Season Finale - Part I
I first read “Season Finale” during the WGA Strike, and I found that the story was firing on so many cylinders. How do we conceptualize the relationship between labor, creativity, and art, and how does that evolve alongside new technologies? What sorts of systems can we imagine to make the world better?
In “Season Finale,” Nic Anstett boldly imagines a world in which actors on television shows look–and work–a bit differently. This story is rich in its examination of the interplay of labor, creativity, technology, and our climate future. Reading Nic’s fiction, I’m drawn to her highly original world building–we can see the parallels between our world and the one she’s created, yet the places we go in these stories are never quite where we might predict, and the meaning we make once we arrive at the story’s end is so much more abundant than what we might have imagined possible.
-Michael
It was Angela’s idea to kill off Morgan in episode twelve. Brian pushed back at first. Even though I had been responsible for Morgan’s arc over the last two seasons, he had been Brian’s baby and it’s always hard to kill your baby. Drew liked it though and wouldn’t let it drop.
“It’s been two seasons since we killed off a main character. We’re losing that buzzy edge that made us such darlings in the first place. Think of all the murder tools we haven’t used on anyone but extra babies. Time vampires. Harpoon accidents. Blood vortexes,” Drew said. Drew really wanted a blood vortex. He’d been pitching one for over a season now.
Brian ran his fingers through his hair. He looked to me for backup. Brian often talked of Morgan the way you would an ex-boyfriend that you parted ways with on good terms. His eyes showed a distant concern. Sentimentality from Brian was a rare sight, especially recently when his artistic sense had swung in a much more perverse direction. I was intrigued and jealous. Brian’s brain worked in ways I didn’t understand.
I was the obvious choice to fight for Morgan’s survival. The last time one of my babies was on the chopping block, I had resisted for weeks. Cynthia. I’d designed her as a quiet rebel. A newcomer brought aboard the Lost Scallion during the Nova Skirmish plotline from season two. She was a fan favorite. Probably my biggest hit while working on The Lost Scallion. My one-on-one check-ins with her had been the highlight of the week. She never liked to leave her container during downtime so we spent most of the script briefs listening to decades old pop music and watching Emma Stone movies. She’s the only baby I’ve met that’s shown so much interest in the old ways. It was special. It broke my heart when she was blown apart by a stray cannon blast. I dreamt of her severed arm for weeks, fingers twitching on the wooden floor. But it was a spectacular episode. We won awards. Even Drew complimented me.
I voted for killing Morgan. I said no to the blood vortex though. Morgan had been going through this season-long struggle with an addiction to scarab dust that he was hiding from the other crewmates. We had already planned that Chloe would find Morgan’s secret stash and expose him to the first mate of the Lost Scallion. I had spent months writing Morgan’s redemption arc from this moment and I wasn’t keen on having it undermined, especially for a blood vortex.
It was a bad set piece anyways. We all knew it, especially Drew. We had an unspoken truth in the writing room that the time vampires should have been shuttered back at the end of “The Planet with No Soul,” but Drew was the showrunner so he got final say and he said that we would keep doing blood vortexes until they worked. In a bout of frustration, Brian and I got drunk a few weeks earlier and spent the two o’clock hour in the bar across the street from the studio lot. It started off with the usual work bitch fest and ended with us spinning around in little whirlybird arm tornadoes and screaming in bad Transylvanian accents until we both got told to go home.
“I think Morgan needs something more dramatic,” I said. “A big redemption sacrifice. He’s been with us since the pilot. He’s probably one of our top three oldest babies. He deserves something exciting and tearjerky.”
Morgan had grown quiet ever since Drew transferred him to me. Brian would have kept working with him, but he had gotten promoted to seasonal villain planning. My one-on-one check in meetings with the baby consisted mostly of awkward finger shifting as I read over big, upcoming character beats. I kept trying to get him to comment on his arcs, how he was managing his downtime self and his Lost Scallion self, but Morgan spent most of our time asking about how I met my wife Edina while working on Sad Hospital Blues. It wasn’t even an interesting story. She worked in marketing. I wrote seven episodes in season five. We spent lunch time drawing a parody comic on cafeteria napkins. Got married two years later. Brian always said that I just needed to push Morgan to open up, and that there was a chattier side to him that I had yet to find. I think he lied. He writes villains after all.
Mostly I think Morgan was bored. Bored with me and bored with himself and bored with interstellar swashbuckling. I couldn’t really blame him. I hadn’t done the best job of stewarding his character arcs since the shakeup. The drug addiction had been my idea. I wondered if Morgan resented me for it. All the same, I would push him to see if there were other directions he wanted to see himself build to. Love triangles. Revenge murder. All the usual juicy stuff. Morgan would just shrug and ignore me. There’s a reason why we don’t have baby writers. Long-term planning is beyond their capacity.
Angela raised her hand, “I can get behind that. Brian’s been looking for an emotional way to defeat The Culling Man. We can roll both into one to tie a nice little bow on the whole season.”
Drew did that thing with his shoulders that he does when he hears an idea that he really likes and told us he loved it. This up and down shake like he’s on one of those death trap wooden rollercoasters. He wrote “Morgan redemption death” on the big board of definite ideas and we moved on to mapping out the Chloe, Clyde, Christian love triangle.
After the meeting, I stopped at the AtmoJuice machine by the men’s room and found Brian waiting for me. I’m a creature of habit. I went there pretty much every day. Writing makes me thirsty.
“I really thought you’d have my back in there, Zach,” Brian said. He took a long sip from an AmnioBerryBlast. “We don’t need to kill Morgan. It’s unnecessary. It’s just the usual shock value that Drew’s been after for the past several seasons.”
I ordered some pineapple kiwi porkbelly mix I didn’t recognize.
“I don’t know, Brian. Morgan’s been an emotional cul-de-sac for a while anyways. I worked my ass off on the guy and nothing’s taking. Maybe death’s just the way to go, right?” I said. This was only partially a lie. I hadn’t worked hard. Morgan demanded minimal attention and turned out serviceably mediocre results in return. I’d been working on a plot pitch for next season about divergent timelines and Arthurian myth. Drew had seemed excited when I pitched it to him in a layover in New Detroit after a con appearance. Brian was right though. Viewers were fleeing the show and shock value wasn’t going to save The Lost Scallion from getting the axe, but neither would deadweight characters like Morgan.
“I just think there’s a lot of potential in him that you’re not seeing. Killing him feels like a waste,” Brian said. I was honestly surprised. I understood that Morgan was Brian’s brain baby, but I didn’t see this same loyalty to The Culling Man or any of the other baddies that had occupied Brian’s time during the last several seasons.
“Look, if you cared so much about Morgan, maybe you should’ve helped me keep the guy from being such a dud. Seems like too little too late, man,” I said. I honestly just wanted to go home. I took a long sip from my fruity porky mix.
Brian raised his hand and took a step back. “All right, fine. We kill Morgan. I’ll leave it up to you to handle. Death arcs are a pain in the ass. Don’t know how you’re going to coach him through this one. Especially with your shit track record.” He left for his car. His shoes squeaked on the vinyl floor. It sounded like a trapped mouse.
*****
I asked Edina about Morgan at home that night. The food generator had failed and kept producing half slabs of uncooked ham. Edina and I took turns rebooting it, turning cogs, and smacking the thing. My father was much better at fixing this technology than me, even though none of this was around when he was my age. Edina said I gave up too easily, but, after twenty minutes on her own, she couldn’t fix it either.
Edina smacked the processor with a spatula. “I think you need to be as blatant about it as possible. Tell Morgan that the end is coming and that it’s going to be a big, dramatic death to be proud of.”
“Isn’t that just going to psyche him out?” I replied. I turned a knob and Edina wound up another smack.
“Yikes. I didn’t think about that. We had this ad for My Lonely Stepbrother once that teased that Kyle was going to get left at the altar.”
“I remember that episode,” I said.
“Yeah, and Kyle saw it beforehand and the emotion was ruined. He was just pissed for episodes beforehand and it undermined the whole season. We got chewed out bad. Yeah, maybe just tease it to Morgan over time. You know how babies love to be kept in suspense.”
The generator popped out a bison rump and we called it a night.
To be continued…
Nic Anstett, a writer from Baltimore, MD, loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the University of Oregon’s MFA program and has attended workshops through the Clarion Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Tin House, where she was a 2021 scholar. Her published and forthcoming fiction can be found in publications such as One Story, Witness Magazine, Passages North, Lightspeed Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.
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