The Verbose Stoic

Another Paramount+ show, from Australia I believe, that again came to my attention because of the ads on PlutoTV.  And the premise sounded interesting:  a young girl disappears and a woman whose best friend was a member of that family who also disappeared when she was young wants to investigate it, with an implication that the disappearance of a young boy years before that is involved as well, with a hint of some supernatural elements to it as well.

So, well, that’s the premise.  Let me dive into the series, then, instead of going through what happens in it.  The first big issues with the series is indeed the main character, Joni.  I read an article at one point where the actress playing her talked about how she was happy that the character was comfortable with her sexuality and was a sexual person, which didn’t fill me with confidence.  For most of the series, that didn’t seem to apply to the character … until she has a sex scene, and then has another one later.  The problem is that these sex scenes have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, and even worse after the first one we get a scene where she tries to get the “Morning After” pill because she had sex without using a condom.  The only reason narratively to have a scene like that is to tell us something about the character, and it really doesn’t do that, and it also causes an issue later because her second sex scene is with a childhood friend who had a crush on her — although he got a different friend pregnant — and she is unconcerned about that after having sex with him, implying that either she used a condom which makes us wonder why she didn’t the first time, or that she’d be perfectly okay having a child with him, even though she returns to the city at the end of the series and doesn’t seem inclined to move back or bring him there. which makes her seem a bit callous, too.

But the problems with the character start earlier, as she is introduced as some kind of counsellor in some kind of correctional facility for young girls, which could have been used to explain why she was so interested in finding the missing girl without introducing her connection to her friend from long ago, or that disappearance could have been used to explain why she took that job.  Neither is really done, but in the scene that establishes this one of the girls that was released but came back is freaking out and threatening people with a pencil or something, and ultimately stabs herself in the neck, with I think should have killed her, and yet the next scene is Joni calmly returning home and talking as if nothing happened, but more importantly not giving any indication that something like that happened and was bothering her, which made her seem more than a bit callous, which carries on throughout the series.  So we have an uninteresting and unsympathetic character who is nevertheless the character we follow throughout the series.  Sure, we get some scenes with her daughter which are a bit more interesting, but those are few and far between.

So, is the mystery at least any good?  Well, the missing girl in modern times ran away from the ultimate killer, the missing girl from Joni’s childhood was killed and her body was burned but it was kinda an accident, and the boy who was killed was indeed killed.  Who the killer is fits with what we find out during the series, but isn’t inspired or a shocking twist either.  And the hints of the supernatural are just hints, but the ending of the season implies that there might be some sort of follow-up from that that allows Joni to see other ghostly characters, if at that point anyone was interesting in more adventures with her.

But that won’t be me, because I found the series boring and focusing on things that don’t add to the series in a short, six-episode season of standard-length TV episodes.  If you want a murder mystery with supernatural elements you’d be far better off watching “Pretty Little Liars” or “Twin Peaks”, which develop the characters far better and make them far more sympathetic than what we get here.  You could argue that as longer series they have more time to do that, but by the end of the pilot episode of “Pretty Little Liars” we are introduced to the mystery, find Alison’s body, are introduced to the girls and find out what their lives are like and so get an idea of who they are and why we should be sympathetic towards them.  With five more episodes, that never happens here. I’m not watching this series again, nor would I watch a second season.

So, my goal starting into the New Year is to clear out a lot of the short series that are on places like Tubi as well as on the pay streaming services of Paramount+ and Disney+ to get through them and take a break from the longer series like “Once Upon a Time”.  So I started with “Twisted Metal” from Paramount+.  Since I have PlutoTV, this one came to my attention through the many many ads for it, and two things in the ad made me put it on my list to watch.  First, I vaguely remembered hearing about the game at some point and so the name was family.  And second, one of the jokes in ad was really funny.  More on that later.

But the basic idea of the game was always some sort of major vehicular combat tournament in what I guess was some kind of post-apocalyptic world.  The series starts with the post-apocalyptic world and some vehicular combat, but leaves the tournament to the second season.  In the first season, we meet John Doe, a “milkman” whose job it is to make deliveries across the devastated world.  He’s called John Doe because he lost his memory in a car accident during the event that caused the devastation and can’t even remember his family, and only has a picture of them.  He gets called into talk to Raven — played by Neve Campbell in the first season — in one of the main city-states that is walled off from the more dangerous areas who makes him a deal to make a delivery run to Chicago and if he gets back in time he’ll get to live inside the city.  As he sets out, he eventually encounters Quiet, a woman whose brother was killed by a dictatorial head of a police-themed faction that is trying to impose order on the chaotic exterior, and after she keeps trying to steal his car but they keep getting attacked by various denizens of the outside world they end up working together to make the delivery and get revenge on the police officer guy.  After a number of travails, he loses his first beloved car and they end up building “Roadkill”, which I guess is the name of the car from the game, to complete the delivery.  At that point, Raven surprisingly keeps her end of the deal … but refuses to let Quiet in, who shoots John — non-fatally — to get him to take his reward.  But Raven ultimately points out to him that the delivery run was a test, and she ultimately wants him to participate in the tournament where the winner gets their greatest wish granted, and offers him information on his family as a reward for doing that.  The second season is the tournament, but Raven has been swapped out with another Raven, who is less charismatic and more blunt than Neve Campbell’s Raven — who is implied to still be around as the rulers are a bunch of Ravens — and wants to win the tournament to get her lover who was injured in the devastation and is on life support.  John wants to escape, at least in part to reunite with Quiet, while she joins up with a female-led group that happens to contain his sister.  They then join up to enter the tournament to demand as their wish the destruction of the cities, but when John’s sister is killed he wants to change his wish to resurrecting her, while another young girl named Mayhem attaches herself a bit to Quiet to provide Quiet with someone to mentor, and Mayhem eventually takes over a guy’s AI-driven car but does get defeated — by Raven, who enters herself after John escapes — although Quiet was torn about Mayhem actually being her target.  The winner of the tournament is a goofball who has been around for most of the series, and ends up finding out that the wishes always have an edge.  At the end, the guy who runs the tournament framed John et all for a bomb at the stadium during the tournament, the goofball returns, and they discover that the guy who runs the tournament has revived John’s sister as a killing machine, which seemingly will lead us in to season 3.

So, let’s return to the joke that got me into the series, and the problem with trailers.  The joke was that Neve Campbell’s Raven says she can make his every wish comes true and asks him what he wishes for, and in the trailer he answers “Toilet paper.  Two-ply.”  She then replies that she can do better, and he replied “Three-ply?!?”.  Now, of course, in the trailer we can easily understand that he probably doesn’t get access to that sort of thing very often, but in the trailer it comes across more as snarky than as a real wish.  In the series, he gives a list of other things before saying that, and later when he ends up at her house he does seem quite impressed with the toilet paper.  But where the joke fails in the series is that it is indeed less him being snarky and more him taking it seriously.  Even the “Three-ply?!?” comment doesn’t really hit as him hilariously missing the point, but not as him snarking at her either.  It also makes the discussion seem pointless because soon after she reveals that what she was really offering him was the ability to live in the city, and in fact for her plan to work it seems like she’d have to make him that offer, so she could have skipped the line entirely and just taken him on the tour.

This carries over to the end of the season, where she refuses to allow Quiet into the city.  There was no reason for her to do that as one more person in the city wouldn’t have caused issues, and all it did was cause John to want to escape the city.  And since Quiet had had to help him make the delivery, and since there are no rules in the tournament about having two people in the car — and there couldn’t be for other plots to work — there was no reason for her not to keep them together and send the team out into the tournament.  And so the only reason to do that was to give him a reason to want to leave the city.  And then the entire first season is made moot by the new Raven entering with her own car and doing well.  And on that note, that Raven comments that everyone liked the previous Raven better, but that’s because this Raven is a brute and a psychopath and Neve Campbell’s Raven was more of a manipulator, which was more interesting and, indeed, was a Raven who wouldn’t have been able to enter the tournament on her own, and the motive for entering is new Raven’s, not Neve Campbell Raven’s.  If this was portrayed as a difference of opinion on what the right way to win the tournament was from the beginning, that would have worked, but it wasn’t, and so there is really no reason to a) not let Quiet into the city at the end of the first season and b) to even try to recruit John Doe, so once we get to the tournament it doesn’t work.

The first season also doesn’t work so well because for people who have had to learn how to survive in the chaotic exterior world John and Quiet are idiots.  The issues they encounter in making the delivery most of the time are the result of their own idiocy combined with contrivance, like his car getting stolen in the few minutes he takes to take a leak — despite his seemingly being smart enough to not do that when he could hear other cars or people around — or the worst case where Quiet loses his picture and they stop in a field to look for it and some gang members show up out of nowhere to steal the car — which ultimately ends up getting it destroyed — despite it being, well, an open field where, even with them being distracted, they likely would have seen them coming long before they got there.  This set of contrivances hurts the first season because, as already noted, it makes them look like idiots.  They really needed more competent or dangerous enemies to make the world seem dangerous, and you could do that while keeping the veneer of humour that the series maintains.

Part of that is probably the existence and prominence of Stu — the goofball — and his friend, along with the clown character of Sweet Tooth, who drives an ice cream truck and is a performative psychopath, in that he likes to perform and is a psychopath.  A lot of the series focuses on them, but they are not exactly interesting characters.  Sweet Tooth works as a quirky dangerous character in the world, but for the most part that sort of character works when he comes across the path of the heroes, but he gets a lot of scenes entirely on his own.  I seem to recall that he was a character — and likely a popular one — from the game, which might explain his prominence, but they had to imagine that given the age of the game — John at one point practices on what looks like a PS1 version of the game — that a lot of people coming to the series were like me:  people who had heard of the game but hadn’t really played it.  And thus we would vaguely recognize the character but wouldn’t have the emotional connection to the character that would justify all the scenes with him, and he’s not interesting enough for that much focus.  It only gets worse when he teams up with Stu, who along with his friend worked as hapless characters whose paths keep crossing with the main characters but worked poorly with being attached to Sweet Tooth, and even his winning the tournament could have worked if he was more out of focus and so came out of nowhere, but that’s not what happened.

The first season, aside from the competence problems and the focus on characters that are not the purported main ones worked okay but wasn’t great.  The second season started off worse with the introduction of the less interesting Raven, the contrivance of meeting his sister, and the introduction of Mayhem who was just really, really annoying as a braggart with no skills — despite having lived to at least close to adulthood in this chaotic world — who nevertheless Quiet takes a shine to.  However, the later parts of the tournament are interesting, with the prom scene and the clash over wishes, and Mayhem gets better and gains some skills — although her biggest wins are her just letting the car do the driving and doing nothing — and so even comes across as sympathetic when she gets injured.  But the ending isn’t all that great, either.

So, seemingly there are possible plans for a third season, so I can alter my normal question a bit:  if season 3 drops, would I watch that season and as part of that rewatch the first two season?  I don’t think so.  The series wasn’t terrible, but was neither funny nor serious enough to really work for me, and the first season has a dearth of car combat while the second season has more but less interesting drama, although the last part of the season was more interesting.  So I think I will just leave this one.