“Stay in the Car” Syndrome

There’s this thing in law enforcement shows where someone who’s not really qualified nonetheless insists upon coming along with the police officer or detective, and for some unknown reason the police person permits them to (presumably because they’re very personally invested, or have some particularly useful knowledge), and then when they get there, the police person orders them to “stay in the car.”  Then they generally don’t stay in the car, and end up either (a) saving the day when the police person can’t or (b) getting everyone in even more trouble.  Version A is more common than version B, in my experience.

There are, of course, very good reasons why law enforcement types don’t bring victims’ family members, consultants, untrained enthusiasts, medical examiners, and random amnesia victims along into dangerous situations without serious preparation.  And those reasons dictate that the law enforcement type shouldn’t even let the unqualified person come along—no matter how useful and/or passionate they may seem.  Letting them come along and then ordering them to stay in the car is just dumb.  What makes the officer think that staying in the car is any more satisfying to civilian, or for that matter, any more useful to the officer, than staying back at the precinct would be?  But I get why writers do this. There are lots of reasons:  It allows the underestimated person to demonstrate their skill or passion, it allows the highly-invested person to be there when the drama goes down, it heightens the stakes.

But the lesson, most often, is that the police person was wrong to underestimate the value and/or skill and/or passion of the person they ordered to stay in the car.  So as a champion of the underestimated and marginalized, I should love this device.  It breaks up our assumptions about who’s capable enough to get in the mix and make a difference.   

So why do I find this trope so infuriating?  I’ve given this a lot of thought, and finally settled on the following:  Most of the time, this trope doesn’t end up empowering the underestimated.   It ends up demonstrating that the underestimated are untrustworthy or bad at following directions.  Or—and this more and more, recently—it ends up disempowering an otherwise competent woman.  Here’s how I get there: with the notable exception of Blindspot, the examples that stick in my mind involve very capable police women ordering able-bodied but fundamentally unqualified men to stay in the car, and being proven wrong when those men disobey and save the day.  Richard Castle.  Beaumont Rosewood.  Lucifer Morningstar.  This isn’t about underestimating at all:  these policewomen are right.  The men are, demonstrably far less trained, for the most part less qualified, to handle the situation at hand.  Involving the men will undermine the legality of any arrest that comes out of the encounter.  And yet the show effectively sends the message that the women, no matter how well trained or capable, just aren’t as equipped to handle difficult situations as the unqualified men.  Humph, I say.  Humph.

And here’s what’s really odd about this.  As I run down these shows, I can’t help but notice that each one features a man who doggedly pursues an uninterested woman, assuming that the repeated application of his charisma will ultimately turn her around into liking him romantically.  And I have no doubt that, as it did in Castle, it will ultimately work in the others, because that’s how these sorts of shows operate.  But to connect that to the “stay in the car” dynamic—the dynamic that demonstrates that these women have poor judgment (at least when it comes to these men)—seems to me a disturbing pattern.

Rosewood (Fox, new Fall 2015.  Banter procedural.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise:  Private medical examiner and a reluctant cop solve crimes in Miami

Promise:  There’s a lot to recommend this show.  I love that its leads are competent people of color and minorities without branding them as “exceptional” specimens of their respective categories.   Hooray for lead characters of color who are very good at their jobs!  Hooray for the everyday treatment of a lesbian couple!   But I ended up losing interest a couple of episodes in.  Maybe it was unconvincing acting by a few of the players.  Maybe it was that I wasn’t engaging with the mystery elements of the procedural.  Maybe it was the subtle but insidious reliance on racial stereotypes.  Maybe it was the “wait in the car” dynamic that felt old the moment it played.  But what I actually think turned me off was the lead character’s obstinate refusal to recognize that the police woman just wasn’t into him.  He had this sunny, charismatic attitude that she just didn’t realize yet how charming he was.  Maybe he was right, but I didn’t want to watch him be rewarded for what came across to me as disrespect.  

Verdict:  I’m out.

Lucifer (Fox, new.  Banter procedural.)

Watched: several episodes

Premise:  The devil (yep, that one) and a reluctant cop solve crimes in Los Angeles.

Promise:  The show is a very liberal adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer comic book.  I’ll start with a side note:  Gaiman’s Lucifer was intentionally modeled on David Bowie, so I found it jarring timing for them to have picked an actor with such a different look.  But Tom Ellis’s talent for walking the line between loathsome and charming (see, e.g., Rush) is well-used here.  And at least he has a reason for acting superior and being so presumptuously, smarmily disrespectful to everyone around him. (Including the lead woman, who he pursues unrelentingly under the presumption that his boundless charm will eventually win her over.)  Also, It seems a quibble, but it actually bugs me that we have to get all the way to “devil” to find an unapologetically bisexual character on television.  That said, although Lucifer is hard to take as a character, he is pretty good at helping to solve crimes, even if his motivations are off.  And he has a pleasant banter with the lead detective and a downright charming relationship with her (kid) daughter.  These things have brought me back for more episodes than I’d have expected in the pilot.  There’s an arc plot surrounding Lucifer’s origins that helps save the show from feeling too gimmicky, but in the end, I wish I cared more about him.  It’s hard to care for someone who doesn’t smile with his eyes.  

  

Verdict:  Not appointment television, and some notably annoying bits, but I’ve enjoyed a good bit of it.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  I count something like 23 shows.  Wish me luck!

The One Who Will Solve Everything

The trope of the “chosen one” has been around forever.  One character is destined to solve some ages-old problem, and is uniquely suited to doing so, usually for mystical reasons having as much to do with chance or genetic as with ability or effort.  The chosen one is special for being special the same way a Kardashian is famous for being famous.  Often these stories focus on how the chosen one has to grow into the role, and by the end, we learn that whatever chose them—genetics, fortune, prophecy—chose wisely. 

Chosen-one stories can be great.  They can be stories of self-discovery, growth, courage, beating the odds.   But the “chosen one” setup isn’t strictly necessary for any of those things. One can discover oneself, grow, be courageous, and beat the odds without being “chosen,” and I’d argue that it’s even more interesting for someone to succeed when they’re not expected to, than when they are.  And the chosen-one setup risks leading into a story about someone stumbling into their destiny, fumbling around for a while, and then magically succeeding because of some mystical power they didn’t have to work for.  That, frankly, sounds too much like the story of privilege:  people destined to succeed do, because the system expects them to.  When push comes to shove, if the world is dangling by a string and depending on plucky heroes to save it, I’d rather those heroes be Frodo and Sam than Deus Ex Machina.

This is on my mind because of a few shows lately where the entire world is hanging by that sort of string, and depending on chosen ones to save it—chosen ones who may even actually be pretty incompetent, but for some reason, the entire world has entirely abdicated its self-preservation responsibilities to heroes who have nothing to recommend them other than that someone said they were supposed to be the saviors.  Which makes me ask, why?  Why would everyone just sit back and leave everything to this singular elf, or whatever?  That’s like an entire soccer team saying “welp, we can sit on the sidelines and eat bonbons instead of playing this match, because we’ve got a 6-year old goalie who will take care of everything, and some crystal ball told us in vague terms that that might work.”  While meanwhile, the fate of the entire world rests on that one soccer match.  That’s not how the world should operate.  And it makes it awfully hard to root for the credulous sideline players.  I’m cheering for the 6-year-old, sure, but wouldn’t you rather watch a story about a whole soccer team pulling together for victory?

                        

And there’s a bigger issue lurking, that makes all this worth discussing here.  There’s undeniable cool to the idea that one person can, through their own small actions, save the world.  And it could be so empowering.  Indeed, chosen ones often come from the ranks of the underestimated—girls, minorities, the physically unthreatening—which could make it even more empowering.  But it’s only empowering when the heroes (and their allies) are themselves responsible for the victory.  When fate is responsible, or other mystical forces, then it’s those mystical forces that retain all the power, not the heroes themselves.  For a hero’s tale to be truly inspiring, I think, the hero has to have agency, will, and competence independent of fate.  That doesn’t mean they can’t be “chosen.”  But that can’t be the only thing they are.

 

Into the Badlands (AMC, new Winter 2015.  High-concept martial arts action/adventure.)

Watched: series so far.

Premise:  In a post-apocalyptic feudal world dominated by motorcycles and bladed weapons, one samurai mentors an orphan who is apparently destined to unlock a better future for all. 

Promise: This is, at its heart, a very traditional samurai story—its main distinction from those is that its setting is American rather than Chinese—the tribal wild-west that emerges after a techno-apocalypse.  But aside from its setting and its live-action hyper-realistic aesthetic, it’s not radically different from, say, the Ninja Scrolls or any number of other warring-ninja animes.  It’s gorgeously filmed and (especially pleasing for a Hong Kong action junkie like myself), phenomenally well-choreographed.  So from a sheer prettiness standpoint, it’s great.  From a story standpoint, less so.  The focus on aesthetic beauty makes the whole thing so stylized that the characters never come across as people worth caring about, the pace is glacially slow, and it has trouble deciding whether it’s a story about the destiny of our Chosen One kid or about the feudal conflict he’s plunked in the middle of. 

Even stranger, that feudal conflict is a confusing battle-of-the-sexes in which nearly every woman is either a caretaker or a complete fighting badass sexual vixen who manipulates men emotionally and has been a victim of sexual assault or oppression.  And I can’t shake the feeling that the women are all someone’s vaguely BDSM-inflected sexual fantasy, in which women’s power comes from their sexuality and their strength comes from their anger at having been oppressed.  And on one hand, I’m all for women wearing fetish boots and carrying knives in their cleavage if they want, and being angry about oppression, but on the other hand, there’s a troubling circularity to the “strength through sexiness and/or oppression” thing that’s worth a post of its own.  And it really bugs me that I think this story could be interpreted as some as a sort of feminist revolution

Verdict:  Pretty problematic.  But I watched it for the pretty.

The Magicians (Syfy, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: first 5 episodes or so

Premise: Harry Potter meets Narnia but the characters are grad-school age.  An adaptation of the book series of the same name.  

Promise: So there’s this secret magic grad school, and only some people are chosen to get in, and the main character is destined to save the entire world from a shadowy evil that is somehow related to a parallel world, but in the meantime we have to worry about the sorts of things that I guess 20-somethings worry about, like exams and hooking up and parties.  (My friends and I call this preoccupation with ordinary life in an extraordinary setting the “Tower Prep” problem.)  This show has a lot of potential, but it’s mired down in stereotyped characters, manufactured drama, and what I can only describe as immaturity.  These people are supposed to be grownups, but they all act sort of angsty and bratty.  I don’t want to be one of those grumps who says young people should grow up or get offa my lawn, but that’s really how I feel about these characters.  They are handed something phenomenally special—the ability to use and study magic—and their reaction is at once frivolous, cruel to those on the outside of their ivory-towered walls, and ill-suited to the apocalyptic danger that lurks in their margins.  Our hero seems pretty incompetent, but everyone just seems to trust that he’s destined to save the world.  And don’t get me started on the show’s treatment of the central female character, whose central personality trait is “desperation” to such an extent that she may yet inspire me to write an entire post entitled “Women Are Desperate.”

Verdict:  I wanted to like it, but too often I find it frustrating.

Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments (Freeform, new.  Supernatural drama.)

Watched: first 5 episodes

Premise:  Young woman discovers all at once that demons are real, that she’s born into a race of demon hunters, and that it's kind of up to her to resolve a world-threatening rivalry in the "shadow" world.  Based on the fantasy series by Cassandra Claire.

Promise:  This show is oddly engaging.To be clear:  It’s not good.  It’s silly and scenery-chewy and cheesily atmospheric and young-feeling.  The cast were pretty clearly chosen for their looks, not their nuanced acting.  The demons literally dissolve into a spray of sparkles.  And yet, it succeeds better than The Magicians, in significant part because the prevailing thrust in the characters’ reaction to world-threatening danger is to pull together and care about each other rather than indulging catty and callous rivalries. There’s no such thing as a young woman who isn’t a leather-clad bombshell—it feels like a man’s idea of what a “strong woman” is—but even so, it seems clearthat the show is trying to be sex- and sexuality-positive rather than presuming a rape culture the way Badlands does.  It has many of the same flaws as the others, especially that it too often credits success to magical forces, rather than the character’s agency, but it’s also a story (albeit a somewhat whiny one) about personal struggle, growth, and competence.  Overall, much the same appeal as Lost Girl, actually.

Verdict: I’m not entirely proud of this, but I kind of enjoy it.

The Shanarra Chronicles (MTV, new.  Fantasy.)

Watched:  first several episodes

Premise:  When a magic tree begins dying, a group of teens are destined to save the world from demonic evil by bringing the tree’s seed…somewhere.  Based on the fantasy book series of the same name.

Promise:  This show is sort of hilariously awful, and yet there’s just enough a hint of sparkle to it that my friends and I have begun using it as Interactive Television.  The main character is a young elven woman of great privilege and virtually no personality except that she gets jealous for no real reason.  She is joined on her quest by a half-elf who I guess is supposed to be cute, because despite his almost complete incompetence, he’s the corner of what’s shaping up to be a love triangle between the elf and the third of our trio, a roguish young human woman.  The women wear ridiculously silly outfits, like leather pants with strapless bustiers that somehow also have hoods, because I guess every bustier needs a hood.  The re’s a druid named Allanon, which they insist on pronouncing like Al-Anon, the support group for families of alcoholics.  The premise of the show is that for every leaf that falls from the dying tree, a new evil enters the world, so the show has a built-in ticking clock, and yet there’s no sense of urgency at all.  In fact, much like Interactive Television masterpiece Merlin, the characters pretty much undertake every plan without bothering to collect adequate information, and half-ass their way through it, leading to inevitable, but completely avoidable, partial failure.  I could go on and on and on.

Verdict:  Sort of gloriously awful.

On the DVR/Unrviewed: I’m still too embarrassed to list them all. But maybe I’m catching up? A little?