The Pleasures and Perils of Serialized Narratives

It's no secret that I've fallen down an Arrow-shaped rabbit hole this summer. I have been speeding through the whole series, rewatching the first four seasons and then moving on to seasons five and six, which I had never seen before. I should finish season six some time in the next week or so, meaning that I will have consumed a show that was designed to unfold over six television seasons in just under two months. Arrow operates as a serialized long narrative each season, and I am *terrible* at consuming that kind of media the way it is "supposed" to be consumed (or at least, as it is originally presented), that is, one episode, roughly once a week, for months on end. I lose interest if I have to wait so long to see what happens next, and what's more, I lose the thread of what was happening. 

This has long been true of me, but I only really put it together once streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime made it easy to go back and watch entire series that I missed when they aired. Suddenly I was free to watch a show exactly on my own terms. One episode every night until you're through all of it? Fine. A giant binge of seven eps at a time twice a week? Whatever keeps your yacht from going down, man. The whole of a season in one weekend? You very much do you. Of course this was possible before streaming, what with DVD sets, but they require so much more effort and stuff. (I have a fair few complete DVD sets of TV shows. They are organizing themselves into a union and planning how to force us to build them their own addition off the back of the house.) And if you were getting those sets from Netflix through the mail or from the library, sometimes you only had one disc worth of show when you were in the mood for so much more. And the last disc of the season often only had one ep on it! (The horror!) You pick up the facetiousness I'm putting down, I'm sure. The point is simply that over the course of my adulthood we went from being largely SOL if we wanted to watch a TV show that wasn't currently airing (or in reruns) (unless you had big bucks to buy the set) to being able to watch thousands of shows in their entirety for a flat monthly fee. This development hasn't so much changed the way I watch TV but gotten me to watch TV (again).

I caught a lot of programs in reruns as a kid, and throughout middle school and high school I had my shows that I did. not. miss. (Even if that always meant recording them to watch on the weekend.) Here's the thing though, whether because television was just like that back then or because I cannot watch ongoing plot arcs over the course of months, none of those shows required me to remember anything specific from one episode to the next. (Except for maybe the last few seasons of DS9. Which, you guys, I have almost no recollection of. Like, what even happened after the war started? I have no idea.) But once the shows I started watching in high school ended, I... pretty much stopped watching TV. This was partly situational--it's harder to follow a weekly television program in grad school, though I watched *a lot* of movies during that period, so it wasn't strictly a time issue. I did watch some TV I missed during that time as well (Queer as Folk, Doctor Who), but only when I could get my hands on at least four episodes to watch in one go.  

Since I have had access to streaming services, I have caught up on a lot more TV, and I have gotten into shows I otherwise never would have. Farscape, Veronica Mars, and yes, Arrow, are all shows I've watched over streaming, entirely on my own terms as far as how much at once and how often, that I'm quite sure I would have bailed on if I had watched them weekly as they aired. These shows are serialized continuous narratives, where little clues to the major plot of a whole season might be dropped one at a time, episodes apart. Sometimes a character is introduced in one episode and then returns four episodes later and you have to remember who they are! What they look like! Their name! What they were up to! I just can't hold these things in my brain over weeks and weeks, especially if I leave that narrative world for a long time in between installments (like say, over the winter hiatus of a show. And if there's a cliffhanger at the end of the season, forget about it.) But if I watch that same material over the course of a week or two, I'm golden. 

Arrow provides an excellent case in point. A dear friend and her husband casually suggested over dinner while I was visiting them a few years ago that I might enjoy this show based on the Green Arrow comics character. I think some variation of the phrase "Oh, you'll like Oliver Queen" may have been employed. (Understatement.) Shortly thereafter, I found Arrow on streaming, fell in love (the first nine episodes of season one are seriously like someone buttonsmashing all of my narrative kinks over and over for six hours), and tore through the first three seasons, rushing the last one a bit to be caught up in time to watch season four as it aired. Aaaaand I hated season four, not because it wasn't good but because trying to watch it threaded out over nine months (nine!) made me lose all interest in what was going on... because I couldn't remember what was going on. And when season five rolled around, I just didn't bother. Season four is still my least favorite season,* but I'm convinced that my disappointment stemmed mostly from the way I was watching it. When I rewatched it this summer at my own speed I was like 8,000 times more invested in it than I was the first time.

I have precisely this same problem with books. If I put a book down for more than a day or two without reading at least some of it, I lose all connection to it and no longer have much interest in jumping back in and trying to pick up the threads again. I used to think this was some sort of weird fickleness on my part, but I'm more inclined now to lump it together with narrative TV shows with continuous story arcs. Once I fall out of the narrative, it is really hard for me to get back in. Explains my terrible track record with book series too. I can do series where each book is basically just another adventure with a set of characters, but multiple books that tell one long tale? Major barrier for me. I would like to be able to read some of those, but I know that if I don't read them back-to-back-to-back (which, honestly, I'm far less likely to do than I am to binge watch a whole season of a TV show), I am probably not going to be able to keep the whole story in my head. Alas. I'm more than happy to wait for most TV shows to be over (or well into their run) before I watch so I can see all or most of it at once. But my trouble getting through book series *does* bother me, as there are several I would quite like to read. 

So while I'm over here agonizing about what to do in October when Arrow's season 7 begins airing (watch it a week at a time, knowing this might make me less likely to love it? save up two or three eps to watch in one go? wait til *gasp* the whole thing is out and risk being spoiled?), tell me about your relationship with serialized narratives. Can you watch your TV one episode at a time? How do you fare with book series?

*Of those I have seen. I'm seven eps into season 6 right now, and so far I am... perplexed. Though that is pretty much how I was feeling about season 5 at this point in the season, and I loved S5 to torturous little bits by the time it was over, so. We'll see.

Wee Narrative Knots I Can't Untangle

Most of the time when I come across something in a novel or TV show/movie that just... doesn't make sense, I crinkle my nose at it and move on. But every once in a while these little errors stick in my mind and I can't seem to leave them alone. But why is it wrong? Why didn't someone catch it? Am I *missing* something? I think of these minor errors as narrative knots, and I just can't let go of the idea that there *must* be a way to unravel them that I haven't picked up on yet. Here are some of my favorites. 

But How Does He Not Know?: Harry Potter and Arrow 

In episode 17 of the fourth season of Arrow, Oliver says that someone is "not Voldemort," and then has this exchange with other members of the team:

Thea: [makes surprised noise]

Oliver: What?

Thea: Nothing. It’s just… well, it’s shocking that you know who Voldemort is.

Oliver: Well, I mean, I’m not immune to pop culture. I read a few of the Harry Potter books.

Diggle: Really? Was gonna bet Thea that you just saw the movies.

Oliver: There were movies? 

This little scene reads a lot like ones from season one where Oliver's missing knowledge about pop culture from the five years he was stranded on the island is played for laughs. But that can't be what's going on here, since all of the Harry Potter books and the first five movies were all out before Oliver got stranded (in the last third of 2007). So maybe it's just commentary on how Oliver doesn't seem like the kind of guy to know about HP? But Oliver would have been exactly the right age when the books were first coming out to have been into  them? Even if *he* wasn't, I do not buy for a second that an American kid of Oliver's background who was thirteen in 1998 (when the first novel was released in the US) could get through the next nine years of his life without knowing who Voldemort is. And to be unaware that there are movies? What? The "there were movies?" line feels dismissive more than confused or surprised, so maybe Oliver is kind of joking, like he's a book purist? Who refuses to acknowledge the existence of the movies? Which, okaaay? Or maybe this scene is an inside joke outside the narrative? I thought maybe this was a haha dig at Tom Felton (who played Draco in the HP movies), as he joined the cast of Arrow's "sister" show The Flash, but Felton joined The Flash in the TV season after the season in which this episode appeared, so? I give up.

But He's Just Little?: Pippin's Presence in Early LotR

In chapter two of The Fellowship of the Ring, we're told that Frodo lived alone but had lots of friends, "especially among the younger hobbits... who had as children been fond of Bilbo and often in and out of Bag End. Folco Boffin and Fredegar Bolger were two of these; but his closest friends were Peregrin Took (usually called Pippin), and Merry Brandybuck (his real name was Meriadoc, but that was seldom remembered)."* This passage comes in the middle of an expository section about how Frodo spent his time between Bilbo's leaving the shire and Gandalf's return and the subsequent revelations about the ring and the beginning of Frodo's journey. We hear about Frodo's wanderings throughout this period, including how he went "tramping all over the Shire with them [Merry and Pippin]." After this description, the narrative goes on to say, "so it went on, until his forties were running out, and his fiftieth birthday was drawing near."** The progression of this description implies that Frodo was wandering with Pippin before his forties were running out. But the marker of Frodo's fiftieth birthday also tells us how much time has passed since Bilbo left (that is, seventeen years, as Frodo was thirty-three at Bilbo's party). So, it seems that Pippin has been hanging out with Frodo for something in the vicinity of seventeen years. Fine. Except. We find out later that Pippin, during the bulk of the narrative, during the attempt to get the ring to Mordor et cetera, is only twenty-nine years old. When a Gondorian tells Pippin that he looks like a child, "a lad of nine summers," Pippin responds, "Though you are not far wrong. I am still little more than a boy in the reckoning of my own people, and it will be four years yet before I 'come of age', as we say in the Shire."*** We know that hobbits come of age at thirty-three****, so Pippin must be twenty-nine (33 minus 4). If he is "little more than a boy" at twenty-nine, he must absolutely have been a child at twelve, the age he would have been seventeen years earlier, when he was, apparently, "tramping all over the Shire" with Frodo. Friends "among the younger hobbits," indeed. If we grant that Tolkien is not absolutely specific about when Pippin started hanging out with Frodo, I guess we can assume that Pippin started doing so somewhere in his early or mid-twenties, which makes things make a bit more sense. But that certainly isn't the impression the description gives. It sounds like Frodo is bacheloring around, keeping company with the young relatives he likes better than his fuddy-duddy peers, for seventeen years while Gandalf is off not finding things out as quickly as one might like wizarding. But surely an eleven-year-old kid is not old enough to be a friend to an adult, not in this sense of "we take long walking holidays all around the Shire." With this age difference, it would make more sense if Frodo had adopted Pippin, as Bilbo did Frodo. But that certainly is never implied. It's tangled up, you see? And this one is particularly strange because Tolkien was notorious for niggling over exactly these kinds of details to make sure they were right.

You Can Do What Now?: Brick and His Crutch in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (the 1958 movie), Brick hurt himself and is walking with a crutch.***** His father, Big Daddy, tries to get Brick to talk about his alcoholism, and they have this exchange, during which Big Daddy takes away Brick's crutch and Brick falls:

Brick: This talk, it’s like all the others—it gets nowhere, nowhere! And it’s painful!

Big Daddy: [shoves Brick, who falls] All right, let it be painful! [takes Brick’s crutch away]

Brick: I can crawl on one foot and I can hop if I have to…

Big Daddy: If you're not careful, you're gonna crawl right out of this family.

Brick's last line, surely, is inside out? "I can hop on one foot and I can crawl if I have to" makes more sense, right? In that one doesn't crawl on one's feet? And in that hop-to-crawl would be progression toward the most desperate action within the sentence? And in that Big Daddy's next line picks up on "crawl" as if that's the last thing Brick said? But if Paul Newman got the line wrong, why didn't they do another take? Was this the best one they had (it *is* good)? And even if that was the case, they couldn't ADR the right line in? Did they not do ADR in 1958? My knowledge of film history definitely doesn't stretch to knowing that. Or maybe the line in the movie *is* correct? To demonstrate how distraught Brick is? I dunno. Every time I see this excellent, excellent film, this little curiosity tosses me out of it for a moment.

So those are my favorite narrative knots I'd love to untangle. What are yours? And do you see what I don't that might explain any of mine? 

*p. 41 of this edition of FotR

**p. 42

***p. 746 of this edition of RotK

****p. 21

*****This is a gross oversimplification of what's going on in this scene. If you've never seen this movie, do yourself a favor and go watch it. It's amazing.