Before And After Science -or- Imperfect Fate

I finished watching The Imperfects. It was a ride. I don't believe there was a moment when any of it made any sense but who cares?

There was a time, before the MCU turned superhero movies into the kind of money machine Chris Roberts could only dream of, when "comic book" was shorthand for "makes no sense". If a review said a movie had a "comic-book sensibility" it wasn't usually a compliment. (Although it could be if the film was showing in arthouses.) Generally, what it meant was a lot of surface but very little substance and a plot you could drive trucks through, sideways.

These days there's a touch more nuance to the term but TV shows adapted from comics still tend towards the looser end of the narrative spectrum. Ironically, they still sometimes hang together better than the comics that inspire them but that's not always a high bar.

Nothing in the main titles or publicity I saw about The Imperfects said it was based on a comic but it had to have been, didn't it? I would have put money on it. No-one was taking that bet so I did a little digging instead. 

Seems there was a comic called The Imperfects, published by Marvel in 2005. Full title: Nemesis: The Imperfects. It ran for six issues in a limited series. 

The comic book was itself a spin-off or at least a sidebar. In 2004, Marvel partnered with Electronic Arts to produce "superhero fighting games" based both on existing Marvel properties and new IPs. "Marvel Nemesis: The Rise of the Imperfects" was the first - and, as it turned out, the only - co-production to come out of that alliance.

The game launched on both Playstation 2 and Playstation Portable (PSP), apparently with radically different gameplay. Neither was successful. It came out on most of the other console platforms around at the time, too, but there was no PC release. 

The plan was for a series of games and comics featuring the characters to follow but the game bombed and that was the end of that. Marvel and EA terminated their arrangement in 2008 with no further games appearing in either this or any other series.

At first glance all of this would seem to have nothing to do with the Netflix 2022 series of approximately the same name. I'm about as sure as I can be that it doesn't but there is one conceptual conceit the two hold in common and it's a striking co-incidence.

Both superhero teams, if you can call them that, get their powers as a direct result of being experimented on by a scientist, variously described as "mad", "evil" or "rogue". In the comic-book that's just one more would-be supervillain but the television Imperfects is without any doubt the most virulently anti-science piece of science-fiction I have ever seen. It virtually amounts to anti-science propaganda. The word "scientist" is interchangeable with "villain" throughout the entire narrative arc.

In the comic/game Dr. Niles van Roekel uses his "super-genius intellect" to genetically engineer a bunch of "test subjects" into super-powered "prototypes". They all have various problems, illnesses or disabilities that his experiments could, theoretically, cure or improve but the results are less than ideal. They're known as "Imperfects" because he hasn't quite "ironed out the kinks" of his process just yet.

Although Dr Niles is "evil", it transpires he's made himself like that for good reason, or what he sees as good reason, anyway: "A race of slavers had taken many of his people prisoners and he had to drop his compassion for others in order to win the war on his home world. He escaped the planet with many other resistance members and he had chosen Earth in order to create an army to help him free his planet from slavery."

In the Netflix series, the Imperfects are also the result of unauthorised genetic experimentation by Dr. Alex Sarkov (Superbly and hilariously portrayed by Rhys Nicholson.) and an unspecified number of scientists working with or for him. The subjects of his experiments are children and adolescents with potentially life-threatening conditions. Sarkov's treatments are supposed to effect a cure or at least alleviate the symptoms but when the treatment is withdrawn there are side-effects, which just happen to be the exact equivalent of super-powers.

Without going into too much detail for fear of spoilers, as the series progresses it becomes clear that, while almost everyone else sees Sarkov as either evil or mad or both, he has a much more nuanced worldview. By his own lights, he is trying to do something positive both for his subjects and the world, but in order to push past the inevitable ethical and beaurocratic barriers he, like van Roekel, has had to harden himself so as not to feel any compassion.

Those are quite similar set-ups but that's as far as it goes. I've had a flip through some of the issues of the comic (Everything's online, ins't it?) and the whole series is pretty much fight scenes, as you might expect given its provenance. It's a notable co-incidence, all the same.

As for the show, it's one insane revelation after another. Everyone swaps motivations like hats. The side-effects/superpowers morph and warp to suit the plot. There's no actual fourth wall breaking but some of the dialog indicates a level of metawareness that gives the whole affair a virtually cubist perspective. 

The final episode is a massive, unrelenting, unashamed pitch for a second season that so far hasn't been commissioned. Given that reviews have been pretty good and public opinion is favorable (78% on Rotten Tomatoes right now.) if the viewing numbers match, I'd say the omens were favorable.

Then again, what do I know? As soon as I finished The Imperfects I started watching another Netflix superhero-analog show - Fate: The Winx Saga. I'm almost ashamed to admit it although, as should be obvious by now, I really have no shame where my cultural tastes are concerned.

I watched the first season of Fate:TWS with a degree of disbelief. It's nominally a re-envisioning of a kids TV show called Winx Club that ran, on and off, on Nickolodeon for most of the first two decades of the twenty-first century but you'd never guess if you didn't know.

Winx Club was a vivid, animated, child-friendly series featuring " the adventures of a group of girls known as the Winx, students at the Alfea College for Fairies, who turn into fairies to fight villains." It was squarely aimed at sub-tween girls. Fate:the Winx Saga is "targeted towards an audience of young adults", meaning there's a lot of smouldering, swearing and sex. Also some violence and torture, a lot of alchohol and the occasional drug reference. Something for everyone, pretty much.

The first season was a critical disaster. Rotten Tomatoes, with a critics rating of 37%, headed their entry "Flat, flimsy, and forgettable, Fate: The Winx Saga is a fantastical flop that fails to capture the magic of its source material." 

That's harsh but not entirely unfair. I watched the six episode arc, embracing it for the hamfisted farago it was, but when the final episode closed on a cliffhanger I never expected to find out what happened next. Surely no-one would commission a second season?

I was astonished to see a second season slotted in to Netflix' September listings. I was even more astonished to see it go straight to #1 in the Netflix UK chart. 

Happy enough to see it come back, I remembered nothing at all about the show other than a vague, warm feeling that I'd quite enjoyed it. Three episodes into Season Two, I can still barely remember anything that happened in Season One, even when the characters drop retro-expositionary hints. The story made that little of an impression on me.

What I do remember is the feel of the thing, which was mostly teen angst with some awkward humor until the big reveals at the end. The second season feels darker and bleaker, although I'd need to re-watch the first to be sure. Maybe I'm remembering it as cosier than it was. 

The acting and dialog, which I remember as stagey and not all that convincing, haven't improved much but the show benefits from having a likeable cast, possibly the only holdover, other than some names and locations, from the original IP. Even the bad fairies don't seem that bad although the new villain is more than adequately nasty.

Fate: The Winx Saga isn't a comic book adaptation either but it sure feels like one. The characters may be "fairies", just like the characters in The Imperfects are "monsters", as everyone in both shows misses no opportunity to remind each other and the audience, but they all behave and act just like superheroes. They're all defined first by their powers and second by the moral choices they make when they use them. If that's not called "being a superhero" I don't know what it is.

For all its faults, and it has plenty, I'm enjoying Fate:TWS. It's trashy but so were the New York Dolls. I'll be watching the rest of the season and the third, if they get one. I really do have no shame, it seems.

Ironically, one show I keep meaning to write about but never seem to find the right peg to hang the post on, Paper Girls, is based on a comic book, even though no-one in it has super powers of any kind. Maybe that's why, despite getting great reviews and being, y'know, genuinely good, it's not getting a second season.

Fortunately it ended in a less cliffhangery way than most, which made it seem less desperate but also maybe more resigned to its destiny as a one-season show, at least on Prime. Word is the showrunners are hawking it around, looking for another platform to continue the story. I hope they find one. Quality deserves to succeed.

Unfortunately for the less obvious shows, the lesson to be learned seems to be go fast, go hard and don't care too much about whether any of it makes sense. Stranger Things may have come good with its slow burn, low key vision but already the days when something like that was possible on a streaming service seem lost to the past. 

There are too many platforms now, all competing viciously for the same subscriptions. The concept of building an audience over time is becoming as alien to streaming as it used to be to network television. Comic books, video games and cartoons make for great source material but only if they're presented with the same pace and punch that made the originals a success. Slow them down, flesh them out, take them too seriously and you'll be looking at a single season, if you're lucky.

It seems like an odd way to go. After all, in other media isn't it the sequels and long-running franchises that make all the money? As interest in Wrath of the Lich King Classic seems to prove, what people really want is more of what they've already had. 

Why keep throwing the dice?