Wrookie Wreck

Have you ever followed a TV show that you almost wanted to end because you couldn't stand what hack writers were doing with characters you liked? Welcome to my relationship with the Nathan Fillion-led The Rookie, which has wrapped its third season.

The last episode aired more than a couple of months ago, so I think I can discuss it freely as most people who want to watch it and who read this blog (Venn Diagram generator: "Error. One set cannot be a zero or negative number") will have done so. Just in case, spoilers ahead.

The Rookie, for those unfamiliar, deals with John Nolan, a man who at 45 decided he wanted to change his life and make more of a difference than he could owning his business. He moved to Los Angeles and applied to join the police department, becoming its oldest rookie. His watch command sergeant (Sgt. Grey) wants him to fail because he doesn't want to deal with a stream of similar applicants if he succeeds. Over the course of three seasons, Nolan adapts to life as a rookie police officer, bringing to the table life experiences that both handicap and enhance his work. He and his fellow rookies, Jackson West and Lucy Chen, learn that proper policing demands a melange of skills well beyond yelling, "Freeze, dirtbag!" Matching its star, Fillion, the show's default setting is wry. Serious things happen, but they are filtered though a mildly ironic, "Ain't life peculiar" lens that allows light banter to co-exist with life-and-death storylines.

The characters and casting are very good. Richard T. Jones as Sgt. Grey begins by wanting Nolan to fail only his personal honor and integrity make him do everything he can to help him succeed, just as he would for any new officer. Titus Makin, Jr., as second-generation cop Jackson West, moves from over-driven overachiever to someone who can be happy succeeding for himself rather than his family legacy. As Lucy Chen Melissa O'Neil, like Fillion a spaceship captain on a show that ended too early, gains a sense of her inner strength when pushed extra-hard by her training officer, Tim Bradford (Eric Winter). Alyssa Diaz as West's training officer, Angela Lopez, is also tough and no-nonsense but ambitious to advance in the department. Lopez's character gained some of these characteristics when Nolan's first training officer, Talia Bishop, was written out of the show. Previously, she had been shown to be ambitious for advancement almost to a fault, but actress Afton Williamson left the show after her accusations of racial and sexual harrassment were not supported by an investigation. Nolan's new training officer, Nyla Harper (Mekia Cox) already is a detective but has gone back into uniform in order to demonstrate a more stable life situation in custody arrangements with her daughter. She has much of the same exasperation with Nolan as Bishop did.

It's been in season three that I started having serious flashes of wanting the show to be canceled so that these well-conceived and likable characters, who are a heck of a lot of fun when properly written, could stop being kicked around by script hackery. During the COVID-extended break between Season 2 and Season 3, nationwide protests questioned the role and even existence of police departments. Shows that featured laudable police officers as heroes earned the derisive nickname "cop-aganda," mocked as attempts to humanize the racist structure that they both participated in and upheld.

Rookie writers pre-emptively defended themselves by creating several storylines that acknowledged racial problems and the way police were seen by some people to exacerbate those problems. Fortunately, our core cast were either educable or already woke. The two most hacktastic of these storylines involved West and Nolan.

With Lopez promoted to detective, West receives Doug Stanton (Brandon Routh) as his new training officer (TO). Stanton is uncovered as a racist, though, abusing his authority to short-circuit West's attempts to report his bullying treatment of people of color. Eventually Stanton overplays his hand when he hangs back to let West be beaten by a street gang instead of backing him up, and he is fired. For some unaccountable reason, the show reinstates him for an episode only to have the evidence he abandoned West shown to other officers and making him a pariah.

This is a storyline larded with problems. For one, the casting. Set aside the fact that Routh's most famous roles have been Superman and Ray Palmer, two straight-arrow good-guy super-heroes. He's just too nice-appearing of a guy. Of course otherwise nice people can show themselves as racists when the opportunity presents. But trying to make Routh a racist bully works as well as putting a Klan hood on Howdy Doody. He's further hampered by modern-day script constraints that don't let him speak the language of racism and by the show's insistence on showing how his racism is hidden until he confronts black and hispanic members of the public. Watch any handful of NYPD Blue episodes and you'll know that Dennis Franz's Det. Andy Sipowicz is a racist. He'll say something racist -- up to and including the N-bomb. Or he'll lock horns with his African-American commanding officer, Lt. Arthur Fancy, in a conflict that clearly has racial dimensions. He'll make a racial joke, etc.

Compared to Blue, Rookie's racial storyline is an almost laughable attempt to handle a very serious matter. Part of that is the way that modern society doesn't really want to help people change if they harbor harmful racial attitudes -- it just wants them out of sight. Blue's creators didn't accept racism any more than do The Rookie's. They were, though, willing to show a character learn and change. The Rookie's showrunners produced scripts that seemed like they just wanted to check a box and move on -- maybe because that's all they knew how to do. Even though I like The Rookie and even though Blue was a pretty tired and formulaic show in its final seasons, almost any Blue writer is going to type rings around the ones who dreamed up and handled the Stanton storyline. Plus, while there's nothing wrong with Titus Makin and Brandon Routh, their acting chops are well below Dennis Franz and James McDaniel, who played Fancy. They're not able to take clunky, artificial situations, dialogue and interactions and make them seem realistic.

The other "anti-copaganda" line concerns the way Nolan learns from both a prickly community organizer and the professor of a night class he's taking how some police officers take actions that make situations worse for minorities, even without intending to do so. The organizer counters Nolan's clueless and ham-fisted attempts to "help" by explaining to him how different life is for the people of the neighborhood, and the professor challenges some of Nolan's naive assumptions about how good police officers help rather than harm a community. Neither of these lines are particularly bad and there is a great deal of truth to them. But in episode 11, Nolan must protect his professor when she is targeted by a group of white supremacist terrorists to be kidnapped, placed on "trial" and executed on video. While there are way too many white supremacist groups ("zero" is the preferred number, FYI), none of them operate in the ISIS-like fashion described here. Not only is placing the professor character in danger a hackneyed, tired move to begin with, it's done with few nods to reality in its execution.

The season cliffhanger has Lopez, who is now pregnant, preparing to marry the father with all of the main cast present -- only to be kidnapped by thugs working for La Fiera, a female drug kingpin with whom she has crossed paths before. How did La Fiera escape custody? Because in this reality, a multimillionaire drug kingpin with hundreds of gangsters on her payroll was driven from the police station to prison in an ordinary patrol car with two officers inside. Since she's pregnant, and since La Fiera lost her son when people trying to kill her shot him instead and since Lopez confronted her about how the situation that allowed that to happen was her fault? I expect much back and forth between the women about the baby, and perhaps a teary storyline wrap-up where La Fiera's maternal instincts prevent her from actually killing or harming Lopez. Season three started with the hacktastic resolution to season two's cliffhanger, and it ends with yet another delivery of plot-holes of all shapes and sizes. It has moments when it remembers it's a show that leans heavily on likable characters and clever writing, but they're coming around less often.

So as I mentioned, I find myself torn. I like this show. But a growing part of me wants The Rookie to be canceled so these nice people I like can stop being smacked around by the group of hacks in the show's writer's room. Of course, the best option is that season four corrects these kinds of blunders and feels OK about being a show that generally holds police in a positive light. I'm afraid, though, that no one will buy that storyline.

Farewell to Shannara

Note to the reader: Since The Last Druid is Terry Brooks' final Shannara book, this review will contain spoilers not only for it but for some previous books in the series. The Shannara books have sold millions of copies so it is unlikely that there are too many people interested in them who haven't read at least some of them, but in case you are one of those people and you would rather learn plot details and book resolutions the old-fashioned way, you should probably stop now and read the rest of this entry later if you'd care to.

Terry Brooks said he began his first novel, The Sword of Shannara, when he was in law school and wrote it in and around his studies as a way of coping with the stress of law student life. After trying his hand at fiction in several genres, he read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and found the field in which he thought he could produce material people would want to read. Ballantine Books bought the manuscript and tailored it for the launch of their new Del Rey Books line, recruiting well-known fantasy illustrators Greg and Tim Hildebrandt to provide cover and some interior art. It was a best seller and launched Brooks' career as an author. Although he's produced a couple of other series, the "Magic Kingdom for Sale" books and "Word and Void" stories that he eventually tied in to the Shannara universe, the Shannara series has been his mainstay and the books for which he is best known.

The whole series, with the Word and Void novels worked in as prequels, spans several thousand years of history, of humans as well as non-human races like the Elves. Its prehistory stretches back to when magic was common on the Earth and in the books themselves jumps to the days in which it began to reassert itself after being long forgotten. The hinge of this history is the time of the Great Wars, a combined nuclear and supernatural conflict and ecological disaster that nearly wiped out all life on the planet. The overall arc of the nearly 30 Shannara books covers conflicts between beings who would use either magic or technology to control the world, work evil on it and exert their will over others and beings who would let everyone live in peace with each other and as they wish. Both the Elves and human sorcerers called Druids try to watch over the power of magic to keep it from falling into the hands of the first group. The Druids' order seems susceptible to temptation to this dark side, with Brona the Warlock Lord being just such an ambitious man and later the main villain of the initial novel. Into the mix we have beings of evil called demons -- usually imprisoned in a mirror universe called the Forbidding but who sometimes cross over.

Over the course of the books Brooks has boiled his groups of antagonists and protagonists down to just a few. Human beings in the Southland are almost all a part of an expansionist and somewhat corrupt state called the Federation, while Elves still retain their ancestral home in the West centered on the city of Arborlon. The various magicians and would-be dictators either rise from one of them or try to take control of them through their own machinations or through the Druids at their fortress called the Keep. He added the semi-futuristic feature of flying ships powered by a mix of magic and science, perhaps to let him expand his geography without building in months of travel time for a culture limited to foot and wagon transportation.

That world is the one into which Brooks introduces his final "Fall of Shannara" series of four books. An ecological disaster has forced a distant nation, the Skaar, to invade the four lands to find space for themselves before their land freezes into inhabitability. The Skaar are fierce warriors with the added gift of being able to make themselves invisible. They spy out the situation and through treachery and the cooperation of the ambitious, power-hungry Druid Cilizia Porse, massacre the Druid order and take it off the board. They occupy the sparsely-populated Northland and then turn their eyes southward. When Last Druid begins, Porse has trapped her only Druid foe, Drisker Arc, in the Forbidding and cast the one other person who might oppose her power, Tarsha Kaynin, into an abyss. Druid Blade (a guard captain) Darcon Leah and the disgraced Skaar princess Ajin d'Amphere travel into the freezing north with a plan to reverse the ecological damage and allow the Skaar to return to their homeland. Drisker Arc must travel the Forbidding to locate the long lost Ilse Witch, Grianne Ohmsford, herself trapped after her defeat of the Straken King in 2013's Witch Wraith.

On its own merits, Last Druid is a two-star book at the end of a one-and-a-half-star four-book series. Brooks' writing is more than a little careless and the book feels as padded as any he's produced. A sequence in which Drisker Arc and Grianne Ohmsford travel to and invade an impregnable fortress surrounded by a deadly swamp repeats the same kind of trek we've seen in at least five different novels, with no real payoff. The three novels Tarsha spent worrying over trying to rescue her brother from the emotional and mental breakdown earlier abuse had brought him were a waste, as he has no role in the endgame, either for Tarsha or Cilizia, who killed him. Although Ajin was responsible for the infiltration and sneak attack that caused the deaths of almost all of the druids under his care -- including a woman with whom he was involved -- Darcon Leah falls in love with her. Brooks doesn't ever really show us how that might happen, he just tells us it does. The teased confrontation between the Skaar invasion force and the Federation Army falls apart when a woman who assassinated the man who assassinated the Federation Prime Minister and who turned out to be a Skaar assassin herself, schemes and plots to set the Feds up for a fall -- only to kill the Skaar king because she's tired of lying to people and being his pawn.

Earlier books drew the characters of the captain and crew of the Behemoth, the airship that went to Skaar, but Last Druid just turns them into a crew of redshirts. Young Shea Ohmsford, when he was introduced, was a mysterious youngster who bore the name of the main hero of the first Shannara book. He's important enough for the story's resolution but he could have had any name; there winds up being no significance to that choice. Over and over again Brooks tells us things instead of showing them, dulling their impact. After Clizia is defeated, Grianne asks Tarsha to take her "home," to the Tanequil. The initial sentences of the dialogue disappear in favor of what might as well be meeting notes of their conversation. The whole four-book "Fall of Shannara" series could easily have been two books, and maybe even one.

On the well-known Goodreads scale, three stars doesn't actually mean that a book is better than a two-star or worse than a four-star. It's supposed to be a measure of how much the reader liked the book. But everyone uses it as a quality rating, and based on that Last Druid earns its third star not for any real aspect of its own. Brooks does two things in the book that give it the star it doesn't otherwise earn. The first is to offer Grianne Ohmsford a redemption after Witch Wraith crapped all over her. She had been the Ilse Witch of the book of that name in the "Voyage of the Jerle Shannara" series, herself damaged by the machinations and lies of an evil wizard. Redeemed by the end of that book, she was one of the protagonists of the "High Druid of Shannara" series, leading the Druid order until an attempted coup trapped her in the Forbidding. After escaping, she offered her life in trade for the woman her nephew Pen Ohmsford loves and entered a kind of spiritual suspended animation as a servant of the Tanequil tree. The tree returned her to the world in Witch Wraith to defeat the demon lord Tael Riverine, but not as Grianne -- it returned her as the hateful Ilse Witch. Her role in defeating Riverine was narratively tiny and Brooks never offered a good reason either for him as the author or the Tanequil tree as a caretaker for the damaged Grianne to sentence her to a return as the evil Ilse Witch. Though it takes a four-book slog to do it, he does get her out of the Forbidding and back to the Tanequil, where she can find the peace of forgetting.

The second reason this book earns a third star is because Brooks had the courage to put an ending on his series and make it a good one. Drisker Arc dies when he and Grianne return from the Forbidding, and Grianne herself re-enters her peaceful existence with the Tanequil. This leaves Tarsha as the titular "Last Druid," since in an earlier book the ghost of Allanon -- the major Druid figure in the earlier books -- directed she be ordained even without training and study. Drisker's last message to her tells her she can decide if the Druid order will continue and if magic will continue to be a part of the Four Lands. Or she can close Paranor away and let magic fade from the human part of the world as the science represented by airships and the weather control device that saved the Skaar homeland takes control.

This is an important pivot point in the Shannara world. The gradual darkening of the world that led to the Great Wars came because human beings set magic aside for faith in technology. The world was unbalanced and its people unprepared for the assault of demonic forces that almost destroyed it. If Tarsha decides to let magic fade the same thing might happen. On the other hand, the Druid Order has constantly fallen victim to ambitious wizards tempted by power and the ability to use dark magic to get it. Which will she choose?

In what is probably his best stroke of genius since creating the Shannara universe in the 1970s, Brooks leaves Tarsha at peace, contemplating her decision with a true friend at her side who has just expressed his confidence she will choose to do the right thing because she has the wisdom to do so. In other words, he doesn't tell us which way Tarsha picks. The ambiguity provides more than simply a great storyteller's resolution; the kind that brings an end to the current narrative while leaving open the reality that the greater story behind it will go on and on. By leaving Tarsha at peace while she considers he implies that whichever way she chooses will indeed be the right choice: Allowing magic to fade will not lead to another technologically dominant era of terror, and re-founding the order of the Druids will not be plagued by secrecy, manipulation and ambition. Her choice however it is made will be one that brings balance and a promise. Schemes and tyrants and manipulators will still make their plays -- the continuing great story needs antagonists, after all -- but it will take a new direction.

Of course, that ambiguity makes a liar out of the series title: "The Fall of Shannara." Nothing falls, nothing comes to a complete end. But since it's unlikely that kind of ending would have fit this series of books, that's probably for the best. His ability to realize that earns The Last Druid its third star.

The Shannara books speak in a young adult voice. Even when they describe great battles or evil deeds or developing love they do so in a tone that suggests the narrator knows about these things but is somehow still innocent of their direct experience. Where Game of Thrones would suggest -- probably at swordpoint -- spending the night together, Shannara wants to hold your hand. A definitive ending would have foreclosed on a hope-filled vision of things working out right this time and belied the open-ended optimism expected of such a viewpoint.

That voice, in addition to some of his own touches and what is, in many places, some truly wonderful writing, may have been a large part of the series' appeal. For his final sequence, Brooks brings all of those skills to bear and shows the deftness that has only surfaced now and again since the days of the first books in the series. He ends the book -- and the canonical tales of Shannara -- very very well and fittingly.

Brooks is in his mid-70s but may have some more ideas about different interstitial books in the Shannara world. He's described the fall of the old world and the rise of the new one that would eventually grow into the Four Lands. He's given us the initial rise of the Warlock Lord and the creation of the Sword of Shannara. But there may be pieces of the history still in his mind to relate. He's said that they won't move forward from The Last Druid, so this world will have definitive closure -- even if the closure is wisely and paradoxically open-ended. He can still put together a good standalone book: the three grouped as "The Defenders of Shannara" are probably as strong as anything in the series since the first trio. So if he does move on and have another piece of the Shannara mosaic to uncover, we can hope that's how it will be done.

Either way, he has wisely said, "Here endeth the tale." And he has done so in the best way possible -- with hope on the horizon and the invitation to the imagination of the reader to continue it on his or her own.

Coding Failure

Soon after he was introduced in Detective Comics #27, Batman gained an important part of his moral code: No killing. Traumatized by the murders of his parents when he was just 8, young Bruce Wayne made the eradication of crime his lifelong mission. But he understood that if he included lethal measures in that mission he would become what he fought, so even though his great skill would make it easy to do so, he will not eradicate crime by eradicating criminals.

This has been a keystone of Batman through his long history -- despite the mayhem and death wrongdoers may inflict Batman's goal will always be their apprehension and imprisonment. Even his singular arch-enemy, the Joker, can't push him to break this code.

Recently, a trial with the DC Universe streaming app has let me read a lot of Batman comics, something I hadn't done in probably 30 years. The art form has developed quite a bit in that time frame, offering audiences more realism in both character and dialogue. We've also seen waves of what's derisively called "grimdark" rise and fall. The word describes how writers and artists, aiming for realism and authenticity, use darker storylines and anti-heroic characterizations to get there. The talented ones succeed but the majority fail, meaning we get simplistic and unrealistic stories that don't even entertain. Some creators can't even really manage the gritty and dark very well, offering readers panel after panel of grimaces, gravity-defying breasts and gore and calling it "mature."

Batman's tragic origin has pretty much always made him a character on the dark side of things, with the Adam West era a major exception. So while he has had some relatively lighter periods, he has mostly tended towards grim. What I noticed in scanning the years of Batman stories I had missed was how his colorful Rogues Gallery of villains had darkened considerably. Some newer villains weren't really criminals at all, just variants on the Hannibal Lecter hunter-of-humans sociopath. They didn't pull off heists or try to amass control of criminal enterprises -- they just killed people in whatever ways the writer's imagination and remaining minimal restraint of the publishing house would let an artist draw.

More than a couple of the existing villains morphed along those lines as well, the Joker being one. He was no longer a deranged criminal who indulged his insanity by littering his crimes with clown themes or patterning them after practical jokes. The Joker had never been shy about how many bodies he would leave in his wake in order to make his score -- in one issue of his own comic he had designed a trap to clog an important traffic bridge with dead motorists to delay law enforcement response time while he stole money. In an early Batman comic, he painted out the white line of a highway at a cliff's edge curve and painted in a new one that sent a bus over the side so he could loot the passengers' bodies.

But in the years since Tim Burton's first Batman movie and Frank Miller's landmark The Dark Knight Returns miniseries, Batman series writers have moved the "Clown Prince of Crime" into someone who's obsessed with Batman himself. His crimes aim to gain Batman's attention or somehow strike at Batman's ethical code or torment him, or to kill for killing's sake. Michael Caine as Alfred in The Dark Knight movie describes him best as a man "who just wants to watch the world burn."

Sometimes a story makes the conflict between Batman's code of not killing and the Joker's code of always killing (after a little bit of maiming) clear, but the end of the tale always winds up with Batman refusing to cross his line despite the Joker's heinous acts. As I read some of the development in this direction, it occurred to me that by making the Joker focus on Batman and the relationship between them, we've been pushed into a dead-end. Batman's code may save him from crossing over to some dark side, but it has sentenced hundreds of people to execution at the hands of a man who could have been stopped (speaking "in-universe" fashion, of course. DC knows Batman-Joker confrontations mean sales and they aren't about to kill that off just because they've painted themselves into a plot-hole corner).

A few panels from a more recent Batman story illustrate this. Writer Tom King had been leading up to a marriage between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle, who is also Catwoman. The Joker's obsession with Batman manifested as anger at not being chosen "best man" in Batman's wedding and murdering an entire wedding party, guests included, in order to draw Batman to the church. Batman finally confronts the Joker, who takes the sole survivor, the bride, as hostage before "accidentally" blowing her brains out, complete with an aw-shucks, "'Cause I suppose I just did" and an "Oops." "Hey you guys?" the Joker asks plaintively. "Any of you alive? I need a hostage so Batman won't punch me."

Aside from the grotesquerie of King playing mass murder for laughs, the incident illustrates how Batman's refusal to kill this modern, Batman-obsessed Joker is itself the direct cause of at least a dozen deaths. The way the character is written today is very simple. The Joker will kill people. He will kill them in order to get to Batman or just because he has a new idea of a way he wants to torment and kill them. Their deaths will further no scheme for personal gain or wealth -- they will only serve to lure and taunt Batman or feed the Joker's desire to kill and inflict pain. And the Batman could end it with a stab, a neck twist, a long drop from a tall rooftop, etc. Since he refuses to take those steps, he causes more deaths when the Joker inevitably escapes Arkham Asylum and goes on another spree. Probably more deaths than he saves.

I don't want to be misunderstood. The Batman's code against killing is in fact a vital part of who he is. The 1990s were littered with also-ran masked vigilantes who did kill their enemies, often in boring job lots. The tightrope walked by a man who must stop crime by any means he can but who must not cross the line to adopt the criminal's ultimate sanction makes for a great character theme and builds depth into every conflict.

Moreover, the code is right. Batman operates largely outside the law even while he tries to hold criminals accountable to it. If he doesn't set rules for himself and follow them, he will all too soon operate with no rules at all. If he doesn't distinguish between himself and them in some way before he begins, then he really won't be any different. The problem is not with the Batman or his code; it's that the code doesn't have room for the current version of the Joker and his obsession with Batman himself. As long as that remains his dominant trait, then we will continue to have the unsatisfying non-solution of beating the crap out of a man who considers that part of doing business and a sign that the object of his obsession still cares.

Is the solution to the impasse, then, finally killing the Joker? In the real world it probably would be, but let's remember we're talking about a world where a man wears black longjohns and a mask with pointed ears in order to fight crime. It's fictional. The real solution is for writers to dial the Joker back and to stop being endlessly fascinated with how many ways they can show him creepily obsessed with Batman.

In Miller's 1986 alternative reality, a catatonic Joker reanimates once he learns that Batman has unretired and is once again fighting crime in Gotham City. The Joker's therapist, the touchy-feely Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, has argued that Batman himself is the real menace to society and that he commits by proxy the crimes attributed to his villainous opponents. Like much of the fictional audience the reader scoffs at this kind of psychobabble. Wolper's goofy misplaced sensitivity gets him (and an entire TV show audience) killed, indicating we readers should not accept his unrealistic vision of human nature. But we learn several pages later that ironically Batman actually agrees with it and considers himself to have murdered the Joker's victims by not crossing the line and killing the Joker when he could.

Writers of today's Batman stories, whether they agree with Wolper's idea or not, have created the exact situation he describes and laid the groundwork for an endlessly unsatisfying cycle of brutality and bloodshed. Lay the delicious dialogue and appetizing artwork out on the slices of dark wry humor, but the meat is still missing.

And what's left is starting to smell.

Bochco Trio

An awful lot of today's "prestige television" can trace itself back to three shows from the 1980s and 1990s, all of which came in large part from the mind of Steven Bochco. Many of the writers, creators, directors and showrunners of today's top-quality television began their careers working on one of these: Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law or NYPD Blue. Or they began their careers working for the people who began theirs on one of them.

Bochco started in television as a writer and story editor for Universal, where he worked on well-received shows like Ironside and Columbo. In 1978 he moved to MTM Enterprises, the studio started by Mary Tyler Moore and run by her then-husband Grant Tinker. His first show for MTM, Paris, featured James Earl Jones and drew good reviews, but had a horrible time slot and lasted only 11 episodes. Unusually for police dramas of the time, Paris spent a lot of story on the lead character's home and off-duty life -- something that Bochco would bring forward into his later series. The show also starred Michael Warren, an actor that Bochco would bring to Hill Street as well. He wouldn't bring co-star Cecilia Hart, but he signed her then-husband Bruce Weitz for the later show. Hart and Weitz would split not long after Paris was canceled, and she then married Jones. Hollywood is weird.

"We have a 9-11, armed robbery in progress. See surplus store corner Peebles Drive and 124th Street..."

Bochco's second outing with MTM went to NBC and started airing five days before Ronald Reagan took office, cementing its connection with a new decade. Although a lot of its features and characters retained a kind of 70s sensibility -- especially Daniel J. Travanti's Capt. Frank Furillo -- Hill Street was very certainly something that television hadn't seen before. It featured an ensemble cast often partitioned into separate, if related, storylines that would stretch across several episodes. Bochco's then-wife Barbara Bosson, cast as the ex-wife of precinct captain Furillo, had suggested the latter idea to him, pointing out how successful it was on daytime soap operas. Handheld cameras allowed filming in a much more confined precinct office set, and the knights in blue who worked the Hill Street Precinct sported some pretty tarnished armor.

Hill Street regularly addressed issues not often touched in crime drama shows, such as the corrosive effects of poverty on an area and its social fabric. It frequently confronted racial issues, both between cops and the citizenry and between cops themselves, with a candor that no 2017 show would dare to try. Patrol officers Bobby Hill (Warren) and Andy Renko (Charles Haid) will have each other's back until the last trump sounds but frequently rub up against each other when Hill's urban African-American context clashes with Renko's rural redneckism. Hill doesn't dismiss Renko because of his prejudice; he tries to persuade him. And Renko doesn't pretend to be something he's not in order to make Hill feel better; he accepts his partner as he is and trusts Hill enough to show his own real self instead of a diversity-coated facade. Both men grow over the first four seasons of the show -- Renko in seeing the people around him as people rather than melanin and Hill in understanding how his own success at escaping his background might make him even more judgmental of those who didn't than his friend is.

All of these swirling narratives wouldn't work nearly so well were they not acted by one of the better ensemble casts ever assembled on a small screen. Travanti, Warren, Haid and Bosson are already mentioned, but Veronica Hamel as public defender and Furillo lover Joyce Davenport, the late Michael Conrad as Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, Betty Thomas as Officer Lucy Bates, the late Kiel Martin as Det. J. D. LaRue and Taurean Blacque as his partner Det. Neal Washington and a raft of others made real the great scripts and scenes written for them. LaRue's season-long descent as his alcoholism sinks it talons into him during the show's first year is one of its more under-rated performances, but only because so much of the rest is so good.

Hill Street also flashed the often strange and frequently macabre sense of humor Bochco liked. During the first season, for example, Michael Conrad's Phil Esterhaus was dating two women -- Grace Gardner (Barbara Babcock), the widow of a former detective and Cindy Spooner, a high school athlete. During the episode featuring his interrupted marriage to Cindy, the 50-something Esterhaus regularly addressed his prospective father-in-law as "Dad" even though they were quite obviously contemporaries. Although the rigid SWAT team commander Sgt. Howard Hunter (James B. Sikking) was too often more caricature than character, his obsession with weaponry and overwhelming response was ready-made for comedy whenever it came into contact with the real world.

Conrad's death in 1984 left Hill Street with a bigger gap than might have been first realized, and its fourth season was probably its peak. The first full season without Conrad, #5, veered much more towards soap-operatic angsty plotlines than before. Season 6 saw several longtime cast members leave to be inadequately replaced by new writers' attempts to remake their characters, and when Travanti announced that Season 7 would be his last NBC decided the show should end then. Bochco had been fired at the end of season 5 and was focusing on his new series, L.A. Law, which would debut in September 1986.

"I've got dibs on his office."

And thus we met Arnie Becker, a partner at McKenzie, Brackman and Chaney (later with Kuzak), as he responds to the sight of one of the firm's senior partners dead at his desk, in the opening episode of L.A. Law. Becker, played by Corbin Bernsen, was the firm's specialist in divorce law and generally carried the load when storylines called for a sleazy lothario or a tawdry and sometimes comical divorce case. Harry Hamlin as Mike Kuzak and Jimmy Smits as Victor Sifuentes rounded out the male half of the narrative leads, while Jill Eikenberry as Ann Kelsey and later Susan Dey as Grace Van Owen carried the major storylines for the women. Dey was also Kuzak's love interest, so she would sometimes play supporting roles in his arcs and he sometimes in hers.

Law is the most dated of Bochco's shows when watched today. Obviously the fashions and hairstyles are straight from the 1980s but also the pastel-heavy look and cinematography look weirdly flat when compared with more modern shows. Bochco used the legal system as a backdrop for a wide range of social issue commentary and pushed the envelope of risqué behavior even more than he had on Hill Street. Often the different cases taken on by members of the law firm highlighted the plight of people being pushed around by corporate interests or other bullies. Its attorneys rarely, if ever, represented guilty people -- or if they were guilty it was of some minor offense.

Acting-wise, Boccho again assembled a talented cast of folks who had for the most part never made it onto the radar of larger productions. His character actors gave the leads solid foundations from which to work, whether it was the snideness of Alan Rachins as Douglas Brackman, the solid decency and gravitas of Richard Dysart as Leland Mackenzie or the keep-plugging-along befuddlement of Michael Tucker as Stuart Markowitz. Hamlin and Dey as the central romantic couple didn't really manage the chemistry of Travanti and Hamel, leaving Law with a much less strongly beating heart than Hill Street.

Law suffered from an expanding cast that started diluting storylines and a quick slide into sanctimony. Alfre Woodard won an Emmy as a rape victim in the pilot episode, marrying her skill to an excellently-written part that brought out the real tragedy she suffered. But later clients devolved into a real Victim of the Week rotation, rarely sticking around long enough for viewers to actually get to know them before one of our Heroic Attorneys delivered the Powerful Closing Argument that would lead the jury into Doing the Right Thing. Sometimes, of course, they didn't, which allowed for the Anguished Questioning of the System and a comeback with a Renewed Resolve to Make Everything Right. Lawyer shows offer a great temptation for speechifying self-righteousness, and L.A. Law succumbed all too often, especially once Bochco left the producer's chair after season three.

David E. Kelley helmed the show in seasons four and five (and decided to pin the sanctimony meter to the wall with his own lawyer show, The Practice). Bochco came back for the sixth season and then left; the show would sputter for another two seasons before ending in 1994. A reunion movie in 2002 did little for the show's legacy and highlighted how much a product of its time L.A. Law really was.

"This is America. I'd a beat you, rich or poor."

The saying summed up a great deal of the philosophy of one New York City Police Detecive Andy Sipowicz, played by Dennis Franz, in Bochco's third great drama, NYPD Blue. Sipowicz says the line to a man who claims he was bullied into a confession because he was a poor immigrant.

Franz was initially paired with David Caruso as Detective John Kelly, the two top cops in the 15th Precinct's detective squadroom. Bochco co-created the show with David Milch, who was inspired by retired NYPD detective Bill Clark. Clark was also one of NYPD Blue's producers.

Blue was the target of boycotts and public pressure when it began airing in 1992 for its boundary-busting language and nudity. Network television had never shown or said some of the things that Blue's cast offered up, but of course compared even with regular cable today it's pretty tame, and matched against premium cable shows it's positively quaint.

The first season opens with an arc that has Sipowicz gravely wounded by a vengeful mobster and Kelly leading the charge to find and arrest the shooter. He also juggles feelings for his ex-wife Laura Michaels, played by Sherry Stringfield, with a developing attraction to Patrolwoman Janice Licalsi, played by Amy Brenneman. Laura's role as an assistant district attorney allows for plenty of path-crossing to show us that sparks haven't gone away, and of course Janice is around the station while Kelly is.

NYPD Blue is almost two shows, as Caruso left after only one season to pursue a movie career that did not go well. That season is interesting to watch knowing that he will be out the door, as well as watching Franz's originally more supporting role take more and more of the meat of the narrative and screen time. Sipowicz was just too good of a character and Franz too good of an actor to stay in any shadow. His interactions with Lieutenant Arthur Fancy (James McDaniel) were definitely some of the acting highlights of a show that regularly offered up great characters, scenes and performances. When season two brought Jimmy Smits in to play Bobby Simone, he melded more into an ensemble with Franz at the center.

Blue also allowed a Bochco show to partially correct some of the missteps it had begun with; things that plagued all his shows in large or small ways. Initially, the women of Blue are all the love interest or potential love interest of one male character or another. Stringfield and Brenneman both left when Caruso did; the writers didn't know what to do with them without him around. They might have some narrative of their own, but the majority of their plots played out in reaction to their relationship to a male character. But Justine Miceli as Adrienne Lesniak and Amanda Thompson as Jill Kirkendall drove their own character lines, and even though Kim Delaney's Diane Russell was in a relationship with Bobby Simone she had a lot of her own arc as well.

The early seasons were the strongest, even though after the opening arc the series quickly settled into a crime of the week pattern. A second crime often occupied the B-team detectives and frequently featured some comic element. The acting and characters could sustain viewer interest but when Smits left the show after season six the pattern wore thin quickly. A bewildering carousel of departures and tryouts made it hard to link to any of the new personnel, and the show finally ended after 12 seasons with Sipowicz now the squad commander and mentor to the crew of young detectives.

Legacy

It's almost impossible to imagine what some folks see as the current Golden Age of Television without Steven Bochco and his work. Some shows had relied on flawed characters, some worked with large ensemble casts, some had multi-episode story arcs. He combined them all in ways that interwove them so each characteristic strengthened the others, offering viewers stories that seemed much realer even though they often involved outlandish characters or situations. Bochco began an era in which the usual assumption that the best actors were on the stage or the big screen didn't apply. Even though he was producing television, he brought a movie-level feel and atmosphere into his shows that was nothing like what their competition offered.

Sure, he had some stinkers. Cop Rock is justly maligned as not just weird -- a cop drama with musical numbers in the middle -- but badly done. And as mentioned above, he had a blind spot when it came to bringing female characters into his shows in arcs of their own rather than ones that placed them in more reactive roles. And there is no doubt that he sometimes lacks vision for where to take his shows once they had established themselves, leaving them in the hands of lesser talents who kept them creaking along long past their prime.

But if you watch drama on television today, you're seeing his influence. Sometimes fainter and sometimes louder but in almost all of them you're going to be hearing a Bochco echo.

Kingdom Come + 20

Note: This piece on the limited comic series Kingdom Come will contain spoilers. If you've never read it and want to learn what happens the old-fashioned way, stop now. Hope you enjoy it and come back.

 Twenty years ago this month, the first issue of a DC Comics prestige "Elseworlds" miniseries hit the stands, offering perhaps one of the best answers to a downward spiral of grim, grit, vengeance and violence that Frank Miller's lesser heirs had levied upon the genre.

In 1986, Miller's The Dark Knight Returns offered an aging and retired Bruce Wayne watching his city crumble in the absence of its protector, Batman. Miller took seriously the impact of an obsessive quest like that fate imposed on the young orphan and what kind of man it might create. He also took seriously what kind of response a real world not made up of curious but helpful citizens popping out of windows would have towards the titans in their midst. The Dark Knight Returns, along with Alan Moore's Watchmen published later that same year, reflected a desire on the part of comic book fans and creators to bring more realism to their cape-and-longjohn worlds. Although most of the main stream of super-heroes in DC comics would retain their various codes of honor, many would become more ruthless and much darker. Of course, few comic creators had talent like Miller and Moore, so a good portion of the new "grimdark" comic world was as cartoonish as its square-jawed, eat-your-vitamins-and-say-your-prayers predecessor. There may have been a lot of mayhem to revel in, but there weren't very many heroes to aspire to. Not all comic creators liked these developments or the dominance of the grim-and-gritty worldview, and in the mid-90s they began to push back via their own work.

KINGDOM COMING

Artist Alex Ross was coming off 1994's Marvels, his landmark collaboration with Kurt Busiek that told a little of the history of the Marvel Comics universe from the everyday person's point of view. Busiek's story broke some new ground in literary complexity but remained very much in the Miller-Moore vein of what a real world might be like if populated by superheroes, villains and mutants, only less dark. Busiek and Ross shared the idea that the inspirational aspects of Silver and Golden Age comic heroes were not entirely useless. A realistic world might very well have room for them as well as for the reality that what super-heroes could inspire included fear, jealousy and anger. Ross's painted artwork, a style in which he'd started working heavily the previous year, enhanced Marvels' narrative as well as its appeal.

DC, obviously, was interested in having the same kind of buzz regarding a story with their characters. Ross was interested in that idea as well, and pitched a story treatment to the company while Marvels was in production. It picked up several themes from a shelved Alan Moore proposal, Twilight of the Super-Heroes, that forecast a future earth ruled by super-hero dynasties more concerned with their power and interests than protecting humanity. When Moore stopped working for DC in 1989, the idea was filed away -- how much Ross or eventual writer Mark Waid knew about it is open to question. Moore patterned his story as well as his title on the Norse Ragnarok myth, which is not exactly all that unknown a tale. I couldn't find any online interview where anyone asked him about it, anyway.

DC selected Waid because of his own extensive knowledge of its universe and characters. The story, which was going to concern itself with a future DC universe, required that widespread understanding of the past. Although Waid was willing to create a story using someone else's idea -- which a couple of earlier collaborators hadn't -- later published interviews suggested he and Ross had a bumpy working relationship with fault lines showing along who had what idea. It would torpedo them teaming for a sequel; Waid's vision of what happened after Kingdom Come showed up in 1999's The Kingdom; Ross's in the Justice Society of America arc "Thy Kingdom Come" in 2008.

THE STORY

Norman McCay is the pastor of a shrinking Metropolis congregation in the first quarter of the 21st century (those writing about the series settled on 2020 as the date). Super-powered beings are no novelty in this world, but in many ways they are no blessing either. The moral codes and restraint that characterized an earlier generation have been largely abandoned, at first in favor of heroes who would "do what needs to be done," including executing the villains they fought. But now even the concepts of "hero" and "villain" are fading as the metahumans seem to fight each other as much out of boredom and a quest for power as anything else. Humanity seems to have lost ambition and drive; there's little point in stretching the limits of strictly human achievement when some random moke with a power ring, cosmic technology or unearthly ability can blow past those limits in his or her sleep. Thanks to his parishioner Wesley Dodds -- the original Sandman -- McCay has been considering these questions much lately, and has even begun to have visions of some apocalyptic event involving the super-powered beings that may mean an end to all of humanity.

When McCay is visited by the Spectre, he learns that his visions have some kind of divine message by which the Spectre will be led to pass judgment about who is truly at fault for the condition of the world. The confrontation he foresees begins to look more and more likely as heroes of old return, led by Superman. A devastating tragedy fueled by one of the modern "take no prisoners" kind of super-beings brings the Man of Steel out of exile to corral the out-of-control super-population. But he has been gone quite awhile, and many of the newer metahumans resist his control. Joined by Wonder Woman and a growing number of heroes, Superman finds himself now also a jailer, as the conquered but resisting super-beings are imprisoned in a super-secure facility called the Gulag. His enemy Lex Luthor works to counter Superman's moves, and finds an unlikely ally in Bruce Wayne, the Batman. Batman sees the same problem Superman does, but fears Superman's method of handling it will only cause more problems.

His fears prove out when the prisoners of the Gulag revolt and break loose from their prison, drawing Superman's forces into battle. Luthor's secret weapon -- Captain Marvel, driven mad by Luthor's brainwashing -- threatens to tip the balance against both Superman and Batman's forces, and eventually the Secretary-General of the United Nations sanctions the use of an incredibly powerful bomb to at least stop the fighting if not wipe out all of the metahumans once and for all. Marvel regains his sanity and sacrifices himself to lessen the bomb's destruction, but at first Superman believes it has killed everyone but him. He flies to the UN to wreak vengeance, but McCay demands the Spectre let him appeal to Superman and is able to counsel him against destruction. The devastation of the battle and the bomb, the sacrifice of Marvel and McCay's words convince the few remaining metahumans to work alongside humanity rather than operate according to their own code or desires.

SOME THINKING

Given that the importance of the problem of real-world destruction caused by super-beings fuels both Batman v. Superman and Captain America: Civil War, the way that Kingdom Come deals with it helps it have some pretty good staying power. Ross's art, of course, maximizes the impact. Few comics were painted in the mid-1990s, and far fewer were painted with his skill, which made the appearance of Kingdom Come that much more special. Like Waid, Ross had an extensive knowledge of DC's history and used it to pepper the backgrounds with a delightfully obscure range of characters that guaranteed a surprise in almost every panel. The almost photo-realistic look of the paintings suggested what a comic book might look like if Norman Rockwell had created it, its nostalgia creating a tension with the bleakness of the future world it showed.

Waid's dialogue and narrative easily matched the quality of the artwork. His characters clash, spar with words, vent and sometimes barely manage to be in the same room without fighting. This is not an episode of the Super-Friends. The dialogue has a real-world quality about it that helps emphasize that Kingdom Come is trying to grapple with the real-world consequences of life among super-powered beings. Some would be good and trustworthy, some would be evil, some would be unhealthy, some would be cautious about how they used their powers, some would be careless.

To borrow a line from another super-hero universe, the only way they could maintain humanity's trust was to realize that with great power came great responsibility. When they began crossing the lines, even in order to save lives, then their ability to be responsible for their great gifts was questioned. Sure, JusticeDude blew away Captain Psycho because Psycho escaped and killed a dozen people every time he was locked up for "treatment." But what if JusticeDude decides someone else needs killing and it turns out he's wrong? Who could stop him?

Waid and Ross said in different interviews and in introductions to various editions of Kingdom Come that the book was in some way a commentary on and argument against the grim and gritty excess that seemed to drive most of the comic book heroes being written at the time. It seemed like titles featuring grimacing, merciless dispensers of "justice" dominated the shelves, with artists trying to outdo each other in creating more and more ludicrous battle armor, weaponry and utterly impossible female anatomy. Magog, the ruthless fighter whose mistake caused the tragedy that prompted Superman's re-emergence, was a deliberate imitation of that kind of character.

Waid and Ross saw that kind of character and storyline as a creative dead end, and potentially harmful to the whole comic book medium itself. In their vision, heroes are more than people who punch harder -- they are people who use their gifts with others for the good of everyone. Superman can stop a meteor from hitting Metropolis, but he can't tuck Joe and Jane Average's kids in for the night or be the ones to soothe them when they have nightmares. And what makes Superman a hero is that he knows that. He has his gifts and uses them, Joe and Jane Average have their gifts and use them, and everybody's better off because they're all on the same team and the difference in what each of them has done is a difference of degree, not of kind.

Waid puts words to that effect in Superman's mouth as he speaks to the UN about Marvel's sacrifice after Norman McCay has persuaded him to turn aside from vengeance. Super-heroes are super because they are strange visitors from another world, or because they've been affected by fantastic scientific experiments, or they represent figures of ancient mythology come to life. But they're heroes because they remember their kinship with humanity -- even if that kinship's mostly metaphorical in more than a few cases.

A WRAP-UP

Kingdom Come happened 10 years after Watchmen and Dark Knight. It's highly likely that without those two groundbreaking works and their opening the doors of the comic book world to some more realistic influences it would never have come to pass. But it's also likely that it, combined with Marvels, helped steer a course back towards the middle, away from the Clenched Teeth Armored Avengers who had flooded the medium. Their successes helped give creators like Waid, Ross and Busiek leverage to create more work according to their vision of the super-hero medium, in both of the Big 2 companies as well as independents.

Grimdark remains, and it remains a problem. DC's current storytelling woes owe something to their ridiculous "New 52" concept, but also to their leaning in that direction. Marvel has its movie mint, but its books struggle because of a stress on "event" stories rather than on the human dimension of their heroes -- which is what's always been their strength up until now. But a significant group in the comic industry recognizes its excesses for the dead end they are, and I think it's highly likely that stems from the kinds of changes that Kingdom Come helped usher in. Only time will tell whether they can be maintained -- and if there are actually comic books to read in the 2020 in which Kingdom Come is set, then we'll know whether or not they were.

I Saw a Cat Who Wasn't There...

One of the many mysteries of quantum mechanics is why things that are very small act so weirdly, compared to everyday, normal-sized things. After all, everyday, normal-sized things are made up of the very small things, so we might expect them to behave like they are groups of the very small things. But they don't, and physicists have long scratched their collective heads as to why that is.

Strike a Superpose

One of those weird things very small objects do is called "quantum superposition." Physical systems, like the incredibly tiny subatomic particles we call electrons, can exist in a bunch of different states. They have different properties, like their electrical charge or energy level, which is called "spin." Each of these properties can show up in different ways: Electrons have a negative electrical charge, but they can have different energy levels. The combination of a certain energy level and the negative charge is a state.

Lots of different experiments, both physical and "thought-experiments," have shown that electrons and many other very tiny subatomic particles show up in one state or another depending on which experiment is being done. An experiment designed to show electrons exist in state A, for example, whatever that state is, will find electrons are in state A. But an experiment on the same electrons that's supposed to show they're in state B will show they are indeed in state B. The electrons seem to hang out in some kind of in-between condition that collapses into one state or another when they are measured.

A physicist named Edwin Schrödinger devised a thought-experiment that showed just how wacky a situation superposition was (it's a thought-experiment because doing it for real would be mean and get you arrested). Suppose, he said, there was a cat inside a closed box. Without opening the lid, you can't see the cat. Now suppose there is a mechanism that would release poison gas into the box and ice poor Whiskers, depending on whether a specific nuclear particle decayed or not. That decay is completely random; it may happen but it isn't guaranteed to happen.

This means, Schrödinger said, that Whiskers is either alive or he's dead, depending on whether the nuclear decay has happened. But the observer doesn't know which until the box opens, meaning that for all practical purposes, to all outside observers Whiskers is both dead and alive at the same time and won't "collapse" into one state or another until someone opens the box lid and looks. One purpose of Schrödingers' experiment was to try to illustrate how superposition works, of course. But another was to establish how different the quantum subatomic world was from the world we experience through our senses and measurements. Measurement and experimentation force the electron into one state or another as the wave function of its superposition collapses. The state really does depend on the measurement. But Whiskers is really alive or really toast, no matter whether we look in the box or not. We don't know which one he is, but that doesn't change that he is one or the other. But on the quantum scale, the electron really isn't one or the other until we look at it.

So one might expect these macroscopic things to behave like an aggregation of quantum-scale things, because that's what they are. Only they don't: superposition doesn't occur on the macroscopic scale. We do not need the wave function of a tuna fish sandwich to collapse in order to detect or experience it. Scientists have never really been able to explain very well why this is.

Super-solving?

Schrödinger did more than imagine experiments to tick off PETA. He also developed Schrödinger's Equation, which can be solved to describe quantum behavior for limited systems, such as a single particle. Particle physicist and retired Anglican priest John Polkinghorne has described it as a matter of language -- what can't be expressed with words can be expressed with equations. So while everyday language (and everyday heads) can't get clear on something being both a particle and a wave at the same time, mathematical language can. This is what Schrödinger's Equation does.

In principle, the equation should be able to describe not simply one particle but larger groups of particles, such as cats or people. Even though we never see larger objects demonstrate superposition or quantum indeterminancy, the equation should be able to describe them in that way. But even the top supercomputers balk at trying to solve Schrödinger's Equation for anything larger than a few thousand subatomic particles. You can see why. The equation for one electron suggests one of two solutions; one state or another, particle or wave. The equation for two electrons has four solutions: A is a particle and B is a wave, A is a particle and B is a particle, A is a wave and B is a particle or A is a wave and B is a wave. It only gets worse, from the point of view of those solving the equations. Three electrons means eight possible solutions, four electrons would mean 24 possible solutions, and so on. When we realize that everyday objects like cats, people and Twinkies consist of billions of atoms, each with its own number of electrons being quantumly uncertain, it becomes pretty clear why it would be difficult for is to figure out superposition for those everyday objects. The math is too complex and like a juggler working one too many things into the pattern, even a computer loses track of what it's doing.

It might seem like the answer is just to wait for better, faster computers. Schrödinger's Equation is not an inherently unsolvable problem like computing the last digit of pi. It has a solution, but like many solvable equations it gets pretty tough to work when the terms get really big. A + B = C, for example, is a solvable equation: Given any two of the terms, the third can be computed. If I know A=1 and C=3, then I can figure out that B=2. Now, as the terms get larger and larger, the solving takes more and more time. But today's computers can solve equations and make calculations that would have locked up a TRS-80 in a heartbeat, so more powerful computers could be the answer. That would work, except for one reality: Even the simplest math computation takes time and energy.

Because we can almost intuitively solve something like "1+1=2" faster than we can say it, we may overlook this, but a finite amount of time elapsed between when I started to say the equation and when I solved it. We could obviously see that a complex equation would take more time, but even a simple equation takes more time as the terms get larger. Simple addition of two single digit numbers takes next to no time at all, but make those even two-digit numbers and it takes an extra beat. More digits will involve still more time. Computers work much much faster than we do, but they still require measurable time to figure answers. It's possible to imagine a fairly simple equation that uses terms so large it could take a computer a very long time to solve it. In fact, there are some equations that would take more time to solve than the universe may have left. The so-called "heat death" of the universe is immensely far into the future, but if current cosmology has it right, there will come a time when the universe has used up all its energy and will be for all intents and purposes "dead." The equation may have a solution, but the universe has said we are out of time and have to put our pencils down even though we are not finished.

If I use a pencil and paper to work a problem, my body uses energy to physically move my hand around the sheet of paper. Even if I solve it "in my head," energy is expended, since the brain cells that do the calculations work by electrical impulses (albeit somewhat slowly, in some cases). Calculators solve math problems more quickly, but they use more energy to do it. Computers work even more quickly than calculators, but only at the cost of a still higher energy use. That energy produces heat, which is why computer towers have fans in them to cool off the processors. A supercomputer can do millions of operations in an eyeblink, but requires huge air-conditioning units to keep it cooled because its operations require -- you guessed it -- even more energy.

The universe has a finite amount of energy. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can't be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. The second law says that at each transformation, the energy involved is less and less useful for work, meaning more and more energy on hand that can't be used to do things -- like mathematical calculations. This non-usable energy is called "entropy," and in every closed system, entropy increases over time. This is how the universe winds down in the manner mentioned above. And so our solvable equation with the too-large terms in it goes unsolved because the universe runs out of time to solve it and energy to perform the calculations -- in fact, the energy used in the attempt to solve it speeds up the process of dying! Had I known about entropy while a student I might have tried to point out that math homework hastened the death of the universe but I suspect I would not have been heeded.

So, is Schrödinger's Equation potentially solvable for a macroscopic object? It would seem, given infinite energy and time, the answer would be yes. But the universe contains finite energy and will exist for only a finite time, meaning that Schrödinger's Equation won't be solved for a macroscopic object even if it could be.

And in this case, the lack of a solution means that macroscopic objects don't exhibit quantum behavior and they're particles or they're waves, period. Schrödinger's Equation is not just a blackboard decorator -- it describes things that actually happen. If it can't be solved that means what it's supposed to describe can't happen.

Invoking a Deity

But suppose there was infinite energy -- call it "omnipotence." And suppose there was infinite time -- call it "eternity." That's not precisely what eternity is, but in this instance we can use that word. And suppose there was a being that possessed omnipotence and existed in eternity...but you see where I'm going. Macroscopic objects, like, say, people, and systems that contain them like, say, universes, don't show quantum behavior in situations with finite energy and time, giving them a sense of determinancy. Smack one billiard ball with another and it will carom off in a predictable direction rather than disappear and materialize on Neptune. The chance that it would do so exists, but it's so small that the universe is almost certainly too limited to contain that particular outcome. But if an omnipotent being in eternity sees that same action, then such a being could indeed see the interplanetary outcome, or ones even weirder than that.

A lot of times our talk of God suggests that God knows the future before it happens. Such a view is implied if we claim God is all-knowing or omniscient. This leaves us with questions, though, such as why God would have created human beings with free will knowing that we would abuse it and cause others to suffer. But the omniscient God would also know of possible futures in which an individual chose to use his or her free will to not harm someone else. And, in fact, of all possible futures, deriving from all possible choices and all possible combinations of matter and every possible solution to Schrödinger's Equation. The omniscient God could know this because God's perspective is not limited by entropy or time, and thus equations unsolvable in our universe would be solvable for God.

So we don't say that God knows the future; God actually knows all possible futures.

The thought-experiment Schrödinger created is not technically an example of a macroscopic object showing quantum behavior. Remember, the poison gas was released or contained based on the actions of a single atom. The cat's survival is affected by quantum behavior, but the cat itself remains non-quantum, whether it has passed on from poison or not. Schrödinger said that because of the weirdness of quantum indeterminancy, an observer could not know if the cat was alive or dead before the box opened. Macroscopic quantum behavior leads to an even weirder question than Schrödinger's. He only asked if the cat was alive or dead. The macroscopic question is, "Is the cat even inside the box?"

And it would seem that the answer, in the fullest sense, is "God only knows."


(This piece came after some reflection on reading this paper at The Physics arXiv Blog at medium.com. Although it deals more with one of the mathematical features of macroscopic quantum indeterminancy, the P≠NP problem, this wound up headed a different way. Thanks for reading, if you have!)

Quis Custodiet?

It's a sin to spoil a book without warning, just as it is to kill a mockingbird. So here's your warning; spoilers below!

Every great story needs a villain and in the story of how Go Set a Watchman came into being, the villain is most probably HarperCollins Publishing Company.

Harper Lee. of course, wrote one of the nation's most beloved novels, To Kill a Mockingbird. It was made into one of the nation's most beloved movies, with that love owing no small debt to the fact that one of the nation's most beloved actors, Gregory Peck, considered his portrayal of small-town lawyer and paragon of decency Atticus Finch his finest role. Mockingbird's telling of how Atticus defended a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama is a frequent school assignment read, with the novel adding layers of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch's awakening to the realities of the world around her that the movie sets aside to focus on the trial. Several generations of middle-schoolers have made Mockingbird one of their first acquaintances with the experience of novels being as much about ideas as they are about plots and characters, and for many of them that first association has been a lasting one.

Mockingbird was published in 1960 and remained Lee's only novel. Whether or not she had ever even finished another full-length manuscript was open to question, until her representatives announced in late 2014 that the manuscript of Watchman had been discovered in a safe-deposit box. According to the story, it was the original novel that the J. B. Lippincott publishing company purchased, and it was over the course of working with editor Tay Hohoff that the idea of building an entire novel from one of the flashback sequences that Lee developed Mockingbird.

But the completed Watchman manuscript, or at least one of its revisions, still existed and it was that which HarperCollins, which now owns Lippincott's copyrights and other assets, began hyping in 2014 and publicizing until publishing it this month. What makes the company villainous instead of heroic is just how much of a disservice to Lee, Mockingbird and their legacy Watchman is. A number of reviewers have pointed out that without Mockingbird, no one would publish Watchman as is. Lee's own advanced age and health left her unable to contribute to preparing the manuscript for publication, and what rests between the enticingly retro covers of Watchman shows that clearly. It's a set of barely-connected episodes as an adult Jean Louise, on her annual visit to Maycomb from where she now lives in New York City, encounters up close and personally the effects of the civil rights movement and the racism that makes it necessary. That racism is in her own family, in her prospective fiance and in her hero, Atticus himself. While not a sheet-wearing cross-burner, Atticus is a member of one of the citizens groups that opposes federal court rulings forcing integration in the South. In one of the many long and overwrought dialogues that make Watchman a chore to read, he explains that he believes the African-Americans of the South have yet not enough exposure to "white civilization" to be entrusted with full citizenship and all its rights. Jean Louise, remembering only his teaching from earlier in her life about loving all equally and his defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman, is devastated by learning what Atticus thinks and breaks with him, vowing to leave Maycomb and never return. She partially reconciles with him by finally removing him from the pedestal where she had placed him and allowing him to be a flawed human being instead of an infallible deity.

As a part of its fairly brilliant publicity campaign, HarperCollins teased first the idea of the book, then the cover, and finally a preview chapter that featured Atticus's backward views on full display. Buzz, of course, was inevitable. I lost count of the clickbait headlines along the lines of "Atticus is now a racist!" The campaign, plus the deeply-felt sentiment for Mockingbird, made Watchman review-proof, which is good thing for it. Although it features several wonderful scenes of the adult Jean Louise recalling her iconoclastic upbringing, written with the combination of youthful worldview filtered through adult language of which Lee is a master, it is in many places curiously lifeless. The temptation is to see the difference sorting out as the dull scenes being those not yet edited when Watchman was abandoned for Mockingbird, but there's probably no way of knowing.

It's not as though Watchman couldn't have been revised to make a proper sequel to Mockingbird. Atticus's seemingly divided character could have been an examination of how someone who has privately awful thoughts may publicly do noble things -- how could the two tendencies be reconciled? How could a man who believed in saying, "Be patient," to a group of people still oppressed almost a hundred years after they were supposed to be have been freed also put his profession and even his personal safety on the line to try to fight an unjust accusation against one of those same people? Jean Louise the adult white woman has an encounter with Calpurnia, the African-American woman who mostly raised her and was almost a surrogate mother to Scout, that is cold and correct and suspicious, an incident that shows how important Martin Luther King's message of ending segregation by preaching love really was, as well as what a tightrope walk it was to try to maintain. The actual arc of the novel -- Jean Louise discovers her sainted father is actually a flawed human being -- is almost trivial, and becomes even more so if you read Watchman without giving it the context and resonance lent it by Mockingbird.

Did Hohoff and Lee spend time trying to work Watchman into such a form, to address and handle those ideas the way that Mockingbird tried to handle its subjects?  An executive who worked at Lippincott when Mockingbird was published says they probably didn't, but we don't really know, and even if they did, that version of the manuscript was not the one in the safe deposit box. And it's probable that HarperCollins didn't concern themselves with that paper once they realized what a truckload of negotiable paper it represented. They were at least right about that, as Amazon reported pre-sales as big as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I've read lots of theories. Some suggest Watchman helps deflate a concept that Mockingbird promotes, that of the "white savior" figure of Atticus aiding the poor helpless people of color. Others say it "exposes the dark side of Atticus Finch." All of these are basically silly ideas. Atticus is a fictional character, and he has whatever thoughts, beliefs, habits and words his creator wishes to give him. If, as the public history of Watchman says, it was written first, then it's far more likely that Lee developed him from a man committed to justice and the law -- even for those he considered backwards and uncivilized -- to a man committed to equality and love. The supposedly more realistic Atticus of Watchman became the compassionate and decent vested and spectacled paladin of Mockingbird, not the other way around.

Watchman, once discovered, should not have stayed hidden. Gregory Peck's son Stephen believes his father, who became good friends with Harper Lee, would have counseled her against publishing it but would definitely approved of its preservation with her papers for use by literature scholars. Stephen also believes that, had this version of Watchman appeared during his father's lifetime and someone suggested filming it, his father would have taken a pass on its version of Atticus.

It would have been nice if HarperCollins had done the same.

Maybe You Will Leave Harlan Alive

Spoilers appear here, but this episode aired a week ago. So I imagine you, O Patient Reader, already know how the show ended. If you don't, then exercise your lauded patience yet again and wait and watch before reading. ;-)

Last week saw the end of the modern-day western Justified, which was based on the Elmore Leonard short story "Fire in the Hole." The six-year confrontation between criminal Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) and U.S. Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) was finally on tap, and the fate of Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter), who had been in love with both men and married (and shot) Boyd's brother Bowman, would be revealed.

The episode was a good conclusion for the series, and interestingly its construction probably mirrored the series' uneven final season. Justified came out of the gate with a lot of potential but a loose first season; a show finding its way. The second season, with main villain Mags Bennett (Emmy-winner Margo Martindale), got next to everything right as Raylan fought against Mags and her more-or-less competent but completely evil sons and their scheme to enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbors. The third season was also uneven, meandering around in the middle with too much filler and wasting the potential of Neal McDonough as Detroit-based mobster Bobby Quarles.

Season Four, featuring a 30-year-old mystery and the hunt for the elusive Drew Thompson, came in just a notch under the second. It offered some great character development in the form of the former hooker Ellen May and a fascinating sub-plot with the conflict between Deputy Marshall Tim Gutterson and Boyd's henchman Colton Rhodes. It exposed how Ava's greed and resentment about her poor childhood would lead her to embrace too much of Boyd's criminal enterprise. It took religion -- a fixture of life in rural Kentucky that most shows probably would ignore -- seriously as Ellen May's religious awakening brought her to make decisions she might never have otherwise made, and showed her as a much stronger person than the woman we met in season 2 fellating a crooked doctor for oxycontin. But it lacked a real heavyweight villain, which made it just a little less satisfying than Season Two. And it ended with Ava's arrest, which set up much of the time-wasting nonsense of Season Five. Five spent much of its time in what I've seen called "fan service," meaning giving fans what they clamor and ask for. Fans hated Raylan's ex-wife and current baby mama Winona, so Raylan chased everything in a skirt. Boyd was criminal genius mastermind, so he criminally masterminded all kinds of plots to manipulate Ava out of prison and build his drug empire and outsmart everyone else because he was smart. Loretta McReady had a sassy mouth and Kaitlyn Dever is a great actress, so let's shoehorn Loretta back into the plot for no good reason whatsoever. None of it rang true and very little of it was all that interesting, as it mainly marked time until we could finish things out in Season Six.

The final season began strongly, with Raylan running Ava as his confidential informant spying on Boyd. The Marshals sought evidence to put Boyd away on racketeering and other serious charges, and the race was on to see if she would learn anything of value and keep herself out of prison before Boyd discovered her treachery. Although the criminal enterprise that Boyd undertook was dressed up with a couple too many complications -- the presence of Mary Steenburgen as Katherine Hale and her sometimes beau, sometimes foe Avery Markham (Sam Elliot) being the main culprits. Along about mid-season, we began spending way too much time on Katherine and Avery; the skill of both actors couldn't overshadow that these two were not the people we had been watching this show to see. It was almost as though producer Graham Yost thought he was shooting a ten-episode final season only to learn somewhere around episode eight or nine that he was actually doing thirteen episodes and he'd better start stretching. There aren't too many other reasons that Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns)'s Mikey the goombah bodyguard gets his own death scene. Nor for Loretta to return again and set up a confrontation with Markham and alliance with Boyd that never goes anywhere before the show runs out.

Garrett Dillahunt's charismatic sociopath Ty Walker, Markham's lead henchman, bows out in episode eight complaining that Raylan shot him in the back -- so the last words he hears on earth are Raylan saying, "If you wanted me to shoot you in the front, you shoulda run towards me." But Avery still needs a henchman and Raylan still needs an antagonist to dance with, so we get the ridiculous collection of performance tics called Boon (Jonathan Tucker). His fascination with Western myths and gunfighting foreshadows a final showdown with Raylan, but I didn't watch seventy-eight episodes of this show to learn what happens to a guy who only shows up when it's 94% over.

Yost also seems to think he needs to remind us of some things so we will expect a proper resolution. Raylan, even though he has shown what Martin Blank once called "a certain 'moral flexibility,'" is the Good Guy. Boyd, even though Walton Goggins' charismatic performance has made him fascinating and often great fun to watch, is the Bad Guy. They may bicker a little like a buddy cop movie that's swallowed William Faulkner's thesaurus, but they are not friends, so Yost must remind us of Boyd's Bad Guyness  in the penultimate episode with a speechy, writerly monologue about being an outlaw. Followed by Boyd shooting his listener in the head, when of course the kind thing to do would be to have reversed the order.

The final episode, though, wraps up the season plotline with about 15 minutes left as we see Ava take off on the run, Boyd head off toward the lengthy prison sentence that awaits him when Raylan doesn't shoot him and Raylan himself head to Florida for a reunion with Winona and their infant daughter Willa. It's muddy but fairly satisfying, but the real resolution comes from the coda, set four years later. Raylan and Winona didn't manage as a couple, but they are sharing custody of Willa and Raylan is an important part of her life. He's settled into the Marshals' office in Florida when he gets a hint about Ava's location. She lives on a pumpkin farm in California and is raising Boyd's son in secret. She asks Raylan not to bring her in but even if he does, to keep the knowledge of his son from Boyd. Raylan leaves her in place, and visits Boyd to tell him that Ava died in a car crash in Texas. When Boyd asks Raylan why he would come to deliver this news in person, Raylan allows there is one thing they shared. "We dug coal together," Boyd says through a plastic window in the prison visiting room. "That's right," Raylan answers.

A lot of internet commentary suggested that Leonard's traditional storytelling sense guided the show in ending this way, with the Good Guy winning, the Bad Guy in jail and the Misguided Woman With a Good Heart turning her life around but still always paying a price for what she has done. Unlike the Darrell Scott song from which this post title takes its name, they do leave Harlan alive, although they have left something behind. Ava has left behind the ability to get through a day free of watching for pursuers, either with badges or without. Raylan left behind his past, for better or worse. Boyd left behind his freedom. Even though the author himself passed in 2013, this is the kind of "old-fashioned" ending that he would have argued for, rather than a more modern ending such as that in a show like Breaking Bad.

My own position that Breaking Bad was a nihilistic flimflam con job may influence my ideas, but I would agree that Justified ended the way it ought to end. The final episode set things right in a season that had lost most of its focus, but it did so with an epilogue that set things right in an episode that had lost most of its focus. It may be that Justified's ingredients were only going to mix right in a couple of ways, and that most of the other possible combinations were always going to be off, either a little like in seasons one and three or a lot like in season five and the last half of six.

Tuesdays won't be as much fun without Raylan's laconic humor, Boyd's hyperkinetic polysyllable-laden snowjobs, Tim's Sahara-arid interjections, Erica Tazel's no-nonsense deadly glare as Deputy Marshall Rachel Brooks, Nick Searcy's I'm-getting-too-old-for-this Chief Deputy Marshall Art Givens or Wynn's World's Fussiest Hitman. But more seasons would probably increase the chances for more misfires like Michael Rapaport's supposed southern accent as Darryl Crowe in season five, so perhaps ending now was not the worst move.

And no matter how much I miss the show, I must confess that not hearing again the mumbled banjo-rap theme song from Gangstagrass instead of the far superior "Harlan County Line" from Dave Alvin will cost me nary a minute of sleep.

April Fool, He Said

The following is a spoiler-heavy discussion of three of Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels, Ceremony, Taming a Sea-Horse and Hundred-Dollar Baby, and spoilerish references to several others. Readers who would like to learn how these stories turn out by using the old-fashioned method of reading them are advised that proceeding will make that rather difficult.

April Kyle never got a fair shake.

Over almost 25 years, crime and mystery grand master Robert B. Parker wrote about April and her interaction with his hero, private investigator Spenser, three times. We first met her as a high school dropout turning tricks in Boston's Combat Zone in 1982's Ceremony. Spenser's girlfriend, high school counselor Susan Silverman, is worried about the girl and asks Spenser to find her and bring her out if necessary. Four years later, a now high-class call girl April makes a bad decision that again puts her in need of Spenser's help in Taming a Sea-Horse. And finally, in 2006's Hundred-Dollar Baby, an adult April owns her own call-girl operation and is facing pressure from some thugs who want a piece of the action. Fortunately, she knows a thug who works for folks who are being bullied and she hires Spenser to teach the miscreants the error of their ways.

In one sense, April is a female counterpart of Paul Giacomin, the aimless young boy Spenser meets in Early Autumn. Paul's plight as a weapon in his parents' battles touches Spenser, who decides to get leverage on the parents in order to get Paul out on his own and give him a chance at a decent life. He becomes more of a parent to Paul than anyone else has been, and Paul becomes in many ways Spenser's son.

Spenser's initial encounter with April parallels his meeting with Paul. Sullen, withdrawn and uncommunicative, she is not a young person with a promising future. Her mother is weak and dominated by her father, who is a class-A jerk that Spenser wants to punch shortly after meeting him. Although her mother seems to genuinely care about her daughter, she will not be able to be any kind of parent or worthwhile guide for April as long as her husband is in the picture.

Like Paul, April is a young person who needs to escape her home in order to have any chance at a good life or to flourish as a person. Spenser blackmails Paul's parents into letting him attend a prep school and then a college to study dance, which he has discovered he loves. He gets April on with a high-class madam in New York City, allowing the 16-year-old girl who has spent the last several months as a hooker to remain one. Even though she will have a higher-class clientele and gather social skills and graces she now lacks, she'll still be a teenager being paid to have sex with men, most of whom will probably be quite a bit older than she.

Over the course of a couple of months spent with Spenser, Paul learns some basic carpentry, how to box and work out, jog and cook. These are the things he knows, Spenser says, so these are the things he will teach Paul. By adding them to his previous skill set -- TV-watching and shrugging -- Paul will be able to make his own way and if he happens across something else he wants to learn how to do, he will be able to take care of himself while he does. Spenser invests time and self in the boy and it's his realization that he has come to care what happens to Paul that prompts him to develop his blackmail plan. Despite both Parker and Spenser's oft-stated belief in sexual equality, the idea of offering the same sort of skill set to April doesn't come up. Apparently the only thing she can learn how to use is her body, and that only as a tool to please and satisfy men.

Spenser may very well not have as much invested in April as he did in Paul. She doesn't grow nearly as much and isn't any more likeable by the end of the story as she is at the beginning -- and that wasn't much to start with. He may not be willing to spend the time and energy on another child. Parker may not be able to figure out how to write Spenser as the surrogate father of a daughter as he was for a son. He'll take a shot at it later in his career as his female detective, Sunny Randall, tries to work with a 15-year-old runaway in 2000's Family Honor, with mixed results.

Spenser says he doesn't know any good social workers or other people in helping professions who he figures will be able to reach and help April. Given that finding her uncovered a massive child prostitution ring run by the chief of high-school counseling in the state of Massachusetts, he has no confidence any state system will be able to help either. He fears that any attempt to try will wind up with April a runaway again and back out on the street as a low-level prostitute, as she has no other skills -- and he, apparently, doesn't care enough to give her any, as he did with Paul. There could be any number of reasons for this. Spenser might not feel comfortable trying to "parent" a teenage girl. He might not believe he could successfully convince April's parents to back away as he did with Paul's parents. He recognizes the effort he put into Paul and might not believe he could muster the same thing for April. He might not like April enough to try. April might not have the spark in her for something that Paul had for dancing. I've read some suggestions that April doesn't have the self-discipline Paul had to try to make something of himself. Perhaps, but that's reading Paul after several weeks with Spenser -- the first adult in a long time to pay any attention to him. When he first shows up, there's no more indication of a diamond in the coal as there will be with April, and there's no initial effort to create it.

Or it could be that Parker, having given his hero one surrogate child, didn't want to write him another. Whatever the reason, what we have are Spenser and his girlfriend, high-school guidance counselor Susan Silverman, arranging for 16-year-old April to meet a New York City madam who Spenser knows from another case, so she can find a way to continue as a prostitute in a safer environment.

Susan has no illusions about April's home life, since she's the one whose initial worries about April brought Spenser into the case to start with. She makes some noises about saying that some serious therapy for the young girl and her family would be the best solution and about some uncertainty in enabling a 16-year-old girl to continue as a prostitute. And as a high school guidance counselor, she knows the wreck the state system will be with its chief director exposed as running a child prostitution/pornography ring. But she knows nobody who could find a way to help a 16-year-old kid not hook for a living? She has no contacts that might get her in touch with folks who may have some experience with that? Yes, this is 1982 and very much prior to large-scale efforts to make people aware of human trafficking and helping the many children involved in it, but what we're left with are the only two adults concerned with April's welfare enabling her to continue to see her body as her only value and sell it.

Ceremony has us see this decision as the best outcome right now for April, and Spenser says that if after meeting his friend the madam she doesn't want to go that way, they will try to think of something else. But since the only two adults who've cared about April for April's sake don't seem to want to put up much of a roadblock, it's hard to see her choosing a path where she's something other than a commodity, even if she will now be a much better cared for commodity -- a valuable toy instead of a cheap one.

Parker seemed to realize in some way his solution to April's problem was inadequate. When he wrote the screenplay for the Spenser: Ceremony TV movie in 1993, he had Susan and Spenser get April connected to a group that worked with young girls leaving prostitution. Whether he believed his original ending wouldn't have worked with a TV audience or he understood it to be an error, he did change it. And that makes the TV movie the only time Parker gave this character an even break.

Taming

Four years later, the madam who took April in calls Spenser. April left her employ and connected with another, less exclusive escort service and the madam, Patricia Utley, believes she will eventually wind up back on the street because the man who runs the service has done the same to other girls before.

Spenser calls April to meet with her and warn her about the danger she is in. But the pimp who runs her service has convinced her they are in love and she has what may be a fairly typical 20-year-old's reaction to adult authority's disapproval of her choice of partner: She storms out. Later it becomes apparent she has disappeared and Spenser has to trail her through a web of connections involving the mob, money-laundering and Parker's stand-in for Hugh Hefner and the Playboy magazine empire. When he finds out what happened to her, he learns that she has been taken from the pimp by an organized crime group who supplies women to a banker who launders money for them. Since, in the words of one of the mobsters, the banker likes "things that women don't," April has been held in captivity for several weeks. Spenser convinces the mobsters that it would be better business to return April to him. They do, and this time he offers her a connection on a personal level that he did not before.

Her reaction suggests that some kind of different life is ahead for April, and that Spenser has some awareness of responsibility towards her, which he is now willing to exercise. Although of the three books in which April appears she is onstage less in Taming than in any other, it is easily the most hopeful appearance for her.

Baby

But, we will learn 20 years later in Hundred-Dollar Baby, that hope was false. Spenser sits in his office one afternoon when a stunning young woman walks in. At first he doesn't recognize her, but then realizes it's a grown-up April Kyle.  After Spenser rescued her, she went back to work with the New York madam, who now has April set up in a kind of satellite operation in Boston's Back Bay. It's the same kind of high-end call girl work that April did herself, but it's run into problems. Some local criminal elements seem to want a piece of the action, and in this case the double meaning would actually be the better outcome. They want protection money from April, who doesn't want to pay it.

As Spenser works to try to uncover who's muscling into April's work -- and discourage them as only he knows how -- he learns that the situation is not as straightforward as April has said. In fact, April has provoked some of the confrontation in an attempt to get control of the business from her former employer and she makes a pass at Spenser as a part of whatever's going wrong with the wiring inside her head. When he finally confronts her with the knowledge of the crimes she's committed (that is, in addition to the whole prostitution ring), April loses it. First she threatens to shoot Spenser, then turns the gun on herself and pulls the trigger.

While Spenser packs his bullet-proof vest away in his car -- he expected April to shoot at either herself or him -- he and Hawk discuss why she went around the bend. Through this conversation, Parker retrofits April with a damaging history of abuse that scarred her so badly she really had no chance of leaving the path that led her to take her own life. So whatever hope we might have had that Spenser might finally take on some responsibility as an adult in April's life was apparently unfounded -- it's been long enough since he's had any contact with her that he doesn't even recognize her when she shows up in his office.

Of course, it's possible that after Taming a Sea-Horse, April shut down again once she was safe, and she distanced herself from Spenser. It's equally possible, and a lot more likely, that Parker is once again using April as a prop. Previously, she's been a MacGuffin he has to find but has had next to no role in her own story. In Baby, she offers Spenser a chance to have a monumental failure. He had the chance to call police at different times once he learned of April's involvement but refused, believing that since his decisions helped create this problem, he had to be the one to try to resolve it. Because of that decision and the confrontation he engineered, April wound up facing Spenser over a gun. Three choices followed: Drop the gun and be taken in, shoot at the bullet-proof-vest-wearing Spenser and get shot by him, or shoot herself. Spenser's pushed this confrontation, and he comes in second place in the "People responsible for April Kyle's death" race behind only April herself.

April's death represents a nearly complete failure for Spenser, on a par with his loss of Candy Sloan in A Savage Place. Then, Spenser's serving as a bodyguard for a Los Angeles TV reporter who is being threatened for her coverage of Hollywood corruption. He fails at a crucial juncture, and Candy is killed. Her death, as well as Spenser's decision to sleep with her, sets up personal conflicts that will echo through the next three books and culminate with Susan's decision to move to California and fall in love with another man.

Not here. Spenser fails April, she shoots herself and we never see another tremor of a mention about what her death or his role in it might cause for him. At almost every turn, he has made decisions that brought April to see her worth in terms of her body and little else, but once the covers of Hundred-Dollar Baby close, April and the failure she represents vanish as though they never existed. Parker can ret-con all the damaging abuse he wants into April's story, but all that does is sharpen the indictment against the two real adults in her life -- Spenser and Susan -- for not insuring she found someone who could help her heal.

Of course, this discussion treats April, Spenser and Susan as though they were actual people with their own volition. They're really only characters written by Robert B. Parker, and they don't do or say anything that Parker doesn't write. So rather than Spenser failing April, it's more accurate to say Parker fails. He fails to treat her as anything other than a prop; first as a MacGuffin that Spenser has to find and then as a handy means to give Spenser a Dramatic Failure. She joins Allie French in Parker's Westerns and Jennifer Stone, Jesse Stone's ex-wife, as women that Parker uses primarily as tools to create conflict for the lead character. To be fair, Parker uses Sunny Randall's ex-husband Richie in the same way. But he doesn't kill any of them off. So whether or not April represents Spenser's greatest failure (I vote no; I still think Candy Sloan holds that title), she very likely represents Parker's. Unless you want to count All Our Yesterdays.

Punchline

Little kids may not understand a lot about society, but when they see the way families are shown in entertainment and when they watch the majority of their peers' families, they develop a picture of the way things are supposed to be. The unwritten story is that whatever else goes on in the world, "home" is a safe place and Mom and Dad take care of you, protect you from harm and love you. One of the tragedies of child abuse is its betrayal of that worldview and hope. Considering what April's parents were like, she may have felt that betrayal early on, even if she suffered no actual abuse. We don't see anything in her father that would lend itself to picturing a nurturing parent, and his domination of the household means her mother is no help against him. When Spenser and Susan discuss some of the psychology or even pathology of prostitution, they consider the idea that many prostitutes may find some kind of meaning in it. Even if they are valued only as a commodity, they are valued, and that may have been lacking for them, as it apparently was for April.

Spenser will have similar discussions with Patricia Utley, the New York City madam with whom he first connects April. As he tries to understand why April left Utley for another organization, she explains the same idea; that like many other prostitutes April is trying to find value or even love and someone who knows that may be able to manipulate her into circumstances she rationally knows could be harmful.

The adults April meets could try to help her understand her value comes from somewhere else. Her parents should have, Spenser and Susan could have, but nobody does. A person in my line of work holds that we are valuable because we are God's creations, but even the agnostic world Spenser inhabits permits the idea that April has value just because she's a human being. In fact, that idea is a bedrock part of Spenser's code. It may or may not have been his responsibility to teach April that she had a meaning beyond what other people wanted to use her for, just like it wasn't necessarily his responsibility to teach Paul Giacomin that he had a value beyond being a pawn in his parents' divorce and battles. He chose to do the one, but not the other and so became another part of the joke played on the girl he rode in to rescue but never saved.