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.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Just Sayin'--No Room For Panic
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?
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?
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Days Gone By--CAPTAIN POWER AND THE SOLDIERS OF THE FUTURE
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:
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 i
n 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?
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 i
n 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?
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Games People Play--THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII
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.
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.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Days Gone By--ADVENTURES OF THE GALAXY RANGERS
(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!
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!
Monday, November 28, 2011
The Witless Prattle Chronicles of THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES
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 . . .
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 . . .
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Just Sayin'--More Delayed New 52 Zaniness
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.
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.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Just Sayin'--And now, some Shameless Boasting
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 this 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.
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 this 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.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The Whole Damn Thing--STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE #46
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:
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?
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."
"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?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
