To describe The Walking Dead as ‘dark’ would be an understatement approaching libellous proportions. Robert Kirkman’s tale of the poor wretches unlucky enough to still be alive during a zombie apocalypse has crossed the event horizon and is now circling a black hole from which no light (joy, humour, hope or general merriment) can escape.

For once the word horror can be applied accurately; forget all of those dreary remakes and mindless torture-porn offerings at the multiplexes, for a story that will truly horrify head down to your local comic shop and pick up a copy of The Walking Dead.

It’s a testament to Kirkman’s abilities that, in spite of its bleakness, the comic remains utterly compelling. Anyone that tells you they didn’t read Here We Remain in one sitting is almost certainly a liar; beloved family pets have been easier to put down.

The Walking Dead’s secret has always been its note perfect characterisation, and in that respect this volume may be the best yet. The previous collection, Made To Suffer, brought the mammoth thirty-six issue prison arc to a chaotic and bloody conclusion. Here We Remain focuses on the aftermath and follows Rick and his son Carl as they set out alone and begin to come to terms with what they’ve been through.

For the past few years Rick has been in a near constant state of crisis management, even as his humanity was being stripped away there was never any real time for reflection. Now, as we watch Rick and his son live off canned beans in an abandoned house, we finally get to see the man that he’s become, and it’s more unsettling than any amount of rotting zombie flesh.

Artist Charlie Adlard continues to be absolutely indispensable and does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting here. Rick and Carl are both at the end of their tethers and the words they exchange can be curt and aggressive. Adlard’s masterful use of body language and facial expressions helps us catch a glimpse of the intimate father-son relationship that lies beneath the anger and confusion.

In his introduction to the series, Kirkman claimed that we’d see Rick change and mature to the point where he didn’t resemble the man who woke in that hospital bed all those years ago. Here We Remain emphatically delivers on that promise, and boy was it worth the wait.

Unless the person signing your cheques is James Cameron or John Lasseter, work as a digital effects artist in Hollywood is a pretty thankless task at the moment. The best you can hope for is to be ignored, however more often than not critics will use your life’s work as a stick to beat the whole industry with. Why is it that in spite of the huge possibilities CGI has brought to modern filmmaking, it is treated with such snobbery?

In almost all aspects of film criticism I am a disciple of Mark Kermode. After years of listening to his show on BBC Radio 5, I worship at his meticulously Brylcreemed quiff and would follow his flappy hands to the ends of the Earth. But the use of CGI is one area in which he and I are at odds. Mark is generally pretty sniffy about CGI, I remember one show in which he was berating a film for its use of digital effects (I can’t remember which film it was, but lets face it, it could be almost any blockbuster of the last decade) and he went on to reminisce about the great analogue effects that were once used in films. He talked about the famous car stunt in The Man with the Golden Gun where James Bond executes a perfect corkscrew jump over a river. He said that it was made all the more thrilling because you knew that it was a real car jumping over a real river.

Although it’s true that the stunt is still impressive all these years later, it’s impressive in a way that has little to do with the fiction of the film. The thrill that Mark Kermode talks about comes from the knowledge that a stuntman actually completed the jump for real, it has almost nothing to do with the fact that superspy James Bond just evaded the bad guys. If this is what you’re after then you’d be better off going to see a stunt show instead of a film.

Surely the ideal situation is that cinemagoers are so wrapt up in the characters and the story that they don’t give a moments thought to how the effects were achieved. Seeing Neo dodge bullets while watching The Matrix for the first time was one of the most exhilarating experiences that I’ve ever had in a cinema, and yet at no point was I worrying about whether Keanu Reeves could actually dodge bullets in real life. If you start to think about the stuntmen then your suspension of disbelief is almost certainly faltering. But I guess given the quality of The Man with the Golden Gun, it’s unlikely that disbelief ever got more than a few millimetres off the ground in that particular case.

I think part of the snobbery around CGI also comes from critics applying rose tinted glasses when they reminisce about the analogue effects of old. The revolutionary visuals Star Wars are remembered, but the laughably sub-Airfix model effects of The Shape of Things to Come are forgotten. I’m sure when critics lament CGI they’re comparing it in their minds to scenes such as the majestic introduction of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which doesn’t really seem fair, because almost anything you compare to a scene of that quality isn’t going to come off too well.

But more than anything else, the reason that CGI is often treated with such disrespect is because it simply isn’t understood. The assumption seems to be that analogue effects are born out of hard work and creativity, whereas digital effects are created by giving some basic instructions to a computer and then sitting back with a coffee while you wait for everything to render. I think this is mainly because as laymen film fans we are never going to be able to understand how CGI is put together, so we just throw up our hands and say “computers did it.”

If you watch the Making Of documentaries on Star Wars you can see how the flyby shots of the Death Star were achieved. Once it clicks into place and you get that satisfying spark of understanding and can appreciate the ingenuity and vision that went in to creating the effect. Yet for all the behind the scenes footage of Avatar that I’ve poured over, James Cameron might as well have used magic to conjure up the world of Pandora.

And spare a thought for the poor folks slaving away at their monitors for hours on end working on Inception. The intricate folding city landscapes were incredible and blended seamlessly with the live action footage, however all the column inches about the film’s special effects were devoted to the fact in an English warehouse somewhere someone had managed to knock up a spinning corridor. As great as the zero-gravity fight scene was, it didn’t stand out to me more than any of the other special effects, and if anything the final act’s decent into limbo left much more of an impression. But I guess interviewing Joseph Gordon Levitt about what it’s like to be hoisted up inside a spinning rig makes for better copy than asking one of Inception’s army of tech guys how they solved a specific coding problem.

In the last couple of decades special effects in film making may have reached the point where most of us are unable to wrap our heads around how they work, but that doesn’t mean we should demean the talent and artistry that goes into their creation.

(Spoiler Warning: This post has major spoilers for both Lost and Sandman. If you haven’t watched all six seasons of Lost or read all 75 issues of Sandman then DO NOT READ.)

Like a lot of geeks, a fair number of goth girls, and the odd literary critic, my favourite comic book of all time is Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. And although I may often profess the genius of TV shows like The Wire and Mad Men, if I’m being honest with myself the show that I have enjoyed more than any other is Lost.

It recently occurred to me that some of the reasons that I love Lost are also the reasons that I loved Sandman back in the day. The more I thought about it the more similarities I saw between the two. After the last article about video games and war got a little heavy, I thought it might be fun to look at just what Sandman and Lost share. (I also thought it might be fun to have a bit of a play with photoshop.)

Following in the critically acclaimed footsteps of The Deal and The Queen, The Special Relationship is the third film in Peter Morgan’s “Blair trilogy.” It charts the tumultuous relationship between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton as they strive to overcome terrorists in Northern Ireland, war criminals in Kosovo, and most dangerous of all, 22-year-old interns in Washington who don’t know when to keep their mouths shut. (No pun intend… oh forget it.)

The Special Relationship is well written and features some fantastic performances, but sadly as the credits rolled I felt as though the last 90 minutes represented something of a wasted opportunity.

After a brief prelude in which a younger Blair travels to Washington to learn the art of electioneering from the recently victorious Democrats, The Special Relationship kicks into gear with Blair and Clinton’s first meeting in 1996. We then follow the pair over the next four years as they both try to navigate the extraordinary political landscape that accompanied the end of the twentieth century.

The subject matter is perfect for Morgan, who has shown with his screenplays for The Deal, The Queen and Frost/Nixon that when it comes to combining political intrigue with compelling human drama, he is one of the best in the business. But this is also where my real frustration with The Special Relationship lies; there is simply too much material here. The Northern Irish peace process, the military intervention is Kosovo and the Monica Lewinsky scandal could all have made brilliant movies, but instead everything is crammed into a one off 90 minute TV special. This is a real shame because television’s biggest strength over cinema is it’s allowance for longer narratives. HBO’s previous historical projects, such as Band of Brothers and John Adams, wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful if they’d tried to blast their story out in under an hour and a half.

The main problem with trying to cover so much ground here is that it leaves very little room for the behind the scenes drama that made Morgan’s previous work so engaging. In the case of The Queen, we were all aware of the political fallout after Diana’s death and what it meant for the royal family, but the film worked because it built on this and painted a fascinating picture of what might have been happening inside the walls of Number 10 and Balmoral at the time. Because The Special Relationship tries to cover so much political ground in such a short amount of time, there sadly isn’t any room for that kind of speculative historical fiction. What we’re we’re left with is a (admittedly well put together) dramatisation of events that anyone with even a passing interest in the outside world would already be familiar with. This forces the uncomfortable question: what was the point?

The reason for covering events with a drama, as opposed to a documentary, is that fiction enables filmmakers to convey themes, ideas and emotions that can’t be easily achieved when your only tools are achieve footage and interviews. In that regard The Special Relationship must be viewed as a failure – it doesn’t achieve the emotional highs of great drama, but equally can’t achieve the insight and perspective of a well put together documentary.

There are still things to like about the film, especially the cast who are all brilliant and capture the essence of their real life counterparts without ever resorting to cheap impersonations. Martin Sheen and Helen McCrory reprise their roles from The Queen and continue to excel as Tony and Cherie Blair, however it was arguably Dennis Quaid and Hope Davis as Bill and Hillary Clinton who really shone. It’s just a shame that they were never really given the chance to explore their characters.

As we approach the orgy of videogame releases that accompanies the winter months, EA are finally unleashing their PR army and flooding us with information about the upcoming reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise. Following the lucrative example set by Call of Duty, Medal of Honor is being dragged out of the muddy fields of World War II and thrown headfirst into the sandy deserts of the War on Terror. The M1 Thompson, French villages and Market Garden are out, and the M16, Afghan mountains and Shock and Awe are in. But with these modern trappings comes the unshakeable feeling that something is a little off – I’ve spent hundreds of hours trekking through virtual Europe and slaughtered countless digital Nazis, so why is it that as soon as I’m handed a controller and told to go kick Al-Qaeda’s ass I feel uneasy?

Good Morning, Afghanistan

I’ve been playing the online beta of Medal of Honor, released to iron out any bugs before the full release in October, and although the gameplay is fun, it’s certainly an odd experience. As soon as you boot the game up it’s made immediately apparent that the developers haven’t been fazed by controversial subject matter. Most games that use the wars in the Middle East as inspiration tend to keep exact details and locations vague, relying instead on the imagery that we’ve all seen in countless news reports. However as I wait for my level to load I’m greeted with this, no doubt intended to get me pumped for the action ahead:

A war torn part of Kabul city becomes the battlefield as coalition soldiers try to rid the area of insurgent activity. Amidst ruins and the burning wrecks of cars snipers take pot shots at anyone who dares move in the open.

Exciting, huh?

Next I’m tasked with kitting out my character with weapons and gadgets. As I’m cycling through the guns, deciding which of the shiny new toys to place into the hands of my rather strapping looking US Ranger, I spot that if I press X I can “Change Teams.” Intrigued, I push the button, only to be greeted by someone with dark skin and a rocket launcher slung over their shoulder – I look down and realise that I’ve just selected to play as the Taliban.

It’s moments like this that really drive home how strange an experience this new Medal of Honor can be; referencing the Taliban by name and describing them as a “team” is simply surreal.

But Everyone Else Is Doing It

The Medal of Honor reboot is unquestionably a response to the success of the Modern Warfare entries in the Call of Duty series. When the first Modern Warfare game was released its setting felt like a revelation. Instead of driving the Nazis out of Europe yet again, first-person shooter fans could now play the lead role in a blockbuster that outpaced anything Hollywood had produced in years; the frantic shaky cameras of the Bourne films were nothing compared to the speed at which I tore through Modern Warfare’s perfectly crafted maps.

Although parts of both Modern Warfare games take place in unnamed Middle Eastern countries, I never felt as uneasy playing them as I did with the new Medal of Honor. I think this is partly because the developers of the Modern Warfare games, Infinity Ward, never really tried to address the current conflicts abroad. The plot lines involved Russian separatists and insane rogue Generals; it was more James Bond than it was Hurt Locker. The world of Modern Warfare is also one of, shall we say, heightened reality. Some of the plot points of Modern Warfare 2 are so ‘out there’ that they make the universally ridiculed invisible car of Die Another Day look as mundane as the Peugeot 206 currently sat on my drive.

Modern Warfare may come in for criticism for borrowing the imagery from the current conflicts while trying to sidestep the issues, but I don’t think there’s any dishonour in sidestepping issues. Sidestepping an issue indicates that while you’re aware of its existence, you’re electing not to get involved. By setting their game in an alternate reality of fictional enemies and impossible scenarios Infinity Ward successfully gave the controversies of the War on Terror a very wide birth.

I think ultimately this is why I had such a problem with Medal of Honor. While Modern Warfare avoided the whole topic, Medal of Honor confidently strode right into the centre of things trumpeting its realism. I’m of the opinion that if you’re going enter the highly contentious and emotive grounds of the War on Terror, you damn well better have something to say about it.

Reflecting Public Mood

The only consensus that seems to have emerged in the last few years regarding the wars in the Middle East is that there aren’t any easy black and white answers; there are just shades upon shades of suffocating grey. In the UK we are greeted with weekly newspaper articles in which the families of soldiers who’ve died in Iraq and Afghanistan ask what it is we’re supposed to be fighting for. We sit, unsurprised, as former MI5 leaders tell us that the huge numbers of civilian casualties abroad have acted as recruiting tools for terrorism and made us significantly less safe at home. But just as pulling out of the Middle East looks like a no-brainer, Time publishes a cover that illustrates the sheer inhuman brutality of the Taliban. Like I said, grey.

Everything that EA has released so far about the new Medal of Honor shows a complete deafness to the tone of real world conversations about the current conflicts. They’ve released a serious of short videos in which they talk to ex and current soldiers (all of whom have their identity hidden) in what appears to be an attempt to indicate how seriously they’re taking the issues. However the videos are so unbelievably jingoistic that it all looks like a Dr Strangelove style farce.

The War rages on. We have dealt the enemy many crushing blows. We have exposed their positions and driven them back. But they have endured. They have adapted. And they are not as weak as we once thought. War requires the sledge hammer but will be decided with the scalpel. A different breed of warrior is required. We are experts in the application of violence. We posses the mindset and will to do what is necessary. We are tier 1.

This is the voice over that accompanies the game’s E3 trailer, which seems to take the chest thumping “America, Fuck Yeah!” attitude of Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America and strips it of all irony. What we’re left with is something that makes army recruitment videos look like nuanced studies into the horrors of war.

You simply can’t reference something as controversial as the war in Afghanistan without at least acknowledging the ongoing debates that envelop it. I’m sure the intention wasn’t to present a game that looks, to all intents and purposes, like interactive propaganda, but by ignoring everything that doesn’t fit into a black and white tale of goodies and baddies, that’s the situation EA now finds itself in.

I think this gets to the heart of why I found playing Medal of Honor such a disconcerting experience. When a society as a whole is still coming to terms with how it feels about a moral issue it becomes impossible to mention it without becoming part of the ongoing debate. A recent example of this that comes to mind is how we as a culture approach rape. I was on twitter recently, following updates about a football match and was pretty shocked when someone wrote that one of the teams was “raping” the opposition. They clearly didn’t mean any offense by using the word, but it still seemed to ring out like a gunshot.

But why do I feel that way about that word? If they’d said one team was “killing” the other would I have been bothered? Probably not. Does that say something about my views on murder? Again, probably not.

I think the use of the word “rape” is more shocking than “murder” partly because the debates that surround it are still ongoing. We may have come a long way, but conviction rates are still shockingly low and sentiments like “well, if she will dress like that…” still hang uncomfortably in the air. Rape, like the War on Terror, is a cultural wound that has yet to heal.

When the Medal of Honor games were set during World War II they didn’t face this problem. As horrendous as the Second World War was, our society has come to terms with it.

I’m clearly not the only person who has been troubled by the new Medal of Honor’s setting, and like all video game controversies it has raised some kneejerk reactions from political quarters. But as the cacophony of angry voices rises, is there a lesson to be learned about the place of video games amongst more traditional media?

Ludicrous Overreactions and Ludicrous-er Responses

As news of this new Medal of Honor has slowly trickled down to the mainstream media EA has been fighting off a lot of flack. This week it reached ludicrous proportions when the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence Liam Fox called for the game to be banned. (Surely we’ve come a long way since Lady Chatterley’s Lover and reached a point where things can be distasteful without being illegal.) However, in what appears to be an attempt to out-ludicrous Liam Fox, EA Games president Frank Gibeau offered this little gem in response:

At EA we passionately believe games are an artform, and I don’t know why films and books set in Afghanistan don’t get flack, yet [games] do. Whether it’s Red Badge Of Courage or The Hurt Locker, the media of its time can be a platform for the people who wish to tell their stories. Games are becoming that platform.

Rule #1 when trying to make people take your game seriously: Don’t compare it to The Red Badge of Courage (also out are Shakespeare, Dickens and Citizen Kane). If Gibeau seriously can’t see the difference between the game his company is putting out and, say, Generation Kill or Green Zone, then allow me to roll up my sleeves and try to clarify matters.

It’s true that other mediums have dealt with modern wars without facing the volume of criticism that Medal of Honor has received, but there are many others factors at play here that have very little to do with the fact that it’s a video game. With the HBO series Generation Kill, David Simon showed us a nuanced and terrifyingly believable picture of what it means to be an American Marine post 9/11. The Marines weren’t held up as heroes, nor dismissed as villains, they were portrayed simply as men. This is in contrast to the Medal of Honor videos in which the soldiers appear nothing less than superhuman.

With Green Zone, director Paul Greengrass sought to combine the hard hitting, almost journalistic, bent of his films like Bloody Sunday and United 93 with the mainstream appeal of his work on the Bourne franchise. His intention was to wrap a serious modern issue in the trappings of a traditional thriller. But though Greengrass’ film was explicitly going for a mainstream audience, its tone and the way it dealt with violence was still a million miles away from the dumb fun of something like Die Hard. And this is where modern videogames run into trouble; when trying to depict modern warfare, all of their techniques are decidedly Die Hard.

Film makers have a variety of techniques that make viewers approach the material in a certain way. When Steven Spielberg wanted to give us a glimpse of what the D-Day landings were like he used hand held cameras and drained the film stock of half its colour. As a result watching the first ten minutes of Saving Private Ryan is a genuine ordeal. However, when Indiana Jones goes up against the Nazis with nothing but a handful of one liners and a whip it’s another story all together.

The first-person shooter mechanics as seen in the likes of Call of Duty aren’t built to communicate to the player the true nature of war. They’re built to reward lightning quick reactions and give us a little shot of pleasure every time we squeeze the trigger and see the digital men on screen drop. They do this fantastically and there’s nothing wrong with it (in fact after a hard day at work there is a great deal right with it). However, the problem comes when you try to graft something with meaning onto these foundations. At best you’ll come away with something incoherent, at worst you’ll make a mockery of the very real issues that you profess to care about.

War Can Be Stressful

So is the situation hopeless, can games ever deal with such serious subject matter? I think that they can, but they simply have to make sure that they intelligently use gameplay mechanics in the same way that directors use shooting techniques.

There are a few examples that may point the way forward. Professed pacifist Hideo Kojima has always wrestled with the morality of violence in his sci-fi spy-em-up Metal Gear games. In earlier games in the series players were rewarded for not killing anyone, however in Metal Gear Solid 4 Kojima actually took this one step further and introduced a mechanic to punish the more psychotic players. Every time you fired a weapon you filled up a ‘stress’ meter. As the meter increased Snake, the game’s hard edged protagonist, became increasingly difficult to control, moving became more difficult and your aim would start to violently shake around. As crude as this sounds, it was surprisingly effective.

As Snake become embroiled in a battle between privatised militaries and local militias I remember frantically trying to wrestle back control of the character as he, and more importantly my controller, shook so violently that it felt as though the gun would be torn from my hands. It wasn’t perfect, and the game still gave you enough weaponry to arm a small African nation, but it went some way to altering the player’s traditional relationship with the violence on screen.

Whether we like it or not, a medium’s maturity is often judged by how well it can articulate the complexities of war. When people point to the growing literary acceptance of comic books and graphic novels they cite works like Maus and Persepolis. There are hundreds of comics that are as well written as these two, but their ability to intelligently deal with the Second World War and the Iranian theocracy somehow give their medium a legitimacy in the public’s eyes. It’s an inevitability that video games will get there, but until they do it would probably be wise for developers to be very careful about where they set their shooters.

Pour out the scotch, light that cigarette, and if you’re entering Burt Cooper’s office take off those shoes, because Mad Men is back and it’s as spectacular as ever.

On Sunday AMC broadcast the first episode in the fourth season of Mad Men, their ongoing saga of sharply dressed ad men, alcoholics and adulterers. The year is now 1964 and much has changed for the residents of Madison Avenue. As Donald Draper struggles to adjust to his new situation, he appears to be making grave errors of judgement that could very well lead to his ultimate downfall. After years of being ten steps ahead of everyone else, is Don finally in over his head?

Mad Men’s fourth season opens with a journalist from Ad Age asking the question that defines the show: “Who is Donald Draper?”

Of course there are two ways to answer this, the most literal being “he’s a guy that died in the Second World War and had his identity stolen by a stunningly handsome yet troubled farm boy called Dick Whitman.” However the more interesting approach, favoured by the show, focuses on the character of Don (no longer Dick, even in his own mind) and tries to figure out what kind of man resides inside those perfectly tailored suits. After three seasons we know him to be charming but cruel, intelligent yet stubborn, and without a doubt one of the most multifaceted characters to appear on television since Tony Soprano.

Don is predictably unnerved by the journalist’s questions and brushes him off, refusing to offer him anything of worth for his article. The journalist then does what journalists do when they don’t have the facts they need, he invents some. These invented facts aren’t too kind to Don, and to make matters worse Don’s failure to mention one of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s (I still get chills typing that out) top clients leads to them losing that account.

After moping around for a bit, kicking over a chair and yelling at a set of prospective clients, Don is forced to meet a contact of Burt Cooper’s at the Wall Street Journal to smooth everything out and drag the Draper name out of the mud. This time Don turns the charm up to eleven and spins the reporter a tale in which he’s an advertising gunslinger, cutting his own path and answering to no man. This romantic vision of the man known as Donald Draper is clearly enough to inspire some engaging column inches and attract some new clients, however it is also the first time that Don’s let his guard down in such a public way. In putting his name out there he’s is taking an incredible risk, one that could see everything he’s worked so hard to achieve undone.

It was Betty’s discovery of Don’s true identity that ultimately destroyed his home life. Obviously his constant affairs didn’t help, but it was the revelation that their whole life together had been built on a lie that finally brought everything crashing down.

With the interview in The Wall Street journal Don has now tied his professional career inextricably to the Donald Draper identity. His interview with Ad Age caused him to lose an account because of a perceived slight, imagine what would happen if it became public knowledge that the figurehead of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce had committed identity fraud and effectively lied to everyone he’d ever done business with. The same mistakes that cost Don his family are now in danger of costing him his career.

So why did Don put himself in such an exposed position? The Donald Draper of season one would never have been so reckless, however the Don we know now is a different man. In the latest episode we saw him totally out of his comfort zone; in almost every scene he was powerless. In a single episode; the journalist from Ad Age wrote a hit job on him; Burt Cooper told him he’d failed at his job; Pete and Peggy went around his back to perform a PR stunt; Betty now has complete control over their kids and his house; the woman he was on a date with said she was only there as a favour to a mutual friend; and as a final indignity the prostitute he hired on thanksgiving (festive, huh?) seemed to talk to him with a mixture of condescension and pity, refusing to stay for a drink because she had other plans.

After suffering through all of this Don headed into the office to give a presentation that was resoundingly rejected by his clients. This was the straw that broke the ad man’s back; Don yelled the clients for their lack of vision and threw them out of the building. The Don from three years ago might have tried to gently persuade them to see things from his point of view, however Don’s current mental state has left him utterly unwilling to compromise in the work place. Tellingly, when Roger suggested that Pete could straighten things out with the clients, and possibly get them to look at some new ideas the following weak, Don exploded, telling him “No, that’s not the point!”

Right now Don isn’t concerned with which accounts he lands and which accounts he loses, he simply needs to feel like there’s one area of his life where he’s still in control. I’m sure in Don’s mind, he needs to feel like a man.

Unfortunately feeling like a man comes at a price. If Don’s going to throw out clients who don’t allow him complete creative control, he’s going to have to fully exploit his growing professional reputation for all of its worth. If he doesn’t his company simply won’t be able to stay afloat. This means interviews with newspapers. This means celebrity.

In a recent interview Mad Men’s creator and show runner Matt Weiner discussed where he saw the character of Don going over the following season:

Throughout the seasons, we’ve seen him come closer and closer to being that idealized man in the suit, with the house in Westchester and the beautiful wife and the two kids and some fame. But it always felt to me that it couldn’t be front and center because he has this secret identity. How much fame could he really get? What is his ambition? So now we’re at a point in the show where, if he goes out on his own, he is the star of the business — and he has to go out and basically claim this success.

All indications are that as Season 4 develops we’ll get to see Don claim that fame and success, all that remains to be seen is if his secret identity can withstand the increased attention and scrutiny. I would put money on the fact that it cannot.

When The Guardian began hosting The Ricky Gervais Show back in 2005, no one predicted what a phenomenon the podcast would become. And how could they, the premise – comedy writers Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant talk to some guy called Karl Pilkington for 30 minutes – was hardly earth shattering. Yet here we are, after five years and several million downloads, with an HBO animated version being broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic.

But before the animated version, before the spin off books, before Karl’s TV career and before The Guardian podcasts, there was The Ricky Gervais Show on London radio station XFM. Every Saturday Londoners were treated to a show that was, it’s fair to say, an utter shambles. The show exhibited no signs of planning, outright contempt for its listeners and was often downright incomprehensible. And it was glorious.

After the success of the first series of The Office, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant returned to XFM, the radio station where they first met. However now that they were big shot telly types they couldn’t be expected to drive their own desk (radio-speak for push the buttons) and so they were given a chap called Karl Pilkington. Karl kept to himself for a while, only speaking when pushed to by Ricky and Steve, but pretty soon he opened up and revealed himself to be one of the most interesting and unintentionally hilarious people on the planet.

The shows typically involve Karl coming out with an insane theory and Ricky shrieking with glee before calling him idiot and telling him to shut up and “play a record” – possibly the most used phrase on the show (well, that and Hairy Chinese Kid which got an inordinate amount of coverage). But to simply dismiss Karl as an idiot would be to miss the point. Idiots, by and large, aren’t funny. We’ve all been in social situations where we’ve been stuck talking to someone who, perhaps after mere seconds, reveals themselves to be an utter imbecile. In such situations laughing is the last thing on your mind as you’re too busy contemplating throwing yourself out of the nearest window.

This isn’t to say that Karl’s a genius, he clearly isn’t, but there is something of the genius about him. No matter their discipline, geniuses see things in a way that the rest of us simply can’t. It’s as if we’re all stuck viewing the world from one angle, but they’ve built up such a level of knowledge and understanding that they can climb up and have a peer around the back. This new perspective gives them access to ideas that would never occur to the rest of us. Karl also sees the world from a different angle to the rest of us, it’s just that through some bizarre quirk of fate he’s managed to do so using only half remembered facts and absolutely zero understanding. Karl isn’t funny because he’s stupid, he’s funny because no matter the subject he’ll come out with something that never occurred to you; something that causes you to see the world in a whole new way. More often than not it’ll be utter bollocks, but it’ll be astoundingly original bollocks.

The original shows on XFM are such a joy because we get to hear Ricky and Steve slowly start to realise just what a comedic force of nature they’ve got on their hands. The podcasts and audiobooks that they continue to produce are still great, but they’re set up with the explicit aim of getting Karl to say bizarre things, and as a result can sometimes feel a little forced. On XFM it just seems that little bit more organic; Steve and Ricky will be chatting between tracks and Karl will chime in with something utterly unexpected that’ll cause Ricky to erupt in an ear-splitting squeal and derail the conversation for the next hour or so. It’s the difference between a band’s D.I.Y., recorded-in-a-basement debut, and their more considered, studio produced, follow up. The second album might be more accomplished and have fewer filler tracks, but there’s something about the rawness of that first record that gives it an energy that’s impossible to replicate.

If you fancy having a listen to these old shows the best place to head to is Pilkepedia, a mecca for all things Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington. Pilkepedia has got archives of all the old shows, and I’m pretty sure that it’s all legal and above board (the site was once shut down for hosting material that was currently available on iTunes and so is now incredibly careful about what they put up).

Enjoy.

And it’s over. Lost, a show that I would unreservedly describe as one of the greatest to ever grace our screens, has finished. The final episode aired a couple of Sundays back and left long term fans in tears and those who had only caught the first half of season one, but tuned in to see how it all ended, utterly baffled. As the show’s final hours played out mythology questions were answered and character arcs completed, but the writers still threw enough curve balls at us to ensure that the series’ true meaning will be debated for years to come.

One of the philosophical debates running through the heart of the show has always been the battle between science and faith. It was put centre stage in the season two premiere Man of Science, Man of Faith in which the conflict between Jack, the man of science, and Locke, the man of faith, came to a head. This conflict perfectly mirrored the competing theories about the nature of Lost itself: would the island’s seemingly magical properties be explained by pseudo-science or mysticism? In short, was Lost a sci-fi or fantasy show? And if you thought that science and religion could inspire heated debates, you’ve never seen sci-fi and fantasy fans go at it on a message board. Now that the series has finished, can we finally declare a winner?

The Final Season

Season six certainly seemed to point towards fantasy, as the mysticism was laid on pretty thick this year. Nowhere was this more apparent than the highly polarising Across the Sea. This episode took place a couple of millennia before the crash of Oceanic 815, and sought to explain the history of the two men who had been giving our Losties such a hard time over the past six years; Jacob and The Man in Black. It included, among other things, a magical glowing waterfall of light. Sadly this looked exactly as hokey on screen as it sounds, however it proved to be central to the mythology of the show. Jacob and The Man in Black’s psychotic, I’m-beating-you-to-death-with-this-rock-for-your-own-good, protector Mother (played by the glorious Allison Janney) described the light as:

Life, death, rebirth. Its the source, the heart of the Island… A little of this same light is inside every man, but they always want more. If the light goes out here, it goes out everywhere.

This is as close as Lost came to articulating what the island actually is, and it left a fair few viewers pretty angry. For years they’d assumed that a sci-fi explanation lay at the center of the show, and in the end what did they get? That the island is the world’s soul.

After finally coming to terms with Across the Sea (in part due to the barnstorming episode that followed) team sci-fi went into the finale tentatively hoping that Mother’s proclamations would be dismissed as the ramblings of a ancient hippy, and something more tangible would take their place. That didn’t happen. What did happen is the flash-sideways storyline of season six was revealed to actually take place in a kind of limbo that the characters went to after they died. The final scene of the show involved Jack’s father, Christian Shepherd (get it?), standing between two angelic statues and literally opening the gates to the afterlife. Cue angry blog posts and shockingly abusive twitter messages aimed at the show’s writers from the fans who were after something a bit less biblical and a bit more Arthur C. Clarke.

So now that we’ve seen the show in its entirety can we confidently file Lost next to Supernatural and Xena: Warrior Princess on our DVD shelves? Well yes we can, but it would be equally at home sat next to Star Trek and Logan’s Run. It may seem like a cop out, but I think the question of whether Lost is technically a sci-fi or fantasy show is something that the writers intentionally left open to interpretation.

What I Told You Was True, From A Certain Point Of View

Mixing sci-fi with mysticism seems to have become a bit of a trend of late, with the two biggest genre shows of recent years, Lost and Battlestar Galactica, both at it. But it should be pointed out that they approached genre melding in different ways. With Battlestar Galactica there were sci-fi elements (vipers, faster then light travel, sentient machines) and mystical elements (Head Six, ghost Starbuck, God) but the show kept the two separate. With Lost it was all a lot more fluid, as the majority of the show’s mythology can be interpreted from either a sci-fi or fantasy perspective.

Mother described the Heart of the Island as the light inside each man. The Dharma Initiative described this same substance as a pocket of exotic matter. Mother’s description may have come later in the series, but that doesn’t make it definitive. Both were simply describing the source of the island’s power in a way that fit with their world view. As viewers we can choose who to believe.

A number of fans have even interpreted the final scene in the church from a sci-fi perspective. They suggest that the light which filled the church was the same exotic matter that lay at the heart of the island. Under this interpretation that island can be seen as a sort of gateway to this realm, and what awaited the Losties wasn’t heaven per se, but a plane of existence beyond our own and outside time; something similar to the supercontext of Grant Morrison’s Invisibles. This view is given some credence by the references to Slaughterhouse Five that have appeared throughout the show. The aliens of the book, the Tralfamadorians, can view all of reality in four dimensions and effectively live outside time. By leaving the church and entering the exotic matter the Losties would have started to view the universe in this way. Having said all that, Jack and co could simply be in heaven, chilling out with some angels and remembering the crazy times that they spent on a magical island.

Man Of Time Travel, Man Of Ageless Supernatural Being

By weaving together sci-fi and fantasy storytelling Lost’s writers were able to approach the ideas at the heart of the show from different angles. Perhaps the best example of this is how they dealt with what is arguably the show’s central concept; fate.

Since the first episode, in which Charlie wrote ‘F A T E’ on his fingers, the characters on the show have wrestled with the ideas of fate and destiny; was their plane crash just an unlucky random event, or were they on this island for a reason? Science fiction allowed the writers to approach these ideas from a scientific and philosophical perspective, whereas fantasy allowed them to approach it from a more spiritual and religious point of view.

The sci-fi storytelling came in the form of time travel. Once the Losties were back in the seventies and working for Dharma the story was driven forward by the question of whether they could alter events to ensure that their plane never crashed. Was it true that ‘what happened, happened’, a mantra repeated throughout the season, or could the future, and their fate, be re-written? When Daniel Faraday stated that they couldn’t alter the timeline his arguments had a distinctly deterministic bent, with the focus lying on simple cause and effect rather than any appeal to what was ‘meant to be’. To illustrate his points he described time as like a stream, which is very similar to the example of a river that Stephen Hawking uses when talking about time travel. Now that the series has finished we know that ‘what happened, happened’ was a pretty accurate way to describe events on the island – by trying to alter their fate Jack ended up creating the very incident that led to Oceanic 815’s crash.

The more spiritual look at fate reached its peak in season six when Hurley led Jack to Jacob’s lighthouse. Jack’s realisation that Jacob had been watching him his whole life, and planned for him to come to the island, was a major turning point for the character. He wrestled with the idea of destiny and his place in the world for the rest of the season, and in the end it was Jack’s conclusions about the nature of fate that led to the show’s resolution.

Because of the genre melding approach that the writers took, the question ‘why did Oceanic 815 crash?’ has two equally correct answers: because its survivors travelled back thirty years to create a time loop, and because an ageless being called Jacob wished it so. Both answers communicate the idea that our fates are set in stone. Both answers also confirm that John Locke was ultimately proved right: they were all on this island for a reason.

The Hows and Whys

Now the inevitable question; was it a cop out to leave certain questions, such as the nature of the island, open to interpretation? Were the writers trying to inspire debate about the concepts and philosophies that govern the human condition, or were they just too scared to finally pull the trigger on the show’s mythology? I think the answer lies in the types of questions they chose to answer, and those they chose to leave open.

I’ve already written an article focussed on the answers provided in Lost, so I won’t go over old ground here, instead I’ll focus on one specific case: Jacob. Jacob, by and large, is the explanation for Lost. The state the island was in when Oceanic 815 crashed can be put down to the troubled relationship that Jacob had with his mother and brother. In the first episode of the show Locke talked to Walt about an eternal battle between light and dark, and as season six developed we saw this battle played out between Jacob and The Man in Black.

We were first introduced to the character of Jacob when his name flashed up on screen during one of The Other’s subliminal films, but by the end of the show we knew who Jacob was, where he came from, and what motivated him. Contrast this with what happened on the other major sci-fi/fantasy show of the new millennium: Battlestar Galactica. On Battlestar the mythical being controlling events was God, however by the end of the show the only piece of information we were given about him was that he didn’t like that name.

Lost answers questions, but only certain questions. We may know who Jacob is and what motivates him, but we have no idea how he does what he does. Throughout its run Lost answered the whys, it just left the hows open to interpretation.

Perhaps Jacob was a disciple of God. Perhaps being close to The Source gave him the ability to shape our reality in the same way the Losties shaped the flash sideways. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Offer me the hows or the whys and I’ll take the whys everytime. Whether Lost is a sci-fi or fantasy show is a how question; how did the island travel through time; how did Jacob control events. I personally don’t need answers to these how questions, but more than that, I actually think providing them may have harmed to show.

Everything

Ask a die hard Lost fan what the show is about and you’ll more than likely get a single word response: “Everything”. Lost was absolutely packed with ideas, philosophies, and cultural reference points. A single scene could incorporate religion, theoretical physics, and The Little House of the Prairie without anyone batting an eyelid. Fans took screen captures of every scene, looking for clues that might shed more light on the writers’ intentions, and more often than not these still images bore fruit. In Season 3 the writers had to even come out and tell fans about one reference that they’d hidden in a scene – turns out they’d hidden it so well that even the finest digital recorders in the land couldn’t make it out.

Lost was a dense collage of ideas. By giving us a ‘correct’ answer to the debate of science and faith – sci-fi and fantasy – the writers wouldn’t be adding to this collage, they’d be stripping layers out.

This isn’t to say that stories should never come to conclusions about those questions, it’s just that Lost itself thrived by throwing everything at the screen and then using the disparate, and often opposing, elements as prisms through which to view the story. Saying that after six years one of these prisms was ultimately invalid adds nothing to the viewing experience and simply removes a distinct flavour from the show. Lost was undoubtedly the Sweet and Sour of the genre TV world: removing one of the main flavours would unbalance the whole dish. And on top of that, anyone with half a brain knows that Sweet and Sour kicks the shit out of everything else on the takeaway menu.