The Nevers kicks off with more villains and Joss Whedon quirks than a premiere really needs
TV Reviews Joss Whedon
The Joss Whedon pattern is a predictable one. Whether in Buffy The Vampire Slayer or The Avengers, Whedon’s storytelling quirks are noticeable: young female protagonists tortured by supernatural ability and responsibility, nefarious baddies with their own otherworldly powers, a broad ensemble of supporting players with various specialties, one-liner zingers, and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. In the debut episode of The Nevers, that Whedon touch is firmly in place. Whedon stepped down from the show in November 2020 (screenwriter Philippa Goslett replaced him as showrunner), but before then, his work as creator, writer, director, and showrunner of The Nevers obviously shaped the show—and this pilot episode reflects a number of his particular tendencies. Whether The Nevers can in time move past these often-irritating elements is anyone’s guess, but if it does, it will be thanks to the work of leads Laura Donnelly and Ann Skelly, who liven up an overloaded and overwrought premiere.
The pilot begins with an inexplicable event. On August 3, 1896, a mysterious vessel flies over London. Is it a spaceship, or alien craft? Or maybe something human-made, but strangely powered? Whatever it is, it travels above London’s populace, some of whom are going about their regular lives, and some of whom are making decisions they might not be able to reverse. Down-on-her-luck Amalia True (Donnelly), who looks like she’s trying to end her life. Inventor Penance Adair (Skelly), who mends a water pump with a clothespin. Singer Mary Brighton (Eleanor Tomlinson), who is left at an audition by her fiancée, Frank Mundi (Ben Chaplin). Dr. Horatio Cousens (Zackary Momoh), preparing to pay a patient a visit; government official Lord Gilbert Massen (Pip Torrens), who witnesses a family tragedy; a woman (Amy Manson) fights the men hauling her off to an asylum. All of them are affected by whatever material the ship is disseminating—some sort of glowing, gold matter that settles on their skin and is absorbed into their bodies.
As soon as this inexplicable event occurs, it’s over. The ship disappears. People return to their routines. But as The Nevers jumps forward in time three years later to 1899, it’s clear that London has changed. The people affected by that event have since experienced “turns”—they now boast powers or abilities they didn’t have before. Instead of drowning, Mrs. True was able to launch herself out of the water and save herself. Penance can see electricity and manipulate its currents. And Dr. Cousens’s medical training is given a supernatural edge as he can treat, suture, and heal wounds and injuries with only his concentration and his hovering hands.
The three of them oversee the safe space that is St. Romaulda’s Orphanage in the middle of London. With funding from benefactress Lavinia Bidlow (Olivia Williams), the orphanage—run by close friends Mrs. True and Penance, and with medical care offered by Dr. Cousens—takes in the “Turned” who are abandoned or cast out by their families, fired from their jobs, or otherwise alone. Whedon spends a good amount of time introducing various characters at the orphanage, but I think of particular relevance to the series moving forward are Rogue-like Lucy Best (Elizabeth Berrington), who destroys everything she touches; 10-foot-tall teen Primrose (Anna Devlin), who is obsessed with propriety; and Sikh Harriet (Kiran Sonia Sawar), who can turn items into ice (or is it glass?). They’re not exactly an invading army, as Lord Massen and his Watchers’ Council-adjacent group of fellow old white men fear. But they could potentially be a threat to the racist, sexist, patriarchal order, and that comes most clearly into focus during Mrs. True and Penance’s visit to retrieve Myrtle (Viola Prettejohn).
Myrtle had been a normal girl, but now her parents are certain she’s been possessed by a demon—she no longer speaks English, and might be a Satanic vessel. Donnelly and Skelly play Mrs. True and Penance, respectively, like women who have seen this kind of thing before, but even still, Myrtle’s captivity—because her parents have chained her to her bed, and placed a gigantic cross above it—is devastating to observe. (Kudos to Prettejohn for the fear and frustration she conveys in her first appearance as Myrtle.) Though shaken by Myrtle’s parents’ cruelty, Mrs. True and Penance are logical and straightforward, explaining that she isn’t speaking the Devil’s tongue, but a mixture of Chinese, Turkish, Russian, and various other languages. They can offer her an education, the companionship of girls her own age, and protection, and slowly, begrudgingly, Myrtle’s parents acquiesce.
But would this be a Whedon show without the reveal that Mrs. True and Penance can actually kick a lot of ass? It would not! So although there are already plenty of enemies for the Turned, this pilot episode also introduces those people—or things, depending on what their waxy faces are hiding?—that attempt to kidnap Myrtle, and are diverted by Mrs. True’s strength, speed, and ability to throw a punch, and Penance’s variety of gadgets. (The car launching out from inside their carriage was pretty sick.) And that’s not even everyone, because The Nevers uses its final opera scene to keep loading up antagonists. First is serial killer Maladie (Amy Manson), whose turn is that she derives power from pain, and who has already killed five male psychoanalysts. Mrs. True is wary of what damage Maladie can do to the reputation of the Turned, Inspector Mundi is irritated by people trying to use Maladie to further their anti-Turned agenda, and Lord Massen sees in Maladie a kind of opportunity. If her horrible deeds are enough to turn all of London against the Turned (ha!), his work to protect London from “the woman, the immigrant, and the deviant” would be easier, wouldn’t it?
When Maladie crashes the opera that Mrs. True, Penance, Lavinia, Lavinia’s socially awkward brother Augie (Tom Riley), his close friend Hugo Swann (James Norton), and Lord Massen are all attending, we don’t get a greater sense of what her motivations are. “I saw God, He was all light, and He put on me his wreath” isn’t exactly a mission statement. But after opera chorus member Mary launches into a song that only the Turned can hear, The Nevers drops a few final bombshells. Augie is Turned, too, and didn’t know it. Hugo, who is running some kind of “pagan sex club,” is working with Mundy to track Maladie and other Turned—perhaps to work as prostitutes in his club? And what do we think of that evil doctor played by Denis O’Hare? How long until he’s performing horrible experiments on one of the wards from the orphanage, drawing “champion of the unfortunate” Mrs. True and Penance into his orbit?
This is all so much for a premiere episode! Probably too much! There are still five episodes of The Nevers to go in this first half of the first season, and we’ve already reached maximum capacity on villains and corsets. Maybe next week: character development? Just a thought!
Stray observations
- Anyone else disappointed that the Turned includes both women and men? My expectation from The Nevers and the hype leading up to it was that this steampunk world was one in which only girls and women were bestowed with powers, whether useful or harmful. But if the Turned are a more heterogeneous group, then… how is this any different from the X-Men?
- Do we learn what “The Nevers” is a reference to during this episode? We do not.
- “It’s only a prototype!” is going to be an every-episode catchphrase, I can already tell.
- Was the whole world affected by turns, or just London?
- Is Mrs. True autistic? This pilot episode already gave her so many personality traits (self-destruction, self-hate, self-deprecation, and the “ripplings” that allow her to see into the future) that I hope the show actually pays some further attention to this rather than just introducing and dropping it.
- One more thing about Mrs. True: When she tells Nick Frost’s Beggar King “This isn’t my face,” what the hell does that mean?
- Do we think The Nevers will explain how the turns manifested? I ask because certain turns seemed to improve skills people already had, whether natural or learned. Penance was already a genius, and her turn helped make her even more brilliant. Dr. Cousens was already a doctor, and his turn improved his healing powers. Why did some turns make these seemingly high-level changes to people while others are as simplistic as “make someone tall,” as for Primrose? I know that X-Men is like this also, with some powers being amazing and others sort of lame, but I wonder if The Nevers will bother with any attempt at explanation.
- Hugo Swann’s line “Flirt with the ugly one. It creates an unexpected balance” gave me a Xander Harris flashback that I did not appreciate.
- Meanwhile, “I would be thrilled to excise the word ‘nice’” seems like a line tailor-made for Etsy mugs.
- Nothing gets more Joss Whedon than having a woman strip off her dress while punching another woman in the face. How will he top himself with next week’s episode, which, I kid you not, is named “Exposure”?
238 Comments
45 minutes into Victorian X-Women:
I admit that I got tired of a lot of the Joss Whedon tropes mentioned here at least fifteen years ago. Still, I have to wonder if the huge amount of disdain for anything seen as a Whedonism in this wouldn’t have been here if this review had been made 3 or even 1 year ago… Even though I think he deserves everything coming to him, it sure became a chore to read (and yeah, I admit I will check out the show).
I’m trying to force myself to watch this because I have to do a recap/review, but just knowing I’m going to have to slog through the same old Whedon tropes is not exactly inspiring me to get on with it. Also I feel like this show is about 5 years too late in the scheme of things because I’m pretty sure that, along with all the Whedon tropes, I’m going to be seeing all the by this point well-worn Steampunk/magic tropes.
Yeah, I thought the Steampunk genre was kind of dead because people finally realized that the Victorian era was a bit icky when you realize where the economic success of Britain was coming from (extractive colonization of Africa and Asia), and why the “explorers” with their cool pith helmets were trying to find the sources of rivers and the like.
True. I have to admit though, I can’t help but think that if we’re going to start abandoning whole genres of fiction because they’re set in or draw upon places and periods wherein humans were exploiting or otherwise being shitty to other humans, that’s roughly 99% of human history (and thus fiction) that’s rendered inaccessible.Including the present and recent past. (The irony is, of course, that most of the pioneering works of Steampunk fiction — The Difference Engine, The Warlord of the Air, etc — actually deconstructed and critiqued Victorian imperialism.)
I agree, although you can have fiction set in historical periods that doesn’t romanticize them. I’m fond of novels set in Ancient Rome that realize that living then (at least for the upper class, the lower class had their own problems dealing with basic survival) was a bit like being a Communist official in Stalin’s USSR with all the associated paranoia — you never knew if today the Emperor would decide he didn’t like you anymore and have you exiled or executed. Good call on The Difference Engine — despite being one of the first Steampunk novels it didn’t shy away from the fact that an even more powerful Victorian Britain than the historical wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.
I’m currently addicted to Chinese historical dramas. Everyone is something of a villain and the royals and aristocrats make my family look highly functional. They really have no illusions about how dangerous life was like then at any level of society. I find myself thinking about all the palace back stabbing when things are rough at work, just to remind myself I’m better off.
I just don’t get the whole “Steampunk is played out.” It’s a setting, not a story. It’s no more “played out” than the Western or “the 50s” or “Imperial Japan”.
The problem is that it’s rarely done well, and to my knowledge has never been done well in live-action.
And yeah, if you can’t tell a story in a time or place where the geo-political situation is problematic, that rules out ALL TIMES AND ALL PLACES FROM THE BEGINNING OF TIME TO RIGHT NOW.
I never got the argument that steampunk is played out because there hasn’t really been a piece of mainstream media that has been steampunk and successful. You have cult classic things like The Difference Engine and The Warlord of the Air or the Girl Genius webcomic, but the average person doesn’t know about those. You have mainstream films that tried and flopped hard like The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Treasure Planet, Wild Wild West and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The closest things that I can come up with as far as successfully mainstream steampunk projects are some Jules Verne and HG Wells adaptations (I suppose that you could throw Time After Time in this category as well, but it’s barely steampunk), the Wild Wild West tv show, and a handful of Ghibli films (mainly Castle in the Sky and Howl’s Moving Castle). So that’s some classic literature adaptations that are mostly decades old, an extremely dated sixties television show, and some cult classic anime films, none of which really point towards a pop culture saturation.I’m honestly shocked at the lack of success considering how popular steampunk is in nerd circles and how many attempts (many by very talented people) have tried and failed. I think that steampunk will eventually get its Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Star Wars that makes it mainstream, but I don’t know when and from who. The way that people are talking here, you’d think that steampunk media is as common in the mainstream as superheroes, but it’s really not at all.
You’re correct in the assertion that there hasn’t been any mainstream TV/Movies that really capitalize on the steampunk aesthetic, but I wouldn’t discount the fact that in recent years there have been a LOT of major mainstream blockbuster video/tabletop games that are squarely in the steampunk genre, and likely what has helped solidify its place in “nerd” culture moreso than any of the flops you mentioned. I’d venture to guess a decent big-screen adaptation of Bioshock: Infinite or Dishonered will probably be what breaks the camel’s back for the genre movie/TV-wise.
Yeah, that’s a decent point, but while video and tabletop games are definitely becoming more mainstream, they’re still kind of somewhat a niche thing as opposed to television or movies, so I still somewhat consider those nerd culture things (you’ll still get a lot of people who just blanket won’t play video or tabletop games, especially the type that would have a steampunk aesthetic, where you get very few people who outright refuse to watch television and movies, that’s my main difference there). And while there are definitely a lot of indie games with steampunk aesthetics, there have been very few that have achieved massive success, with the aforementioned Bioshock: Infinite and Dishonored probably being the biggest two by far (Bioshock: Infinite is also dieselpunk rather than steampunk, but I realize that is extremely nitpicky and makes no substantive difference). It’s definitely more common in that space, but I would argue it’s far from saturated or dominant.I also forgot Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra in my original comment, which slipped my mind because they aren’t the European or American setting that most things in the genre have and are more fantasy based than a lot of the genre, but very much should still count, but while immensely popular in a lot of ways, that is still a niche property and not really the “people in top hats, corsets, goggles and with ridiculous amounts of cogs and pistons” that most associate with the genre, so I’d still say it doesn’t really contradict my point. Steampunk is really popular in some nerd spaces, but it’s practically a nonentity to most of the general public.
I’ve always considered Steampunk more of an aesthetic than an actual genre.That said, if you want to read some really good contemporary fantasy literature with a steampunk setting, check out Josiah Bancroft’s amazing “The Books of Babel” series.
Yeah, it really is more of an aesthetic. Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check it out.
I never got the argument that steampunk is played out because there hasn’t really been a piece of mainstream media that has been steampunk and successful.I think that’s exactly why people are sick of steampunk. Whenever it’s tried, it ends up being trash. Maybe one day someone will pull it off, but it doesn’t seem that this is it either.
Carnival row did this better.
Not really.
AV Club mentioned this show when it was first announced, back before the whole Ray Fisher/ everything else fallout hit (I think his ex-wife had brought some stuff to light, but that was it). And even then, it sounded more like Whedon parody. Victorian London? Mysteriously super-powered ladies? Names like “Amalia True?” “Penance Adair?” “Dr. Horatio Cousens?” I mean, Jesus Christ. Is this a joke?
Is Victorian London a common Whedon setting/trope that somehow I’ve missed out on? (I really only know his TV work from Buffy to Dollhouse—yep, never seen The Avengers or any movies aside from Serenity) Can’t argue your other points…
He did an arc of the Runaways comic which sent the characters back to 1907 New York where they met several characters with mutant powers, which looks like a dry run for this.
I guess maybe the flashbacks on Buffy/Angel to the origins of Angel-Spike-Drusilla is the source of that “trope”?
Yeah, I don’t know were I got that from, but a Whedon steam-punk joint just seems so obvious.
With Buffy and Angel he did relatively frequently revisit the coming of age for his vampires and he did a run on the Runaways comic (that simultaneously kept the series afloat and temporarily killed it?) where the characters travelled back to early 1900s-ish New York, despite primarily taking place in modern day SoCal. On Firefly/Serenity it seems like he also dug a lot of the period set dressing and speech patterns over futuristic components?
“I mean, Jesus Christ. Is this a joke?”- The KinjaAVClub
On the plus side, all of those names sound fantastic when read aloud by Matt Berry.
Everything sounds great when read aloud by Matt Berry, though.
LOL it’s like he said “oh you broads don’t think I’m a feminist just because I like to torment my actresses? well watch me feminist the shit out of this story.”
It does seem like it’s devolved into Tim Burton-style self parody does t it?
I though it was a rip off of Gail Carriger heroine names.
I remember there was a Buffy week on the AV club shortly before Kai Cole’s public declaration about him, and the site switched gears pretty fast without any real acknowledgement of the disconnect.
A corollary of people overlooking shitty behavior of artists they like is this trend of people acting like someone who is revealed to be a shithead or worse has always sucked creatively. That is probably not as helpful as they seem to think.
Linking someone’s artistic output to their abusive behavior just makes it harder to accept when someone whose work you like is revealed to be a predator, which is a huge part of the cultural problem. Normalizing “I really liked this thing, but the guy who made it is a sex offender who probably shouldn’t still be getting work” would make it easier to go after the Cosbys and Louis CKs without turning it into a referendum on irrelevant things like taste.
Yeah, Joss Whedon was my favorite filmmaker as a teenager and I still love a lot of his shows, but I’m never watching anything he does in the future after all the revelations about him, because the merit of his artistic output isn’t the issue here. I will say, though, that I can understand some negative critical shift, because “odd moments” I used to give the benefit of the doubt now seem much more telling. But the idea that there’s “nothing more Joss Whedon” than an overtly sexist moment inside the text of his shows just seems like a complete mixing of art and artist. That Joss Whedon was able to create high-quality, mostly feminist art while being a misogynist in real life is, as you noted, a genuinely important takeaway for the future.
I think of people like Martin Scorsese and Margaret Atwood and how, if he turned out to be a wife beater or she were keeping runaways locked in her basement, respectively, their entire oeuvres would almost instantly be recontextualized as a series of massive red flags. But they’re both pretty old and likely to die without any major scandals, so instead, the works will remain modern masterpieces. Allowing that a work can be good even though the person who made it is an asshole or a monster also allows a person to be condemned as an asshole or a monster even though they made something good. We desperately need that ability as a society, as our struggles without it have so far not gone all that well.
Atwood and Scorsese have both come out in defense of predators, so there’s that.
i used to think separating the art from the artist was a more adult, mature way of looking at things…but now i actually feel the opposite.louis ck, for example, used to make a lot of ‘relatable’ jokes about constantly needing to masturbate…and those jokes DO get recontextualized when you learn that he literally has a compulsion that hurts other people.the jokes were ‘good’ and the man is ‘bad’, but i think you ought not to completely separate the two.
People mean a couple of different things when they talk about separating the art from the artist, some of which I think are appropriate, some I would argue against on philosophical and practical grounds, and some which I think are a matter of ethics.
I don’t object to, for example, “Regardless of how well-constructed this masturbation joke may be, a man who uses his dick to trap people has lost the right to treat the subject so lightly to rapturous applause.”
Similarly, “I’m going to stop giving my money to hear Louis CK’s work because he’s a predator” seems like a necessary first step for improving entertainment’s shit swamp of abuse.
But “Louis CK has always been a terrible comedian” doesn’t automatically follow from finding out he was a sex criminal in his personal life. It just shouldn’t matter, and making it the focus of the discussion distracts from the real issue, even if it’s well-intentioned.
But “Louis CK has always been a terrible comedian” doesn’t automatically follow from finding out he was a sex criminal in his personal life.While there may be people retconning their views, part of the dynamic might also be that people who really never did like him speak up more while people who did aren’t writing paeans of praise anymore. And that bit can create a bad impression without dishonesty on the part of individuals
That’s probably true, but again, I would suggest that taking someone’s being revealed as a sexual predator as an opportunity to air your grievances with their creative output is unhelpful at best. At worst, you’re prioritizing vindicating your own taste over preventing future assaults by redirecting the discussion from what’s important.
Yeah, the internet isn’t conducive to nuance, but I think there’s this is a kind of case-by-case situation where artists need a lot of leeway to experiment and occasionally fail, but also… some works do cross a line where we’re no longer talking about moral ambiguity. And instead we’re just talking about someone hiding behind a thin veil of fiction to live out power fantasies and spread hate while maintaining plausible deniability.
“But the idea that there’s “nothing more Joss Whedon” than an overtly sexist moment inside the text of his shows just seems like a complete mixing of art and artist.”
And I gotta say (and I could very well be in the minority on this) when I finally saw the moment the reviewer was mentioning–where she changes into her, err, fighting underclothes while falling–I thought “Wait, this was the moment that shows the awfulness of Joss Whedon?”
That Joss Whedon was able to create high-quality, mostly feminist art while being a misogynist in real life is, as you noted, a genuinely important takeaway for the future.Is he mysogynist, though? I mean, he’s an abusive asshole, but one does not necessarily follow the other. My impression is that he’s a man-child who throws an absolute flopping-on-the-floor-at-Target temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his way and just hurls abuse at the most convenient target.
When you’re more concerned with how your actresses look than the performance they give, and berate them for being fat, that’s misogyny. Set that to music and give it to Dean Martin to sing.
The worst stuff is definitely targeted at women, often in very gender-specific ways: Charisma Carpenter, Gal Gadot, Michelle Trachtenberg… One of the Firefly writers said he bragged about being able to make the female writers cry. And his ex-wife talked a lot about his sexism a few years ago, and her general comments have now been corroborated.
I was specifically thinking about Gal Gadot and his reaction to her. He was freakin’ livid that she didn’t want to read the lines he gave her and reacted like a spoiled child with the whole, “I’m gonna make you look sooooo stuuuupid in this movie if you don’t read what I give you!!”
That doesn’t come off as especially gender-specific (to me, at least) but more like a shitty hair-trigger asshole who wants everything his way all the time and lashes out like a toddler if he doesn’t get it. It also sounds a hell of a lot like the James Marsters story: “I came along, and I wasn’t designed to be a romantic character. But then the audience reacted that way to it. And I remember he backed me up against a wall one day, and he was just like, ‘I don’t care how popular you are, kid, you’re dead. You hear me? Dead. Dead!’ And I was just like, ‘Uh, you know, it’s your football, man. OK.’”
But it all might be a distinction without a difference. Kind of the “I can’t be sexist if I treat everybody like dogshit!” defense.
There is the business which came out before the more direct bullying, about Gadot not wanting to do the scene with Flash tripping and falling on WW’s breasts, which her stunt double ended up doing. That seems gender-specific, however it connects to their other disputes.
Yeah, his best defense is definitely “I hate everyone.” I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s at least as racist as he is sexist, between Ray Fisher’s comments and his portrayal of minorities in his TV shows, which seemed problematic even back when people like myself thought he was outright feminist. A handful of often-stereotypical Black people across four shows, and everyone else was white, even in Firefly where the characters cursed in Mandarin.But most of his attacks on women seemed to have a gendered edge, even if he attacked other people as well. And it occurs to me, most of his collaborators who’ve stayed silent, or clearly been oblivious were men, while pretty much every woman who’s talked about this seemed to already know he was a jerk. Like, both Sarah Michelle Gellar and Anthony Head were supportive of Charisma Carpenter, but Gellar seemed to know exactly what Carpenter was talking about, while Head appeared genuinely shocked. Plus, Whedon’s always had an “interest” in gender and feminism, which feels a bit suspicious now that we know his general temperament.
He left the show, what more do you want? Why punish everyone else involved?
I meant in the future, like, if he creates a new show or movie after this point.
I had a similar thought watching the ads for this. Men being angry they can’t control powerful women is a trope that comes up often in Whedon’s work. Only now do we know that he’s on the opposite side of it than we had thought.
I do wonder if there’s self-loathing involved in it, or if he’s just too self-absorbed to notice or care. But I’m sure somebody will make a tell-all documentary about him one day, and that’s the last I need to hear from him now.
I think the reason is that certain shitty behavior highlights parts of work that were previously overlooked, and so what was once seen as fine, suddenly becomes a lot more concerning. Ignoring Whedon whose had his own reevaluation, there’s some men as women ‘humour’ in I.T Crowd that comes off a hell of a lot worse since Graham Linehan want off the TERF deep end, and parts of Transmetropolitan that come off as significantly more dodgy now we know how Warren Ellis dealt with women he had power over.
I agree that A.V. Club should always have realized that Joss Whedon sucked creatively
Well said–and I agree completely. And maybe my reading of this review is unfair and the critic would have been as harsh on all the Whedonisms regardless, but… (Having watched the first episode, I personally didn’t feel they were as prominent as this review did anyway, though admittedly a lot of his influence has now become pretty standard genre TV tropes).
Yeah, I saw the list of Whedon tropes and . . . they didn’t seem all that specific to Whedon. I mean, yeah, “young female protagonists tortured by supernatural ability and responsibility” sounds like Buffy, but only Buffy. And the rest of the examples just sounded like genre staples. I mean, listing “hand-to-hand combat” and “bad guy with mysterious powers” as Whedon storytelling quirks?
The guy’s definitely got a style that, as you said, has been copied enough that it’s more-or-less become a set of generalized tropes. Surprising the audience by setting up a well-known trope only to zag into a different direction at the last minute, self-aware characters who comment on the absurdity of the situation they’re in, reference-heavy dialogue, setting up a BIG DRAMA moment only to undermine it with an unexpected gag, there are a lot of things he did well enough that they became wildly popular and now are just part of the storytelling language.
“Woman with power and suffering because of it” could plausibly cover Drusilla, Illyria kind of, Fred, Cordelia, Kitty Pryde, River, Willow-ish, Echo, November, and probably others.That said, I’m aware that male superheroes often go through those issues too since there’s less conflict if people are totally chill with things and less conflicted.
“Woman with power and suffering because of it” is not what the reviewer said, though.
“young female protagonists tortured by supernatural ability and responsibility”It rules out pretty much everyone on your list aside from Buffy and, true, Cordelia later on in Angel’s run. (Either they aren’t the protagonist, their abilities aren’t supernatural, they aren’t tortured by it, or don’t feel the weight of responsibility).
Whedon does have his tropes, and there are several in The Nevers, but they aren’t really mentioned in the review. And, like others have mentioned, it’s not really heavily identifiable as Whedonesque. If I didn’t already know he created the show, I wouldn’t necessarily make that connection.
Also, I don’t get the, “Nothing gets more Joss Whedon than having a woman strip off her dress while punching another woman in the face.” in the review. That’s . . . not a Whedon thing. I suppose I could be forgetting something, but as far as I can recall that’s never ever happened on a Whedon show.
But, oof, the closing credits . . .
Obviously there was nothing HBO could do about it, but “Directed By Joss Whedon, Written By Joss Whedon, Created By Joss Whedon, Executive Producer Joss Whedon,” was obviously designed for the period of time when “EVERYBODY’s SUPER EXCITED FOR WHEDON’s RETURN TO TELEVISION!” was the prevailing opinion.
Haha yah the four straight Joss Whedon credits in a row were a bit much. At least put written and directed under one!
I was just reframing it it as an accusation I’ve seen thrown Whedon’s way that was slightly less narrow but still reasonably close— that was meant to be the precise phrasing as opposed to a direct quote but I guess in hindsight I could have been clearer about it.I also meant power as in superheroics/supernatural/not existing in this world vs. power dynamics and protagonist as “hero” so someone like Blindspot (is that the name?), the mutant girl with no eyes who was alienated for her prophetic visions that made her come off as “crazy”/neuroatypical, still help illustrate a potential pattern. (I guess even in Sugar Shock— was that his only time there was a WOC as the lead protagonist of a team?— you could argue that was an instance of the outright lead as opposed to a supporter who suffered for her gift, granted it was something like rocking too hard or something.)There is a lot of nuance there, in part since a lot of those characters still have a bunch of other traits beyond just those boiled down aspects, but I can see where people would build a case with the text. (Like the Age of Ultron Black Widow “monster” line I’ve seen glibly used on a bunch of these G/OM sites as a way of writing off Whedon as definitively linking it to infertility, even though in context it seemed relatively clear to me he meant it to refer to her actions/assassinations.)
Gotcha. Plus, as you said before, “(Person) with power and suffering because of it” is a pretty standard superhero trope. I mean, it’s Spider-Man’s whole “great power/great responsibility” thing. It covers, like, 90% of the X-Men. It’s the Snyderverse version of Superman, Cyborg, AND Aquaman. So it’s kinda weird to say “apply a basic superhero trope to a young woman” is specifically a Whedon thing. It’s more just a “writing female superheroes” thing.
Now, as for that Age of Ultron line, it was clunky as hell and definitely came across like she was talking about her infertility making her a monster, but that probably wasn’t the intent. Plus, that whole movie was clunky. It really needed about three more script revisions to really connect all the dots.
I mean, at one point a character asks a really important question, “Why would Ultron immediately go evil,” and instead of even trying to answer they just change the subject. Especially on a rewatch, it’s obvious no one had a clue other than, “because otherwise there’s no bad guy for the movie.”
Yeah, someone being totally cool with their powers and just having the wish fulfillment of it all would probably be dramatically inert so fair enough.To some extent though, in having so many female characters with some sort of supernatural abilities there are some pitfalls that might occur if some of the same beats keep coming up in similar manners. (Like yeah I was primed to hear some off hand quipped line readings like “oh no she fell” as Whedonesque since I went in watching the show familiar with his work, but the neuro-atypical “crazy” villain speech was very much like a more sexual Drusilla one.)Also I think it’s also important to note that some of these stories aren’t just in the context of the creator’s own work but the genre and tropes they belong to as well. Like Bryan Fuller pointedly talked about avoiding sexual violence as a component of any of the murdered women on Hannibal— and as far as I know he adhered to that, even though in some cases the bodies ended up being nude women? Yet with Whedon I do remember reading some articles that had issues with perceived patterns of sexual violence as a threat against his female characters. (I’m somewhat of two minds about that as a non-woman since I recognize that yes it happens but is it necessarily serving some of those stories to have that be a part?)I didn’t particularly like Age of Ultron either and I forget if they ever said it outright or not, but I got the impression Ultron got access to the internet and decided we weren’t worth it? That seems fairly close to the scene in The Fifth Element where a character gets all of human experience loaded into her brain and starts to question of Earth is worth saving when she mostly encounters the war and callousness.
I mostly agree – a lot of people are involved in making a TV show, and dismissing the whole thing because the guy in charge was a bad person minimizes the contributions of all those other people. My one quibble is that sometimes these sorts of revelations make elements you’d otherwise be able to overlook more glaring – eg, Xander’s “but I’m a nice guy”, borderline incel behavior. But yes, I thought this review was being really hard on a show for things outside the text. A new X Men show sounds like fun – what’s the problem?
My one quibble is that sometimes these sorts of revelations make elements you’d otherwise be able to overlook more glaring – eg, Xander’s “but I’m a nice guy”, borderline incel behavior.
Yeah, I don’t even know that I’d disagree with that. I wouldn’t even argue with people who find Buffy has been totally ruined for them — I can’t watch anything starring Cosby because they all star an unrepentant serial rapist. But I have no beef with people who were big fans of the Cosby Show way back when because “this plays differently for me now that I know what he does in his spare time” is a bit different than “he was never funny.”
Well said. I think these narratives conveniently like to ignore just how many people are involved with a TV show (and Joss Whedon, particularly at this stage of his career, doesn’t run his writer’s room like Aaron Sorkin or Matt Weiner). But, yeah, it’s absolutely fair to point out how it does bring certain things into question…
One can still appreciate Buffy (and other things Whedon was involved in making) while also acknowledging how Whedon is toxic. There were a lot of other artists involved in the making of those projects.
Agreed, but while “Whedon the man was toxic” is pretty reasonable at this point based on what we know about him, I think we should resist this urge to assume that everything good about his work came from other people and that Whedon was mostly just lurking around, waiting to pollute the waters with sexist tropes that represented his true feelings.
It’s probably more useful in the long run to grapple honestly with the more difficult but also more likely possibility that a guy was capable of saying a lot of the right things with his work while being a complete hypocrite in his personal life. Our inability to do that has historically ended up sheltering predators.
Does he deserve everything that is coming to him though? From what I’ve read the allegations all boil down to the fact that he’s kind of a jerk and not exactly a ray of sunshine to work with. If we start cancelling people for that 75% of the population is going to be out of a job. If he sexually abuses someone or does something overtly racist let me know, otherwise he’s still ok in my book. Artists aren’t exactly normal people… Tim Burton, for example is a known lunatic that throws hissy fits and breaks stuff when he doesn’t get his way. So yeah maybe he’s not your best friend, but he makes good films and employs a lot of people to make those films so maybe just suck it up and do your job?
That’s fine. Honestly I was maybe too glib by saying that he deserves what he’s getting—my main point was simply that this review struck me simply as being heavily biased because it was Joss (having watched the pilot now, I honestly didn’t think the “Joss tropes” were as overly abundant as the critic states) and that by pointing that out I didn’t want to get into whether a Whedon work should be judged differently or not. Certainly Joss’ stuff seems tame even compared to others like Scott Rudin who has been getting away with asshole producer stuff for decades—but I’m not interested in using this space to debate whether he deserves being “canceled” or not (for what it’s worth it seems that he genuinely did leave this project at least partly because of some personal issues outside of everything else).
We do know that Jane Espenson was also heavily involved in the writing here and a lot of the elements here are common to her writing–granted, she honed her writing (at least in the mainstream) working with Whedon, so…
I love Whedon’s work. It is a big reason I work in the TV industry. But the shit people describe from the Buffy was not acceptable. I’ve worked with arsehole directors and producers, but nothing where every female cast member is traumatised 20 years later. Where the director isn’t allowed around one of the shows stars because she is under 18. He *prided* himself in making female writers cry on notes calls.Even if that is normal in the industry for the likes of Burton to be pricks, we should stop letting it be. The romanticised notion of the abusive “perfectionist” creative can frankly get fucked. I’m not saying ban Buffy or anything, but maybe in future we hire people who can behave with the basic professionalism and courtesy that is legally required in 99% of jobs.
Yeah, we need to stop doing the thing where somebody is an abusive boss and the explanation is, “Well, they’re an artist.” No, you can make great art without the abuse, suck it up and be professional, this is a workplace, not a place for a director to work out his/her (but usually his) anger issues on people who work for him.
I don’t care if it’s Hitchcock, or Kubrick, it’s past time for that shit to be over.
100%. And it’s a mindset that starts early, in my experience. Even at university level filmmaking, you had a bunch of people who’d never directed before, so excited to be pricks. There’s a weird romanticisation of Fincher/Cameron/Kubrick bullshit like doing a million takes, refusing to compromise or collaborate, obsessing over unnecessary details and being a total arse to everyone (frequently women), as if those are the important bits to emulate. Luckily, it seems to be becoming less acceptable in both amateur and professional settings.
meh I think we can start holding people like Whedon accountable for being abusive on set, he fucked over Carpenter for simply being a woman and Fisher sounds like a victim of a racism even if it wasn’t direct. He has some rage on set that needs to be checked, otherwise make room for someone worth working with.It’s not cancelling, legit had an HBO show premiere last night lol.
Kind of a jerk? He threatens people’s careers for daring to exercise autonomy. No man, he’s bad news.
Artists actually are just normal people, you’re talking about people who were given authority and made enough money to be protected by their studios from the consequences of their antisocial behavior.If you’re an artist and you don’t have that privilege you’ll soon find that your tantrums, or otherwise obnoxious behaviour, mean that people won’t want to work with you in the future.
Yeah, I think it’s a problem of bad behavior being excused and protected for a LONG time, and therefore escalating.
If somebody at the network would have grabbed Whedon the first time he got abusive on Buffy and told him to cut it the fuck out or he’s losing his job and his show, he might have learned to put a lid on that shit.
“If you’re an artist and you don’t have that privilege you’ll soon find that your tantrums, or otherwise obnoxious behaviour, mean that people won’t want to work with you in the future.”
Usually, although there are a lot of examples (think of the avant garde theatre world–not exactly a lucrative career space) where people feel they should put up with an awful lot for the chance to be around a “genius” even if he’s a genius with little financial support. That attitude isn’t always dependent on having a huge company you’re making money for covering for you—it’s an odd but still prevalent attitude.
Firing a woman for being pregnant goes beyond “kind of a jerk to work with.” Crossing lines with your under-18 employee to the point where you’re not allowed to be in the same room with them alone is a litle more than “not exactly a ray of sunshine.”
exactly, people handwaving his actions as not that bad are part of the problem. I also commend SGM for coming to support her costars, we’ve seen the relationship between actresses still supporting folks like Woody Allen because of his hand in their career. I don’t really blame the actresses for this, we don’t know what level of manipulation happened to them on set. But SGM obviously is able to separate her gratitude for her career and her ability to see the harm Whedon has done to others, and that should be the way it is.
Dude encouraged Charisma Carpenter to get an abortion because her pregnancy made her less physically attractive and would disrupt shooting.
Look, I’m not thrilled with the “everyone who does something bad is THE WORST EVER AND NO BETTER THAN A PEDOPHILE CHILD PREDATOR WHO EATS GRANDMAS,” thing that’s been going on.
Not everyone who’s a jerk or even creepy is a Harvey Weinstein/Kevin Spacey level predatory scumbag.
By all accounts, Whedon’s an abusive asshole when he doesn’t get his way. He plays favorites, is WILDLY unprofessional, has had many morally questionable (but consensual) sexual relationships, and was also an awful husband.
So, the guy sucks. He sucks in the same way a lot of TV creators and movie directors have sucked. That doesn’t make it okay and I’m glad the word is out that directors and creators need to cut that shit out if you want to remain employed. Making good films or TV shows does not require the director be an abusive shithead.
“So yeah maybe he’s not your best friend, but he makes good films and employs a lot of people to make those films so maybe just suck it up and do your job?”
Or maybe the dude making directing the movie or TV show can just not be an abusive shithead. Professionalism starts at the top. Seems a lot easier than forcing HUNDREDS of other people to suck it up and deal with the abuse.
I don’t understand how “artists” don’t have to hold to the general rule of “hey, maybe don’t be an unrepentant asshole all the time” like the rest of humanity.
And hey, if you want to be an asshole artist, go be a writer. Or a painter. Or sculptor. Or poet. Or a solo musician. Or any other art form that isn’t inherently collaborative. Be a raging asshole all you want in the comfort of your own studio. Just don’t subject a bunch of employees (writers, actors, crew) to your insecurity and anger issues.
I was just listening to an interview with Jameela Jamil and she said that Mike Schur is renowned for his one-strike “no assholes” policy (the first thing he says to any new cast member or crew, “Two rules, one, best joke wins, two no assholes on set. Period. One strike and you’re gone.”) so it’s not like it’s impossible to make a GREAT show without being a dick.
Pressuring your employee to have an abortion is more than “being a jerk.”
Think of it this way: if your best friend—or heck, even a casual acquaintance—told you, verbatim, the stories people have told about Whedon happened to them, would you say to that person “Sounds like he’s just not a ray of sunshine to work with, but he employs a lot of people, so maybe just suck it up and do your job.” Would that person ever speak to you again? I’m not saying Whedon deserves to never work again, and obviously I don’t know what really happened with him, but “he’s kind of a jerk” is a pretty dismissive reaction given the many complaints against him.Also, he doesn’t really employ all those people, the studios do, and they’d be employed with another director. Just like with The Nevers.
“My boss is pressuring me to have an abortion because he thinks my pregnancy is making me less attractive.”“Sounds like he’s just not a ray of sunshine to work with, but he employs a lot of people, so maybe just suck it up and do your job”Yeah, it’s not working.
“Does he deserve everything that is coming to him though? From what I’ve
read the allegations all boil down to the fact that he’s kind of a jerk
and not exactly a ray of sunshine to work with.”
Does he deserve a job if no one wants to work with him anymore?He’s not entitled to having his own show, or to directing blockbusters. There’s only so many of those that are made every year, if people decide they’d rather someone else got a chance to make one, rather than let him make yet another one, why shouldn’t they?
Go find out about his interactions with Charisma Carpenter and a teenage Michelle Trachtenberg and then get back to us.Here, I’ll even give you some help with that.
He was also not allowed alone in a room with Michelle Tractenberg. God only knows why that washttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michelle-trachtenberg-says-joss-whedon-was-not-allowed-to-be-alone-with-her-on-buffy
Because she was a minor? Two in the room is a pretty standard rule for interacting with minors these days. I offered to watch my kid and another kid at my husband’s church for like 10 min while the caretakers each went to the bathroom and took a phone call and was told I couldn’tcouldn’t be the only adult, it was just policy.
My only defense of watching a movie or TV show again when someone who has done something immoral is that there are a megaton of people working on those shows, so it is not a singular vision by far. Rewatch for those people. I just do not like it when all offenders are labeled for cancel mode. Being a jerk and being taken to court when several women testify against you are two totally different things. As is having a contrary opinion. Yet I see authors and directors of all types being “cancelled” for even things they apologized for. What a world.
I think a lot of people replying to this comment are focusing too much on the most shocking allegations that have been made public recently. Bottom line: no one should have to work in a toxic environment, even if their boss is a creative professional.
Joss may be a jerk, but he’s still one of the greatest writer’s of all time. Great first episode. Fuck the haters.
Honestly his stock had been on a downward trend since Age of Ultron was a bit of a letdown – though I wasn’t nearly as down on it as a lot of people – and Justice League whipping wildly between Snyder’s “every moment is epic” and Whedon’s quippier approach was a pretty major blow to his reputation even before the revelation that it was even worse behind the scenes.Given that his critical stock was on a downward trend anyway and he’s honestly rarely ever able to make a pilot that wasn’t the worst episode of the show, I don’t know if this would ever have been considered great. There are just fewer people able to forgive its flaws now that he’s more not than hot.
What tends to make Whedon’s spiral more severe is that he was seen not just as an extremely talented writer or producer, but as a god. To me it felt like he got more of the hype for his shows than many in the cast did. The same happened with The Avengers. Many people put him up on a huge pedestal and needed him to be whatever they wanted him to be. Even as late as 2013, long after many had already begun to be more vocal in their criticism of the misogyny in his work, people were agog at his big speech about feminism, because wow, Joss Whedon was saying it. The allegations and the further declining quality of his work are what led us here, but the fall wouldn’t have been so hard if he hadn’t been so unnecessarily deified in the first place.
He really did seem to be one of the first extreme examples of showrunner as God to many fans. Even on seasons and entire shows where he never was the actual showrunner (which I admit is one reason I think it’s a bit too simplistic to—both when viewed positively and negatively—to now read every minor moment on any of his tv shows and indicative of Joss. Interestingly in the making of featurette that aired after this premier, the only writer interviewed was Jane Espenson, who has been one of his major writers since early Buffy, though has gone on with mixed results—we won’t discuss the season fo Torchwood she was co-showrunner of—outside of the Whedon realm.
I haven’t seen Ultron or either Justice League, but you have a point about how rarely he manages to land the pilot (though this is a pretty common issue–at least as common as those who can do great pilots and crappy follow through).
Whedon could very well be “done,” in the sense that his contribution has been made and it’s time to move on. But he did make the contribution. The dude walked onto The Avengers and his sensibility was a perfect fit. That wasn’t a coincidence. That was like somebody finally getting their pity/apology Oscar, and, at least in my opinion, doing a solid job on that project to boot.
Whedon fatigue could also be real, but I’m wary of some serious Seinfeld Isn’t Funny or Tolkien Is Just A D&D Ripoff vibes too. As far as making the choice to retroactively dislike the guy’s work because he’s an asshole, well, that’s quite obviously a fight that isn’t getting won with an argument.
He might not be a talent on the level of Tarantino, Larry David, Sorkin, or the original The Simpsons writers room, but within the wheelhouse of nerdland tv/movie shit, he did the same work during roughly the same time period. He made shit smarter, expanded the possibility space, slightly increased female actor/character representation, and served as a beyond-necessary corrective to how overwrought and clunky the dialogue and character interactions had become.
(Full disclosure: I tend to think that, for nerdland shit, the grimdark movement was a necessary first half to a larger corrective movement, with Whedon coming in for the second half and leveling some shit out.)For whatever it’s worth, he also had an eye for talent, and was willing to actively stump for actors he thought deserved better things. That makes it all the more tragic he mistreated some of them too.
I’m not really going to argue about the quality of his work – though the first Avengers was great – just that fashion has a fairly large amount of play in terms of what critics love and loathe. Whedon is out of fashion – initially because has done some of his worst work in the past few years, additionally because of the accusations – and thus isn’t going to get the benefit of the doubt like before.
The actual pilot to Firefly was just fine.
Yeah it is weird how becoming an unperson being erased like the ministry of truth does changes things. A couple people say he acted like a crappy person and all of a sudden all the things he did that were beloved just a year ago are now “tropes” and to be avoided, when Buffy is one of the most beloved series of all time and the Avengers is a 4 star movie. He did pretty well with those tropes.
The first avengers is probably a three star movie in isolation. It’s not bad, and it built a decent framework for Phase 2, but it’s not up to the standards of even the first Captain America movie. And Age of Ultron is even worse.
It is not my favorite movie ever but most published reviewers gave it four stars
He’s always been a one- or two-trick pony to me.
I don’t know – I was disappointed to hear Whedon was going to direct The Avengers because I was already sick of his one-note style by then and I can’t imagine I was the only one.
I hated Whedon before it was cool.
My wife and I were in line for.. something.. at New York Comic Con in 2009 and Whedon and Tahmoh Penikett walked by and Whedon just gave off this bad vibe. It’s something we remember to this day.
I saw Whedon chatting with Riki Lindhome at some comic con event and then I happened to see them eating together at a restaurant and I thought, “oh, shit, please don’t tell me Riki Lindhome is dating Joss Whedon.”But, apparently they weren’t. Thank god.
Which came first?
Joss Whedon’s Debris?
Or NBC’s The Nevers?
So they’re The Turned in the series but The Touched in commercials? Did this change in ADR because somebody finally realized The Touched could have icky connotations?Odds on if they explain the empowering event later or if it remains mysterious like Heroes & Misfits?
No, the show seems to exclusively use the term “Touched.” Watching right now and I haven’t heard “Turned” at all.. not sure what’s up with this review
also most of the opening scene (as it was described in this review) doesn’t actually happen until the very end of the episode…
This review mentions a number of things that I didn’t catch AT ALL while watching (like some of the abilities that some of the Touched have). It is very possible I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but given that the review talks about the scene of the vessel flying over London as if it happens at the beginning of the episode (I know the EVENT happens before the main events of the episode, but the episode doesn’t show us that part until the end), I rather wonder if whatever screener this reviewer saw was a slightly different edit. It definitely made me feel like I’d watched a slightly different version of the episode than they did.I fear more likely that the reviewer used info provided by a press packet (info that hasn’t fully been revealed or explained to the audience yet) to pad their review because maybe they didn’t pay that close of attention themselves.
I know what you mean by “mysterious like Heroes”, but I can’t help but think when I hear of anything “like” Heroes, well I’ll let John Hurt say it for me
I genuinely like the first season of Heroes, and had it ended with that it would still be viewed as a great series.
I don’t know, Sylar surviving the S1 finale was the series’ original jump the shark moment for me.
Heroes taught us that there is a very dangerous character type to introduce into a superhero story: ones who can steal or absorb powers. They ratchet up power creep, often kill off characters with weaker (and more unique) powers, and almost always have boring motivations about being power obsessed or being special (especially if they start with no powers).They’re almost as bad as time travelers, which of course Heroes had as well. They managed to make both work in S1 with heavy application of the rule-of-cool, but it would’ve taken an absolutely excellent writer (and probably writers) to make all the pieces they set up work in a clean way in future seasons.Frankly, I sometimes watch Infinity War/Endgame and marvel (hah) at what an unbelievably good job they did facing a not-too-different set of problems. Those were also writers benefitting from decades and decades of comic book stories, a huge starting fan base, and (eventually) Disney’s wallet.
You know how the place Sylar was defeated in season 1 was called Kirby Plaza? I read it was named after Jack Kirby, but to me it also works as a reference to Kirby, the video game character who acquires the powers of people he eats.
Wouldn’t that be more Peter though? Sylar kept his abilities, whereas Kirby loses his abilities under certain conditions?Cute reference though, was not aware of it.
I haven’t played Kirby game in decades. Also, I just watched season 1 of Heroes but nothing past that.
“Did this change in ADR because somebody finally realized The Touched could have icky connotations?”Clearly. Everytime someone said “touched” in the promos, I winced. I don’t think anyone wants to conflate female empowerment with being “touched” … except Whedon.
They’re “the Touched” in the show but their powers are called “turns”.
No, they’re called The Touched in the show. I don’t know why the review referred to it differently. “Turns” is the term used to refer to their abilities.
One, if it only included women amongst the Turned, there would be a murmur that this was some kind of exploitation of women. This is one area that isn’t very winnable. Best just to put whichever choice is made under the light of great storytelling.Two, the storytelling needs to improve as more time separates the show from Whedon. I’ll use the show Cobra Kai as an example. While it does do a great job of drawing from the Karate Kid movies, it also introduces new material and works amazingly with that as well. Thus, a 4th season is coming.
This is a reboot of the “twist” in the Buffy finale, where every potential slayer was activated, with a bonus retread from the Angel episode where it turned out that not every activated slayer started out sane, Drusilla’s backstory (insane even before becoming a vampire), and maybe a dash of Velvet Goldmine. I don’t think it’s a horrible concept to revisit (if your broad aim is to empower everyone, you have to take the good with the bad) but I don’t think this level of self-seriousness serves Whedon’s concepts well. It doesn’t play well as a slow burn.
You do kind of have to wonder what this review would have looked like had it been the exact same show but we were still been living in the alternate universe where Joss Whedon’s shittiness hadn’t been exposed and the dominant critical mindset towards him was still a kind of fawning adulation based on him being some kind of feminist nerd-god.
So, you think this show would have gotten a good review simply because Whedon was viewed as a feminist, but got a bad review because people now know he is not a feminist. Very A/V Club comment.
Yes.
Actually I suspect it got a bad review now because people know he’s an abusive creep, not just because people know he’s “not a feminist”. (Or, to be less glib, I can’t help but suspect that reviews of this show might have been a bit more generous, if still possibly critical, had we still been living in a world where Whedon’s abusiveness was less well-known and he still had a lot of goodwill from Buffy to burn through.)
Personally, I find his work to be a bit juvenile. I will always love Buffy and Angel, but recent rewatches were slightly disappointing. The rhythms in the dialogue get grating after a while, and characters betray each other so deeply and ~dramatically that it’s an utter fallacy to expect half of them to still be around. The basic storytelling is great but i don’t think Joss “gets” people. So as someone who hasn’t seen the MCU stuff and couldn’t get through Firefly, I have to say that a serious reading of Buffy-type tropes SHOULD work bur might not.
Dunno about kinja, but before the Kai Cole story I’d been seeing people criticising Whedon’s past work for a fair while on the basis of it being fine for the 90s, but failing to keep pace with progress.The much-maligned Wonder Woman script was leaked before his separation from Cole too, and I don’t recall a single positive response. The best thing you can say about it is “At least it’s not Frank Miller’s version.”His fall was inevitable. The revelations of his personal and professional shittiness – and the ways it intersects with the flaws in his work – only hastened the decline.
Yeah, the writing was on the wall that he wasn’t growing as a Feminist and wasn’t growing as a writer. After Buffy there was still how Cordelia and Fred were treated, Inara in Firelfy, and basically the entire premise of Dollhouse. The Avengers was basically teed up for him in terms of it being an extended fan service movie (which is fine). But I’d tie Age of Ultron being so insipid to the general feeling of Whedon irrespective of his personal issues with women and his actors.
I don’t think it’s that easy. I think a lot of people were tiring of Whedon’s schtick way before we knew who he was. I don’t know anyone who bought into the “Joss Whedon, Super Feminist” thing for quite a while.
I mean, we’ve “known who he was” for quite a while, though. He’s been fairly well-known since the 1990s.
It’s easy to reinterpret it now but people had lost interest in his work since Age of Ultron. That’s when his old bonafides no longer worked to dispell all criticism.
So I just watched this and I gotta say – I really enjoyed it. But I can’t say I ever really tired of Joss Whedon’s work (I’m not talking about him as the person but his stories) exactly. I might have taken issue with one thing or another but… I genuinely don’t mind it being exactly what it appears to be – a generally female Victorian X-Men show with mysteries. Whedon aside (I mean, there was a classic superhero landing in this episode), I’m not sure you can call it a Whedon trope for the lead to “kick-ass” given that she’s lead in what’s effectively a superhero show. What else is she going to do? Not kick ass?I dunno. I actually had a good time and I anticipate a good time will continue to be had by those that stick around. Are there a lot of pots on the stove? Sure, but it seems pretty clear that a lot of these things are going to come together fairly quickly.
Alot of what this review had a negative reaction to is what I liked. I like overfull stories, I like snappy dialogue, I like exposition. The rest of the negative criticism just sounded like more “blah blah this guy we’ve been trying to convince you is a paragon of feminism even though you could totally tell he wasnt perfect at it and clearly had his own fetishes, is actually not a perfect feminist and has fetishes blah blah”. Like. Taking issue with the lady pulling her self out of the dress for her fight? So she still had on more clothes than I do right now, fighting in that dress would’ve been stupid, and 10 yrs ago the review would have been something like “she metaphorically removed the restrictive role forced on women by Victorian society and gained practical self agency”. In short. This review is fashionable bull shit.
I completely agree, this was one of the best pilots that I have seen in a while. But I am not surprised by this since I have liked or loved pretty much everything Whedon has done.
I understand that not everyone can or want to separate the work from the artist though.
I mostly agree with you. In fact, reading this review was so odd. There is an EXCELLENT chance I wasn’t paying full attention and missed some details while watching (I sometimes distract myself by doing other mindless things during TV time), but the review sounds like it was covering a slightly different version of the episode than the one I watched. (Or reviewing it with more information at hand than was actually revealed in the episode, which is not cool.)As to how I felt about it: I went into this VERY skeptical and ready to dislike given the recent revelations about Whedon. I had planned to skip it entirely, but at least a couple people whose taste I trust mentioned that it was actually really good, so I begrudgingly gave it a shot. I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, there were some things. (The dress rips off as she jumps from a dangerous height and lands in superhero landing? Really?) As some others have mentioned, I found the quippiness downright subdued. I am a little curious as to how Mrs. True is a borderline superhero in her fight skills. Is that an ability she gained in addition to her future flashes? If not, it’s a little eye-rolly. Still, I enjoyed it. There was a time I would have been all in, but I have more of a critical eye to Whedon’s work than I once did. Now I see it as a good start with a lot of potential but also plenty of room to go off the rails. But I’ll definitely tune in for the time being.
I also wondered if I missed something based on this recap. Granted, I wasn’t paying 100% attention, but I don’t recall it being revealed that the opera singer had been jilted, for example. And I think it’s poor…form? to write the recap as if the audience knows, from the start of the episode, pieces of information that were not, in fact, revealed until the end (e.g. antagonist’s daughter) – that’s just not how the episode unfolded.
Re Mrs True’s fighting skills. I was reminded of something I learned recently, that some English suffragettes learned jiu jitsu (also referenced in the netflix sherlocke-holmes-but-not-sherlock-holmes movie with Millie Bobby Brown). I wonder if it’s based on that fact, although exaggerated.
Laura Donnelly, Ann Skelly, Pip Torrens, and Nick Frost make the show. This was quite a bit too gonzo. Pip says we’re seeing the parts but not the whole. So yeah, lots of parts. I want – or wish I could say this was no more overstuffed than Penny Dreadful or Carnival Row, but it’s like someone at HBO or Whedon himself decided “Hey let’s keep the casts of Penny Dreadful and Carnival Row as is … and cram them into the same show, plots and all.” I can kind of see this going forward in its current form and being just this mass of chaos where maybe the concept is to swim through it all from episode to episode and hope various threads will float to the surface sort of like one-offs and eventually the threads will burn out or sort themselves eventually. It would be a heck of an experiment to start out this nutty and get simpler over time (whereas most shows go the opposite direction). Maybe it’s designed to have a high body count. HBO clearly blew a lot of dough on this, but such is the way of things when deals are struck years ago amidst high flying careers and bidding wars. I’m a little bit wishing this wasn’t such a hard PG-13 show, as it might have paired well with His Dark Materials. Yes, this is Mrs Peregrine’s Home for Throat-Slashing Steampunk X-Men. The Whedon “Whedonisms” don’t bother me as much as some. I’ve never gorged on Whedon until I threw up. His pilot episode for Agents of SHIELD was pretty good. Chatty, yes, but AoS only had a cast of 8 to introduce. The Nevers is like where an adhd kid you’re babysitting dumps a laundry tub full of assorted Legos on the living room floor and builds a magic car, an angelic spaceship, a castle, a theater, a subway tunnel, and a guy with a mini-gun arm among a dozen other things. It’s a mess, the child is a brat, but you can tell he’s having fun and you kind of want to get on the floor and help build stuff. However the painful memory of stepping barefoot on (and kneeling bare-kneed on) a two-by-three-dot Lego brick won’t leave your brain and keeps you on the couch – removed from the action. Cool spaceship though.Edit: Lordy, I watched it twice. You catch more on the 2nd go. I think it would have gone down better if they had left The Sex Club stuff for another episode.
Now this is a review!
I’ll give this one a couple more episodes. Seems like it could be an interesting world in the right hands, but the pilot didn’t exactly give me much confidence. It’s so weird that we still see these X-Men-like stories where people are given super powers and then treated as FREAKS and weirdos. They always want to portray them as foreigners, minorities, or the handicapped and yet give them these incredibly wonderful powers.
They mention that there have been cases of Touched worldwide but these were all people who had been in London 3 years ago. So yes. It was very localized.
I guess it is worldwide according to a Victorian “sun never sets on the British Empire” way. 🙂
The Whedonisms are strong but the cast is incredibly solid and the premise, while nothing amazing, is decent enough. I’ll likely keep watching especially to see if the change in showrunners tightens it up even more or causes it to implode.
As for what ‘The Nevers’ are I recall a piece early on mentioned it wasn’t intended as an in-world reference but as an external reference to the reaction to them. The ‘Well, I never!’ factor when faced with things that both should not be (in certain perspectives) and towards those who go against polite and proper established norms. (Again, very Whedon).
Yeah, I only read a couple of promo pieces, but both seemed to go out of their way to explain that The Nevers wasn’t a term that would actually be used on the show.
Just like nobody ever said “Boy, I really feel like a Leftover!” on that show.
I hope Stranger Things end with a title drop, like:“I hope things get back to normal around here.”(shrug) “Stranger things…”
It just seems like HBO needed a non-YA counterpart to The Irregulars. Hopefully it’s better.
Is this the period. lesbians.?
Maybe. The two leads adore each other very, very hard. I kept wondering if this was supposed to be “Very best friends” or “Happily Married”.
The reviews were so harsh but the actual show is quite fun and enjoyable. The Whedon revisionism at work here and pretty much everywhere is disappointing to say the least. Imagine a world where we as a society can differentiate between Joss Whedon and the show(s) he created. Now that he’s been excised from the public view, and righty so, it’s troublesome that the merits of the show rest exclusively on his shoulders. I mean, this entire review is Whedon-bashing like he’s the only person who’s working on the damn thing. There’s a lot of fine people that work on The Nevers who’s job is being diminished because of Whedon. So I say fuck him, and congratulations everyone else who did a splendid job of this pilot. It’s fast-paced, the world is wonderful and so is the friendship between Amalia and Penance. Laura Donelly and Ann Skelly are magnificent.
Which HBO seems to be trying to emphasize a lot. Watching the little featurette after the episode was frankly odd with how clearly it was avoiding any mention or appearance of Whedon. They even had these shoehorned in bits with Jane Espenson giving producer level commentary that felt very much like they were meant to fill a void left by cutting interview footage of Whedon. Don’t get me wrong – I love me some Espenson. It just very much felt like there was a Joss Whedon shaped elephant in that whole featurette.But yes, it is important to remember how many other wonderful artists contributed to the creation of this (as well as anything else Whedon was ever involved in).
I had a lot of fun watching this, even though it has practically every Whedon writing tic both good and bad. Victorian steampunk X-Men show is kinda my jam. The pilot is waaay overstuffed, with at least 3 or 4 different Big Bads to choose from with varying motivations. Would’ve been better if the pilot was 90 min just to give the characters a little more space.
I think making the pilot longer and dropping one or two of the big bads would have helped a lot. As is, there’s just way too much going on.
Maladie could very much be a Helena from Orphan Black if the show manages to last long enough (and they don’t kill her off this season).
Maladie reminded me of a deadlier version of Jennifer from the 12 monkeys tv series.
Having watched it after reading this review (though skimming the lengthy plot recap), I liked it a lot more than I expected to, especially after the first 20 minutes or so. Maybe I’m just a bit out of touch with Whedon—I was a devoted follower of Buffy from when the second episode aired, and followed Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse all as they aired—and I’ve gone back and revisited a lot of them but no full series rewatches and only a bit in the past 15 years. And I haven’t seen his movie work outside of Serenity (and Cabin in the Woods which I guess sorta counts). So maybe my radar for Whedon tropes are rusty—or so many of them have become common serialized genre tv show tropes anyway, but they didn’t bother me as much as I expected from this review (in fact the Whedon one-liners, which always bugged me, seemed positively
subdued here).
So I was expecting the worse, but I enjoyed the first episode at least enough to mean unless it really goes off the rails, I’ll be tuning into these first episodes. Will be interesting to see any difference with the post-Whedon episodes.
One trope I am getting tired of (but I don’t think this is a common Whedon thing) is we see that Swan is bi or pansexual in the opening scene (which is still played as if it’s meant to be a shock) but it seemed like any potential romantic relationship he’ll have on the show will be with one of the female leads (pretty clear which one). Which I guess I shouldn’t complain about—obviously if you’re pansexual or bi then the chances are just as likely you’ll end up with someone of the opposite sex than the same—but it just seems all too common for shows now that wanna be edgy to play their characters this way (it ultimately being far safer to have them romantically involved with the opposite sex). But I could be wrong—though I can’t remember Whedon ever really doing much with M/M relationships. And about gender…
“Anyone else disappointed that the Turned includes both women and men? My expectation from The Nevers and the hype leading up to it was that this steampunk world was one in which only girls and women were bestowed with powers, whether useful or harmful. But if the Turned are a more heterogeneous group, then… how is this any different from the X-Men?”
Besides the reviewer, WERE other people disappointed by this?? I mean, if so, why? We already had the all female slayers, and it seems clear that men who are “touched” (God that’s awkward) are a distinct minority, so I don’t really see why this would cause disappointment or a sense of the show’s advertising being misleading. Though it does seem to exist partly to facilitate an already telegraphed plot point, with the upper class and male Augustus showing powers. That said that could be an interesting plot point–that the white, upper class, male people in power only start to take this all seriously when it does affect their own (an uncomfortable parallel being the way AIDS was treated when it seemed to only afflict one “less important” part of the demographic).
omg the Swan trope is driving me mad because they do it the same in so many shows where there is a sleeping male sexual partner and that’s the last we see of it. Anyway, I enjoyed it! I was surprised some of the effects were a little janky like the giant little girl and how sloppy the first kidnap scene felt, so much cloak tripping. and it was weird how closely the lead feels to Buffy (mannerisms, self seriousness with a dry humour, lots of walls). But Buffy is also a very likeable character so I don’t mind spending time with this version of her.
I mostly feel the same (like I said, that first 20 mins didn’t really win me over too much mostly due to the first action scene). And I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought that about Swan with a male bed partner—I can’t even think of many concrete examples, and yet, it feels like it’s already become a tired trope to, as you say, show the sleeping male sex partner when you introduce the character (giving it some “edge”) but then pretty much ignore it. We’ll see, but at this point that’s not really any more progressive than a certain show apparently showing that a character is looking at both men and women on a hook up app…
He was 50/50 in the early Buffy seasons on whether Willow or Xander would get into a same-sex relationship, so there’s foreshadowing for both even though it ended up being Willow. Though there’s also the whole running gag that Andrew is obviously gay but they’ll never actually say it, which pretty much defines “product of its time.”
Andrew comes out in the Buffy comics.
So kinda like how Dumbledore came out? Fan-service after the fact.
Somehow I had never heard that about Xander. I guess I was thinking of how poorly Andrew was handled (though, as you say, that was partly a sign of the time–still, that Angel episode where he had a harem of women? …ok…) and the fact that somehow (unless I’m forgetting something) Dollhouse completely avoided the question of gay men renting male dolls as Whedon mostly avoiding M/M stuff.
I was. It makes it more difficult for the piece to have any kind of coherent critique of institutional misogyny. Plus, it feels like a sop to male audiences who the creators imagine wouldn’t watch the show otherwise. It reminds me of when Orphan Black introduced male clones, a choice that was clearly a mistake in retrospect and one that the show never really recovered from.
I agree with you about Orphan Black. That said, I don’t agree with you in general (and maybe that’s just cuz I’m a guy and the sop for male viewers is working for me, who knows 😛 ). They certainly can address institutionalized misogyny still—if a far far lower degree of touched characters are male, will those men be treated differently than the women? (“Realistically” I would assume they would be—especially if they’re upper class.) That can be a more obvious way of showing the misogyny than if it is only something that affects women–by showing the different treatment (I’m not saying the show will go this way, of course).
This sounds cynical but I guess my mindset was that there are a fair number of stories out there (not just Buffy) where the “powers” only affect women already so going that route again doesn’t feel too fresh to me. But I admit, I hadn’t really thought that through all that much and aside from Buffy and I guess Marvel’s Amazons, it’s not really as common a trope as I thought.
It just seems ancillary if you’re planning to make the show primarily about women, particularly if you’re going to set it in a time period as fraught regarding gender roles as Victorian England. The men aren’t going to be the thrust of the story anyway, but you’re still going to have to take screentime to deal with them in what is apparently a very cluttered show already. It just feels like an unnecessary distraction.
Male viewers wanted male clones instead of more Tatiana Maslany. I totally didn’t know that.
What
“Plus, it feels like a sop to male audiences who the creators imagine wouldn’t watch the show otherwise. It reminds me of when Orphan Black introduced male clones… ”
Yes, it looks like some cis-guys were Touched, but we don’t know any of them well enough to what their gender identities actually are. I can’t help but note that given the time period, most trans and genderqueer people would have been pretty firmly in the closet, and would have presented as cisgender.
Yeah, I didn’t get the xmen complaint at all – that sort of premise always has lots of potential story directions it can go it, that’s why people go back to it so much. I think maybe the reviewer’s expectations were just misset by the advertising? Maybe it’s one of those things where you bite into something expecting it to be sweet, and when it’s salty it grosses you out, even if you’d otherwise like it. Or, maybe it’s just them being unable to separate the show from the whole Whedon thing.
I think it’s a little bit of “all those reasons”.
Reading reviews for this show is giving me strange deja vu to the reviews of Kanye’s wyoming sessions.I don’t doubt your or other critics intentions, but it’s painfully clear fear of being ostracized for supporting an asshole weighs heavily on everyone’s criticism.I can’t help but think how the reviews and public discourse would change if these works came out months before the bad press.
A lot of those Wyoming sessions were lame. No one is listening to Ye in the Biden era.
So… I didn’t know this was a Whedon show until the credits rolled… and I thought this review was spot on. In fact, I came here specifically hoping for a review that mirrored my own thoughts about the show, and I wasn’t disappointed. I think the show would be getting the same reviews even without the bad Whedon press.
Kinda sounds a bit like a steampunk version of “The 4400″ with Whedon writing. That might actually develop into something cool, to be honest. Or it might collapse under it’s own weight.
the lead was channelling Sarah Michelle Gellar’s dryness as Buffy to a tee. It was kind of a nice throwback but also made me just want to watch Buffy.
Minus the hair, I think she even looks a little like SMG.
yes the scene after the little buggy pops out of the carriage looked like SMG in a wig. And when she revealed thats not her face, I was like is she actually Buffy hello time travel?
I didn’t realize that this was Joss Whedon until the end credits and then was like “oh, this explains a lot.”how is this any different from the X-Men?It isn’t. “Steampunk X-Men in Victorian England with a feminist mix of Avengers, Ms. Peregrine, X-Files and RDJ’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’” is a hell of a pitch and this show comes off as busy and convoluted as that pitch would imply.The fact that it’s Joss Whedon explains why HBO gave it the greenlight and the money. Take away all the Anti-Whedon sentiment that’s come to the surface this year and this show was STILL VERY overwrought and overstuffed. It’s a try-hard.Now, is that because it was a first episode? Probably. But it laid A LOT of track. Too much track by half. Worst of all, as my wife put it 3/4 of the way through the episode, “this is boring.”The fact that you’re going to have Dennis O’Hare chewing the scenery for literally 15 seconds and Nick Frost basically going to waste in a set-up scene are just two clear examples of how this show is setting itself up to get stuck in its own way.Maybe the tighter pitch for the above is “Steampunk X-Men with a roster of characters that rivals GOT.” And that’s not a good thing.I’m really intrigued by the concept, but it needs to get a lot tighter and a lot less Whedonish.
I think Penny Dreadful borrowed a bit from Buffy, or at least presumed that it would have a built-in audience. Now I’m seeing that The Nevers is springboarding off of Penny Dreadful’s aesthetic and characterization a little bit.
Thank you! I had a show that I couldn’t put my finger on that this was so reminiscent of and was filing back through old BBC shows like “Copper” (which has a real vibe in that detective character). I don’t know why a show that I enjoyed as much as “Penny Dreadful” didn’t come to mind since we basically have a cut-rate Reeve Carney playing the same character, as well as a would-be Eva Green, in a show tied solely to the vision of one big name Hollywood screenwriter.But now I can’t unsee it. I might have to start referring to this show as “Ha’Penny Dreadful.”
I would love it if Harry Treadaway popped up in this. He was such a great fit for this type of aesthetic and storytelling.
Wasting Nick Frost is a crime. The key thing about him is that he doesn’t just show up and make funny, there’s a rhythm to his performances that gets funnier the longer a scene goes on.
Ah, this gets at a little bit of why I’ve been hesitant to watch this show, the try-hard energy and a feeling that the Victorian/Steampunk/Old Timey London shtick has been done to death. Are there really no other time periods or locations in the universe? Must everything come down to a foggy British street or an aristocratic manor nestled among rolling green hills?I don’t necessarily want just a reskinning with a different locale of classical Cairo, Tokyo, Moscow or wherever. I want something creative, imaginative, and different. Influences are fine, but when an influence slips into analog, it’s gone too far.This is what I liked so much about the first season of Westworld. Yes, it’s clearly inspired by the west but that’s also the point. There’s also this entirely other world surrounding the park and the glimpses we get are futuristic and almost alien. Not that Westworld managed to keep itself in check though…
I ended up turning it off after 20 minutes, so I can’t comment on the rest of the episode. But it was just..ugh. I’ve seen this before in what seems like hundreds of shows. Tiny, frail woman beats up two giant robbers because she’s smarter than them?Super smart Steampunk engineer breaks out a car in 1896. Everyone has super powers and is perfectly dressed and perfectly clean even though everyone around them is filthy with coal dust and dressed in brown. But they’re *special*, you see.For a show about magic powers, it’s too unbelievable and eye-rolling.
I almost stopped watching after the first 15 minutes as it was just such an insane tonal mess from the word go. The insane exposition scenes did little to help matters, although they did provide some unintentional hilarity in how bafflingly clumsy they were. I’m not writing that you can’t have seriousness with quirky characters, but it felt like the show could never decided what was the overall tone of the story they are telling.To give an example of this, the episode literally introduces four, maybe five, grand threats against the Nevers, which is a lot in a pilot episode. Yet the reaction of two main leads in any dangerous situation to basically everything is ‘meh’ and throw some banter around. It was just, nothing felt like it mattered from a threat point of view, while so much resources was spent on those threats.It also doesn’t help that the action scenes were actually pretty basic, almost shockingly so. This is a show about people with special powers and every action scene features True, whose supposed power is to see the future, but who also is apparently also super-strong and enduring? Like I couldn’t get it. Especially the True/Maladie fight was so badly choreographed that I started laughing watching it.
As a sidenote, when they introduced the benefactor’s brother, I groaned as I instantly knew he would be Penance’s romantic interest as they it did seem like his utter lack of basic social skills is supposedly endearing. When that shared look then happened at the theater, I muffled a scream.Something, though, I couldn’t quite understand was why the show rushed to establish romantic interests for both of the main characters already in the pilot?
i found it incredibly boring…because there was too much going on. this is very much HBO MAX content and not HBO premium television.
One of the laziest scenes in this episode, which is saying a lot, was when that hedonist guy whose name I didn’t bother to remember wakes up and the camera pans to the breasts of the woman sleeping next to her.It was just such a blatant ‘This is an HBO show, okay?’ moment.
i was surprised by that moment as i thought this was being promoted as an empowerment type show.
STRONG. FEMALE. CHARACTERS. WHO OWN. THEIR SEXUALITY http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=311
That weird jump in the beginning was so bad, either spend more time establishing things before the jump or just do the flashback at the end. No idea why they cut that part up.
Anyone else disappointed that the Turned includes both women and men? My expectation from The Nevers and the hype leading up to it was that this steampunk world was one in which only girls and women were bestowed with powers, whether useful or harmful. But if the Turned are a more heterogeneous group, then… how is this any different from the X-Men?In complete fairness, making it a “only women get superpowers” situation would just make it Buffy 2: Victoriana Boogaloo. And, well, considering a large part of this review is already taking it to task for Whedon repeating himself…
Giving it to everyone though defeats the purpose of the repressed masses fighting the power of the Victorian era.
I wouldn’t say so; women weren’t the only oppressed group in the Victorian era.
*young, white, thin, conventionally attractive female protagonistsAlso, do we know how much involvement Whedon had with the rest of the season?
The first six episodes are from when he was running the show, and he directed three of them. Can’t make out whether the four remaining episodes of the first season, which are going to be aired as a split season, are from before or after he was replaced.
Oy
I need to ask something as it is quite possible misunderstood something in that scene, but I couldn’t make any of what happened at the Opera.When we are first told of Maladie, it is explicitly explained that she kills psychotherapists. At the beginning of the opera scene, there is that one old dude who they basically draw an arrow with the words ‘psychotherapist’ written on it. So then Maladie arrives to the scene, but her goal was from the start to find the angel, known as the singer? Yet when she tells her henchman to start shooting with his first shots killing the psychotherapist in the audience, but then he keeps shooting at other people as well. So was the psychotherapist death intentional or accidental? Also, if the previous targets had been specifically psychotherapists, why are they now just mowing down a bunch of people? On that front, was the shooter himself Touched or not? And since it seemed not, where the hell did he get that weapon?
I’ll give answers a go: I think Maladie has been killing psychotherapists but that that group is by no means the exclusive target of her violence, just her main target. I interpreted her chatter as meaning, she was drawn there for something, wasn’t sure what, and if it wasn’t for someone special then it was going to be for a massacre. Seems like she was trying to draw out whoever she sensed that drew her there. When the singer let loose, she decided there was the prize. I believe the shooter was touched, and maybe is some sort of weapons smith. Or maybe just had gun arm because someone thought that was cool, and the parameters around “Touched” are already broad enough to include everything from precognition to pyrokinesis to just really large (I have so many practical living questions around that but sure okay).
So basically, Joss said, “Imma do a mix of Buffy, Firefly, and X-Men and pad out my harassment-lawsuit war chest!”?
I was confused that is was not just women so aftewr that i just kept saying “x-men” over and over.Love seeing some Poldark stars in thisseeing the violence and partial nudity that does not move the plot is kept saying “HBO” over and over.
My wife and I liked it but she may have gotten annoyed at me.
Same, I was confused and disappointed. I think the only man that we see use any power was the doctor, do the other guys even know that they are touched?
Anyone else disappointed that the Turned includes both women and men?I actually found it kinda interesting that it appears to be more women than men—what (if any) significance is there to that?
More women were outside during the event?
We’re in a golden era of superhero media (come at me purists) and this…also exists.
My new favorite phrase lately has been “aggressively fine.” This is aggressively fine. It’s not horrid – let’s not go crazy here – but it doesn’t really make a case for itself. Would like to see some cooler powers as well.
I will say I’m a bit of a sucker for the “people get powers based on what they were doing in the moment” trope.” So I’ll give this more of a shot than I normally would, but so far, kinda dull what they’re doing with it.
Sure there were a lot of people introduced, but I didn’t think it was at all overwhelming or hard to follow. It was an exciting pilot! What’s the problem?
This seems so tiring I can just about summon the energy to write a snarky comment, but certainly not the energy to actually watch it. Does Jack the Ripper make an appearance? I mean, it’s late Victorian London so it’s that or chimney sweeps.
He does, but only referentially.
Yeah, this comes off as the most “let’s see how many genre cliches we can fit into one episode” thing I’ve ever heard. I’d be shocked if they didn’t figure out a way to get a young Nikola Tesla in there.
Don’t forget the inevitable 221B Baker Street background reference!
“Whedon’s storytelling quirks are noticeable: young female protagonists tortured by supernatural ability and responsibility, nefarious baddies with their own otherworldly powers, a broad ensemble of supporting players with various specialties, one-liner zingers, and a lot of hand-to-hand combat.”I think that’s just, y’know, the entire superhero genre.
“Anyone else disappointed that the Turned includes both women and men? My expectation from The Nevers and the hype leading up to it was that this steampunk world was one in which only girls and women were bestowed with powers, whether useful or harmful.”No. I didn’t get that from the marketing at all. I got that there would be a couple central characters that are women… Really not sure why or how you got that from it.
This sounds like someone writing a bad parody of Whedon. Which I guess is at least 75% of Whedon’s output anyway.
Not really, it’s just a bad review by Roxana. I had no idea that Whedon was involved until reading this.
I wonder how this would’ve been reviewed before Whedon imploded.
I’m down with Victorian era R-Rated X-Men. Last scene hooked me because everyone forgot the freaking spaceship except the crazy mutant.
“But if the Turned are a more heterogeneous group, then… how is this any different from the X-Men?”It isn’t. Like I said when the project was first publicized, it’s like someone threw darts at a dartboard and landed on X-men and Victorian and said, “Whelp, that sounds like a show.”
Whether in Buffy The Vampire Slayer or The Avengers, Whedon’s storytelling quirks are noticeable: young female protagonists tortured by supernatural ability and responsibility, nefarious baddies with their own otherworldly powers, a broad ensemble of supporting players with various specialties, one-liner zingers, and a lot of hand-to-hand combat.Pretty much all of those are standard components of any action ensemble show, I don’t think they amount to storytelling quirks. Whedon does have a very particular style of dialogue (though somewhat muted here insofar as the period setting means fewer pop culture references).So far this is a pretty formulaic steampunk action show (Victorian X-Men, if you will). Decent, but nothing special, as yet.
“The Avengers, Whedon’s storytelling quirks are noticeable: young female protagonists tortured by supernatural ability and responsibility”Did you not watch The Avengers?
Yeah, the main female cast member has extraordinary combat skills from a dark past as an assassin for Soviet Russian and the bad guy calls her the c-word, what’s your point
It was very good, looking like a worthy successor to Penny Dreadful
If I were inclined to watch this, and I am not, I would have no idea where.
I only watched “Firefly”, and can draw a couple of comparisons to that show in terms of tropes, so oddly there is no “meh this is old” factor to spoil my watching. It’s like when people say “I’m SO over [insert musical artist]” when really HEY you’re the one who listened to them non-stop and got sick of them. Yet I totally get why the Whedon-ism would wear any longtime fan down. Much like Burton-ism.
The worst thing about this pilot is that I actually liked it. It was upsetting to see “Directed Written and Created by Whedon” at the end, but fingers crossed it can be developed and nurtured by a strong cast, crew, and showrunner Goslett. Seems the whole “period piece with super powers” was sort of explored in “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” (set 50 years-ish later, I know). But HEY the Burton-ism already wore me down enough to never watch that, so I’m on board for this ATM knowing that it has the potential to be something creative and interesting without future involvement of designated Hollywood creeper behind the scenes.
I’ve hated Whedon’s particular brand of lazy storytelling for years, but if it weren’t for him being revealed as a real life creep, AV Club would have been drooling all over this as ever so empowering.
It wasn’t the best pilot, but there was a lot to like. Some of these characters are really endearing. I loved the moment when Penance aborted a bow halfway, thinking she needed to do so when being introduced to someone, reminding me of Bruce Banner bowing to King T’Challa. Augie dodging cigarette smoke. I liked all the awkward social interactions the most.
It’s a bit convulated to say the least i guess, but Whedon usually demands a lot from his audience, so it didn’t surprise me. It’s not a “oh,wow!” pilot, but i’m intrigued enough to see the next episode or two and i’ll keep watching as long as it doesn’t go off the rails since there isn’t a sci-fi/fantasy show i follow at the moment.
Well I watched it. Why not? I’m paying for the app and I had nothing else to do. It was fun. I’d give it a B- or maybe even a straight B. Full of exposition and character introductions, almost dizzyingly so, but what pilot isn’t? I found the premise intriguing, and both of the leads were engaging, and I like the idea of Victorian steampunk X-Men. It certainly started better, and has a less instantly problematic premise than Dollhouse with its “Let’s use Eliza Dushku as a reprogrammable sex toy / sexy assassin” plot. Now that one was definitely evidence of the creator’s issues. I did shudder when I saw his name at the end, and I’m hoping that if I stick it out, it improves after the new showrunner takes over. I’m torn because he clearly is a control freak slimeball who hides his misogyny under a slipping veil of faux feminism, and I doubt I will be going back and doing another Buffy or Firefly rewatch ever again, but I can’t discount he has been responsible for some of the finest individual hours of television I’ve enjoyed.One thing about the review: maybe it’s my aging hearing, but I swear they called them the “Touched” and that their “turns” were their powers? Guess I should be using subtitles now…
From the CC on my TV I got that the act of the people getting afflicted was called the Turn, while the people called themselves the Touched. Both terms were used, according to the captions.
“Touched”. The word is touched, not turned, touched.Jesus, did you even watch this episode? It was only said 419 times…
In their defense, the CC says Turn a lot too. Not sure why one word was used when the spaceship came and Touched was used for the people affected by the Turn…maybe world building?
To echo others, Whedon seems like a jerk, but I watched the episode and it was fine. Maybe I haven’t watched enough stuff by him to recognize “whedonisms.”So much is given to that, that it seems some details were missed:1. Yes, in the meeting scene of Very Important Men, it was established that while there are Turned outside of London, so far those individuals have been confirmed to have been in London at the time of the incident.2. Speaking of the Very Important Men, wtf was up with the hourglasses? At first, I presumed some time mechanism for the speaker but it clearly doesn’t align as such. It was elaborate and distracting enough to me that I would like to know more.
3. And returning to the incident, it is unclear to me, but it seems that everyone went back to their goings-on immediately afterward as if they’d forgotten it, yet several characters seem to know the incident happened. Most distinctly Maladie and Stuffy Antagonist (and it was left vague whether he is Touched. Which means he likely is).
3. There was a murder mystery in the tunnel. Is that a throwaway for the scene just to establish the detective is good at detecting?
4. Did I miss it or did you fail to mention the Beggar King in your rundown of the Rogues Gallery?
They used a SFX lighting cue to show which characters were touched when the singer was singing her siren song. Torrens’s character was distinctly NOT glowing but he did seem aware that others had been affected by the song. (They even discuss this in the little post-episode featurette although they don’t explicitly mention that.) I suspect his antagonism to the Touched is more based on whatever it was The Incident did to his daughter.
Ooooooooh?! That’s what the streams of light meant? Thanks!
CAn’t say I was terribly bothered, or even noticed, particular Whedon tropes (whereas some if them they drive me a little crazy in Avengers), but even with me being able to overlook/forgive that the episode was a total bore. HBO’s track record with sci-fi tends to lean towards being completely lifeless and dull; Raised by Wolves, Westworld (after the first season), His Dark Materials – so I don’t have much hope of there being some hidden gem in this show, I might give it another episode but I’m guessing this is another show so entertained by how clever its conceit is it never bothers with figuring out how to be entertaining or compelling.
I consider myself reasonably smart and was actually paying attention to the show while watching it, and I still missed half the details you pointed out in the review. There was just so much going on. That said, I still enjoyed it all and look forward to the rest of the season.
“Anyone else disappointed that the Turned includes both women and men? My expectation from The Nevers and the hype leading up to it was that this steampunk world was one in which only
girls and women were bestowed with powers, whether useful or harmful.
But if the Turned are a more heterogeneous group, then… how is this any
different from the X-Men?”I am not disappointed. In fact, I find the development more interesting in that I think women and men were touched equally, but white men, being in power can use their new abilities without having to be revealed (not something physically altering/deforming). Women and other oppressed have a harder time staying under the radar, become even more an enemy to those in power when they stand out.
I would give it a solid B as a premiere