Nightwatch: CSM-115 Pt 1 By Jeff Williams

[kailhofer]

I've never envied whomever had to follow me.<br><br>I figured if it did well, then Tinsel Rime would be a hard act to follow & not many would want to try. If I did badly, then I knew it would take a Herculean effort to clean up my mess, and again, who'd want that much work?<br><br>Why, Jeff. Of course. <br><br>Simon was so derailed when last seen, I really wondered how anyone would get him back on track. Jeff's solution was so simple as to be elegant: just stick a mystery under Simon's nose. He can't help but try to solve it, and in so doing, fix himself. Hopefully.<br><br>Last season, life wasn't about skipping from mad scientist to mad scientist & stopping wild plots to destroy the world. It all seemed to be about showing the world to be a lot more complex than it had seemed, and that real world solutions get messy. In Kindness of Strangers Simon had to kill someone to save the future & made a ghost happy. He killed again in Peacekeeper, showed his darker side, and hinted at a complicated past. His friends weren't safe either: Stephanie was shot in Jigsaw Creek and nearly bled to death. Tom risked his life to save us all from Dan's comet with help from the secret, enigmatic Zod in Fly By Wire, and wound up--of all things--in love. Not to be left out, Jaimie blurred the gap between dimensions in Sin Watcher and proved conclusively that there are things out there that go bump in the night. Me, I set out to show that nothing may be what it seems and than even a hero like Simon could lose.<br><br>If I had to guess what this year was about from this half story, I'd say: mystery--solving what's going on. The Sherlock Holmes references are hard to miss, after all.<br><br>Maybe that's not true. I'm not in the meetings anymore, so they don't tell me. Then again, maybe Mrs. Turner and the rest of the Baker Street Regulars will show up after all. ;)<br><br>One nit & one comment.<br><br>Nit: Stephanie knew about Simon's garage. In Tinsel, she wanted to mount the chain hoist in it that she was getting for Christmas, knew it was for storage, and also knew it was big enough to hold a car. She had to have seen it or had more information than she let on to Tom. <br><br>Comment: You can write truly beautiful things, Jeff. Really. The ending scene in Kindness with Emit sent shivers down my spine, and the opening here with Simon looking at the rain running down the pictures on his bedside table... I just ate that up. However, your cliffhangers just don't seem to reach me, and it fell flat, IMO. I mean, FBW showed there are so many launch vehicles out there that they practically litter the streets, so why should this one be special? Sure, I want to know where this is going, but I wasn't compelled to impatience for the next part like a great cliffhanger should do.<br><br>You've always seemed to be an up to the last-second deadline kind of guy, so chances are, at the time the first half went up, the second half wasn't written yet--so you maybe didn't know where it was going at the time. True or not, that's the way it seemed to me.<br><br>You are good at this, so you may pull the rabbit out of the hat again, and it may be a beautiful thing to behold how it happens. Again. Still, it seems that having all parts done ahead of time would make both stronger, and be a lot less risky.<br><br>Please make no mistake. I love Nightwatch. I read this one the night it was uploaded. I will always read it, and that should be testament to the strength of what you've created. <br><br><br>I waited weeks for other comments to be made, so I wouldn't seem like such a poison pill all the time. But I had to say something before the next version goes online, and no one can guess when that's going to happen... even with computer modelling and a slide rule. :)<br><br><br>Anyway, good luck on the second half.<br><br>Nate