Tag: sense8

There’s a special place in my heart for creators who aren’t very good at being progressive but keep trying anyway until they start to get the hang of it. I’m talking the Wachowski Sisters, who made the mess that was Cloud Atlas but then came back and did Sense8 (which has its own issues but is so much better). I’m taking about Moffat, who cannot stop saying the wrong things and needed multiple years and a lot of reminders before he realized that he could make a working class black lesbian the companion but then he did it and it’s so good. I’m talking about Terry Pratchett who was constantly improving and trying to be more aware and more cognizant of diversity in his works, until he finally started putting in one or two explicitly LGBT characters. It might take them a while to get the memo, but they’re willing to listen and they’re willing to change. That’s important. 

I don’t know, it kind of reminds me of a lot of older people I’ve known who were really passionate about progressive causes but hadn’t been “in touch” since they protested on their college campus. (Aunt Kathleen, I appreciate your support but there have been so many studies on gender since the seventies and we’re pretty sure it doesn’t work like that any more.) It’s not always easy to stay up to date on developments in philosophy and science and politics, much less articulate that coherently and sensibly. Sometimes people are going to be a little slow on the uptake. What’s important is that they keep trying. Especially when we’re talking about already established popular creators, who can help normalize new paradigms and make diversity more generally accepted, who already have a platform and can share it. It’s all too easy for celebrities to get criticized once and retreat into a shell of denial and never try to address the issues. Being able to improve and move forward is a superpower as far as popular media is concerned. 

I know that it’s a luxury afforded mostly to already established media darlings, white people are allowed to slip up and take their time in a way lots of other people aren’t, but I still feel like it’s important to see creators actively evolving and becoming more fair-minded in a very human way. Your average middle-aged individual is going to need a few running starts before they figure things out, and they are going to say terrible things on accident (Yes, Aunt Kathleen I know what you meant but it’s still not a great thing to say. The words that came out of your mouth were bad). Holding them accountable until they slowly but surely improve and then watching their work improve too is very enjoyable. 

Lots of people tend to dismiss those in that category of “problematic creators” entirely, but I view it as an exciting adventure. There are too few people in this world willing to change. Look, this month it seems like Uncle Steven is finally starting to go to bat for his suspicion that gender doesn’t determine personality. And Aunt Kathleen discovered singular “they” pronouns!

I think one thing Netflix has seriously underrated is the idea of Network Reliability, especially in regards to serialized shows. When an audience starts a show, they have to have faith that it is going to be followed through on, that it’s going to get a good ending, that it’s not going to get screwed over by the companies producing it. Where there is public mistrust, people are reluctant to get attached to new shows. Where there’s good faith and follow through, you can build a good rapport with your viewing base. No network has a perfect Network Reliability factor, they’ve all made missteps and due to the sheer sizes of audiences it was impossible to please everyone, but up until these last few years Netflix was up there with the best. Unlike older channels, they hadn’t had time to build up an archive of fan backlash, cancelled shows, mishandled character arcs, and executive mandated bad choices. That was one of their big selling points! They were supposed to be better than the old fashioned cable networks. They were supposed to be different. 

Now Fox and HBO and TBS are doing the exact same thing they are in terms of diversity (ie: looking for more of it) and Netflix is cancelling several of the exceptional shows that really made it stand out from the crowd. They’ve jeopardized the sense of “don’t worry, we’re better, we’ll take care of you” and that’s going to hurt their television offerings going forward. If they’re going to act like all the other networks, we’ll have no choice but to treat them like one. It’s going to be a lot harder for me to get emotionally invested in their next, big, ambitious drama because of how messily and suddenly they ended Sense8. No one likes a nasty surprise, or an open ended story. For many people, their reliability factor just dropped and unless they can figure out how to change the game to better take care of viewers and follow through on shows they’re never going to be anything more than Moderately Mistrusted Television Network 2.0. 

All the other sensates in the world are minding their own business, trying not to get their brains cut open, and then the Aug8 Cluster is running around like madmen screaming and trying to fight people and getting on the news and having matching million view youtube videos of themselves making impassioned speeches and all the other sensates are canonically just thinking “Who are these lost, wild children? Where did they come from? Why did no one tell them the rules?”

I like to think that eventually word trickles down that these are Angelica’s babies and everyone just nods, like, yep, that checks out. There are the normal sensate genealogies and then there’s that little disaster zone that nobody touches anymore. Angelica’s kids are the ones trying to tear apart BPO with their teeth? Makes sense. More power to them. All us normal folks are going to be over here, trying to, y’know, survive. 

If Angelica is the Sense8 gang’s psychic Mom, does that make Jonas their flaky stepdad, just trying his best but always messing up? Do they need to be getting him a card? “You told our mind meld progenitor to kill herself and since then you’ve only betrayed us, like, twice. Happy (stand-in) Father’s day!” Is Whispers the sensate equivalent of their Mom’s creepy ex boyfriend who everyone hates but who still shows up at parties and tells them to call him Uncle Milt? 

For that matter, what’s the technical sensate term for a cluster that isn’t yours but which shares a “parent” with you? Clearly there’s some relation there, so what’s the word for it, is it a sibling cluster? 

Logically, would Jonas and Angelica’s sensate “father” be their sensate granddad? You could go pretty far back with that- all the way to the origins of sensate history- and since they have some collective memory sensates might actually be able to track their single line of descent all the way back to the first of their kind. Is this all going to end with them making a psychic family tree for sensate social study class?