Canadian Politics Today

Flashback to 2017. I honestly don't know why. Just boosting this because I'm quite drunk.

Even though Inhumans is really bad, I have to keep watching. Part of it is an academic exercise.  I'm fascinated at how bad it is, and I need to analyze it from the perspective of what makes it fail. I try to identify what aspects specifically make me hate it, and then I try to analyze my own writing to look for the same elements. Do I make the same mistakes? 

I'm intrigued at how Inhumans made it all the way to network TV.  Surely at some point somebody must have looked at it and realized that it's a terrible product.  It doesn't just fail by August1991/Michael Hardner type criteria, it fails by the standards of its own genre, its own aspirations. Surely somebody at either ABC or Disney or Marvel must have thought "this is really bad. We shouldn't put this on TV."

I watched the entire Twilight series of movies because I was fascinated at how bad it was. I was intrigued that people spent tens of millions of dollars making each of those bad films. I was amazed that people spent hundreds of millions of dollars watching each of those films.  Each step of the way I thought to myself "I can't believe adults made this. This seems like something junior high kids would have made."

And I watched the entire first season of the "Shadowhunters" TV series on Netflix. It's probably the single worst thing I have ever seen produced by allegedly professional creators. So astoundingly stupid that Twilight looks brilliant by comparison. For me it was a multi-car pileup I just couldn't look away from. So incredibly inept.  Watching it was like reading Donald Trump news articles. It was maddening and yet somehow addictive.  I hated every moment but I just couldn't stop. I had started to crave the pain, the anger, the hate.  I forced myself to not watch season 2 of Shadowhunters.  I felt like I just couldn't expose myself to that kind of punishment again without risking my sanity. I went cold-turkey on Shadowhunters.

Inhumans isn't quite as bad as Twilight or especially Shadowhunters, at least from an execution point of view. I think that from the point of view of learning how to create a bad program, I have learned what I needed from Inhumans.  But I still need to find out what the payoff is for the bizarre politics of the program. 

It's a program where the intended protagonists are enthusiastic supporters of a system based around eugenics, aristocracy, the establishment of a permanent underclass,  and the enslavement of those deemed genetically inferior.  The supposed heroes of this show are, almost literally, Moon Nazis.  They boast openly of their genetic superiority and openly express their contempt of those like their own brother who are deemed genetically inferior.   In 2017, we had white supremacists marching in the United States, and here is a program where "the good guys" are fighting to restore such a system after it has been toppled.

It's like the creators of the show said "you know, we've had a lot of one-sided coverage of eugenics and racial supremacist ideology this year, and we just wanted to present an alternative view, to show a more positive side of racial supremacy ideologies."


Right now, as of episode 4,  our "villain" Maximus has consolidated power in Attilan. He has imprisoned the ruling "Genetic Council", the ruling eugenics experts at the core of the caste system. I gather we're supposed to hate Maximus because he has beaten and imprisoned his political enemies, and even killed one. Compared to real-world revolutionaries, Maximus has been a model of restraint, but on this show even one murder is too high a cost for liberating thousands. No it isn't! Slaves are dying in the mines while the "Genetic Council" lives in comfort! Go Maximus!

Meanwhile our Nazi "protagonists" are floundering around Hawaii, pursued by agents of Maximus, and surviving only with the help of inferior humans. Who help them even though our heroes are horrendous people and treat them terribly.  I expect that the eventual payoff is through their misadventures on earth, our obnoxious royals will learn to have empathy with the inferiors. This is kind of like a story where David Duke and Richard Spencer get lost in north Detroit and survive only with the help of black people, and we're supposed to be cheering for Duke and Spencer to get home. No doubt that when Medusa Duke and Black Bolt Spencer get back to Attilan and take back power, they will be kinder to the slaves when they send them back to the mines.

 -k