My thoughts on Dr. Horrible.

[seriousfic]

More and more, I’m starting to think of Joss Whedon as the Michael Bay of dialogue. He writes really good dialogue that lets you go on a really fun ride, but the destination is always the same. His twist endings are always “unexpectedly, tragedy strikes!” Basically, he’s that old cliché of darkness and edginess somehow being more artistically valid than a happy ending, with all the smug pretension such a position demands. I mean, “I give my audience what they need, not what they want”? How did fandom let him off the hook for that and the one-way, almost dictatorial street of creator-fan interaction it implies?

Take Penny, for instance. She’s not a character. She’s barely even an object. Even objects can have two dimensions. She’s such a sweetness and light creation (down to her signature character trait being caring for the homeless. Yeesh) that if this were the 18th century, her eventual tragic demise would doubtlessly be from consumption.

The plot of Dr. Horrible hinges on Billy loving her, yet… why does he love her? What’s the focal point of his attraction? He doesn’t even know her (beyond the fact that she’s hot) and neither does the audience. The naked mechanics of the script come out in Captain Hammer’s attraction to her. He literally only wants her because Dr. Horrible does (Captain Hammer’s odious sociopathy never really gets an explanation either. Why does he hate Dr. Horrible so much? Because he’s the imagined high school nemesis of the geek set, acting out because… he’s just mean, that’s why!).

As for Penny herself, she has no inner character. You’d wonder what Dr. Horrible sees in someone who’s so easily taken in by Captain Hammer (and given that her function in the series is to be Dr. Horrible’s potential redemption, that’s a very pointed question indeed). For a second in Act III, it looks as if she’s getting wise to Captain Hammer’s Zapp Braniganiness, but that’s obliterated so that her last line can be “Don’t worry, Captain Hammer will save me.” Because it makes the tragedy more potent, you see.


Now, any Smallville viewer who’s had to suffer from the endless dance of Clark and Lana will tell you the dangers of a creator shipping their own creations, but I think it provides a necessary function that’s missing from Whedon’s works. He sees characters cynically, as puppets that are moved around to create Good Drama. We’re not supposed to root for couples or feel sorry when they split up. We’re supposed to applaud the Good Drama, the labyrinthine workings of this colossal machine built from secrets and characterization and continuity. It whirls and winds and grinds and eventually arrives at a Tragic Conclusion, while we applaud politely and observe that yes, truly, Joss Whedon is our master.

When TPTB have a canon ship, it at least provides a sort of loyal opposition for fans who ship something else. There’s a plan they can oppose, instead of this irrelevant miasma of pairings that are all just as meaningless as the other. It kind of makes you suspicious of all the time spent on relationships in BtVS when by the end of the show, pretty much everyone was either single or widowed (except for the eleventh-hour lesbian relationship, because killing off Tara was politically incorrect). It’s like going into a romantic comedy and being told beforehand that the star couple won’t get together. Joss Whedon always ends his pairings with a tragedy, so what does it matter?

Worse yet, this attitude has spread through the television world much like herpes at a convention in Vegas. Somehow, no relationship, platonic or otherwise, can be complete unless there’s a tragic ending. It makes things… ‘profound.’ Which is why every series of Doctor Who has to end with some tragedy befalling the Companion du jour, despite the chest-thumping proclamation of DW as a humanistic, positive show. Personally, I think the nadir of this kind of thinking was the Enterprise finale, where they leapt ahead several years just to show that nothing had come of the flirtation between the only two likeable characters with chemistry, indeed, killing off one of them to lend the series finale some unearned ‘oomph.’

Of course, this is because the conventional wisdom says that Moonlighting started to suck when David and Maddie got together.

That was over twenty years ago.

Think about this. Imagine you’re writing a story, and someone comes up to you and says you shouldn’t go in X direction with the plot because another story did something similar twenty years ago and people didn’t like it. What would you say? “Well, maybe they didn’t do it right, but I’m going to do better!” “But here it fits the characters, and lets me tell all kinds of new story!”

Apparently, a lot of people say “Righty-o, more of the same old, same old then!”

They didn’t want Clark Kent and Lois Lane to be married. They don’t want Peter Parker and Mary-Jane to be married. They just want this eternal circle-jerk of sexual tension, as if this is the grand poombah of storytelling greatness. Sexual tension. Unresolved sexual tension.

For some reason, romantic love is always a mirage on the horizon, never something tangible, consummated, treated maturely. Which is pretty dang weird. We don’t have this problem with platonic love. Dean and Sam go through most episodes with their brotherly love never in doubt, sometimes going out of their way to affirming it, sometimes having it threatened by fighting, but it’s always in evidence. It’s the backbone of the whole goddamn show. Imagine how silly it would be if every episode ended with them WANTING to play two-player on their X-Box or catch a midnight showing of Star Wars, but getting tongue-tied at the last minute. Or if the sweep week episode of Stargate Atlantis had Rodney and Shepherd giving each other high-fives, then never talking about it again and getting sheepish every time it was brought up.

Yet, the idea of treating romantic love with the same kind of consistent dignity is never broached. For some reason, heterosexual monogamy is a taboo. It’s not just outrageous, it’s NUTRAGEOUS.

This subversion of the cliché has become so common that it’s as cliché as the cliché it’s supposed to replace. And, at the very least, the cliched happy ending is satisfying when earned. For some reason, God only knows what, writers everywhere have become convinced that while deus ex machina to give the good guys a happy ending is unforgivable, similarly contriving circumstances to give them an unhappy ending is worthy of praise and adoration. It’s profound! Artistic!

Only it isn’t. When you think about it, Dr. Horrible is the story of a man who wants something “ignoble” (in this case fame and fortune, which is unoriginal on its own merits), gets it, but realizes what he really wants is the love of a good woman, which previously wouldn’t have contented him earlier (but now he sees that love is all you need). So, basically, it’s the first two-thirds of EVERY STORY EVER IN THE HISTORY OF EVER. All that’s missing is the third act where he realizes that joining the Evil League of Evil isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and runs to stop Penny from getting on a plane to An Unloved And Unfulfilling Life (while Captain Hammer and/or Bad Horse try to stop him before receiving Ironic Comeuppances).

THIS. IS. NOT. GOOD. STORYTELLING. And don’t fool yourselves that it is just because Joss Whedon gives you a fan-boner.