Hal's American-hero essay

A seventh-grader accidentally predicts the Entertainment's endpoint and gets marked down for it. Hal's essay traces the TV hero from the man of action (McGarrett) to the man of reaction (Furillo), then leaps: the next hero, he says, is the hero of "non-action," the catatonic one, "divorced from all stimulus," so passive he must be physically carried across the set. Ogilvie docks the grade because the conclusion isn't supported — but of course it's the truest thing in the essay, because Hal is reading the audience's own trajectory. The evolution of what people want to watch bends steadily toward passivity, toward a figure who does nothing, until the logical terminus is a hero indistinguishable from the immobilized viewer watching him. The catatonic hero and the catatonic viewer are the same body; the samizdat is what happens when the screen finally delivers the audience its own reflection.