Death is inevitable. It's life's one and only guarantee, the toll we must all pay at the end of our journey through the lands of the living. So if we all have to die, then we might as well make it a good one (if possible). How 'good' is to be defined will vary from person to person, of course, but since there's no avoiding our ultimate fate I've always thought it would be best to make our final act relevant, to turn the great tragedy into something worthwhile (again, where possible). Two people, having lived the same life--all other factors being equivalent, in other words--but die differently: one dies mowed down by some drunk-driving bozo at an intersection, the other in trying to rescue others from a building being consumed by a blaze. The latter death is obviously the better one, having been invested with meaning, rather than being stupid and random like the first. In the real world, this is all wishful thinking; most of the time, we have little control over the circumstances of our death, and obviously we can't all die heroically without everybody else essentially being in constant peril. But fiction allows one to control the uncontrollable, and the action-adventure genre comes with certain generic expectations--with good reason. A lot of those conventions exist because it's been discovered, through decades of trial-and-error, that they make for better stories, as the abominable failure that is Before Dishonor demonstrates. Subversion for subversion's sake is as meaningless as trying to be edgy for the sake of being edgy--but I'm wandering off on a tangeant. Since it is possible to have characters die well, I think characters should die well, particularly those most central to the narrative and whose existences have the most meaning already invested in them. Our deaths are the final chapter of our narratives, and if that death is dumb, stupid, or otherwise meaningless, then it'll ruin the tale altogether with an anti-climatic or thematically inappropriate ending. This is surely part of the reason why Janeway's death is so atrocious, skewered like a bit part in a slasher film; her death does not accord with her life, in terms of magnitude and relevance to the audience. The manner in which a death is executed, then, becomes all-critical.
I'm thinking, now, of a TV show I watch which killed off two characters in this week's episode. One received an awesome death scene, a heroic sacrifice that perfectly capped her story arc with a redemptive act--and it was actually a character I hadn't much cared for until that point, but her final act did much to endear her to me. That was a good death. The other wasn't as awesome and didn't particularly fit any character arc (I suspect the producers just didn't know what to do with the character), but it was touching. She established a genuine emotional connection with another character in her final moments, and that, and some good cinematography, lent her passing dignity and pathos. Both dealt with how those characters choose to confront their proximate mortality, and in choosing well, invested their deaths with meaning. Before Dishonor lacks these qualities altogether. Janeway's death had nothing to do with Janeway; she was an incidental victim. And where no choice can be made, nothing about the character can come through. Dying a victim--it's a bad death, unworthy of a principle character from a show that purports to be, at heart, humanist and optimistic.
The aftermath doesn't particularly interest me. It's anger and sadness--grief. Been there, done that, no urge to revisit it in any prolonged fashion. There are a number of reasons why grief doesn't interest me: one of which, as I mentioned, being because I find it hard to pull off in fiction without it either being dull or coming off as emotional blackmail, which is why I prefer my characters to do their grieving off-screen and return when they're ready to act again. Which brings me to a second point, which is that grief is a terrible motivation. Or, rather, grief is an extraordinary motivator, which makes it terrible motivation. People maddened by love or grief act in all sorts of uncharacteristic ways, we know; these things chisel away at our constructed selves and leave us a raw mass of instinct and emotion. One can then use grief to justify just about any action or direction from a character, regardless of precedent, which makes it a cheap and poor story device. Stories about people motivated by grief aren't really about those people choosing to take action, but rather being led about by their trauma, hostage to the emotions we all have in common--and as such, don't need to know more about. It tells me nothing about those characters, because I would no more recognize an action taken under the influence of grief as representative of who that person would choose to be when they are in control then I would a contract signed under duress as representative of their genuine intentions. Reason and will are the highest of human attributes, and what interests me in narratives is how those faculties are exercized. I've no burning desire to read stories about individuals who capacity to choose has been hijacked by trauma and are being victimized by their own emotions.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
), and I've come to the conclusion that the reason is, I really wanted to find out more about her post-Voyager, and apparently I'm not going to get to do that any more - I'd rather she went out big. Opinions seem to differ as to whether she does so here. To put it mildly.
