Entry tags:
writing in eight dimensions
Mostly prompted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tafadhali 's (very NSFW but very good) "Super Bass" fanvid for Sense8, I decided to go back and give the show a rewatch, which I haven't done since it finished. I think I watched season 1 at least once before with a friend, and I definitely went back to see the movie-length finale episode after it aired, but all of this was in The Before Times and my memory is fuzzy.
First off, I have to give the writers a lot of credit here -- they had to basically make eight separate shows with their own protagonist and arc and pacing, AND THEN ALSO figure out how and when all of those protagonists will intersect. It's a lot! It would be a feat of superhuman artistry lot for anyone to try and pull off, and I'm not expecting them to get it 100% right all of the time.
But listen. We have to talk about Riley. I'm sure this has already been talked about in meta posts and Important TV Journalism, but it's annoying me now just as much (if not more) than it did the first time I watched this in 2015, so I'm going to talk about it too.
Riley, who is a DJ from Iceland (not that you would know this if she didn't tell you, because that is not a name you can give your child in Iceland), spends the entirety of the first season getting herself into various Situations that other people have to rescue her from or help her make decisions about. And oh boy, there are SO MANY SITUATIONS. Usually involving drugs, or money, or people manipulating her. She mostly reacts to this with the same deer-in-headlights look that she always has. That is when she isn't wandering around London (why London? Why not, I don't know, Ottawa? It's doubly confusing because all the other characters are so deeply tied to/emblematic of their Location, but she is supposed to be in both, or neither? Was this on purpose?) in a drug-fuelled haze trying to escape some tragic past. We don't actually learn that she has a tragic past until about 3/4 of the way through the season, by the way. Until then, there is no set up, no hints about what her deal might be, she's just this skinny girl who has something wrong with her all the time.
(Something I noticed this time around: outside of the three other women among the Main Cluster, Riley barely talks to another female character "in real life". I think the only woman we see her interacting with face-to-face is a friend's girlfriend, who I get the sense we're not supposed to like very much? So... make of that what you will.)
When we finally do learn the Tragic Backstory, it comes too late to provide any meaningful payoff, because there was never any setup for it. We learn about her husband when she visits his grave. That's it, that's his introduction to -- and impact on -- this narrative. Who was he? Why did they start dating? What's the deal with the horse? We don't know any of that and we never will, it is never remarked upon again. Poor Magnus is only there as set dressing, I think he has less than ten lines of actual dialogue and one of them is just "Come with me" repeated about five times in various hallucinations/flashbacks. Whatever she has felt for him doesn't seem to stop her from falling in love with Will the Chicago Cop either, in fact it doesn't seem to ever come up.
And like I said, writing is hard. I get it. You've already come up with seven characters who each have some Cool Superpower for your Cool Superpower Psychic Cluster, but Riley's contribution, at least in season 1, is... basically nothing? Maybe she was being set up as The Heart, but she mostly stays on the receiving end of everyone else's advise rather than giving out any of her own.They do give her slightly more to do in the next season, but I would argue that was just to justify her being there at all. Like, "oh crap we need to give her something to do, uhhhh here lets have her meet a bunch of other unrelated characters and be like the diplomacy bard I guess".
tafadhali 's (very NSFW but very good) "Super Bass" fanvid for Sense8, I decided to go back and give the show a rewatch, which I haven't done since it finished. I think I watched season 1 at least once before with a friend, and I definitely went back to see the movie-length finale episode after it aired, but all of this was in The Before Times and my memory is fuzzy. First off, I have to give the writers a lot of credit here -- they had to basically make eight separate shows with their own protagonist and arc and pacing, AND THEN ALSO figure out how and when all of those protagonists will intersect. It's a lot! It would be a feat of superhuman artistry lot for anyone to try and pull off, and I'm not expecting them to get it 100% right all of the time.
But listen. We have to talk about Riley. I'm sure this has already been talked about in meta posts and Important TV Journalism, but it's annoying me now just as much (if not more) than it did the first time I watched this in 2015, so I'm going to talk about it too.
Riley, who is a DJ from Iceland (not that you would know this if she didn't tell you, because that is not a name you can give your child in Iceland), spends the entirety of the first season getting herself into various Situations that other people have to rescue her from or help her make decisions about. And oh boy, there are SO MANY SITUATIONS. Usually involving drugs, or money, or people manipulating her. She mostly reacts to this with the same deer-in-headlights look that she always has. That is when she isn't wandering around London (why London? Why not, I don't know, Ottawa? It's doubly confusing because all the other characters are so deeply tied to/emblematic of their Location, but she is supposed to be in both, or neither? Was this on purpose?) in a drug-fuelled haze trying to escape some tragic past. We don't actually learn that she has a tragic past until about 3/4 of the way through the season, by the way. Until then, there is no set up, no hints about what her deal might be, she's just this skinny girl who has something wrong with her all the time.
(Something I noticed this time around: outside of the three other women among the Main Cluster, Riley barely talks to another female character "in real life". I think the only woman we see her interacting with face-to-face is a friend's girlfriend, who I get the sense we're not supposed to like very much? So... make of that what you will.)
When we finally do learn the Tragic Backstory, it comes too late to provide any meaningful payoff, because there was never any setup for it. We learn about her husband when she visits his grave. That's it, that's his introduction to -- and impact on -- this narrative. Who was he? Why did they start dating? What's the deal with the horse? We don't know any of that and we never will, it is never remarked upon again. Poor Magnus is only there as set dressing, I think he has less than ten lines of actual dialogue and one of them is just "Come with me" repeated about five times in various hallucinations/flashbacks. Whatever she has felt for him doesn't seem to stop her from falling in love with Will the Chicago Cop either, in fact it doesn't seem to ever come up.
And like I said, writing is hard. I get it. You've already come up with seven characters who each have some Cool Superpower for your Cool Superpower Psychic Cluster, but Riley's contribution, at least in season 1, is... basically nothing? Maybe she was being set up as The Heart, but she mostly stays on the receiving end of everyone else's advise rather than giving out any of her own.They do give her slightly more to do in the next season, but I would argue that was just to justify her being there at all. Like, "oh crap we need to give her something to do, uhhhh here lets have her meet a bunch of other unrelated characters and be like the diplomacy bard I guess".