From: Tavia tavia@btinternet.com

Fiona, then Neil:

...

Perhaps I've just been disillusioned by recent events on the lyst, but Neil-- *how* does fandom in and of itself strip reality down to its bare essentials and ask fundamental questions? Cock-up on my part. I actually meant fan*fic*. I got confused between the creative output and its source. Fanfic compares quite well to punk lyrics -the naivety and/or simplicity (as you prefer) of the texts is not necessarily echoed in the writers. And not all of the texts are either

naive

...

or simple.

Well, I for one am still confused. In my experience of fanfic -- limited I know -- I'd say that there was a strong positive correlation between complexity of the text and seriousness of the questions addressed.

Which brings me, actually, to something that's been on my mind during the Aftermath thread, but it kind of began in the Deliverance thread, to be honest, so I thought I'd try and verbalise it here. In fact, I think I'll go the whole pretentious hog...

THE STATE OF THE NATION: "SLOPPY" WRITING AND AFTERMATH (by Fiona Moore, class 5b)

In the recent discussion of the episode Aftermath on Lysator, some interesting suggestions have come to light vis-a-vis the character of Hal Mellanby. While these items are of interest in and of themselves in terms of the interpretation of the episode, they also point to differences in the writing styles and orientations to the viewer of the principal writers on B7.

Viewing Aftermath again, it comes across as more complex than initial viewing might suggest. It is possible to see Hal Mellanby--as I did when I first watched Aftermath--as just someone like Blake but more fallible-- he had an ideal and took a stupid chance, he was tortured and (as one does under torture) confessed, and managed to get lucky and escape. However, watching it back, one can see under this message the pattern of a deeper guilt, pointing to something darker-- the allusions to Prospero, the ambiguity about Lauren's presence, Mellanby's almost ingratiating eagerness to tell Avon his story, and yet the indication later on that this isn't the version he has told his daughter, and Mellanby's hypocritical scruples with regard to manufacturing weapons and yet refusing to use them. The final scene with Servalan is particularly interesting, in that Servalan never actually accuses Mellanby of anything beyond leading a revolt; she says a series of ambiguous phrases which evidently hit a nerve, and cause Mellanby to reveal more than he should. The suggestion at the end of the story is that Mellanby was an arms dealer who led an uprising of which he and his daughter were the only survivors-- but the fact that he escaped, the mysterious "chance to save Dayna" which he took (and, interestingly, which he never explains, suggesting that there was something dodgy about it), the fact that before he left Earth he was somehow fitted with vision-augmenting technology (without which he could not have flown the spaceship), the fact that he watched his friends and family die (and there is additionally the suggestion that this was a deliberate massacre; as one is unlikely to bring children along to a riot, it seems likely that the families of the conspirators were rounded up after their capture), all expose Mellanby as a self-serving hypocrite who cut a deal with the Federation to save his own life.

But the question is, is this interpretation just down to poor writing on Terry Nation's part-- is the darkness not there, but he has written the story so sloppily that it can be read in? I would say not, and here's why: because there's a *pattern* to the omissions with regard to Mellanby. We get three different stories about him-- his own, the story he told Dayna, the story Servalan weasels out of him at the end. While changes between episodes or series are more understandable, it would take a mentally subnormal writer to forget a character's backstory from one scene to the next. Lauren's presence, as has been noted, is never fully explained-- but why put the character in at all, then? Working on a limited budget, you don't want to hire more actors than you need. Perhaps Lauren's very function is to be ambiguous, and leave some doubt about Mellanby's story. Poor writing is not the presence of ambiguities and unexplained gaps per se (some of the best films are full of unexplained moments), but the randomness of these, the presence of one or two glaring absences in a script otherwise carefully-written.

So Terry Nation, rather than writing sloppily, seems to be doing something rather clever-- he's putting forward a story that can be seen as a simple story on the first viewing, and on the second viewing as a simple story with some holes in it, but if you care enough to view it a few more times, a more complicated strand emerges which makes sense of the holes-- and makes the story less simple. Furthermore, it is interesting that it is only the viewer who hears all three of the versions of Mellanby's story-- even Servalan never learns the whole truth, but the viewer, as in Kurosawa's *Rashomon,* is given all the clues they need to piece together what happened on Earth. Aftermath is not the only Nation story of this type, either. As was discussed elsewhere, Deliverance is another story which looks simple with a bit of sloppy writing--H. Rider Haggard in space, complete with a scantily-clad priestess--but then when it is looked at more closely, the story transforms into a complex tale of traps which speculates on the nature of Messiahdom and the impact of the fulfilment of prophecies on millenarian societies.

Now here's where I'd like to bring Chris Boucher into this. Chris also writes very complicated stories, but the complexity is always accessable to the viewer. You have to work a bit to understand some of the things going on in, say, Weapon-- but you know there's something going on, and you feel like watching it again until you understand. Terry Nation, by contrast, is a showman-- he gives the public what it wants, and it wants bug-eyed monsters, Robin Hood, and H. Rider Haggard. But Nation is also intelligent, and so, while he is cynically giving the public what it wants, he is also writing something else below the surface, sufficiently deep down that most of his audience will miss it completely (it's interesting that the only time when Nation's subtext does become accessable is in "Genesis of the Daleks," which was heavily edited by Robert Holmes, Chris Boucher's mentor).

It's also interesting that Chris Boucher seems to be at his best when writing in an established formula. Writing for Doctor Who and B7, the premises of the medium are already simple, and so he can take these and write a story which is rather on the complex end for each of these series. Freed from these constraints, he writes a show--Star Cops--which is liked by intelligent cognoscienti, but alienates the ordinary viewer (don't blame the naff effects, either. B7 had worse, and got four series). Nation, by contrast, specialises in taking simple premises that sell--Robin Hood in space, post-apocalyptic survivalism, Nazi stories-- and writing them into something simple that sells, but which has a much deeper message underneath, if only the viewer can be bothered to analyse it.

So in the end, it perhaps isn't fair to say that Terry Nation is a less complex, or more sloppy, writer than Chris Boucher or Robert Holmes. All are equally complex-- the difference, however, is that the latter two overestimate the ability of their audience to cope with a complex message, and the former underestimates it.

Fiona

The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Thesis, what thesis? at http://nyder.r67.net

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