I recently started watching The Walking Dead. One of the things I really enjoy about the show is the internal chaos within the group, while there is external chaos all around them. The key to any good story is conflict and if our heroes are fighting with each and the walkers at the same time, it’s a great way to keep out interest.
And the character who excels at internal conflict is Shane, and here’s why:
1. He often does the right thing the wrong way
Even if Shane has good intentions, he invariably doesn’t care how he does something, just as long as it gets done. Like when he stops Ed from hitting his wife, he nearly beats him to death. Stopping Ed is a good thing, beating the man mercilessly is not. Or when he lies to Lori (who is out searching for Rick at night). Shane tells her Rick is back at the camp when he isn’t, because Shane wants to keep her safe. And, of course, the ultimate, freeing all the walkers from the barn and mowing them down in front of Hershel (who believes they can be cured) just to prove a point. Shane’s right, those people can’t be cured, but when you’re a guest at somebody’s home diplomacy matters.
And every time Shane does something like this he creates conflict between himself and everyone around him and I LOVE IT.
2. He’s too valuable and too reasonable to abandon
Shane isn’t like Merle; he can play well with others, he just frequently chooses not to. He was also kinda-sorta the guy in charge of the camp before Rick showed up, so people look to him for leadership.
Also, as far as most of the group knows, he isn’t crazy so he can be reasoned with. So after Shane and Rick try to kill each other, Rick has a conversation with him and thinks everything is going to be OK.
Shane is also good at killing walkers, so from a practical standpoint it’s difficult to justify expelling him from the group because they need him.
All this means that every time Shane does something bad, there are plenty of justifications to keep him around, which means Shane can do a lot of bad things without consequences. This makes him dangerous and exciting to watch.
3. He constantly disagrees with Rick
Rick wants the group to hunt for Sophia? Shane wants the group to give up and move on. Rick wants to go back and help Merle, Shane doesn’t want the group to split up. Rick wants to release their captive alive and away from their camp, Shane wants to kill him.
It’s almost like Shane disagrees with every one of Rick’s ideas and the unfortunate thing is Shane’s ideas are often more ruthless, more survival oriented, but safer. Having Rick, Glen, and Daryl around when the walkers attacked might have been better. Killing a guy who is part of a heavily armed group of pillagers is safer than letting him go.
The more Shane disagrees with Rick, the more tension it adds to the show.
4. Priorities
Shane has three simple rules:
Survival matters
Lori matters
Carl matters
Everything and everybody else be damned. He keeps telling Rick, “the world isn’t like it was,” and while that’s true there are a lot of things outside the box of Shane’s priorities. Even though he’s in a group of people, none of those people ultimately matter to Shane, which means he could do anything to any one of them, at any time, and that is an exciting possibility to have around.
5. He’s fun
Shane is like a time bomb that gets to explode over and over. He has the strength and ability to see all of his convictions through and he sees no reason why he shouldn’t. he provides so much yelling and acting without thinking, it’s wonderful television. Everyone loves Daryl and Glen, but when you have a story of people that have to work together in close quarters and are stuck with each other, it’s more interesting to watch a hot head creating conflict, than it is to watch someone being reasonable.
Would Daryl, Glen, Hershel, Carol, Tyreese, or Maggie beat a man senseless? (I guess they might, people change quickly and I’m only on Season Four, but let’s call this an educated guess). Would any of them throw open the barn doors like Shane did and let those walkers out? Disagree with, and yell at Rick at every turn?
The key to keeping any show interesting is conflict and in The Walking Dead, the more potential for internal struggle, the better. When Shane was around there was always the possibility for an argument, a fight, a disagreement, an amoral decision made for survival reasons, a dissolution of diplomacy — pure anarchy. He’s the worst guy to keep around and that makes him the BEST guy to keep around for the show.
For years my Mom has been saying that The Good Wife is the best show on television. My Mom knows her TV, so I promised myself one day I would check it out.
Momma was right.
The Good Wife might have the most compelling storytelling style I’ve seen. In a lot of shows you’re able to look away from the screen from time to time: Send a text, maybe grab a snack. You might miss “something,” but not necessarily anything you won’t be told later. This is not the case with The Good Wife. Not only does each scene have critical information, but every scene is brief, filled with multiple layers of tension, and it doesn’t repeat itself. The Good Wife is one of those shows that starts and says, “I’m going to start running and I don’t care if you get left behind — keep up.”
So I sat down and analyzed an episode from Season One to figure out why The Good Wife was so good at creating compelling television, and how it was doing it.
Note: If you haven’t started watching The Good Wife yet, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, but you’ll need some details for context. Don’t worry, you won’t have time to think about these “spoilers” while you’re watching; you’ll be too busy.
The Good Wife begins with Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), a State Attorney, admitting in a press conference that he’s had an affair and that he’s resigning from office. He is subsequently arrested for suspected misuse of his position as State Attorney. The first season of the show is about the aftermath of this event, particularly in how Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) attempts to rebuild her and her children’s lives. Because Alicia was a housewife while her husband was in office, she’s forced to return to work as a lawyer, but due to her long hiatus she starts as a Junior Associate at a law firm. She has an apartment where she lives with her two teenage children, Zach Florrick (Graham Phillips) and Grace Florrick (Makenzie Vega), with her Mother-in-Law, Jackie (Mary Beth Peil) watching the kids. The episode I analyzed was Episode 15: Bang, where Peter has been granted an appeal to his case and allowed to leave prison and return to the apartment under house arrest.
Here are five things I noticed that helps the show achieve it’s tension.
1. Almost Every Scene has Characters with Ambivalent or Conflicting Attitudes
This is the beginning of the episode. There are four characters, Jackie (the Mother-in-Law), Alicia (The Good Wife), and her two children, Grace and Zach. They have just been discussing Peter’s return home. What’s interesting about this scene is every single character feels differently about this event and we get to watch them all react to the discussion differently. Jackie thinks her son is the Golden Boy who can do no wrong and thinks it’s great he’s coming home. Alicia is a complex person and has mixed feelings. Grace loves her Father, but has been mad at him since the arrest. Zach appears to be supportive, but he’s complicated and independent; his feelings aren’t clear either.
Within 20 seconds there’s a knock at the door. It’s Peter. Suddenly the person they were all discussing, worrying about, and having conflicting feelings about is back in their lives and isn’t going anywhere.
2. The Show Frequently Introduces Characters in Scenes to Change the Social Dynamics and Add Conflict
When Peter shows up at the door, he’s accompanied by a Police Officer who is there to explain the rules of the house arrest to the family and to put on the anklet. Now the viewer has to consider new relationships in the scene, not just between Peter and each previous character, but all those characters together AND while being watched by a police officer. And the characters don’t tell us how they feel, we have to interpret it based on what they show us.
3. The Good Wife Shows, it Doesn’t Tell
One of the cardinal rules of storytelling is “show don’t tell.” It’s more interesting for the viewer to infer something from observation than it is to be told something. For example, instead of having a character tell us they are scared, it’s more interesting to see him huddled in a corner, hugging themselves and trembling. The Good Wife is devoted to showing, not telling.
Take Grace’s reaction to Peter in this scene. Peter has just embraced Zach and with his arm around his son, there’s his daughter, who won’t even approach him. Her one arm is positioned protectively over the other. In a weak voice she tells her Father, “we baked you a cake.” Peter asks, “would that be an upside-down, Pineapple Cake?” Then Grace’s eyes well up and she runs into her Daddy’s arms. This tells us exactly what we need to know about how Grace is feeling: Even though she’s anxious about Peter being there and probably still angry with him, she’s still Daddy’s Little Girl. And she’s reminded of this by the mention of a cake that presumably has some importance in the family. And we aren’t even told the cake has some kind of family history! We don’t need to be told, Grace’s reaction makes the association obvious. And all this has happened within one minute and fiften seconds of run time.
4. Short Scenes
Very few of the scenes in the show are longer than three minutes. Most are under two. That’s why you can’t look away from the show: If you were gone for thirty seconds, you might miss an entire scene.
The Good Wife utilizes this to build further tension. Typically the central conflict of each episode is a court case. One of the ways you build tension in movies and television is to cut from from one scene to another, and then back again. This works best if the first scene establishes a conflict for you to worry about, then takes you away from it before that conflict is resolved. This way, even though you’re in another scene you’re still worrying about the first conflict because you haven’t seen it resolved yet. So by having brief scenes in the court room and then quickly shifting to other scenes, we’re continuously invested in how the court scene will get resolved.
5. The Show Expects you to Pay Attention
The Good Wife transitions quickly from scene to scene without much transitional explanation.
In CSI they’ll learn a piece of information, one character will say it out loud, and then another character will repeat that information in how it applies to the case before cutting to commercial.
After the police officer explains the rules of house arrest to the family and we see our first moment of Alicia and Peter alone together, we are transitioned immediately into a court case where we initially don’t know who Alicia’s firm is defending, what the details of the case are, or what we’re supposed to pay attention to. We are simply begin the scene with a police officer on the stand giving testimony. We do, however, recognize characters so we have to watch the scene and look where the lawyers from Alicia’s firm are sitting, and listen to the testimony to piece together the details. The show doesn’t waste time telling you what the case is about before it begins, it expects you to figure it out for yourself.
In an age where television loves to hold your hand and tell you what we’re doing and where we’re going, it feels good to be treated like an adult.
6. Adversity Between Characters
The Good Wife frequently fills a scene with people who either disagree, or flat out don’t like each other. In this episode, Peter, his lawyer Daniel (Joe Morton), and his repuation manager Kya (Francie Swift) are meeting with a campaign strategist, Eli Gold (Alan Cumming).
To give some background, since Peter has been home there’s been a beeping he can’t find. He calls Daniel and Kya to start strategizing his return to office and in the next scene we see Daniel and Kya looking around ineffectively for the beeping sound.
So when Eli finally joins them in a later scene they begin discussing reputation. Peter says, “Eli, look, considering your reputation, I think we’re gonna have to talk about a few ground rules. Your mind tends toward expletives. You’re a classically trained pianist, and you require Saturdays off.”
And then Eli turns to Kya and says, “Who told you about Saturdays, shiksa Bambi over there?”
Immedielty animosity is created between two characters in the room. Peter continues, “I’ve also been told that in a street fight, you’re the man.” And then Eli turns around and fixes the beeping sound that no one else could find, which tells the viewer: Eli is indeed the man who solves problems.
It’s a brilliant way to show us who Eli is while creating tension amongst characters and introducing a new source of conflict for the show, all within a scene under two minutes.
Unbelievable as this may sound, this is level at which every single scene in The Good Wife operates. While other shows focus on hitting one or two home runs a season, The Good Wife is trying to do it every single episode and (so far) it is succeeding.
Recently I watched the Fast and Furious series in chronological order (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 3, credits for 6, 7). While I love the Fast and Furious movies I frequently just return to my favourites (the ones at the bottom of this list). And when I do, sometimes the characters will reference something or someone I’m a little fuzzy about, so I thought watching them this way would help clarify the series’s history. And it did. It also made it painfully clear that some of the movies were a lot of fun and some where not. While I don’t typically like to write ranking lists, I’m going to brave it this one time. Here goes:
7. 2 Fast 2 Furious
Recently a friend admitted to me he hadn’t seen the earlier Fast and Furious movies. I told him, “you don’t really need to see the second one,” and I feel that’s accurate.
2 Fast 2 Furious features Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) pulled in by the government to infiltrate a drug organization by posing as an expert wheelman. Brian demands that he get some help from a former childhood friend, Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson). They’re also working with an already-under cover agent, Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes)
The problem with the movie is that it’s trying too hard to be fun. Believe it or not, there’s a subtle art to the tone of a Fast and Furious movie: You can have over-the-top fun, but not in a cartoony way. You might think of Fast and Furious movies as brainless blockbuster entertainment, but they respect themselves.
I’m wondering if director John Singleton thought the series was a joke. There’s an awful lot of animated blur added to the car races when the drivers use their NOS and there are far too many cartoon-style close-ups on a driver’s eyes widening when something unexpected is about to happen. Even the colour palette for the film is so wild and bold, like clown colours.
There are some decent stunts and races (and plenty of them), some laughs, and a somewhat coherent story, but somehow the movies never escapes the impression that it is a joke.
6. Fast & Furious
Fast & Furious is the fourth installment in the series and is a return to a more Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel)-centric story. Dom and his crew are still performing complex, high speed vehicle heists (this time for fuel tankers), but disbands the crew because he feels they’re getting too high on wanted lists. Meanwhile, Brian is working as an FBI agent trying to track down druglord Arturo Braga and has Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) infiltrate their organization. When Letty is found murdered, Dom wants revenge and he and O’Connor kinda-sorta work together, posing as expert wheelman, while really just trying to locate and capture Braga and find out who killed Letty.
The plot is not all that disimilar from 2 Fast 2 Furious, the main difference is the tone. Fast & Furious is about the revenge of a lost one and that’s not very fun. It’s grim.
5. Furious 7
This is highest earning Fast and Furious movie, which likely means it is one of the most popular movies, so giving it this position on the list (especially considering the classy send-off for Paul Walker) will not be popular.
Hear me out.
Furious 7 is about Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) seeking revenge on Dom and his crew for hospitalizing his younger brother, Owen Shaw, in Fast & Furious 6. “Kinda.” It’s also about the Turetto crew helping out a covert ops group led by Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) acquire a tracking tool called “God’s Eye” which can find anybody anywhere. And it’s also about saying goodbye to the late Paul Walker.
The best thing about Vin Diesel movies is their focus. They’re not going to win any Oscars for Best Picture, but they have decent storytelling fundamentals while staying entertaining. The more complicated you make the story, the harder it is to follow and the more difficult it is care about all the little bits. So when you have our heroes chasing this God’s Eye so they can help find Deckard Shaw with it, and Shaw chases them everywhere they go, interspersed with meaningful, but out of place moments where Paul Walker’s fatherhood and life are discussed, it’s hard to stay focussed on what the characters are doing and why they’re doing it.
It’s just too big, too convoluted.
4. Fast & Furious 6
Fast & Furious 6 has a beautiful self-awareness to what the Fast and Furious movies have become. It admits, “Yea, our stunts are getting a little crazy, but you know what? We’re going to make them a little crazier and we’re going to have fun doing it.”
The movie takes the same crew from Fast Five (but replaces the bickering Spanish brothers with Gina Carano) who are hired by Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to take down a rival crew. Then it filters that mission with the series-long dedication to family by also being about saving Letty from the rival crew (and herself) because, while she survived, she seems to have lost her memory.
It’s a great two-pronged approach to a Fast and Furious story because no matter what crazy stunt they try there’s a reason and emotion for it. “How did we end up driving a car through the front of a jumbo jet? Well, we were trying to stop Shaw and protect family.”
3. Fast Five
A strong argument could be made that Fast Five is the best of the series. It’s well-paced, entirely focussed on having fun, introduced perhaps the best character to come to the Fast and Furious series (Hobbs), established a successful crew / heist focus, and finally figures out how to use each character effectively.
While on the run from law enforcement, Brian, Mia, and Dom involve themselves in a car heist that gets the attention of DSS Agent Hobbs who brings a specialist team to apprehend them. Instead of running, Dom decides to rob the biggest gangster in all of Rio and calls in former favourites from the series to help him do it.
It’s one of those rare cases where you take a group of actors, put them all together, and the chemistry just works. Roman and Tej, Hobbs and Turetto, Han and Giselle. This is where the Fast and Furious group became a true family. Salute mi familia.
2. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
I’ll admit that I’m unreasonably biased toward this film. I’m a huge fan of the anime Initial D, which is about street racing and drifting on Japanese mountains. So when this movie came out I was predisposed to liking it.
Tokyo Drift is about as stand alone as it gets. None of the previous cast (save a cameo by Vin Diesel) returns. It’s a story about Sean (Lucas Black) who gets sent to Japan because he keeps getting in trouble street racing. First thing he does when he arrives in Japan is get into a race with someone named “Drift King” who has ties to the Yakuza. Sean is taken in by Han (who people liked so much that producers altered the timeline of the rest of the movies) who helps teach him how to drift and encourages his races and conflict with the Drift King.
This movie taught me a lesson about how to appreciate movies. Technically this is a spoiler, but the movie isn’t that deep so it probably won’t bother you. At the end of the film, Han is dead thanks to D.K., and his entire crew is thinking of disbanding. Sean thinks of a solution and finally decides to take responsibility for the destruction he keeps creating. He will go to the Yakuza bosses and ask to race D.K.; loser leaves town for good.
This makes no sense. From the Yakuza’s perspective, everything is fine. Sure D.K. made quite a public mess by killing Han, but Han was stealing from them so that’s probably OK. The Yakuza bosses don’t really know or care who Sean is. Why agree to Sean’s request?
Because that’s the conclusion to the movie we want to see and it shouldn’t matter how they get there. So why get mad at it?
Thank you for the lesson, Tokyo Drift.
1. The Fast and the Furious
This is as close to a traditional story structure as we get in the series. It’s where everything begins. Brian O’Connor is an undercover agent trying to figure out which crew of racers is responsible for $6 million worth of truck heists. While infilatrating the street racing world with the Turetto crew, Brian’s loyalty to law enforcement wavers the more he spends time with the family and the more he develops feelings for Mia.
Structure-wise, this is the best movie. Heists aren’t just entertaining, they’re involving. The film’s climax features Dom, Brian and crew trying to save one of their own who’s tied to a truck. But there are legitimate stakes and a tension to the scene. All the other chase sequences in the series may be flashier, more entertaining, or even more dangerous, but this one feels the scariest — and we don’t even like the guy they’re trying to save!
There’s also a character-building scene with Dom where he tells Brian about his Father and the car that killed him.
That’s my dad. He was coming up in the pro-stock circuit. Last race of the season, he was coming into the final turn when a driver named Kenny Linder tapped his bumper and put him into the wall at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. I watched my father burn to death. I can still remember him screaming. The people who were there said my father died long before the tanks blew. They said it was me that was screaming.
We also get to see Brian struggle between duty and a genuine desire to be accepted by Dom. He’s in love with their world, but can’t be honest with himself about it.
You don’t get this kind of heart or character anywhere else in the series. And while it might not be as fun as Fast Five, it feels the most geniune, the most legitimate — the most alive.
A friend of mine keeps watching Jurassic World over and over. He wants to like the movie more than he does and he thinks each time he rewatches it, that somehow he will, but he is trapped in an abusive relationship.
While I really enjoyed Jurassic World and accept it for what it is, watching it with the idea that it loves with one hand and slaps with the other, I suspect Jurassic World is attracting him with the nostalgia of Jurassic Park, but leaving him feeling hollow by the end of it. Here are a few reasons why.
1. The Problem with Kids
Zach, the older brother in Jurassic World is presumably modelled after the modern teenager. Initially he is aloof and doesn’t seem to care about anything other than pretty girls.
His little brother, Gray, on the other hand, is excited by dinosaurs, cares deeply about the people around him, and is worried that his parents are going to get a divorce.
The problem with the modern portrayal with Zach is that it’s difficult to care about his character, unless you yourself are an aloof, apathetic teenager. And all of the scenes with the brothers include the vacant Zach, which diminishes the brothers as a whole.
By comparison, while you might find the kids in Jurassic Park annoying, we view them through Dr. Grant’s perspective and the whole thing plays off like a comedy routine, because Dr. Grant doesn’t like kids and here are these kids trying to latch onto him.
2. Insidious Use of Music
In Jurassic Park, the music accompanies moments that feel earned and enhances them. In Jurassic World, the music from Jurassic Park is used in attempt to rekindle your fond memories of Jurassic Park, whether the moments are deserving or not.
For example, there’s a moment in Jurassic Park where Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler see a dinosaur for the first time. The film spends a lot of time building up the importance of dinosaurs to Dr. Grant. Upon finding a new dinosaur skeleton (Velociraptor) with his excavation crew, he gives a brief lecture on the similarities between dinosaurs and birds. He then terrifies a child who makes fun of the skeleton by describing to the kid in detail how raptors hunt and eat their prey before telling the kid, “try to show a little respect. OK?” Dr. Grant also carries around a fossilized talon of a raptor with him everywhere. So when he sees his first dinosaur, John Williams’s music swells, Dr. Grant looks over and witnesses live dinosaur behaviour for the first time, and can verify with his own eyes theories he’s only read about or discussed intellectually. It’s an emotional moment.
The same score is used at the beginning of Jurassic World as Zach and Gray first arrive at the park. Zach is disinterested, and Gray is jumping up and down urging his brother to hurry up. As they get to their hotel room that overlooks the park, Gray opens up the doors to the balcony, which begins a sweeping shot of Jurassic World, and John Williams’s music swells just as it did in Jurassic Park, possibly in an attempt to infuse that scene with the same emotional heights as the one in Jurassic Park. But while a child finally getting to see dinosaurs for the first time is akin to Dr. Grant’s experience, the build up is different and doesn’t have the same effect. Jurassic Park‘s scene has a variety of close ups on Dr. Grant’s face and we can see the intensity of the moment in his reaction. In Jurassic World, the camera follows the brothers from a distance, and when Gray opens the balcony doors, the music swells, and the camera moves away to the park.
3. Weaker Characters
John Hammond has the strongest emotional moment in all of Jurassic Park. Too few movies these days take an aside and have a character tell a story that describes their emotional centre. By doing this the character is revealing their humanity to us through their insecurities and their hopes and dreams. In the scene, John Hammond tells Ellie about the first attraction he made, while Dr. Grant and the grandchildren are alone somewhere in the park.
You know the first attraction I ever built when I came down south from Scotland? It was a Flea Circus, Petticoat Lane. Really quite wonderful. We had a wee trapeze, and a merry-go -uh – c-carousel. And a see-saw. They all moved, motorized of course, but people would say they could see the fleas. “Oh, I can see the fleas, mummy! Can’t you see the fleas?” Clown fleas and high wire fleas and fleas on parade … But with this place, I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real, something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit.
The camera spends a long time close-up on his face. If you’d asked Hammond what he’d wanted most in the world, this is the story he would tell. And it becomes a moment of growth as well, because Ellie challenges his dream and Hammond is forced to reconsider what he wants with what has to be done to protect his grandchildren.
Jurassic World attempts to evoke the well-shaped character of Hammond with a different CEO who repeats Hammond’s famous, “spared no expense” line and says they’re here for more than money … as they fly off to their new genetically modified dinosaur that cost them $26 million to make and can’t kill even though it’s free and killing people.
4. The Chris Pratt / Raptor Story is Effective, Even if it Lies
As silly as I thought it would be, I think the plotline about Chris Pratt’s character, Owen, and his pack of raptors works well. The first thing we learn about their relationship is how dangerous the raptors are to everyone — including Owen. Whenever life or death stakes are involved our interests are piqued and the raptor/Owen relationship is a life or death partnership.
I suspect that’s in part why the image of Owen standing with his hands became the mild internet phenomenon the way it did, it’s an intriguing relationship and an iconic image.
So when the raptors and Owen actually work together, it’s a thrilling moment, because we’re interested to see how effective their relationship is, and whether or not Owen will survive their team efforts.
Unfortunately, Owen spends the entire movie telling people how dangerous the raptors are and how they shouldn’t be used for militaristic purposes. Then he agrees to use them in a military-like operation to hunt the Indominus Rex, and while it’s AWESOME, there’s some conflicting ideals there.
5. It Parades as Jurassic Park, But it’s Not
Dr. Grant doesn’t like kids? Claire doesn’t like kids. Both come to appreciate them more by the end of the movie. The difference is that Dr. Grant is with the kids throughout Jurassic Park. They’re snuggling up into him at night because he’s their protector and that’s endearing. Claire hugs them when she is reunited with them; it’s not the same.
There’s a raptor chase near the end of both movies where the main characters are pursued by raptors. There’s a T-Rex save in the final action sequence. There are dinosaurs loose in a park that is meant to be a safe. Both films have a dinosaur expert protecting two children and a woman. And there’s a guy literally wearing merchandise from Jurassic Park in an attempt to sell Jurassic World.
Jurassic World is dishonest because it takes a love and appreciation that was earned in Jurassic Park and attempts to spray its odour all over new movie thinking the pheromones will make you fall in love all over again. But love doesn’t work that way, infatuation does. Jurassic Park‘s success is that it appeals to your sense of wonder, your dreams. It is the embodiment of movie magic. Jurassic World doesn’t appreciate that the belief in wonder and dreams is not given, it is earned.
