Medium Mashup

Category: The Deep End

In-depth think-pieces about Movies, TV, and Games

  • Community: Dan Harmon’s Story Circle and Why Community Can End Now

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    Dan Harmon’s Story Circle

    Last week, Yahoo posted the final episode of Community’s sixth season, and possibly the final episode of the series. Dan Harmon has whisked himself away from the internet to avoid answering questions, and Yahoo hasn’t made any official decisions on a follow-up season, despite claims that the show has been extremely successful on their platform. This season also fulfilled the first part of the “six seasons and a movie” fan-joke that originated way back in season 2, and ended with a “#andamovie” hashtag, suggesting that perhaps the TV series portion of Community had concluded. Combined with a season finale that actually felt like a series finale, there is a strong reason to believe that Community will soon wrap-up entirely with a movie.

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  • Telltale’s Game of Thrones: Choice vs Narrative

    game of thrones telltale(The following article contains some spoilers from Telltale Games’s Game of Thrones series)

    Ever since their first season of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games has been primarily known as the company that specializes in narrative-heavy, choice-driven games. While familiarity with their formula has led to slightly diminishing returns, and none of their recent titles have packed the emotional punch that the first season of their Walking Dead series did, they have been consistently entertaining and unique. The Wolf Among Us was a cool comic-based neo-noir fantasy piece, tied to the existing “Fables” property but also perfectly suited to the uninitiated. Tales from the Borderlands has nailed its parent series’ style and sense of humor, while crafting a story and cast of characters with a lot more complexity than its shooter-siblings would allow. Even the second season of The Walking Dead, while paling in comparison to the first, did a generally strong job of balancing player choice with a pre-ordained story.

    However, four episodes in, their Game of Thrones series appears to be their first major misstep. This is for several reasons, but two stand out in particular. First is that, on a conceptual level, Game of Thrones was destined to run into trouble. Unlike The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, which utilize different sets of characters than their source material, and The Wolf Among Us, which is a prequel to the main series, Game of Thrones takes place during the same time period as the fourth season of the show. It also utilizes many of the same characters. The central families involved, the Forresters and the Whitehills, are inventions for the game, but are frequently interacting with characters whose fates are set in stone.

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  • The Mad Men Finale Strikes the Balance Between Resolution and Ambiguity

    (This article contains spoilers)

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    Update: Between the time I wrote this piece and the time that it published, a Hollywood Reporter interview went live in which Matthew Weiner spoke more in-depth about the ending than he had before. That being said, the headline most websites are running with (that Weiner confirms the reason for the Coca-Cola commercial’s inclusion) is wildly misleading, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Weiner clarifying the comment in the near-future. He also pushes back against the pure-cynicism many critics are deriving from the ending, something I talk about below. You can find a link to that interview here. My original piece is below.

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    If ever there was a show that trusted its audience to “get” its message, it’s Mad Men. The cast consists largely of characters who constantly say what they don’t mean. They lie to get accounts, they pretend to be people who they are not, and they manipulate their actual feelings to make them marketable and tie them to products. Even when characters say what they mean, like when Don and Peggy proselytize about moving past your problems, the show usually doesn’t stop in its tracks to explicitly agree or disagree. It is up to the audience to discover what the show is about.

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  • P.T. and Art Revisionist History in the Age of Access

    P.T.Last year, a free promotional game called P.T. hit the Playstation Store. It was a wildly inventive and terrifying experience, entirely set in a single repeating hallway. Unlike a lot of horror games, which rely on jump scares and enemy AI, P.T. felt intentionally and masterfully designed against your expectations. Complete game or not, it was a marvel of game design and, at least in my personal opinion, the most interesting video game released in 2014.

    Enter today: Konami, the same company that published P.T., is trying to erase it from history. As I mentioned, P.T. was technically a promotional game, and the game it was promoting was Silent Hills, a reboot of the classic survival horror game series. That game (and P.T., by extension) was developed by legendary game designer Hideo Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions, in creative collaboration with Guillermo del Toro and starring Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead. Unfortunately, Konami has been on a roll of self-destructive decisions that ultimately led to the loss of Hideo Kojima from their company. While he’s staying on as a contractor to finish the nearly-complete (or, if you believe some rumors, the complete-but-standing-by-for-a-fall-release) Metal Gear Solid 5, his other projects are being killed. That includes Silent Hills.

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  • Game of Thrones and the Nature of Adaptation

    game-of-thrones_aofEQt(This article will contain spoilers for both the Game of Thrones series and the A Song of Ice and Fire series of books)

    When the Game of Thrones series began on HBO, it was one of the most faithful book-to-TV adaptations in recent history. Nearly every chapter of the book was present and intact, and the few segments left out (aside from a potentially game-changing dream sequence in one of Ned’s chapters) were not significant. If anything, season 1 was notable for adding scenes to the story. Since the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book chapters are all written from the perspective of specific characters, any moments not involving those characters could not be included in the books. This wasn’t a problem in the TV show, where we could get scenes between Cersei and Joffrey, or Varys and Littlefinger, without breaking up a pre-determined narrative structure.

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