So, I’ve been watching Persons Unknown. There, I said it, and I feel better for having admitted it. It’s not a good show – between the sketchy character development and the ridiculous 1970s camera work (wherein everything is FLASHED BACK with groovy EFFECTS so you know you’re watching a MIND SCREW) it’s slightly less than compelling drama. Of course with these sorts of serialized dramas, where the main point is the mystery behind it, you expect a little wonkery and wankery; the producers, after all, expect to string you along long enough to get a syndication deal, and then roll in your money for the rest of their lives.
Still, I started watching it. I watched it a) because I am a sucker for shows with mysterious premises like “x number of strangers are kidnapped for no obvious reason”, and b) because it sort of came out of nowhere for me – just suddenly on the screen. And after two episodes I was pretty much done with it: It was stiff, kind of poorly written in a everything-weird-but-the-kitchen-sink way where all sorts of bizarre details are thrown into the mix for no apparent reason, and I had not come to care about any of the characters at all. So after two episodes I was ready to fold up the tent and abandon ship.
And then I saw the preview for episode three, and it was bananas.
The power of the Bananas Plot Twist (BPT) should never be underestimated. You take an ordinary, possibly not very interesting story, and give it a sudden and irreversible twist to the left, and you can transform something boring and generic into something, if not good, at least interesting. It’s like the Truck Driver’s Gear Change in music (that moment when the song suddenly and unexpectedly lurches into a whole new key for dramatic effect, e.g. Man in the Mirror): Just when your audience is writing your story off, you throw something bizarre and wonderful at them and they stick around.
All I saw in the preview was gas masks being dropped from a plane, but only three masks for six people, and then gas everywhere. And I thought, well, damn, I guess I want to know what’s going on here after all.
The trick, of course, is to introduce your BPT early enough in the story to hook folks before they do actually give up on you. In the case of Persons Unknown, the third episode was perfect: The first episode is all about premise so I was willing to accept some slow storytelling and lame character development. Episode two wore me down a bit as the characters glumly sleepwalked through their predicament, and I was just getting ready to give up when the BPT came up and reeled me back in.
The other trick is to make the BPT bananas enough. We’re a long time in on the modern story form, and a lot of twists have been done plenty of times before – if you’re going to try to pull off a BPT, don’t go weak sister on it: commit and take one more step across the line than seems absolutely necessary. When you’ve got a show like Persons Unknown to begin with – a show about strangers kidnapped and psychologically tortured, for god’s sakes – you can’t just reveal that someone’s not who they say they are. That’s ho-hum. Think John Locke revealed as paralyzed or Agent Cooper dreaming about the Man from Another World – go for it.
Persons Unknown remains in the meh category for me; I’m interested enough now to see where it’s going, but if there isn’t something amazing by, say, episode 8, I may wait for the spoilers to show up on the Internet. Still, the gas masks got me this far, and there will probably be other BPTs that might suck me in further, who knows? There had damn well better be. I’m a sucker for a good BPT.
