i F they only had a brain

Last night Sci Fi ran the entirety of their new miniseries, Tin Man, back-to-back-to-back. With commercials it was 6 hours long. The first 4 were a fun frolick. The 5th hour was flawed, but still lovable. The 6th hour left me wishing the power had gone out 4.5 hours into it. Then I could have imagined my own ending that would have been cooler.

WARNING: Significant Spoilers will be in hard-to-read white text. If you haven't seen Tin Man and may still want to, make sure you don't read the white letters. If you've seen the show and want to read my thoughts and insights, either highlight everything below or paste this whole post into a text editor.

Good things: With the exception of the bulleted complaints below, the directing was solid enough. The acting was superior to most of the Sci Fi channel exclusives, and Zooey Deschanel channeled Judy-Garland-in-a-leather-jacket better than I'd have expected. The budget was clearly high, and the special effects were pretty decent (but neither breaktaking nor seamless). The Nazi, steampunk, film noir and western elements were for the most part appropriate and fun additions to the Oz-like setting. The first 4 hours of the spot-the-reference game was quite engaging.

Bad things: Here's some things that bugged me about the show Tin Man:

• Inconsistent Camera Work. Overall, most of the camera work was fairly mundane and predictable, which meant that the few artsy shots really stood out. If used as such for a reason, this would be fine, but instead there was zero meaning to any of the artsy compositions or affects. This is a mostly trivial gripe, but I'll say this: If your film features weird-looking sci-fi guns that are in fact just normal guns, don't use a bullet's point-of-view the very first time they are shot. Especially don't have that bullet POV trace a slightly crooked path through the air, or else the viewer may think you have heat-seeking bullets. I also think it was silly that the fistfight in the ice palace inexplicably used camera work that felt like a drugged-out POV, but the scene where everybody was doing drugs in the nightclub didn't.
• Inconsistent Tone: Most of the time, the film was trying to be a dark and gritty version of the Wizard of Oz. That was admirable. Though it wasn't perfect, to be sure. As horrific as the concept of the Tin Man's torture was, it didn't hold a candle to the sick and disturbing Tin Man backstory of the original novel. Every so often it would suddenly devolve into the campiness of the Judy Garland musical. In particular, the way Glitch would be a total clutz in one scene, then a badass kung fu master in the next, (then back to clutz again later) really didn't resonate for me, even with his brain problems. If you're going to alter the tone and theme of the subject matter, really do so. Flipfloppage and half-committal doesn't aid the artistry of your vision.
• Undermined by Homage: I like Syncretism in my art, so I was okay with the idea of it being a darker version of Wizard of Oz, with elements of Film Noir and Westerns woven in, and a rebels-vs-Nazis plot overlay. When the repeated direct and overt homages started, I thought they were pretty cool. Here's the references I caught: roughly in order of appearance: 2 to Lost, 2 to Return of the Jedi, 1 to Dark City (plus numerous repeated thematic references later), 1 to Casablanca, 1 to Temple of Doom, 1 to Empire Strikes Back, 1 to The Two Towers (could have been Fellowship or Return of the King, hard to say), 1 to Star Wars: A New Hope (and another a couple hours later), 1 to Band of Brothers, 1 to Dark Crystal, 1 to Classic Trek (the Season 3 episode titled "Spock's Brain"). I feel like there were a few I missed, since nearly an hour went by without an homage in episode 3. I was totally digging these, until around the end of the 5th Hour of the show. That's when they revealed that the Wizard of Oz references weren't just a heavy homage or parallel, but rather that the Outer Zone was literally the land of Oz as of 3, 6, or roughly-25 generations post-Dorothy, depending on which of the film's 3 time-indicating references you use (those being eras of the classic film, the original novel, or the witch's "I've been waiting 500 years for this" comment). As a film packed with references and influences, of which Oz was merely the strongest, I really enjoyed it. Once they'd said this actually is Oz, it made the other homages seem out of place. It also made me apply a new level of analysis to everything that had occurred in the past 5 hours. Post-analysis, I just couldn't accept that this was the world of Oz - certain developments had no simple logical path to get where they were, and other cannonical elements of Oz were ignored completely when they should have either been present or been explained away. I was also disappointed by the lack of even a single overt reference to Zardoz, which I think would have cutely brought the postmodern sci-fi referentialism full-circle - a perfect opportunity they sadly failed to capitalize upon.
• Incompletely realized ideas: I'll keep this complaint simple. If you're going to show warpaint-wearing ewok-referencing xenophobic munchkins in the first hour and list them amongst the rebellion's forces, you better have them show up on the rebellion's side at the Death Star battle later. The munchkins are the worst example of this, but there were a few other oddities that either failed to follow through or didn't get enough screen time to make sense. Much of the show felt like an overview, where things were referenced but rarely resolved. Yet since the main plot wrapped and all badguys were defeated, there's no desire to revisit and get the detailed explanations.
  
• The name. Tin Man would be a fine name for a show revolving around said character, but since this was really all about D.G. and Azkadalia, it was a misleading title. They wouldn't have named that story "Glitch" or "RAW" or "Toto", so they shouldn't have named it "Tin Man".
• Trail of bread-crumbs. It felt more like an ongoing RPG campaign than a mini-series plotline. I like RPGs, but this wasn't a well-crafted campaign, it was a fairly linear "A sends you to B who sends you to C who sends you to D" computer-RPG guild-quest kind of thing. The Good Queen's conspiracy also involved too many possible leaks, and too much reliance on chance. They explained that away ala Dark Crystal-style prophetic declarations. They never clearly told us who the prophets were and rather than ancient prophecies, they were clearly made within D.G.'s lifetime.
  
• Sci Fi needs more sponsors. I know this isn't the fault of Tin Man's writers or director, so it's a bit unfair for me to list it here. Just the same, I'd guess there were 150-200 commercials in those 6 hours. Yet there were 3 of them that aired at least 30 times each. Those 3 spots made up at least 40% of the commercials shown. During the first couple hours this was okay, we made dinner and talked about the show, so we weren't paying much attention while the ads were playing. But when it got late around the 4.5 hour mark, Sarah had the good sense to go to bed. This left me alone for the last 1.5 hours, with each of those 3 ads appearing at least 6 times in that span. I tried real hard to ignore them, but this morning I feel somehow strangely compelled to eat chocolate cake while stacking rows of ipod-dominoes on the back of my new pet pony.

In summary: While I enjoyed the first 4 hours a lot, the last 1/3rd of the miniseries mostly ruined all the good stuff that went before it. Maybe this wouldn't have been a problem if I'd waited till it comes out on Netflix: Spared of the painful commercial breaks in which to analyze the holes, I may have been able to keep my disbelief suspended. What started out a rich and complex tapestry turns instead to be a threadbare and derivative patchwork quilt.