Too Much Mystery

I've just finished watching the whole of the first season (volume?) of Heroes. Which, incidentally, is the reason that several of my posts this week have been late and rushed. That show is very, very good.

I'm not going to talk about it at length, since it hasn't finished showing on TV in Britain yet and I don't want to mention any spoilers. And I want to encourage anyone who hasn't seen it to watch it, so no spoilers for them either.

But I do want to talk about that particular genre. A type of show with an ensemble cast, each with their own plot lines which inevitably tie into a complex arc. There are a few minors examples, often cancelled early, but the most prominent ones are Lost, Prison Break and Heroes itself. I'm obviously a fan of Heroes and I watched some of Prison Break on DVD and keep meaning to catch up with it. I watched some of Lost but I really lost track of it and don't much feel like catching up.

You see, in my opinion, Lost fell into the trap of over-complicating things. There were too many questions and not enough answers, to the point where you felt that no conclusion could properly resolve all the mysteries. If you don't quite see what I'm getting at, think of it in terms of some other genre.

Take a whodunit. The author takes you along with the detective as he discovers clues to solve the main mystery, a murder for example. Along the way, smaller mysteries will crop up. Why is character y in the house? What was character x doing on the night of the murder? What was in the hidden safe that the murderer had crowbarred open?

These smaller puzzles are solved simply as a means of getting to the final conclusion. If it turns out that y is here because she is in love with x and that they were together on the night of the murder, then that eliminates them as suspects. Perhaps the open safe was a red herring, installed years before and never used. But that false clue must have been planted by someone who knew about the safe, which means it could only have been the long serving butler.

Now, to put a Lost-style twist on it. Character y is at the house because she is in love with x and x is the father of her child, z. Unfortunately, z has gone missing, y thinks x has him and now y has come to confront x, who has completely forgotten about her due to receiving head injuries in a car accident. This accident was caused by a drunken v (an alcoholic, traumatised by an event in her youth, probably involving her millionaire father), the butler's old sparring partner from a fencing club he frequented as a child living in village A. Incidentally, y's mother comes from village A.

Before reaching the denouement, the detective must unravel all of this, probably meeting at least three minor characters for each main character, each of whom have their own stories that will only be told in the spin-off graphic novels. Eventually, you, the reader, are informed that the butler did it.

You think to yourself “Ah-ha! The butler did it! What an excellent ending!”. Then you start wondering “Wait. What did the butler do?”. It just gets worse from there on in as you realise that the author has put themselves in a position where not even they know what's going on. Even if they do know, they seem to have completely failed to convey the facts to the reader.

Then the novel gets unexpectedly renewed for a second series and it turns out that the butler was a polar bear.

And that is the ultimate pitfall for these kinds of shows. Maintaining the balance between questions and answers, particularly when trying to craft a long-running TV show with many characters and tight continuity, is a delicate and difficult task. Heroes, it seems, has managed it.

And that's all I have to say.