After the Horrible End

[akirlu]

There's been some dissatisfaction on the 'tubes over the ending of Dr. Horrible. Luckily, one of the finer uses of fanfic is the speedy propagation of better endings for profic gone bad.

For your consideration, here are bellatrys's and also amaliedageek's contributions to the betterment of Joss Whedon.

Comments

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

ameliedageek is made of win. All it needs is songs.

I was thinking about it myself, and I was considering whether the death ray maybe would have proved, rather than killing Penny, to have transformed her into an Evil Genius, but this is better.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Very.

[avram]

Wow, some people just can't stand not having the happy ending.

Which isn't to say the ep 3 wasn't rushed, and didn't foreclose on the possibilities inherent in ep 1. But still.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Is that silly hyperbole intentionally ironic, or no?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a matter of having a happy ending as one that wasn't lazy and uninteresting and a complete failure of the implied contract between writer and audience. A writer sets up a situation and sets events in motion. For example, gives us a scene in which we see a seemingly unoccupied car rolling down a hill at a baby buggy parked outside the A&P at the bottom of the hill. If all the writer then gives us is the car careening into the buggy and smashing it into the side of the store, The End, then the writer has not done their job. We could have predicted that ending ourselves. There needs to be something more, or something different, to give the audience a payoff for having sat through the set up. Dr. Horrible doesn't bother providing a payoff. It's lazy writing.

[avram]

I agree that it was sloppy. Compared to the first two acts, the actual climax of act 3 is very rushed and abrupt.

But your analogy with the car seems odd to me. I see people complaining that Penny's death comes out of left field -- that's it's not a natural outgrowth of the earlier events.

The story seemed to me like a classic tragedy, in which a tragic outcome emerges from the expression of the main characters' flaws -- pride in Hammer's case, evil ambition combined with cowardice in Horrible's. (Penny isn't a main character so much as a reward token, something for Hammer and Horrible to compete over, which is another problem with the show.) The ending grows out of those personality traits.

The problem isn't that the ending was (or wasn't) predictable, since 99% of fictional endings are predictable if you've read enough fiction, but that the explosion of the death ray was arbitrary. In a proper tragedy, we need to see how the tragic ending arises from the characters' choices. In Hamlet, once the characters start putting poison in the wine and on their blades, we know what's coming. In Dr Horrible, there's no equivalent to the poison. We have no reason to suspect that the death ray will blow up until it blows up. (Well, maybe a hint a few seconds earlier when Horrible says something like "No, you idiot" while Hammer handles the gun, but that's not really adequate.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Penny's death is a completely natural outgrowth of earlier events, given that Horrible has almost killed her once already with one of his defective gadgets, and given that not one of his inventions has worked to spec when tried in the field, but I regard Penny's death as something of a detail. The larger set-up / problem for Horrible is that there is a conflict between his two goals. His idea of doing evil to get the girl is never going to work. The details of how that outcome plays out are somewhat open, but we can clearly predict that if he succeeds in killing Hammer and getting into the Evil League of Evil, he will Not Get the Girl. That is the basic juggernaut that Whedon has set in motion, and he does not resolve it, he just lets it play out.

And what I'm talking about is not the ending per se, but how you get there. The ending may well be quite foreseeable, but how the writer gets us there must not be. This is what I mean about crashing into the baby buggy. There was no deviation from set-up to forseeable consequence -- how we got there did not reward our attention.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I regard Penny's death as something of a detail.

That's part of the problem. The gun blowing up may be a natural outgrowth - but it would have been better if it had been explained (Dr. Horrible warned Captain Hammer not to touch it; what did he know to say that?) - but Penny's death was a random accident from this, that was not framed as a random accident (impartial cruelty of the universe sort of thing).