WARNING: This post will contain spoilers for Citadel season 1!
So, if you’re anything like me, you probably watched the first episode of Citadel and thought it was pretty good! Likeable characters, a mystery in who the mysterious Manticore is, some great humour, nothing particularly special otherwise but an enjoyable watch. But as things go on, you start to see… problems. A shocking twist! Nadia’s in communications with somebody mysterious about a package! Another shocking twist! Manticore has taken Orlick captive! Nadia had a baby! Mason’s wife is a former Citadel agent! Mason was the one that betrayed the agency, and he’s also the son of a major Manticore operative!?
Blah, blah, blah. The episodes are less and less fun on their own, more and more obsessed with Shocking Twists, to the detriment of everything else. That’s not good storywriting. That’s incredibly cheap, and incredibly dull. A good twist is well-foreshadowed, and can actually add to future viewings, as you can spot details that were meaningless before but now hint towards the true nature of things. Without spoiling things, I’ll say that The Expanse does this pretty well on more than one occasion. A good twist also invites speculation – just who commands the stealth ships that blew up the Canterbury? How is Julie Mao related?
A bad twist just… happens. There it is, with hardly any foreshadowing of note, and can sometimes leave you going “… huh?” if it’s particularly poorly executed. This, in my opinion, is very much the case with Citadel. They’re just thrown at us, the writers don’t bother seeding in any good hints beforehand, and we’re expected to value those as we do a good twist. But the thing is, we can’t. For one thing, bad twists can often detract from the rewatching experience: all the fun comes from the twist, at the expense of everything else good about a show – character interaction being the main thing here, for me. You know the twist, so what’s the point? There’s nothing else to enjoy. Incidentally, this also brings to mind the problem with spoiler culture, but I think I’ll be nice to y’all and save that fo a separate post.
It might not surprise you all to know that I consider myself something of a writer. Something of a competent writer, even, although that one I back up with testimony, at least. And when I see people rave about such… amateurish writing, it actually kind of hurts. There are so many shows out there with utterly amazing writing, including this genre! Alias – at least, the first couple of seasons – springs to mind, where even with the twists already known, it’s still a goddamn good watch, beacuse the journey is so good that the destination – or at least, the stops along the way – almost don’t matter by comparison.
TV and movie writers, you need to do better. TV and movie executives, you need to step off and let your writers do better, instead of going like “oh what about atwist” or whatever.