The Tricky Art of Adaptation

As long as we've been telling stories, we've made adaptations. The first stories we ever wrote down are adaptations of the oral traditions that came before.

So it makes sense that once we started monetizing our stories we continued the tradition. From a business perspective, taking an already popular story and transposing it to a new medium is, theoretically, less risky than throwing an unfamiliar, original property in front of audiences. It's been a staple of Hollywood since before there even was a Hollywood- D.W. Griffith's infamous The Birth of a Nation was based off the second book in a then popular trilogy focused on the "heroics" of the Ku Klux Klan.

As a strategy, adapting stories did lead to a lot of financial and critical successes for early Hollywood- think Disney, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, The Maltese Falcon, even Casablanca- so in the mode of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," Hollywood has continued to look for the next profitable well to draw from.

These days, fantasy is the gold vein the entertainment industry keeps mining for the next big hit, with the usual mixed results in success and quality. Today I want to look at three recent franchises- Watchmen, Game of Thrones, and The Witcher- and examine how well, or more often, where the tricky art goes sideways. 

We'll start with Watchmen. Now, even though this technically isn't an adaptation of the original comic, the show is clearly trying to continue Alan Moore's tone and themes, so it counts. And unfortunately, it is the worst kind of adaptation, filled with pointless references and callbacks to the original comic with no real purpose but to mindlessly copy the source material. 

At the end of the first episode, the main character, Angela Abar, pulls up to a tree in the dead of night to find an old black man in a wheelchair sitting underneath the hanged figure of Judd Crawford, Chief of Tulsa Police, Angela's boss, friend, and mentor. The camera pans over his dead body, going down to the ground until we see his badge laying in the grass. The camera switches to a slow zoom on the badge getting closer and closer until a single drop of blood falls from Crawford's body, splattering in a nice, single streak across the left hand side of the badge.

Or, from earlier in the pilot, there's a scene where Klan stand ins the 7th Kalvary read a message claiming credit for the death of a cop. They mention how the filth will be hosed from the streets and the streets of Tulsa will become extended gutters full of race traitors and whores. There's also Angela, investigating Crawford's death, sneaking around his bedroom finding an old costume hidden behind a false panel in the closet. Or, in a later episode, Adrian Veidt screaming "I did it! I did it!" when he escapes the pocket dimension he's imprisoned in. Let's not forget Looking Glass broodily eating a can of beans with his mask pulled up just above his nose.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head, but the show is littered with moments like these. If you haven't read the source material, these moments just fly by, they don't particular stick out for any reason, but they don't seem to be serving any kind of purpose, either. But if you've read the comic, you instantly recognize all these individual moments because they are lifted wholesale from Dave Gibbons panels. The act of referencing a parent work isn't inherently bad- it's only a bad thing when you do it for no apparent reason.

A film criticism channel on Youtube called Red Letter Media invented a phrase that perfectly captures this phenomena- I Clapped When I Saw. They devised it when talking about Rogue One and the incessant Easter eggs or more blatant references to the original trilogy for no reason other than to elicit an emotional response from audience members who recognize it.

It's an empty, meaningless gesture. The charitable way to look at it is that showrunner Damon Lindelof is a genuine fan who wants to pepper in as many little references to the source material as he can because he wants to make a game for other mega fans like him to rewatch the show frame-by-frame to find as many of these little details as they can. 

The other, more cynical possibility is that Lindelof and/or the other producers were uneasy about the show's reception among parts of the comic fandom. Specifically, their worries would've centered around whether segments of the fandom would react rather violently and negatively towards the fact that the show focuses on black characters, and a black woman at that. So these references were peppered in to ease the anxiety, a security blanket to give comfort to those who would say that it isn't Watchmen because well, it can't be Watchmen and be about them.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that it's a bit of both. Lindelof has a blurb on the anniversary editions of the comic, so his appreciation of the work is genuine. I also have no doubt that the producers and HBO wanted to ease any controversy from that the story would generate with the bigoted elements which tend to be even more expressive around this specific comic by tying this iteration to the original in as many ways as they could. The mismatch of this strategy- part genuine love, part marketing strategy- means the result is haphazard, obvious, and manipulative at best, and lazy and desperate at worst.

Granted, these complaints mean nothing to general audiences and why would they? It doesn't mean anything to them if references and callbacks to a thing they've never read are done badly or mishandled, as long as those references don't shit on the uninitiated's heads as they fly over, they're not going to notice.

While this may seem a point in the show's favor- that a central part of its construction isn't obtrusive to a general audience's enjoyment- what's the harm. To which I say, if a part of the show is so utterly pointless you wouldn't notice it if was never there, why do it at all?

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, let's take a look at what is by far the best episode of the Watchmen series, "This Extraordinary Dream." The episode follows Will Reeves, Angela's grandfather, from his time as a child survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, to his time as a cop in 1940's New York City.

Part of what makes this episode so powerful is that it takes a blank spot in the original comic- in this case, the identity of Hooded Justice- and expands on it. It takes the opportunity to recast or thinking of the original by making Hooded Justice a black man who survived one of the worst instances of racial violence in U.S. history, who then goes on to be nearly lynched by his fellow officers. It lets

Will Reeves take the noose, the instrument of so many extra-judicial and official murders of his people, and turn it into something he can use to inspire the same terror against those who have hunted his own for so long. It's a transcendent episode, one that shows what the show could've done if it wasn't so obsessed with referencing everything it could from the original.

Moving on to another HBO property, Game of Thrones faced a different challenge in adapting a series of massive novels with hundreds of named characters and multiple point of view characters in a story spanning multiple continents. To navigate this unwieldy mess requires an exacting attention to detail, distilling each book to the essential themes and character arcs so you could figure out what to cut, how to those cut pieces work with what you are keeping, and plot out how what you're cutting will affect the story further down the line.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the show runners for GoT, did none of these things.

In a Q&A session at South by Southwest, the duo said their process for adapting the books boiled down to taking the key scenes from each book and transcribing them over to their scripts. This, well, this explains everything that went wrong with the show.

The problem with this piecemeal approach to adaptation is that, eventually, you end up with a show with big blockbuster moments with no connective tissue to build up to them or to add cohesion- plot, character, thematic etc- to the events themselves.

This, among many, many other structural writing problems, is what overtook GoT in an avalanche of botched story lines. The absolute mess made of the Dornish plot-line, for example, is a direct result of D&D cutting almost every single character from that plot-line and then having no idea what to do with the characters that remained. Since they cut off all their own avenues for characters with depth, D&D instead left themselves no other option but to write horrible, one-dimensional vamps that pretty much every one was happy to see die.

Now, obviously, even when done in such a ad hoc fashion, this is still a very complicated process. Trying to pinpoint any one decision as the representative example of why the show ultimately failed is overly simplistic.

That said, the changes made to Varys conspiracy doomed any hope the show had of paying off.
In the books, Varys swaps out Rhaygar's son with another baby and squirrels him away to the eastern continent where he is to receive the best education Varys can devise to make the boy grow up to be the "perfect" king. What this means in practice is that Varys actively works to sabotage the monarchy so that Westeros remains unstable and divided, aka the perfect environment for the lost heir to a old dynasty to come back and restore order to the world.

The plot isn't finished, obviously, but there's enough to find its shape. The maybe lost child takes over parts of the country, disposes of the Lannister regime- who have no connection to the meta-plot tied to the White Walkers- and then acts as a final, brutal confrontation for Danereys as she tries to balance out her desire to bring justice to the world with the autocratic, kneel or die drive to bring that same world to heel. This clears up a lot of loose ends and setting up while making sure all the important character beats get to where they need to be.

By removing this element, D&D entered their end game without any tension or way to deliver on their grand finale which lead to well, season 8.

Finally, let's look at The Witcher.

This series had a somewhat unique challenge in that it was adapting a set of only sometimes connected short stories into a long form series. The main challenge with this series was to find a way to give a story about a character who actively doesn't want to be in his story a sense of drive and momentum. Sadly, the series doesn't quite pull this off.

Part of this comes down to having Ciri being one of the three main characters that appears in every episode. Yes, the series eventually does revolve around her as the child of destiny and all, but these stories aren't that. The books handle this by weaving Ciri in and out of the narrative so she acts like an inescapable center of gravity. I honestly don't know why the show didn't follow this formula but, we all make choices.

Where the show does go well, for the most part, is Yennefer. The addition of her backstory from hunchbacked farm girl to sorceress is extremely well done, and adds lots of depth to what is one of my favorite characters in fiction. The wrinkle of her wanting a baby after sacrificing the chance so she could then become a sorcerer is something I don't like, but that's personal taste. It's in character for Yen to want everything that's possible for her to get her hands on in the world and do whatever she can to get it. That the story skirts uncomfortably close to making Yen's central character drive just dressed up baby fever isn't the fault of the show as much it is the just what they've got to work with.

A big complaint of Hollywood is that they don't do any new stories anymore. That it's all just reboots and adaptations. Remember The Maltese Falcon? The one with Humphrey Bogart, the that gets counted as an all-time classic? That was the third crack at adapting the book. However new you think a trend is, it's not, and has probably been done worse, or better, then what's going on right now.

We won't ever see a day where we get an entertainment industry of 100% original stories. It's neither feasible or, more importantly, what we as audiences want. There's a reason we keep passing around familiar stories in new forms. We want the comfort of something familiar with the thrill of seeing it in a new way. Adaptations aren't inherently a bad thing; done well, they can expand the story we love and present it to us in a way that only draws us in further. Done badly, they're just largely forgotten and we all move on, thankfully.

More often than not, though, we get (mostly) well meaning attempts that are a mishmash of success and failures. Even though we've been doing this for as literally as long we could write, we've still got a lot to learn. Which just makes things more fun, don't you think?

Fallout 4 is a Terrible Game

As I was walking this morning, I saw this Jeep with the Brotherhood of Steel logo on it. Since I will take any opportunity to think about the Fallout series, my mind started drifting over the game's when I landed on how terribly awkward the Brotherhood's introduction in Fallout 4 is.

It starts out well enough- you come across a small, besieged scouting party holed up in a police station in post-apocalyptic Cambridge outside Boston. You help them clear out the ghouls attacking them, then find out they're on a mission to recover some advanced technology they don't want falling into the wrong hands. It all goes well, you shoot your way out from an ambush by the big bads of the game and even get a cool energy gun as a reward. 

Then, just as everything is going so well, you get an offer to join the organization right then and there. 

The first time I played the game, this blew me away and practically killed all my hopes for it. Overly dramatic, no doubt, but it served as a harbinger, a sign of things to come that point to the fatal flaw at the core of Fallout 4. That is, Fallout 4 is an open-world RPG that doesn't want you to engage in its world. 

To catch everybody up, the premise of the game is that your character lived in the time before the nuclear war that annihilated the world. You actually start the game on the day all hell breaks loose, making it into a vault just minutes after the bombs start dropping before you're thrown into a cryogenic freezing chamber. Time passes, until you wake up to venture out into the wasteland to figure out why you've been awoken, who did it, and what's become of the world in the 200 years after the atomic war. 

Your very first mission involves you stumbling across a rag tag group of survivors, besieged by the ne'er-do-wells of the wasteland, who call themselves the Minutemen. You find out that they're the last survivors of a group dedicated to reestablishing a form of democratic society with all that entails in the Commonwealth wasteland. But they were betrayed and set upon by another mercenary group, who annihilated the rest of the Minutemen and let the survivors run into the wild to let the world finish the job. 

This wisp of a group is seeking one last place of refuge, somewhere they can make a home and rebuild. Since you're the main character, you lead them to the ruins of what was once the suburb you lived in with your family and it's here you get introduced to the settlement system. Or, as I like to call it, the mechanic that single handedly strangles the game in its crib. 

I have always, always hated the settlement system. At first, I thought it was because you are bulldozed into doing it- even if you don't want to, you have missions where the direct result is the creation of a settlement that you're now responsible for. Even if you neglect them, it's still an active decision that you have to maintain. The looting, inventory, and upgrading/customization options all either directly incentivize or require you to have at least one bare minimum settlement that can fulfill those functions. 

In a game that's ostensibly about you affecting the world through the choices you make, having a mechanic that requires you to shape the world in one specific way is actively antagonistic to that experience. And for the longest time, I was content to leave it at that. 

But then that little decal sticker led me to a breakthrough. That the system is actually worse than I thought. Because, the reason your induction into all the different factions have to be so divorced from the world the game presents is that the game never intends for you to fully experience the world it takes place in. 

Your settlements don't integrate with the communities in the world. Some individual farms and homesteads come under your protection if you pursue the Minutemen story, but once they do that, they just disappear into the background until they're an objective to protect in the mind-numbingly repetitive quest system. 

It'd be great if, after you've built up your settlement network, you had the opportunity to set up alliances or trade networks with the two main cities in the Boston wasteland. Hell, even if you just had the chance to use your settlements as supply boosts for the Minutemen, or workshops for the Brotherhood, or safe houses as part of the runaway slave network the Railroad runs, they'd be amazing. 

Instead, the settlements become more insular the more advanced they become. Eventually, you can build shops at them, meaning all your gear and loot selling needs will be contained to the settlements, so what's the point going anywhere else?

This leaves nothing for you to invest in the world the game creates or explore it for any other reason than to strip mine it for the raw materials you need to build and upgrade your settlements. 

Which is a goddamn shame when you get right down to it. Fenway Park has been turned into a community called Diamond City where people turned the baseball diamond into a thoroughfare which they built a community around. There's a seedy neighborhood of misfits, criminals, and the desperate called Good Neighbor that should be so much fun to delve into but you get like, three or four quests there. And then you're done forever with the place.

The core of the Fallout games is the wider world they exist in. There's a joy of discovery in wandering around the wasteland, tripping over whatever weird shit is waiting out there for you. And there's plenty here in the game that delivers on that front, too.

One of my absolute favorites, in this or any Fallout game that I've played, involves you creeping up on the Salem Witch Museum. When you get there, you find a few mauled bodies, one of which has recording on them. When you listen to it, you hear the small platoon talk amongst themselves when they hear something following them in the dark. When you go inside the basement door, working your way through the building, all is quiet except a very heavy thump from the floor above you. Then, when you finally get up to the second floor, the lights flicker over all the naked mannequins inside until you finally come face-to-face with the thing that slaughtered the mercenaries.

That, is a Deathclaw. An 8-foot-tall figure of death that's terrified Fallout players for years. And now you have to fight one in a dark, cramped, enclosed space with nowhere to run. It's a great moment, full of tension, atmosphere, with a terrifying and exhilarating climax.

But the game doesn't care. Which is what makes it so incredibly frustrating to play. Bethesda knows what draws people to the Fallout series, knows what makes the game interesting, but in the end decides not to focus on them at all. Instead, they shunt you off into a glorified inventory management mini-game and insist you enjoy it so you won't notice the lack of attention paid to literally every aspect of the world.

There are moments, scattered throughout the story, that almost, almost make the game worthwhile. The Railroad, with its mission to free the androids created solely to be slaves by the Institute is one of the coolest factions in the series. The moment you find out your son is actually in his sixties and is leading the Institute's efforts to swap out real people with identical android copies to extend their influence and destabilize the region, awesome. All your companions have the classic "burn outs need redemption" story lines- save two, who are excellent exceptions to this rule-that are a delight to play through (Kat, Piper, and Nick are my favorites). 

For all that, though, none of those threads are woven together to create a cohesive whole. None of them compound, enhance, or enrich the others. Nothing that happens in the world really matters because you aren't connected to it. Whatever end you choose, the sun comes up on a wasteland that barely even notices the next day and the day after that. And that feeling, that all you've done means nothing, just makes the whole experience feel like a crushing waste of time.