Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Better Days and Other Stories by 'The Nevers' is the Worst of Joss Whedon. This overcrowded, faux-empowering HBO sci-fi series is a wholly original disappointment. Welcome to Up Next , a column that gives you the rundown on the latest TV. This week, Valerie Ettenhofer reviews The Nevers, the ambitious HBO series created by Joss Whedon. Pop culture lovers have spent a lot of time over the past few years discussing the dearth of original stories on our screens. Regurgitated content is bad. We want big! We want bold! We want a story that’s not a remake, reboot, prequel, sequel, or adaptation, damn it! The HBO series The Nevers , which was created by Joss Whedon before his exit as showrunner last November, is a flashy, wholly original failure that reminds us to be careful what we wish for. In some ways, small-screen stories don’t get much bigger and bolder than this one. The Nevers is a steampunk sci-fi Victorian ensemble period piece. In its spare time, it’s also a crime drama, an X-Men -like superhero saga, and — with all the subtlety of a hammer over the head — a story about women. Every few scenes, someone in The Nevers talks with importance about women as a collective: the strong, the downtrodden, the underestimated, the dangerous. Years before Whedon was accused of serious workplace misconduct by several actors, he made the ambitious and beloved woman-led series . Though the series had its flaws, it was, at its best, an ass-kicking take on the evils of patriarchy. Any Buffy fans who held out hope that the creator would have a more evolved take on female empowerment more than twenty years later — or who would even settle for a rehashing of the classic series’ thematic greatest hits — will be sorely disappointed by The Nevers . The series is a crude caricature of a feminist work, if that. It’s the sort of cartoonish series in which a round table of white men appears in the very first episode to make their mustache- twirling, villainous opinions of powerful women abundantly clear. With the exception of its ultra-basic ideology, The Nevers is overstuffed on every level. Aside from the veritable genre Mad Libs mentioned above, the series also includes a myriad of unremarkable and at times indistinguishable characters. Amalia True ( Laura Donnelly ) and Penance Adair ( Ann Skelly ) are introduced as our two heroes. Amalia is “touched,” meaning she suddenly developed superpowers three years ago, along with countless other women across England. Penance has a penchant for mechanics, while other touched women have abilities, ranging from the talent to sing magic songs to the admittedly rather useless power to tell anyone the time without a clock. True and Adair live at a place called The Orphanage, where other touched women gather. They sometimes rescue touched women who are misunderstood by their families and hunted by others, but they also keep finding themselves face to face with a serial killer named Maladie ( Amy Manson , sporting a look that hilariously calls to mind Sheila the She-Wolf from GLOW ). The Nevers is muddled, overcrowded, and less-than-engaging despite its complex lore and flashy special effects. Nearly every emotional beat in the first four episodes misses the mark, in part because characters aren’t given the scene-time needed for viewers to form any substantial opinion of them. As a long-time Buffy fan, I’ve often found myself rationalizing that classic series’ questionable sexual politics, but The Nevers makes Whedon’s narrative preoccupation with sex and punishment impossible to ignore. Amalia is the series’ would-be protagonist and most fleshed-out character, yet her personality hinges on past trauma that’s led her down a specific self-destructive path. When she lists her unhealthy coping mechanisms, she adds sex with strangers, and she’s later seen trading “a kiss for a pint” at a local pub. Similarly, Maladie is described as a woman who mixes violence and pleasure and is quickly revealed as a trauma victim herself. Essentially, these are both underwritten depictions of PTSD, ones that attempt to tie together sexuality and emotional “brokenness” in a clumsy, unconvincing way. “How are we ever going to see justice if we aren’t a part of justice?” a character says in a later episode, and it’s a line that would mean something if it weren’t thrown into a series that’s crammed with things like goofy-looking CGI laser guns and superpowered brothels. There is an effortless balance to some of Whedon’s earlier works, including Buffy , Firefly , and even Dr. Horrible’s-Sing-A-Long Blog , that made it possible for high- concept genre elements to coexist naturally with human stories. That balance has evaporated, leaving an insubstantial, silly story in its place. Some of The Nevers ’ first season was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Philippa Goslett was announced as Whedon’s replacement in January, two full months after he stepped down. Either of these behind-the-scenes interruptions could be responsible for the series’ choppier elements, but neither fully explains away its many confounding choices. There’s always a unique disappointment that comes with realizing that an artist we once considered great is actually quite the opposite, but it’d be a mistake to dwell on this single narrative failure when the TV landscape is ripe with truly empowering and complex female stories in a way that it wasn’t when Whedon first came into power. Try Alena Smith’s Dickinson , or Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You , or Noelle Stevenson’s She- Ra and the Princesses of Power , or Pamela Adlon’s Better Things . The list goes on and on, but The Nevers isn’t on it. A Brief Tour of Joss Whedon’s Many Controversies. On Wednesday, actor fired off a tweet accusing producer Joss Whedon of “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on-set behavior toward the cast and crew of Justice League . Whedon inherited the superhero consortium movie from its original producer, Zack Snyder, and addressing the handover in 2017, Fisher — who played Cyborg in the film — initially described Whedon as a “great guy,” adding that Snyder “picked a good person to come in and finish up for him.” Joss Wheadon’s on-set treatment of the cast and crew of Justice League was gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable. He was enabled, in many ways, by Geoff Johns and Jon Berg. Accountability>Entertainment — Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) July 1, 2020. In a tweet on Monday, however, Fisher said he would “like to take a moment to forcefully retract every bit” of that statement. He has also accused producers Geoff Johns and Jon Berg of enabling Whedon. I’d like to take a moment to forcefully retract every bit of this statement: pic..com/1ECwwu6TG1 — Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) June 29, 2020. While Fisher did not go into detail as to the nature of Whedon’s alleged behavior, he is not the first one to accuse the producer of creepy and upsetting comportment. Fans have speculated that Whedon fired an actor over her pregnancy. Actor Charisma Carpenter played a pivotal role on Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as its spinoff, . Ahead of season four of Angel , however, Carpenter informed production that she was pregnant, which is allegedly when things started to deteriorate. In the fourth season, her character’s story arc took a strange turn for the outlandishly evil, culminating with a coma from which she never emerged. At the time, viewers wondered if Carpenter had been written out of the series because of her pregnancy, speculation Whedon appeared to refute in a 2003 interview with TV Guide . He said that Carpenter’s storyline had simply played itself out, adding that any reported tensions between himself and the actor were “stuff between us and not stuff that I would talk about in an interview.” In 2009, however, Carpenter suggested that her pregnancy had indeed been a factor in her departure from Angel . “What happened was that my relationship with Joss became strained,” she said at that year’s DragonCon convention, according to the Telegraph . “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the [fourth] season go.” She went on to say: I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is — it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience. Carpenter suggested to Complex in 2018 that production did not sufficiently account for her pregnancy in setting the schedule, compounding her devolving relationship with Whedon: “It wasn’t necessarily graceful on either side. So it was difficult, I think for them to accomplish what they needed to accomplish with a female lead in the position I was in but these things can be done and they have been done and they’ve been done gracefully in the past with other productions, I’m sure.” Whedon’s ex-wife has accused him of posturing as a feminist to hide his infidelities. Whedon has been vocal about his identification as a feminist, but according to his now-ex-wife, Kai Cole, it’s an act. In 2017, Cole wrote an essay for The Wrap, addressing their divorce after 16 years of marriage. In it, she details Whedon’s eventual admission, in a letter she says he wrote her near the end of their relationship, to more than a decade’s worth of infidelities. “As a guilty man I knew the only way to hide was to act as though I were righteous,” the letter read, according to Cole. She also said he told her: “It’s not just like I killed you, but that I’d done it subtly, over years. That I’d been poisoning you. Chipping away at you.” “He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted,” Cole said. “I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.” A rep for Whedon said Cole’s “account include[d] inaccuracies and misrepresentations,” but ultimately declined to comment “out of respect for his ex-wife.” Whedon has been skewered for his sexist first attempt at a Wonder Woman script. Whedon has a history of creating strong (often they are literal superheroes) female characters, but typically those characters are white women who fit a very particular beauty standard, viewed through a distinctly cis-het male lens. (There is a whole blog, Joss Whedon Is Not Feminist, devoted to this topic.) Despite having described himself as a “woke bae” — arguably not the best way to signal one’s sincere allyship — Whedon’s initial script for Wonder Woman , which he wrote in 2006 and which leaked just before Patty Jenkins’s movie came out in 2017, did not read as woke at all. Indeed, it read as a sort of male-gaze bodice-ripper. “To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point,” as Whedon originally described Diana, played in the Jenkins version by Gal Gadot. “She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow … She is barefoot.” Other excerpts, splashed across Twitter, feature lascivious observations such as, “Then she moves her back leg and turns, fluidly, a curve rippling up her body as she folds into a dance that is sensual, ethereal, and wickedly sexy.” I'm reading Joss Whedon's original script for Wonder Woman pic.twitter.com/r0NOIrfEew — pauline (@Punziella) June 16, 2017. the first pronoun in Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman script is "she" so i got excited that maybe it WOULD be about a woman, but its about a plane pic.twitter.com/eZRx4VlZGL — Rave Sashayed (@_sashayed) June 15, 2017. It was gratuitously horny, and not a little objectifying, just very cringey stuff. But when Whedon went back and read the script, he saw no issue. He told Variety he felt that his characters had “integrity.” “I don’t know which parts people didn’t like, but … I think it’s great,” he said. “People say that it’s not woke enough. I think they’re not looking at the big picture.” Buffy Deserves Better Than Joss Whedon. This week’s revelations of Joss Whedon’s on-set behavior, in a post from former Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel star Charisma Carpenter, further tarnish the reputation of one of the most acclaimed and beloved creators of the 1990s and 2000s. Carpenter posted that Whedon had “abused his power” during the years that she worked on shows he created, playing favorites, pitting actors against one another, and treating her terribly in a specifically gendered way during her pregnancy. Her message was supported by former co-stars including , , and , some of whom testified to their own memories of a toxic environment on set. For me, a longtime Buffy fan, these allegations feel different from other abuses of power by creators and producers revealed over the past few years, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I think it’s because at the height of my love for this show, I prized it not only for its wit and excitement but for its progressivism—for the way it shone like a beacon in the doldrums of turn-of-the-millennium TV, the kind of feminist story that no other series was even trying to tell. In a time when a woman writer could have never gotten this kind of show greenlit, we fans said to ourselves, at least there was Joss—an ally. He empowered his actresses and the women who wrote and produced on his show to tell a thrilling story of a strong, complex young woman who subverted the expectations of a sexist culture. (Whedon has not responded to requests for comment on the allegations.) It wasn’t just that we loved Buffy . We believed that, despite its flaws, the show, like its heroine, was a force for good. So it sucks extra hard to learn, from multiple women who were there, that the set wasn’t a particularly nurturing environment, and that actresses on the show felt cruelly treated by the very visionary whom we fans so thoroughly believed in. I recently rewatched all of Buffy and Angel , fulfilling a dream my wife and I have had for years: sharing this formative series with our now-teenage daughters. Like us, they loved it: loved Buffy and her struggles, loved sweet Willow and stupid Xander and glamorous Faith. And of course they loved Giles, Buffy’s Watcher, the mentor and father figure who guides and nurtures her through those difficult years—one of my models, I’m not ashamed to say, for engaged and caring parenting, even if like all good television characters, he can’t always live up to his own ideals. (In an interview Thursday, Anthony Stewart Head, who played Giles, sounded as bewildered as I am. “I am really sad that people went through these experiences,” he said. “How on earth did I not know this was going on?”) Rewatching the show, far away from its original context, was eye-opening. Lots of it really holds up well, and some episodes even improve on later viewing: Gloomy, stormy Season 6, much maligned by fans online at the time, works much better as a binged experience than it ever did as a slow- moving, week-by-week story. It’s my older daughter’s favorite season for its gritty look at depression, and she can’t understand why we ever thought it was a drag. The special effects look even worse now than they did then, of course. The gay panic jokes have aged as badly as the gay panic jokes in every TV show from that era. But what’s also striking is how run-of-the-mill the show’s feminism feels now, a time when it’s much easier to find women’s stories in all styles and genres, when a female superhero is not a unicorn but verging on a commonplace—and when many of those female superheroes get their stories told, well or badly, by women. When I asked my older daughter, the Season 6 fan, what she thought about the allegations against Joss Whedon, she shrugged. To her, Buffy was never about Joss. “Lots of people made Buffy , and it’s still a really good show,” she said. “And honestly, a lot of the feminism feels really dated.” She laughed about Season 7 villain Caleb: “The way Buffy kills him? That’s a little on the nose!” I guess, with the benefit of perspective, it is a little obvious that the villain was a cruel, misogynistic priest, and that Buffy axed him in the balls. Boy, did it feel great in 2003, though. To come to terms with Buffy , I think, it’s important for me to be more clear with myself about the circumstances and context of its creation. That it can no longer feel so revolutionary as it once did does not mean that it cannot be meaningful to those who discover it now; it’s just meaningful in different ways. And that its founder was not all that we once thought he was does not take away from the small miracle that is this moving, funny, and stirring show; it’s a testament to the many others who made their way through a difficult environment to ensure that the results would be moving, funny, and stirring. These days I’m trying to think, as my daughter does, less about Joss Whedon and more about the people I didn’t give enough consideration to 20 years ago. The female producers and writers who did remarkable work at an even more challenging time for women in creative fields. The actresses helping one another through difficult days and sticking together long afterward. And even poor Tony Head, who hoped to be a father figure on that set but learned, as many fathers do, that things he thought were simple were actually terribly complicated all along. Better Days and Other Stories by Joss Whedon. The special premiered on November 11, 2012 on the Science Channel. Read more. Jayne: I married me a powerful ugly creature. Mal: [dressed as Jayne's wife to lure bandits] How can you say that? How can you shame me in front of new people? — Jayne Cobb and Malcolm Reynolds [src] The Floating World Class cruise liner was a luxury starship designed to transport passengers through the Verse in relative comfort and with ample entertainment. Consisting of five decks, vessels of the Floating World Class employed a quartet of engines to drive them through space. Each vessel was crewed by over eighty personnel, including officers, space hands, passenger care specialists and entertainers. Ships of the Floating World Class were lavishly appointed, with dining and gambling salons, extensive passenger quarters, entertainment facilities and Companion services. Ships in the class included the El Dorado , the Galaxy Princess , the Lotus Blossom , the Nu Du Shen , and the Truthful James . (Read more…) Ray Fisher Finally Opens Up About Joss Whedon's Mishandling Of 'Justice League' Actor Ray Fisher, who has long alleged that director Joss Whedon’s behavior was abusive on the set of the 2017 film “Justice League,” finally revealed details in an interview with published on Tuesday. Fisher, who plays the man-turned machine Cyborg in the DC Comics movie, said in July that Whedon, who was hired to complete the film after original director Zack Snyder stepped down due to the death of his daughter, was grossly unprofessional, disregarded Snyder’s vision and was abetted by executives from Warner Bros. Picture Group’s DC Films division. Now he’s offering specifics. “Warners did not want me to write this story, to put it very mildly,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters tweeted of her article quoting Fisher. Fisher told Masters that Whedon slashed Cyborg’s presence in “Justice League,” neutering the character’s tortured arc of coming to terms with newfound technological powers. Whedon insisted on a portrayal that was less like Frankenstein and more like Quasimodo from “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” he said. “I didn’t have any intention of playing him as a jovial, cathedral-cleaning individual,” Fisher said of Cyborg, adding that he had had to temper his feedback to Whedon by explaining “some of the most basic points of what would be offensive to the Black community.” Once, Fisher said, Whedon cut him off. “It feels like I’m taking notes right now, and I don’t like taking notes from anybody ― not even Robert Downey Jr.,” Fisher quoted Whedon as saying, referring to the Iron Man star in Marvel’s “Avengers” movies. Whedon also worked on those films. Fisher said he also questioned Whedon’s insistence that Cyborg utter the word “booyah” during the film ― the character’s catchphrase in the “Teen Titans” animated series. Snyder didn’t include the word in his original script. Fisher said he wasn’t necessarily against using it, but he was wary of Black media characters with catchphrases that bordered on stereotypes ― for instance, Gary Coleman’s famous “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis” on the television show “Diff’rent Strokes.” Fisher said he ultimately was cornered into saying the line by Warner Bros. producer Jon Berg. “This is one of the most expensive movies Warners has ever made,” Fisher said Berg told him. “What if the CEO of [Warner Bros. owner] AT&T has a son or daughter, and that son or daughter wants Cyborg to say ‘booyah’ in the movie and we don’t have a take of that? I could lose my job.” Fisher reluctantly performed the line, and said Whedon uttered a quote from “Hamlet” as he did so: “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you.” Other “Justice League” performers, including Wonder Woman star Gal Godot, also have gone public with negative experiences working with Whedon. Fisher said the director told Godot to “shut up and say the lines” or he would make her look “incredibly stupid” in the film. After Fisher first spoke out against Whedon, other actors stepped forward to accuse him of demeaning and toxic behavior, including “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” star Charisma Carpenter. Warner Bros. investigated abuse and racism allegations against Whedon last year and took unspecified “remedial action.” Fisher in January criticized that probe and said on Twitter that he had been removed from his role in “The Flash,” a film slated for 2022. Meanwhile, Zack Snyder released his original version of “Justice League” last month on HBO Max after prolonged fan demand caught the attention of Warner Bros. The director’s cut ― a whopping four hours, compared to Whedon’s theatrical release of half that ― received much more of a positive response, with many critics, including those at HuffPost, highlighting Fisher’s character.