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In Praise of Tragedy
Dec. 19th, 2004 12:48 pmDisclaimer 1: contrary to rumour, I am not a complete angst addict. I do get happy endings. Truly I do. It all depends on the show/book/film/narrative in question. I thought the ending of ST: TNG was perfect for the optimistic show it was, for example. And I liked it.
Disclaimer 2: I don't think "dark" or "tragic" is always the better option, either. Or inherently superior in quality. There are a lot of crappy tragedies around (although most are only known to theatre historians), and in fannish terms, there is just as much bad darkfic as there is bad fluff.
Disclaimer 3: As some lj friends are currently watching/reading several stories referenced here, I hid the most glaring spoilers behind cuts.
This being said, let's embark on…..
I never promised you a rose garden: In Defense of Tragic Endings
Discussions with various lj friends - some of which take very different positions on the matter - about various endings of storylines or entire shows have me assemble some thoughts on just why, while crying my heart out, I love Londo's storyarc culminating in season 5 with The Fall of Centauri Prime, instead of waving him off having a comfortable drink (and who knows what else) with G'Kar in season 4's Rising Star; why I adore the infamous bloody finale of Blake's 7 and would not have wanted the show to end with the dark but somewhat more optimistic Terminal of season 3; why I'm never even tempted to go into denial about ( Sandman spoiler ), and thought that ( DS9 spoiler ) was an excellent idea.
It all comes down to expectations we have of fiction. Which of course differ from person to person. The famous exchange between Giles and Buffy in early season 2 about the good always being good and getting happy endings, while the bad are total black hats and getting punished (a principle Giles gently parodies and Buffy rejects along with her earlier optimism through her final word, "Liar"), sums up what is certainly a widespread attitude. (Today, not necessarily in the past. While villains got duly punished in Elizabethan theatre, for example, the good guys usually ended up bereft or dead as well if it was a tragedy.) But hardly the only attitude around, at least not in genre circles; any given rant about "the fake happy endings" of movie X or show Y is proof of that.
In my own case, I suppose I want an ending appropriate to the logic, both emotional and rational, of the narrative, and to the impact the characters' earlier actions had on me. Not to go again into what I explained at length in my Londo essay, but Londo Mollari is a tragic character precisely because he knew what he was doing and because he had a choice about doing it. If B5 had ended with season 4, we would have been left with the impression that he got away with his past crimes without even a real apology to G'Kar. (The heartfelt monologue in No Surrender, No Retreat is pointedly not quite an apology.) And without the self-realization that was to come, or an active act of penance. That might happen a lot in real life, but it does not make for satisfying fiction.
Moving over to my other space station, we have the Cardassians and Cardassia. Now as opposed to Londo (or Dukat), we don't know exactly what Garak did - that is a part of his mystery that never remains solved - but we do know something. He was a spy, and not one living in a James Bond world (one of the reasons for Our Man Bashir being so witty). He worked for what was clearly a fascist state. He committed assassinations for this state. He interrogated and tortured people on a regular basis. (Yes, you can take hints from the scenes with Tain and go the fanfic route of blaming it all on Daddy, but he still did it.) He also tried to comitt genocide during the course of the show. As for Cardassia in general, the sixty years of occupation of Bajor looms as large over the DS9 narrative as the century of the Centauri occupation of Narn looms over the B5 one. ( More DS9 ending spoilers )
Now, a tragic ending does not have to mean a bloody one. Obviously, Londo and Garak do not die (though in Londo's case we know how and when he eventually will die). As they weren't the leading men of their particular shows, their individual storyarcs were also accompied with other storylines that did end happily (more or less). So you can say that the overall sagas of Babylon 5 or DS9 are not tragedies; individual aspects of them are. How about Blake's 7, though, aka The One Where Everyone Dies?
B7 is very interesting for many reasons, not least because the ending, in retrospect, seems inevitable (imo, as always), yet this definitely wasn't a show with long-term planning. You have personal arcs there, but they developed as a work-in-progress. So many factors could have given us a different story - if Gareth Thomas had not left as a regular after the second season, for example. If there had not been a fourth season. Heck, if there had not been a third, or even a second. I doubt the fanfic written after a hypothetical B7 got cancelled early on would have predicted Blake. It certainly wouldn't have predicted Orbit. (One of the more famous B7 fanfics written during the second season, The Haunting of Haderon, has Avon act exactly the other way he will in Orbit and go to great lengths to save Vila's life instead of ditching Vila which could have saved his own.) Yet I think what was clear about B7 even from the start was that this was a dystopia. This wasn't a Star Wars kind of narrative, where of course the rebels would defeat the Empire for good one day. It was more optimistic than Orwell's 1984 since it positions - and that remains constant even in the final episode - that the human impulse to strive for freedom, to rebel will never die. But a B7 ending with a victory celebration of the rebels would have rung impossible from the start.
A B7 ending with them all escaping with their lives and little else is viable; I like Terminal as an episode. But then it would have felt unfinished; with dangling threads everywhere. Cancelled, in a word. The Blake ending, otoh, was not just finite because they all died, but because it pushed several themes that had developed during the course of the show to their logical and ultimate extreme. Avon's obsession with Blake. Avon's paranoia. Blake's paranoia and increasing willingness to be ruthless for the cause. The way the two circled around each other. The totalitarian society finally managing to get Our Heroes not because some evil mastermind is on the case - Servalan is absent for this final episode - but because it is so all-encompassing, which goes right back to the pilot of the show. (I remember how shocked I was back then at the casual execution of Blake's lawyer and his wife.) And says something about totalitarianism that a hero vs villain showdown would not have. So - Blake feels like the perfect B7 ending to me.
In Neil Gaiman's Sandman, as with B5 and DS9, you have multiple storyarcs going on, but as opposed to the other two examples, here it's the arc of ( spoiler for Sandman ending galore ) Of all the tragic endings I'm in love with, the one of Sandman is paradoxically enough the one that exudes more persuasive hope and peace than many a happy ending of other stories. As Aristotle put it so many years ago - tragedy achieves a catharsis.
And in the right story, a catharsis is good to have.
Disclaimer 2: I don't think "dark" or "tragic" is always the better option, either. Or inherently superior in quality. There are a lot of crappy tragedies around (although most are only known to theatre historians), and in fannish terms, there is just as much bad darkfic as there is bad fluff.
Disclaimer 3: As some lj friends are currently watching/reading several stories referenced here, I hid the most glaring spoilers behind cuts.
This being said, let's embark on…..
I never promised you a rose garden: In Defense of Tragic Endings
Discussions with various lj friends - some of which take very different positions on the matter - about various endings of storylines or entire shows have me assemble some thoughts on just why, while crying my heart out, I love Londo's storyarc culminating in season 5 with The Fall of Centauri Prime, instead of waving him off having a comfortable drink (and who knows what else) with G'Kar in season 4's Rising Star; why I adore the infamous bloody finale of Blake's 7 and would not have wanted the show to end with the dark but somewhat more optimistic Terminal of season 3; why I'm never even tempted to go into denial about ( Sandman spoiler ), and thought that ( DS9 spoiler ) was an excellent idea.
It all comes down to expectations we have of fiction. Which of course differ from person to person. The famous exchange between Giles and Buffy in early season 2 about the good always being good and getting happy endings, while the bad are total black hats and getting punished (a principle Giles gently parodies and Buffy rejects along with her earlier optimism through her final word, "Liar"), sums up what is certainly a widespread attitude. (Today, not necessarily in the past. While villains got duly punished in Elizabethan theatre, for example, the good guys usually ended up bereft or dead as well if it was a tragedy.) But hardly the only attitude around, at least not in genre circles; any given rant about "the fake happy endings" of movie X or show Y is proof of that.
In my own case, I suppose I want an ending appropriate to the logic, both emotional and rational, of the narrative, and to the impact the characters' earlier actions had on me. Not to go again into what I explained at length in my Londo essay, but Londo Mollari is a tragic character precisely because he knew what he was doing and because he had a choice about doing it. If B5 had ended with season 4, we would have been left with the impression that he got away with his past crimes without even a real apology to G'Kar. (The heartfelt monologue in No Surrender, No Retreat is pointedly not quite an apology.) And without the self-realization that was to come, or an active act of penance. That might happen a lot in real life, but it does not make for satisfying fiction.
Moving over to my other space station, we have the Cardassians and Cardassia. Now as opposed to Londo (or Dukat), we don't know exactly what Garak did - that is a part of his mystery that never remains solved - but we do know something. He was a spy, and not one living in a James Bond world (one of the reasons for Our Man Bashir being so witty). He worked for what was clearly a fascist state. He committed assassinations for this state. He interrogated and tortured people on a regular basis. (Yes, you can take hints from the scenes with Tain and go the fanfic route of blaming it all on Daddy, but he still did it.) He also tried to comitt genocide during the course of the show. As for Cardassia in general, the sixty years of occupation of Bajor looms as large over the DS9 narrative as the century of the Centauri occupation of Narn looms over the B5 one. ( More DS9 ending spoilers )
Now, a tragic ending does not have to mean a bloody one. Obviously, Londo and Garak do not die (though in Londo's case we know how and when he eventually will die). As they weren't the leading men of their particular shows, their individual storyarcs were also accompied with other storylines that did end happily (more or less). So you can say that the overall sagas of Babylon 5 or DS9 are not tragedies; individual aspects of them are. How about Blake's 7, though, aka The One Where Everyone Dies?
B7 is very interesting for many reasons, not least because the ending, in retrospect, seems inevitable (imo, as always), yet this definitely wasn't a show with long-term planning. You have personal arcs there, but they developed as a work-in-progress. So many factors could have given us a different story - if Gareth Thomas had not left as a regular after the second season, for example. If there had not been a fourth season. Heck, if there had not been a third, or even a second. I doubt the fanfic written after a hypothetical B7 got cancelled early on would have predicted Blake. It certainly wouldn't have predicted Orbit. (One of the more famous B7 fanfics written during the second season, The Haunting of Haderon, has Avon act exactly the other way he will in Orbit and go to great lengths to save Vila's life instead of ditching Vila which could have saved his own.) Yet I think what was clear about B7 even from the start was that this was a dystopia. This wasn't a Star Wars kind of narrative, where of course the rebels would defeat the Empire for good one day. It was more optimistic than Orwell's 1984 since it positions - and that remains constant even in the final episode - that the human impulse to strive for freedom, to rebel will never die. But a B7 ending with a victory celebration of the rebels would have rung impossible from the start.
A B7 ending with them all escaping with their lives and little else is viable; I like Terminal as an episode. But then it would have felt unfinished; with dangling threads everywhere. Cancelled, in a word. The Blake ending, otoh, was not just finite because they all died, but because it pushed several themes that had developed during the course of the show to their logical and ultimate extreme. Avon's obsession with Blake. Avon's paranoia. Blake's paranoia and increasing willingness to be ruthless for the cause. The way the two circled around each other. The totalitarian society finally managing to get Our Heroes not because some evil mastermind is on the case - Servalan is absent for this final episode - but because it is so all-encompassing, which goes right back to the pilot of the show. (I remember how shocked I was back then at the casual execution of Blake's lawyer and his wife.) And says something about totalitarianism that a hero vs villain showdown would not have. So - Blake feels like the perfect B7 ending to me.
In Neil Gaiman's Sandman, as with B5 and DS9, you have multiple storyarcs going on, but as opposed to the other two examples, here it's the arc of ( spoiler for Sandman ending galore ) Of all the tragic endings I'm in love with, the one of Sandman is paradoxically enough the one that exudes more persuasive hope and peace than many a happy ending of other stories. As Aristotle put it so many years ago - tragedy achieves a catharsis.
And in the right story, a catharsis is good to have.
