JmeWhyte

There is some­thing amiss about the end­ing of Dis­hon­ored. After being dou­ble (dou­ble?) crossed, you stealth up to face those that wronged you, ready for a bat­tle, only to find that Have­lock has killed every­one involved with the con­spir­acy. There was no final bat­tle, no last hur­rah, noth­ing. Just res­ig­na­tion from Have­lock for his actions echo­ing the end­ing of Macbeth.

Before I reached the final room, know­ing that the end of the game was near, I skirted up and around the con­ser­va­tory and found another build­ing. It looked like an area where you would retreat to fol­low­ing the last bat­tle, over­whelmed by loy­al­ist sol­diers with only a plat­form left to make a last stand. I imag­ined that Corvo and Emily would make some last pact and leap to their fates, with the thought that Samuel might be able to fish them out – would have made a nice last scene, Samuel row­ing and reach­ing into the water.

Any­way, back to the true end­ing, it really seemed like a missed oppor­tu­nity. Through­out the game I’d cho­sen the non-lethal option for each of the tar­gets. At one point when you have to get your gear back, you find Camp­bell con­sumed by the plague left to rot in a base­ment. Here I thought the game was giv­ing me a choice, one last chance to assas­si­nate him. It was at this point, that the game was test­ing me – did I really want to let this guy live, the orig­i­na­tor of Corvo’s cur­rent circumstance.

It was here that I thought another twist was afoot. The rather obvi­ous twist that Havelock/Pendleton/Martin would betray you was clear as day from miles out. But here I thought the writ­ers were ready­ing another plot twist that would have made an inter­est­ing alter­nate end­ing. Since these loy­al­ists were the only ones that told you who to kill, there was no way of con­firm­ing Camp­bell and co.’s guilt. Thus if you let the sup­posed bad guys live through non-lethal mis­sion com­ple­tion , at the very end of the game they would all return and assist you in estab­lish­ing a new régime.

I realise this would mean that Have­lock would have had to have enlisted Daud to assas­si­nate the Empress but it could have worked. As it was, the fact that you can sim­ply pick up a key from a table and open a door to end the game was disappointing.

The world the devel­op­ers cre­ated was bril­liant, I love the way that each mis­sion had a myr­iad of solu­tions, the whole back­story about whal­ing, the harsh soci­ety in which they live, the plague and the author­i­tar­ian land­scape. The mys­ti­cism was also great, though those bizarre husks that shoot acid at you make no sense, and nei­ther really did Granny Rags.

I won­der if we’ll ever find out about whether any alter­nate end­ings were devel­oped as the one offered just wasn’t pow­er­ful enough. Given you’re this supremely pow­er­ful assas­sin, surely you should be the one to exact vengeance to all involved, not just Have­lock. Plus, once you have Emily, you’re still locked on an island where every­one is on the look­out for you – it was like a freeze frame movie end­ing… dull.

— turns out this is the low chaos end­ing, and that area men­tioned above was in use for the higher ver­sions. guess i’ll have to play through again! —

So this is an idea I’ve had for an age — it involves the redis­tri­b­u­tion of the nation’s wealth through a weekly lot­tery. The idea is that each tax­payer is charged £1 per week for the chance to become a mil­lion­aire. In the UK, there are about 30 mil­lion tax­pay­ers and so each week we could cre­ate 30 mil­lion­aires — mean­ing 1,560 mil­lion­aies per year.

If you win you drop out of the lot­tery, if you stop pay­ing tax, you drop out of the lottery.The gov­ern­ment pays no money into this fund — but per­haps they could throw in a few incen­tives — addi­tional prize money, tax rebates if it so desired.

It’s like the national lot­tery, but the ben­e­fit to the gov­ern­ment is that it encour­ages the pub­lic to get on the tax sys­tem. The ben­e­fits to the pub­lic are man­i­fest — £1,000,000 is enough to clear all debts, your family’s debts, set your­self up nicely with a great house, car and could well give peo­ple the cap­i­tal needed to start-up their own busi­nesses (given the banks con­tinue to fail s spec­tac­u­larly at this).

£1,000,000 also isn’t a crazy amount of money. There are many sto­ries of lot­tery win­ners that go broke a few years after their win, so this mod­er­ate fig­ure will force the win­ners to think sen­si­bly about what they want to spend it on. And this is the key, they are very likely to spend the money which in turn will help kick-start spend­ing habits again — think about all those kitchens that will be redesigned, those walls that peo­ple will knock through and so on… These things all require trades­men and so we would drive up the rev­enues of local busi­nesses too.

The chance of win­ning the lot­tery is 1 in 14 mil­lion — this new ver­sion is 30 in 30 mil­lion or 1 in a mil­lion — chances 14 times greater that the exist­ing model. I’m not sure who we can con­tact to make this hap­pen, whethers is HMRC, the gov­ern­ment or NSandI, but if you do read this, spread the idea far and wide — whichever coun­try you’re from.

Also remem­ber these wise words from George Orwell, “The Lot­tery, with its weekly pay-out of enor­mous prizes, was the one pub­lic event to which the pro­les paid seri­ous atten­tion. It was prob­a­ble that there were some mil­lions of pro­les for whom the Lot­tery was the prin­ci­pal if not the only rea­son for remain­ing alive. It was their delight, their folly, their ano­dyne, their intel­lec­tual stim­u­lant. Where the Lot­tery was con­cerned, even peo­ple who could barely read and write seemed capa­ble of intri­cate cal­cu­la­tions and stag­ger­ing feats of mem­ory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their liv­ing sim­ply by sell­ing sys­tems, fore­casts, and lucky amulets.”

If noth­ing else — it will cheer up a few peo­ple each week.

I’m not quite sure why any­one is sur­prised by HMV going into admin­is­tra­tion. They occupy prime loca­tions in cities through­out the UK with these cav­ernous shops that are noth­ing more than ware­houses with peo­ple wan­der­ing about on a lunch hour, after work or when bored on weekends.

There is sim­ply no need at all for such shops these days – not only can every­one buy online, but we’ve also learnt that man­u­ally brows­ing shops for stuff is highly inef­fi­cient. We’ll do it at super­mar­kets, for now, but who has time to do this for CDs, DVDs and games? Cou­pled with the fact HMV were get­ting killed by online prices, it’s a won­der they lasted so long.

We just don’t need these shops any­more. Block­buster also went into admin­is­tra­tion today and I’ve always been amazed at com­pa­nies that fail to see the way their own indus­try is going. They could have cap­tured the stream­ing mar­ket years ago – deal­ing in com­modi­tized goods when a dig­i­tal ver­sion exists is pointless.

So the death of the high street con­tin­ues, only it’s obvi­ously not the death of the high street. It’s just evolv­ing as always – shops need to start tak­ing rad­i­cally reduces premises where cus­tomers can pur­chase in store or order online there and then. You might even go fur­ther and use your shop as a gallery with barely any­thing for sale in-store. Really any shop that is need­lessly large is under threat – clothes stores will likely sur­vive as peo­ple need to try things on, but book, game and phone stores could quite eas­ily go the same way.

Oh, and that whole stuff about HMV gift vouch­ers not being valid is shameful.

Okay game devel­op­ers, it’s time you all came together and agreed upon a uni­fied con­trol sys­tem for all con­sole games. Look at the great work the GSMA has done with tele­fony with all their stan­dards — hell even mobile charg­ers are all the same now (bar greedy, greedy Apple). We urgently need to do the same with con­trol sys­tems in games.

Deus EX Human Rev­o­lu­tion is the per­fect exam­ple of this. This crit­i­cally acclaimed game was on sale on PSN for £6.99, an unbeat­able price. So off i trot, down­load it, load it up and die over and over attempt­ing to get to grips with the con­trol lay­out that is full-on broken.

Aim down sight is on the right ana­logue and works as a tog­gle. Call of Duty and Bat­tle­field defined the left shoul­der for ADS. It works well. There is no need to ever change it. Sprint on Deus Ex is top left shoul­der but­ton and not the stan­dard L3. Why was this deci­sion made? Mus­cle mem­ory is essen­tial to gamers, the intu­itive way we pick up the pad and feel instantly at home with a game is manda­tory to con­tin­ued play. Think about how easy it is for you to use Ryu and Ken, you could play a round right now while read­ing this, just remem­ber­ing the cross ups, spe­cials and you’ll quickly notice your fin­gers danc­ing out the com­mands with­out think­ing about them. I’m sure I can learn to play Deus Ex but there are now to size­able bar­ri­ers to this — firstly, I died on a check­point about 15 times on the way out of the lab at the start (it’s on hard, ok! :P) and sec­ondly the prob­lem is com­pounded by but­tons that I’m not sure I have the will­ing­ness to overcome.

Con­trast this with Dis­hon­ored [sic lol]. What appears to be a rather com­plex power sys­tem is made eas­ily nav­i­ga­ble with the ease of the con­trols. I unlocked the pos­ses­sion skill and on the first try dived into a mouse, snuck past the guards emerged on the other side, ready to assas­siante a guard from behind. Every­thing felt nat­ural and this is solely because the but­tons are in the right place.

Deus Ex might not get a replay for a long while.

Remem­bers the lay­out of Oca­rina of Time, it was per­fect and made tra­vers­ing the 3D envi­ron­ments — still fairly new in 1998 — and tack­ling boss fights sec­ond nature.

When sys­tems go wrong it’s bor­der­line far­ci­cal (like Bor­der­lands dri­ving con­trols). The ulti­mate pro­po­nent of this has to be Metal Gear Solid — every­thing is just so con­fus­ing — if you aim, you can only can­cel the shot by doing a mêlée attack. And then there is absolutely every­thing else — here’s Dara O’Briain run­ning through its myr­iad of problems.

Of course you can always mas­ter it — but why do devel­op­ers put play­ers through the ordeal in the first place. It’s like the Bloomberg bank­ing ter­mi­nal — it’s out­dated and inef­fi­cient, but bankers like being able to say they can use the ter­mi­nal even though its inter­face could be rev­o­lu­tionised quickly . We for­give MGS because the rest of it is bril­liant and Kojima had the stones to make MGS2 utterly post-modern.

When con­trol schemes go wrong, they become more mem­o­rable than the plot or any other part of the game. Res­i­dent Evil will be for­ever remem­bered for its atro­cious con­trol sys­tem, the impos­si­bil­ity of walk­ing and shoot­ing, swap­ping weapons with­out going into a menu, and an aim­ing mech­a­nism that was like you were steer­ing a tanker or a very large tele­scope with two hands. It’s so bad, it’s as if they did it on purpose.

Back in the early 2000s, FIFA was an inco­her­ent mess com­pared to ISS Pro Evo­lu­tion Soc­cer. There were early Fifa iter­a­tions where the play­ers’ limbs had dif­fer­ent skin­tones — Michael Owen black arms a per­sonal fave. How­ever when they finally got their shit together, one thing that und­out­edly helped FIFA attract fans from its great rival was that it whole­sale stole the com­mand lay­out. Every­thing from how to exe­cute through chipped through-balls to dum­mies and even sprint­ing. To retain a mod­icum of their own IP they sim­ply swapped the shoot and long-ball but­tons and labelled Pro Evo’s lay­out as “Alternate”.

Call of Duty and Bat­tle­field 3 have defined the FPS lay­out and if you swap from BF3 to CoD you’ll only bring up the score­board instead of spot­ting and knife instead of crouch. These minor tweaks mean swap­ping between play­ing both titles is work­able if a lit­tle clumsy.

So let’s get this done. This is the start of a jour­ney that will set out the stan­dard for games.

The new nor­mal lay­out for Action Adven­ture: FPS or 3^rd per­son. Xbox but­tons in brackets.

Square (X) — Inter­act / Cover / Weapon-wheel
Tri­an­gle (Y) — Reload
Cir­cle (B) — Con­firm menu selec­tion / Crouch / Hold for prone
Cross (A) — Can­cel menu / Jump
D-pad — Quick select weapon or skill
Left ana­logue — Move
Right ana­logue — Look (AND WHILE WE ARE AT IT INVERT-Y IS AUTO-ON, DEAL WITH IT)
L1 (LB) — Aim down sight / Lock on
L2 (LT) — Tal­ent / Spe­cial / Other weapon
R1 (RB) — Fire
R2 (RT) — Grenade
L3 — Sprint
R3 — Mêlée
Select — Menu
Start — Pause

Con­tact your favourite devel­op­ers and let them know we need uni­for­mity and if they are
insis­tent on their own style, at least let us gamers reas­sign the buttons.

*This post con­tains plot spoil­ers for Home­land Sea­son 2*

You know, I really liked the premise of Home­land; seaon one was great — full of ten­sion, Carrie’s psy­chosis and Saul’s world weary caught in the mid­dle focus on his job to the utter detri­ment of his per­sonal life. How­ever the char­ac­ter of Brody never sat well with me. I liked the is-he-isn’t-he plot but there were too many holes in the story — i.e. Tom Walker goes up to a roof to set up a sniper point, the bad­die cou­ple below get killed need­lessly given the point Walker actu­ally sets up is not over­look­ing an air­field but in Wash­ing­ton. This was just one of many mis­steps the show took as it worked around the fact it had been com­mis­sioned for a sec­ond sea­son. I wrote about the prob­lems with the show in an ear­lier post stat­ing that there would be “no point tun­ing in for Sea­son 2.”

Unfor­tu­nately that has been proved cor­rect. Brody needed to die at the end of sea­son 1 — Car­rie and Saul would have been vin­di­cated in their inves­ti­ga­tion and the sec­ond sea­son could have focused on the hunt for Abu Nazir or other sleeper cells. Instead we now have a plot whose direc­tion has been mud­dled. Much like 24 that couldn’t main­tain its focus on Jack Bauer in sub­se­quent sea­sons, the pro­duc­ers looked to develop other char­ac­ters. Kim Bauer’s var­i­ous mis­ad­ven­tures were beyond insane and now we have Brody’s daugh­ter involved in a hit and run. For­tu­nately the char­ac­ters in Home­land are more well rounded, his wife Jes­sica is great, but things are career­ing out of con­trol — his bud­dies try­ing to catch him for Walker’s death is inane.

This was most evi­dent in the episode, A Get­tys­burg Address, in which an entire CIA squad is shot to bits by a crack team of insur­gents dressed in SWAT gear. Even typ­ing that sen­tence is ridicu­lous and some­thing that would be only at home on shows such as 24 that are will­ful in their depar­ture from real­ity. This is also the point that a lone shark upon the seabed donned a jet­pack and jumped from one con­ti­nent to another, salut­ing pass­ing 747s. Con­trast this episode with the one at the same point in sea­son 1 — the lie detec­tor episode in which Brody cheats the exam and Saul fails. That was a true high­point of the first sea­son in which the seed of doubt that some­one as trust­wor­thy as Saul could be involved. Back to sea­son 2 and Brody is feed­ing info to a news reporter who is send­ing attack dogs to take out threats in broad day­light. Nonsense.

The thing is, once a show jumps the shark it loses its cred­i­bil­ity and rea­son for view­ers to engage in and believe in the premise. It must be very dif­fi­cult for the writ­ers to script a sec­ond sea­son so quickly on the back of the first, but they should have had the stones to kill off Brody. Unfor­tu­nately the pop­u­lar­ity of Damien Lewis has meant that he, as the star, will sur­vive until at least the final episode of sea­son 2. This in itself is a prob­lem as it removes the drama and ten­sions of the dan­geros sit­u­a­tions he gets in. We know he will be ok because he’s the star — think Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds. It’s a shame, because it was a very intel­li­gent show that has dealt with the issues it addresses in an adult man­ner. How­ever, that has given way to rat­ings bait and set pieces ever upping the ante while for­get­ting com­pletely what made the show great in the first place.

Also they know he is a ter­ror­ist and they cut him a deal?! Oh come on!? He’d be in Gitmo for life, not walk­ing about and cer­tainly not a Con­gress­man. Jebus, look up and salute the shark jump­ing high above your head.

If you’re look­ing for direc­tions to my house, please fol­low the words below in the form of a lit­tle ditty to be sung in the style of an out of tune washer-woman or Cher Lloyd. May I present to you The Turn­pike Lane Anthem:

Get off at Turn­pike Lane stayyy-ssshunn
For you’ve reached your destinaaayyy-shhuunnnn
And every­thing is rosy and deviiiinnne.

Turn left along the Green Lanes
And mar­vel at the locale
For you’ve truly arrived at Nir­vana noooooowwwww

It’s like a Dick­en­sian novel
As every­one lives in a hovel
Poor and happy that is the only way to beeeeeeeeeeeee

And if you’re lucky you might just hear my girl­friend shout…

Fix the damp,
Get a new kitchen
The bath­room needs to gggoooooo

The area is so shit
It looks just like The Wire
And Wait­rose is afraid to deliver to our door

And though I try to pla­cate her
There’s just no escap­ing Turn­pike is our hooooommmmmmeeee

Oh Turn­pike,
Tuu­ur­rrnnnpike,
Turn-pieee-eeeee-kuh
Laaaaannnnnneeeee

End

Har­ringay seems like the kind of place you move to when you first hit Lon­don, much like in Grand Theft Auto. Every­one is bustling about, there are a huge range of enthic­i­ties here and a lot of fam­ily run busi­nesses. Every­one is friendly and there are a lot of hard work­ing traders here.

Much of the area was built for ser­vants of rich fam­i­lies in Kens­ing­ton and it sure feels that way now, as thou­sands flock to Turn­pike Lane/Manor House to work in cen­tral Lon­don. Still though, can’t shake the thought that every­one would pre­fer to move to nearby Hornsey or Crouch End — I’ll escape through writ­ing a comic called ‘Harri ‘N’ Gay’ about a young boy and his gay guardian learn­ing to obey the Green Cross Code and other coun­cil ser­vices. Har­ringay Coun­cil will love it.

Doing spon­sored deeds for char­ity has come a long way from bad­ger­ing neigh­bours to pledge a few pen­nies per lap of a swim­ming pool. From sky­div­ing through to abseil­ing, climb­ing a moun­tain and rock­ing the f*** out, peo­ple have com­pletely altered their approach to char­ity and ensure that they’re in it for them­selves and the expe­ri­ence as much as for the charity.

The more inter­est­ing the under­tak­ing the less we should donate unless they’re doing some­thing seri­ously chal­leng­ing like going on hunger­strike, salut­ing while stand­ing in the rain, a trip to a local gulag, or com­plet­ing a chal­lenge from the Saw movie franchise.

These days Just Giv­ing has rev­o­lu­tionised how peo­ple approach char­ity. They should be lauded for mak­ing char­i­ta­ble giv­ing sim­ple and acces­si­ble for every­one. Pages can be set up in next to no time and the money goes directly to the char­ity. But this final point high­lights the fatal flaw in the sys­tem — the per­son run­ning the page has no need to actu­ally do what they say. The money has already dis­ap­peared and sec­ondly, who would ask to get the money back any­way as they’ll be seen to be truly miserly.

So I thought I’d set out to see if I could raise some money by start­ing a page whereby I would pledge to do the fol­low­ing chal­lenges over a weekend:

Fri­day Night
Return from work, tri­umphant after tend­ing to all client needs
Get some din­ner
Play some Jour­ney — PS3 not that awful band-that-no-one-remembered-until-Glee-used-it-and-then-everyone-loved-it
Drink gin

Sat­ur­day
Take the dog to the vet
Receive the Wait­rose deliv­ery
Pwn some noobs on Bat­tle­field 3
Do light, real light, house­work and/or DIY

Sun­day
Take the dog for a walk with Wynn
Pop into a café
Get lunch
Relax on couch

As you can see that is some list. I doc­u­mented the chal­lenges here as I com­pleted each one:
http://pinterest.com/jmewhyte/justgiving-weekend/

You’d be right to think that was all entirely idi­otic and I was being a dick espe­cially to those that do amaz­ing things for char­ity but the ends really do jus­tify the means. Char­ity is the only ben­e­fi­ciary whether you’re run­ning a marathon or climb­ing a moun­tain, whether you tell a heart-rending story of loss or are rak­ing up head­shots on video games.

The results were stun­ning. At the end of the week­end, I’d man­aged to raise £213.88 thanks to 10 dona­tions from friends and my mum. This goes to show that being a nice guy will aid you greatly in rais­ing money, but this is clearly a one-off tactic.

Here is a selec­tion of com­ments from peo­ple who pledged money:

Because of all the work you’ve done on arab-israeli pol­i­tics, here you go. Good work Jamie!

YES! YOU! CAN! You’ve been train­ing for this week­end your whole life.

I was rais­ing money for the fight against Alzheimer’s as my grand­mother died from it. If you’d like to get involved, you can see the page here: http://www.justgiving.com/jmewhyte

How to raise money for charity

No one does enough for char­ity, so I implore you to start your own Just Giv­ing cam­paign or pledge your time to char­ity to help out where you can.

The work of Tracey Emin has long been the focal point of every­thing that is wrong with mod­ern art. Nigh on every­thing she does is utter bull­shit. The thing is, every­one in the UK knows this so why does she still get talked about, is allowed to be exhib­ited and gets com­mis­sioned for future work? Per­haps it’s because she is the only per­son left in Britain who can dick about mak­ing art while the rest of us bust a gut try­ing to negate con­tin­ued gov­ern­ment inep­ti­tude. Any­way, back on topic here’s three exam­ples of her work:

Yup. Proper shit. She likes her vag, we get it Tracey, you like your vag. It’s the kind of art that is per­fect for Shit Art For Rich Peo­ple. Every­thing she has ever done is uni­ver­sally awful and there is noth­ing redeem­ing in any of her works. It’s hard to even call it art; her tech­nique is shock­ing, her instal­la­tions are mun­dane and an eleven year old could best her.

So quite why she was allowed to cre­ate a por­trait for the Queen will prob­a­bly never be known. Here it is below, titled HRH Royal Bri­ta­nia:

Amaz­ing. Will prob­a­bly sell for tens of thou­sands. How is that even fair? I could shit out a bet­ter pic­ture, fuck.

Moisha sat for­lornly on the toi­let seat and gazed down at his boxer shorts stretched apart by his knees. He noticed the seam was com­ing loose, no doubt due to the near atomic level of destruc­tion his inces­sant flat­u­lence had inflicted upon the poor cot­ton. He pon­dered whether the Ame­ican Israeli Pub­lic Affairs Com­mit­tee could help. He sighed, he knew they couldn’t. These pants were destroyed.

Home­land fin­ished last night and yet again it showed how Amer­i­can execs can mess up really strong story arcs when choos­ing to com­mis­sion a sec­ond sea­son. For the first few episodes every­thing worked really well, peo­ple enjoyed guess­ing the is-he-isn’t-he and the duplic­ity along­side the build­ing of an immi­nent ter­ror­ist threat. Then it all started to fall away pretty quickly in the sea­son finale.

So the plot went like this – Brody returns and is con­vinced to work with Tom Walker by Abu Nazir to take out the Vice Pres­i­dent and his allies who bombed a whole bunch of chil­dren includ­ing Nazir’s son years ago. Great up to a point, except that at the cli­max the bomb vest mal­func­tions and he’s talked down by his daughter.

Every­one could see that once the daugh­ter got on the phone the show had cho­sen to com­prise and also felt rushed given the episode had bizarre day by day titles that need­lessly informed us of the pas­sage of time.

There were also glar­ing omis­sions in the nar­ra­tive that failed to tie-up any of the loose strings. Who slipped that ter­ror­ist the razor blade? Who was the mole that told Walker the Saudi diplo­mat had turned infor­mant? This may have been con­ve­niently left by the way­side because hav­ing a mole in a spy drama is the most obvi­ous mechanic avail­able. Also, what was the point of the white Mus­lim woman? Ini­tially they thought she was pro­vid­ing a van­tage point to an air­field for Walker to set-up but actu­ally she was…oh that’s it. Um. So that sto­ry­line was pointless.

Home­land really should have been a one sea­son show. Brody gets into the closed room in an excel­lent diver­sion, det­o­nates the bomb, the sea­son closes with his video tape filmed at the top of the episode either buried by the CIA after being found by his daugh­ter or is played on CNN/Fox.

A more inter­est­ing sto­ry­line would have been to have Issa not been Nazir’s son at all, made it all staged to con­vince Brody to turn, have that come out in the closed room and end with Brody choos­ing whether to believe the Vice Pres­i­dent or not. Fade out, huge cliffhanger.

By hav­ing the vest mal­func­tion we were left with noth­ing more than a set-up to sea­son two. There was no need for Brody to shoot Walker at all – the two could been a bad-ass team in sea­son two but now undoubt­edly it’ll be a generic Brody tries to get close to influ­en­tial peo­ple to expose their links to war atroc­i­ties. Cou­ple this with the mirac­u­lous recov­ery of Car­rie no longer blighted by her mania and you’re left with noth­ing more than 24 – which at least was will­fully absurd.

Get­ting com­mis­sioned for sea­son two ruined this show just like Prison Break which was build­ing up to be a great show. In that show the crew was on its way out but then out of nowhere the writ­ers installed a metal pipe that made the escape plan null and void. While this allowed the execs to spin out fur­ther episodes the sub­se­quent escape and fol­low­ing sea­sons were all non­sense and crit­i­cally panned.

Home­land fell foul of this too. It was a real shame as there won’t be any point tun­ing in for sea­son 2.