I don't get involved in discussions about the secrets of Lost, or speculating about who might explode in Heroes or how they're going to be stopped, or who Sensor Girl or Monarch are, or who killed Sue Dibny, or who the third Kryptonian is.
This is because I have read or seen or heard a lot of stories. I'm not going to claim to be an expert on stories, but I will claim to be an informed layman, and one of the things I have learned in a lifetime of devotion to stories and trying to understand how things work is this:
At any given stage in a story, a storyteller can make any choice they want.
Certain choices may be more probable than others. Some choices may require more work to justify given what's come before. But, in general, if I have a partial story, it does me very little good to speculate about its ending, because the constraints on the author are so few.
Consider the mystery. 2/3rds of the way through, the author has presented clues and suspects. You, as a reader, can analyze them to reach certain conclusions. But the author both has more information than you and more control than you. You don't know until the end which clues are red herrings or lies and which clues are valid.
The obvious example of this is Armageddon 2001, where at one stage of the story the identity of the Monarch was changed because so many readers had correctly deduced his original identity.
Speculation--what will the author do--is pointless. They can do anything, and if they're good enough, justify it.
On the other hand, how would I do it is a different question, and sometimes even an interesting one, since it deploys the same analytic engine used in speculation, but doesn't deploy it against an unhittable target. See Christopher Bird's recent series on "Why I Should Write the Legion"; instead of speculating how the Legion's stories would be continued, Bird figured out what choices he would actually make.
How you or I would structure a Heroes finale is interesting in that we'd have a wholly different set of constraints (and probably goals) than the TV writers themselves.
In my review of Superman #662, I speculated that the third Kryptonian would be "an ancient mystic, half-Jesus and half-Conan and half-Richelieu", in part because that was literally the worst idea that I could come up with that would be in some sense consistent with Busiek's known predilections. But it's pointless to speculate who the third Kryptonian is, because he could be anyone. Even if we'd been told he was a middle-aged sewer worker exposed to gold K, the third Kryptonian could still turn out to be a tween girl in California still working through her princess phase (because she's the sewer worker's daughter living with his ex-wife, and the sewer worker dies just as Kal finds him, and all it would take to fix up what we "knew" would be the prophet showing up to ominously say "this one didn't count").
But in addition, what I said was "I'm holding out for Dev-Em". Because that's how I'd write the story of the third Kryptonian; a secret agent of the, oh, I dunno, Guardians of the Universe, here on Earth where I can use him to answer the question "Must There Be a Superman" by contrasting public heroism with secret acts of grace.
If you ask me what I think is going to happen in the Heroes finale, my answer is "Anything they want to happen".
So if we're going to talk about the Heroes finale, or whether Starbuck is the 9th of 12 borgcylons, or who Ronin is, or whether Captain Clarinet's parents get a divorce, let's ask ourselves How would you do it?
Posted by Greg at May 11, 2007 3:17 PM
I'm still going to stick like glue to my claim that whenever there exist hidden backstory elements in a plot, and the author does not actually know the truths behind those elements (or the author is frequently chaning the truth behind those elements in his head), it is a sure-fire signifier of bad storytelling.
How things will finish can stay up in the air as a legitimate choice, but not things that ought to have been motivating characters and action all along. If you're using, say, an un-openable metal cylendar as a macguffin*, you'd better know what's inside it from get go, I say, or you're a hack. Same for third aardvarks/kryptonians.
(*: actually, the box in question served as an anti-macguffin, literally stopping any semblance of a plot dead whenever it appeared. But it's a similar principle.)
* Nathan, in full view of NBC News, grabs the Exploding Sylar and makes a Mach 1 run for the Atlantic, saving NYC.
* Starbuck is a human with a Special Destiny and the Final Cylon will be Dirk Benedict.
* I could care less for who Ronin is but it would require an electron microscope to measure it.
* I'll wait for the trade.
Bonus Answers:
* The Smoke Monster is a Creature from the ID created by Island Psychics like Jacob.
* All of the Trio will live, Harry will marry Ginny Weasley and become the next Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts, eventually becoming Headmaster.
I'm still going to stick like glue to my claim that whenever there exist hidden backstory elements in a plot, and the author does not actually know the truths behind those elements (or the author is frequently chaning the truth behind those elements in his head), it is a sure-fire signifier of bad storytelling.
To some extent, this is a weakness of the serial form. If the whole work (or some large chunk) has to be finished before publication, then it's a lot easier to hide the seams and false trails. (One thing that's really striking about the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's notes and drafts is just how good a job he did in making Middle Earth appear to be a seamless whole despite the fact that it was being wildly revised almost on the fly before, during, and after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. If we'd been reading LotR issue #7 featuring Trotter the Hobbit, his tranformation to the rightful king of Gondor and Arnor would have been harder to swallow.)
While I find the modern style maddeningly frustrating, it's pretty easy to see why working out years worth of saga on spec (without knowing whether you'll still be writing that comic/renewed for that season/employing the actor who plays that character three years from now) is difficult for most writers to manage. (And only a few are good at successfully faking it.)
Jeff, I don't think it's as bad as that, especially if you have access to feedback.
For instance, in RPGing, I often put plot elements on the board without having full details about them in mind, because the feedback from the players tells me what they're interested in, and their theories are fruitful orchards. In my current game, I just figured out, for example, that there's a connection between NPC D and NPC H that wasn't there before I started the game.
But there are limits on that, and you've pointed out some of them: By the time that the plot elements start to gain plot focus, you should know a lot of their details, because your audience can usually tell when you're working them out on the fly.
But the capsule Locke was trying to break into on Lost isn't a good example: You don't need to know what's inside until you've decided to let him open it, because the contents can't get plot focus until that point.
I think that we're hitting a fundamental difference between GMing and Authorship here, actually. In an RPG, the author of the resulting story is the entire group, not just the GM, even if you're not playing one of those new-fangled forge/hippy style Narrativist games.
(As far as Lost goes, well, sort of. But the meta-question of 'what the heck is going on here, anyhow' has had plot focus from the get-go, and so as far as the hatch and bunkers fit into the answers to that go, they do to.)
And I'm perfectly willing to accept people who are sufficiently competent at making it up as they go along to convince me that they had it planned that way from the beginning. The Sensor Girl business worked because I had no idea that Kara was anything but a red herring until a few weeks ago, owing to Levitz' writing skills. Likewise, I'm confident enough in, say, Steven Brust's skills to believe that he knows full well why Vlad recounted Morrilan telling a war story that actually happened to Tazenda (even though he may well have no idea until he writes some book years from now). But I'm (having only watched seasons 1 and 2 so far) not nearly as confident that the writers of Battlestar Galactica have any idea how Baltar survived the explosion that we see every episode in the credits...
Interesting that you mention Brust. He clearly does know a lot that isn't obvious to the reader. After each Vlad book lately, you can re-read the previous ones and find a lot of remarks that made no sense at the time suddenly Hugely Meaningful.
Brust plays fair.
Miriam Sharpe goes on television and explains what Wolverine told her: Nitro was given MGH by Damage Control's CEO so they'd get the contract for Stamford. So he and that late CEO are directly culpable far more than the New Warriors.
It's a start.