Jane Espenson: "Make it ugly and rough and emotional"

As well as writing our own pieces on what gets us excited and enthusiastic about genre/sci-fi TV storytelling here at Nathan Fillion is My Imaginary Best Friend we're also going to share links to interviews, articles and interesting ephemera that washes up along the shore of the great wide Interwebz.


This interview "Caprica"'s Jane Espenson: "It's Time For Sexuality to be Incidental" appeared on www.afterleton.com and is worth reading in full.


Jane Espenson has written on a lot of this blog's favourites, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, BSG, Caprica and soon Torchwood.


In telling stories that are also issues based, which I'd argue all the best sci-fi/speculative storytelling is, there's a risk that one might lose sight of the storytelling in order to 'make a point'.  Espenson talked about how the writers on Caprica handled the storylines of two characters, one of whom is gay, the other in a group marriage, and neither of whom are entirely squeaky clean.


"But I kept coming back to they're complex, real people who we aren't bending them around to accommodate their preference. They're the most interesting people for our world and our stories, and making the sexuality incidental. It's time to start doing that."


Making "it" incidental, whatever "it" happens to be, seems so obvious, but is so easy to forget when you're up close and personal with trying to tell a story. 


Joss Whedon has spoken at length about his writing and the "dark place" that he goes into to find it. It's this understanding that can lift something like Buffy - (blonde teen fights vamps whilst wisecracking about high school) - such a ridiculous concept that it should only be played for laughs, right? But instead of settling for a cool, jokey show, the creative team elevated it to address "issues" along the way such as being an outsider who finds acceptance, confronting death in all its forms, dealing with the way that killing damages the killers, the way that love can be romantic, obsessive or generous.


So in this article it is interesting to see Espenson referring to the "dark place" in response to not only the work she has already done, but that which she is embarking on now - a new series of Torchwood.


"The Children of Earth miniseries that was their Season 3, oh my God, how brilliant! The decision that he can't save his grandson, his grandson has to die. Yes, that's a very Battlestar-y/Buffy kind of decision to pay the dark price. Go there. Don't make everything sweet and wonderful and all tied up. Make it ugly and rough and emotional."


As a writer, my response to Espenson's observation about being prepared to "pay the dark price" strikes such a chord. That is the stuff that moves me, when I read it or see it. It's the way I try and write. Not in a melodramatic way, that I think is the point, but in a real way, one that illuminates the truth about the way we live and die in the real world. 


In Walden, Thoreau wrote:  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation" and in "The Gift" Buffy tells her sister, "...the hardest thing in this world... is to live in it" - Walden and Buffy, two extremes of culture, yet united in the recognition that within the ordinary processes of living lies great suffering and tragedy; both echoing a philosophical observation made millennia earlier, in the first of the Buddhist 4 Noble Truths that of the Truth of Suffering - a truth that is often unrecognised in our daily life. 


"Don't make everything sweet and wonderful and all tied up. Make it ugly and rough and emotional" - they are words to hang up on your shingle if you're a writer.

Telling long stories in Space - sometimes it helps to stay in one place

One of the most satisfying features of genre TV making is its embrace of long form storytelling. The concept of the long running show itself is not unique; serials and soap operas secured themselves a place on the tube early, along with that other genre stalwart, crime, although until The Wire showed how it could be done, crime tended to use its long running format to tell self-contained crime-of-the-week stories, to which the casual viewer could drop into - and out of - with ease.

In a book analogy, the crime-of-the-week, self-contained episode format is rather like a short story anthology. Maybe all the stories are set in the same place, maybe even featuring the same characters who may gradually change from story to story, but the reader doesn't need to read it cover to cover or in any particular order to enjoy the stories.

Long form storytelling in Sci-Fi, such as Torchwood, DS9, BSG, have increasingly offered their audience something more like a contract - we have a story to tell, it won't be told fast, it's going to involve layers, you're going to need to pay attention, but it'll be worth the trip.

Sci-Fi series, such as Star Trek, began with the self-contained planet-of-the-week format to tell their stories. This model was maintained when Star Trek : The Next Generation was re-launched in the late 1980s, apart from occasional two part special episodes. Within this episode based framework, characters developed and changed and made their journeys over the 7-year run of the show, most notably that of the sentient android Data who sought to become human rather than a facsimile of a human. But these developments happened often in spite of the alien of the week format, rather than because of it.

The long form narrative, a coherent detailed and expansive story remained limited to mini-series, such as V until, in 1993, two new shows launched: Babylon 5 and another iteration of the Star Trek universe Deep Space 9. Both series, though structured around the self-contained episode-based storyline format, contained one significant new element.

They were static. 

The were set on stations in a fixed location in space, with residents and neighbours and conflicts that weren't going to disappear in the rear-view mirror at the end of forty-five minutes never to be seen again. In this universe the decisions made had long lasting consequences, and the makers of those decisions had to stick around and experience the ramifications.

For the first time perhaps, in recent Sci-Fi TV making, there was a real sense of a fully developed place. Place in a literary sense of the word, containing all that that implies, not just the physical space of the station, but layers of people, politics, culture, geography, society and history that surrounded the station.

The effect of this sense of place on the storytelling that developed, particularly in DS9, was crucial. It morphed from a self-contained episode-based space opera quite early, opening its second season with the first three-part story arc in Star Trek storytelling history.

The subject matter of this extended story explored the rebuilding of the political culture of the station’s nearest neighbour, the planet Bajor. It revealed the religious and political culture of an alien world; it played out conflicts, established characters and saw decisions made that would reverberate all the way through to the conclusion of the series, five years later.

This was story telling on an epic scale.

Whether the Star Trek creators were initially aware of the narrative consequences of their decision to remain at a fixed point in space is debatable. The fact that the two subsequent series in the Star Trek world, Voyager & Enterprise, both reverted to the ship-based blast-away-at-the-end-of-the-episode structure suggests that some in the franchise were uncomfortable with the long form story format inspired by anchoring yourself in a place and creating authentic worlds and people in that place. 

The storytelling influence of Ronald D Moore, who both wrote and produced on DS9, became clear as the drama began to develop this rich and complex sense of place, and a large cast of regular supporting characters. As Moore and show-runner Ira Steven Behr’s confidence grew the story arcs became longer, richer and more complex and the creators asked their audience to check in and commit for the long ride.

Next time: Taking the long ride

A first conversation

This blog came about after yet another email exchange that began with a quick catch up about the latest episode of Caprica, and ended up talking about the absence of god in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This is pretty much how the conversation went:


PM: How was ep 2 caprica? He forgot to backup the Zoe file? Silly, silly Daddy. This is going to end badly.



SH: It was a slightly implausible plot point - how could he not back it up when he's a computer genius? - but obviously necessary. And I got little chills seeing the birth of the Cylons ...



PM: Poor, poor robot – that was nice work in capturing the horror and terror of Adama's girl waking up and not having a heart and knowing it was wrong, then the confusion of Zoe cylon feeling its body, flexing and testing and then looking at itself in the mirror. Explains so much about them already, they have the personality of highly pissed of teenagers who have a religious obsession .....



SH: Yes! I wouldn't have been able to articulate that but I'm glad you did :) I also think it's bold that they're addressing religious fanaticism so directly - and it's not really even under the veil of sci-fi because Caprica society is very much like modern US society, just with robots. It would seem that many Americans presume God in all sorts of media and culture, but they don't often say the word in TV shows - at least, not this way. And I'm guessing that Zoe's 'God' is a precursor to the Cylon 'God' as opposed to the 'gods' that everyone else references (both in BSG and Caprica).

Okay, now I'm sounding like a geek.



PM: No not geek - this is what I love about sci-fi and that I often think is missing in "Lit" festivals. The geeks get stuck right in to exploring the ideas and the universe and the nuances and ramifications  of the characters and their decisions. Sometimes at festivals the sessions end up being  all about the "beautiful" writing and cleverness of the author but the “thing” of the book, what it was about, who was in it, how did they make me feel, did they make me care about them, that seems to slide away in favour of a rather more detached discussion…..

Ronnie D Moore cut his teeth on Deep Space 9, which was all about the religious fanaticism of a race rather like a Tibetan/Jewish hybrid (alien of course) - who'd just been liberated from a long, vicious, deadly occupation that ravaged their planet and killed many of their people. DS9 unlike other Trek shows stayed put. They didn’t blast away at the end of every episode. They were stuck with witnessing how these people were going to establish a society, that was basically a theocracy, and how they would come to terms with dealing with their recently departed oppressors ..... and it all played out over 7 seasons. It had some restrictions on it (cos of Trek universe "laws") but it really laid the groundwork for Ronnie D's clear fascination in how all these issues play out today.

And yes - BSG is such a post 9-11 exploration of issues  like religious fanaticism, past oppression, the limits of power and authority, and torture. And now Caprica is, as you say, a really in your face “let's have a look at what makes religious fanatics tick”  and a good hard look at the societies that produce them. And with the cylons, for good measure we’re going to wrestle with that whole Dickian (Phillip K Dick) question of what does it mean to be human. Brave TV making - sadly the audience numbers aren't looking good in America for the new series ...... oh no, I feel a Firefly moment.

Buffy was brave TV making too - it's really struck me re-watching it how "absent" religion is in that world - which is startling considering it's all about good and evil and heavens and hells etc ..... I know Joss W doesn't believe in a "sky-bully" and it shows. I just wonder whether now - with Christian fundamentalism really on the march in America - if he would get away with it today?

I read something the other day that made sense too - that Buffy ended up being something of a reluctant bodhisattva - she was pulled out of a place where she felt "finished" at rest - nirvana - but the bodhisattvas decline Nirvana in order to try and ease the suffering of sentient beings ..... nice one.



SH: Buffy's statement/plea/cry to Spike about where she came from and how she felt about heaven and earth probably struck many people - like me - as being more convincing than anything religion has ever offered. Not to mention her suicide - not for 'faith', but for love. I still can't watch that episode without crying.

Joss's reach is wide - at the end of class, when students are in savasana (relaxation), I often ask them to come back from whichever dimension they're in, and that comes directly from the Whedonverse. I think he would get away with that today for the reasons that Caprica got made in the first place - while there's a lot of truly wacky stuff in the US (gun lobby, the religious right), it's also home to some amazing creative thinkers, and some of them make commissioning decisions on cable networks.

Let's start our own sci-fi real-world discussion group! Meeting once a quarter or something like that.



PM: There's a plan! Get our geek on big time.

It's true the description of "heaven"

"And I was warm. And I was loved. And I was finished."

- is truly beautiful - love to know if that was Jane Espenson's line (she's writing on Caprica!) or Joss W's.

Buffy offering herself instead of Dawn - yes, but I also think the sacrifice aspect is leavened by the theme of that series - about why slayers die - Spike telling her they all wanted it by the end. They were tired and ready to die. Buffy looked excited and almost happy when she started running. Peaceful and relieved as she fell.



SH: I know - that look on her face when she turns towards the platform. I guess it was all those things - relief that she got to die for the best of reasons, not just because a vampire got the better of her; peace at the end of a job well done. And then in season seven she admits that if she had to do it all over again, she wouldn't.

So I know one person who for sure would be interested in a discussion group. Should we confine it to friends or put it out there on Twitter and Facebook? And this is a question for you because you have a few non-friends following you on both.

OR here's another idea - we do a blog together writing about this stuff, and see if a group arises from it. Clearly we both like to write about it ... Maybe it would be blog posts in the form of discussion between us. Or something.



PM: Oh getting misty thinking about it - the beautiful music helped too .... just hearing it playing behind the selection titles on the DVDs gets me all sad. It was really picking up in that season her fears she was becoming hardened to all the killing - I loved that after all the slaying they dealt with the impact of it, she was a killer, she killed, that has to damage you.

This has potential I think. Live is always fun - because then of course there are drinks!

A blog would work as well - or actually in addition. Maybe pre-meeting postings to generate ideas for discussion plus a regular update of stuff as it happens? Caprica season etc .....

Oh - fun!!!





And so it came to pass that Nathan Fillion is My Imaginary Best Friend was born out of the unanswered question: Buffy in The Gift – sacrifice or suicide?



Feel free to join in the conversation because, that’s the thing about Sci-Fi, about writers like Joss Whedon, Ronald D Moore, Russell T Davies. They write genre. They make it entertaining. They take it seriously. If in any doubt about how seriously, then check out “The Body” from Buffy or  “Flesh and Bone” from BSG or “To the Last Man” from Torchwood. Stories that move you, that are packed with ideas, with ambiguity, with shades that reveal themselves on re-watching, It has been said that what makes a book “Literature” is its re-readability. The re-watchability of much Sci-Fi genre television then begs the question – is this the literature of moving images?