailer.  Looks good. But not what I would expect.

To be Continued…
            No joke, I planned to make this just one entry.  I thought to just bang out my thoughts over a thin outline and be done with it.  That was optimistic.
            I got to 1700 words without a plot synopsis, compliments, or criticisms.  The part that took up most of the space was the pretentious and totally necessary, the “What would I do section”.  Sensing no way to edit it down to a palatable length I decided to break this up and put out the pieces over the course of this week… Because Halloween?  More because I want more time to edit all this.
            Or… OR!  Better way to frame this: it was a miniseries; thus, it should be reviewed in a miniseries of blogs.
            Yeah.
            That’s the ticket.
            Either way, I hope I am being mildly entertaining and that will encourage you to hang around.
            Some Time Later… Continued in Part 2...

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Saturday, October 21, 2017

Some Thoughts on Creepypasta

What is Creepypasta
            The term Creepypasta is a quasi-pun on the term “Copy Paste a” as in you are copying and pasting a story you read somewhere to a new forum for people to read.  The idea being that the original source is lost, much like a rumor, gossip, or in the case of “Creepy” a campfire ghost story.
            It is an online community that was based around the format of presenting stories in such a way that they look real.  Photoshopped pictures, drawings, formatting the text to look like a web board conversation, and other little tricks to make them appear as authentic.

Authenticity inevitably dies by the sword of meme culture though.
            The creepy factor has more to do with playing with people’s expectations of the mundane.  You see and read information off of a chat window every day, so reading someone else’s chat going back and forth about something creepy, like finding a dead body, or hearing something outside, that can be cool.
            The problem is… WAY TOO MANY of these things are god awful to read, and I can tell you why, but first let me state something about criticism in this instance.

Criticism
            All of this hacky, poorly structured, poorly edited schlock is just a creative writing exercise.  People will never get better at writing unless they have the space to practice and the support of a community that will read their stuff and give them criticism.  The idea that your stuff is being read and enjoyed by someone motivates you to write more, and getting sound advice and biting criticism can push someone to become better.

I cannot recommend Gladwell's books enough.
I have read "Tipping Point", "Blink", and "Outliers" (Where this quote is from).
They have a lot to say about critical thinking and wider social trends.
            Writers get better with practice and an idea made of the misassembled ideas stolen from other works can mutate into something of value and substance.  As derivative as this all can be, something can come out of it.
            If you don't like reading amateur work, that is fine, but you should not be down on it as a whole. These communities act as creative outlets for people who might not otherwise have access to the teachers or support groups necessary to cultivate their aspirations as writers.  These communities serve a function, and it is a function that should be respected, lauded even, for what it can do to help people become better.  Only 1/10,000 people has any knack for writing, and lot of what they write will be bad too.  But without the other 9,999 people around to read their stuff and give them support, it will all go to waste.
            If you want to read these things, try to encourage people to not only write something out, but to edit their work for typos, edit their work for word use, and to edit for punchy and functional length. Don't just tell them that they never got past 8th grade, because the reason their writing didn't get past 8th grade English probably has something to do with a lack of support to begin with.  Or they are literally in the 8th grade and starting out early to develop their writing.  I wish I had an online means of getting my stuff read back in 1998, I would have gotten a lot more down and reviewed.
            Be a critic.  Be better than the guy who insults amateurs for trying.  Even if you are a better writer, even if you are a really good writer, don't be the guy who derides other's attempts when they are starting out just trying to tell scary stories to their friends.  Help them, don’t dissuade them.

Famous Creepy Pasta
            There are really no bones about this one.  Slender Man, star of video games, internet memes, and the inspiration for one real life attempted murder of a child by other children has to be number 1 with a knife.
            I am confident most people have heard of this character, and there is more lore surrounding him than I am interested in learning, but what is sort of fun, he might be a work of quasi-plagiarism.  Here is a video from the youtubers, RedLetterMedia to explain how they kind of invented a character like Slender Man.

  
            What is important to note here, aside from the fact that creepy people in suits talking to children is instant horror, is that this idea permutated in an interesting way.
            Suits are dehumanizing status symbols that imply an uncaring but wealthy/powerful person with control over your life.  The less personality or distinctiveness to the suit the more alienating it is.
            I am sure in Ancient Rome there was a boogeyman figure that wore a toga.  And I am sure there have been similar non-person manifestations of the supernatural thru all cultures.  Wearing something nice, and otherwise having no identity.
            See, even if the guy got an idea from watching some shit movie in the Midwest, it doesn’t really matter because the ideas are so derivative and hack that they could have come from anywhere.  Slender Man is a mashup of elements that has inspired a lot of online… let’s call it “literature” and has grown beyond the original idea, which had grown beyond the work of RedLetterMedia, and wherever the germ of that idea came from they grew it from beyond that.

Idea Growth and Development
            Stories are in some ways, living things.  They grow and change passing from mind to mind, changing the environment of those minds based on how much of an impact they carry and passing onto new minds via being memorable and catchy.  Like a pop song or a virus.
            The reason I wanted to talk about Creepy Pasta has to do with a show I watched last year and whose sequel series is being called, “The best horror show you’re not watching”.  The show is “Channel Zero” which might be the best title for a horror anthology show since “The Twilight Zone”.
            The reason, I suspect, that no one is watching season 2, has to do with the steady decline of season 1 to a truly unsatisfying ending.  It left a bad taste in my mouth that I have wanted to talk about for ages, but because I had so much to say I just couldn’t sit down and get it out.
            If I were a youtuber I would go thru “Channel Zero” episode by episode pulling it apart.  Here, on blogger, I am just going to put down enough of my ideas to feel like I am done thinking about it.  To get it out of the cycle of my thoughts.  Because, and this is no joke, for the last year I have thought about that show periodically and it has bothered me how disappointed I was with it.
            See, the “Criticisms” section above, that applies to the amateurs that put their work out on a website for fun and some attention.  That does not apply to a professionally produced TV show on Sy-Fy made by people who are supposed to know where to make cuts and where to put things in.  I wanna lay into them a bit, but not too much because the show had a lot of positive elements that I feel could have been great if not for the key failures.
            Here is Part 1 of my look at "Candle Cove".

The monstrous figure here... That is an element that should have been given a miss.

A Parting Criticism
            This is Jenny Nicholson, a delightful woman who primarily makes fun of “Star Wars” and is a combination of low key strangeness and cuteness.  She is an interesting youtube persona.  This video is her explaining a SUPER LEGIT criticism for Creepy Pasta that I think many writers of the stuff might want to take to heart.
            The issue being how the genre(?) has moved away from plausible to just an arms race of gore.  Lots of purple prose discussing guts.  Guys, I respect your efforts, but you are not Clive Barker.  Try to describe something mundane like a flower or a bookshelf before trying to describe viscera.

                                    
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Tuesday, October 17, 2017

The Core Appeal of Batman


            I did not like the “Wonder Woman” movie that came out earlier this year.  It, along with “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” are the two most popular and well-reviewed films that I have a deep dislike for (I think I will write a bit more on one or both of these later in the year).  But, something I will concede is that the Diana portrayed in the movie is a perfectly valid portrayal.
            The version of Wonder Woman I am most familiar with was defined by two sources, the “Justice League” animated series and the writing of Grant Morrison on JLA back at the turn of the century… Not his more recent work on the character in “All Star Wonder Womana bad comic I reviewed in two parts where I also talked about how incestuous and lame the marketing decisions of the comics industry can be.
            My point with all of this is that I had to ask myself while watching the latest “Wonder Woman” movie was, “do I dislike the “Wonder Woman” movie only because it is NOT like the versions of the character I am more familiar with?  Was I just attached to the confident, confidence inspiring, more veteran version of the character I had become accustomed to and seeing a less experienced version bothered me?”
            The answer is NO.

Though I definitely got sick of every freaking character in the movie saying how pretty she is.
Yeah, I get it.  You can be hot and strong.  Hooray for Lipstick Feminism. Can we just drop the stilted dialogue?
            I welcome interpretations of work that create fresh takes on stories and characters.  Permutations on familiar things are some of my favorite avenues of storytelling.  Changes in style, motivation, or even drastic changes in setting can make things better, interestingly bad, or (most often) neither better or worse but different enough that I appreciate it existing.
            But I can see other people having this problem.  For instance, I have seen lots of people who look at the “Harry Potter” movies as being bad because they deviate from the books.  These people are of course, fools, those movies are bad for numerous reasons unrelated to the books.  Side note, I would really like to encourage the Harry Potter fandom to read more books, when I see every god damn thing from politics to Stephen King’s “It” compared to Harry Potter mythology I start thinking they are all really dumb and myopic, get out of your comfort zone a little, they’re YA fiction, not a religion.
            What the hell was I going on about?  Oh, yes… Adaptations.
            With all this in mind, I decided to kick around the idea of how different can you make a character before it is unrecognizable.  To do this I decided to look at Batman, because there have been so many versions of the character.  They even made a joke about it in his last movie.


            Different aspects of characters appeal to different people and what constitutes the core aspect of a character is up for debate.  WHAT MAKES BATMAN…. BATMAN!?

To start, let’s list the three most important aspects of Batman,

1) He is a rich man who watched his parents getting murdered as a child.
2) He is intelligent and well trained in multiple disciplines related to combat and criminology.
3) He fights crime dressed as a bat using bat themed weapons and equipment.

            I am betting some people would say those things encapsulate everything you *need* about the character in order to make a movie, and that would be the minimum.  But others would say no list would be complete without,

4) No killing, more specifically Batman does not use guns.
5) He has a butler who raised him after the death of his parents.
6) He has a surrogate family, primarily consisting of adopted children who have similarly lost loved ones to criminal activity, but extends to father figures and love interests.

            Christopher Nolan decided 5 was more important than 4 (Nolan’s Batman has guns on his vehicles if not his person and does cause the death of several criminals, though under such extreme circumstances that it could only be seen as excusable).  Nolan cut number 6 almost entirely, his supporting cast is far smaller than other iterations of the character.
            Zach Snyder has Batman using guns and killing people left, right, and center.  Snyder would have had Batman kill Superman if it weren’t for an unintentional and really out of place reference/appeal to point number 1.  That screaming of “Martha!” was a sort of out of nowhere appeal to the core of the character… maybe a subtle way of saying, “Batman really shouldn’t be killing people, Superman especially”.  Was that a winking bit of self-awareness on the part of the creatives?  Or was it just another misplaced bit of character trivia to try and build a report that wasn’t earned… I would say it was silly either way and that movie sucked.
            Tim Burton had Batman kill people in massive explosions or throwing them to their deaths.  Beyond that his inner circle and surrogate family was the smallest it ever was.  During the whole first movie Batman’s only humanizing cast members are Vicki Vale and Alfred, Batman doesn’t speak to Gordon, Dent, or Knox and there is no Robin in the movie at all.
            I am sure more people saw Burton's movie at the time of release than had read a comic in the preceding 10 years.  I am sure more people saw Nolan's movie than had read a comic in the past 25, mostly because comic books are an industry on life support in spite of them being the core ancestral home of the most popular genre of entertainment on the planet currently.  But my point is, comics getting the title of “Definitive” is REALLY misplaced.
            More people having seen the movies or the old TV show means that their version of Batman is VERY DIFFERENT from what a comic book fan might see as definitive.  And if you are looking at “Definitiveness” as a sort of middle ground of what most people think of when they think of a character… More people will recognize a Batman that does kill.  Some might see Batman killing criminals as something so typical or part of the character that they wouldn’t even comment on it, or they might even dislike versions of Batman that don’t use lethal force, seeing them as childish or just out of date.



            Who's to say one iteration of a character is the superior or more iconic version of the character?  Especially when the multiverse exists in comics and film and each iteration "exists" in the same way all fictional characters "exist".  Like Shakespeare said in “The Tempest”:

As I foretold you, we’re all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.


            For me, Batman the animated series and to a lesser extent the “Arkham” video game series is the definitive version of the character and his supporting cast.
            If you prefer the Burton version, you aren’t wrong.
            If you like Lego Batman, you’re not wrong.
            If you think that Batman is just a lamer version of Zorro or the Shadow… You’re not entirely off base and I suppose if you dislike when characters are derivative I can see how that would be a strike, but I would still think you are an ass for writing off a character just because he is one of many other similar characters…
            … I mean, if you are going to knock them for that, let’s call them all derivatives of the Scarlet Pimpernel.


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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.