HOW NOT TO WRITE: The I-Land

How Not to Write: The I-Land

The I-Land has a number of problems: Lazy dialogue, stiff acting, bizarre pacing, shoddy world-building. A lot of it could be overlooked, if the show had made better effort at characterization, but there are so many characters and so little time devoted to them, that the show is totally unable to save itself. Neither Yosemite Republican Warden nor Woke!Twist Ending can rise to make this watchable.

Below I’ll make a short overall critique/summary, and at the end (if you want to skip ahead), I’ll give some writing advice that would help improve The I-Land.

What The Fresh Hell

We open as our dark-haired lead wakes up on the beach with a conch shell. Don’t worry too much about that shell, because it will never really impact the narrative, since the characters never read the words printed on it. It’s just a pretentious literary reference to Lord of the Flies. The woman runs into a Red-headed woman, who immediately hates her and holds a knife on her, Dark Hair disarms Red Hair, and it becomes clear that they and the other ten randos wandering around on the beach all have amnesia.

The pacing, as I mentioned, somehow manages to be too fast and too slow. Because the characters come to the island as blank slates, there’s a real need to spend some time nailing down their characters before things happen. Instead, they wake up, sit in a circle, and have some really repetitive arguments before going off to search. Or some of them do. Some of them sit their asses on the beach and go swimming. So now, we’re Survivor.

For some characters, you don’t get any development them until right before they die. I’m pretty sure Moses’s only personality trait is being hungry which makes fuckall sense when you finally get his backstory. Taylor is lazy and sullen. Brody is rapey. K.C.’s only trait is hating other women (which also makes no sense with her backstory but wuteva).

So the beginning manages to be boring, and then graduates to confusing as things start happening rapid fire: Shark attack! Rape attack! MATH!!!

By the time we hit the second episode, another woman is assaulted, and I still can’t remember all of their names. Which is what happens when you have 12 main characters and do no work to earn your scenes. The dialogue lampshades this, having our lead Dark Hair (aka Chase), refer to Brody and K.C. as Rapist Guy and Red-headed Chick. Because at this point, that’s really all they are at this point (and through most of the series).

Another major way this show fails in characterization is how all of the characters IMMEDIATELY hate the lead, for no reason, and don’t act the way normal people would. They get mad at her for finding things on the island, but don’t seem curious or motivated to explore and secure their location. It is utterly ridiculous to suggest the lead is unique just for being curious about her surroundings and wanting to know what’s going on. It’s also weird that they don’t know her from Adam, but every time she suggests they try to do something, they are suspicious of her. By the time they have a real reason to be mad at her, it has no impact at all. Why would anyone trust these people?

Later on, it seems as though the writers ended up making this choice because apparently, they are all criminals (which I called by the end of the first ep, fine… I was hoping it was a reality TV thing, but okay), and so apparently, criminals don’t have any survival skills or brains and are inherently bitchy to each other, even when they have no memory of who they are. They don’t make the effort to explore until another pair of people on the island basically tell them that there’s a village to find. It’s especially jarring, since one of the main themes is redemption, but since the vast majority are, even without their memories, lazy, mean, and prone to violence, uh, I can’t imagine anyone walking away from these mixed messages as anything confused.

Then, because pacing is a myth and there is no god, they manage to blow their wad in the third episode, in which the tell us over and over what’s happening, as though it’s so complicated (it isn’t), effectively killing any tension. When Chase gets back to the island, you wonder if she can get them to believe her when they hate her… but of course, some people show up and end up explaining the thing that she’d been trying to convince them of. I mean, who needs narrative tension, amirite?

The group hated Chase and continues to hate Chase. At this point, everyone is running around while they’re getting their memories back. Great plan. We move from a mystery about what’s going on the island to a bunch of people wandering and having hallucinations specifically about their crimes. If they’d done this gradually, I might say it was a bit clever, but since we haven’t had time to get to know them outside of this, it’s hard to really be that invested as their (three day) illusions of who they are shatter, and K.C. gets a mini-Lifetime Movie for her backstory just dropped down as looooong as it can be among everyone else’s flickers of memory.

Most of these memory reveals don’t make things slide into place in that good way when you’ve been trying to figure a story out. It doesn’t build the characters, either, in the way OITNB does with flashbacks. The rest unfolds in similar fashion… boring, nonsensical, and unsympathetic. Chase starts to grow on you, if only because everyone is such a dick to her, and SPOILERS:

She’s actually innocent. (Which apparently makes all the difference in someone’s character, as ppl who break the law are all inherently bad.) I think that if they’d focused their narrative on her and Cooper, who turns out to be her husband, then they could’ve made this work, but instead it’s a huge mess with a lot of horrible people who have no reason to be so horrible because they don’t remember why they were horrible.

If this was meant to allude to Survivor or Lord of the Flies: It fails. You have to give groups logical reasons to form over time. They can’t just be psycho from the beginning and pick allegiances at random. Having a conch shell doesn’t do it.

If this was attempting to capture the mystery of Lost: It fails. It doesn’t work just because you introduced some random codes, that you later explain don’t really make sense. And the number 39 wasn’t that clever, man, even if you did more than just introduce it and then forget about it until the final episode.

If the deaths are supposed to move us: They don’t. I can’t care about characters who I don’t know, or who have no personality traits. The only one that really bothers me is Taylor because it is just so CRUEL and undeserved.

If the twist ending was meant to be shocking and poignant: It isn’t. It wasn’t earned, and a moral out of nowhere that makes no sense with anyone’s motivations isn’t going to shake us to our core about climate change.

TL;DR—How Not to Write

So, yeah. The I-Land is pretty godawful. But as a concept, it isn’t irredeemable. Even with a shoestring budget and a limited run, some better writing choices could have saved this and made it popular. Maybe people might even want more than the limited series, as it was in The Haunting of Hill House.

In some order, with the most important piece of advice last, here are my recommendations:

• Don’t ignore pacing. You have to establish a status quo and characterization before you disrupt it. Since the narrative begins with a big disruption, you need to let things settle to let us get comfortable and find attach to the characters before you start pulling out rapists, sharks, and secret messages. It’s like shampooing your hair—Settle, disrupt, and repeat.

• Don’t grind your narrative to a complete half to explain things or drop in backstory. Honestly. You can earn an infodump after some time has passed, but not multiple ones, and not as often as this show does. The 39 steps thing isn’t nearly as clever as they think, nor is the “find your way back,” and therefore there was no need to just sledgehammer the point home by having characters draw attention to it.

• Don’t disperse your viewer/reader’s attention with too many characters in focus. Learn which characters are leads and which are supporting. When you have a limited amount of time, even if you are truly masterful as a writer, it is incredibly difficult to juggle a large number of characters. Dialogue, development… It can’t be done quickly, and the more characters you have, the more time you have to devote to balancing the reader’s/viewer’s feelings. Problematically, a lot of ensemble cast work doesn’t seem to get this. Glee never did, and its tone was all over the fucking map. Arrow is grimdark all the time. Walking Dead used to, but failed in general to manage the size of its cast compared to ongoing tragedy, so can we keep caring if one guy has plot armor and people come and go underdeveloped?

• But most importantly, and building on the previous point, DON’T try to make your characters wholly unlikable or perfect. People will read, watch, and stand almost anything if they’re really hooked into those characters. I know people who stayed in fandoms for years beyond the subject material failing them because they were so invested in the characters. However, you can have characters who are pretty much a dumpsterfire mess, and have them be very popular. We have Bojack Horseman, we have Jessica Jones, we have Lucifer Morningstar (angelwing dumpsterfire)…. House, Rick Sanchez, Snape… Seriously. You can have flawed leads, but you need to make them engaging and relatable.

Get that kind of investment for the characters early on, and you can actually cover up for some errors. Pacing only has to be good enough to get us through the main plot points. Logic only has to be good enough to withstand the moment it has onscreen. I’m not saying to make your story a drunken disaster on purpose, but focus on characterization first, and then let that guide your plot, and a number of ills will ease, I swear. It wouldn’t make The I-Land perfect, but you could make it more watchable.

But Netflix still shouldn’t have spent money on this.