Witless Prattle

The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP #3

2012-01-28T20:10:00.006-05:00

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system--how y'all doin'? It's time once again for another installment of Witless Prattle's comprehensive coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop. This week, we look at the end of the first "season" (more or less) of Bebop, and move on to the second half, and have a quartet of episodes wherein things are not what they seem.

In other words, just another week of episodes, really.

"TOYS IN THE ATTIC"
"So what else could it be but a horrible alien, huh?"

I used to hate this episode because it seemed to go on and on and it seemed like a stock horror plot with a dash of "Alien" grafted on to "Bebop." Didn't help that it came after "Ganymede Elegy," which I loved so much.

This was a few watch-throughs before I twigged on to the fact that for the most part, plots don't mean shit in Bebop, and they're merely vehicles for characters, and this episode was meant as a character showcase.

So let's knock the plot out the way: Spike's left something in the fridge for a year, and it comes to life, gets out, and starts biting everyone on the Bebop. Spike eventually gets the fridge out of the ship so we can have a 2001: A Space Odyssey homage, and Ed eats the purple blob thing.

The real goal of "Toys" is to shine a light on each of the characters as they deal with some "empty time."--a long hitch of traveling in space, boredom has set in--well, before the blob thing gets loose. Jet loses his shirt (literally) gambling with Faye (who, as is her wont, cheats) and delivers the first of four lessons that frame the episode. Jet's lesson is that anyone who goes in for getting rich quick is going to pay a high price in karma, which he's just paid, of course. Whether he includes Faye in this I leave for you to speculate.

Faye's lesson is that nothing good ever happened to her when she trusted someone, which will make oodles more sense when we start looking at her character in more detail in the later episodes. Faye also gets bitten by the blob thing in the bathtub, because the blob thing was not able to tie her up, I guess.

Ed's lesson is "If you see a stranger, follow him." This is pretty cut and dried, because that's exactly what Ed did when she came aboard the Bebop. Bear in mind, of course, that Ed is even more strange than the collective rest of the Bebop crew. She has no more luck with the blob-thing than anyone else, but then again, it really isn't the point.

Spike's lesson is the last one we hear, and the one that closes the episode, is perfectly in keeping with his character's ongoing repudiation of the idea of any mysticism/predestination/etc. We saw him not take the shaman's warning seriously in "Asteroid Blues," say him scoff at the words of Wen in "Sympathy for the Devil," and so his lesson is the eminently practical admonition that you shouldn't leave things in the fridge.

On the face of it, it's obviously a wink to the audience not to take any of this all that seriously, though if one is so inclined, one could look at it as foreshadowing as if you keep something in your past secret, it can easily come back to bite you later.

Not that that kind of thing ever happens on this show, right?

"JUPITER JAZZ"
"I have no luck with them--I'd rather be an armadillo"

Man, the first two scenes of this two parter are murderously awful. They may actually be the shittiest in all of Bebop, but I don't like to dwell on the negative. The Indian mystic stuff is so agonisingly on the nose (even moreso because its reprised at the end of part 2) and has none of the counterpoint stuff that "Asteroid Blues" had, so we're meant to take it seriously, and there is no damn way that one can take at all seriously any more than that My Little Pony episode where they tried to talk about Manifest Destiny.

This is then followed by an equally embarrassing scene of leaden exposition where we are reintroduced to Vicious and Lin, who fails to make an impression in any meaningful way (which is a shame, as he's somewhat more important) because the exposition chews it all up. Here's what I know--Vicious is dispatched to Callisto to broker a drug deal with a man he knows. Lin is sent along because the heads of the Red Dragons don't trust him and go on and on about how Vicious is a snake and Vicious tells Lin he should be prepared to betray him and can we please get on with this?

OK, back at the Bebop, Faye has ripped off the ship and run off with all their money. Naturally, Jet wants to get the money back (Faye he can take or leave) but in the process of getting that plot off and running, Spike hears the name "Julia," and heads off for Callisto, but not before having a knock-down drag-out fight with Jet, who throws him off the ship and we're left to fret that their bromance may never be the same now.

The fact that, in trying to track down what "Codename Julia" is, Spike runs into a transvestite named Julius and there's that whole weird scene where Gren (our nominal main character) tells Faye that if you don't say "take care" when someone sneezes you turn into a fairy really makes me wonder about the subtext of this episode, at times.

We get a good fight wherein we learn that comparing Spike to Vicious will cause him to murder your ass, and he finally faces off with Vicious, but rather than their protracted fight as they had in "Ballad of Fallen Angels," Lin steps between them and shoots Spike dead.

Oh, and Faye finds out that Gren has boobs, because Faye is unable not to be nosy.

We get an explanation for some of this in part 2, which is good, as this episode has really been struggling not to be shapeless. Gren is trying to set up a trap for Vicious, because Vicious saved his life when they were soldiers on Titan and Gren thought that meant they were buddies, but Vicious actually set him up for charges of treason and led to him getting moobs. Concurrent with the man-boobs, Gren is also terminally ill in that oh-so-Japanese way where you look really weak and wan and cough up blood occasionally--it's a good non-specific symptom, and they're a real big believer in it. In any event, Gren is trapped by the past and declares he's both at once, and neither," which on the surface seems to refer to his extra attributes, but in a larger sense, he exists as a distillation of the Bebop crew and their driving struggles to escape their pasts.

There's a nice callback to the end of "Ballad of Fallen Angels" with Spike having feathers (black, this time) raining on him as he wakes up--Lin shot him with a trank dart and we get a few more nuggets about Spike's past--his eyes are two different colours and his left eye sees the past. Spike lays out his plan to leave the Red Dragons to Julia and asks her to come with him, but she can't. Vicious says to someone "I'm the only one who can keep you alive and the only one who can kill you," which is true for more than one person in this series, I'd wager.

Anyways, never mind all the foreshadowing for a bit, we must get on with things. Gren knocks out Faye and ties her up because it;s been two episodes and the withdrawal was killing them. Gren stages a drug deal to give him a chance to face Vicious and ask him why he sold him out, but Vicious sneers that "there's nothing in this world to believe in" and gets Lin killed, because when your mentor's name is Vicious, you kind of expect that and they'd telegraphed it so blatantly my neighbours complained about the excessive foreshadowing and asked could I turn it down please.

Anyways, we get a good fight in the skies above Callisto, Gren gets killed but wants to be sent out to space to return to his past again and the god damned Indians are back to tell us that the falling star is the tear of a warrior and . . . hey, you know what? The song that plays over the credits, "Space Lion" is actually pretty damn good!

Right, well. "Jupiter Jazz" has the makings of a good episode of Cowboy Bebop. So why is it two? It feels extraordinarily padded, and while it has some good dramatic beats and foreshadows a lot of what's to come for everyone, since you don't really know any of that until you get there, you have a two-parter that feels a bit bloated and overlong and the stuff you do learn isn't doled out evenly enough to keep it all lively. I don't hate it . . .but there are a lot of other episode's I'd just as soon watch.

"BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY"
"This is either an idiot or a genius!"

Someone has enacted an insanely intricate plan to punish the manufacturers of the astral gates that make hyperspace travel possible.

If ever there was one episode which blatantly undermined it's own plot, it's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here is an episode which, while it's going on, basically proves that it's plot is inconsequential when it reveals that the person who planned out this incredibly baroque plot to get back at them . . .is now too senile to really even remember that he did it.

Not only does the plot stand revealed as an intricate but ultimately pointless endeavour, but it actually negates itself. One should admire that kind of gusto, I think, really. There's a really good bit at the end where you get the idea that Spike kind of admires Hex (the literal and figurative chessmaster behind the gate plot) because in completely forgetting his past, he's able to live with a freedom he can't even imagine. It's a subtle thing, but if this episode is truly "about" anything . . .it's probably that.

Also--Ed claps with her bare feet, because of course she does.

I also like that in the future you will have an entire space colony dedicated to growing and smoking marijuana, and I'm certain that will probably be the next Harold and Kumar movie or something.

In any event, that's the end of this week's installment! Join us next week when we get more Faye backstory (in a way that may or may not involve her being tied up--it's hard to know, really) in "My Funny Valentine"; Jet gets into a plot so noirish it might as well take place at midnight in a coal mine in "Black Dog Serenade"; EVERYONE GETS HIGH and also Pam Grier in "Mushroom Samba"; and we end where we begin with "Speak Like A Child." Until then, why don't you go and have a sandwich?

Turkey Shoot: SILVERHAWKS

2012-01-26T08:09:00.005-05:00

I know you guys probably think I'll find any sort of driftwood from the 80's and write some long-winded blatherskite about how it was an unappreciated gem and blazed a trail for what came next in SF or cartoons or whatever, and it's true, I have done a lot of those lately.

However, because my goal is as much confusing my regulars as anything, the subject of the inaugural edition of the Turkey Shoot is Silverhawks. You may know it as Thundercats' unloved middle child back in the oh-so 1980s. I know it as one of the most brain-meltingly bland shows I have ever seen, and I once watched M.A.S.K. all the way through.

Despite all this . . .I don't hate it. Probably because I'm completely fascinated that one could grind 65 episodes of it out without having a single driving idea through the whole thing, perhaps it's just nostalgia (I had pretty much all the action figures, which I loved because they were shiny and I was 11 and was also apparently part magpie) and perhaps it's because the very absence of anything to talk about makes this something of a challenge to me.

But before we start tearing it down, I will totally stand up for it's totally bitchin' intro:

Let's get right down to it, then--In the galaxy of Limbo, hard-boiled desk jockey Stargazer has imprisoned the evil Mon-Star, keeping him in a dark cell because if he gets a look at the Moon Star of Limbo, he hulks out, kind of like when Goku looked at the moon and became a big pissed-off monkey. Why he looks like Getter Dragon is anyone's guess.

Anyways, Mon-Star naturally gets to look at the star and breaks out of prison, gets his mob back together, and starts rebuilding his empire of organised crime. Now here's the first problem I have with this--because Mon-Star is constantly sold as a Bad Motherfucker even when he's not in super mode, but uhm . . .all he wants to do is like, rob casinos and shit? The Mob is a big problem with this show--for all that they're hellaciously powerful and could easily roll over the whole galaxy, but they set their sights so low that it means precious little that the Silverhawks bust up their plans.

So let's meet the Mob, shall we?

BUZZ-SAW--Buzz-Saw, as you'd guess, is made up entirely of dildos. Oh, wait, no--he's made of saws. He has no personality and yells a lot and I remember I had the toy of Buzz-Saw one time. He came with an attack bird called Shredator, which needs to be my new band name, I think.

MUMBO-JUMBO--The Mob's brick, Mumbo Jumbo is a bull who walks like a man. Yes, this is where the WWE got the idea for Mantaur:

Well, actually, I don't know that they did, but there is so little to say about the guys, one has to do something.

HARDWARE--Is this where Rob Liefeld got the idea that everyone needed like 90 dozen pouches? I don't know. Hardware is the gadget genius of the Mob, and can somehow dream up intricate technology which works just long enough to fill 20 minutes, allow, the Mob to get defeated narrowly by the Silverhawks, and then never think of trying it again, because this is just how cartoon villains roll.

MELODIA--I have no idea what one of the Misfits is doing working for an intergalactic crime boss, but there it is. Meldoia has two jobs on this show--be the opposite number to Bluegrass and also be annoying. Melodia fires blasts of evil music from her keytar, which she has because it was the 80s

WINDHAMMER--In addition to being the name of a 1970s progressive rock group, Windhammer is also ridiculously powerful, and, if this show had any kind of relationship with actual science, utterly useless. Because Windhammer controls weather, which means jack shit when half your battles take place in space. Of course, because this is Silverhawks, Space has air and they wave any concerns about it away by claiming her creates "space tornadoes." To which I say "bullshit."

MO-LEC-U-LAR--Speaking of being mind-bustingly powerful and underachieving all the same, Mo (I am not typing that crap out again) can transform himself into any person place or thing, and he can be like, a perfect replica of it. Naturally, he uses this ability to rob banks.

YES-MAN-If Peter Lorre was a rattlesnake, he would be Yes-man. Essentially, he's just Mon-Star's simpering lackey. This is all I have to say about fucking Yes-Man.

POKER-FACE--

Well, you bloody well walked right into that one, didn't you?

Anyways, Stargazer is all like "Oooh, shit just got real," and so asks earth to send him a squad of agents who can fight the mob and allow him to sit on his lazy ass and yell at them for being lazy. Earth complies because anything to shut Crazy Cyborg Grandpa up and send in our heroes, the Silverhawks:

QUICKSILVER--Quicksilver is the leader of the Silverhawks, which means he gets suckered in and captured by the bad guys most often. Quicksilver is the straight-arrow leader of the group and is honest and fearless, which would make him the core member of the team . . .er, if 90% of the rest of the Silverhawks didn't have the same damn character trait.

STEELHEART--The team chick, and the character who you'd have hoped most would break out. Steelheart is the straight-arrow second in command of the group and partner to her brother Steelwill, who is an idiot, which in this case actually counts as character development. This is all I really have to say about Steelheart.

STEELWILL--Steelwill is a former football player, and as I said before, an idiot. He's also a mechanical genius whenever the team needs gadgets and the people writing the show have forgotten than Copper Kidd was supposed to be the mechanical genius. Steelwill is nominally the team brick. It really doesn't matter.

COPPER KIDD--Copper Kidd comes from The Planet of Mimes, which needs to be exploded with a Black Egg if you ask me. Also, no one will get that reference, ever. The Copper Kidd is the resident gadget genius of the show except when they forget and make Steelwill the gadget guy. He talks in irritating musical whistles because that is something space mimes do, I guess.

There are times I wonder aloud which fictional character was more annoying--Snarf, Scott Trakker, or Copper Kidd. Then I reach for the loaded pistol I keep in my desk, stare off into the middle distance, and wonder what have I done with my life, really?

BLUEGRASS--Groups of cyborg intergalactic cops consisting of former football players and space mimes need only one thing to become unbeatable--a ridiculous hillbilly with a magic guitar. Bluegrass pilots the Maraj, which is actually a slick-looking spaceship. Bluegrass can't fly, but can detach the forward part of the Maraj and fly around shooting things with his guitar with the cockpit door open because there is air in the galaxy of Limbo and Silverhawks does nothing more consistently than piss in the eye of Science.

Even more ironically, the little "it's not just a toy ad, look we're teaching you about astronomy!" bumpers feature Bluegrass training Copper Kidd to fly the Maraj. Or, well, that's the conceit. He really just annoys him with questions about planets in the solar system, which goes about as well as, oh, let's say, the science in Gamera Vs. Guiron.

Later on, it's discovered that the core five are. . .well, pretty bland, as you've probably twigged on given how hard it was to make jokes about them. So they rolled in 4 more Silverhawks, who ended up taking over the show (seriously--near the end you barely even see the core five do anything) Not that the new Silverhawks were any great shakes (they were better than the New Thundercats, but that's like saying for a midget, someone is awfully tall) but they seemed like complex multi-layered characters compared to the core five:

HOTWING--Hotwing is pretty cool, as he's got magic powers which are so ill-defined that he could, conceivably, wipe out the mob and solve every problem before the first commercial break. So to prevent that, they really just seem to forget about him completely for dozens of episodes at a time. Hotwing has no real personality either, and I wish I could make that into a keyboard macro, as I am so very tired of typing that now.

FLASHBACK--Flashback is big and green and has an accent that seems to wander all over the continent of Europe. Flashback can time travel, and while the series seems to recognise this is one hell of a plot-wrecking power, not unlike Hotwing's, their inability to keep anything consistent really undermines it. It's kind of cool when Flashback's first introduced and he has to work against the Silverhawks in order to save them, and gives things a unique tension, but no one really seems to give a shit after awhile.

CONDOR--Condor's actually kind of cool, even if the voice actor has a heck of a time keep him Humphrey Bogart-esque voice consistent. Condor is a former partner of Stargazer, but unlike Stargazer, who just sits behind a desk and bitches all the time, Condor actually gets to step out and kick some ass. He has little depth as a character, which I know is hard for you to believe on a show with a complex and multilayered as a cast as this. But at least he's cool. That goes a long way with me.

MOON-STRYKER--Moon-Stryker is supposed to be the hot new rookie of the Silverhawks, and the only reason given for this is that he is able to remember that he can shoot lasers out of his shoulder (the core five seem to have forgotten it's even a thing) and, unlike the core five, can hit what he aims for. Moon-Stryker also has a turbine fan at his waist which is supposed to make him more capable of directed flight than the Silverhawks otherwise are (as they tend to glide. In sapce. Where there are no air currents.) However, it really looks like he has a waist mounted band saw at groin level.

I have to admit, the idea of a crotch saw probably easily makes him the most dangerous Silverhawk in an extremely ridiculous way. However, as he has no personality to speak of, and never dry-humps one of the mob to death, it's terribly difficult to care about it one way or the other, but he's the last of the Silverhawks, which makes me very happy because my soul is trying to escape--talking about them is that deadly dull.

Not least of which because this show has nowhere to go, and doesn't even bother disguising it. Is the goal to put Mon-Starr back in prison? Well, they do that two or three times, as I remember. In fact, all of the Mob at some time or another get throwing back in prison, only to escape, because Limbo's prison system is like Arkham Asylum. Even Thundercats, which had much the same problems as this show (except I could probably pick out the Thundercats in terms of character traits way easier and I had to struggle for the Silverhawks) occasionally did something to up the stakes or mildly change up the status quo and managed to run for about 90 some episodes as a result.

This? Kinda just goes on. And on.

So there you have it, our inaugural Turkey Shoot, wherein I prove to you that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. Join us next time, as I'm sure I have something else lying around here that is in need of deconstruction.

So We're Told, This Is The Golden Age

2012-01-22T12:21:00.004-05:00

Beginning a new feature here at the Prattle, wherein we take a look at the Justice Society of America's heyday--the glorious 40's when things clearly meant very different things than they do now:

I don't like where this is going . . .

The Whole Damn Thing--COWBOY BEBOP #2

2012-01-21T07:42:00.003-05:00

Hi amigos! All 300,000 bounty hunters in the solar system, how y'all doin'? It's now time for Big Sh--oooh, almost got too caught up in the bit. This is Witless Prattle's continuing coverage of the entirety of Cowboy Bebop, because you demanded it. Both of you. This week, we continue on, and imagine my surprise when I was watching these and taking notes that damn near every single episode pivots on the themes of "time" (don't worry--there are plenty of eye motifs also) I don't know if it was intentional, but it runs right through all five of them, and that's good, as it gives us something to talk about.

So let's get right down to the heart of this thing.

"SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL"
"A baby hipster--very cool!"

I'm sure Spike's odd little flashback wherein he apparently got an artificial eye will in no way shape or form really ever be germane to anything, will it? This whole episode seems like yet another "The Bebop crew gets roped into some weird plot that has a bounty attached to it and solve the immediate problem, but fail to collect the bounty" thing, but damn if it isn't positively drenched in foreshadowing from the first scene on.

Spike and Jet are taking in the music of a kid named Wen, who has an amazing facility with the harmonica, specifically in the realm of blues. Jet's into it, as he's been singing the blues since the day he was born, so he says (and given what we see of Jet's past, that may not be much of an exaggeration) They're also trying to take down a bounty of course, but that goes pear-shaped, as usual, as they get wrapped in old business that is intimately tied into some of the backstory of the Cowboy Bebop universe.

You see, about 80 years before the show began, they fired up the first hyperspace gate and blew up the moon, creating a constant shower of debris that rain down on Earth without fail and also, for reasons even Jet has trouble wrapping his head around, "froze" Wen as a young boy. Worse still, he can't die, and he's turned into a bit of a nutcase.

Meanwhile, Faye makes a point to Ein about how women need to be pampered whilst wolfing down a can of dog food. You may feel free to apply your own reading of that scene here.

Jet later tells her that "Betrayal comes easy to women, but men live by iron codes of honor." Faye asks him if he really believes that and Jet says he's trying to. This scene means little for this episode, but it's as revelatory about Jet as it gets, and we're not gonna long wait to see that.

Wen is a very literal metaphor for time and how messed up you get if you're "stuck" in one point in time. Recall that Vicious was caught up in the past and kept dealing in ways that just weren't right anymore, and in not dissimilar ways, Wen is also caught in a destructive pattern, where he can't die, and he's lived way too long, and he's gotten a bit indifferent to anyone but himself.

To his credit, spike shoots him in the head. It doesn't take alas, and Wen already shot him in the arm, which leads to a scene where Jet's patching him up and spike apologises . . .but for what we're encouraged to speculate.

The guy who got Spike and co. roped up in this mess, a man named Giraffe (who was trying to save his friend Zebra--neither black nor white, as the plot of this episode is") has a ring with a very special stone, a stone that can return time to Wen.

There are about a dozen ways in which to do this, but Spike knows what makes good drama, and gets one single bullet made and tags Wen in the head, and just so we tie in the whole "devil child" motif that's run through the whole episode, there's a big fire roaring around them when he does so.

Fortunately it works and Wen goes all Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on us, whispering to Spike that he feels "heavy" and yet at peace (this will be contrasted later with the final song in the show. . .I did say this was layered with foreshadowing) and Spike flips Wen's harmonica up in the air and shoots it with his finger whispering "bang."

Ah, that's odd. Oh well, I'm sure it won't be important later.

This episode is not that bad, really, but works much better if you've already seen the series once. If you haven't, then it's a passable mystery with a few good hooks and a very grim noirish style to it that really keeps the episode moving along. It's nothing that hasn't been done before, but . . .well, that's not really the point.

"HEAVY METAL QUEEN"
"It's called heavy metal. It's quite soothing."

First things first: This song is rad as all hell:

"Heavy Metal Queen" is all about how a space trucker named V.T. is all sorts of awesome. She can kick ass with the best of them (In this case Spike, running a few gears lower this time because he's got a vicious hangover) and can pilot a space truck through a collapsing asteroid. He name means "victory dance" (sorta) for Christ's sake.

But less explosively, she's on her second life, much like spike. Her husband was an infamous bounty hunter who died, and then she became a trucker. Likewise, Spike was a criminal who became a bounty hunter. V.T.'s done all she can, to the point of hiding her real name so much that it's turned into a game for people to guess her name.

The interplay between the two of them is the dramatic heart of the episode (while the action is totally bitchin, it's framed by V.T. and Spike's interaction) V.T. hates bounty hunters and initially wants nothing to do with Spike when she finds out he's one. Spike did all he could to not be like Vicious (He'd "bled all that kind of blood" away, after all) and yet. . .it's V.T. who saves Spike when he recklessly ejects himself into the hard vacuum if space and nearly gets himself killed and it's Spike who figures out V.T.'s real name--"Victoria Terpsichore" ("Victoria"="Victory" and Terpsichore is the muse of dance. The More You Know . . .) while one of Bebop's themes is that your past is not so easy to outrun with a simple change of address, in this episode, we have a more benign version of that.

This is part of a subset of Bebop episodes throughout the run that are character studies wherein the main cast is paired up with a one-shot character and we're invited to examine the both of them working together (or against each other) in such a way as to allow us the luxury of comparing and contrasting them. Of course, there's still plenty of great action and atmosphere here and the episode is well worth a look.

"WALTZ FOR VENUS"
"He was a great guy. Exactly like the person you thought he was."

Well, for those of you keeping track of all the eye imagery in Bebop, this episode is about as on the nose as you could get short of 22 minutes of Spike kicking a giant eyeball. We start with Spike stopping a hijacking (after being rudely awoken--I like this his sleep blindfold has eye painted on the outside) and runs into Rocco, who is so blown away by Spike, he annoys him into teaching him some of his fancy moves (and Spike takes the opportunity to drop a little Burce Lee on him) and more importantly, gets Spike to hold his MacGuffin for him, and draws Spike into the plot, which is full of eye and vision metaphors.

Rocco, you see, has a sister who's been blind because of a rare condition which affects people on Venus. He's stolen a plant from the group of thieves who were looking to sell it for huge amounts of money, because it can be synthesized into a cure for her blindness.

There's a couple of hooks here--we have all the eye imagery and important plot elements hinge on a music box (this will be important later) Rocco's fate is foreshadowed by a shot so long it must be deliberate of Spike looking at a sign that says "Observation: You can see one off" moments after they talk.

Rocco appeals to Spike's mercy and compassion, Spike insists he's all out. His actions this episode give the lie to that. Rocco's sister, Stella, after meeting Spike says there's something beautiful inside him (just like her brother) Spike says he doesn't beleive that.

Rocco's attempt to help his sister gets him killed, and we have an intriguing bit where he wonders if he and Spike had met earlier would he have turned out different (again, time and timing at play) which, given what we already know about Spike, could be taken many different ways, I imagine.

The final scene, where Spike visits Stella in the hospital is rather sad, but features an interesting line from Spike, which was the quote of this episode, and it's a telling idea--that what a person "looks like" has as much (maybe more) to do with the image the seer has of the person than actually seeing them.

This is actually a much-beloved episode by people other than me. I find myself wanting to like it more than I actually end up liking it. It has some good ideas and is rather thought-provoking, but it never quite clicks together for me.

"JAMMING WITH EDWARD"
"Always alone."

In which Spike answers a question before he asks it, and the Bebop gets a new crew member.

Here's more eye imagery--specifically the HAL-like "eye" of MPU, a satellite that apparently got self-aware, then got bored and starting drawing the Nazca lines on South America out of . . .nostalgia? It's not entirely clear, but then it's not meant to be. The actual answer is much more intriguing, but we'll get to that in a bit.

We learn a little more about what happened to Earth after the gate accident--apparently it rains moon-rocks there like, all the damn time, and everyone on Earth is a little strange, not least of which Edward herself (it blows my mind that the English voice actor for Ed was also Gaz on Invader Zim. Talk about establishing two opposing poles. . . ) who is a genius hacker despite the notable handicap of being absolutely insane.

It's Ed who makes contact with (and names) MPU, whose habit of going all Banksy with the laser satellites surrounding Earth and who becomes their means of communicating with the crew of the Bebop, who are there to collect the bounty on MPU (which goes up in smoke, because satellites aren't sentient, according to the police. I hate when I lose money due to issues of philosophy) in the best tradition of these kinds of capers, no one on the Bebop really gets the idea of hacking, which allows for Jet to get this zinger off on Faye:

"It may have been that way when you were young, but that was a long time ago."

Yeah, it seems like not much of a sick burn, but if I wrote it down in my notes, that meant it was probably some kinda foreshadowing.

Tying into our theme for this week, MPU is trying to recapture the past Earth and the strange drawings he used to see from up in orbit. You're not really a Bebop character unless you're trying to live in or escape from some period of time, are you?

So the Bebop crew "captures" MPU more or less and in trying to puzzle out what a satellite was doing drawing things in the Earth, and Spike answers quite plainly: "It was lonely, so it drew itself some friends." Think about that and then look at the scene where, as he did the previous two times, Spike's complained about a new crew-member on the Bebop. I refuse to believe this isn't intentional.

We get another great line from Faye about how "some promises are made to be broken--in fact, most of them are." Which tells you a lot about how she views promises (yet she's frequently bailed out Spike and co. even when it wouldn't possibly profit her. Funny, that)

This is the intro of Ed, and Ed episodes tend to follow their own surreal childlike logic, and this episode is no exception. There's a weird sense of playfulness to the episode (bitchin' action scene with Spike flying in to capture MPU notwithstanding) and the whole thing has a breezy gentleness to it--since the bad guy's not really bad and he doesn't really get caught either. Plus, Ed will slowly be driving nearly every member of the crew crazy, so there's that to look forward to as well.

"GANYMEDE ELEGY"
"I live and wander with a group of weirdos"

I wonder sometimes is Jet Black isn't the most tragic character in the entire show. Oh, we'd like to think it's spike, or it's Faye, but consider this: Jet continually does the right thing over and over again and he seems to get nothing but misery out of it. We'll see more of this in "Black Dog Serenade," but this is the first really detailed look we get into his past and his life.

Of the quintet of episodes this time around, this is the one most blatantly about "time." Part of that has to do with the pocket watch Jet carries, frozen on the moment in time where the woman he loved, Alisa, left him.

Bit on the nose, sure, but then the whole episode is about being frozen in a moment in the past. Jet's great gift--he's nicknamed "the Black Dog" because one he gets his teeth into something he never lets go--is also the thing that causes him the most pane in this episode--he's stuck in this moment, and the reason Alisa left him was because he was so rigidly overprotective, she felt like a child.

I'm not sure she exactly traded up, but that's kinda pointless to the larger themes at work. That theme, as well as time, is futility. Faye puts it best when describing her suntanning routine thus:"Beautiful skin can only be maintained by tireless efforts which are ultimately futile." That she's telling Ed this while Ed tries to unsuccessfully fish and Jet fails to get much closure from the whole business with Alisa.

While he does ultimately toss the pocket watch in the water, understanding at last that time can't stand still, that this knowledge gives him any peace at all is unlikely. While we move on, and can ultimately let go of things, the notion that it gives you any kind of "closure" is probably wishful thinking, and more likely, as Jet says, "little by little, a part of you just goes numb."

And on that rather down note, we're going to leave it there. Join us next week when we learn some valuable lessons in "Toys in the Attic:; groove on through the mid-season finale (kinda) in "Jupiter Jazz, Parts 1 and 2"; and get caught in a landslide, no escape from reality in "Bohemian Rhapsody." See you in 7.

Just Sayin'--BATWOMAN #4 and JUSTICE LEAGUE#4

2012-01-19T19:23:00.003-05:00

To no one's shock, these are ridiculously late because that's how things work here. But here, for the benefit of several, here's two issues I janked from my new comics pile today:

BATWOMAN #4--Erm. Much as I wanna like this, I can't really say I did. It's not that Flamebird gets "fridged" or whatever the term is, it's just how unnecessary the whole thing feels. Flamebird runs off half-cocked, gets nearly stabbed to death just so she can give up Kate's name to Cameron Chase and the various plots (save for Kate and Maggie getting together) just kinda stop so we can get that plot beat done. And because that's all we have going on here, it makes it feel even more arbitrary.

Do we need Flamebird? Really? She's been trailing along as a continuity artifact for decades and she's only ever hauled out to mess stuff up for the main character of the book or be played for a joke, and if that's the case, why fucking keep using her? No one likes her, she's not an interesting character (she's at best like the Booster Gold of the Teen Titans set, and all her bellowing about "I was a Titan" only looks foolish because all that got pitched out with the reboot, dinnit?) and the role could be filled by anyone, so why do we keep going round and round like this?

I'm being hard on the book, and it's not as if it's taken a dip in quality (looks beautiful, really) but this is the first time that the storytelling really fell down and we spent a month in Plot Convenience Playhouse. I hope the last two issues of this arc are more true to form, because this was really thin soup.

JUSTICE LEAGUE #4--Reading this book is like the movie Groundhog Day. New character shows up, acts like a jackass, falls in with the team when more para-demons come in, lather, rinse, repeat. This time, it's Aquaman's turn and it has absolutely no impact because FOUR PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY DONE THIS SCHTICK. THERE IS NO NEED TO DO IT A FIFTH TIME AS IT MAKES THE ENTIRE CAST LOOK UNLIKEABLE AND NOT LIKE PEOPLE I WANT TO SPEND MONEY READING ABOUT.

Sorry for the caps lock, but fucking really, y'all. Even early Image comics weren't this shrill.

Oh, and Cyborg gets all . . .cyborg-y. For something that takes up so many pages, it sure does feel like an afterthought.

That said, the double page spread where Darkseid farts so hard that the Justice League is blown away was an interesting artistic choice on the part of Jim Lee. Didn't add to the drama, but so few gods of evil announce their presence with bombastic flatulence that I felt like it was quite the novelty.

I . . .really am not crazy about the backmatter stuff which implies that damn near every evil scientist is working at S.T.A.R. Labs. Trying to impose this kind of rigidity out of the gate on your superhero universe seems. . .intentionally limiting. Plus, that's six pages where Darkseid could have been farting and blowing shit up.

The Whole Damn Thing: COWBOY BEBOP #1

2012-01-15T10:44:00.004-05:00

. . .well, it was the clear winner of my "what shall I review next?" contest (with two whole votes. My majorities are generally silent) so I guess we have to do it. Plus, at a neat seven weeks, this'll hold us until we get to Mad Men's 5th season starting in March. Here, for your entertainment and edification, we here at Witless Prattle will be covering the entire run of the rather awesome anime (awesome especially for people who generally don't like anime) Cowboy Bebop.

First, a brief word about how I'm going to be covering this: Typically, I tend to do long rambling intros with information about the character and the background of the series and all that. Not going to be doing it this time, as half of what makes Cowboy Bebop so good is that you're not really given a whole lot of backstory about the world or the characters.

Rather than that feeling like half-baked storytelling, it's . . .not, really, and I'm going to attempt, and in all likelihood fail to explain it. You're given certain impressions of the main cast, and expected to make up your own mind about it. The goal is not to give you the kind of backstory you could pull off a Wikipedia entry, but to give you a sense of the person, and as you watch Bebop, draw your own conclusions about what's what.

Typically, I hate that kind of thing, but they make it work here. It's not unlike Blade Runner, wherein the story behind the story is

Oh yeah, another programming note. I reserve the right to stop the reviews at any time and draw your attention to certain selections in the soundtrack. Because it is (along with the soundtrack for FLCL) an amazing soundtrack, full of multiple genres, and it easily transcends genre and indeed its parent anime and can fully be enjoyed on its own.

I have a LOT of Bebop music on my MP3 player.

Okay, let's get right to the heart of this thing!

"ASTEROID BLUES"
"This is all very mystic and all, but do you have anything to eat?"

First things first, we need to address this stuff at the start--There are two kinds of people: Those who think "Tank!" is an absolutely banging thing to play over the intro to your TV show, and assholes:

After a flashback which is terribly stylish but doesn't mean too much to us [yet] we meet our heroes, Spike Speigel, the lanky green-haired guy who might remind you of Lupin III and Jet Black, who may remind you of Daisuke Jigen (If you have no idea who either of those people are, it's not that important, just recognising the general reference for both characters) Spike and Jet are broke and hungry, being that they're bounty hunters in space and while they're pretty good at their job, they have a tendency to cause so much damage in the doing of it that any profits.

One of the things you don't really notice about the series as a whole until you've seen it through a time or two is the recurring eye motif that's sprinkled throughout, from the eye-shape of the exit to the hyperspace gate, the iris in the intro, to the way this episode's villain, Asimov uses his super-drug Bloody Eye--by spraying it into his eye, which somehow gives him, well, kinda-superpowers.

Asimov and his girlfriend have picked an out of the way place to compete a Bloody Eye deal, but really, the plot's not super-important, except as a vehicle for the characters to do their thing. In this case, it's to give Spike a big showcase and let us in on some things about him which we won't be able to contextualise until we're a bit further along.

For now, all we have are an allusion he makes that he was killed by a woman before, no one seems to know when he's joking or not (which he uses frequently in this first brace of episodes to cause people to underestimate him) and my God does he kick a lot of ass. He's the only person that Asimov, all hopped-up on eyedrops can't murder outright, and is so good, in fact, he actively seems to be messing with him in various moments.

Ultimately though, as frequently happens in Bebop, the situation spirals out of Spike and Jet's control, and there's an intriguing callback to the prophecy of "being killed by a woman" that unspools in a way not precisely as you'd expect.

This is a pretty good intro to the series. It gives you a clear picture of these characters and what they do, even if the "why" is not entirely clear. It rolls along at a pretty fierce clip, has some amazing action scenes, and the music is pretty damn awesome. You won't be able to make much sense of the clues about Spike until you've seen the final episode, but really, you have to approach Bebops as being more a story of the journey and not the destination, as after 26 episodes with these people, a lot of the heavy lifting about what it all means is going to be left to the viewer to draw his own conclusions.

Oh yeah, and the song over the end credits, "The Real Folk Blues," was what made me fall in love with this show.

"STRAY DOG STRUT"
"SHIT! THIS IS WHY I HATE PETS!

If "Asteroid Blues" was a slick but very thin noirish episode, "Stray Dog Strut" goes pretty much in the direction of pure comedy. Essentially, it's Spike chasing after a dog and a guy who looks like Kareem Abdul-Jabar for 22 minutes. It's dressed up with a lot of hugger-mugger about the dog in question being a "data dog," which sounds impressive, but is rather light on actual facts.

The data dog in question is an adorably precocious Welsh Corgi named Ein, who takes an immediate liking to Spike (much to Spike's irritation) and seems to be pretty adept at getting himself out of scrapes. Ein becomes the first new crew member on the Bebop (Jet's ship) and thus begins a recurring theme of them getting new crew members who don't profit them at all, and even though they complain the whole time . . .Spike and Jet never really seem to get around to throwing them off the ship.

For the second time in as many episodes, there are attempts at prophecy or divination that don't quite come off as you'd imagine, partly because they're so vague they could mean anything, and also because by the time the person finally spits it out, it's not the future anymore.

"Stray Dog Strut" is generally lighthearted, and even the soundtrack underlies that, featuring ska-style music over the final chase and the brassy tune, "Want It All Back" that plays over the first:

If you go into it looking for a frothy stylish caper show, you'll get a lot out of it. Just be aware that this kind of mood whiplash is the norm for this show.

"HONKY TONK WOMEN"
"Somehow, I don't think Charlie Parker'd be quoting Goethe."

Enter Faye Valentine, the Fujiko Mine of the show, if you're still doing the Lupin III comparisons. Frequently, and most especially in this episode and the one following she's as much an ally as an affable adversary--she's perfectly willing to snooker the Bebop crew out of a fat bounty as she is to beg them for help when she ends up broke and stranded--Faye being up to her eyeballs in debt is a common theme with her.

Faye doesn't have a past as such, or not one she's willing to share (or, as we discover later, entirely comprehends) except we know from her dealings with Gordon the casino boss this episode that she's assumed to be the legendary Poker Alice. Faye points out if she was, she'd be 200 years old, which is . . .not really a denial. Later on she claims to Spike and Jet that she's a gypsy, which is not technically true, and yet . . .

The caper this time out is that Faye is hired by Gordon to cheat at cards and get a special poker chip--one which contains a smaller microchip with the ultimate decryption program on it (Hopefully the irony of a program which is designed to reveal all things kept secret on a show where the amount of things kept secret could fill a small building if you printed it out is not lost on you) Spike very helpfully swallows the chip and keeps it out of Faye's hands (he can cough it up at will, which he demonstrated earlier in the episode, in a nice subtle touch) and they try to sell it back to Gordon for a higher fee than Faye's bounty.

The denouement of this takes place in space, and features one of the coolest things about bebop--here's a show that understands that space has three dimensions and there is no real "up." This is shown off in a very elaborate action climax which features Spike fighting in an EVA suit on Gordon's ship while the Bebop is inverted above/below (depending on your perspective) it. Pretty gnarly.

While Faye hasn't technically joined the Bebop crew yet, she's been drawn into their orbit, which we'll see play out in the very next episode. This episode continues the early run of the show's predilections for flashy, stylish action sequences that offer plenty of opportunities for the cast to strut their stuff and it plays really well. We're getting a few crumbs of clues about who they are, but there's still a few pieces to put into place yet . . .

"GATEWAY SHUFFLE"
"I don't know and I have no opinion."

Spike and Jet try to stop a group of environmental terrorists from turning everyone into primates with a genetically engineered virus. Faye helps for purely mercenary reasons, and naturally ends up with nothing because that's just how these things go.

This is the first instance of something which happens again in the movie--while trying to collect on a bounty, Spike and Jet get snatched up in something that is wayyyyy above their level--in this case, biological warfare.

I should also add that the head of the Space Warriors terrorists, Twinkle Maria Murdock, is this year's recipient of the Daisy O'Mega Cool Yet Ridiculous Name Award, even if she is a stuck-up bitch who ends up not being a smart as she thought she was.

Spike, however, gets to show off why underestimating him is such a dangerous thing, as his initially reckless attempts to open up an ampule of the virus, which seems like it would be a hatefully dangerous thing to do, but he's actually doing it to watch Murdock's reactions to it--thus, he knows it's dangerous enough for her to worry about, which comes in handy later.

We get a cool space battle (in hyperspace!) as well, the denouement of which fills us in a little on how hyperspace works in the Cowboy Bebop universe. I quite like that we get little bits of world-building like that with such economy.

Faye also joins the crew in much the same way that Ein did--with Spike and Jet bitching about it the whole time. Also as with Ein, while she gets on their nerves, they don't seem in so much of a hurry to throw her off the ship (the punchline of this episode notwithstanding) which says as much as what they do.

"BALLAD OF FALLEN ANGELS"
" . . .you sing off-key."

And now here's the episode that starts answering a lot of questions about Spike, and as with the best kinds of those episodes, it brings up twice as many questions.

The teaser from last episode makes explicit a recurring motif of Spike's--that he's living a dream he can't wake up from. This will ultimately hit a critical mass at the finale of the series, but we're a way's away from it, and this is only the leading edge.

A man named Mao Yenrai, who works for the Red Dragon Syndicate, is murdered just as he makes peace with a rival syndicate by a man named Vicious, who, and I may be reaching here, is the Goemon of the show, with a little Captain Harlock thrown in. Vicious is a horrifically amoral killer who takes a quiet glee in killing people. More on him later.

Before he dies, Yenrai gets off a good line about how times have changed and the kind of bloodletting that Vicious deals in have to stop, which is a good bit, and ties into this episode's recurring bloody imagery and the notion of characters who are locked in specific times, which applies neatly to about 80% of the cast, now that I think about it.

There's a bounty out for Yenrai, and Spike's resolved to go after it. Jet balks at it, wanting no part of anything that dangerous, but Spike's still resolved to go. It's obvious there's something else at work here, but Spike isn't talking. When Jet presses him on it, Spike reflects the question by asking how Jet got his artificial arm. Neither is willing to answer the other, which is kind of the problem underpinning this episode.

As Spike's leaving, Jet notices that he dropped a card--the Ace of Spades.

Also known as the death card. Ah well, probably means nothing.

Faye, coming in at the 11th hour and not really caring about their tiff, looks at the dollar signs for Yenrai and, in trying to collect the bounty, meets up with Vicious and gets herself captured. I've not mentioned how often Faye gets handcuffed or is otherwise in some kind of bondage, so let me make a note of it here, as I'm sure someone out there reading this is probably into that, so let me point it out here: Faye spends a lot of time in bondage of some sort. There.

Spike, meanwhile, follows the trail to a woman named Annie, who knows him, and is more than a little shocked to see him still alive. She claims that Yenrai never thought he was dead and we get the impression that he was some sort of mentor for Spike and what's more, we learn that Vicious has a history with both men, and that Yenrai took Vicious in and "made him everything he was." Vicious kind corroborates this, but seems to imply that he lost respect for Yenrai because he because "a beast that lost its fangs." Whatever that means.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Faye calls in Spike and Jet, and Jet's all like "Screw you, you got yourself captured." but Spike decides to go for her for reasons of his own, one assumes. I should add that the tracks that plays as Spike walks to the church where the showdown takes place, "Rain" is another awesome track

The subsequent fight in the church is pretty awesome as well, partly because the setting of the church really elevates the scope of the fight and provides a really slick Gothic backdrop to things, but mainly because it's a substantially different fight that we've seen before, because Spike is overmatched from the beginning, takes more than a few share of hits, and when he finally fights Vicious, we're put on notice that this guy is Bad News, because he's the only one we've seen thus far who can hang with Spike and ultimately beat his ass and toss him out the window, considering how easily Spike runs rings around most of the bad guys so far, it's a big deal.

As Spike tumbles out the window, we get a series of flashbacks (punctuated by shots of, you guessed it, Spike's eye) which gives us some picture of Spike and Vicious' backstory--they were allies, there's a woman involved, and apparently Spike "died" as a result of all this, but how much of that is fact and how much of it is conjecture is, well, I did say that a lot of Bebop was you putting the puzzle pieces together.

We finish up with Spike, bandaged to the point of mummification hassling Faye, who shreds a pillow over his head (giving us a rain of feathers which calls back to the episode title) and leaves the Ace of Spades on Spike's head. Not that that probably means anything.

While the previous 4 episodes had been slick and action-packed, they'd been a bit samey and stingy and a little formulaic. It's this episode that finally gives us a peek at what's going on and raises the stakes in a real way. It's the first great episode of the series, and an ideal place to close out our inaugural edition of this feature.

And that's gonna do it for this week. Join us next week when Spike declares war on lids in "Sympathy for the Devil"; we have an extended debate over the proper way to make a prairie oyster in "Heavy Metal Queen"; Spike gets an apprentice of sorts in "Waltz for Venus"; the final member of the Bebop crew arrives in "Jamming with Edward"; and Jet gets mad at his watch in "Ganymede Elegy." See you in 7!

I Read This--DAREDEVIL #3 (2011)

2012-01-11T21:36:00.002-05:00

I have a relationship with the character of Daredevil much like my relationship with Batman. It is one characterised by a sort of benign neglect--I have been aware that many people are writing Daredevil and Batman stories, I just never saw much of a need to actually, y'know, read them.

Most of this was due to the fact that a lot of very good Batman and Daredevil stories came out in the moment of my personal golden age (12 years old) and they had such a lasting impact that they made following up an impossible act to follow (not least because everyone who came on after seemed determined to do a mannered cover version of those seminal works which typically only carried the surface elements forward while missing things like subtlety and craft) but most because I felt like I'd gotten everything I needed in those stories and there wasn't a great deal of curiosity on my part to read more.

And, it seems, in the case of daredevil, I didn't miss much, as everyone followed the recipe of "make the title character's life a grinding hell" to ever more diminishing returns. Oh sure, there were the occasional bits of new takes to be had--the times daredevil started beating indestructible robots with sticks, fighting demonic vacuum cleaners, and a few other bits of business, but not much air got in, as the Frank Miller cover band ground on and on.

Near the middle to late 90's an attempt was made to do something a little different. Joe Kelly and Karl Kesel tried to take Daredevil back to something like his original conception as a devil-may-care man of action, and while it got pretty good notices at the time, it was scuppered as soon as Kevin Smith came on, and no expense was spared at the time by the new regime slagging off the old and getting back to the Frank Miller fanfiction.

In any event, the time to Try Something Different, seems to have come again. Mark Waid's Daredevil has been getting some pretty positive notices, and I decided to pick up an issue and see what it was all about. In an added ironic touch, in this issue, Daredevil fights Klaw, who was the guy he fought in the first issue of Daredevil I ever bought.

It's . . .good. It's got an interesting plot hook that manages to tie the villain into Daredevil's civilian milieu, the use of Klaw is rather novel, and the whole thing zips along at a clip so swift as to be virtually unheard of in this day of dragging everything out as long as possible. It's really well done, actually.

Will I come back for another issue? I don't know. I was really never that high on Daredevil and I can't say I really followed it with any great consistency. But I would like to read the early issues in trade (and plan to buy said trade), and I would say that if you like Daredevil and would like to see that it doesn't always have to be Frank Miller fanfiction, this is well worth a look.

Democracy In Action Thwarted By My Undemocratic Inaction!

2012-01-05T20:15:00.002-05:00

Well, being that it's 2012 already and I totally sat this one out, I figure I should bring it back one more time to see what y'all think I should cover for this year. For those of you (OK, all of you, myself included) if you wanna see it in more detail, here's the link to the original post, explaining all about the candidates in detail.

And here's out current standings as we left them half a year ago.:

BABYLON 5--zero votes
CRUSADE--1 vote
MAD MEN (Seasons 1-3)--zero votes
DEADWOOD--zero votes
COWBOY BEBOP--2 votes.

We'll try one more time to see about getting some votes together! I really am sorry about dropping the ball like this, y'know.

Just Sayin'--No Room For Panic

2012-01-03T11:23:00.002-05:00

Well, 3 days into the new year and we finally talk about comics.

Once upon a time, there was this movie, and everyone went to see it. A lot of people loved it and it was really influential. There was a time that everything that came out in that movie's genre took its cues from that movie. That movie got two sequels and everyone like the two sequels to that movie, and they liked those movies (collectively) so much they were still chattering on about how they wanted more nearly 25 years after that movie came out.

"More," they said. "Give us MORE!"

And then came the news that there was going to be more movies. Even better, they were going to be set before that movie so now, finally fans of that movie would be able to see how it all began. All the questions would be answered, and the long wait would soon be over and there's be more.

And more is always better, isn't it?

Oh, I'm getting off-point. Anyways, the day finally came when the prequel to that movie came out. And what, pray tell, was this movie, this surely worthy successor to the movie that had been so widely seen, widely loved, and so influential?

I think it was called The Phantom Menace.

"What the hell is THIS shit?" they said.

Think about that as you follow those Bleeding Cool leaks, won't you?

Days Gone By--CAPTAIN POWER AND THE SOLDIERS OF THE FUTURE

2012-01-01T12:27:00.004-05:00

Man, it's great when circumstances collude to provide content.

Back not so very long ago (but ages in Blogtime) during the inaugural edition of this little feature, longtime friend of the Prattle, the illustrious Diana Kingston-Gabai pointed out that while Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers may have it's charm, it's a hell of a hurdle to its credibility when the main characters are riding robot horses in the intro whilst synthesizers blare.

And I had no comeback for this, except to shrug and say "well, it was kind of what you had to do then." And it kind of was, because at the end of the day, you had to sell toys, that was what you were there for, and that was all the sponsor cared about (well, that and taking the curse off the people who were pointing and shouting at them for being History's Greatest Villains for creating 30-minute adverts that kids seemed to want to watch without needing guns put to anyone's heads)

It's pretty cool in a sense--provided you hew to a handful of directives, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted., and by the end of the golden age for this kind of stuff (let's set the date at 1987. I said 1988 last time, but I'm only human--born to make mistakes.) the people creating them had worked that out, and you got stuff that was a bit more ambitious than the usual fare--stuff like Galaxy Rangers, Spiral Zone, and today's subject Captain Power And The Soldiers of the Future (which I will refer to as Captain Power until I forget to) which I was lucky enough to be gifted the full series on DVD for Christmas.

Circumstances conspired to make this happen, is what I'm saying.

Nominally, Captain Power was made to sell toys, of course, with a cool gimmick--essentially, the vehicles are light guns and you pointed them at the strobing targets on the screen and racked up points. The TV show could strobe back at you and if you took enough hits, your jet exploded. Kinda.

It seems pretty daft now, but at the time, it was pretty slick (and the Phantom Striker is just an awesome design. If anyone wants to snag me one on eBay, I will speak highly of you), and led to a lot of puffery in press about how this was a bold new frontier in TV which would allow us to truly interact with the programs we were watching (otherwise known as every damn article ever written about every innovation in television ever.) even though it was the same damn technology as an NES Zapper, and we'd had those for two years already.

But if you're around 11, this shit seems major, especially when they sell it to you by completely fucking with your head, as they do in the teaser commercial:

Score or be hit. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SCORE OR BE HIT!!

I'd like to think the whole notion of "breaking into the TV signal" came about because this guy had been in the news not so very long ago. I have no proof, but any time I have the opportunity to post a link to it and possibly cause nightmares is an opportunity I would be a fool to pass up. This has been one of those opportunities.

You might be able to detect, ever so subtly, that this is a little different from the typical way toys are being huckstered. We'll get to that in second.

Concurrent with the toys, a TV series was mooted. This would be live action (a rarity back in those days) and would feature CGI character interacting with human characters. Take note: this is 1987, so the CGI is naturally incredibly recognizable because it's so goddamned shiny and looks exactly like something done with the bleeding edge of computers in 1987 (for some perspective--we'd only just moved to 3.5 diskettes and that was seen as a quantum leap. Think about this) so we're really trading on the novelty at this point more than anything else.

Now, remember, all his is in the service of selling toys, or so the verdict on high says. Bear this in mind as the intro tries (heroically) to hard sell you on this.

Right so--it's the future, everyone's dead, some rather dodgy CGI is hunting down the final pockets of humanity and making their faces melt into video effects, and the only hope are five guys, and their leader's helmet doesn't even fit properly. Plus the show is called "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future," which as even J. Michael Straczynski, who worked on the show, said was "the worst title in the history of anything."

Much as we may hate to admit it, he kinda has a point.

So, with all that against it, why are we talking about it? Because despite all these handicaps, it's basically Terminator: The Kid's Show. Because despite the mandate to sell toys, and the ropiness of the production, the people writing it are actually trying to do an honest-to-god grown-up SF show.

The problem is that that doesn't really exist yet. More on that later, let's actually get into the details of the story, shall we?

In the far-ish future, all combat is done by machines and directed by computers, which has led to essentially a permanent stalemate. To break the stalemate and provide a more evenhanded control over military forces Stuart Power and Lyman Taggert build Overmind (not that one. Also not the Overfiend, thank god) Naturally, calling your computer "Overmind" is totally not going to be a regrettable choice should said computer lose his shit and turn against humanity.

Taggart, impatient with Overmind's development, plugs himself into the machine, and this makes him insane and makes Overmind lose his shit and turn against humanity. Taggart gets blown up and is rebuilt as Lord Dread, leading to people remembering Captain Power (if they remember it at all) as "that show with the guy who looks like the Borg" and Dread starts a fascist cult of Dread Youth (in a show with total war, mass slaughter, concentration camps, did you not think they wouldn't play the Nazi card too?) while Overmind digitises whatever humans are left, with the intention of collating them and finally deleting them.

Let me stop here and point out again that this is a kids show, and humanity has already fucking lost. The new normal is a fight for whatever can be salvage out of the ruins. The planet is totally fucked, there's barely anyone left, and . . .well, go by toys kids, and try not to think about how much of a brainfucked Rorschach blot of Cold War paranoia this is.

Stuart Power kinda anticipated this, and so was creating the Phoenix Program, which boils down to special digitizer-resistant power suits. And there's maybe seven of them. To fight an enemy that has the entire planet in its grasp. He also--and man, how lucky was this?--was training his son Jonathan (because only people named "John" get to fight to fight the machines in post-apocalyptic hellscapes) on the mathematically insignificant chance that Overmind would go nuts and wage a war of extinction on humankind. Jonathan gets his power suit and forms the backbone of the Soldiers of the Future, who deserve a ROLL CALL! right about now don't they?

CAPTAIN POWER--The leader of the group, Power is also the nexus of this show's schizophrenia. Because Power has to be the bold square-jawed hero and profess something other than a grim determination to survive at any cost, Power carries the bulk of the show's heroism, which is good in theory--lead character, right?

The problem is, he's also painfully naive and I think he gets betrayed, tricked, suckered, or trapped like 5 times in the first disc of this series alone. He's also upstaged by Pilot as a character in just about every way, but we'll get to her in a bit.

"HAWK" MASTERSON--Like Mr. B Natural, Hawk new Jonathan's father and worked with him on the Overmind and the Phoenix Program. Essentially he's Team Dad and has a role beyond being the guy who has the same laser fight with Soaron in the sky every third episode or so (seriously, this show reuses footage a lot) which is good.

"TANK" ELLIS--You may remember Tank from being the big guy with the hammer from Conan the Barbarian or as laFours from Mallrats, and of course, I would be the kind of anorak who would know this. Even on the DVD they joke about his role in movies was to be the big strong guy who gets killed before he has to talk (his accent is awfully thick, as the show demonstrates) Tank is the team's Big Strong Guy, a genetically-engineered supersolider from Babylon 5 (no, not that one. Not yet, anyways) He's apparently supposed to be leading a life of peace, which explains him shooting people all the time.

"SCOUT" BAKER--Our stealth specialist, Scout has a lot to do, but doesn't get near the level of character development he should, which is a shame, as the one time he does (in the final episode) he really sells the anecdote about his family. Scout was pretty awesome, and I wish he'd gotten more time.

"PILOT" CHASE--Hey kids! Here's the breakout character of the show, and she's a chick! Pilot is the most awesome of the Soldiers, not because she's super-powerful or more competent than everyone else, but basically because she's the only one with a real character arc on the show, and I am going to spoil the shit out of it right now.

Before she was recruited, she served in the Dread Youth, which is exactly what it sounds like. Power finds her and convinces her to defect, but it leads to a recurring thing wherein she's called out for it, meaning the survivors don't trust her because of what she was, and the Dread Youth (who want to be digitised because Dread conflates it with religious enlightenment) think she's a traitor. Plus she has a crush on Power (God knows why--maybe she digs guys she has to bail out of danger all the time) which means that she's ill at ease on three sides and never really seems comfortable in her own skin.

This all comes to a head in the series finale, which frankly blew my young 11-year old mind. Left on her own in Power's base, Dread's forces overrun the base and Pilot holds them off long enough to save everything the Power team needs and blows up the base with her inside it. We're given pretty explicit direction that this was not just because she was wounded and couldn't get clear in time--that she wanted to kill herself.

This is the other thing people remember if they remember this show at all--because kid's shows did not end with lead characters committing suicide. It was a lot like the end of Blake's 7, which ended on a note even bleaker than this one.

I should point out two things:

Yeah, the command structure is incredibly confusing. Also, man, what a great idea it is to go up against a numerically superior force in shiny metal suits, huh?

Oh, and he's the bad guys, for balance:

SOARON--One of the Bio-Dreads who function as the field commanders for the Troopers, Soaron was the first creation of Overmind, and the beginning of the war against humans. Soaron initially seems like a generic second-in-command, but gradually gains something of a distinct personality as the show evolves, as his personality matrix is evolving unaccountably and he has a rival with the other field commander . . .

BLASTAAR-- No, not the Living Bomburst. Blastarr is the commander of ground forces for Lord Dread as is a major-league asshole. Has more guns than I am able to count and in the best Imperial Stormtrooper tradition, can't hit a bull in the ass with a steam shovel. Treats Soaron like shit because Blastarr's the new and improved model. Despite his braggadocio, Blastarr is not as smart as he thinks he is and is forever getting himself blown up and trapped underground.

LORD DREAD--Lyman Taggart plugged himself into Overmind and, well, neither of them has been the same since. Taggart came out with a headful of nonsense about "the perfection of the machine" (yes, he was editor for Wired magazine) and, after getting blown up a bit later, got turned into a half-robot. Despite selling out his own people and leading a genocidal war against them, Overmind doesn't trust him, and halfway through the season creates a robot lamed Lackki to function as a snitch.

Yes--a robot stooge named Lackki. I love this show for things like that.

OVERMIND--The problem with all these "war against the machines" high concepts is that giant computers are not, in and of themselves, visually very interesting. Overmind, being a weather balloon inside a hula hoop on top of a dry ice machine, is yet another attempt to overcome this obstacle. I leave it to you to determine if they succeeded.

This show was pretty unique in that the entire season has the rough shape of an arc. Essentially, the season is all about Power and co. finding about Dread's Project: New Order (no, not them.) which is Dread's plan to finish off humanity and start building his perfect world. Dread being dread, this involves poisoning them, digitizing them from orbit and raining fire on them from space.

And in perhaps the perfect encapsulation of this show and it's not-quite-kid's show-ness, Power succeeds in stopping it. Unfortunately, he does it a whole two episodes before the end of the season, which means the final two episodes (the one where Pilot dies) are a savage counterattack by Dread, who manages to pull an Empire Strikes Back and put Our Heroes backs against the wall only a little bit after what should have been his final defeat.

That kind of dichotomy--selling toys vs. telling a dark SF story--is the heart of what makes Captain Power such an interesting little historical curio. It doesn't really succeed in all it attempt to do, but the mere audacity in attempting to do them is itself interesting.

And obviously, as Captain Power is kind of forgotten 25 years later, it didn't really work. Part of it is, well . . .it's a bit of a feathered fish. Too grown up to really grip the kids, too kiddy to be taken seriously by grown-ups.

But it's still a snapshot of a transition that was happening at the time. One of the reason I look so close at shows like this is that the writers doing them really wanted to be writing grown-up SF television. But it didn't exist yet. So you did your time on the kid's shows, selling toys and trying to add your own personal touches here and there.

So what changed? Well, Star Trek: The Next Generation pots of money, and the powers that be started seeing there was really money in SF shows. So by the late 80's there's a bunch of SF (and SF-esque shows) shows on the air and by the turn of the decade, there's going to be even more--3 Star Trek shows, Babylon 5 (which had a good chunk of the people behind the scenes at Captain Power working on it), et al. Concurrently, the kids shows that ruled the 80's die off, barely remembered except by anoraks like me.

Captain Power gives us a great look at what that transition in action, and what the road ahead was going to look like. I can't say it's worth tracking down--it has aged horribly, and you are always acutely aware while watching it that it's not quite one thing or the other. But it certainly doesn't want for ambition, and if you wanted to see what kind of transition was happening during that time, well, it's worth a watch-through once.

Plus--hey, robot snitch named Lackki. Who doesn't like that?

Games People Play--THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII

2011-12-31T20:08:00.002-05:00

Well, I thought we'd commemorate the end of 2011 (a year I will be exceedingly happy to throw in the bin, because God DAMN it sucked) and post #400 of our little miracle we call Witless Prattle by completing the circle on a somewhat infamous feature.

If you remember, back in the Prattle's first year of issue, I looked at The King of Fighters XII, which was the most recent--and the first HD-ready--installment in the now nearly twenty year old series.

It was a disaster, and I was not kind about saying so.

Essentially, what we got was a half-baked game that had some great-looking character animation, but had no storyline, no end boss, and half the moveset gone. My litany against this awful, awful, game was only one of many--pretty much everyone panned it, and it was such a failure, in fact, that talk was afoot that SNK would probably be finished.

Well, since today we're looking at the 13th installment, the answer is "obviously, they weren't." The even better news is this: The King of Fighters XIII is the return to form that XII should have been, and features pretty much everything that was missing from that misbegotten mess.

This is good and bad, but we'll get to that in a little bit. The storyline picks up from XI again as effete antihero Ash Crimson finally pays off his ongoing master plan, which, I'm not going to lie, started out being overly baroque and ends in the most "wait, what?" way possible and a lot of things get explained and yet don't. I'm being intentionally vague, but even if I explained it in detail it would still make your head explode.

If this seems like an awful lot of tortured plot for a game which involves people beating the crap out of other people, let me remind you that previous storylines involved clones and satellites blowing up cities and millennia-old Japanese mythology. This is just about par for the course.

Gameplay-wise, things are back where they should be, featuring the usual teams of 3 vs. teams of 3 combat and an insanely cheap boss at the end, as is the custom with SNK games. To round out the package, there is a massively increased roster with a substantial increase in moveset (supplemented by 3 DLC characters who act as enhanced alternate versions of three of the cast members) two unlockable characters, and several different play modes.

It's not all sunshine and roses, however. The online is god-awful, despite the legion of killjoys online who will try to make it out to be your fault for not having a wired connection and playing with a joystick The Way God Intended. Fortunately, Atlus is on the case and an online patch is on the way to deal with the crippling lag which is a problem because . . .

KOF XIII has the strictest damn inputs for special moves I have ever seen. And given the depth of the combat system this time and how dependent it is on cancelling moves into other moves and all that, and since online is such a major part of the fighting game scene nowadays, it's kind of a major flaw.

(Then again, one might say that overly byzantine combo and combat systems, coupled with strict inputs and a rather unforgiving learning curve is what ensures your fighting game falls more on the Street Fighter 3 Third Strike--which demands a certain investment of time and is not for everyone--end of the scale, rather than the more accessible Street Fighter II, which pretty much anyone could pick up and play. I'm not saying that one or the other is good or bad, I'm just saying this is what the split between depth and accessibility looks like)

But the general underpinnings of it are sound (and they are making some headway to working on the problems, which is more than we ever got for KOF XII) and I've had more fun with this game than I have an game in a few months (though Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 was still the winner of the year) and over and above all that it's great to be able to have one of these end on a high note, so let me bottom line this by saying that the sins of the past are put to rest, and I have plenty of hope for King of Fighters XIV. This game is well worth your time.

Days Gone By--ADVENTURES OF THE GALAXY RANGERS

2011-12-12T08:16:00.003-05:00

(Beginning a new feature that will hopefully expand the scope of the Prattle, provide some content and has nothing to do at all with the fact that I haven't had any comics to talk about in a fortnight or so, here we take a look at my other big obsession--80's cartoons)

So, back in the early-to-mid 80's, thanks to a loosening of advertising guidelines with respect to children's television, it became OK to create cartoons based on toy lines whose sole purpose was to show off the toys with only the merest skein of a story to hold the whole thing together. This coincided with the rise of syndication as a major force in filling program hours (this would ultimately be killed dead by the infomercial at the end of the decade, but that's another rant altogether) The upshot was--there were more independent stations (typically UHF) and they needed airtime filled, and these were a good investment, as kids tuned in every day and pestered their parents for what they saw, and kids, being creatures of habit around the age of 10, would set aside hours of their live to circle round the TV and watch the damn things.

I speak from experience.

Now, for a successful cartoon back then, you needed a couple things. The first was a toy deal--whether the toy company instigated it or would back you with one later on is immaterial. The second was, you needed 65 episodes for a single season (Think about that--cartoons now are lucky if they have 65 episodes in their entire run) or enough to run an episode a day for five days of the working week for three months time.

So, when you get right down to it, mass production is really the goal here more than artistic expression. It's nice if it happens and the people are involved enough and care enough to raise it over and above the level of a toy ad, but in general the main goal is to full 65 half-hours and sell that bastard across the country. Then, if all goes well, you come back and do 65 more.

There are a number of ways to do it. Robotech squeezed three anime series together and sanded off the rough edges as much as they were able to make it a generational saga. Voltron did the same with two other anime series (though really everyone only knows the first one) Transformers did a 13-episode first season, and made up the difference with the second, G.I. Joe did three five-day miniseries before they rolled out the other 50 episodes in its first season.

Now, the point of this discursive blather is to set up a problem--generally, whatever your storytelling engine, sixty-five episodes of it is a fucking awful lot to do. Imagine watching the Coyote chase the Road-Runner every day for three months and see how long it takes you to get sick of it. Even the best shows can get numbing after awhile--how many times can you watch He-Man punch Skeletor, or Mumm-Ra get his ass kicked by furries (or heaven help us, Berbils) before the episode is a foregone conclusion?

Which finally, however many hundred words I've written thus far, to the subject of today's little rant: The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, a show you've never heard of, but should definitely check out, as it's an interesting little curio that generally managed to stay fresh through its only 65-episode season.

It also has one of the most badass intros of all time:

(Yes, you were just dropkicked in the face by the 1980s. Take it and like it.)

The folks behind Galaxy Rangers came to the table with a number of influences in their heads--Thunderbirds, X-Men, anime (especially Space Adventure Cobra) The Velvet Underground (no really!) and Westerns (obviously) and decide they were going to smoosh all that together into a tasty melange which manages to be traditional and offbeat and pretty awesome.

The general plot is more of a skeleton for the various sub-stories to run through, but here we go: After mankind has it's first contact with friendly aliens who give them hyperdrive technology, mankind starts its early colonisation efforts, which are fairly on-the-nose references to the Old West. However, as mankind makes its way to the stars, a crumbling but still powerful interstellar empire, the Crown, is still a force to be reckoned with.

From here, the plot vectors off in several directions, each of them a storytelling opportunity. Sometimes (merficully rare) episodes would involve a range war between colonists, or problems with aliens or colonisation tech gone amuck, Or the Rangers would run up against one of the minor gangs that plagued the colonies--the Black Hole Gang, Captain Kidd, and the awesomely named, yet sadly underused, Daisy O'Mega.

But the two main threads were directly tied to two of the Rangers, and it's past time we got to know them, so let's ROLL CALL this!

ZACHARY FOXX--The leader of the group, Foxx is tied most directly to the threat of the Crown Empire, as in the opening episode, his wife is kidnapped by the Empire and turned into a Psychocrystal (The leader of the Empire, the Queen of the Crown, creates Psychocrystal to power her Slaverlords, who enforce her will across the galaxy. Humans seem to make the most awesome psychocrystals) To get her back, Foxx gets cyborged and can turn his hand into a cannon. He's also played by Jerry Orbach who was on Law and Order forever. I would like to think these two things are related, but can't really finesse a reason why they would be.

NIKO--The Token Psychic Girl who's not a Token Psychic girl, Niko gets to kick ass with the boys and thankfully avoids being constantly kidnapped or a useless shrinking violet through most of the run of the show. Niko's psychic power is enhanced with the strength of her bionics (all the Rangers are cyborgs) but even if she didn't have that, her tendency to jumpkick people in the face or draw on them with the Ranger equivalent of a sawed off double-barrel shotgun. Niko is pretty damn hardcore, is what I'm saying.

SHANE GOOSEMAN--Man, the Goose, despite having a ridiculous name, ended up being the breakout character on this show. Gooseman is a Supertrooper, a pre-Rangers attempt by Earth's military to create super-soldiers. This went wrong, as they so often do, and in trying to juice them up, they created a bunch of super-powered psychotics, all except for Goose, who is the only stable one. Goose's bionics give him the power of reactive adaptation--whatever he needs to do to protect himself, his body will automatically adapt to protect himself. As a condition of his duty as a Ranger, Goose is also charged with hunting down the other renegade Supertroopers, which is our other long-running subplot through the show's run. Goose is also Clint Eastwood, more or less (mostly more) and is utterly badass. If you meet one of the ten people who remember this show, there is a better than average chance, 80% will say Goose was their favourite character.

DOC HARTFORD--Doc is the plucky comic relief of the group, and he sadly gets the least character development out of our little quartet. That said he's always quick with a joke (and his humour doesn't feel all that forced), never portrayed as less than competent, and actually has a pretty interesting skillset. Doc essentially has a Six Demon Bag of computer programs which can infiltrate and take over any computer system. Even better, said Six Demon Bag is shaped like a whiskey flask, which is all kinds of awesome. Despite getting the short end of the stick when it comes to character development, he's still just as cool as all the other guys.

I'm leaving out the rest of the extended cast or I'd be here all day. Wikipedia has a partial listing of them here (though they sadly omit Daisy O'Mega), and even the show's creators on the DVD commentary joke that they would gleefully add 5 10 characters per episode and think nothing of it--whatever broadened the scope of the show and gave them liberty to explore in later episodes was fine with them. Whatever else you can say about Galaxy Rangers or how well it aged, it one cannot fault for ambition.

So, uh, why is it mostly a footnote now? Well, it had a couple strikes against it--one, they couldn't quite balance their toy deal with their syndication clearance, it had the handicap of debuting simultaneous with two other space Westerns, the seriously cool Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs and the utterly wretched excuse for a cartoon that was Bravestarr (Seriously, I have seen few shows as utterly despondently terrible as fucking Bravestarr). But their main problem (and they're pretty up-front about this on the DVD) was that the show was successful in the wrong demographic--older and college kids loved it (especially in Europe), but as demographics didn't really make allowances for more grown-up kids digging cartoons at the time so while it completed its initial order, it wasn't brought back for a second series, although there was plenty of storytelling gas in the tank.

The entire series is available on DVD (and has been marked down in price quite a bit as well) and its well worth a look, as it presages quite a few things that would become more common practice (more obvious anime influences, arc stories, a little more maturity in characterisation, etc.) and pretty much did Firefly before Firefly was a thing. It's well worth your time!

The Witless Prattle Chronicles of THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES

2011-11-28T14:20:00.003-05:00

So, as I cast about for things to write about now that the Deep Space Nine reviews aren't around to give this stuff some kind of structure, wouldn't you know it, my sister lend me both DVD collections of Termintor: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was good in that I was rather keen to watch the whole thing (having frequently missed episodes here and there when was actually on the air) and I was even more grateful when I realised this was a rich vein to mine, as I could turn this into a blog post.

This then, is the resultant post.

Despite the best efforts of people making Terminator movies in this new century (and Kyle Reese inadvertently cock-blocking me that one time, in a story I will never tell you, but invite you to speculate about to your heart's content) I am a fan of the Terminator franchise . . .er, the first couple of movies, anyhow. Then came Terminator 3, which made me sad in that it managed to undo Terminator 2, more or less and did so rather lazily ("Wait at Crystal Peak" was all John Connor had to do? Really? A fucking shut-in with a ham radio could have managed that) and I haven't seen Terminator Salvation yet, because it's buried in my Netflix queue somewhere and Batman leading the war against the machines feels a little like a foregone conclusion, somehow.

So when a TV series was mooted, I was a little skeptical. Oh it could work--a long, open-ended chase structure has worked like gangbusters in the past: The Fugitive and The Incredible Hulk come to mind--but the most recent thing we'd seen from the franchise was Terminator 3 and . . .man, it was just so goddamn disappointing, wasn't it, and one wondered if the people who hold the reins on the Terminator franchise (God knows who they are, given that the rights issues for the Terminator derailed an attempt at a fifth movie recently. For all you or I know, we actually might own the rights for the Terminator franchise right now. We can't know for sure) would put their best foot forward.

Well, fortunately for me, they did. The first season of Terminator (I am not typing out "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" anymore, as that subtitle makes it seem about when she was 12 and vacationed in Nantucket and was all boy-crazy.) is actually pretty awesome, as it keeps the focused energy and stripped-down approach of the first and second movies--the good guys are being chased, and are on the defensive even though the mission statement of the TV show is that they're tired of running. It's a good enough concept . . .

. . .for the small handful of episodes that comprised the first season. It goes a bit like this: Sarah and John are saved by River Tam from Firefly who is a Terminator and has a time machine which allows them to jump from 1999 to 2007 and do what I did--namely, skip the third movie. From there, they decide to focus on eliminating the threat of Skynet rather than just running from the Terminators over and over again, and given how amorphous that threat turns out to be (Skynet is a chess program! No, wait it's this thing!) that's a broad enough goal to hang a TV series on.

The first season is pretty tight and there's not a lot of flab to be had--there's one recurring nemesis in Cromartie, the Terminator who ends up looking a hell of a lot like the guy who shot Wild Bill Hickock, a goal to track down The Turk, a chess program which is fated to become Skynet, and John and River Tam adjusting to life in high school, which River Tam adjusts to about as well as expected.

And then season 2 happens and it all goes a bit wrong. I'd like to think it's a fault of ambition more than anything, as Lost and Battlestar Galactica were busy making named for themselves at the same time Terminator is going on and that made it OK for shows of this genre to have lots of dangling plot threads, incoherent storytelling, and muddled questions with what turn out to be painfully boring answers, and a complete and utter lack of focus from what was pretty damn focused only a season before. And really, something with the name "Terminator" on it, shouldn't feel like it's spinning its wheels this much.

The second season stresses credulity and patience on so many fronts things ultimately break down. For one thing--who in the future doesn't have a fucking time machine? Seriously, half the population of Greater Los Angeles seems to be future refugees or Terminators. Jesse is perhaps the least convincing future solider ever minted, and her plot to keep John away from River Tam with Riley's Boobs (and to a lesser extent, Riley herself--I know this sounds salacious, but honestly . . .her boobs really are everywhere) would have some credibility if 1) we got some sense of the downside of John chilling with River Tam 2) Riley and Jesse weren't both lightweights and 3) It has a resolution that in any way justified the amount of time spent on it (SPOILER: it doesn't)

More than that, there's Sarah going nts and having visions (or maybe she isn't! HOLY SHIT WHAT SYMBOLISM) we've got the T-1000 who runs her own company who's doing . . .something, and for a large part that something seems to be playing with Bionicles and talking about Jesus, and everyone's just kinda hanging out in search of a direction.

And then with about two episodes to go, we get one, and for all the shit I have slung at the second season, I gotta say . . .I really do like the ending, as it manages to be something of a head-fuck, but in such a way that feels like a Terminator head-fuck would be rather than the whole nonsense with the dream sequences and three dots and all we'd slogged through previously.

Despite the wrongness of the second season generally, I found I still liked the show, and decided that the problems with the second season stemmed generally from the fact that they weren't really sure they'd have a second season after the first one, and they'd fallen in with a bad crowd (I very much hope we're done with the BSG era "whatever seems like a good idea at the time run with it and also talk about God some more" style plotting, because I am beyond done with that bullshit) but was a far surer way forward than damn near anything else the Terminator franchise has rolled out here since the second movie . . .

Just Sayin'--More Delayed New 52 Zaniness

2011-11-27T20:23:00.003-05:00

Checking in with some quick thoughts about the latest comics I got in the mail:

JUSTICE LEAGUE #2 and #3--Well, it's a bit less generic than before, but I'm not sure tying the various bits of DC continuity back to the Fourth World is such a great thing--it smacks a bit too much of the Ultimate Marvel continuity, which apparently blamed everything from mutants to the recurrence of gout on the Super-Solider serum.

That said, Wonder Woman wandering around DC with a sword asking if anyone has seen a harpy was a pretty cool bit.

BATWOMAN #3--The pause in my month that refreshes. The thrust of this issue is less the mystery of the Weeping Woman and more the pressure than Chase is exerting with her investigation. While it seemed like it was going to mess things up between Maggie and Kate last issue, the aftermath of Batwoman's first direct conflict with the DEO and the Weeping Woman ends up bringing them close together--that scene between the two of them was rather sweet, and I like the little formalist touch of the panels aligning as Kate changes out of her Batwoman outfit contrasted with Bette changing into her Flamebird suit.

That said . . .Flamebird is problematic, and despite the best efforts of all concerned to make her seem like she belongs in the, book, the whole deal feels like a hangover from the pre-Crisis Batwoman which is stuck on this book like a barnacle because everything that ever happened is important even when it's not, and I like Batwoman so much better when it's not being part of the trends that have all but eradicated my love of comics.

I'm willing to give them time to justify her inclusion, but for now . . .it's not really working for me, apart from giving JH Williams III the opportunity to do an awesome triple-scene final page with Kate and Maggie's scene flowing into the Weeping Woman's appearance and Flamebird going on patrol for the first time.

I'm still on board with this one--even if the story was utter dross, the art is beautiful and has some amazing formal touches to it. Looking forward to the final parts of this story.

Just Sayin'--And Now, A Brief Reaction To . . .

2011-11-25T21:04:00.003-05:00

. . .t he news that Marvel is doing a $100 Omnibus version of the utterly reviled and frankly batshit crazy Avengers: The Crossing

WHAT.

Just Sayin'--And now, some Shameless Boasting

2011-11-22T11:52:00.002-05:00

Like everyone with a Blogger account, the occasional long silences between me writing about stuff, has occasioned me to visit my Stats tab and wonder if there is, in fact, anyone out there.

If you've never been, I encourage you to go, because it will be something of a revelation. Because I have found, without fail, that the two things that draw people like a magnet or things that a magnet might attract are "power girls tits" (no surprise there--I think if ever I want to game the system and up traffic, I'm gonna just start going back and randomly inserting synonyms for boobies into all the old posts) and "Best Dinosaur Comics," referring to th is early post I wrote about how awesome Dinosaur Comics is.

This intrigues me on many levels because

1) This means there are a hell of a lot of Dinosaur Comics fans out there

2) They read my blog.

3) Ok, just that one post.

4) But they read it, like, a lot. Every week it's the top hitter, near about.

I would like to think, then, that upon getting a signed copy of the newest Dinosaur Comics collection "Everyone Knows Failure Is Just Success Rounded Down" (which I highly encourage you to buy immediately, if not sooner. It's an awesome book which will make you a better person) that the following was included as gratitude for my service in spreading the word about Dinosaur Comics' awesomeness:

But nahh, it's just coincidence (and money. I think I would now like to be famous enough to where people will pay me to write their name). Still, it was nice to see this pop up in my mailbox. Dinosaurs in funny hats bolstering your self-esteem is a panacea that soothes the soul in ways Bob Seger could never hope to approach.

Just wanted to share and find a way to undercut my own attempt at self-aggrandizement at the same time!

PS: No, there is zero chance that I will ever get anything from Power Girl or anyone connected with Power Girl and then have to diplomatically talk about it in a blog post without saying "tits" the whole time. And you and I are both very happy about that never happening, trust me.

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #46

2011-11-13T13:23:00.006-05:00

I was going to open this one with some obscure reference that no one would catch, but I figured the smartest thing to do would just be to get into it, and not drone on at length for a little until I'm 1,000 words in before I talk about the episode.

Yes, here we are at last, the absolutely last installment of our review of every single episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Today we look at the series finale. Who will live? Who will die? Who will move away? Perhaps we should find out now!

"WHAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND"
"Four hundred years ago, a victorious general spoke the following words at the end of another costly war: 'Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended... we have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no going back."

The finale is a bit odd, because it's essentially split in two. The first hour deals with the final battle of the Dominion War, and the second hour tries valiantly to be about Our Heroes splitting up and heading on and also Sisko and Dukat's final reckoning. The problem is that the second half doesn't feel quite as strong after finishing up with the Dominion, which--despite higher-ups irritations with the storyline--had drawn in so much of the storytelling energy of the show for so long that anything coming after it would be a bit of a letdown.

So Sisko and Co. saddle up to fight the Dominion while Damar, Kira, and Garak are in Mila's basement, trying on the whole resistance thing. Meanwhile, Dukat's got his sight back, and he and Kai Ratched go off to the fire caves (finally) and walk around while all the important shit's going on.

Thankfully, two of these things converge. Damar's civilian resistance works a bit better than his military one seems to, at least at first, because he's convinced the Cardassians to stop working and ultimately paralyse the Dominion's ability to communicate with its spacefleet which is engaging Our Heroes at the moment.

However, Big Momma is not taking any more shit from the fucking Cardassians any more and orders an entire city annihilated. That's pretty scary. However, the Dominion makes a slight mistake by broadcasting the "hey we took out your fucking city and every time you act up, we're going to kill another one" message to other Cardassians, which leads to them gunning down the Jem'Hadar assigned to kill Kira and co and more importantly for the Cardassians in the fleet to switch sides and join our heroes in kicking the holy shit out of the Jem'Hadar.

But just to show you how abusive and destructive the Cardassian/Dominion relationship is, the Dominion ups the stakes by killing the Cardassians. I mean every fucking one of them. Never mind that there's a bit space war going on Big Momma is so tired of this shit that the only thing that can scratch her itch is genocide.

There's a subtle touch here, which is carried over the first part of the finale--with the end of the war in sight, Garak is allowing himself to think about his exile being over. After all, he's back home finally . . .which makes his grief and rage at watching the Dominion scouring his home (literally and figuratively) He lost his lfe before thanks to exile, now it's being destroyed in front of him bit by bit.

Damar is killed in the final assault on the Dominion's bunker, and Garak gains a measure of revenge for what's been done to his world by killing Weyoun (once again, Garak Does Not Know What "Stun" Means) and as Damar had destroyed the Vorta cloning facilities, this means that was it for Weyoun (not sure why that would be, really--isn't there a clone bank in the Gamma Quadrant?)

The fleet finally drives the Dominion right back to the Cardassian homeworld. It's all over but the shouting now, but Big Momma is still feeling bitchy and spiteful, and orders the Breen and the Jem'Hadar to fight to the last man, reasoning that Our Heroes might well win, but it will be so awful and so bloody that it won't feel like much of a victory.

For all her bloody-mindedness, at least we're given a window as to why--Big Momma feels like any weakness would be an indication for Our Heroes to bring the war into the Gamma Quadrant and destroy the Great Link (which is in no condition to resist anyone, now) But thankfully Odo rode along and assures her that the Federation won't let its allies strike at the Link, and thanks to some magic firefly butt communication, she is cured and orders her forces to stand down. The war is over.

Remember that prophecy that Big Momma gave to Garak back in "Broken Link" at the end of the 4th season, when she said Cardassia was dead and the Cardassians were doomed from the moment they attacked the Founders? That has finally come home to roost, awfully and irrevocably so: Cardassia is a wasteland, and the numbers of dead (and that isn't including the ones killed in the war) is eight hundred million at least.

Martok, Admiral Ross and Sisko try to make good on their promise to drink bloodwine in the halls of Caradassian Central Command, but Sisko and Ross are way too appalled by the loss of life to be able to drink. Big Momma was right--victory doesn't feel like much of a triumph under these circumstances. Martok is all like, "what the hell, these are Cardassians. If you were Bajoran you would have said these bastards finally got what was coming to them (they're actually worse off than Bajor was at the beginning of the series, now that I think) I really like this scene and the one that follows, because it has the classic DS9 nuance that had been a little thin before the final episodes. Yes, the Cardassians were fascist dickheads who nearly allowed the Dominion to overrun the Alpha Quadrant, but we've known enough good Cardassians (and people like Damar, who were evil but had their eyes opened) to know that scorching the Earth and nearly wiping them all out may not be commensurate punishment.

That ambivalence carries through to a scene with Garak and Bashir, in what is easily the best scene in the finale survey the casualty reports and have the following exchange, worth quoting in full:

"I know things must look bleak for you, Garak . . ."

"Some would say we got exactly what we deserved. After all, we are not completely innocent, are we? And I'm not just referring to the occupation of Bajor. Our history is filled with arrogant aggression. We collaborated with Dominion, betrayed the entire Alpha Quadrant--we're guilty as charged."

"We both know the Cardassians are a strong people. They'll survive. Cardassia will survive . . ."

"Oh please, doctor, spare me your insufferable Federation optimism! Of course it'll survive. But not the Cardassia I knew! We had a rich and ancient culture--Ourliterature, music and art was second to none. And now so much of it is lost. So many of our best people . . .our most gifted minds . . ."

"I'm sorry Garak. I didn't mean . . ."

"It's quite all right, Doctor. You've been such a good friend. I'm going to miss our lunches together."

"I'm sure we'll see each other again."

"I'd like to think so, but one can never say. We live . . .in uncertain times."

The episode never really hits those heights again, sadly. This part of the episode finishes with the signing of a peace treaty between the Dominion and Our Heroes and Big Momma is taken away to stand trial for her crimes, telling Odo it's up to him now. Odo has volunteered to go to the Great Link, heal his people, and also teach them not to fear the solids. This means, of course, that this is goodbye.

O'Brien is going back to Earth with his wife to teach at Starfleet Academy, Worf has been named the Federation Ambassador to the Klingons (which you can tell Martok is looking at him as payback for getting him kicked to the top of the heap, heh.) and Odo's going on as well. They gather for one last time at Vic's, and damn it, I have to admit, whether due to my own sentimentality or not, the scene where Vic sings "The Way You Look Tonight" is pretty effective, especially as it's the exact break point where everyone moves on . . .

. . .oh and Sisko gets called away to finally fight Dukat in the fire caves. Yes, the Prophets have no concept of time at all, really, as they let this get so bad that he's right on the point of victory when they finally page Sisko . . .

But before that, let me back up and bring you up to speed with this plot: Dukat and Kai Ratched walked around the caves and bickered a lot. Then they found the place in the fire caves they were looking for, Ratched babbled some mystical bullshit and everything caught on fire, then she poisoned Dukat as a sacrifice to the Pah-Wraiths. The Pah-Wraiths then resurrected Dukat (as a Cardassian again) with the goofy red contacts and +10 ker-AZYness so he can rant at length to Kai Ratched.

Then Sisko shows up, and after a lot of stuff I don't care about and is frankly beneath this episode, figures out that he has to destroy the book of the Kosst-Amojan and tumbles into the fire with Dukat. Only he gets rescued by Deus Ex Machina--literally, in this case--and becomes a Prophet.

This is kind of stupid. If the Prophets could body-jack a living being and reverse-engineer Sisko as their Emissary, you're telling me they couldn't body-jack someone else and just destroy the fucking book before things got to a crisis? And why a book for heaven's sakes? Are you telling me omnipotent beings who can create their own wormhole and exist without time are afraid of a few bits of wood pulp and binding? The Orbs I could see as being important--they were objects of obvious power. The book was . . .well, a book, and really had no special powers except as how the plot demanded.

So Sisko appears to Kassidy in Prophet-land and tells her he's going to go learn with the Prophets for awhile, but he'll be back someday, just like Frosty the Snowman. What makes it even worse is that he tells Kassidy, and not Jake, who functioned as his lifeline after he lost his wife and we've already seen the effect losing him will have on Jake in "The Visitor." The episode obviously intends you to think in that direction because the leitmotif from "The Visitor" is played in a couple times, so I'm not really sure why this isn't played up more. Yes Kassidy's pregnant, but it's . . .well, a bit abstract. Jake we've seen grow up for seven years and we have a meaningful connection to him as viewers--indeed, when the show was pitched in the first place, the Jake/Sisko relationship was seen as one of the core elements driving the show, and to not take advantage of that seems as much of a shame as all the silly buggers with that stupid book that wanted to be sufficiently epic and . . .wasn't.

I'm told one of the mooted endings for Deep Space Nine would have been Benny Russell finally getting his Deep Space Nine story done as TV series, but the powers that be worried that that might have had some unusual ripple effects--all of Star Trek would have come from Benny Russell pro and retroactively, not unlike when Tommy Westphall saw St. Eligus in that snow globe, I reckon. It woulda been kinda cool--of all DS9's stories, poor Benny's deserved a happy ending, especially given the last time we saw him, and the idea of checking out on a massive head-fuck like that (especially given Voyager and Enterprise's series finales and how safely they played it) It's a real missed opportunity.

Anyways, things finish off with everyone saying goodbye. Odo heals the great link, Kira's in charge of the station, Nog got promoted to Lieutenant (and good for him!) Ezri and Bashir are going out, and life goes on. But (and I think this comes out as more gloomier in light of the lack of closure between Jake and his father) the show finishes on a shot of Jake and Kira watching the wormhole open, looking for his father. It is the bloody Visitor all over again, innit?

It's odd, because Next Generation's finale ends on a very upbeat note. The eternally distant captain walks into the crew's poker game and says he should have done this years ago and they tell him he was always welcome. The message in that finale underlines that of the show's--we are stronger together than we are apart, and we have places and people to whom we belong, even if we don't always know it. But we can take a chance and if all works out, then we're welcomed in a place we always were and never knew.

What then, is the final message of Deep Space Nine? Is it that everyone leaves? Is it that goodbyes are never easy to say? Is that you can dream of going home again but you ultimately do in a way you could never even imagine? Perhaps it's that every time you say goodbye you leave a piece of you someplace or with someone. Sisko says as much during the final party--wherever they go, part of them will always remain there, as everyone you've ever met lives on in memories. But that knowledge sometimes isn't enough to dull the pain of saying goodbye, and sometimes all you find yourself doing is waiting for them to come back, on the slim chance they may return someday.

And so things end on a kind of down note (at best ambivalent) for Deep Space Nine. Kind of appropos in a sense--it was always the odd child out so ending things oddly was probably an inevitable by-product of its life as a TV show. While there were plenty of times (especially in the last season) the show dropped the ball, and sometimes they zigged when they should have zagged, it stayed generally strong and true and we will probably never see its like again. And good thing . . .as it's better to blaze new trails than retrace the footsteps of the past (that's what DS9 was intended to be--a complete inversion of the Star Trek formula) While for Star Trek things ultimately returned back to the formula, we had the interesting little spin on it for awhile, and "awhile" is far better than "not at all."

I hope as we've gone on with these, you've seen and can appreciate what a strong series it was, and how it blazed its own trail. I always enjoy revisiting it, and I always have good things to say about it, and it was quite fun to analyze it in detail for this entire run. I think you for both your patience, your indulgence, and your endurance if you made it this far. I hope you found something in this exercise and will follow along for the next one, whatever that might be.

Got a couple thank-yous on the way out--Thanks to the illustrious Diana Kingston-Gabai, who sparked the idea for me to do this and read with keen interest all the way through, Chris Elam for his continued support (even though there were probably oodles of times he was utterly mystified as to what I was talking about) and one last goodbye to Kati--absent now, but in memory still bright.

And to everyone who read and followed this, thanks for following along with me. I never know how many of you are there or found it, but I am grateful for every time you stopped by and read one of these.

Thanks guys! I'll see you next year for whatever y'all decide I should do next for The Whole Damn Thing.

. . .I suppose I should probably get going on that, shouldn't I?

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #45

2011-11-12T19:23:00.002-05:00

4 a.m., we ran the miracle mile. We're flat broke, but hey we do it in style, and we do it two more times as DS9 Weekend 2011 continues as we get one step closer to the grand finale of our now not-so-never-ending coverage of every single damn episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This week, we finish up the regular episodes and reach the penultimate point in our saga . . .

The problem is we kinda do that 2 episodes before the final episode, which means we waste two more hours mostly dickering around in ill-considered and ultimately unimportant ways. However, we have one supremely awesome episode to carry us through, perhaps the last perfect episode of DS9 from start to finish.

Let's roll onwards!

"WHEN IT RAINS . . ."
"You need a lesson in humility. And I'm going to make sure you get it."

OK, so yesterday we left off with things in a really bad way. The Dominion had kicked the Federation out of the Chin'Toka system, depriving them of their only foothold thanks to the Breen's energy draining ray they used to destroy the Defiant. Dukat and Winn's satan-worshiping bullshit now has a body count and the only good thing that happened was Damar finally rose to his moment and instigated a rebellion against the Dominion.

We open with a little good news--apparently Klingon ships aren't as vulnerable to The Breen weapon, which seems like it would be good news and I suppose it is in the sense that not everyone will be taking the week off from the whole war thing, but bad in a sense that maybe the unstable government full of suicidal warrior yahoos may not necessarily be the best foot to put forward.

But all is not lost, as Our Heroes decide to help out Damar and his resistance movement. This leads to Odo, Garak and Kira going to train Damar at being better terrorists, and even Sisko recognises the irony at work here. In the name of not undermining Damar's authority, Kira gets a Starfleet commission (though I'm not sure Colonel=Commander, but whatever) which is a nice subtle touch--Sisko started out as a Commander, after all, Kira had nothing but contempt for Starfleet and for her to be willing to wear the uniform certain indicates some changes have occurred lo these many years.

But it's easier said than done. When they get there, Rusot is determined to goad Kira into a fight at every opportunity and while Damar is quite willing to consider her new tactics (up to and including attacking their own people) he's not willing to rein Rusot and his toadies in when they try to stir shit up, which means the resistance movement is as much a danger to itself as to the Dominion.

Oh, and that virus that's killing the Changelings? Yeah, Odo has it too. When Bashir tries to get information to possibly cure him, he begins to suspect very strongly that Section 31 is behind the virus (or at the very least the cover-up) which is bad news . . .I know this because I've seen that episode and it's bloody dreadful.

Meanwhile, Kai Ratched and Dukat are playing tug of war with the book, as Dukat hangs around being all nosy and shit until he finally sneaks a peek at the book and the book fucking blinds him. When Ratched tells him it's punishment for his arrogance--because he didn't want to help her, he wanted to see if he could do it without her. In a great scene near the end of the episode, she tells him he's going to be taught a lesson, and throws him out in the street to live as a blind beggar. The levels of vindictive bitchery she reaches in this episode are quite amazing to behold.

And because things weren't tense enough . . .Gowron shows up to the station to honor Martok. Welll . . .that's a bit misleading. He actually plans to kick Martok upstairs and take over the war planning himself. This ultimately leads to Martok being sent on what are tantamount so suicide missions that he's almost certain to fail at in an effort to humiliate him in the eyes of the Klingons.

This episode is less a functioning entity on its own as much as it is the bridge between the last episode and the next which has so much pay off it feels like two hours crammed into one. Things get worse and the odds get stacked higher and higher against them and even things that should be good news (Hey, Damar's on our side! Hey, they Klingons can still fight!) prove to be thornier issues and aren't quite the rally you would expect them to be. Fortunately these payoffs come in the very next episode . . .

"TACKING INTO THE WIND"
"They weren't a part of this rebellion. The Dominion knew that. The Founder knew that. Weyoun knew that. To kill her and my son... the casual brutality of it... the waste of life. What kind of state tolerates the murder of innocent women and children? What kind of people give those orders?"
"Yeah, Damar, what kind of people give those orders?"

If this episode has a theme, it's probably the one reflected in the quote above--what sort of duty to you have to yourself and to your government and whether that whole thing about "being the change you want to see in the world" is a real thing people can do (especially in societies that are as much a slave to duty as the Cardassians and the Klingons) and what kind of people come out the other end.

I should point out also that contained in this episode are Ezri and Worf's Finest Hour., and given how hard I've been on them the entire run of this series, this is saying something. We'll take that bit here in a second, but first . . .

I'm kind of questioning O'Brien's logic that if Section 31 developed the Changeling Virus, that automatically follows that they have a cure, but it's the wheels of the arc turning, and it's amazing that these small scenes inserted between the two major plots have more energy and emotional content than the next episode, which is devoted entirely to the last ride of O'Brien and Bashir. Bashir is the obsessive, monomaniacal guy we saw back in "The Quickening" who can't accept failure on a personal level, and gets so pissy he yells at O'Brien. O'Brien, to his credit, never gives up on Bashir and ultimately comes up with the angle that will draw Section 31 to them.

Meanwhile, Damar and company have decided the best way to help the Federation turn back the Dominion is to steal one of the Breen weapons (which are now being fitted onto all of the Dominion ships) Rusot gets all bitchy about this, because the intent should be to liberate Cardassia, not do any favours for the Federation and co. Damar points out that by helping Starfleet they help themselves, but Rusot is determined to be an asshole about it, which gets him beat up by Kira (who has now thrashed three Cardassians barehanded--one per season) and they're both pretty certain that one will kill the other.

Odo, meanwhile, isn't doing too well either--the virus is accelerating the more he changes shape, but he's determined to stay strong for Kira, partly because he loves her and that's what you do in in that situation, but also because he doesn't want her to pity him. Kira already knows how bad he is, and if him putting on a brave front for her makes this easier on him, she will pretend she doesn't know. I swear, the further they get away from Vic Fontaine, the more credible they are as a couple.

Meanwhile, Big Momma is determined to break the back of the Cardassian revolt, She orders that Cardassian civilians be posted in all facilities from here on in. If Damar blows them up, he'll be killing his own people, and a few hundred civilians as collateral damage ought to turn the people against him. This kind of monomania and overreaction will ultimately come back to bite the Dominion in the ass, but uh. . .we'll have to wait for that.

Oh, she also order's Damar's wife and son murdered. Damar is gutted, and wonders what kind of people can so casually murder people like that and Kira hits him right between the eyes, because she's been just as stunned at how people can do that. Damar's furious and very hurt and Kira immediately realises it was a stupid thing to say . . .

. . .but Garak catches her. Damar always hoped that with the Dominion gone, Cardassia could get back to its usual dickheaded ways as a suffocating totalitarian state and not have to fret over the kind of collective guilt Kira just nailed him with. Hell, at the beginning of the arc, he all but begged Dukat to become Cardassia's leader again, and Dukat told him it had to be him. Cardassia has to change, and for that to be a reality, Damar has to change also.

Naturally, these people being who they are, it all comes to a head when their scheme to steal a Breen weapon nearly collapses just about the time Odo does. Rusot freaks the fuck out and pulls a gun on Kira, which leads to Garak pulling a gun on Rusot and Damar pulling a gun and telling everyone to put their fucking guns down already.

Rusot tempts Damar with the notion of taking the weapon and fighting on themselves, as he and Dukat had during the Klingon attack. Again, the temptations of the past when there wasn't all this confusion, when Damar knew his place and things weren't going to change. He's got it all in his hands, and whether they go forward to a new Cardassia or fall apart chasing nostalgia is his choice . . .

. . .so he shoots Rusot, declaring: "He was my friend. But his Cardassia is dead. And it won't be coming back."

It's a nicely done scene which flares up into near-unbearable tension, then underplays the Big Decision by very quietly conveying the weight of what's happened. How amazing is it that this guy who was just Dukat's second in the fourth season has grown into this character who has his own affecting dramatic arc, huh?

Speaking of characters who grow into something amazing, let's check back in with the Klingons. Gowron is doing everything he can to break Martok's will, and Worf is doing everything to get Martok to challenge him for the leadership, and Martok is all like "Klingon, you crazy." For one thing, Martok doesn't play that way--he is a straight-ahead soldier and right or wrong, you don't try to shank the commander in chief. For another (and this calls back to "Once More Unto The Breach") he can't imagine anyone wanting to follow some common guy.

But something has to be done. Sisko all but orders Worf to take whatever measures necessary, but Worf is stuck. He can see Martok's point, but he knows this is wrong, and knows that so much is riding on this. So he asks Ezri, and this is Ezri's Finest Hour, right here.

Because Ezri doesn't have the romanticism that Curson and Jadzia did about the Klingons. She sees it as an empire that's dying, and what's more, deserves to die, because it's a society obsessed with honour, but perfectly willing to tolerate extreme corruption at its highest level. When Worf balks, Ezri drops some continuity on him and reminds him of all the compromises he's been party to and all the cover ups he knows about and asks him who was the last leader of the Empire he respected.

And there's not one.

There's no hope, Ezri hammers home, because if Worf--the most honourable person she knows (erm, that's probably gilding the lily a bit) will tolerate the status quo, what hope is there.

And this, then, is Worf's Finest Hour. Because what he does is something only he can do, because he's always been the outsider. Only this time, that is the key to his salvation and the salvation of his people.

Because Worf challenges Gowron and fucking ices him. Immediately, Martok is willing to declare Worf the new leader of the Empire and even gives him the badass coat and everything.

But Worf isn't the man for the job, and he knows it--Martok is, and Martok becomes the new head of the Empire. Holy shit is this scene awesome, y'all. In fact, the whole episode is awesome. Go watch it right now. It's like, "Duet"-level perfect.

Sadly, the final two regular episodes? Not so strong.

"EXTREME MEASURES"
"What good do you think will come of this?"

Oh dear, I do not like this episode. Probably anything was going to be a comedown after the episode previous but this? ooh.

Some of the reason for this owes to behind the scenes stuff--they'd run out of money that wasn't allocated to the finale (which would still be loaded with stock footage) and do this had to be the "bottle show." Which uh, would have been better . . .well, I can't think of how this would have been better. It is one of many things that hurt this show, really, that so much of it is Bashir and O'Brien chasing Sloan through a bunch of very familiar corridor sets as they go through an "Inception" kind of plot on the cheap (about 10 years before "Inception" was a thing) But if that had been the only problem with this episode, I would have learned to live with it.

It's not though. For one thing, for an organisation that was able to suck Bashir into a hopelessly convoluted plot in "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" earlier in the season, Sloan is a fucking moron in this story, possessing none of the subtlety or shading that he had in his previous two appearances , and . . .not really doing anything, really.

Except they finally get the cure and cure Odo. That happened.

Oh, and the spine of this show, with people going into people's minds and not being sure they wake back up, you could fucking follow in your sleep--it is that wrote.

But what, I hear your say about the Bashir/O'Brien bonding moment? Uhm, if it's your thing, great. I don't really care. The relationship was great window dressing, but I never thought it was strong enough to hold its own episode without some sufficiently interesting outside pressure as in "Hippocratic Oath."

This is just . . .completely insubstantial. That said, in one line break I will be wishing I had this marshmallow fluff to complain about because . . .

"THE DOGS OF WAR"
"You never told me you had a secret mountain hideaway."
"I was going to surprise you."

. . .ohhhh SHIT y'all it is SO goddamned important in this arc that we get some closure on the Ferengi stuff, isn't it? ISN'T IT? And this episode will tempt me with several good scenes and interesting sub plots which are somehow not the main plot because at the end of everything, by golly let's jam one more Komedy Kavalcade with the Space Jews down my fucking throat, why don't you?

Deep breath. Focus on the positives first. You're almost done.

OK, so Our Heroes get a new Defiant-class ship, and I have to say, as silly as this damn scene is and how it undercuts the loss of the original Defiant a few episode back . . .I kinda like this scene, because it reminds me of the movie Beerfest, wherein they had the heretofore unknown twin brother of a character who just died--who acted exactly like the dead character--come in and insist that they act like he was his dead brother for all intents and purposes.

I love the absolutely bare-faced audacity of that. You pretty much can't get away with underlining how silly that cliche is except in the broadest of comedies.

I think that's what leads me to giggle at this scene, as the USS Sao Paolo, which is exactly like the Defiant except for the carpeting and Admiral Ross gives them special dispensation to call it the Defiant, which once again shafts Brazil (c'mon guys--was Xuxa really that bad?) and handily means they don't have to change any of the stock footage substantially now. All I can say is "wow."

Meanwhile, Damar's resistance movement gets wiped out by the Dominion, and, as so many people have done in our own country, he moves into the basement of Garak's . . .well, we're strongly led to beleive it's his mom Mila (who you may remember from "Improbable Cause," back in season 3) with Kira and Garak, convinced that as the last 3 survivors os the rebellion, they're pretty much fucked.

Only Damar's rebellion has become something else--it's now a popular movement, and his example is so strong that even when the Dominion smugly announce the rebellion's destruction, they don't beleive them, and in this, there's a way forward--Damar can take his case to the streets, and the Cardassian people will be his army.

Now, in the plot I nor any other right-thinking people should care anything about, Quark gets a garbled call from the Nagus, who he thinks has named him his successor. Wackiness abounds, but it's actually Rom who's the new Nagus.

There. I saved you 45 minutes.

There's a lot of chin wagging about how Rom will change the face of Ferengi society and drag it away from the unchecked capitalism of the good old days and Quark's not having that shit and uh, yeah, I have totally seen all of this before with various Ferengi characters in these roles (sometimes Quark is progressive, other times he's not) and this is the penultimate episode and I am just fucking empty.

If you care, Bashir and Ezri get together this episode. I would be more invested in this if their courtship hadn't made Ezri bickering with, then screwing, then bickering some more with Worf. But well, that's 11th hour ticking off plot checkboxes for you.

Speaking of that, let's deal with the final bits of set-up. The Dominion fall back to Cardassia, planning to fortify themselves for awhile and come back out ready to grind the Federation and co. to dust. But The Federation has decided to take the fight to the Dominion in one sustained final assault, and this one is for all the marbles.

After that weighty meeting, Sisko goes back to his quarters, wherein Kassidy drops the bombshell that she's pregnant. Oh-oh, remember how that worked out for Jadzia . . .

. . . but we're going to leave it there one more time. Join us tomorrow for . . .well, the end.

10 months, 2 weeks and 3 days come down to one extra-length two-hour episode and one last go-round. Join us one last time for "What You Leave Behind." See you then!

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #44

2011-11-11T12:32:00.003-05:00

Wake up kids, we've got the dreamer's disease, edge of fourteen, we got you down on your knees, so polite you're busy still saying please. "Oh, wait, it's not Saturday already is it," I hear you saying? That's when I'd been coming by here for your weekly recaps of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" Nope, it's not, but owing to extraordinary circumstances involving what we will euphemistically term "real life," I will be covering the final arc of DS9 in a weekend. As this is ten hours of programming done at what could probably be referred to as "lickety split," this will be . . .an interesting experiment in my endurance and patience vs that last stretch before the finish.

But I think it kinds works out, given what we're dealing with here. Because for the last stretch DS9 became a straight serial, telling one vast interconnected story that was supposed to tie up all the loose ends (supposed to--as you'll see, they succeed at some and fail and others) and bring all the character plus as many of the recurring characters as possible and do what they could draw a line under everything save the endgame of the war with the Dominion and Sisko's final destiny.

How'd they do? Let's find out now.

"PENUMBRA"
"That doesn't concern you."
"No, of course it doesn't"

Our story begins with Sisko telling Kassidy that he's purchased a few acres of bottom land on Bajor and he's planning to finally make good on the thing he said back in "Favor the Bold" last season about building a house on Bajor. There's a bit of ruminating about how things have changed for him and how he really didn't want to be there at first and now he can't think of living anywhere else, and while I can appreciate what the scene is trying to do, it feels every so slightly like Jadzia's sudden onset baby-craziness at the end of last season which so blatantly and obviously painted a bull's-eye on her. Not that I am implying anything about anything here.

Sisko decides to pop the question to Kassidy and she accepts, which sets plot 1 in motion . . .

Meanwhile, Worf has gotten himself lost behind enemy lines in an escape pod, and rather than send the Defiant, they decide to send Ezri along, who despite avoiding Worf ever since "Afterimage" now has a sudden craving to be The Other Dax and go rescue him. And what, pray tell, does she take into the war zone? That cool as gun she had that shot through walls last week? Hell no, she goes in a runabout, because we have to give Ezri something to do, even if it's stupid.

Plot 3 rolls in with Damar drinking himself stupid because being the Dominion's bitch is really wearing him out. Weyoun treats him only slightly better than a lackey and makes no secret about how Damar is cut out of all the big decisions. It's pissing him off, but he doesn't he feel he can really do anything about it. It isn't helped by the grim reality that the war has killed so many Cardassians that no one family on their homeworld hasn't lost someone to the war.

Not that the Dominion is having a great time either. Big Momma's looking quite desiccated as the changeling disease is doing its work. Weyoun tells her their research has reached an impasse, and in one of those wonderful scenes where you get a picture of exactly who you're dealing with, Big Momma tells Weyoun to have the scientist team killed, and have their clones reactivated, because it will provide "a fresh perspective."

Ezri somehow manages to rescue Worf because it's best that the two characters with the least two do get sent off for awhile. Worf expresses his gratitude by being an utter dickmonster to her, not helping when the Jem'Hadar force down the runabout, arguing some more, and then, in a scene that appalled me from the first time I saw the episode and continues to appall me even more now, they have sex, because even in 1999 that "kiss a woman hard until she likes it" was considered "passionate" and not "attempted rape" or shit like that. You can try to wave it off as "oh they're aliens," but there aren't any aliens writing this, are there?

Thankfully, the Breen (yes, the aliens we've seen exactly three times!) show up and tase them, which I can't say as I blame them for. More on them next episode.

Damar is awakened and meets with Dukat, who mercifully is a bit less ker-AZY than we've seen him in some time. Dukat is obviously concerned about his former second in command's dissipation, and their scenes together are really great, and Marc Alaimo plays Dukat with an amazing amount of subtley (I have not been able to say that . . .for a long time) and it plays off amazingly in the next episode. For now, Dukat asks Damar a favour--namely, he wants a good plastic surgeon to make him into a Bajoran. We'll find out more why later on.

Meanwhile, news about Sisko and Kassidy's wedding has gone out and it threatens to become the Bajoran equivalent of the wedding of the century. Or would be, except the Prophets show up (in the form of his robot-voiced mom) and tell him he can't do it because he has a Great Trial coming up (over-egging the pudding a little there, I would say) and if he does get married, he will know nothing but sorrow, and when you consider the last time Sisko waved off their advice his friend got killed . . .well, he's obviously concerned.

"'TILL DEATH DO US PART"
"Those days might be gone, but the man I served with isn't. He's still in there--reach in and grab hold of him, Damar. Cardassia needs a leader."

Kai Ratched drops by to tell Sisko that she's invited herself to perform his wedding ceremony, because that's just how she rolls. Sisko tells her all about the Prophets warning him off marriage, but all Ratched takes away is being all pissed off that the Prophets never talk to her, despite that she's Space Pope and all that.

Except! No sooner does she get out of Sisko's office than she has a fucking vision. On the surface, it looks miiiiighty Prophet-like, and gives her exactly the kind of message someone with her level of overweening narcisissim would want to get--only she can bring about the Restoration, and the Sisko has faltered and only she can prevent forest fires. For more details, she's told a guide will be along shortly and he will have "the wisdom of the land."

Meanwhile, Weyoun is playing his favourite game--Shit On Damar, by telling him to get his drunk ass cleaned up, they're going on a road trip. Weyoun spares a few words for Dukat, telling him his whole "dress up like a Bajoran for Casual Friday" is some bullshit and generally just makes Damar reach for another bottle, right in front of a mirror. Unable to look at himself, he turns away and takes a swig.

This leads to Dukat and Damar's goodbye, where Dukat kicks his former adjutant in the ass, tells him to put the fucking bottle down and be the leader Cardassia needs. Damar tries to push it back on Dukat, but now that he's got ker-AZY religion, Dukat isn't interested in that kind of power. He has a different (and incredibly silly) destiny. When what happens with Damar happens, please keep in mind that History's Greatest Villain made it possible, and lament the fact that it would mean a bit more had they not yanked all Dukat's shading last season.

So Sisko decides to call off the wedding, which pisses Kassidy off, until he decides "screw it, they already killed my best friend and Kassidy's only a guest star anyways" and they get married anyways. To the show's credit, Kira is absolutely morose at this, as he's very obviously going against the will of the Prophets and can't really find it in her heart to be festive about it.

Meanwhile, in some excruciatingly padded scenes, Worf and Ezri do the following: Talk, end up arguing, then the Breen come in, tase one or both of them, and drag them off. Then they cut to something else and then the same scene happens again, near-exactly.

Again, to their credit, they at least bring up the whole thing about reassociation that was supposed to be a big taboo in Trill society, but Ezri waves it off by saying that Worf's probably broken a few rules in his time as well which means . . .well, something, I'm sure. I tend to read it as the Trills not giving a shit about what Ezri does or doesn't do, just like everyone else.

This ultimately sours as Ezri keeps psychobabbling about her weird dreams and how she keeps fixating on Bashir, who she seems to have a thing for, though we really only got the merest hint of that before. But whatever. Worf handles this in his usual way, by ramping up his dickmonsterdom to 1.75 Shoggoths. Then the Breen come in and taze them.

Meanwhile, Dukat, masquerading as a Bajoran farmer named Anjohl, meets with Kai Ratched and ingratiates his way into an audience, then into her confidence, and then into her bed, and this may actually be the most messed-up part of the episode because, essentially, Space Hitler is banging the Space Pope. I don't really like to think about it.

Meanwhile, the nine dozen Worf and Ezri scenes finally reach some kind of point when they're beamed away to a Jem'Hadar where Weyoun and Damar are waiting. You see, the Breen are joining the Dominion, which again, would be news except this is only the fourth or so time they've been seen, and the building up of the Breen is going to be rather grating, as is the "Look! The Breen are on our side! Holy shit, right? DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!" ending . . .

"STRANGE BEDFELLOWS"
"You know, Worf, I'm getting a little tired of your little Klingon aphorisms."

Big Momma shows up to meet with the Breen and welcome them to the exciting world of Amway--er, I mean, the Dominion. Ezri and Worf are sentenced to death, because those fucking arguing scenes last episode were just that irritating they easily rise to the level of a capital offense.

Damar, meanwhile, is a bit pissed off that the treaty with the Breen hands over quite a few Cardassian planets to the Breen, and Weyoun just tells him to sign the thing without worrying about the fine print. When the war's over, they'll have plenty of choice in terms of getting new planets to compensate him for this, but Damar sees it for what it is--Cardassia being thrown under the bus. Again.

This reaches a point which is very nearly Worf's Finest Hour--Damar tries to strongarm Ezri and Worf into cooperating with the Dominion and thus commuting their death sentence down to life imprisonment. When Weyoun teases Ezri that it would be too bad if she gets killed before she can tell Bashir how she feels about him, Worf up and snaps Weyoun's neck. That is, and I say this as someone who finds Worf generally annoying, pretty fucking hardcore.

To Damar this is the funniest thing in the world, and frankly, I can't say as I blame him.

Meanwhile, Space Pope and Space Hitler are enjoying -shudder- post-coital bliss when she has another vision and this time, she twigs that it's not the Prophets that are calling her--it's the Pah-Wraihs. She naturally freaks out about this, tries to consult with the Prophets, who won't speak to her--again (she claims it's because the Pah-Wraiths got to her first) and loses her shit even more when Dukat tells her he's a servant of the Pah-Wriaths as well. When she throws him out, he tells her to keep on graveling to gods who give her nothing in return.

So Ratched turns to Kira, who is very happy that she wants to change and is willing to do whatever it takes to change . . .except for exactly the one thing Kira suggests: give up her power as Kai. Well, there's no way in hell that's happening, obviously. It's actually a really good scene between her and Kira, actually, with Kira genuinely trying to get through to her and being incredibly disappointed when she walks back from the edge.

Meanwhile, Ezri and Worf bicker some more, and Ezri gets off a few good zingers at him. This finally leads . . .somewhere good, believe it or not, as both of them give a little and decide there's no way in hell they actually love each other and maybe the way to be is just very close friends. This is actually a wonderful scene, and it's done with subtlety and real thought and it makes you wonder if they could have got here eventually, then why in the hell did they have to do that really regrettable shit with Worf kissing her until she liked it, because. . .man, no.

Anyways, just when they're about to be executed, Worf and Ezri are saved by . . .Damar. He gives them a way out and tells them to tell the Federation they have an ally on Cardassia. This pays off a bit more in the next episode, and I have to say, Damar's slow groping way toward becoming a hero is one of the most successful things about this arc to me, and we're very close to when that launches into high gear.

But before we do that, we have to have another regrettable closer like we did at the end of the last episode, wherein Kai Ratched pledges herself to the Pah-Wriaths and makes one of the most face-palmingly ridiculous "I am evil now" speeches I have ever heard in my life. Anywas, she's all ready to do whatever evil shit they require, and as we'll find out in the next episode . . .the Pah-Wraiths want her . . .to use her library card . . .

"THE CHANGING FACE OF EVIL"
"I believe he was quite fond of that ship."

OK, shit starts getting real right now. The Breen launch an assault on Earth which scares the shit out of everyone. Dukat and Winn hole up on Bajor and get the Text of the Kosst-Amojan (the bible of the Pah-Wraiths. Obviously when it comes to eeevil literature, Bajor is like Miskatonic University and shit) and are all ready to start unleashing some eeeevil on everyone, only oh wait--the pages are blank, so they get more books and try to work out how to make the words appear.

Meanwhile, Damar is plotting with his new aide Gul Rusot (who is played by the same dude who played Neroon on the other show, and is kind of his polar opposite. Nice touch that) and gathering together the first inklings of a resistance movement. Rusot doesn't think much of their chances, but Damar is convinced that people who are fighting for their homes and the sovereignty will ultimately triumph over people even the mightiest force.

I rather like that this story thread doesn't make the parallels too plain here (because yes, the Cardassians have essentially become the Bajorans) and is willing to let things play out in such a way as that they give the viewer credit that they've been paying attention. This will pay off a bit later on, for now, just know Damar has his shit together finally. So much so that Weyoun tries to give him shit about it and he brushes it off, mainly because Weyoun mistakes it as Damar finally getting his confidence in his Dominion masters back.

"You know me so well," Damar says, capping off a fucking awesome scene.

So, hey, you know how Dukat's arrogance usually proves his undoing? Yeah, it happens here too. Dukat slaps around Kai Ratched's assistant, who then has a sample of his DNA re-sequenced and discovers he's the father of--oh wait, sorry. Maury was on in the background--and tells Ratched that she's been fucking Space Hitler.

Ratched freaks out again, and it's kinda bad this time that she has a knife in her hand. Doubly so, when the monk who thought he was doing you a solid finds out you're in league with evil gods and is about to expose you. Fortunately, she stabs him with a knife and then throws some blood on the pages of the book and FOOF! now there's words on it.

Kinda sad that all that could have been averted by putting a sticker on the front of the book: "To see words, please shank acolyte and exsanguinate him on the pages."

In any event, it's just a damn bad day all around anyways, because, emboldened by the Breen (we we're still getting the hard sell on) the Dominion re-takes the Chin'Toka system, which the Federation took over at the end of the last season and force the good guys back out.

And this is a costly battle, what's more, because the Breen have a magic zap gun that paralyses the Defiant and then -sniff-- destroys it. It's a shame they missed the chance to have Sisko glaring out at the Defiant being blown up as he did in "Emissary," but that may have been gilding the lily.

In any event. with things looking this bad for our heroes, they'd need something major to turn it around. And wonder of wonders, Damar makes his move with the following epic speech, quted here in full:

"...And so two years ago, our government signed a treaty with the Dominion. In it the Dominion promised to extend Cardassia's influence throughout the Alpha Quadrant. In exchange, we pledged ourselves to join the war against the Federation and its allies. Cardassians have never been afraid of war, a fact we've proven time and again over these past two years. Seven million of our brave soldiers have given their lives to fulfill our part of the agreement, and what has the Dominion done in return? Nothing. We've gained no new territories. In fact, our influence throughout the quadrant has diminished. And to make matters worse we are no longer masters in our own home. Travel anywhere on Cardassia and what do you find? Jem'Hadar, Vorta, and now Breen. Instead of the invaders we have become the invaded. Our 'allies' have conquered us without firing a single shot. Well, no longer. This morning detachments of the Cardassian First, Third and Ninth Orders attacked the Dominion outpost on Rondac III. This assault marks the first step towards the liberation of our homeland, from the true oppressors of the Alpha Quadrant. I call upon Cardassians everywhere: Resist. Resist today. Resist tomorrow. Resist till the last Dominion soldier has been driven from our soil!"

Damar's opening salvo destroyed the Vorta cloning facilities, as an extra little FU to Weyoun, who now may be the last clone. Big Momma is deeply enraged and orders Damar found at once. There's a wonderful scene after Weyoun order the Breen to find him when he nervously looks over his shoulder at the Cardassians working behind him . . .

I did tell you shit gets real, didn't I? This is the best episode of the arc so far, really, as it features plenty of major turns and not so much annoying drivel to drag it down. We get several plot motions going forward and the stakes have been raised, and unlike when Jadzia died, the loss of the Defiant really feels like a loss and not just a stunt (of course there are problems later, but taken as a standalone for now, it works) and Damar has made his move. The next four (really, the next two) episodes do better in terms of elevating the game and balancing Damar's being a good guy with what he's done in the past.

We'll cross that bridge tomorrow, as things get worse for everyone, in "When It Rains . . ."; Worf's Finest Hour happens in "Tacking Into The Wind"; Bashir and O'Brien have their . . .well it's intended to be their finest hour in "Extreme Measures"; and we stop everything for the critically important wrap-up of the Ferengi plotlines in "The Dogs of War" (sarcasm added) Join us tomorrow for rites of succession, Ferengi Komedy, and pleasure!

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #43

2011-11-05T11:47:00.003-04:00

Winding like an ancient river, the time is now again. Yes good people, it's time once again for our weekly sojourn through the entirety of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and this week . . .well, like that first taste of fall and the winter that accompanies it, we're at the end of Season 7 . ..er, at least the "random feature episode" portion. We'll talk more about this at the beginning of next week's episode, but in the name of wrapping everything up (or trying to) DS9 had to basically transform itself into a continuing serial for the final ten hours of shows in the name of ratcheting things up to an appropriately epic conclusion. So these are kind of the final "typical" episodes DS9, and so there's a little bit of closure to be had here, and an acknowledgment of time running out.

Yes, the days are getting darker sooner, now . . .

"FIELD OF FIRE"
"In the morning I'll be sober--and you'll still be beautiful."

Operation: Get Ezri Over Part Many Of A Lot

If I had to guess, this is pretty much the moment where DS9 gives up on Ezri being a counselor of any description, and in the name of saying "fuck it," in this episode, she starts shooting people while the murderer in her head tells her to kill more people.

You know, everything about this episode makes my head hurt, but not in a stupid "Emperor's New Cloak" way, as much as "this story makes no goddamn sense, but is constantly escalating the stakes in ways that are impossible to take seriously, plus it's fucking Ezri, so let's just enjoy the subtle comedy of dashed expectations."

When Ensign Deadmeat gets his ass killed by being shot despite being alone in a locked room, this is clearly a job for Odo, right? Or maybe Worf, because he actually used to be a cop back on the Enterprise. Both of them would be prime candidates for something like this.

So naturally it falls to Ezri to work it out and everyone plays along to help her because the counseling thing just isn't working out and this means a chance to play with guns. In this case it's the TR-116, perhaps one of the most ridiculous weapons in the history of anything.

Stick with me here: The TR-116 fires bullets at high-velocity (rayguns are for pussies) through walls because it has a transporter located within the barrel. How the bullet is still able to travel at high speed despite pretty much every time we've seen the transporter work the person place or thing is frozen in place I'm not really clear on. With the addition of Konami's Laser Scope, you can see through walls (but not people) this gun I'm pretty sure violates nearly every right afforded to us in the US Constitution to one extent or the other. Yes, even the one granting women suffrage.

Ezri decides to investigate this in a way that is both fun (testing the gun by blowing up funky watermelons) and really stupid ways by summoning Joran (the murder from "Equilibrium") so he can do the whole "Hannibal Lector" deal with her, despite the fact that Joran hadn't been a serial killer in his initial conception but now he's acting like he's an expert on killing people and shit. If this were the sole logical fallacy in this episode, we'd be doing well.

In any event, this is a mystery where the mystery is not really important, is solved in the most daft way possible, and really, so much is attempted here, and yet falls short of the mark. And yet . . .I really like this episode because it tries so hard to be grim and dark and have a shocking conclusion and it just so damn goofy. It's a murder with a gun that shoots through walls for Christ sakes, and . . .man. It just rises to the level of funny more than anything.

Plus, there are a hell of a lot of people who enjoy this episode because Ezri is holding a gun that shoots through walls. I'm not sure if it's Ezri with a gun that fires their blood, or just the idea of a supergun that tells he laws of physics to go fuck themselves, but I just wanted to let you know this is totally a thing.

"CHIMERA"
"I know where I belong"

Odo meets up with a Changeling who isn't a Founder. And yet, he's still a bit of a dickmonster.

"Chimera" is a really good episode, and features a boffo performance from the guy playing Laas (Odo's new Changeling buddy) who is also the kind of guy who plays Martok, and let me tell you, it's like night and day (he was also Sisko's Captain who got blown up at the beginning of "Emissary", beleive it or not) and how Laas perceives Odo's life.

Because to Laas, Odo sold the fuck out. Laas had enough to solids ages ago, but instead raising up an evil anti-Federation that would eventually fighting the other Federation, Laas just went of on his own and and decided to spend his days transforming into animals and smoke, and fog, and fire (yes, this not only stresses credulity but utterly annihilates it, but it's a great episode anyways, and it's never brought up again, so just go with it for now) and whenever he's around solids he can't stop himself from being the DS9 equivalent of a hipster douchebag.

Despite his drastically eroded social skills, Odo links with him first chance he gets. Oh Odo. You goo slut.

However, Laas hits a nerve with Odo, because Laas has found a way that hasn't involved joining the Dominion or passing himself off as a human, and he's found a kind of peace with it, a peace that's eluded Odo all his life. Even though he's with Kira (and frankly, this episode has the best treatment and justification of their relationship for the series thus far) he's never felt like he fully belonged, and even Kira can see that.

In fact, when he and Laas link, the truth comes out: were it not for Kira, Odo would go back to the link and be a Founder (given all he heard in "Treachery, Faith, and the Great River" and the thing about the Changeling virus, you can hardly blame him) which is, itself, something we've heard before from him, but now . . .the call is a little harder for him to make. Kira roots him to his life outside the Founders nearly a strongly as his pull to be back with his people.

The episode is really about that choice--which of the three options does he really want to reach for? And what will Kira have to say and/or do about this? Sure, she loves him, but it's a hell of a lot to ask someone to be willing to give up the person they love because they'd be happier someplace else.

It's a really good episode, even if the changeling stuff will make your head hurt if you think about it too much. Think of it more as just a Kira and Odo story that raises their relationship to a place that doesn't deal with stupid sitcom cliches or needs Vic Fontaine around to mess things up, and give it a chance on those terms. It's highly recommended.

Speaking of Vic . . .

"BADDA-BING, BADDA-BANG"
"I see. When are you planning on getting back to work?"

So everyone's hanging out at Vic's one day, wasting everyone's damn time with about eleven episodes left and the mob randomly takes over Vic's lounge and beats the shit out of him and threatens to do worse than that. This is, it turns out a "jack in the box," a feature written into Vic's program to introduce some random element to keep things interesting. There's no resetting the program without losing everything (Vic's lounge is apparently a roguelike. I guess) so the only thing for them to do is for them to resolve the problem of the mob intrusion, which naturally involves some complicated Ocean's 11's shit.

Sisko tells them all to get their asses back to work and stop wasting time. I know how he feels.

I'm gonna go ahead and put my cards on the table here--I really needed to see an Ocean's 11 style cape episode of DS9 like I needed to be hit in the junk with a boulder fired from a trebuchet. However, because this episode couldn't stop at just that we have to lay a message on it, and because that wasn't annoying and misplaced enough, as soon as it's brought up, it's brushed off again.

Sisko's main beef with Vic Fontaine's vision of Las Vegas, is that it's horseshit and ignores the quaint racism of bygone days. That's a fair enough cop, really, and gives me pause as well, but is pretty much incongruous with the fact that ever since it rolled in, Vic's has been portrayed as the height of cool, and it's kind of hard to then make an argument that it's kind of bullshit in-show.

They must have realised this, because Kassidy handwaves it away by saying "that was then, this is now, and we can play in a fake past and whitewash everything because now the only limitations we have are the ones we put on ourselves."

Yeah, uh--bullshit. Just . . .bullshit. If this was the best counter-argument one could come up with, maybe this not something that should ever have been pointed to in the first place.

So from here on in, everything follows the identikit for caper films--elaborate caper, painstaking setup, 11th hour complication, big happy success.

The odd thing about this is that except for the whole racism thing that's picked up and dropped in the same scene, is that I'm not really that pissed off at this episode. I can't decide whether that's because I've just gotten so beaten down by the non-stop onslaught that is Vic Fontaine that I've just quietly swallowed my hatred, gutting out every unpleasant minute of it while swallowing my hatred and feeling its acid touch murdering the parts of myself that had been good and wonderful at one time, maybe I've just run out of ways to articulate my antipathy for Vic Fontaine, or maybe I'm just tired and I want to get to the next episode because it's good and I'd rather talk about that, but . . .look guys. If you like this kind of thing, you will find it the kind of thing that you would like.

"INTER ARMA ENIM SILENT LEGES"
"I'll spare you the 'ends justify the means speech and you spare me the 'we must do what's right' speech."

The title means "In times of war, the law falls silent" Section 31 returns, and catches Bashir (who was on his way to a medical conference--frankly, he should stop going to those, because they kidnapping everybody out there) in a rather intricate web of lies and deceit that occasionally threatens to confuse the hell out of the viewer, but really ends up working as one of the strongest statements about what Section 31 and the Federation is willing to do to not only win the war, but win the next one.

Sloan, Section 31's master, wants Bashir to gather intelligence on Koval, a member of the Tal'Shiar, the Romulan intelligence bureau that apparently wasn't completely annihilated back in "Improbable Cause"/"The Die is Cast." Bashir asks why we're spying on our allies in the war and Sloan explains that after the war is over, the Klingons and Cardassians will be decimated, the Dominion pushed back to the Gamma Quadrant, and the only two powers in any shape to vie for control of the Alpha Quadrant will be the Romulans and the Federation and between the two of them, they're probably gonna take the Next Generation movies.

Bashir is alarmed by this, but back in "Inquisition" Sisko told him to cooperate with Sloan as much as possible in the name of getting a chance to expose them. So Bashir toddles on to the medical conference on scenic Romulus and tries his best to seem to cooperate without cooperating, which is made ever so slightly difficult because on the one hand, Sloan is there himself, but maybe not to keep his eye on Bashir (or maybe so?) and also, no matter what Bashir does (and as he becomes more and more motivated by panic, he enlists more and more people he would never have trusted under the circumstances and it has typically catastrophic blowback) I won't spell all that out, since this episode is most effective when the big twist comes in and hits you right between the eyes, so you should totally see this episode, yes please. I will watch it with you right now, in fact.

In any event, the episode is best summed up by a quote from Sloan, who tells Bashir: "The Federation needs men like you, Doctor. Men with conscience, men who can sleep at night. And you're also the reason that Section 31 exists: to protect men like you from a universe which doesn't share your sense of right and wrong."

Not surprisingly, the same guy who wrote this goes on to revamp Battlestar Galactica, a show which was at its best when it played in this grey area between duty and morality and what actions were justified when. It's a really great episode, and my only regret is that the big twist needs to reverberate more than it does, especially given what's coming up . . .

But more on that next week. Join us then as the final trilogy of DS9 reviews begin with (now stripped of spoilers and/or snark) "Penumbra;" "Till Death Do Us Part;" "Strange Bedfellows;" and "The Changing Face of Evil." Join us next week for matrimony, surprising heel/face turns, and pleasure!

I Read This--THE NEW TEEN TITANS: GAMES

2011-11-03T19:26:00.002-04:00

OK, I guess I procrastinated long enough. Sorry guys--this was supposed to be done last week, but life intruded.

So recently we looked at the first two years of New Teen Titans and examined how it came along in a pivotal moment for DC comics and ultimately ended up setting the tone for the entire line more or less. Since the next volume of the Omnibus isn't due out until next year, I lamented that I wouldn't have a chance to go into the next chapter of our little saga for some time, and then, only twenty years or so too late, I got a gift in the form of New Teen Titans: Games, which I will refer to as Games from here on in, because god dammit, I hate to do anymore work than I have to.

Games is an interesting little artifact, as it really doesn't fit into any continuity, not Post-Crisis or New 52. The writer of the book, Marv Wolfman sees it more as a time capsule of an era of Titans history, which helps gloss over the continuity niggles some and also works for my purpose here tonight.

Because Games is absolutely a time capsule of the New Teen Titans.

Specifically, it's a peek at the beginning of the end.

Looking back now, it's safe to say that The Judas Contract was the peak of the New Teen Titans run. It was a long-term story that had run through every single issue of the book (more or less) to that point, contained several gut-punch surprises, featured a major character change (Robin finally became Nightwing) and felt like a culminating moment. Whatever came afterward was going to cost the book some momentum, as it was only natural--no book or creative team can sustain that pace forever.

However, leave it to DC to make things worse. Just before Crisis, DC decided to take New Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes and make them direct-market only titles, on higher quality paper and (most importantly) cost more money. It can be said that neither book has never recovered from that decision, as pulling them off the newsstands narrowed the readership down and broke the momentum of the book even more than finishing out the big plot did.

Of course, DC thought they had a solution. It went something like this: "Hey, newsstand readers, you who made New Teen Titans a success in the first place--don't despair! You can still read New Teen Titans stories . . .only you have to wait a year to read them in Tales of the Teen Titans, available on newsstands everywhere. Well, not really, you see, we cut the print runs, because who really wants a reprint book, and . . .well . . ."

It went badly for all concerned. For one thing, when New Teen Titans relaunched as a Baxter book, they'd jumped six months or so ahead so as not to step on Tales of the Teen Titans, which was still running new stories before they became reprints.

Confused yet?

Anyways, the Baxter book slogs on for awhile, and, having been cordoned off in this little petri dish of the direct market, soon begins eating its own tail. Hey guys: Raven's evil--again! Donna Try can't figure out who she is--again! Starfire and Nightwing are kept apart by a need to draw out the soap opera . . .again. Like Uncanny X-Men near the end of Claremont's run, the book was running on fumes, and the fatigue was pretty apparent on the page. Wolfman himself has said in interviews he didn't feel he had anything left to say, and wanted to leave. The question then becomes is staying too long worse than leaving I suppose.

Anyways, to place this in some kind time frame so we can actually get to talking about the book before midnight, Games is a snapshot of a time when George Perez had returned to New Teen Titans, somewhere around issue 50 of the Baxter series, and they were giving it a go and trying to recapture lighting in a bottle. It is the hope of Wolfman, Perez and all of DC comics, I would imagine, that a prospective reader of Games would look at it as a return to form from the Wolfman and Perez of the early NTT run.

That's . . .uh, not what you get. That's not to say Wolfman doesn't do his best or Perez doesn't turn in some great work--because he does. The larger pages and format really show off the detail he packs into everything and some pages echo that "painted" effect he was doing on New Teen Titans covers at the time in one sequence and it just looks great.

But the story? Well, I'll explain in more detail as we go, but the story manages to be obvious and completely inscrutable at the same time, the Titans really could be swapped out with any superteam and the book would still generally work (the big problem with games is how removed it feels from the mise en scene of the classic Titans books) the antagonists are generic ciphers without even particularly interesting gimmicks, and the Big Twist that drives the book . . .really doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense.

Much like the tail end of Claremont's X-Men it is the work of someone who long ago exhausted anything and everything they had to say about these characters and yet, like Ahab lashed to the white whale, are dragged along with it to their mutual doom.

Our story begins with a mini-Chernobyl somewhere that was part of a ridiculously elaborate way to call King Faraday out. Because when I think of the Teen Titans, I totally think of a character who is an artifact from the pre-super Silver Age. Farady gets sent a copy of a Game Manual from some guy called the Gamesmaster, who Faraday assumed was dead, and we get out first look at the bad guys, who are supposed to be representatives of different styles of game--sims, D and D, shooters, RPGs, etc. The problem with all this is that they're not particularly interesting and the "game" motif isn't a strong enough unifying force. Plus we've spent six pages with Faraday and the plot is an already impenetrable mess and we're just now mentioning the Titans.

You could say this book has a few structural problems. This whole plot was based on something the US Government actually does--namely, call in game players and SF writers to create improbable scenarios for combat to test the finest minds in the Department of Defence, which is a really nifty story and probably would make a great Greg Rucka book, but as a Titans story? Erm . . .

The actual Titans don't come into the book until page 11, and that's only Faraday showing up and being an asshole to Nightwing. Faraday has reason to believe the Gamesmaster (no, not that one. No, not Kevin Sullivan, either) is targeting the Titans and is also going to destroy New York, but before we get too far in there, seeing as how the book has actually deigned to get them all together, let's do a late 80's era ROLL CALL for our heroes, shall we?

STARFIRE--Despite the fact that a whole bunch of nonsense with her silly arrange marriage happened in the actual book, Starfire is pretty much where we left her in the early days--the bodacious, stacked cutie that even 30 years on, George Perez loves to draw. She really doesn't have much to do here except get her ass kicked by a guy named Asteroid. If I were her, I would be so pissed.

RAVEN--This would be Raven The White, having survived another battled with Trigon and her own cursed heritage which was supposed to have drawn a line under that plot forever until she came back as an evil lesbian thing and started impregnating everyone, including Starfire and Changeling (THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED) Raven is sidelined for a good chunk of this book, as her powers would have solved everything in about a fourth of the time. The rest of the time, she's her usual goddamn mopey self.

CHANGELING--Holy shit, Changeling is rocking the mullet, to much lesser effect than Eddie Guerrero, I'm afraid. Yes, having pretty much shot his storytelling bolt when Terra messed with his head, Changeling is basically just here to spar with Danny Chase and unsuccessfully try to be funny, and he somehow lacks the pathos that underlied his braggdoccio back in the day. He also gets punched by a guy made out of TV screen. Yes, this a thing which happened.

In perhaps the most benign SPOILER I have ever dropped--Changeling does not keep the mullet by the end of the book. You'll never know how glad I am about that.

JERICHO--Did they ever decide whether Jericho was gay? I ask because Wolfman was pretty well determined (and it is frequently noted in Games) that Jericho got in more vaginas than a speculum at a fertility clinic, but he had that big blonde afro, which, like Elemant Lad, means that someone was determined that he would be retroactively homosexual. The man-fro is always a signifier of . . .something. Look at Terry Long, or Bob Ross, or that one bear in the Hair Bear Bunch.

TROIA--Oh, dear. As Wonder Woman had only recently come on the scene post-Crisis, Donna Troy had been a sidekick far longer than Wonder Woman had been around in fictional time, plus she was in her early 20's and married to Terry Long's creepy ass, so the notion of continuing to call her Wonder Girl probably seemed a bit icky.

So we did this big thing where Donna got a hircut and dressed like an Athenian cheerleader and called herself Troia and, uhm . . .I suppose had people just left it at that that might have been . . .sorta OK. But then her son ends up being an evil dictator from the future and things get progressively more heachache-inducing from there. Troia, despite having a much-increased power set spends most of her time in this book punching a subway car to death. I kinda feel like she should be doing more with all of New York City in jeopardy.

NIGHTWING--He's the leader of the group and sadly, this isn't him at his best, as he gets outmaneuvered by Faraday, nearly gets killed in battle against his counterpart, and, like most of the Titans, spends way too much time reacting to things, which was a recurring problem for the book around this time, as Nightwing and before him, Robin were the cool, collected professional core the rest of the team rotated around. Nightwing in this book is so reactive he could be an X-Man.

CYBORG--Cyborg is still the Angry Black Guy, but in a marked change from standard Titans dogma, generally keeps a cool head during most of this (despite given enough motivation to be a loose cannon, like Brian Pillman) and is pretty goddamn competent. There had to be one, I guess.

DANNY CHASE--If there is one thing Games can be said to do, it's to give a whole new generation a chance to loathe and despise Danny Chase all over again.

Danny Chase was Wolfman's effort to introduce some actual teenagers back into Teen Titans, as the book was The New Early Twentysomethings would have been too big to fit on the masthead. Also, Danny would bring some humour back into the book, which had been sorely lacking since the whole Terra thing had caused Titans to generally hover at an angst level of about 5 Claremonts.

What was puzzling was that nothing in Danny's makeup seemed designed to make him either humorous or endearing. Danny Chase was a 14-year old super-genius super-spy who was a really low-level telekinetic who seemed to live to be an utter dickweasel to everyone on the Titans and puff himself up as this great big ass-kicker, and every time he got in a fight he would always get scared and cry like the biggest bitch to ever bitch the bitch.

Not that there wasn't potential there--you can be team asshole, but you better have an apparent reason for it. For example, if you continually punch holes in everyone on the team's boat, but at the same time, when the chips are down, if they swoop in to save people they profess to despise, well, there's a story there. That story never came with Danny.

Instead, Danny had to pretend to be a cooler hero by draping a sheet over his head.

Then they killed him off and then they kept the sheet as a member of the team (THIS ALSO ACTUALLY HAPPENED)

Titans fans made it plan that Danny was as welcome on the team as a fart in church, but Wolfman was determined to shove Danny Chase down everyone's throats until we loved the little prick, which led to a tug-of-war between the fans (and the editors) begging Wolfman to drop him and Wolfman insisting that the fans just didn't get what he was trying to do (to be fair, in the backmatter, he finally seems to relent a little, though we still get a big "redemptive moment" for him, which in the best Danny Chase tradition, isn't very redemptive) and revisiting this whole moment of authorial intransigence was . . .something.

Anyways, back to the plot. Faraday wants the Titans to kill the Gamesmaster, but the Titans aren't assassins, and Faraday is too much of a goddamn idiot to remember that the DC Universe has people like the Suicide Squad and Checkmate who do assassinations and shit all the time, and decides to put pressure on the Titans in order to make them do what he wants and off to the races we go.

In the best Identity Crisis tradition, the Gamesmaster attacks the Titans supporting cast, killing one of them, one that I had said "Hey, whatever happened to her?" right after I finished the Omnibus and the day before Games arrived on my doorstep. Irony is pretty ironic sometimes) and the Titans split off and take on the Gamesmater's pawns in the middle of the book which consists of fitfully cool set-piece battles that try to hammer on the whole "game" motif, but I wasn't really buying it.

Perez renders it all well enough, but I just could not get into it, as the whole story feels . . .kinda disconnected. Yes, being a standalone graphic novel, the intent was perhaps to make it more accessible, but really, anyone could be in this story, and it's kind of a shame, after so many years of building up the Titans's own corner of the DC Universe to not use it to its fullest extent.

Then again, at least it wasn't the Wildebeest Society. There's that, at least.

There's a twist in the final act of the book which you could probably work out, but as the whole plot's been so muddled and the person involved has no real connection to the Titans in the same way that Terra's betrayal really shook things up it just feels like a way to tie things up because we're running out of pages. There is a meaningful sacrifice that ultimately leads to victory, and yes, of course I mean Changeling's mullet. The story ends with the Titans back together looking down a hole and then going for pizza.

I know how they feel.

Post story, there's a great bit of backmatter wherein Wolfman annotates the original plot for Games and drops in some things that got changed and some general reflections on the book (and yes, Danny Chase) which is an interesting kind of after-action report (and indicates the problems I had with the plot were endemic from the very beginning) which I kinda wish more books had, like that annotated Heir to the Empire that came out recently.

This is gonna sound weird, but I'm gonna give a guarded recommendation to Games, believe it or not. While it has a lifeless plot that feels very much like an unfocused mess, it has dazzling art, and as a historical document of the Titans at that time (as an awful lot of Titans material, especially from this time, has never been in print, this is as close as one can get without doing a back-issue crawl) and an interesting counterpoint to the energetic and fun stories found in the Omnibus. One feels boundless and exciting, like the right people at the right moment have found the best toybox to play in and they're going to make the most of it. The other is the work of people walled in by their own success.

It's well worth a look. If anything, you can see what a real Pet Character looks like as Danny Chase makes Jessica Jones like like Kitty Pryde.

Just Sayin'--Some Very Late Quick Hits

2011-11-02T09:55:00.003-04:00

JUSTICE LEAGUE #1--Yes, I am just now getting my copy. It's not so surprising I'm this late, is it? Anyways, this was pretty mediocre. I don't know what I was expecting, but if I had to guess I would say I was hoped the Jim Lee who did X-Men #1 twenty years ago had showed up to work and covered up a weak story with dazzling page layouts because I really think that would have helped here.

On the other hands, Superman smacked Green Lantern around. That part wasn't bad.

BATWOMAN #1-2--This, however, was just splendid, for the most part. It was great to see that not only are there cool hooks setting up (resolving the business with the Colonel--finally--left over from "Elegy") Chase and the DEO (kinda glad Bones made it over to the new 52 continuity, as he ended up being my favourite Infinity Inc. character for reasons best termed "bizarre" but seriously, guys, Mr. Bones is fucking cool) and the Batman Inc stuff which I hope is just there to give an early rub to the book, as I prefer Batwoman kinda standing on its own as its own thing.

The best thing about this issue is the relationship between Kate and Maggie Sawyer and how their relationship forms the fulcrum for the plot. Sawyer is caught between Chase trying to investigate Batwoman and she's working on the case du jour (the Weeping Woman, who so far is slightly abstract and very creepy) and Batwoman putting pressure on Sawyer leads Sawyer to work with Chase, which will eventually hurt Kate. It's actually pretty well-realised and handled with an surprising lack of cheap melodrama. Kinda interested to see where it goes from here.

Not really sure about Flamebird, however, but I have sufficient faith in the creators to give them time to see how this plays out.

The 2011 Witless Prattle Halloween Spooktacular--CARNIVAL OF SOULS

2011-10-31T21:47:00.004-04:00

Evening boys and ghouls, here's your horror host with the very least, Kazekage, who like one who walks on a lonely road doth walk in fear and read down to the liquor store, stopping in to drop in a Halloween themed post for you here on the actual day, lest I wait a few more hours and then it's All Saint's Day and everything just feels a bit late and past it and it's all faintly embarrassing somehow.

The movie we're going to talk about tonight is Carnival of Souls, an incredibly strange movie from 1962. It's an annual Halloween tradition to watch it at the House of Thump (the codename for the compound from where this blog emanates, and if you're a longtime reader, you know "emanate" is the right word to describe what we do here) and it's something I've always had a soft spot in my heart for--no least because I think I befriended the illustrious Diana Kingston-Gabai based on a spirited debate about the virtues of this movie (she thought it was rather dated, and to be fair, I made a poor defence of it) though I think we both enjoyed it's occasional silliness.

If you'd like to follow along, you can watch the movie for free via Youtube (thank heaven for public domain, eh?) It's rather short and won't take up great wodges of your life. For those of you who want to know what you're getting into, here's the trailer:

Man, even back then they gave away pretty much the entirety of the movie.

Anyways, before we get to the actual movie, a little background. Carnival of Souls was the brainchild of Herk Harvey, a man who made his living doing instructional films for the Centron Corporation, and if you're a big Mystery Science Theater 3000/Rifftrax fan, you will know them well. Carnival hovers close to that at times--it all too often veers towards the thudding, earnest blandness of an instructional film in the dialogue scenes (the bits with Mary--our heroine--and the psychiatrist set new speed records for an almost enervating dullness) and everyone looks intensely uncomfortable being on camera and tends to ham things up as a result.

However, Carnival isn't a Manos: The Hands of Fate kind of bad movie. It's actually rather good and eerie in some places, with a plot nicked from an Ambrose Bierce story before that became a thing, and a rather strange dreamlike quality that prizes images more than narrative coherence.

So let's dive right into the movie, shall we? Mary and her friends decide to have a drag race. The first thing you notice , of course, is that none of the drag racers seem to be at or above the age of thirty. Naturally, they pick the ricketiest bridge to drag race on and Mary's car flops off and sinks with all hands.

Or so they think, because Mary, our heroine, wanders up covered in mud and looking a little spacey. She'll look a bit spacey through the whole movie, actually, and you can read that several ways depending on whether you're willing to let it go as a dramatic choice or a comment on the skill of the actress. Mary takes the whole "falling off a bridge" thing like a champ, and doesn't let it break her stride at all. Mary, you see, is a budding church organist in her native Lawrence Kansas and has just received a job offer to go play organ for a church in Utah who has what I consider to be easily the hammiest pastor I ever did see.

One curious side effect of the bridge thing seems to be that Mary's a bit indifferent to everything--playing in a church is just a job to her, and most anything she can take or leave. During her first visit with the pastor she drives by an old pavilion that catches her eye in an eerie sort of way (Mary was the first urban explorer, you see) and suggests to the reverend that they bust in and look around and this is the first inlking that Mary's a little bit of a sociopath.

Fortunately, she's living in the creepiest boarding house in Utah, which should calm her right down. The owner of the house, Mrs. Thomas, who is mind-bogglingly obsessed with people taking hot baths (she's not one to make a fuss about such things, as she tells Mary a dozen times) and Mr. Linden, the other boarder in the house who is pretty unpleasant himself, as we get to know him by making clumsy passes at Mary, drinking a lot, and stealing a peek when she's undressing for the bath (God dammit Mrs. Thomas, every time you mention the baths, it's like you're ringing the dinner bell for him) Mary handles this like a champ, by alternately coming on to him and freaking the hell out around him, which ultimately puts him off, and you must say . . .takes a lot to out-creep a creep, doesn't it?

As an aside, this movie works even better if you just assume that everyone in it is fucking insane. It makes it like Eraserhead before Eraserhead was a thing.

But Mary has her own problems . . .every now and again during her day, she sort of "drops out." The sound seems to fade out and all she can hear is weird organ music (this is also known as "the entire soundtrack of the movie--seriously, the only place you'd hear more organ music was if you camped out at an ice rink) Everyone seems to ignore her. It's like she doesn't exist.

Well, that is, she doesn't exist except for the creepy dude (actually the director) who seems to appear and disappear and gets ever closer to her. This leads to the bits of the movie that are very effective indeed--the surreal, dreamlike, scenes that really kick in right here at the middle of the movie:

Man, the preacher losing his shit at the end of that clip is just awesome, as is Mary acting catatonic. This movie slips so neatly between striking images and unintentional comedy so easily, which is probably a reason why I love it so.

Things go downhill for Mary after that, and she proceeds to get weirder and weirder to the point where even Linden decides there's too much crazy in them drawers to justify the effort involved, and he finally gives her the broom. So Mary spends a little more screentime freaking the hell out and finally returns to the pavilion one final time, wherein the shocking secret (OK, if you've read the wiki thing or seen the movie by now, it's not so secret and probably not shocking) of the whole movie is revealed. Oh, and someone who's supposed to be dead blinks on camera. Once you see it, like the arrow in the FedEx logo, you can't un-see it.

I cannot, in all good conscience say that Carnival of Souls is a good movie. I will say, however, that it's one of my favourites, as somehow even its flaws--the wooden/hammy acting, the unlikeable lead, the somewhat meandering plot--really add to the dreamlike ambiance of the piece. The scenes that work the best--the ghouls coming out of the water, the ghouls on the bus, the odd dancing scene at the end, while a little mannered today, really stick in the mind and point the way towards later movies like Night of the Living Dead a few years later.

It is, however, entertaining for what it is--a very odd strange little film that seems to be several things but also it's own thing at the same time. I do rather like its goofy earnestness and somewhat effective moments of atmosphere (it makes excellent use of black-and-white photography to give certain scenes a real desolation and coldness), and it's well worth a look if you're curious as to what horror was like pre-Night of the Living Dead (which made it a little more OK to be gory) but after the horror waves of the 40's and 50's.

Or, if you just like to see preachers lose their shit when the organist goes off script.

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #42

2011-10-29T19:58:00.002-04:00

I could be out getting drunk as a skunk at several Halloween parties, but something in me said "No, let's get one step closer to the goal of recapping every single episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." That, plus I wasn't invited to any of them. In any event, join me as I endure three hatefully shitty episodes and one great one with my typical lack of patience for how far things have gotten out of whack in the seventh season. Let's just get it over with.

"COVENANT"
"I've always found that when people try to convince others of their beliefs it's because they're really just trying to convince themselves."

Oh God, I fucking hate this episode so much. Kira gets hijacked over to Empok Nor (THIS SHIT AGAIN ARGH) and find out the cult of the Pah-Wraith (yeah, you remember--the cult that's all over Bajor that we've seen like, twice) and, in a plot twist you could see from the next state over it's led by Gul Dukat. We run through all the expected Jim Jones /David Koresh comparisons and Kira escapes in time so we can close the episode with her saying Dukat is "more dangerous than ever." How this is possible when all he has is an under-motivated hippie commune when he once had the Dominion on his side, I am not exactly clear on.

This episode is so problematic, I don't really know where to begin, except to say just in general, that this is where many of Season Six's sins come home to roost. We have Dukat being Ker-AZY and really uninteresting as he tries to do the cult leader thing, even though he's still up to his usual tricks like banging Bajoran women (married Bajoran women) and spawning Bajoran/Cardassian love children (which he then spins in to a miracle, which takes balls bigger than all outdoors)

There's an attempt at nuance here, however--Dukat is seen praying alone to the Pah-Wraiths, which would undercut Kira's assertion that he's only joined a Bajoran cult to win the love of the Bajorans, but it never really goes anywhere because this would imply nuance in Dukat, and that's not what we do anymore.

Because it's not enough to revisit one misstep, it's time to plunder over the Prophets/Pah-Wraith conflict, although unlike "The Reckoning" no one busts out goofy contacts or Force Lightning. The shape of the Prophets/Pah-Wraiths tiff is explained thus: The Pah-Wraiths wanted to take more of an active role in Bajoran like, the Prophets told them "uh-uh" and they kicked the Pah-Wraiths out of the wormhole.

The sad thing is, this is actually sort of interesting. Over on Babylon 5, they managed to frame the extended conflict between the two major powers, articulated their philosophies, and made them credible and interesting in that they were both right, and both wrong, and at the conclusion of Babylon 5's war, the actual conflict was about finding an option outside of their two philosophies.

DS9 rolls this out, then ignores it for the rest of the episode and the rest of the series. They were just shitting you about making this a somewhat even contest, all you need to know is Pah-Wraiths=bad, Prophets=Good*

*(That's "good" despite their opening and closing the wormhole whenever they get in a snit. And brain-raping Sisko's biological Mom. Oh, and jerking Sisko around like, every season. Other than that they're fucking saints, I guess)

Did I mention that I hate this episode? Yeah, I do. The whole "evil cult is evil" bullshit is bad enough, but the thing that really honks me off is how we have a whole bunch of interesting ideas get rolled out, and are immediately buried so we can go for the safer choice. The idea of a clash of philosophies forming a structure for the finale is one thing, the notion of dueling Emissaries is also very interesting. Without spoiling it, we're not going getting that. Sorry.

"IT'S ONLY A PAPER MOON"
"He's a one legged crazy man!"

It's somehow fitting that Ezri's second big attempt at helping someone fails as miserably as the first. For all they try to get her over as a Worthwhile Addition, her inability to do her fucking job really undercuts it.

I just wanted to get that out of the way before I sank my teeth into the meat of this episode, which is one of DS9's best episodes, which is no surprise. The true surprise here is that: This is an amazing episode that features Vic Fontaine, and until I saw this, I just assumed that was like dividing by zero or some shit--you couldn't do it.

But you can, apparently.

Nog returns after getting an artificial leg to replace the one he lost last week (our time) in "The Siege of AR-558" but he's having a little trouble. His leg hurts and makes him limp, and he requires a cane to get around. He's not interested in anything anymore, and rebuffs his friends and family when they try to help him. The only thing that seems to make any difference is when he goes to Vic's and asks him to sing the song that was playing when he lost his leg ("I'll Be Seeing You")

This leads Nog to basically move in to the holosuite and hang out with Vic all the time. Vic does his best to help--giving Nog a cane to replace the other cane to subtly wean him from the need for it, and Nog helps him expand the parameters of Vic's program. Things seem to be going well.

Until Nog beats the crap out of Jake when his girlfriend keeps calling him a hero. Then it becomes plain this is a way that Nog is trying to escape from a life he's become to terrified to try to live, as he articulates in the following speech, worth quoting in full:

"When the war began... I wasn't happy or anything, but I was eager. I wanted to test myself. I wanted to prove I had what it took to be a soldier and I saw a lot of combat. I saw a lot of people get hurt. I saw a lot of people die. But I didn't think anything was going to happen to me. And then, suddenly Dr. Bashir is telling me he has to cut my leg off. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it. If I could get shot, if I could lose my leg, anything can happen to me, Vic. I could die tomorrow. I don't know if I'm ready to face that. If I stay here, at least I know what the future is going to be like."

Vic responds by telling him that running away to a holosuite will kill him little by little until he's as hollow as Vic himself is and shuts down his program. It's only when Nog finally agrees to try to live in the real world that Vic re-activates, and in gratitude, Nog gets Quark to leave Vic on all the time (which depending on how you feel about Vic may be a rather unpleasant prospect) which, well . . .I'll complain about it when I get there. This is my only moment to be positive, and damn it, let's ride that train as long as we can.

This is one hell of an episode. The Nog story is continued (as it should have been, as blowing the poor guy's leg off and just shrugging your shoulders and saying everything's fine would have been rather disingenuous) and we're allowed to follow along and identify with Nog's need to escape from a world that has far more drastic and terrible consequences than he thought he was ready for and his anger at his inability to control himself and his withdrawal from things. Typically that sort of thing usually gets sacrificed at the altar of your heroes being "heroic," forgetting than a story like this--of someone triumphing over a less tangible but no less lethal foe is also very heroic, even if it's not a conflict that ends in punching.

I can't really do this episode justice in a review--it's too damn much a character piece and really the kind of thing you need to see for yourself. In fact, g'head and do it now, because you ain't missing anything if you skip the next two episodes, lemme tell ya.

"PRODIGAL DAUGHTER"
"I hate your hair."

Operation: Get Ezri Over Part . . .shit, even I've forgotten.

This episode is regarded by most of the people who worked on the show as the worst episode of the season, and while it is dull, ultimately pointless, boring, and fails to tell us anything interesting about Ezri, they are absolutely wrong, as the next episode is easily the worst of the season and in contention for worst things ever.

Someone had the bright idea to use Ezri trying to reconnect with her amazingly dysfunctional family to follow up a thread from lasts season's "Honor Among Thieves." These were two bad ideas that never should have been stuck together.

Ezri has a dysfunctional family because this show was made in the 90's, when we all found out our families were totally fucked up in the head places. Her mother is a queen bee who runs her own mining company the same way she runs her family, with an iron fist. Ezri's older brother is the dutiful son, the younger one is weak-willed and a sensitive artist guy, and why yes, they are pretty stock character types. The problem with this bit is that we barely give a shit about Ezri at this point (admittedly, not for lack of trying) so a cipher coming from a family of ciphers really is hard to get all that het up for, despite the whole murder mystery thing that comes up.

The O'Brien thing follows up on a character who died at the end of "Thieves," and the whole reason that the episode was in any way memorable was their interplay. With that gone, there's little reason to give a crap about O'Brien rummaging through the dead guy's backstory, and that's without the fact that it takes places pretty much entirely off-screen. This episode has some fundamental and downright mystifying plot problems that I cannoy believe no one saw before it filmed.

They're so bad they really seem to negate the point of the episode at all, and it thus becomes, as Homer Simspon said, "Just a bunch of stuff that happened." But beleive you me when I tell you that it is like goddamn art when compared to . . .

"THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOAK"
"Do we look smart to you?"

The only good thing about this episode: Vic Fontaine gets shot dead.

This is DS9 at its most emetic. Someone had the brilliant idea to combine a Mirror Universe episode with a Ferengi episode, and already I can feel my dinner fighting it's way up through my esophagus.

I'm going to make this as quick as I can: The Nagus gets captured because he went over to the Mirror Universe to look for new business opportunities. This is shrugged off in show as a "well, it seemed like a good idea at the time" and you know, if you have the characters in the episode complaining about the plot . . .

The Alliance holds him for ransom in exchange for a cloaking device. Mind you--we saw they have cloaking devices back in "Through the Looking Glass." This touches off some Klassic Ferengi Komedy as Quark and Rom steal a cloaking device from Martok's ship while it's still cloaked and . . .and. . .

Fuck, this is so fucking stupid, and I can feel my brain cells dying just writing all this shit down. It was clear as far back as "Shattered Mirror" the Mirror Universe shit was running on fumes--it's the place where everyone's a bit camp, and that's pretty much all there is to it. When you layer Ferengi style broad farce on top of more broad farce, you get something rather unbearable, and if you've been following this blog, you know good and hell well what's coming:

That's it for this week. Join us next week when Ezri confronts the killer within because that's so much easier than doing her job in "Field of Fire"; Odo encounters another Changeling who isn't a Founder in "Chimera"; Vic Fontaine convinces everyone to rip off "Ocean's 11" before ripping off "Ocean's 11" was a thing in "Badda-Bing Badda-Bang"; and Section 31 returns whole Bashir's on a road trip to Romulus in "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges." Join us next time for exploding watermelons, espionage, and pleasure!

Just Sayin'--The Times I Come Closest To Giving Up

2011-10-27T09:50:00.002-04:00

Everything about the existence of the linked article I find grossly, oppressively, terribly, depressing.

Yes, that includes the bloody comments, too.

Seriously--can't we just divorce the politics from the book for one second and just admit that Miller is way past his shelf life and Holy Terror was just total shit? Can we go ahead and do that?

Besides, which--my favourite comment about Miller of all time was some wag on a discussion board who said "[Miller] always wanted to see giant Nazi stues fucking each other." That was it for me in regards to the notion of Miller being a Serious Artist Worthy of Consideration, now I'm just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

He's a clown now, guys. Just a clown. All-Star Batman and Robin and the Spirit should have taught us this by now, so why are we still talking about this in two thousand god damned eleven?

I leave you with this nugget of wisdom: Consider that Rob Liefeld, on balance, carries himself with more dignity than Frank Miller. Rob Motherfucking Liefeld. Think about that for a second and consider the chill that rushes through your bones as you contemplate something so improbable and how it tampers with the fulcrum of your world and everything you thought you could depend on.

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #41

2011-10-22T08:16:00.004-04:00

Hey, ho--let's go! Time once again for another stretch of time around the racetrack on our final lap covering the length and breadth of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Last week, we kinda stumbled through the opening moments and it proved an excellent peek into the future for this season, as really awkward and ill-advised bits stood cheek by jowl with bits that were excellent and completely up to DS9's standards. This week, we have a couple of stronger episodes that I can recommend a little more unreservedly. So let's hop right in, shall we?

"CHRYSALIS"
"That's a stupid question!"

When you get to the final season of a show, especially one that has had so many long-term plot threads wandering through the entirety of the show, every hour of television becomes precious, as you try frantically to tie everything up with the time you have and do it in a way that feels satisfying and justifies the time the viewers have spent following the show.

Of all the plot threads running through DS9, the one that I could safely say I DIDN'T need any follow-up or closure on, was the goddamned Jack Pack. Yes, those lovable mentally-ill manques who nearly sold the entire Federation down the river back in "Statistical Probabilities"
are back to waste an hour of our precious time in a story that is pretty much "Flowers for Algernon" mixed with an almost word for word rewrite of "Melora" from the second season of this show.

I'm going to speed through this because this episode is awful and the next one is far more worth my time in terms of writing about it. Here goes: Sarina, the mute member of the Jack Pack returns to the station and Bashir develops some Whatever Science that makes her not catatonic and isolated, and it works. Sarina also falls in love with Bashir which kinda makes me wonder if "roofie" was hidden somewhere in the treatment.

But Bashir pushes too hard and it freaks Sarina out and ultimately it comes to nothing because Sarina is a guest star and Bashir has already been destined by the Fickle Finger of Plot that he will hook up with Ezri, a plot convulsion that happens in even more muddled way.

So I'm not really sure what the point of this episode is really supposed to be. Sarina's a stereotype that walks like a person and Bashir has five or ten people come at him the whole time telling he's lonely, which kinda undercuts the point there a little. The zaniness of the Jack Pack is even more annoying the second time around and again--I saw this episode before when it was called "Melora," and while "Melora" wasn't amazing or anything, it was leagues better than this.

"TREACHERY, FAITH, AND THE GREAT RIVER"
"Of course I'm paranoid--everyone's trying to kill me."

Hot damn--here we go. Odo journeys to meet with an old informant, only to find that it's Weyoun, who wants to defect. He no longer believes in the Founder's plan for war against the Federation and he wants to surrender to Odo. However, Damar, along with ANOTHER Weyoun (they're clones, remember?) send the Jem'Hadar after them, as Weyoun is a near-fatal security risk they can't afford to let run loose.

In the B-Plot, O'Brien loses Sisko's desk, and hilarity ensues. No, really, it does.

Let's take the A-Plot first, as there's a lot to unpack there. Odo has never been comfortable being viewed as a god by the Jem'Hadar and the Vorta, and so sticking him in this situation causes him plenty of awkwardness, mitigated somewhat because he can pretend, at least initially, that it's a simple matter of "this is my prisoner, I'm not going to let you take him."

Initially, anyways, because Weyoun won't leave it there. After all, he's genetically predisposed to see Odo as godlike, and when Odo says "yeah, you know they probably programmed you to think that way"; Weyoun's all like, "Yeah, of course they did, because unless you have people worshiping you, you're just some prat in a robe doing stupid magic tricks." The interplay between Odo and Weyoun, covering as it does the past (Weyoun explains how the Vorta became what they are now--the Vorta once saved a Changeling from persecution, and in gratitude, the Founders gave them a place in the Dominion) the present (how in the hell are they going to get out of there current predicament) and the future, which is a critical plot point and deserves it's own paragraph break:

The Founders are dying. Some sort of disease is spreading through the Great Link. There is no cure, and no hope. Odo, despite his rejection of his people, despite his repudiation of the Dominion, may one day be the last Changeling left alive when all is said and done. His words are borne out when we see Big Momma show up, and she's not looking very well at all. There's actually a good bit there where Damar and the other Weyoun are trying to keep it a secret that they're trying to kill the good Weyoun--who's got Odo with him, remember?--which shows just how messed up the situation's gotten.

Ultimately, the Jem'Hadar boxes them in and good-Weyoun self-terminates to save Odo's life. It's actually a great scene, as the only thing he asks for it is Odo's blessing, and as a god, Odo makes a good waiter, as it's incredibly awkward for him. Then again, given he's learned that his people are dying, it had already been a pretty bad day up to that point.

Had this episode had a bad B-Plot, the strength of the A-Plot would have made it essential viewing anyways--it's that good. Fortunately, the B-plot is just as good and genuinely funny as Sisko gives O'Brien an impossible deadline for fixing the Defiant and Nog schools him in incentive-based economics (yes, we kinda saw this in "In The Cards," but dammit, if you're going to take from comedy episodes, take from GOOD comedy episodes) things seem to be going fine, until O'Brien finds that Sisko's desk is gone, which leads to the following exchange between O'Brien, Bashir, and Kira:

"What do you think?"
"It's white."
"I know it's white, I'm gonna' paint it."
"It's the wrong shape. The wrong height. The wrong width. Other than that it's perfect. The captain will never suspect you switched desks on him."
"Julian, I need help, not sarcasm."
"I'm afraid Nog is the only one that can help you now."
"If he gets back to the station before the captain does."
"Maybe he's not coming back. Maybe he's decided to make a run for it."
(Kira enters) "That isn't the captain's desk!"
"He's gonna' paint it."
"Get it out of here!"

I love that exchange more than is healthy. There is some effort to dovetail the two plots together and reflect the title (and they kind of pull it off, actually, which is even more of a reason to throw down some gold stars on this episode) Point is, this is the first unreservedly strong episode of the season, and it's sixth. If they'd spent more time doing episodes like this and less trying to do the hard sell with Ezri and dicking off with the Jack Pack, this season might be a bit stronger. But that's probably the headache medicine talking.

"ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH"
"If you do, then there should be no doubt in your mind that he died a hero's death. If you do not believe in the legend, then he was just a man, and it does not matter how he died."

OK, so not two minutes ago I typed that DS9 really shouldn't have spent so much time exploring tangents like the Jack Pack, and this would, naturally, lead you to believe that I would hate this episode, as it features the return of Kor, who's only shown up on this show twice and had little going for him apart from he was a link to the original series.

And yet . . .this episode kicks all kinds of ass, not least because it uses a guest star like Kor to et us know something about a character we're more familiar with--Martok. Kor returns to the station to ask a favor of Worf--he wants to do something to help out the Klingons in the war, and his own efforts have come to naught. Part of that is because he's old and considered past it, but some of it is that he's made so many enemies in the Empire that now that he's down on his luck, no one will help him.

Indeed, when you consider that the last time Worf and Kor were together in "The Sword of Kahless" they were trying to kill each other, it should give you a sense of how bad things have gotten for him. I should mention that for an actor who is (or sadly was) a mighty ham like John Colicos, he really does do well with the subtle touches this episode, as when his voice breaks slightly when he says it's not easy for him to beg Worf for help. It's nice to see some of the melancholy that colored Kor's character back in "Blood Oath" return for a bit.

However, there are two important bits that should be addressed, here. One, Martok is one of those enemies that Kor has made. Back when Kor was on the review board for the Klingon equivalent of OTC, Kor struck Martok's name from the list because he comes from the poor part of the Klingon homeworld. The shame meant Martok spent most of his early years working as a janitor before he got lucky enough to earn a battlefield commission. Kor doesn't even remember he did it, which makes it even more galling, but it burns in Martok every time his name comes up.

The other and more important problem is that Kor has the Klingon Equivalent of the mad cow. It happens to a lot of OG Star Trek guys, apparently--hell, Kirk had it so bad he thought he was attorney from Boston and talked like a Pokemon for five whole years. But seeing as how this is military operation, maybe it's not a good idea to take the senile guy who your CO despises on a mission.

Worf, being Worf, of course gets Kor posted as third officer so he can be right up there annoying the shit out of Martok at every opportunity. Worf is . . .kind of an idiot like that sometimes.

Well, Martok is annoyed that the rest of his crew worship Kor and have a tendency not to focus on the task at hand, and he'd probably also like to beat the crap out of Worf for putting his sworn enemy on the bridge as well, but Martok Gets Shit Done, and so focuses on the job . . .

. . .until Kor loses his shit and nearly gets everyone killed. Martok nearly kills him then and there, except Worf catches the knife he was throwing and backhands Kor (which, idiot or not, is seriously fucking awesome) and it is more or less All Over For Kor. The crew ride him unmercifully, Martok rubs his nose in the fact that his mind is going and all Kor can do is accept his fate with some real dignity and a great line, worth quoting in full:

"Savor the fruit of life, my young friends. It has a sweet taste when it's fresh from the vine. But don't live too long... The taste turns bitter... after a time."

This pisses Martok right the hell off in return, with another great line:

"I've hated his name for almost 30 years. I've dreamt of the moment when I would finally see him stripped of his rank and title - when he would suddenly find himself without a friend in the world, without the power of his birthright...Well I've had that moment now - and I took no joy from it."

I like that the episode doesn't have Martok ever relent in his hatred of Kor, but is willing to at least let Kor earn his respect. That can be a hard think to write credibly, but they pull it off here.

What they don't pull off so well is that we don't get to see Kor's final stand. I know there was a story reason for it--the whole point of the episode is do we beleive or not in the legend of Kor, but . . .nahh, it just doesn't work. I see the point of it, but I don't buy it, especially since we get a bunch of Klingon singing at the end and I've seen all of that I need to, like, ever.

But it's a minor blemish on an effective episode, so it's still well worth your time to check it out.

"THE SIEGE OF AR-558"
"We held."

Is this another of those really controversial episode among Trek fans? I think it kinda probably is. This is the "war episode," wherein our heroes get deposited right on the front lines, and there's very little of the Federation's virtue or nobility on display here, just people trying to survive as rather desperate situation as best they can, and . . .some of them succeed.

Not all, though.

Our Heroes are running relief supplies to an outpost that was recently taken that houses a Dominion communications array. The soldiers guarding have been there for five months. Most of them are dead. They've been there long after they were supposed to be rotated out, and they're well beyond cracking as not only do they have to deal with Jem'Hadar attacks, but the Dominion's latest nasty surprise--Houdini mines. So named because you hit one and disappear.

The Houdinis are really nasty customers, as they float through subspace and can suddenly appear anywhere. Think of what kind of fear you'd be living under if a mine just decided to pack itself on you at any moment. The soldiers live in fear of them and consider them a really sneaky and unfair weapon . . .

. . .until they crack how to use them, and suddenly they're not so sneaky and dishonorable anymore. This kind of moral relativism was fairly new in Star Trek--or at least it wasn't made as explicit, really.

The Defiant has to chase off some Jem'Hadar fighter (which means Worf misses the ground battle, which I'm sure just killed him) leaving Sisko to rally everyone for one final holding action to finish off the Jem'Hadar.

While this desperate fight is going on, of course, Quark is there for . . .well, some germane reason in terms of story, but the real reason he's here is to say "This shit is fucking crazy, the Ferengi would never have let things get this bad," and it's frankly a good use of Quark as a counterbalance to what's going on, most especially in the scene where Quark shoots a Jem'Hadar dead to protect himself and he's kinda freaked (as he was last time) There's an honesty to it that's really effective.

So now, let's talk about poor Nog getting his leg blown off. Man, this is a hard bit to talk about. We've seen Nog in a lot of contexts and really watched him develop more than Jake and a few other characters have over the years. He wanted to be the first Ferengi in Starfleet, with all the glory that entailed, and now, he gets the other edge of the sword--the Jem'Hadar catch him and as a result, he has to have one of his legs amputated. This is a wrenching scene, and it'll be even moreso when we look at the follow up episode next week. There's not a lot I can say that can convey the sense of loss this moment has, it's one of those you'll just have to see for yourself.

This is a really great episode, and kinda makes you wish they'd really not acted as though the war was some far-off thing so much, as it provides a lot of grist for the storytelling mill. This is one of DS9's best and oh my GOD is it good to end on a high note.

That's all for this week. Join us next time when I really raise some hell over the hopelessly annoying and problematic "Covenant"; We follow up with Nog AND witness a miracle with a great Vic Fontaine episode in "It's Only A Paper Moon"; Operation: Get Ezri Over continues with "Prodigal Daughter" and you get to watch my soul die right in front of you as I have to gut through the final Mirror Universe episode, "The Emperor's New Cloak." Join us next week for bogus religious mumbo-jumbo, Frengi Komedy . . .and displeasure.

Witless Dictionary #27--Year-Skip Paradox

2011-10-20T08:58:00.002-04:00

It's amazing that I go from not doing these things for months to doing two in the same month. This is, for the uninitiated, a continuing effort to provide a working language we can all use when talking about comics and is in no way a way to spout off snarkily about comic trends that annoy me, and anyone who says different is a damn liar.

Year-Skip Paradox--Term referring to the inevitable screw-up that happens when comic creators decide to skip ahead in fictional time so they can jump right into a new status quo without all the tedious writing it through and letting the audience see it for ourselves.

Inevitably, major status quo changes are hidden in these year-skips, much as one might sweep dust bunnies under the couch. The problem is, these plot movements are typically major things that the readers then clamour to have explained, only the creators had no intention of ever explaining it--they just wanted to get to things going their way.

So typically what ends up happening is some mind-manglingly convoluted plot is then cobbled together to explain what happened during the year-skip (it may not necessarily be a year, but for the sake of our hypothetical construct) This is considered a fail state, because it negates the stated intent of skipping ahead in story time in the first place, as all the time they could have spent on new stories in the new status quo is now spent filling all the gaps and they could have avoided the whole mess just by not skipping ahead to begin with.

Alternately, then new status quo is dumped in a panic and there is much frantic scrambling about and the writers busily keep all their metaphorical plates spinning and hope everyone forgets that they every skipped ahead in time at all. This is also a fail state.

Examples include the skip-ahead after Age of Apocalypse (Hey, Sunspot's back! Only wasn't he evil just before the . . .no, shut up) DC's One Year Later post Infinite Crisis (seriously, rebooting everything was preferable to that nonsense) The skip-ahead that they did when Claremont came back to the X-Books at the turn of the century (Cable and Gambit are leading the X-Men and stuff! We don't know why, either!) and of course, the "Suddenly, One Year Later!" thing from the justifiably forgotten move BRAIN 17.

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #40

2011-10-15T12:06:00.003-04:00

Well, well--never thought we'd make it this far. It's time once again for us to begin the final lap of our run-through of the entirety of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This week, we begin the final season of the show, a season which will do a lot of things write, and all too many things wrong.

I was on another review site recently and someone articulated the big problem I'm having with DS9 here lately--they're working diligently to color in all the shades of gray which previously set this show apart and to a large extent made it good. This wouldn't be a bad thing, except the colours their using seem to consist of black and white. Characters that typically thrived on ambiguity become one-note mustache twirling baddies, of all the various paths to a resolution of a plot point, typically the most obvious and least interesting path is the one chosen.

And unfortunately, it's not going to be long until we run into this. So let's get to it, shall we?

"IMAGE IN THE SAND"

"So, what'd you find out?"
"That you should never try to match drinks with a Klingon."

After last episode's offensive which saw the Federation getting a foothold in Dominion space, but everything else going to shit, we skip ahead three months. Kira has been promoted to Colonel, and been left in charge of the station and is chafing ever so slightly under the new Admiral Ross brings over--the Romulans want a liaison officer posted to DS9 a la Martok, and Kira is none too pleased about this.

The Dominion has managed to keep the Federation bottled up on their foothold, which is bringing Bashir and O'Brien down, as they've been on convoy duty and are bored out of their minds. Worf is dealing with the death of Jadzia by smashing up Vic Fontaine's holosuite, which I can't really find a lot of fault with. But generally he's being a real dickhead, and as I rack my brain and go over the breadth of the season, I'm not sure he ever really stops being one, bar once.

Sisko is completely out to lunch, working in his dad's restaurant to get over the funk he has about Jadzia's death and the wormhole closing and all that stuff. He soon finds out that his father's been lying to him about something when he gets a pretty vague vision involving a woman he's never seen before and he confronts his father, who tells him that the woman he thought was his mother . . .really isn't. I would call bullshit on this whole plotline right now, but it has one more turn to go through and I'm saving my ire for that.

"That's an awful lot of setup," I hear you saying. Yeah, it is. The two-parter that opens the season is willing to try and juggle an A, B, and C-plot, and unfortunately, there's only one of those that's any good. See if you can guess which one.

Kira's plot comes to a head when Cretak, the Romulan liaison, asks if the Romulans can set up a field hospital an a Bajoran moon, only to fortify it with weapons. Kira says words to the effect of "bitch, you crazy" and blockades the moon. Obviously, this is a suicide mission--the Bajorans don't even have warp drive, remember?--but Kira is determined to force the Romulans to withdraw, whether it torpedoes the alliance or not. I should mention, given how fiery and defiant she was in "Emissary" it's great to see her draw the line line this once again. It's not her only finest hour this season, but it's a hell of a good one to start on.

Worf, Bashir, O'Brien, Martok, and Quark all pile up and go off to win a glorious battle in Jadzia's name and ensure her a place in Sto'Vo'Kor, but I think it's really just to shut Worf the fuck up because no one really believed they were at all romantic because they had them chemistry of used dishwater, really. You may also wonder why it is that Bashir and O'Brien, who are rather critical Federation servicemen, can just fuck off on a Klingon ship on some nonsense mission where no one else on the ship can talk about anything but "honor" and junk, and yes, it's kind of bullshit, but DS9's relationship with the war they say is going on rather atrophies in moments like this, and really it's best not to think about it and just hope that it's over quickly.

Sisko is all freaked out about his biological mom, not least because she seemed to have a locket with ancient Bajoran writing, which speaks of an Orb no one knew about--the Orb of the Emissary--and soon after being stabbed by a member of the Cult of the Pah-Wraiths (who have been growing in numbers since the wormhole closed--sadly, this plot thread doesn't go far) Sisko and Jake, and Sisko's dad pack up and head off for Tyree, or they would, only Dax shows up.

Ezri Dax, that is. Guys, Nicole DeBoer was really awesome in the movie Cube, and she is indisputably cute as a button, but sweet Jesus in a smoking birchbark canoe, Ezri is one of the most problematic characters ever, and I may not be kind to her as we make our way through that season. I am warning you now.

I am also warning you that she will, in fact, have one scene where the character works out like gangbusters, and when Ezri Dax's Finest Hour happens, you can trust that I will point it out, because for all my snark and impatience, dammit, I like to think I'm fair at the end of the day. Hop on over to the next episode and let's get this over with.

"SHADOWS AND SYMBOLS"

"Because it could be no one else."

In the A plot, Sisko goes to Tyree, and we catch up with Ezri's backstory. Ezri was a counselor on the ship carrying the Dax symbiont back to Trill when they had to put the slug in her as an emergency measure. This is a little bit of bullshit, as several times (most notably in "Equilibirum" and "Invasive Procedures") we've seeing that being a joined Trill takes years of training and vetting and you can't just plug them in and out like flash drives, only apparently now you can. This has given her the equivalent of Trill multiple personalities, which is played for laughs, even though one of them is a murder (remember?)

I understand what the point was intended to be, I suppose--they wanted to experiment with a character that wasn't a composed, complete Trill. Well, OK, but it didn't really ever succeed: Ezri tries had to be winning and ends up just being an ear head who upchucks all over the controls the first time she's in space and does very little else. It's sort of like if someone but Twist from Spaced in a Star Trek show.

In any event, Sisko is searching for the Orb in the only way he knows how--by wearing a bathrobe, wandering around the desert, and bugging the fuck out. He keeps hearing an intercom announcement that a Doctor Wykoff needs to report to the isolation ward, and Sisko really wishes he'd get his ass there already, and if I had to hear it nine dozen times, I really would too. Sisko finds the Orb, digs it up and before he can open it . . .

. . .oh shit it's Benny Russell. Benny Russell has not been doing too well since "Far Beyond The Stars," namely he's gone all Syd Barrett and is in a mental ward, and has apparently been spending his time writing the entire saga of DS9 on the walls of his cell, a fact which Dr. Wykoff (who may or may not look like Damar without his makeup) is dismayed by.

The stories are what drove him there in the first place, Wykoff says. He offers him a roll of paint and says he's giving him a chance to wipe away the past, paint over the stories, and get well. Benny's actually considering it.

Things look bad. . .

In the B Plot, Kira has drawn a line against the Romulans, and the Romulans are threatening to step over it by sending a fleet of warships to ensure their supplied get through. Ross begs Kira to back down and seek a negotiated settlement, but Kira isn't having that shit--even if she is outgunned and outmatched, she will not go down without a fight.

I will put my cards on the table right now--of the three plots, I really love this one the most, as it has so much of DS9's DNA running through it and feels more true to the characters. Kira fought the Cardassians because they invaded her home, remember, and so it stands to reason she'd fight to stop anyone else from trying to stage an incursion on their territory, and the notion that she will risk everything for that is so very true to her character. Nana Visitor plays this perfectly, as he outward bravado to Cretak and Ross is tempered by her genuine fear that in making a stand she's more than likely not going to walk away from.

Let's flip quickly back to the Benny Russell scene for a moment, because it sets up the best scene in this two parter (the Benny Russell scene is great, but falters because of how it's woven in to the overall story) as Benny, completely out of his damn mind and so close to wiping the words he's basically sacrificed his life for drops the paint roller, punches Wykoff the fuck out, and writes on the wall that Sisko opens the box.

Sisko follows the plot, and the wormhole opens up and blasts the Pah-Wraith out. The scene that follows is one of my all-time favourites because it is so quiet and so understated but incredibly effective: Kira sees the wormhole open, and all of a sudden, with the reappearance of her gods on the scene, she feels no longer hopeless and is more determined than ever to stand her ground.

But she doesn't have to. The Romulan ships withdraw. Not because they were scared off by Kira's blockade, but because her defiance convinced Ross that just because Bajor doesn't do as much for the cause as the Romulans can doesn't mean we can throw one under the bus for the other in the name of expediency.

I do really love this scene, as it has so much paralleling with "Emissary" (Sisko coming to Kira's rescue, the wormhole returning, Kira facing down overwhelming odds with nothing but her gigantic metaphorical balls) and I really wish the rest of the episode was as good as this.

Over in Plot C (I demoted it, because I hate it) Worf and Co. blow up a shipyard with technobabble, because of course that's what Klingons would do in that situation. Before that happens Worf runs down Bashir, O'Brien, and Quark for horning in on feeling sorry for Jadzia and Martok is like "are you serious bro? Maybe if you turned down trying to be a shit-cock for five fucking minutes, you'd see these people are trying to help you honour her and you are not sole custodian of her memory."

Oh, if only he'd listened. The next episode might not be necessary.

Anyways, they succeed in getting closure, only Worf is still sulking about this as the season reached endgame, which makes me wonder what the point was, and . . .y'know, I'm kind of tired of Worf being an asshole dickmonster and yet everyone thinks of him as this honourable warrior type. Frankly, he's a big fat poseur who utterly fails to pull his own weight and just because he's not the designated "strong guy who gets smacked around so we know the threat of the week is Serious Fucken Business" anymore go to his head.

That said, Worf too will have a few good scenes this season. And a whole lot more awful ones, too.

Oh, and . . .uhm . . .-deep breath- the Prophets appear to Sisko and tell him his previously unrevealed biological mother was taken over by the Prophets so she would conceive him.

I thought this then and now: Bull. SHIT.

I know what they were going for here: Of all the Trek Captains, who are typically considered almost godlike, why not make one an actual demigod? Plus, think of all the story avenues this opens up, as it makes the Prophets kinda sinister, as they kinda bodyjacked this women to ensure the creation of their Emissary and doesn't that mean we can't completely consider them the good guys?

Well, all of this would be very interesting, except for a few things: One, the Prophets gimmick was that they really didn't understand corporeal humans. Two, they didn't perceive time as linear. I don't think that meant they could travel in time, they just saw it all happening at once, which means the Prophets are now just the generic godlike aliens down the street.

And three, none of this is followed up on in any meaningful way, really. Sisko's Mom just becomes our designated Prophet, robbing the Prophets of that whole "speaking through people you knew" thing they did and . . .it's kind of disappointing just how rote and mystery-killing this whole twist is. I didn't like it then, and I don't now. It feels too pat, too . . .easy. I like DS9 a whole lot better when they're willing to give me messy resolutions and let me make up my own mind, and I don't really know what happened to them here.

You had a good mythic thing going already: Sisko came to Bajor not wanting to be there. Then he didn't want to be the Emissary. By the beginning of the sixth season he's embraced being the Emissary, talks about building a house on Bajor, and has pretty well gone native. That's good enough (even if it's a bit unsettling in that "identifiable protagonist goes native so we're more comfortable with them being noble savages" trope that's in far too much SF anyways) right there, as we've followed him grappling with and embracing it over six years now.

But sometimes people keep fixing things until they break.

In any event, everyone comes back to the station and everyone's happy again, and oh look here's Dax everyone! She's totally not dead--sorta--and now we'll have to try very hard to find her something to do!

"AFTERIMAGE"

"You dreamt about what? You're crazy. Now get out of my office."

Sorry--the chance to drop in that Rush song was too good not to take. It's not really cool among Rush fans to find any value in their snyth period, but dammit, I do.

Operation: Get Ezri Over, Part 2 of Too Many This Season.

Ezri is a counselor, which means she's kind of a shrink. Deanna Troi was a counselor over on Next Generation, and set new standards for being crappy at her job, as all she really ever seemed to do was get her brain raped and had the uncanny ability to sense what everyone else on the goddamn bridge could figure out anyway.

All Ezri would have to do is be sightly better at her job than Troi. Given Troi's record, that wouldn't require much more than not drooling like an imbecile at the dinner table.

You know where this is going, right?

As Ezri grapples with the fact that being a counselor more mentally ill than the people she's treating is about as useful as mag wheels on a dump truck (as Arn Anderson once said) Garak is bugging the fuck out as his claustrophobia is now to the degree that he's trying to walk out of an airlock because the entire station is too confining for him. Worf is being an absolute shitheel to her because he can't deal with a person who has Jadzia's memories in her head but isn't Jadzia walking around--it's really unsettling and creepy.

However, Worf can't just leave it at that, he has to actively sabotage Ezri's attempts to fit in, and nearly beats the shit out of Bashir when he talks to her, and really, it's stuff like that that makes you wish Worf had gotten whacked rather than Jadzia, because that one extra step really eradicates any sympathy you might have for his plight. That's not a man grieving--that is a fucking psycho.

I should also mention that I'm certain this is technically against the Trill "re association" taboo they have--remember the episode "Rejoined," aka The Last Good Dax Episode?--but if the people who write the show can't be bothered to keep it straight, then why should I care?

In any event, the point of the story is Ezri trying to help Garak so he can get back to work breaking Cardassian codes without trying to step out of an airlock and get some fresh vacuum. To be blunt, Ezri does as well at this as the doctor in Revenge of the Sith. Garak can see through this immediately and lets her have it in one of the great bits in this episode, which is worth quoting in full:

"I want someone to help me get back to work. And you, my dear, are not up to this task. I mean, look at you. You're pathetic – a confused child trying to live up to a legacy left by her predecessors. You're not worthy of the name "Dax." I knew Jadzia. She was vital, alive. She owned herself, and you... you don't even know who you are. How dare you presume to help me? You can't even help yourself."

"Now, get out of here before I say something unkind."

Ezri (who, remember, we are supposed to be rooting for in this episode) breaks down and cries and quits Starfleet. Sisko yells at her and that makes her even more upset and more determined to quit and finally she goes back to Garak, who finally tells her what's bothering him (less because of anything she says and more because there's like, five minutes left in the episode and we really need to get on with it) Gark is wracked with guilt because he knows that with every code he breaks, it means more Cardassians die. He knows his people will fight to the bitter end, and he--who only every wanted to go home--is assisting in the murder of his countrymen, and the guilt is is literally killing him.

It's a great scene, and most of that is down to the fact that it's, well, Garak. However, there is one problem I can't let go of: NONE OF THIS IS BECAUSE OF ANYTHING EZRI DID. This is kind of a problem because the whole point of the episode is to show that she has a reason to be on the station and she fucking has failed at every opportunity, up to and including the problem set before in this episode which she was supposed to fix and we were gonna all fall in love with her because she was cute and competent.

Naturally, they promote her to lieutenant, because god dammit, we've evolved past the need for money, but you can't get rid of the Peter Principle, I guess.

She can't do her job, everyone reacts to her as though she's Jadzia's ghost or something (which in a way she is) and in the three episode she's been in she's either been acting ditzy or crying or failing to accomplish the one task she was given in an episode designed to showcase her.

How do you fail that hard? I really hate to keep harping on this, but the real reason Ezri is here is because there was a Dax on the show before and for no other reason than that, dammit, we have to have another one whether it makes any more sense to do so or not.

I'm kind of glad the last episode this week ends on a high note. I'm complaining even more than usual for me . . .

"TAKE ME OUT TO THE HOLOSUITE"

"I know that look. It's the I'd-really-like-to-smash-something-but-she'll-think-I'm-crazy look."

From the moment that Sisko explained the game of Baseball to the Prophets, by hook or by crook we were going to get a goddamned baseball episode, and here we are. Sisko longtime rival (who we've never heard of before or since) Solok comes to the station and in his own irritatingly passive-aggressive way challenges Sisko to a game of baseball. In practical terms, this means we go through every baseball movie cliche you've ever seen in the name of getting the game going.

I should mention, in the name of historical curiosity, that some Trek fans consider this part of an overall trend with the franchise of making the Vulcans smug, superior assholes, which is, according to them, a betrayal of one of the noblest fictional races ever. I don't really give a shit about this and neither should you.

In any event, Sisko assembles his rag-tag team (I do love that Odo is the umpire. It's so perfect) and they are utterly fucking hopeless. Oh, they've got some good people, but it's not enough and Sisko gets all pissy because he really wants to beat Solok, and this is a way for Sisko to Learn A Valuable Lesson About What's Really Important and . . .yeah, you've seen this shit a dozen times.

But there's enough good bits in there to make it worthwhile--Worf advising Nog to find and kill a runner instead of tagging him out, Odo tossing Sisko out of the game, Ezri's totally kickass wall-flip catch (see? It's not all negative) and Kira coming this close to fucking up one of the Vulcans keeps the cliches grounded in the characters we've come to know and love, which keeps it from being an empty stylistic exercise.

Except (SPOILER) there's no come-from-behind victory for Sisko's team. They get one run entirely by accident, but that's enough of a moral victory for the whole thing to have been worth it, and it's a very DS9 ending. Plus, there's something really damn sweet about Sisko's reaction when his team gives him a baseball they all signed.

I know some people hate this episode, and wonder why this is being done when there's not much season left and a war going on in the show, but that ship sailed long ago, and that's all there is to it. It's nothing original, but it works very well making the cliches work in the DS9 milieu.

Plus there were no major long-term plot developments I didn't like that I felt compelled to rail on at length. I'm just as tired of it as you are, y'all.

And that's it for this week.. Join us next week, as the Jack Pack returns and we all but re-do a previous episode in "Chrysalis"; Odo has to protect a defector from the Dominion from the Dominion in "Treachery, Faith, and the Great River"; Kor returns in "Once More Unto The Breach"; and we get on the front lines of the war with the Dominion in the excellent "The Siege of AR-558" Man, I wish we'd led with these episodes. Join us next week for long-term plot revelations, maiming, and pleasure!

I Read This--THE NEW TEEN TITANS OMNIBUS Vol. 1

2011-10-13T09:24:00.003-04:00

A man's first Ominbus is a much cherished moment. After all, one so rarely gets books large, ungainly and heavy enough to double as a murder weapon, should the need arise. The New Teen Titans Omnibus Vol. 1 is such a book, weighing in at a hefty 686 pages, I imagine I could easily bludgeon someone to death with it, if I so chose.

Rather than that, I decided instead to review it.

Recently we talked a little about the "Marvelisation" of DC that had happened in the 70's and 80's. To put it as succinctly as possible--what was happening was that Marvel people were going over to DC and vice versa, and with each movement of talent, certain changes to the content and character of the books happened.

It's especially pronounced around the late 70's/Early 80's. You have Firestorm, which is DC doing the Spider-Man formula in all but name. You have All-Star Comics and later All-Star Squadron which fill in the history of the JSA, helmed primarily by Roy Thomas who had just come from Marvel and did, among other things, fill in their Golden Age history.

And you had the New Teen Titans, which, in many ways, copied the approach that made X-Men a top-selling book. Indeed, one of the biggest guaranteed argument starters back in the day was whether or not NTT ripped off X-Men. I'm not going to pry that can of worms open again, but it's something worth thinking about. I wouldn't necessarily say that they straight up ripped it off, only that there is a similar approach at work.

Because both books made their successes by following the . . .er, following formula. You take a cult hit book that's been on the shelf for a few years. Add in a few new characters, but keep a few of the old ones around as a link to the previous history of the title (also providing grist for the mill for stories) Bring in characters from other forgotten books--it changes the team dynamic and allows you to fold in plotlines from their other books. Then add in some new characters that can generate stories of their own. Mix it all together by plotting in the following way: Small one-issue plots become larger extended plots that weave in and out of the book, creating an extended soap-opera-ish narrative where one feels like there is a living world in this book and anything can happen.

And it goes without saying, add in some mind control and domination stuff. I had forgotten NTT did that a lot, but, well . . .George Perez, y'know.

In any event, it was 1980, and DC was still smarting from its last attempt to expand their market share (the "DC Implosion") and were at the time time getting quite an influx of people coming over from Marvel again who weren't happy with the way things were across the street. Into our story comes Marv Wolfman (creator of, among other things, Nova, and former Editor in Chief of Marvel comics back when it seems the only criteria for being EIC was "be the 10th caller") and George Perez, who was well-regarded but not quite a superstar just yet, mostly because the hallmarks of the George Perez style (insane detail, huge elaborate panels stocked with characters) weren't quite coming together as they should.

(In fact, as an aside and because I have no other place to put this thought, Perez's work is very dependent on who is inking him at this stage of things. Perez and Pablo Marcos tends to soften his details down but not in a bad way--just in a way that calls to mind his Fantastic Four and Marvel Two-in-One work, where his Kirby influence seemed to have a bit more sway. Dick Giordano, who inks the teaser comic that opens the book subsumes a lot of his detail with his thin and somewhat angular ink lines. His longest serving partner on this run of the book, Romeo Thangal, finds a happy medium and really enhances his sense of detail)

So DC gave them a book, the New Teen Titans, and Wolfman and Perez both figured it probably wouldn't run more than six issues and so decided to just have fun with the six issues they had and do they book they wanted to do. And so, without any sort of strict editorial guidance (obviously, this would never happen today) New Teen Titans was sent out into the world . . .

. . .and soon enough found its audience and became the DC's big breakout hit. Not bad for something that even the people working on it thought only had six months to live, eh?

Our Omnibus here covers the first two years of the book and yes, I promise we're getting to the meat and potatoes in a bit. But before we do that, let's get to know our Titans in a segment the longtime readers of this blog (the ONLY readers of this blog) know well. ROLL CALL!

ROBIN--You might remember him from being Batman's sidekick. Robin is the glue that holds the team together, and for the purpose of this book, functions as the only "normal" one that everyone else is allowed to be crazy around (The Dave Foley, if you will) Is typically most consumed with proving himself to Batman, a little thing which culminates years later when he finally steps into the role of Nightwing.

WONDER GIRL--Before she became a continuity nightmare (but not too far from that) Wonder Girl was the ultility infielder for the Titans in that she had no real extant drama (er, yet) and she had enough time as a member of the Titans and was enough of a blank slate with a connection to Wonder Woman's mythos that would allow for story potential and ultimately, her death from Mystery Collapse disorder.

She also dated Terry Long, who made his first appearance in this. I'd like to thank the Internet for beating the "Terry Long is a creep" meme into the ground so this is the extent that I have to talk about that douchebag.

KID FLASH--Wally West runs very fast, and is sort of the odd man out, as he is manipulated on to the team at first, has a thing for Raven that never quite goes anywhere, and generally seems to the member most intent on getting out as soon as is convenient. That's not a knock against his character--he has some good bits in the book, but he's one of the thinnest-drawn characters in the team.

CYBORG--One of our brand-new characters, Cyborg is . . .an interesting case. For one thing, he's a pretty powerful character, unusual when you consider the most powerful black guy in the Titans last go-round only had a trumpet. Cyborg is estranged from his father because his father made him into a cyborg after he'd Tampered With Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and his son got crippled. Cyborg is a genius and a super-athlete and plays the role of the malcontent in the team, as he's not 100% on board with joining the Titans, or at least he says he is.

STARFIRE--The Red Monika of her day, Starfire is cute and has boobs and George Perez unmistakably loves drawing her, as a casual flip-through of this book will tell you. She also flies around and wants to kill people, but never really seems to do that successfully. It's rescuing her that actually pulls the trigger on the Titans uniting, and her back-story actually proved sturdy enough that the Omega Men ended up spinning off outta this. If you don't know who the Omega Men are I . . .can't really help you, as I never figured that book out.

RAVEN--Has Raven ever not been a problematic character? Because she's always seemed so to me. She's committed to an extreme sort of total pacifism but is not above manipulating other people to do her fighting for her, has powers that 30 years in continue to be pretty ill-defined, and, well, she really doesn't do all that much on her own, as we'll see.

CHANGELING--At first, Changeling seems like the most irritating comic relief character there could ever be, but scratch the surface and you see dude has a really shit life. Former member of the Doom Patrol that he is, Changeling has already seen his biological parents die, his adoptive parents die, and his stepfather routinely lose his fucking shit and turn evil. He's the Shinji Ikari of the DC Universe, if Shinji Ikari had been crossed with a third-rate Borscht Belt comedian.

Our story opens with a 16-page teaser from DC Comics Presents. These little tipped-in books were kind of a cool gimmick to trail new series, and I'm sure paper considerations would make something like this impossible today, but it was a damn good idea, really. Anyways, the teaser opens with Robin tripping balls as he seems to be simultaneously helping save S.T.A.R labs from a hostage crisis and fighting a big slimy monster at the same time. Needless to say he's a little bit confused, but it's a handy way for the team to show up as a unit, show off its powers, and set up an interesting paradox--Robin and co form the team as much because they've already seen the team together.

Our first issue opens with the Titans uniting to free Starfire from the Gordanians, which somehow covertly ended up becoming the DCAU's standard aliens, but sometime, apparently it happened. Early on we get sketches of what everyone's role is going to be on the team--Changeling cracks jokes, Cyborg complains, Raven pulls the strings and never seems to do anything, and Robin holds it all together. This would probably take six issues today, I'll bet.

Incidentally, while they're fighting the Gordanians, they wreck the apartment of Grant Wilson, who is tight with the H.I.V.E. one of the dozens of villainous conspiracies which were stalking around the DCU at the time. Grant volunteers for the H.I.V.E. to give him superpowers, only he's a bit of a reckless tool and gets himself killed forcing Deathstroke the Terminator, the guy the H.I.V.E. wanted to hire in the first place. The particular plate will be kept spinning in a direct sense through the next 40+ issues of the book as Deathstroke, the H.I.V.E. and the Titans fight in various permutations off and on.

Issue three introduces us to the Fearsome Five, a group of . . .shall we say third-rate villains led by Dr. Light before he was all rape-happy. While this initially seems just a mere stunt to make sure the book has an action sequence, it's actually tying into the main plot for the first six-issue arc.

We find out in issue four that Psimon of the Fearsome Five is an agent of Raven's father, a rather goofy looking demon named Trigon. This leads in a roundabout way to two major things--the Titans fighting the Justice League of America and having their big "we're not like you" statement of purpose, and Zatanna revealing that Raven has been manipulating the team to fight Trigon since the beginning, up to an including making Kid Flash fall in love with her. Naturally, this causes the team to dissolve just when they're needed most.

Curt Swan shows up to do one chapter of this story, I should mention, which is an interesting clash of styles considering all that happens in this arc. Since I'm talking of things I miss that they don't do in comics nowadays, I kinda miss the whole "use the splash page a summary/teaser for the main story" thing. It's kind of cool.

In any event, as befitting such a problematic character as Raven, her backstory is equally headache-inducing: Trigon raped her mom, who fell through the cracks of the social safety net (Regan was really hard on that "demon rape recovery for unwed mothers" program) and got spirited away to a magic land of sanctimonious pacifists who swear to defend the universe against Trigon, but don't really want to, y'know, do anything.

Trigon isn't much better. Apparently he can crush universes, and has phenomenal power and all that, but really doesn't do much with it short of act like a dickhead and shoot rays at people. He sorta works as a uniting force for this story, because all he has to do is show up in the final act, look super-scary, get defeated, and end the arc.

Unfortunately, they kept bringing him back to diminishing returns, which was kind of a continuing problem with the Titans. The strength of the book, like X-Men, was the fact that they had a set number of plates they kept spinning--if you hopped off for a bit and hopped back on when, say Deathstroke came back, you could be brought up to speed with a minimum of fuss, because everything just goes 'round and 'round and that's . . .OK.

For a while.

The problem comes in which you don't change up the plates. X-Men under Claremont finally fell in on itself for me personally because I could not stand to read one more story about the Marauders or the Shadow King or Genosha . . .I had seen that come around so many times I knew just what to expect and I did not want any more. Titans undergoes a similar disintegration, and Wolfman's final issues, which are maybe 15 years from these early days are just . . .embarrassing because of how obviously they're just running on fumes at that point.

But that's the future. Let's get back to the now. The Fearsome Five show up again at the conclusion of the Trigon arc to do that old beloved classic: Turning the heroes headquarters against them (man, given how many times this happens, you really wonder about superhero real estate. It's like fucking poltergeists, only so much worse) positively ancient villain The Puppeteer returns for some mind control shenanigans, and the Deathstroke pops back up to rope the Titans into his plan to pay the H.I.V.E. back for killing his son, among other things. Oh, and Deathstroke kills Changeling, more or less.

But that's just a means to get us to the next big plot--the New Teen Titans vs. the Titans of Greek Myth. This, uh . . .wow. Wonder Girl gets a Titanic mickey slipped to her and becomes the love-slave of one of the Titans (although given the competition is Terry Long, this may or may not be a step up) and it's up to the Titans plus the Amazons, then finally the Olympian gods themselves, to beat back the Titans.

The problem with all this is that it's not terribly exciting (and sadly, it seems Perez did not get that memo) and the Teen Titans are kind of sidelined as Greek gods fight other different Greek gods and there's some baffelgab about free will and no one really ever raises their hands and says "Hey man, that shit with Wonder Girl being a love slave is foul," which I feel is a missed opportunity of sorts. It tries for an epic feel, but can't really close the deal, possibly because it's too far afield from where Titans works best, which is a more earthbound milieu.

Thankfully, the next extended storyline works far, far better, as the Titans get drawn into the search for the Doom Patrol and end up in a battle between a number of their old foes. This is the intro of the New Brotherhood of Evil (Don't worry--they still have the French gorilla) who go on to become recurring nemeses.

It's a pretty decent story, as Changeling actually gets to purge some demons he's been dragging around (and create a few more as he relentlessly pursues the people who took his family from him and he's willing to kill them for doing so) and we get a story that could have easily have been a "Doom Patrol story in all but name but done here because that's the book Wolfman's writing" made to fit with the Titans milieu a lot better than the Titans of Myth arc does.

A few done-in-ones close out the first 20 issues of New Teen Titans. They're . . .okay, and quite necessary after the Titans of Myth and Doom Patrol stories, as we needed a good stretch of time where we could get closer to the cast and feel a bit more grounded, as it's a danger with Constant! Epic! Action! that it's also meant to be more than constant epic action.

The final four issues in the Omnibus is the 4-issue Tales of the New Teen Titans mini-series, which provided expanded origin stories for Cyborg, Raven. Changeling, and Starfire. It also provided George Perez a chance to collaborate with a couple of great artists who inked his pencils. The Changeling issue features Gene Day inks (it was one of his last jobs before he died, sadly) and it is an incredible combination and makes me wish that 1) They'd been able to do more stuff together and 2) More people knew how good Gene Day was. While these issues were generally in the business of filling out the backstories of the lesser established characters, they also function as teasers for newer plot elements that will eventually filter back into the main book.

So . . .being we're talking about a book that is 31 years old, the question must be . . .do they hold up? And the answer is . . .well, sorta. Wolfman has a reputation for writing melodramatically and really shoveling on the purple prose and that is not an undeserved charge. However, Chris Claremont was doing the exact same thing across the street on X-Men and both books were selling quite well, so obviously that was what people wanted to read back then. Despite that handicap, these books have a tremendous energy--Wolfman and Perez did 6 issues of whatever they wanted figuring they had nothing to lose, and the book reflects that. Compare the joy and excitement these first six issues of New Teen Titans have with six issues of the latest book to spin out of a crossover or editorial diktat, and see which one feel less like work to get through.

There's a feeling of boundless possibility here, and being this is the early years of the run we're far away from the stuff that would finally kill the book--the repeating plots, the whole Baxter Paper bullshit, etc. Believe it or not, the notion of superhero comics universes being tightly vertically integrated things with ironclad canons was actually a fairly late development in the history of superhero comics--this book and All-Star Comics treat a superhero universe with 50 years (at the time) of accumulated history as a great big toybox to play in, and don't sweat things like making sure ever story lines up with every other one--there is an effort made to keep everything consistent, and the rest is just there to have fun with. There's a freedom in these stories that is almost unheard of in today's books.

It was nice to revisit this time and these characters and have it still have a certain charm even now. As to the rest of y'all, well, just remember: oftimes nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Witless Dictionary #26--Mystery Collapse Disorder

2011-10-09T11:22:00.004-04:00

Continuing my extremely irregular feature here at the prattle, it's time once again to crack the books on the Witless Dictionary: an ongoing attempt to come up with words we don't have, but should.

And yes, I know that's exactly the same thing as "sniglets." Only mine are far dorkier and, as such, of far less interest.

Mystery Collapse Disorder--Term given to define the precise moment when a character for whom an aura of mystery has been carefully cultivated ultimately collapses into irrelevance under the weight of accumulated mysteries layered one on top of the other until any intrinsic qualities the character has are utterly buried under layers of "secrets," "clues," "shocking revelations," and other kinds of bafflegab.

Or, to be blunt, the point at which the viewer/reader can no longer keep track of what the hell the deal is with the character, and doesn't really care that much.

Noted sufferers include Wolverine, Cable, Gambit, and Professor River Song.

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #39

2011-10-08T19:07:00.003-04:00

What up everybody, so glad you're here. It's Kazekage with the flow back in your hear. This ain't the Fantastic Voyage, but I'm, still on a mission to see if I can get your attention. Now I'm about to drop some information--a little additive to your education. Yes, Coolio references aside, it is time once again for another installment of recaps of the entire run of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This week, we close out Season 6, and this means we are coming on to the final lap. Who will live? Who will die? How many times will goddamn Vic Fontaine pop up?

Well, let's find out, shall we?

"THE SOUND OF HER VOICE"
"The war changed us – pulled us apart... I want my friends in my life, because someday we're going to wake up and we're going to find that someone is missing from this circle. On that day, we're going to mourn, and we shouldn't have to mourn alone." "

OK, I figured it was just close enough for the 38 Special reference. Sue me. The crew of the Defiant responds to a distress call from one Captain Lisa Cusak and Our Heroes each take turns talking to her to keep her alive and generally chart everyone's character arc through the season only to learn thanks to some technical bafflegab, all is not as it seems.

I'm playing coy because for the most part, the Big Twist at the end is really all this episode has going for it, at least insofar as the actual main plot is concerned. Once that has banged, there's not much meat to this episode . . .

. . .unless that is, you're watching it for the character interactions between the characters and Cusak. O'Brien and Bashir's scenes (and to a lesser extent, Sisko's) are actually quite good, and they get a lot of mileage of what would be, on the face of it, a If you're looking at the B-story, which is some zany sitcom bullshit with Odo and Kira's one-month dating anniversary (which is, once again, the kind of thing I desperately hoped this show was above because it's impossible to do this plot without making the woman look like a petty shrew and the man like an idiot) which is best dashed off in this paragraph and not thought about any more than that. Ditto with their bit in the next episode.

It's an OK episode, really, and function as less a living breathing episode in its own right and seems to function more as a selah, a palate cleanser wherein we take stock of things before the season finale, which will be going too fast for such things. But it really has to be watched in conjunction with the next episode, as it's far too slight to stand on its own.

"TEARS OF THE PROPHETS"

"By this time next year, the three of us will drink bloodwine in the halls of Cardassia's Central Command."

The Federation and its allies go on the offensive, the Cardassians try a daring plan to thwart them, and one of Our Heroes Will Not Return, probably because she never left the station in the first place.

It's been decided that Sisko's plan to attack the Dominion at a weak spot in their lines--the Chin'Toka system, and there's some internecine bickering as he tries to get the Romulans and Klingons to join in the fight (as one would imagine the Dominion would be wise to the Klingons tendency to ride in to the rescue at the last minute) There is a time limit on this, as the Cardassians have deployed orbital weapon platforms to reinforce that particular weak point.

While this is humming along, let's thread in some subplots. Kira and Odo are having their first argument, which as I said before, is one of those things which makes both characters looks petty and stupid, and really we're not going to spend a lot of time on it.

Not when we have this to deal with--Dax and Worf are trying to have a baby, a fact which initially makes Quark and Bashir all depressed, because this means they're totally out of the running insofar as securing Dax's affection is concerned. Mind you, the utter lack of romantic chemistry she had with either of them might have been a clue, but the upshot of this whole thing is that it's time for them to visit Vic Fontaine for some vague words of comfort and a musical number. While I think James Darren does a great job singing "Here's to the Losers," I really don't see that it adds much, as his advice to Bashir and Quark is "Stop moping; there's plenty of other fish in the sea" and thus, this scene has very little real point except to make us feel like Dax having a baby is a game changer. It is, but not in the way you think.

Oh, hey! While all the pre-war prep work is happening Weyoun and Damar are fretting over the Federations imminent attack and Gul Dukat shows up With A Plan to open the wormhole back up. As this is Ker-AZY Dukat, this plan is very stupid, but everyone goes along with it anyways, because they had nothing to do on Saturday.

Dukat's plan is to re-open the wormhole by having a Pah-Wraith (yes, the awful future I predicted in "The Reckoning" has not come to pass) fly up his nose, turning his eyes red and giving him a spooky voice. It is so much more idiotic than it sounds.

Back to the station, where Sisko feels a great disturbance in the Force when the Prophets tell him not to go to Z'Ha'Dum--er, Chin'Toka, and when he tells Admiral Ross that, Ross digs in his heels and tells him that he can be the Emissary or a Starfleet Captain, but he can't be both. Man, we've never heard that before, have we? (we have, of course--we just saw it in "The Reckoning") so Sisko decides to go, because apparently "The Reckoning" didn't really convince him that The Prophets were Serious Business, although that episode doesn't really make the best case.

Anyways, the fleet flies off for some battle footage that isn't 60% re-used shots for a change, and while they're off Dukat shows up on the station, casts Gifoi on Dax, and barfs Pah-Wraith all over the Orb that's in the Bajoran shrine, demonstrating a mind-boggling lack of security on the station.

The wormhole . . .slams shut, so well done Dukat. Given that you're crazy as a shithouse rat I can't say I'm shocked by this. I should mention here that Dax is dead, but given all her talk about having a baby with Worf . . .c'mon guys, she was a walking bullseye from frame one of this episode.

I should mention here, that the writers felt this was all a great idea because it followed up on thwarting the battle that framed "The Reckoning"--because the battle never finished, the Pah-Wraiths were free to attack the wormhole. However, the problem is this is never really made explicit and it's hard to give credit for something not in the episode . . .when it's not in the episode. Also, it is goddamn impossible to take "The Reckoning" seriously enough to fret over the long-term implications of it, and the fact that they rolled out the spooooooky voices and the red contact lenses for it doesn't help very much either.

Sisko goes all Obi-Wan Kenobi when the wormhole closes, but the battle is won--the Federation and their allies have successfully gotten a toehold in Dominion space, but it's a Pyrrhic victory--the wormhole is closed, Dax is dead (Jadzia, anyways. The symbiont is OK, and how convenient is that?), and Sisko and everyone is all distraught. Sisko is so distraught, of course, he heads off back to Earth, having been seriously broken by the whole ordeal. In an echo to last year's finale he takes his baseball with him, because he's not sure he's coming back.

Yes, well. The actually battle stuff is somewhat OK, I guess, but the rest of this episode makes my head hurt. Once again the goofy shit with the Pah-Wraiths and the Prophets and Ker-AZY Dukat just kills any dramatic weight the episode has, as does the notion that Dax's death is supposed to be anything more than the big ball of cliche that it is. For fuck's sake, her last words were "our baby would have been so beautiful."

Still, should we say some words about Jadzia Dax, the member of our ensemble Who Never Worked Out? I'd like to say there was plenty of potential there, and there was, and we got some decent Dax-focused episodes out of her character ("Blood Oath" and "Rejoined" spring to mind) but generally there was a feeling that no one really had a consistent idea of what she was supposed to be. She couldn't be the strong angry chick, because that was Kira's thing, and she had too much of an alpha-wave pattern to be Troi or Crusher, so that was out. And so began her long drift to the background until they paired her off with Worf, who was another character they never really had a handle on and together they were allowed to be romantic without romance and get on everyone's nerves trying to convince us ever more desperately that they really loved each other and then when that didn't work, they finally killed her off so the actress could go be Becker's secretary.

Sad to say, it was ultimately no big loss, as they gave up on making Dax interesting long ago and this was only late confirmation of a long-known fact: Creative had nothing for her.

And much like the season, we will leave it on a down note. Join us next week when we begin the final DS9 season with "Image in the Sand"; We then juggle three plots at once, introduce a very troubling retcon, and introduce an old new character in "Shadows and Symbols"; Treat said new character like shit and hope she survives the experience in "Afterimage"; and take some time out for fun as we finally come to The Baseball Episode in "Take Me Out To The Holosuite." Join us next time for promotions, honest-to-god successful comedy, and pleasure!

I Read This--HARK! A VAGRANT

2011-10-03T11:55:00.002-04:00

Ever since Achewood went on hiatus (a hiatus which looks more permanent every week) I'd been jonesing for a comic that had Achewood's sense of manic unpredictability and uproarious hilarity, and finally, by dint of getting many links recommended to me, I found Kate Beaton's strip Hark! A Vagrant and have been a big fan ever since, and now that Drawn & Quarterly has done a collected edition of her work, now is as good a time to say that it's an awesome book and it is well worth your time.

Hark! A Vagrant has a very anarchic sense of humour. As it has no real continuity to speak of, every installment is an adventure, including but not limited to scenes from the movie Top Gun done by people in powered wigs; Utterly lackadasical teenagers charged with solving mysteries who just can't fucking be bothered; Wonder Woman getting back to her roots; Nancy Drew, the OG mystery-solving teen; and the side-splitting hilarity that is Sexy Batman.

That's impressive enough, but along with these random spurts of insanity, Beaton also drops plenty of historical figures into her works and does an amazing job of making them all accessible by virtue of making them just as deranged as everyone else. Witness Jules Verne's fan letter to Edgar Allan Poe; F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald being all passive-aggressive with one another; The Bronte sisters revealing just where they get their ideas; and Miyamoto Musashi explaining duel etiquette.

History nerdiness combined with my love of silly comedy. It's the nerd equivalent of Shredded Mini-Wheats for me.

You may have noticed that this is less a review and just me posting a lot of links and not so subtly pushing you towards going to read them. Generally, because this book kind of defies review or classification. Beaton is an amazing artist and has a phenomenal sense of humour and a unique ability to think around corners and come out with an absolutely daft punchline you or eye would never have twigged to on our own.

It's just a good book and incredibly funny y'all. This is totally well worth your time.

I Read This--SHOWCASE PRESENTS: ALL-STAR COMICS

2011-10-02T14:30:00.004-04:00

The typical narrative in comics fandom is that Crisis on Infinite Earths really messed up the Justice Society of America, as they were tossed into the bin of history for being "redundant" as compared to the JLA.

This is, like so much commonly-accepted bits of fan dogma, entirely wrong. While the fallout from Crisis did, in fact damage the JLA by writing them out in a terribly silly way made all the moreso by being so rushed, it was the ill feelings from how DC handled writing them out that rubbed certain creators the wrong way, and they made their displeasure known at every single available moment, and ultimately this became its own meme: Crisis sucked because it got rid of the Justice Society and isn't it a shame because the JSA were the very first super-team and thus important enough to stick around forever.

I too am surprised I made it through that paragraph without using the words "Geoff Johns" or "Alex Ross" either, guys.

Sadly, the notion of them being The First, And Thus Very Important became the overriding element in the team's makeup, and so it became damned impossible to do anything with the JSA except put them up on the mantelpiece and blather at length about how important they were without actually, y'know, doing anything interesting with them to justify their importance.

Mind you, there's plenty of intriguing things to do with the JSA (less so as real time passes) the notion of the super-hero Greatest Generation still trying to make a difference and fight evil while grappling with the passage of time and fighting alongside succeeding generation/their own kids (and no, the 9 million times the JSA fought Obsidian because he turns evil every alternate Thursday don't count) is healthy grist for the mill. If you wanted to make it a little darker, you could even have them grapple with the fact that some of the things they took for granted back in the day (the casual racism and sexism, let's say) aren't the rule anymore . . .sure, it would be a bit like if Roger Sterling was a superteam, but it could totally be a thing.

All-Star Comics was an attempt to do something with the JSA before they were legends. Or, well, more accurately it was part of an effort on DC comics to roll out a lot of new books all at once and hopefully cut into Marvel's market share. It . . .well, wasn't pretty, and probably taught DC that ambitious roll-outs like that are largely a matter of timing and must be handled carefully. Probably.

In any event, All-Star Comics didn't really fret overmuch about the JSA as icons, partly because they weren't icons quite yet at this point (having been confined to the annual JLA/JSA team-ups) and partly because the book's writer, Gerry Conway, can only write characters in one voice (in comics this is not as much of a handicap as you might think), and really, that's not it. There is a certain Marvel-style pacing that creeps into All-Star (no shock, given Conway had just come from Marvel and his other collaborators had come from Charlton fandom/pro-dom during a recent flourish/implosion that had happened at Charlton in the mid-70s) partly because of the pedigree of the writer and partly because they had 17 pages to do these stories in.

This is a rather important point, because for all we moan about decompression, these comics have a tendency to be so compressed as to be a bit jumbled. Plots bleed one into the other frequently, threads get picked up and dropped, and the whole thing can be kinda . . .well, hard to absorb, really, as you have a large cast all speaking in the same way and so much stuff happening all at once that the details can get, a bit fuzzy. For that reason we're skipping the usual recaps and roll calls. Those of you who are interested have the book already. Those of you who don't probably don't care.

And yet . . .I kinda liked these. The JSA is far more relatable when they're not being venerated as icons who seem remote and distant. Here, they're just another supergroup, not unlike the Defenders to the Justice League's Avengers.

But there were a million of those books even then, what makes this one so interesting?

Well, I think it's just that I liked Earth-2.

Earth-2 was a fictional offshoot, a parallel world in which, unusually for superhero comics, time was allowed to pass and some notion of organic growth had been allowed some rein (compare this with the current "freeze everything at one specific point" mania now)--this was before the top-down "everything is homogenized" kind of superhero books today and you were allowed to play around in the margins a bit more. Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman have all retired (in a great twist, Batman is actually the police commissioner) and the last few Justice Society members are fighting crime and dealing with a younger generation coming up--namely Robin, Huntress (Batman and Catwoman's daughter) The Star Spangled Kid (a migrant from another JLA/JSA crossover) and Power Girl.

Today, these stories are almost entirety known for Power Girl's introduction, which is a shame, as, setting aside the fact that Wally Wood obviously loved every moment of drawing her (seriously it is, uh, plain to see) she's not the strongest character, as she is intended to be a "liberated woman of the 70's," which, translated from the comic book-ese means she's a bitch on wheels who's constantly going on that despite being a woman, she's not to be taken lightly.

It gets a little grating, as it is very plainly trying so hard. Likewise, Huntress is a bit of a drip early on. Yet both characters really grown on you and were the real breakout stars of this relatively short run.

I can't really say these are great comics or essential comics or anything like that, but they are terribly interesting in that they had their own distinct identity while managing to exist in a shared universe, they were given leave to do their own thing and really play with the "parallel Earth" concept in a way that DC never quite fulfilled (whichever time they brought back the parallel Earths) and broadened the fictional universe in a way that allowed for a book to have its own flavor while still being part of the larger whole.

If only that was still a thing now, eh?

The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #38

2011-10-01T19:41:00.003-04:00

Hello hello, and welcome to a very special edition of our seemingly never-ending journey through the entirety run of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This week . . .well, our first episode this week is one of the worst and most troubling episodes of the entire run. While I attempt to explain this below, I should mention that when I started Witless Prattle back in the oh-so-2009, I made myself a promise that I would try not to swear as much as I had in other places wherein I had a platform for my musings.

Unfortunately, I failed in keeping in clean, as anyone who so much as visited this place one time could tell you. I bring this up because I have a feeling I will swear more in this entry than I did the previous two years of Witless Prattle combined. I don't want to, but it's gonna be that kind of entry, so let's get down to it.

"THE RECKONING"

"During the reckoning, the Bajorans will either suffer horribly or... eat fruit."

"The Reckoning" is a bad episode of DS9, only worse. Because the ripple effect to and from "The Reckoning" is so bad and so troubling that in a very real way it fatally damages the show and locks us on a course we'd be a lot better . . .well, not being on, let us say. Because like it or not, "The Reckoning" is the blueprint of DS9's endgame and it's the kind of thing you didn't need to see played out once, never mind as the endgame for seven years of a series one has invested time and interest in.

So remember last year in "Rapture" when Sisko found the ancient city of B'Hala and got all nutty and Jesus-like? Yeah, well, even with the war on, the Bajorans have still been digging up the ruins of B'hala and found a tablet with some ancient Bajoran writing on it. The writing is addressed to the Emissary, which makes me wonder how River Song fits into things, but never mind vague references to other things I hate, it's a message from the Prophets, and it's full of dark, ominous warnings about how Bajor will burn and stuff.

Naturally, no one seems to be willing to stop picking at it.

Kai Winn (who, in the process of this episode will undergo a de-nuancing on the level of Dukat a few weeks ago) objects to Sisko taking the tablet back to the station, and complains to Admiral Ross, who tells Sisko to knock it off already. But you can't tell The Sisko what to do, so he breaks the tablet, and unleashes crappy special effects which means The Reckoning is on.

The Reckoning, I should mention, is the final battle between the Prophets and the Pah-Wraiths, who you may remember from "The Assignment." The Pah-Wraiths have been elevated to the level of anti-Prophets, which DS9 will struggle mightily to make into a Big Important Conflict, but never rises above the level of well, I'll let the Iron Sheik say it for me:

Now. The Prophets are timeless, godlike beings that have no concept of linear time, barely understand corporeal lifeforms, and would generally not like to be bothered by them. The Pah-Wraiths are totally OK with possessing people, but haven't really shown that they're all that super-powerful, really.

How do you think a conflict like this would be portrayed. Whatever idea you had just now is far better than what they did--which is the Prophet possesses Kira, the Pah-Wraith possesses Jake, they pop their eeerie contact lenses in and distort their voices and throw Force lighting at each other on the station.

It looks way more cheap and far more stupid than I can possibly convey to you with words.

Now, the episode is trying to milk this for all the dramatic weight it can--this is, after all, Sisko's penance for asking the Prophets to intervene and wipe out the Dominion fleet.

Oh yeah, about that. We finally get an answer to the question of what happened there: It was a one time thing. The Dominion just kinda decided not to send any more ships through the wormhole in case they might do it again, which they wouldn't.

What

The

FUCK

First of all, the Dominion always seemed like "if at first you don't succeed, try try again" types. I can't believe they didn't just ram ships into the minefield faster than they could replicate new ones. After all, "In The Pale Moonlight" told us that the Dominion could turn out Jem'Hadar and ships with mind-mashing speed. Are you telling me that an empire as resource-heavy as the Dominion would blink at losing 1,000 ships?

And that's not even considering the fucking Prophets. If it's a one time thing, then what the hell is . . .how much good does it really do that . . .oh God, let me just get through this fucking thing.

The episode tries to make some dramatic hay out of the fact that Sisko's penance is, like Abraham, to sacrifice his son for the gods he believes in, but for fuck's sake, this is two people throwing shitty special effects at each other and talking in spooooooooooky voices, and it is mother-fucking-god-damned-impossible take that shit at all seriously. You just can't invest in it because it looks so stupid.

Here, let me put it to you this way. Here is the trailer for this episode. It prominently features scenes from the climactic battle:

Here is a guy juiced out of his mind on PCP wearing training pants and dancing with a stuffed rabbit.

I ask you . . .which is easier to invest in as a viewer? There's no wrong answer here--it's totally the second one.

And this is the new paradigm for DS9's conclusion--the Prophets and Pah-Wraith's conflict overlaid onto the Federation/Dominion conflict, and for all the heavy lifting that will be done to and make this work, I am here to tell you: it does not ever fucking work. It comes close exactly once, and this is quickly abandoned, because it would require us to think a bit more than Prophets=good Pah-Wraiths=bad. Fuck knows, we can't have that.

"But Kazekage," I hear you say. "I thought DS9 excelled at creating stories that were willing to ask questions and not put things into neat little boxes and spur a little thought on the part of the viewer?" And yes, they do, and will do in the future, although at a much lesser extent than previous. "The Reckoning" exemplifies a trend we've seen a couple times already in episodes like "Waltz"--as the clock ticks down, DS9's creators are not so willing to dabble in ambiguity, preferring a straight good vs. evil black and white morality and while there's nothing wrong with that on its face, that's not what made DS9 a good show and to see them walk that back at the 11th hour is more than a little disappointing, not unlike drawing a line under all the mysteries your TV show has been building for its run with a tossed-off "well, God did it."

"VALIANT"

"I don't remember anyone inviting you to the bridge."

I can't decide if I'm just feeling charitable because of the utter atrocity that is "The Reckoning" but "Valiant" isn't that bad. Then again, the last episode was so dreadful a longshoreman's Heimlich would be better than "The Reckoning." In any event, it's a decent episode that mostly achieves what it sets out to do, even if the high concept of it doesn't make one iota of sense if you give it more than the most cursory thought.

Jake and Nog get trapped behind enemy lines, and get rescued by the Valiant, which is a ship just like the Defiant, which just proves they're actually mass-producing Defiant-class ships and this is not some budget-conscious way to save money by using the Defiant sets. The Valiant is being commanded entirely by Red Squad, the Academy's best and brightest (last seen in "Paradise Lost" two years ago) as their Starfleet supervisor got killed and they've been fighting behind enemy lines ever since with their own heavily-armed warship.

I can't decide whether that's the best field-trip ever or the shittiest.

In any event, the outward conflict is that the Valiant is hunting a Dominion battleship that they've calculated has a weakness in the design--a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port. The shaft is only two meters wide, and it's ray-shielded, so they'll have to use quantum torpedoes.

The interior conflict is between Nog, who is all for helping the crew out, because he's Starfleet, and that's what you do. There's no question of him doing whatever he can. Jake, meanwhile, sees this for what it is--a suicide mission being ramrodded by people who have no idea what they're setting themselves up for, kept going by a captain, one Tim Watters, who's dosing himself with Space Crank to keep going and relying on force of personality to get the crew to go along.

This point is rammed home with all possible force when the Valiant fires on the weak point and . . .it doesn't work. Watters immediately collapses mentally at seeing the Dominion ship survive and proceed to kick the shit out of the Valiant.

Yeah, the notion of cadets getting a field trip on a warship and being able to fight a guerrilla war behind the lines is utterly silly, and the idea that Nog couldn't come in and take command (as an Ensign, he'd be the ranking commissioned officer) is one of those things people tend to bring up, the episode . . .ain't bad, and has some interesting things to say about the dangers of a cult of personality and how the war is eroding the vaguely ominpresent smug superiority Starfleet always seem to have. I also like that this one time the million-to-one shot doesn't work. It appeals to the nihilist in me.

"PROFIT AND LACE"

"He's the one that should be wearing the dress."

Hey, kids! Do you like Quark? Do you think he's a funny character and one that is versatile enough to be in many different kinds of stories? Well here's forty-five excruciating minutes of Quark with tits, and lots of jokes about Ferengi and their sexism and so much stupid mugging and no one in this episode comes out of it with any dignity whatsoever. Does that sound like fun? It sure as fuck isn't!

So Grand Nagus Zek is trying to give Ferengi women suffrage. This nearly gets him deposed by Brunt. Moogie is along to be shrill and annoying. Quark changes his gender and gets boobies. I hate this episode so much, as it aspires to very little and manages to achieve even less.

You see, with all the other plot lines going on on this show, even the ones they've fumbled the ball on (the Prophets and the Mirror Universe, f'rinstance) and with us being three episodes from the beginning of the final season, we really have neither the inclination nor the time to deal with stupid fucking horseshit involving Ferengi politics that no one cares about and/or Quark crossdressing.

I am sick and tired of talking about this episode. It upsets me. So let's relax with something pleasant and easygoing that the whole family can enjoy. Something like Devo's "Love Without Anger":

"TIME'S ORPHAN"

"Oh, bollocks!"

So it's time for another "Let's torture O'Brien" episode, and . . .well, six seasons in, they seem to have lost their bite after peaking with "Hard Time," as this episode, his daughter Molly falls through a time warp and comes back as an older child from the Clan of the Cave Bear. With all the earnestness of a Movie of the Week (do they still have those?) O'Brien and Keiko do their best to look after their forced-aged cavegirl daughter, but eventually, the time shenanigans get reversed and their daughter comes back at the proper age and not a cavewoman at all.

It is so much more bland than it sounds. I should mention here that Doctor Who recently did the high concept of this episode leagues better than this (something I haven't been able to say of Doctor Who this season to a great degree) because it's a whole lot easier to ask the question "is it OK to run back the clock on someone's future self and negate their whole existence" when your choices are not "cute moppet" and "feral cavegirl." The Who episode is willing to play it to the hilt--as bother versions want to live, even if one has turned old and bitter from her experiences, but doesn't see that as adequate reason to negate her life.

The DS9 version loads the dice from the start--obviously we don't want the fucking cavegirl, and the episode plods along until it can reverse it at the earliest opportunity. Plus, we see O'Brien's family only maybe one time more frequently than Halley's Comet, and usually when they do they're being possessed or being pissy about being there so, really, my general feeling is something like "does anybody give a fuck?" I don't!

I should be mad that this episode is padded and pointless, and I kinda am, but given the other episodes we've had this week, I'm willing to let it go at simply being mediocre and unengaging, which means, given this week, means I'm giving this a gentleman's C minus.

That. mercifully enough, is it for this week. Join us next week for the final two episodes of season 6, as Our Heroes get a message from the Twilight Zone in "The Sound of Her Voice" and in "Tears of the Prophets" one of Our Heroes . . .WILL DIE! Join us next time for twist endings, battle scenes that aren't stock footage, and death!

Just Sayin'--About That Whole Catwoman Thing . . .

2011-09-26T10:01:00.004-04:00

While I'm sure that everyone's dying to hear me weigh in on the whole Catwoman/Starfire kerfuffle that happened last week, I'm afraid I'm gonna have to beg off on this one. Partly because Kate Beaton did it way better and funnier than I ever could, and also because at this point even I'm tired of edginess in the service of pointlessness and all I can manage about this kind of thing is to shrug my shoulders and sigh.

I can't decide whether it's a fault of approach or just incompatibility issues, but the more "adult" stuff you try to drag into the tights and flights superhero comics, the more juvenile they become. I really wish people would start getting that.