Deej Thoughts: Metaknowledge

Your Guide To Lazy Storytelling

Here is another piece I first posted to my Locals which is a bit more…concise…than it was in my memory. But chatting with LawDog this past weekend (Hi, boss!) brought it to mind, and it is another point that bears repeating.

I made reference in the post on mystery box storytelling to stories that rely on metaknowledge, but didn't really explain what I meant. I'll give a few examples, but the basic gist is writing a Big Shocking Revelation that's supposed to wow the audience, but makes no sense within the story.

In Star Trek: Into Darkness (a terrible piece of storytelling on all sorts of levels), Benedict Cumberbatch plays a character named "John Harrison" until he delivers the following dialogue:

John Harrison was a fiction created the moment I was awoken by your Admiral Marcus to help him advance his cause, a smokescreen to conceal my true identity. My name is...Khan.

He has not been hiding his identity because "Khan" is known. If you recall the original Khan episode of the original series, he was very definitely not remembered. Despite the change in timelines, there is no in-story (or diagetic) reason that would lead to Khan being remembered any better than he was originally. The hiding of his identity, and its revelation, was only for its effect on the audience, who, even if they're not particular Trek fans, will know who Khan is because he was the villain in the best Trek movie. This revelation was considered so important that everyone associated with the movie straight up lied in interviews.

Lying to your audience is always a bad sign.

A year later, in the James Bond film Spectre, Christoph Waltz plays a similarly-disguised villain, who reveals himself with:

Franz Oberhauser died twenty years ago, James, in an avalanche alongside his father. A man you're talking to now, a man inside your head, is Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

This time, the screenwriters at least tried to backfill and make the revelation make sense, pasting on a backstory never mentioned in any of the previous Daniel Craig Bond films, making Bond and Blofeld stepbrothers and revealing that information to the audience after the revelation of his name.

But it's a very weak, very lame effort to justify the real reason for doing it: to wow the audience. Except that, since none of the storytelling work had been done in any of the previous movies, there was nothing impressive about it. The original Connery Bond films did a much better job of building up Blofeld, without relying on audience recognition of the name at all. Because he was A Presence in the films, pulling strings behind the scenes from the second movie onward.

Amazon's abominable Rings of Power series did much the same thing, "revealing" in the final episode of the first series how Mordor was "created." The method of the creation was beyond stupid, and the revelation that it was Mordor had no dramatic meaning. Even people who were trying to like the series found it lame, because it was.

It is of course entirely possible to write a story that makes use of metaknowledge, but you cannot rely on it alone. Consider, as one example, Babylon 5.

After the first season, there was a shakeup behind the scenes of the show for reasons that are not important here, and the character of the commander of the space station was moved offstage, and a new commander brought in: Captain Sheridan, played by Bruce Boxleitner. From his first episode, it was made clear that Sheridan was a widower whose wife had died on an archeological expedition. As his first season (the second season of the series) played out, her death was slowly revealed to be something other than accidental, and tied into other mysteries in the show's story that had been foreshadowed (ahem) from the beginning.

During the third season, more of the mysteries were revealed, and near the end, Sheridan's wife walks into Babylon 5, still alive. Now, here's where the metaknowledge came in. The actress who was (re-)cast as Sheridan's wife was Bruce Boxleitner's wife at the time, Melissa Gilbert, most famous for playing Laura Ingalls in the Little House On The Prairie TV series.

But no references were made to Little House, no winking at the camera over the fact that she was really his wife. The drama played out according to the rules the show had set up, and any actress could have played it. Having it be Boxleitner's real-life wife was a bonus, an extra dash of spice. The story would work perfectly well without that casting.

Making your story depend on the audience's knowledge outside of the story you are telling is lazy. Make sure your story works; then, if you can't resist it, add a little spice of metaknowledge in a playful way. Then the story does work, and anyone who does not have the knowledge you are presuming will still enjoy it, anyway.