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You’ll Have Another Governor Next Week

The problem was best illustrated not when Andrew Cuomo responded to Tish James by sending out his own lady lawyer to do the only thing he knows - attack his accusers and try to discredit a process he probably put in place himself. No… the problem was best illustrated months earlier when Andrew Cuomo responded to allegations from more than a dozen former employees by suddenly ending his daily self congratulatory press appearances celebrating the magnificence of his response to the Covid pandemic.

Indeed, by March it was clear that the “Masterful Pandemic Response Show” had well overstayed its welcome anyway.  Not that Cuomo wasn’t an effective and commanding executive during the initial response; despite conservative complaining, virtually no executive had done more in worse circumstances in 2020 at a time when Trump’s uselessness was especially pronounced. Still, the revelations of “managed” statistics of nursing home deaths, if not objections to policy choices made for that population were simply too much to ignore, and at least deserved a comprehensive response.

There’s a lot of giving Cuomo a hard time for things that are not, necessarily the bad things about him: yes, he’s tetchy and high handed and sure, he’ll steamroll anything in his path to achieve whatever end he thinks is a priority at the given moment. But that’s basically Being A New Yorker, and it’s not necessarily bad, to New Yorkers. Cuomo’s self aggrandizing press wasn’t a failing… it was his Achilles heel: as long as you were buying it, he was happy to sell. When you stopped buying it… well, no more press conferences for you, babe.

No, what destroyed Cuomo was simpler: a terrible manager who made a series of incomprehensible decisions meant solely to either consolidate his power or achieve his political aims or most likely both, discovered that years of built up ill will and repeated examples were simply too much to ignore. That story, too, is very New York. And at this late date, it’s a problem, bigger than Cuomo, about the state’s failures in governance.

Had Cuomo stayed, he was very likely to become the 2nd Governor we’d impeach; as it was, he was the 4th resignation under uncomfortable circumstances in a string of state level scandals that have hit both parties and almost all of the state’s leaders from the mid to late 20th Century. It’s embarrassing, dismaying, and a subject that deserves more thoughtful conversation than has been attempted across 30 years at least of reeling from scandal tp scandal. At some point; this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of our leaders.

Sure, we can make this about Cuomo’s personal failings - that ego! The nerve! The seek and destroy approach to politics… yes, all that and so much more. But that elides the reality that in April 2020, perfectly reasonable New Yorkers who knew damn well of multiple scandals Cuomo had played a part in were portraying the man as a genius who was all we had standing between us and the abyss. And that was his genius, his secret power - he’d so scorched the earth of New York politics, there was no one but him. 

But was that so different from Elliot Spitzer? Al D’Amato? Nelson Rockefeller? Alan Hevesi? Joe Bruno? Over and over…. New Yorkers ensconce power mad narcissists in senior roles and then wonder how it all goes so wrong (but hey, we tried to tell you Donald Trump was bad news), turn around… and do the same thing again. In part, it’s because we’ve never (ever) developed a healthy leadership bench. But more than a little of it is, why even bother? There’s a fatalism to our self governance that no one, really, should envy or emulate. We have quietly and calmly expected - over the course of my lifetime, to be sure - that Albany is just a cesspool of corruption and bad faith. Fix it? We don’t even know if government runs without it!

So now we look to Kathy Hochul - try to squint hard enough so you ignore her central role in Cuomo’s “Women’s Party” meant to derail Zephyr Teachout!~ as hopefully not more of the same. Or maybe Tish James rides her ambition that much further now that she’s iced Cuomo. Even now New Yorkers are quietly convincing themselves that women and/or minorities represent the hope for government beyond self interest and scandal. Because, as you can see, we have done so well, convincing ourselves of things.

What we need, really, is not so much a new star, but less corrupt and healthier institutions. Better, more effective policing of corruption. Dismantling the various personal fiefdoms that help individuals aggrandize power to themselves. A less sprawling, more manageable system of local governance. Election reforms. There’s plenty we could do. But we won’t, most likely, as we stand by, looking helpless and stunned that another shining hope let us down. The dysfunction isn’t the lying liars who lie to us… it’s us, the lied to, who put the Empire in Empire State, who put the scepter into the Emperor’s hands and say “be kind.” Get another governor? We’ll have another governor next week. And another one… probably soon after.

Loki: If You, Could Save Time, In A Battle...

Not every attempt at comic book TV can be a home run hit out of the park... but I get that I'm going to look contrarian saying that Disney/Marvel's Loki has turned out to be the weak link of series programming by the company thus far.

From a geeky, comic book standpoint, the yea-sayers are probably right: Loki laid the groundwork for much of what's to come in the MCU, and those developments were compelling and intriguing to consider. But to those defenders I would confidently respond... "okay, then why was Loki mostly a long, talky dud?"

While previous series laid ever more tantalizing clues and foreshadowing as they went, week to week, Loki was a set up in search of a promising result. It may be interesting to imagine what the end of time looks like... Loki is the sad reminder that you may be really, really disappointed by what you find when you get there.

Over and over, the series set up promising pot machinations only to stall: when our wayward God of Mischief leapt through time and space to escape his captors... he wound up on a dying moon where the only outcome was certain death. When he cheated that ending (in a total Deus Ex Machina where he wasn't even the Deus), we were left floundering in yet more bureaucratic hell while...zzzz... Excuse me, where were we again? On the dead planet at the end of time? Does this set come only in grey?

Loki was exhausting. Based on the "now what" implications of Loki making off with the Tesseract (again) in the time traveling part of Avengers Endgame (also a bit of a dud), the series started promisingly enough with the introduction of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) policing the "variants" who do something or take things that impede the orderly flow of time itself. Loki - or many Lokis - do this a lot. That's interesting. So is the TVA itself - a homage to seventies era imagery of endless bureaucracy, wood paneled, brutalist architecture, endless files, life in constant triplicate (the show homages everything from A Clockwork Orange to Brazil to Hitchhiker's).

The trouble is... where to go? Loki quickly sets up the existence of an even more remote agent of chaos, a variant who is upsetting timelines in ways that cannot be easily mended. This turns out to be another, female, version of a Loki, chased by TVA authorities across multiple time and landscapes. Also promising. But once we meet this young woman... things gradually stall. What a first looked like thrills and chills and wild adventures become more and more talky set pieces musing on the nature of love and loss, free will vs. determinism and... well, lots of other stuff that I started to just tune out.

Which is unfortunate. I wanted to like Loki, and as with all the Marvel series, I do think it's smart and well executed, even as a talky often pointless existentialist rumination on the nature of free will. But that doesn't make it great, and we should hold Loki, as with all shows, to some standard set of expectations. And there, really, Loki just doesn't meet the imaginative brilliance of Wandavision or the deft weaving of contemporary politics, racial awareness and heroism at pay in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Loki has grander ambitions. And, grandly, it swings hard and misses. A for Effort. C for execution.

Filled with top flight performances - Tom HIddleston's Loki is brilliantly complex, ably abetted by Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wunmi Mosaku (the casting in the MCU is really off the charts, these days). Sophia Di Martino and several of the other Lokis are fun, but the effect of so many shades of one persona is... wearying. Jonathan Martin provides some zip towards the final proceedings... but getting there is still a bit of a slog.

Visually, too, Loki is a bit of a letdown. As those sets devolve into ever murkier browns and greys and blacks, the murk just takes hold and sludges up what had been fairly brisk pacing. And tonally, I think the show never quite found the - yes, hard to find - comic book sweet spot between seriousness and humorous hooey. Not Batman level drudge, but Loki spends considerable time being a bit of a downer. You can't just occasionally bring up jet skis to get around the fact that episode after episode of Loki boils down to 2-3 characters expositioning one another to near death. And that's just a preventable, unforced writing trap that no one, I think, was watching out for.

Tp their credit, Marvel and the Loki team are the first to get a Season 2 and I say... good. Take a minute, work out the kinks, and deliver on the promise that lurks, so sweetly, at the edges of this talky, murky letdown. Give us a Loki who jumps into action! A story that's compelling! Time travel that's interesting! I know you got this. But you don't get an A for snoozy. Not yet.