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Pre-Modern and Post Midlife – Volume 5


Amazingly enough I didn’t start watching Will Trent this last season because I was too busy. I had every intention of binge watching the season when everything else went away for the summer, and that just so happened to start yesterday, while I was on the elliptical for an hour. Holy smokes the show somehow got better, and this is despite the full ownership of this IP by Disney now. Yes, I was generally concerned, that a great show that had a lot of WOKE features would have leaned harder into the WOKEness, dump the good story writing, and acting, and become a dumpster fire. This is me, admitting that I was wrong so far. The first episode of season three was a rollercoaster of excellent writing, amazing cast chemistry, and believe it or not even more WOKEness. Again, WOKE stories are trash because they are trash stories. If you write a good story and it happens to be WOKE there is a difference, and this is the proof. 

Goodwill goes a long way in a TV series. I say this with 55 years of experience going for me. The amount of acceptance of a story going downhill is directly proportional to how beloved the story is, or how steady the decline is. Anything Jim Henson created managed to last from the days I was in a diaper until my kids were too old for Muppets. They finally got there when they became too political or too sociopathic, but that was a forty-year arc. Then there were IPs like Star Wars that had good will for about forty years and was destroyed in two. This includes the mid-way point where, Jar Jar Binks and a stupid speeder race could have derailed the franchise but the goodwill that the IP had carried it past that and to better times. The Last Jedi closed the coffin, and The Rise of Skywalker nailed it shut. 

Let me take you all the way back to 1999, when a show called The Sopranos aired on HBO. This is the perfect example of how far good faith can take you, as the first episode of The Sopranos was one of the greatest first episodes of any television show that ever aired. It was so good that people watched the entire series chewing on the memba berries that was the first episode. Every season started with a good episode followed by a steady decline. The second to last episode of the entire series was the absolute worst episode, and the finale was barely better. The average person reading this and arguing with me in their head would get the same question I would ask anyone who defends a typical HBO series that was base lowest common denominator, with a lot of shock value and some horrible messaging, “How many times have you rewatched it?” 

I can hear it now, “Didn’t you defend The Wheel of Time?” and that would be correct. I have even defended The Rings of Power” here and there despite its complete rewrite of Tolkien, with a worse story. It was still kind of entertaining, just like the Wheel of Time is, but a lot less than the Wheel of Time is. This is where the good will comes in. I personally think that (after a reread) of the Wheel of Time Books the actual characters, their races, and the things that people use to call it WOKE are inaccurate, and the girl bossy stuff in the show, is what the books were. The first season was not very good, but it had glimmers of good things, and I think Sanderson helped them right that ship in the second and third season. You can disagree with me, but this is my blog. Feel free to argue in the comments, I love criticism. It either makes me bolder or it makes me wiser.  

To demonstrate what I meant with the Will Trent reference I am going to watch the first two seasons again now that I have gotten past the second episode of season three. Why? Well this season did something else that I miss in all the other garbage that Disney does (aside from The Rookie, Nathan Fillion is still a boss) they introduced the new big bad, and coincidentally it was a childhood friend of Will Trent. Yes, that is what we in the old and can still cry at a Star Trek movie call, epic. I want to make sure that I am ready for what is going to be an amazing season by having all the back story fresh in my mind. The Sopranos didn’t make me want to do that. Game of Thrones didn’t make me want to do that. Shockingly enough only audiobooks seem to make me want to do that. I guess that is the best compliment I can give Will Trent on TV. It makes me want to listen to all the audiobooks once I get past a redo of the television series. Now get off my lawn! 

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