evisneffo wrote...
Back in the fray, and with a tummy-ache. 
Anyway, minor ramble incoming (aka. ending thoughts - burnt ochre edition)!
Some of you are probably more familiar with the show Taggart than I am, so forgive any liberties taken in this description. For those who don't know it, it's a Scottish detective show. The older episodes rival Bollywood movies in length -- three hours, give or take for ad breaks. You can imagine what kind of a story they can build in three hours: there are always a hundred things going on, a whole bunch of characters and lots of mystery and convoluted story threads.
And the thing is, I find the endings of these episodes are done really badly. Everything gains momentum in the last fifteen, twenty minutes. The final pieces of the puzzle fall into place and you realise (mostly) why everyone did what they did. The killer goes for his last victim. The police run up just as the would-be victim pushes him away and he stumbles into a ditch, dropping his weapon, a look of horror on his face. BAM. Credits.
The abrupt halt of that momentum throws me off every time. Given how long the episode is already, you'd think they would dedicate more time to the ending. You don't really get post-case-closing congratulatory scenes or visualisation of the police enjoying the pay-off of their work, although that's straightforward enough to mentally extrapolate. What you do get, however, is a story that comes full circle and generally makes sense. May be a crazy-ass story, but still a coherent one. There tend to be a lot of random scenes during the three hours, but in retrospect the vast majority will make sense. There may be room for questions ("why wait until the victim was at work to kill him?") but the biggest questions, the ones that carry the story, are answered.
You know what? That's more than we get from the ending of ME3. And it still makes me throw my hands up in the air.
I didn't sink 150 hours into the story and setting of this episode of Taggart. I didn't have any say in how the story played out. I didn't even pay to experience the story. These things, I did for ME3. That's what makes it a kick in the ovaries.
That's a really good analogy.
It reminds me of how your average Tom Clancy novel (from the height of his career, not his more recent, crappier books) would play out: plot thread after plot thread, seemingly making no sense at the time of their introduction. But then Tom proceeds to weave those disperate threads into a cohesive narrative, a comfortable blanket of a story you can almost lose yourself in. The characters are solid, the circumstances are believable, the buildup to the climax can be quite thrilling, and the payoff really delivers.
And then you get to the last couple of chapters.
Political thrillers were never really my thing until, by pure chance, I was given a used copy of
The Sum of All Fears. It was genuinely good and really sucked me in, and the book as a whole was quite memorable. It's probably the only one of his works, save for
The Hunt for Red October, that didn't just putter out like a Model T running out of gas. And therein lies the rub with most of his works; they just don't end very well. Two of his novels were particularly noteworthy in this respect:
Rainbow Six and
Executive Orders (itself a whale of a novel at 1,300+ pages). In the first, the climax is actually quite anti-climactic as the Rainbow team engages in a completely one-sided takedown of the "enemy organization," after which they round up the survivors and proceed to demolish their compound and leave them at the tender mercies of the Amazon jungle. In the second, Tom's pet Mary Sue has a pissing match with a Mideast figurehead during which he threatens a tactical nuclear strike unless some criminals are handed over. Both were really blecch, and both were quite forgettable.
Despite all of that, I would gladly trade the lackluster endgame that is endemic to the Clancy novel for the ending that we got in ME3. Because for whatever his faults as an author, Tom knew how to tie up his plots.
Modifié par Goodwood, 22 avril 2012 - 11:01 .
Ce sujet est fermé
Retour en haut
