On Jan. 14, Hawaii Five-0 will give its fans a chance to determine the outcome of its show. The whodunit—where the team must solve the murder of a prominent professor—will (according to Entertainment Weekly) feature three different endings, each with a different killer: The professor’s boss? A student? A teaching assistant? One of ’em will be unveiled as a nefarious murderer—his guilt determined fans’ votes on cbs.com and Twitter.
In a way, this is nothing new. Fans of American Idol and other reality shows have been voting on the outcomes for shows and seasons for years now. And certainly in this era of ever-greater connectivity between programs and their fans, this feels like, in some ways, the next logical step. It even has precedence in the very low-fi world of books: Time’s Graeme McMillan compares the Hawaii Five-0 gimmick to the venerable Choose Your Own Adventure book series of the 1980s.
Those books were, incidentally, pretty awesome. I grew up with them, and essentially they worked like this: After reading a couple of pages, the reader would be asked to make a decision. Say the plot took the protagonist down a dark hallway where he/she sees a strange, big dog who seems to be hurt. The reader then could choose to A) back away slowly, B) try to help the pooch, C) kick the dog and run, or D) cry quietly. Each decision will take you to another line in the narrative, wherein you’ll be faced with another decision (assuming the dog hasn’t eaten you, of course). Writes McMillan:
The spirit of the series has not only continued to be felt throughout pop culture, but in many ways, overtaken it. After all, as the New Yorker’s Dirdre Fole-Mendelssohn wrote in 2010, the CYOA books allowed the reader to ‘role-play or game-play; you could hyperlink from one page to another, distant page in an instant, like a Star Trek character teleporting to another planet (one that, in many instances, held aliens of a dangerous nature). You could erase your tracks or track your history. As an amazingly exhaustive Web site on the books shows, they were, in fact, like early versions of the Internet.’
They were also, looking back, pretty instructive in the way that they indirectly taught young readers about the concept of choices and consequences and the perils and rewards of free will. While some of the choices made in the Choose Your Own Adventure books were purely random (“Do you pick the door on the left or the right?”), many were imbued with moral underpinnings. Readers learned early on that, if you came across a hurting dog, it was probably a better idea to try to help the thing than kick it. Unless, of course, you were hoping to send the protagonist to a laughably quick ending.
As such, Hawaii Five-0 doesn’t resemble a Choose Your Own Adventure book as much as a sort of reverse form of the game Clue: We play the game, but the fun of it is and picking which cards we stick in the envelope.
Which makes the Jan. 14 episode, I think, a missed opportunity. We don’t play detective as much as we play god with the characters—and a pretty pernicious god at that. Forget free will: We’re forcing these evildoers into the evil that they do. That’s not that cool, when you think about it.
Now admittedly, the screenwriters for Hawaii Five-0 didn’t write this show to make any deep philosophical or theological points. They wrote it because they thought it’d be a fun little gimmick. Still, I kinda wish that the makers had actually adhered more to the Choose Your Own Adventure format. Forget changing the identity of the killer: It’d be awesome if viewers could choose the path of the investigators: Which trail of clues do they follow? What risks do they take?
That might’ve been enough to let me use a bit of my own free will and tune in.
Recent Comments