But the reason Russell makes this season so good is that he’s illustrating a simple fact: most of the people who go on Survivor fall into two camps, namely wannabe actors/models looking to raise their profile and become the next Elizabeth Hasselbeck,¹ and fans of the show who want to experience Survivor and play the game, and generally speaking none of them are any good at the game. Watching Survivor is often an exercise in frustration: it’s like watching a game of football where two members of one team are resolute in the belief that in order to score they must run backwards, and another who thinks that the opponent’s 10 is actually where they score the touchdown.

Russell isn’t like that. Russell realized right from the start that the rules of Survivor are largely in people’s heads.

Consider the immunity idols. Russell has been portrayed by the show as some sort of devious genius for finding two immunity idols without so much as a single clue. But it’s not rocket science. Russell himself explained the thought process: the immunity idols are usually around camp and within spitting distance of something that can serve as a landmark for people looking for the idol.² Russell applied this theory, looked around camp, found visually noteworthy elements of the camp (first a craggy tree, and then a bridge), and searched, and found the idols. Granted, the magic of editing made what probably took a few hours look instead like the snap of fingers, but the principle is solid.

But why is Russell the first to do this? Because nobody else thought to do it. It doesn’t matter that the immunity idols are arguably the biggest asset anyone can have in this game, because everybody playing prior to Russell had internalized a rule which didn’t exist: You’re Not Allowed To Look For An Immunity Idol Without A Clue. Russell understood what nobody else did: not having a clue didn’t mean you couldn’t search for a hidden immunity idol. It just meant you’d have a harder time of it. Of course, that nobody would think of this before isn’t surprising, because as said: most people who play Survivor aren’t any good at it.

Witness Dave, the hairy ponytailed guy whose smug grin as his tribe of Galu won challenge after challenge was wholly undeserved, because Dave A) wasn’t actually helping anybody win anything, because he’s not a very physically skilled guy, and B) because Dave, like most of his tribe, is an idiot. Dave’s sense of Survivor gameplay is borderline disabled: after the merge, at one point he was suggesting that in order to avoid an immunity idol countering their elimination, they should divide up their votes equally and vote for two people so that they’d be sure to eliminate somebody.³ John, the only player on Galu who actually knows how to play the game,⁴ had to point out to Dave that they had six people, and if they divided their votes three and three to prevent immunity idol use, the four remaining members of the old Foa Foa tribe would simply all vote in a bloc as planned and Galu would win easily. (For this bit of obviousness, Dave now calls John, with absolutely no irony whatsoever, “the numbers guy.”)

But it gets better. Dave’s plan to keep Russell from getting another immunity idol this week? Follow him everywhere! (How this would stop Russell from getting the idol is beyond me. I suppose this way, at least Dave would know about it.) Now, obviously this is the wrong plan. The right plan – given that Dave knew exactly as much as Russell did about where the next immunity idol was – would be to search for the immunity idol himself, which would give him at least 50:50 odds of finding it versus Russell. But Dave instead relied on his “follow Russell” plan, which backfired because Russell, despite looking like a fat cabbie, is actually in good shape and went for a run, winding Dave and losing him. Then Russell went back to somewhere Dave had searched, but not very carefully, and found his third immunity idol.

Of course, Russell’s problem now isn’t that he’s good at the game, but that he’s visibly good at it. People who are visibly good at Survivor have to be very careful, or stupid players will start considering them “threats,” not realizing that somebody has to go with you to final tribal council. The previews for next week’s episode seem to hint that Jaison (a below-average player who thinks he’s smarter than he is) and Shambo (an above-average backstabber) are going to turn on Russell and try to blindside him. This is stupid – there is nobody you want at final tribal council more than Russell, because Russell has thus far engineered the elimination of every single member of the jury and has only the “you have to respect a great player” argument to try and win the million dollars, which historically does not work that well when compared to “hey, I might have voted you out, but you really hate this other guy more than me, huh?”

I hold out hope that Russell survives to the end. Good play is so rare in Survivor that it’s really a treat when it comes along: being able to watch this show and not feel chagrin at players’ horrible strategy is a nice change of pace.

1. Now, in fairness, Elizabeth Hasselbeck is a horrible, horrible person. But she is rich.
2. To this I would add: “and sometimes they’re buried, and those are the hardest immunity idols to find – but there’s no beach this season for Survivors to dig in, so the odds that they are buried are very low.”
3. Rather obviously copying the strategy of Yul back in Survivor: Cook Islands, except that in that case Yul A) had the numbers and B) was not a dumbass, but rather a brilliant player in the Russell mold. Additional fun fact about Yul: he is now a Deputy Chief at the FCC.
4. He’s sort of a proto-Russell, in that he recognizes the hard realities of vote numbers and basic strategy, but has yet to go beyond to disobey the “unwritten rules.” He also isn’t quite confident enough yet: witness this week, where he tried to play chicken with a potential tie and bailed.

QUICK QUIZ: You are a billionaire American businessman turned Senator, enormously charismatic and vitally important in your country. You wish to become President of the United States. Do you:

A) leverage your personal wealth and popularity in the Senate to run for President, using your money strategically to create an unstoppable electoral campaign, targeting swing states with large cash outlays in the form of advertising, and spend your way to the Presidency in an era predating campaign finance laws?

OR

B) use your power and influence to take over a small, moderately unsuccessful high-tech crime cartel, use it to hire a shapeshifting assassin to kidnap the President and Vice-President, then have the shapeshifting assassin kill the President and assume his form so he can name you Vice-President, then resign, leaving you as the Presidency? (Note that if this plan fails, you have a backup plan where you don a palette-swapped version of the Prowler’s costume and fight Booster Gold to the death.)

Choose one and explain your answer.

The easy answer, of course, is that Dollhouse was a good show while Hank sucked. But presumably the people who were watching Hank didn’t think it sucked, and on average about twice as many people watched Hank as Dollhouse (though the two were on different nights, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair.) So our question remains: why were Dollhouse fans so much noisier about its cancellation, and about the show in general, than Hank’s fans? The answer, I think, is in the phrasing: the people watching Hank were really just viewers, while the people watching Dollhouse were fans.

“Fan” is short for “fanatic,” of course, and the qualities that distinguish fans from viewers do have some similarities to fanaticism. Fans, in general, have a personal investment in whatever text it is they are fans of: they feel pleasure when other people recognize its quality (and pain when others criticize it), they care strongly about the narrative, they think about the text when not consuming it (sometimes to the point of wanting to be part of its creation), and they identify personally with its success or failure. All of these are similar to how one relates to, say, a political philosophy or religion.

What’s interesting is that while just about all religions or philosophies have attracted their fanatics, only certain texts have typically attracted fans: what are called (by non-fans) “genre” texts and, in general, the most marginalized and despised of those genres — science fiction, fantasy and their adjacent genres such as superheroes. That marginalization probably has something to do with the strength of fan-feeling — we define ourselves as much by what we’re not as by what we are, and shared exclusion can create a strong bond — but that’s obviously not all there is to it, or we’d be swimming in Gilligan’s Island fanfic. Another factor is probably the unreality of these genres, which provides the audience with “blank spaces” they’re invited to fill. Star Trek, for example — really the classic fan-text — provided next to no detail about its universe beyond what was absolutely necessary for the story, which led to endless speculation and discussion about just how many moons Vulcan has and what happened to Kirk’s nephew and so on. More importantly, it’s impossible to treat an SF or fantasy story as a “found object”; its unreality means someone must have written it. That may explain why I’ve never met anyone who read science fiction or fantasy fan who didn’t also want to write it, at least in passing.

For a long time mass media, and TV in particular, valued viewers over fans: a show that makes fans is, by its nature, harder for the casual viewer to get into, and therefore, all else being equal, will be watched by fewer people. But recently that trend has been reversed: with new distribution channels (particularly DVD sets) and increased competition from other media, the greater commitment that fans bring makes them worth more as consumers than simple viewers, which has led to the inclusion of fandom-generating elements such as continued stories in non-genre shows. As well, the Internet has made it much easier to connect with other fans of the same show, which has had the interesting result of creating fandoms for shows that traditionally wouldn’t have them. (The prime example of this is Mad Men, which has reached some kind of pop culture singularity where there are more people discussing it online than actually watch it.) It’s an odd and perhaps surprising phenomenon — I don’t know about you, but I threw up a little in my mouth when I learned there was such as thing as House fanfic — but it reveals just why a classic laugh-track, always-return-to-the-status-quo sitcom like Hank was such a dinosaur, and died so completely unmourned.

But, you ask, what does all this have to do with Being Erica? Okay, few of you — all right, none of you — are asking that, and probably most of you don’t even know what I’m talking about. For those among us from south of the border, Being Erica is basically My Name is Earl done as science fiction: the title character meets a mysterious “therapist,” Dr. Tom, who has her write down a list of regrets and lets her travel back in time to revisit each one, trying to make it better. Except that not only is it not called science fiction, the early promotional material insisted that it was not science fiction. I can only assume this was for the same reason that Margaret Atwood claims her books which clearly are SF aren’t: because many people, and in particular many women (the core target audience of both her books and Being Erica) simply won’t consider reading or viewing something if they think it’s SF. The result has been a tightrope walk, avoiding outright science fiction while providing fandom-inducing elements. This season has introduced a key one of those elements — a mythology, as we learn more about Dr. Tom, discover that there are other therapists like him, and that they have some sort of hierarchy — and I’m curious to see what effect this will have on the show’s already shaky ratings. In the first season Dr. Tom was really just a device, but with these added elements the show has moved clearly into the realm of the fantastic. If the conventional wisdom about women and SF is correct, it might just kill the show — but on the other hand, it could make it a show people will miss.

I wandered the backwoods of Saskatchewan, preying on wild game and howling at the moon.

No, wait. Not that.

John Pontoon: You should write about your fantasy baseball league that you started and then ignored because you picked a crap team. The league that I won. I demand credit for this irrelevant accomplishment.

(to the tune of the “Warner Brothers theme”)

HOORAY FOR JOHN PONTOON
HE ISN’T A RACCOON
HE EATS FRENCH FRIES
KNOWS BASEBALL GUYS
AND SITS IN A LAGOON! HEY!

Dystel: What kind of Pie is best?

For eating main-dish, shepherd’s pie. For eating for dessert, strawberry rhubarb pie. For eating main-dish when all you have is dessert pies, sweet potato pie. For taking into battle against evil cyborg armies, Gauss-cannon pie with chocolate frosting. For defeating a third-tier supervillain, Hostess snack pie. For negotiating with a ninja, pear gelee pie. For bribing a third world official, apple pie with crumble topping (not pastry topping – that would be an insult). For calculating the value of pi, a bowl of lemon meringue with no crust. For winning an election in France, raspberry-blueberry pie with clotted cream on top. For defeating a shark, peach pie. For defeating a cyber-shark, pecan pie. For defeating a cyber-were-shark, cheddar cheese pie. And for defeating a vampire cyber-mecha-were-shark, Godzilla pie, made with freshest Godzilla.

lance lunchmeat: Ever check out Sonic the Hedgehog comics?

I would but they go by too fast! HEY-OHHHHHH!

Cookie McCool: Baking recipes and kittens?

JELLY TOTS
6 tbsp softened unsalted butter
2 tbsp vegetable shortening or lard
1 cup unbleached flour
1/4 cup light brown sugar (packed)
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg
ground nuts of some sort as per preference
fruity jam as per preference

Cream together butter and shortening with sugar. Separate the egg, add the yolk and the vanilla to the mix. Add the flour and salt. Roll the resulting dough into 1-inch balls. Whisk the egg white in a bowl until it’s a foam. Dip the balls in the egg, then roll them through the crushed nuts. Bake at 350F for three minutes. Take them out. With your thumb, squish an indentation in each ball so it lays flat and has a sort of mini-bowl in it. Bake for another 7=8 minutes or until they’re lightly browned. Spoon jam into the mini-bowls of the cookies. Wait as long as is humanly possible to eat. (My record is five minutes.)

JQ_NW_American: How’d you meet your wife?

It’s a long story involving her only existing as such in potentiality and all. I suppose this means I get to pick, though! So I will say “while dodging the meteors whose strikes upon the earth signalled the return of magic to the world and the New Age Of Humanity.”

Also I get to be the king.

Edgar Allan Poe: I want some serious talk about Daredevil.

DAREDEVIL RAPED YOUR MOM.

Fifthsurprise: What is your zombie plan?

1.) Realize zombies are fictional
2.) Eat cake

I’m one of the millions of Americans already benefitting from Socialised medicine. I’ve been on Medicaid since last Summer. Before that, I’d gone a few years with no insurance at all, which was very difficult as I have pre-existing conditions and some expensive prescriptions. But even so, I’d much rather have the US scrap all mandated insurance, and abolish the most of the regulations we currently have, and try to return to an actual Free-Market system. We have far too much Socialism in this country already, and letting the Government into everybody’s private medical concerns would just let them continue to erode our freedoms even farther, I think. This could very well hurt myself, I know, possibly severely. But what’s right for society, and what’s most beneficial to oneself, are not necessarily the same thing.

You’re all going to gang up on me over this, aren’t you?

There shall be no ganging! For I am one, and therefore I shall not gang.

Look, I get that libertarians recognize – correctly – that the United States is not a classical free market when it comes to healthcare. But as many a writer has pointed out better than I could before: a perfect free market in healthcare cannot exist, because in order for a free market to operate properly, consumers and sellers need a perfect amount of information, or at least something close to it.

You can’t get that in healthcare, mostly because medicine is so complex that doctors actually have to specialize in sub-areas of it to have a realistic shot at doing their jobs properly – forget about you, the non-doctoring schmuck, being able to accurately determine which treatment is best for you, even if you spend whole days on the internet. You can’t do it; even doctors mostly have to make educated guesses for the serious stuff. And that’s before you get into the idea of effective cost. Do you feel confident taking the $1000 surgery over the $1500 surgery? Christ, I wouldn’t – but that’s not a rational decision based on the relative skill of the surgeons, it’s just the root assumption that the more expensive surgeon is the better one, which isn’t necessarily true and how could I tell?

(I’ve had people seriously inform me that they know how good hospitals are based on the politeness of the staff. I mean, polite staff are nice and all, but I will pick “staff more likely to save my ass” over “staff more likely to ask me if my pillow is fluffy” ten times out of ten.)

On top of that, it’s not a free market because for the majority of serious treatments, you don’t have the opportunity to refuse. If you need chemotherapy and it’s two thousand bucks, you are not going to sit back and say “well, I’m gonna wait for the spring sale.” You spend the money. And you spend it right away. Because you’re a captive to the necessity of care, and therefore you are not a rational, discerning consumer.

And on top of that, you need some form of regulation because, hey whoops, healthcare is really expensive. There are exactly two ways to lower this cost and neither one of them is “competition.” The first way is for government to mandate how much healthcare costs, typically by employing all the doctors, or alternately by telling doctors what they can charge. The UK goes the employment route; Japan, Canada, and most of Europe goes the dictating-prices route.

The second way is through massive risk-pooling. The concept of insurance is simple: everybody pays a little into a collective fund against the risk that something bad happens to them. If something bad happens to you, the people who did not have something bad happen to them’s money goes toward fixing your something bad. This way, everybody pays a little, rather than somebody going bankrupt because of the bad thing (and since that bankruptcy can have ripple effects, in the long run it’s better to help them anyway, so it’s basically win-win).

But that concept doesn’t work for health insurance, because unless everybody dies a tragic instantaneous death or is healthy as a horse till the age of 98 and then dies peacefully in their sleep, what happens is that eventually everybody will get old and need to access health insurance – and the old people who use health insurance the most are also the biggest drains on the system. Thus, the only way health insurance works is if the healthy, young majority subsidizes the old, sick minority, on the theory that eventually they too will be old and possibly sick and will want the young people of tomorrow paying their way. And so on, and so forth. But this only works if the young people pay into the health insurance system – which (beyond maybe catastrophic health risk insurance for those inevitable bus crashes) they have absolutely no selfish incentive to do, because they are young and healthy and don’t really need health insurance to cover their yearly physical.

Thus, the concept of mandated insurance and/or universal participation. This is the other way that every country in the world with a decent healthcare system lowers costs. It works, and so the right-wing in America is predictably shitting a brick over the idea that it be proposed.

Ashleigh and Jakob: hip-hop. Nabithleontabbywhatever are just ripping themselves off at a horrendous clip these days: I think their last three out of three routines now have featured that hunched-over high step and I was seeing entire patterns of hand movements and thinking “I have seen that before, and I don’t mean in a generic sense but those specific movements in their other routines.” Jakob nailed this, however, so I am not entirely ungenerous. Ashleigh started out really, really sloppy (horrendously off-beat and weak sauce on the beats) but after about twenty seconds really settled into a decent groove and became quite watchable. She is still the Kameron to his Lacey, though.

Karen and Kevin: Broadway. This was honestly very weak (I mean, when you can’t get an audience of tweenage girls to scream at least once during your routine, you know it’s weak). Kevin looked terrified yet again and his performance was almost nonexistent as a result (and his technique was crap, even for someone with his dancing background). Karen was at best middling: I can forgive the lack of extension that only classical training or exceptional strength could really provide, but her performance quality was average and nothing more.

Russell and… uh… gimme a sec… oh right, Noelle: foxtrot. Russell’s first foxtrot was actually quite acceptable by this show’s standards but this was just an improvement by any measure: better technique, better sense of the dance itself, more comfortable. Genuinely good. Generic Female Dancer was Generic Female Dancer: perfectly acceptable within the parameters of her skillset, about as memorable as taupe. No, as memorable as the concept of taupe.

Channing and Victor: jazz. Tasty Oreo is so much more enjoyable when he is not doing horrible Broadway choreo: I really liked the choreo in this piece a lot. Channing and Victor danced it quite well from a technical standpoint: I am hardpressed to point to a single mistake. That having been said, the utter soullessness of their respective performances was horrific. They might as well have been robots set to “enjoy self while dancing” – there was no sense of character at all, and they were given obvious – stunningly easy – characters to work with. I found myself simultaneously fascinated and bored.

Kathryn and Legacy: paso doble. I really, really wanted this to be good, but unfortunately for Legacy a furrowed brow alone does not constitute proper paso attitude: his movements were all too often tentative rather than forceful, cautious rather than fiery, and Kathryn frequently appeared to be leading him during the piece – in the dance where above all the male partner has to take the lead. This is not to say that the seeds of promise are not there for Legacy’s ballroom skills, but at best they are only seeds this time around. Kathryn, on the other hand, was holy shit awesome in this and I will brook no dissent on that fact.

Ellenore and Ryan: contemporary. Probably the first routine from Travis that didn’t feel like he was just aping Mia Michaels again, and definitely the best one he’s done so far. Ellenore’s lines in this were just staggering – beautiful and precise and clean and smooth all at once. Just fucking amazing dancing. Ryan wasn’t quite at Ellenore’s level, of course, but he was damned good in this and his strength at partnering really made the piece come together as a whole. (Nigel says that Ryan is the best ballroom dancer ever to do contemporary, leading Pasha, Vincent, Heidi, Lacey and Chelsie all to simultaneously turn and say “wait, what?”)

Mollee and Nathan: dogshit pop/jazz. A major stinker of a routine from LaurieAnn Gibson this week, but maybe the producers of the show specifically told her to put together a routine with long stretches of very little movement so Mollee wouldn’t fuck it up. I mean, I can really see that happening. And yet, she was still bad, dancing like she was tired halfway through the routine after having next to no fucking dancing to do other than some little hand bobbles. Nathan was actually reasonably good in this despite the fact that he and Mollee have, like, negative chemistry, and of course this meant that the judges all went after him for not being great, because Mollee is Teh Chosen One and ne’er shall one speak badly of She Who Shall Pull The Suck From The Stone.

Probable bottom three: Karen and Kevin, Channing and Victor, Ashleigh and Jakob. (Mollee and Nathan should have the third spot. But they won’t.)
Should go: Channing and Kevin.
Will go: Channing and Victor.

I’d like your take on [American] health care reform

Right now a lot of the kerfuffle is essentially a tempest in a teapot, because all of the kerfuffle is essentially about the public option. But here is the thing: if the public option could be measured in terms of flavourful condiments, flavorless oil being “most capitalistic” and a bottle of hot sauce labeled SUPER SUICIDE DEATH GENOCIDE SAUCE XXXXX DO NOT USE EVER WE HAVE WARNED YOU BECAUSE OUR LAWYERS MADE US WARN YOU being “most socialistic,” the public option would be, I dunno, mayonnaise. Or possibly Miracle Whip Lite.

This is because the public option has gotten so watered down at this point it is beyond stupid. To sum up: at present, it will be a government-run corporation which cannot draw on government funds to remain solvent and cannot charge artificially lower rates to be convenient to the populace at large. All it really promises to do that other insurance companies will not do is this: they promise to not screw over policy-holders. And that, that alone, has insurance companies terrified. This should tell you something.

And because of the kerfuffle over the public option and stupid Palin bullshit about death panels, the actual meat of the proposed legislation isn’t really getting discussed. These come in two flavours: the new rules forcing insurance companies to be a little less fuckersome (but not nearly so tightly regulated as in, say, Germany or the Netherlands) and the insurance subsidies for low-income families. The former are necessary and probably aren’t strict enough. The latter are necessary as a short-term means to increase coverage, but don’t address the real problem of American care, which is basically that America spends too much money on goddamn everything in health care for reasons that are almost entirely artificial, and it is bankrupting the country.

But it’s a first step, and I think a lot people boosting these policies regard it as a first step. (Not the more conservative Democrats, of course, but conservative Democrats aren’t entirely sure about whether or not we should use fire, let alone governmental answers to insurance costs.) Of course, that’s exactly why Republicans are screaming bloody murder: they know it’s a first step too. Which leads Democrats to say things like “there’s nothing inherent about these acts that will create government-run healthcare.” Which is true, but not really, you know?

It’s common knowledge that magic, generally speaking, needs intent to function. Magical spells are complex tools, and the driving will of the caster is akin to the torque applied when you use a screwdriver. Just as merely putting the screwdriver against the screw is not enough to twist it, so is merely saying “enogh morlincck ptg’aah” enough to appeal to the Seven-Handed Sloghee of Ptu for a magical zappy bolt. Without the will, the word is meaningless. Everybody knows this, and it is always the case.

Except, of course, when it isn’t. Not every spell is like a screwdriver. A small few are more like a .45 automatic; the culmination of lifetimes’ worth of refinement of work, resulting in magical expression so innate that intent becomes meaningless. And just like the .45, if you gave them to a baby, the baby could blow his head off. Or yours, for that matter. That’s why nobody ever uses them: the entire point of magic is that you have the power, not Joe Shitbag down the street. (Sorcerers tend to get in a huff when the peons get magical power without a lifetime of study. It smacks of cheating.)

It begins when a teenaged girl burns up in a pyroclasm outside of Houston. She had thought she was a mutant, even told her parents of her intent to go to San Francisco and join the X-Men so she could use her powers of fire and flame to help people. Her parents weren’t wild about it, but accepted her choice – until the aforementioned fiery death. But Hank McCoy knows a mutant when he sees one – and when he doesn’t – and puts two and two together, and calls Reed Richards. And Reed Richards eliminates everything Hank didn’t, and that’s when he calls Stephen Strange.

A bit of investigation leads the Doc to a tattoo parlour, where he discovers in the sample book a series of glyphs no tattoo artist should have, much less ink. The glyphs are old magic, very powerful and very dangerous – spells meant only for combat with massively dangerous consequences. The girl had a glyph that combined seven separate fire-wielding magics into a single rune stencilled onto her back. (The tattoo artist explained that it meant “warrior” in Sanskrit. He was not correct about this.) She only lived another six months after getting the tattoo; it was amazing she managed six days given that she didn’t know the limits of her power.

But she’s dead now, and tragic as that might be, she can’t hurt anybody at this point. But the other tattoos the artist unknowingly empowered other cool-seekers with can. So Strange and his coterie have to find those other young people and get them to remove their tattoos. Not easy, but not impossible. Right?

Except that they’re not just looking for one or two people who might explode, but specifically a group of five people with a multi-part spell tattooed on their backs. If those five people ever ended up within, say, twenty feet of one another, the spell activates. That the designers of these magic glyphs – who were willing to give people power to turn themselves into walking bombs – actually took the time to put in a failsafe that meant requiring five individuals to work in concert, you can get an idea of how dangerous the resulting spell is. (Hint: think in terms of hemispheres being removed.)

Except that the tattoos were designed to not only give great power, but also avoid detection. (These were designed for an ancient civilization’s warrior elite, after all.) So the usual scrying spells won’t work, and that means Strange and his band have to do things the old-fashioned way: with footwork and deduction. Although none of them are stupid, this is not exactly their forte.

And except that somebody gave the tattoo artist that book of glyphs – and they have a vested interest in making sure that the fivepart charm fires off.

If you do this you owe me a million dollars.

I’d really like to know how you wrote that Beatles story.

Okeydoke.

The story actually started out as something entirely different because I usually hate “what if John Lennon had lived” AU stories, for one simple reason: most of them are beatifically terrible. By which I mean that the common thread of these stories is that if only John Lennon hadn’t died, absolutely everything would have gone right forever. So the original story was a farce, originally intended to be the second in a series after “Scenes In An Alternate Universe Where Saved By The Bell, Rather Than Law and Order, Becamse The Dominant Television Franchise For A Generation.” The story at various points had Paul and John discovering the cure for AIDS, George singlehandedly bringing the Kosovo conflict to a peaceful end, and finished with Ringo being elected Pope.

There was a problem with the story, though: I didn’t like it. Usually after I write something for forty minutes or so, I know if I want to keep writing it. (This does not necessarily mean that it is good, but if I don’t want to keep writing it, it’s never going to be good.) And so I sat back and thought about Beatles AUs and why I hate a lot of them, and thought “what if John Lennon survived and it turned out that everything sucked anyway?” And I wrote that for about twenty minutes, but although it felt a little closer in message, it was even less fun to write. (Some people like writing that kind of story, and can make it really good to read. I am pretty sure I am not one of them.)

At this point I was about ready to give up on it, but then the magical little man who lives inside any writer’s head whispered in my ear.

“What if Ringo made a wish and it went all monkey’s paw on him?”

And that interested me. So I combined elements from the first two drafts blender-style and rewrote it. This time around it got closer to the feel of what I wanted: an alternate universe where John lived (at least for a while) but it wasn’t magical hunky-dory. Roy Orbison living and Michael Jackson and Jeff Lynne dying – they originate in this draft (the idea being that Ringo wishes for people to live and the wish, being a wish, turns right around and fucks other people over). In this draft, Ringo got what he wished for, but not what he wanted.

But it still didn’t feel right. Firstly, given the style I was using it was nearly impossible to explain the wish subtly without taking the reader out of the story. (I had to explain it to a couple of test readers, and both said that once they knew about the wish, it became obvious in retrospect. But I had to tell them. Problem.) And more importantly, there wasn’t really an ending to it: it just petered out. But I was tired at this point and was at the “aw, fuck it” stage, and scheduled it as a post and went to bed.

And then at about 4 AM I woke up and thought “what if it was time travel instead of a wish?” And I got up and rewrote for about half an hour and was finally satisfied with the damn thing. For those wondering, I was using the Marvel comics paradigm of time travel, wherein traveling back in time and altering the past creates a new timeline in which you are now trapped. So Ringo-Prime time travels, alerts Ringo-B, Ringo-B takes steps, alters timeline, but not enough to fix everything, and so goes back to warn Ringo-C… Not that it really matters, because you can use your time travel ruleset of preference. (I kept it vague for a number of reasons.)

The reason I like the story at this point might seem a bit strange given the reactions I’ve gotten to it, but I like the story because I think it’s ultimately a tragic one. Ringo/Ringos is/are attempting to fix the impossible. I mean, the point of the “new” deaths and Orbison living is the old “Sound of Thunder” problem – you can’t predict with any accuracy what changing the past will do to alter the future. People describing the alternate universe as “better” are just weird to me: I mean, yeah, I love the Beatles and The Muppet Show too, but come on – Michael Jackson? (I hold the minority opinion that Bad is actually a better album than Thriller.)

Here’s the sum total of what one gets in the alternate universe: four and a half more Beatles albums and seven seasons of The Muppet Show. George still dies. Linda still dies. John still gets shot. From a hardcount perspective, Ringo hasn’t really achieved much at all, which is proper because he shouldn’t be able to achieve much at all. If he goes back and tries to fix his fixes, he’ll just be throwing another stone in the pond and creating more ripples.

But the other thing I like about it is that I’m pretty sure he knows all this and he does it anyway. I’m a big fan of human defiance in the face of entropy and oblivion, of shouting “fuck you” to the void. Every once in a very long while, it makes a difference. And that’s why I think the story works.

That isn’t to say it’s perfect. There are things I might change in another revision. Initially I explicitly wrote that John’s assassin had an extremely low IQ, sub-Forrest Gump levels. I took it out because I thought it was overselling it and the result was people thinking I was tossing in a cheap shot at conservatism when in fact I was trying to avoid that. (Mind you, the cheap shot at Sean Hannity was entirely intentional. My explanation for this is as follows: fuck that guy.) Someone also pointed out that I forgot to mention Billy Preston and they were right: he deserves mention in here somewhere. And I think Roy Orbison would still die, but John would take his place in the Wilburys. But for the most part I’m happy with it.

(As always: no “I should write” requests, and no guarantees from me.)