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“Timing is everything” is a phrase you usually hear applied to comedy, but it’s equally applicable to tragedy. Maybe even more so.
Consider the ending of Romeo & Juliet, if Romeo arrives 10 minutes later or Juliet awakens 10 minutes earlier. For that matter, there’s that message the Friar sends to Romeo telling him that Juliet is going to fake her death… the messenger gets delayed and those crucial words that could have changed everything are never read.
My most recent poll asks the question, “Do you think Muriel would have left peacefully if Zeke had been handed over?” Not one person so far has given an assured Yes, but at least a handful voted that it was a possibility as long as things weren’t allowed to escalate the way they did. Unfortunately, people in possession of the information that could have changed the situation just didn’t know that it mattered, or didn’t get to convey it in time.
There’s a TV Trope that sort of covers these situations, called Poor Communication Kills. I say ‘sort of’ because the way the trope is defined heavily weighs on the side of inexplicable and out of character lack of communication employed by a writer in order for a plot to proceed. That’s (hopefully) not what I’ve put together in our last arc… I set the locations, timing, and various egos (or lack thereof) up in such a way that a feasible tragedy could occur. Yes, it’s possible that communication could have set it right, but that’s the truth of most tragedies, including ones that take place in real life. Shakespeare knew that well, as did the Greeks (though those dramatists were helped out by their cultural audience being preconditioned to the idea of unavoidable fates). The trick, then, is to arrange the elements so that the characters have palatable reasons to not speak, or speak but not be listened to. Information that could defuse the issue arrives too late, or never at all… but for dramatic reasons it’s usually the former, so that the survivors know along with the audience that things have taken a terrible turn. And for my money, it’s even worse(better?) for us in the modern era where we feel fate is something that isn’t predestined and wonder on those small things that could have led to a happy ending instead. But so long as the characters’ actions feel right, and the timing is right (if also oh-so-wrong), then the tale should feel solid, no matter its conclusion.