Where Do We Go From Here?

The wife and I just finished our run-through of Buffy and are a good chunk into the final season of Angel. There will be a number of posts on those shows, rest assured, but this is not one of those posts. What struck me was that my wife had that sense of loss of finishing something and knowing that these characters are done. I realize that there are the comics for continued adventure but even at their best they’re still a bit off from the tone of the show. So, as the cast sang at the end of “Once More With Feeling”: where do we go from here? Take my hand, gentle readers, and I will show you. I will offer you up more television shows to help fill the excavated hole in your heart.

And the loss doesn’t have to be recent. Who among us doesn’t get that periodic twinge when they realize that a beloved series has ended. A random remembrance of that fact out of nowhere.  A flash that Harry Potter has grown up and moved away, that your favorite Starfleet ship has been decommissioned, that while you can relive Frodo’s journey again and again you will never be able to take one more new step with him. That if your home was in Sunnydale you truly can’t go home again.

So where do you go? It depends on what you’re missing from the series. People have the seasons they love and the seasons they don’t. That’s because Buffy is an amalgamation of a bunch of different genre shows which means that, depending on the story arc, it shifts in tone. That means you might like the quirky word play from the Scoobies or the emotional knife twisting of season 5. So I’ve come up with a couple of different aspects of Buffy and a show to match each one. Hopefully there’s something here to fill your yen.

The Middleman
An art student is recruited into a secret, crime fighting organization

For those who miss the early seasons, when it was quick and light.

This show is all about satirizing tropes and making good characters. The key element here is fun with an emphasis on word play. You know that ‘whedonesque’ patter? This has it in spades. From the banter between Wendy and The Middleman to the small side characters like Noser everyone here is quick, even when they’re being slow. It has a heavy hand of goofy in it, so if you really don’t like early Buffy then that may put you off

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Veronica Mars
The daughter of a private eye takes on her own cases at school

For those who miss later, complex seasons.

This keeps the quick dialog going but thematically focuses a lot more on the darker side of life. If you were interested in the idea of Buffy and Spike breaking down what abusive relationships are (whether or not you think it was successfully done) then this is the show for you. Once again, it’s a cast that feels like Scoobies. They’re quick, pop culture savvy, and whenever someone is at a loss for words it’s a character moment and not a break in the script. But it is dark. I’ll say trigger warning here and just take it as a given if you watch the show. You will squirm in some episodes, but you’ll laugh in almost all of them. And just like Buffy, the description of the show turned my off while watching one episode hooked me. The summary is a high school girl investigates crimes. But taking the show as just that would be like assuming Buffy is just a standard teen vampire romance. And you know it’s so much more.

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Lost Girl
A woman finds herself in the middle of Fae politics while trying to control her powers

For those that want the urban magic, and maybe some Dark Willow.

Do you want another fantasy show? Do you miss urban skewed mythological creatures? Did you enjoy the darker side of magic? Then this is the show for you. Take all of that and roll it together with a better portrayal of liquid sexuality than Willow ever got and you’ll come up with Lost Girl. The actual plot? It’s mainly thin magical political machinations draped over a frame of personal drama. But it’s fun! I’d say that the two leads, Bo and Dyson, get the plot but the fun characters are their sidekicks, Kenzi and Hale.

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Todd and the Book of Pure Evil
There’s a high school and some Satanists and also Jason Mewes and it’s gross and funny. And there are a couple of musical episodes

For those that wished there was a Buffy/Evil Dead 2 crossover.

This is basically the hybrid of those two. If the silly episodes of Buffy and the last season of Angel is Urban Fantasy Marx Brothers than Todd and the Book of Pure Evil is Urban Fantasy Three Stooges. It is gross and over the top and hilarious. This show is so much more than the sum of its parts that describing it won’t sell you on it. Just go watch if the above sounds like your thing.

What’s NEWs?

I’ve been gone for a while and I apologize. It’s been a perfect storm for imperfect TV blogging. First, I’ve been marathoning Angel and Buffy with the wife and once we got intoBuffy season 5/ Angel season 3 it’s been way too depressing to write about. Seriously Joss, you were running those two and Firefly. Things were great. Why was all of your TV so miserable?

The other reason is that my media center has been down, then up, and now replaced with a box I built myself from scratch yesterday. That means that even with what I’ve been watching, I have been in a bit of an engineer mindset. But I have been watching and waiting (to write), and I’m back.

Rather than dwell on sadness that has been my re-watching, or the disappointment of recently quit shows, I want to celebrate the coming of the new. This past season of new TV hasn’t been the greatest, but I have come away with a couple of shows that I’m pleasantly surprised with.

Sleepy Hollow. This show has quickly emerged with possibly the most rabid fans of dark humored contemporary supernatural apocalyptic storytelling since Supernatural. And why is that? The plotting is a bit thin, the interwoven historical action and contemporary story don’t always line up, and each episode’s mystery is just a bit too easy for the characters to solve. So what’s the appeal? Well, the acting is solid, the chemistry is perfect, and the characters are fun. They range from adorably gruff (Orlando Jones seems only to be rough around the edges because it makes him happy inside) to flat-out adorable (Tom Mison’s Ichabod is hilariously appalled by modern life and also has that ‘thing’ that Tom Hiddleston has where anything he says or does is automatically entertaining). That’s it and yet it is also enough.

It’s dark in direction but light in tone. Its plot is good enough to get you through. And yet at the end of each episode I felt incredibly entertained and satisfied. In a year of overly involved shows that are 100% plot driven or middling extensions of franchises, this off the wall, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mythos in a package of fun is a welcomed addition. I avoided it at first for the remake aspect and the fact that the storylines I was hearing about weren’t engaging. If that’s what’s been keeping you away from this, then do yourself a favor and give it a watch.

The other show I’ve recently adopted is actually similar in tone. The stories are good enough but the end result of the show is still a delight to watch, and that’s Almost Human. A future where robots are sometimes indistinguishable from humans, not restrained by the laws of robotics, and framed with a gruff human detective? If you think that sounds a lot like Blade Runner, you’d be correct. And while we’re making comparisons, why not throw in the fact that he loves Asian noodles and extras are often seen carrying around umbrellas with glowing poles. Yup. Spot on. But the difference between this and Blade Runner is that Almost Human is funny. Karl Urban plays his cop like Harrison Ford but not so much Deckard as Han Solo. He’s fed up with everything but doesn’t have that dark resignation. Michael Ealy as his partner is fantastic. There’s no slow roll out of unrobotic quirks; rather, he is turned on and immediately picks up with his development from before the show and his dismantling.

The tone is actually more like the secret sit-com that Stargate SG-1 was so good at pulling off. The plots are serious but the characters and banter often sound so fun that you can imagine the writers simply refusing to cut it for the sake of tone. The result is a show that knows what it is. Another thing that helps with that self-awareness that keeps it from getting too heavy is the production. It looks like it has a good budget but the way they use it mostly for layering effects on existing, hyper-well lit sets rather than whole cloth scene rendering brings to mind a lot of Canadian shows like Continuum, Welcome to Paradox, and evenTotal Recall 2070, which was a cop show in the combined universe of Blade Runner andTotal Recall. This layering style and careful selection of physical settings gives the whole thing a cheap/expensive look, sort of as if the future were built out of cutting edge appliances. Nothing is dirty, everything looks like plastic and is lit like a commercial. It’s just enough to let them off the hook for lacking a gritty angle and that works for the funny tone that is throughout this procedural.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Four Vs. The Buffy Balance

In most speculative fiction, there’s a balance of elements: plot, character, world building, etc. Depending on what one is trying to accomplish, something might take the lead. In action, it will usually be led by plot; hard science fiction sometimes leans toward the world building, and when something is both speculative and “literary,” then it’s most often code for character. With most genre television it’s usually a careful balance of all three. And sometimes that balance is broken.

In Buffy The Vampire Slayer at some point each of these takes the lead, throwing the elements out of balance, for better or worse. During my re-watch I’ve just emerged from season 3 into the notorious season 4. This season introduces the ham-handed science fiction element that fails from 1999, when the season premiered, until 2012, when it was retooled for the successful Cabin In The Woods. This season also features the teutonic Riley Finn whose very presence is the cause for classical guitar solos, a character who can only be described as aggressively benign. But one of the worst offenders is how it highlights how utterly far behind the character of Buffy has fallen in relation to the plot and world building.

Buffy’s first personal story in this season is her dealing with classmate Parker. He’s a sensitive guy who quickly woo’s her to bed with a pre-written script and lack of any chemistry. He then considers his work done and moves on. Buffy does not. In a later episode he refers back to this incident and her subsequent emotional follow-up with the joke “What’s the difference between a freshman girl and a toilet? A toilet doesn’t follow you around when you’re done using it.” Charming, I know.

But follow him she does. She’s utterly confused by his lack of a phone call over the next few days. Her slaying suffers. She asks Willow constant advice on what happened. She repeatedly wonders out loud what she did wrong. She tries to justify his behaviour and questions her own. But she’s done nothing wrong. She was fooled by an asshole. End of story. And the storyline doesn’t even have her realize what she does at this juncture, either. Instead there’s a binge drinking metaphor episode where Buffy regresses to a caveman like mentality. In that episode Willow actually has the closure conversation and Buffy settles it by being put in a situation where she can physically deal with her issues. She pulls Parker from a burning building and, since she’s still in caveman mind, hits him with a stick. Physical strength substituting for emotional.

All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. In the very special “sex is bad” episode in season 2 Buffy sleeps with Angel. This causes him to lose his soul and she wakes up next to an asshole. Her response then? She wonders if she was bad at sex and what did she do wrong. Now, this is perfectly fine in the context of the show’s second season, and of her first serious relationship and her first time. This occurence ends very similarly to the way things work out in season 4. She has trouble dealing and is put in a situation where it’s OK to physically attack for closure, stabbing Angel to send him to hell. His soul returning at the last moment makes it harder for her but

The problem is the show is now in season 4 and Buffy is still just as emotionally weak if not weaker. She’s learned about herself in her social circles. She lost her powers for a bit and came to some self discovery about how much she appreciates being different. She even had to face the opposite side of that at the end of season 3 and really discover where she draws the line on using her powers. But by Buffy: The College Years she should really have grown a bit in terms of who she is as an individual. She’s a strong person but a terribly weak woman. And the regression in her fallout with Parker is jarring and discomfiting.

As a side not I am also watching Angel in sync with Buffy. There is an episode just after the Parker incident in Angel where Buffy goes to LA to visit. She is furious at him for sneaking in during the Thanksgiving episode to help but not say hello. She says she doesn’t understand why he stayed hidden and that he should have asked her first. In essence she says that he should have asked her directly for permission to hide from her, and that she didn’t understand what he was avoiding and how dare he dredge up these feelings when she found out he had been there. Only towards the end of all this does she slowly see his point. Fine, it was a fun bit of confrontation (even if it was Sorkin-esque in its mirroring of a scene from season 1 of Buffy). But it was a terrible bit of character. Once again Buffy regresses to a foolish, emotionally incompetent child when faced with an emotional crises until it either passes on its own while she remains passive or it gets a metaphorical plot that lets her punch the representation of it.

That said, I’m beginning to wonder if season 4 might not be the ultimate failure that I remember it as. The arc is rubbish and even rewatching it the larger story points don’t go anywhere. At this point I’m just about halfway through the season and nothing has really happened. The dialogue is still great though so at least it’s a very enjoyable treading of the waters.

P.S. I’ll try to spread out the Buffy posts. New shows are starting up so hopefully something will grab my attention for better or worse.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Angel Aberration

I’m currently working my way through the Buffy the Vampire Slayer show once again. My wife had never sat down and seen the whole thing. As she’s a Joss fan, this seemed bizarre and she decided to rectify this. My reaction? I was a bit hesitant. I watched through the show in its entirety twice. The first time I thoroughly enjoyed it. The second time I appreciated it for being Joss’ living film school but it hadn’t aged particularly well. There were also a number of highly problematic points in both plot and construction. Especially starting in season 4. But what the hell, I’d give it another go.

I am surprised at how much I am enjoying it on this round, fifteen plus years after it came out. But… parts of it are obviously of its time in terms of Joss Whedon’s career. This really breaks into two parts. The first is that the metaphors are incredibly bad. There have been a few issues where my wife will turn to me and say “That doesn’t really make sense” and the only defense I can come up with is “Well, it’s high school…” That applies to even the non-school related bumps. But that’s another post. The other vein of issues comes from problematic mythology building. Nearly every question that comes up will be answered in a later episode. However, often this answer doesn’t mesh with the inciting incident. I’d like to tackle one of those gaps right now. I’ll be addressing Angel and the problems he brings light to during the first two seasons.

Angel is a ball of contradictions. Not because he’s a vampire with a soul. Not because he’s a centenarian and then some. He poses a dilemma because he’s complex and at the time of his creation the world of Buffy simply isn’t. Yet. So let’s take a look at his curse, arguably his defining characteristic.

Angel was cursed by gypsies after killing their favorite daughter back in the late 1800s. His curse is that he has his soul and must continue his existence with both his soul (which affords him a conscience) and his memories of the horrible acts he committed as a vampire. It’s almost like a magic version of Alex’s punishment in A Clockwork Orange; his punishment is guilt in freedom. Lovely. Except- Except we know that when a person is turned into a vampire in the Buffyverse their soul flees the body and a demon inhabits them. This means that the vampire that murdered their tribesman isn’t being punished. He’s being shoved aside and the human soul is being pulled in to take the punishment. This is akin to selling a car, having the new owner run down a person, and then taking on the guilt of vehicular homicide when buying your car back. The crime is being committed by one driver and the punishment visited upon a different one.

That’s a problem with the casting of the curse. But what about Angel’s endurance of it? He is being tortured with this for 90 years before he chooses to go and make himself a better man, someone capable of protecting the slayer. But why was he tortured with this? Sure, he has memories of hundreds of years of atrocities. That will mark anyone. But those are just things he has seen, not things he has done. At no point in these past 90 years between 1886 and 1996 did he ever take pause in his life and meditate on what he has done and what makes up him? After even a little self reflection he should have been able to alleviate some of that guilt. Sure, trying to be a better person and atone for actions that happened in the abstract is a noble cause. Go for that. But he really should have come to the conclusion that these bad things were never his bad things.

And then there’s the curse itself. I know, the gypsies here aren’t interested in justice. They want vengeance. Perhaps they don’t know how to punish the demon portion of Angel/Angelus and will settle for afflicting his physical form and whoever is in it. That’s pretty shallow but perhaps it is what they want. But then we find out that the gypsies have the ability to punish the demon portion of Angel and (accidentally) avoid doing so. Confused? Then consider yourself on par with the Roma tribe and take a look at the Angel timeline up through the end of season 2:

• Angel with soul
• Angel the vampire demon
• Angel with soul + memories of vampire acts
• Angel the vampire demon + memories of being in love
• And at the very end of the season 2 finale – Angel with soul + tons of baggage. Seriously, this dude never gets a break

So what, you ask yourself. So everything, I tell you. This means that the demon gets punished and he’s punished directly because of the gypsy curse, but NOT the way it was intended. The vampire demon is punished once he loses his soul as the curse is lifted from having a moment of happiness. Up until then there’s been 90 years of emotional build up. 90 years of acts that the vampire will feel weakness, shame, and anger over. 90 years of preparing for vengeance to begin. You see, until Angel loses his soul for the second time, in season 2, there was no vengeance. There was no moment of the creature that murdered their beloved made to suffer. Jenny Calendar was sent to Sunnydale to keep Angel and Buffy apart but she should have been playing matchmaker. For people devoted to instilling suffering forever, these guys have no clue as to how punishment really works. After 90 years of redemption and love, of guilt and good acts, of love, that is when the vampire can start to be hurt emotionally. That is when he feels real weakness.

There are other things. There’s the fact that when Angel regains his soul it is only his earthly memories that torment him. Of course, this won’t be an explicit problem until season 6 when we are shown that he should also suffer from being pulled from the afterlife. But that’s just another example of situations raising questions early and answering them later with a different situation. But most of the problems with Angel are… well, most of them are directly responded to with Dollhouse. Oddly enough, Dollhouse seems to be Whedon’s penance for many of his philosophical gaps in the Buffy story. Angel brings up the question of where identity comes from, is it in the mind or the body? Does personality dictate identity? Where does fault lay? Does actions and responsibility fall on those who committed the acts always or sometimes does it rest with those that instill said drive? I had never connected the shows in that way but many concerns raised in Buffy are explicitly dealt with years later in another. The mythology of Buffy is sort of like an inebriated college party roundtable: there are a lot of ideas thrown out and eventually most of them are addressed in one way or another, with varying degrees of specificity. Dollhouse comes across as a thesis. Jump anywhere in their timeline, from the beginning to the future epilogues, and it’s the same questions being addressed.

The Reality of My Surroundings

Let’s talk about reality TV. Dirty word, old hat, I know. It became popular with production studios because it’s relatively cheap to film and the turnaround can be quick. It became a staple when producers realized they could hire people to actually write out scripts but no longer had to pay them as writers according to union rules. Blah blah blah, big picture stuff.

Is reality TV my guilty pleasure? No. Absolutely not. I’m still as picky and critical about this genre as any other, although to be fair I must admit that reality TV is almost too broad to count as a genre. It’s almost a production style. Think about it: the shows are all still storyboarded, scripted, and written. They’re professionally shot. They’re edited. Even within reality TV one finds the actual genres. While most “scripted” television falls into comedy, drama, procedural, and so on reality TV has its own subsets. There’s voyeur, competition, hidden camera. Even then, there are the more traditional genres that work in parallel: comedy, drama, romance. The “reality” in reality TV is more of a production pretension than anything else. It’s just as conscious of itself as hand camera work on “gritty” police shows. But enough about the general. Let’s get specific. What do I watch?

I don’t think I watch a single voyeur show. That “follow some schmucks around with cameras” style. That’s not my thing. To me it’s a bunch of people who can’t act, acting poorly, pretending that they’re explicitly not acting. It’s a perfect storm of poorly executed drek. There are a couple of hidden camera (Tosh.0) and meta-hidden camera (The Soup!) shows I that I watch, none on a regular basis. They act as surrogate Youtube which is fitting as that’s what a large portion of content comes from. So what’s the meat of my reality tv? Competition shows. And yet still, I’m very particular…

RuPaul’s Drag Race
This is not a guilty pleasure. It’s just… pleasure. It’s allegedly a competition but it’s really more of a Mean Girls-esque season long fight. It’s so campy that rich people could send their kids there during the summer. The girls’ tastes are almost always questionable but then there’s the fact that they make about two or three outfits an episode and there’s almost zero screen time devoted to them actually constructing their clothes. There’s tons of footage of them criticizing the other contestants, planning, and walking around. But there’s oddly little time devoted to what could be an entire show. That just goes to show that Drag Race knows exactly what that is, and what it is is fabulous.

America’s Next Top Model
Fine, this one comes as close to a guilty pleasure as I can find. I don’t watch this on a regular schedule. I will gladly binge during a marathon. I don’t really watch it for the competition. Like a bizzare David Lynch piece, Top Model’s competition is only a meta-narrative wrapped around the real core of this show: the slow, disturbingly candid unraveling of a model. It’s all about Tyra and her descent into a Hollywood madness. It’s possibly a modern day reboot of Sunset Boulevard. What happens to someone when, rather than fading into obscurity off camera, they loose themselves to their ego and id while the camera’s still roll. On top of her explicitly narcissistic behavior you also have the additional point that these cameras are hers. She’s producing it. And while she’s being paid for episodes it’s a self-produced vanity project. The cameras that are so interested in capturing her? They’re her cameras! This is truly a dark piece of art.

Additionally it has the dubious distinction of being one of the few reality shows that has lowered my opinion of the subjects rather than confirm or elevate it. I used to think that the whole “vapid, stupid model” archetype was a bit shallow. Now I see that it’s utterly accurate.

Project Runway
Let’s take a trip up the ladder of quality. This one is not nearly as circuitous in its quality. This show is about fashion design. It’s a blast. Really, it’s hard to do much more. You have a bunch of artistic extroverts living and working on top of each other for a hellish month. The challenges range from blatant advertising to bizarre materials and the results are usually equally all over the place. What’s great is that seeing the context of some the more out there designs actually provides a real grounding to them. While not strictly accessible, this show sometimes makes the avant garde palatable. Another thing that I like is that I get to see the process behind an art that I am very unfamiliar with in my personal life. That’s not to say I don’t have style. I can be a singularly dapper dan. It’s the sketching to fabrication that blows me away. The process is fantastic and I adore being exposed to it.

I should add for the sake of disclosure that Tim Gunn is my patronus.

So You Think You Can Dance
There’s no hidden agenda when watching this show. It takes the competition set of reality shows and turns it on its head… by being about the content rather than the contest. I had the exact opposite reaction this than I did with Top Model. I went in not really caring all that much about dance and left the first season that I watched (probably season 3 or so) in love with dance. I don’t dance. I won’t dance. I probably can’t dance but won’t bother to find out. But I can say that this show has made me love dance. I can watch along to certain competitions and, understanding the rules and methods, have come to enjoy the criticism. I love analysis and sometimes that active deconstruction is all I get out of certain activities. SYTYCD is as far from that as a show can get.

The contest is about dance and, being dance, they have to have partners. That means trusting each other on the show as well as elevating them. Because of that there’s never any of that “drama” (real or fabricated) to be seen. It’s almost more like an locked room mystery, with a large cast all working together while slowly dwindling toward the final guest. The judges are even welcoming, asking people to try out again when they have more experience. And they mean it too. I’ve seen them take returning auditioners and push them ahead to the second round because they had proven themself before.

And oh, the judges. Rather than just a barely wrangled set of three random semi-celebrities, each with their own inherent demographic appeal, this show gives us experts. That means when they criticize they sometimes speak over the heads of the audience (myself included) with the use of technical terms. Why? Because they actually have something constructive to say to the dancers. So often criticism from TV judges are the sort of things that give criticism a bad name. Here they give out professional notes.

And I do believe that takes us to the end of the reality tour. I like to think that the common thread that these all have is none of them makes me sit on the couch, smug, and feel superior to the featured people. Maybe the models on Top Model but I still contest that the show is actually a grand tragedy about Tyra, perhaps even a dark character study. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to films some Dogme 95 in the pursuit of real truth.

Review: Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition

Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition by Ben Schott

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book is brilliant. Each entry has 5 parts: an article about the word, the word itself, the transliteration, the English definition, the literal definition. Let me tell you, often times the literal definition is simply poetry. Is there a German word for "the completed feeling of an entire story from a short phrase"?

Many entries in here fall into "why is there not a word for that in English" or "holy crap, there's a word for that specific concept?!" But sprinkled throughout are words that are touching and bittersweet.

Erlösungsfreudeschuldbewusstsein
Guilt at the relief of a loved one’s death.
deliverance-joy-shame

Some words in here are profound, you know that if they are used then there is a much longer story behind the situation.
Schubladenbrief
The letter you write, but never send.
(desk-)drawer-letter

And some are short poems. Japanese has the succinct structure of 5/7/5 for their haiku. I believe that Germans have truncated the art of confined poetry to a single word.
Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen
Kicking through piles of autumn leaves.
autumn-foliage-strike-fun

Some words are so specific it seems silly that they exist at all.
Geheimgangsverlockung
The conviction that all old, large houses must contain secret passages.
secret-corridor-seduction

Some make you wonder why we don't have a word or phrase for it in English yet.
Leertretung
Stepping down heavily on a stair that isn’t there.
void-stepping


Where should one catalog this book? Poetry, linguistics, reference? It's so damn good perhaps one copy belongs in each section. And I'll leave you with one last word that you will need while reading.

Zeuxisgelächter
Laughter so prolonged and intense it causes physical pain.
zeuxis-laughter



View all my reviews

Warehouse 13: In My Wheelhouse (13)

Today’s post is brought to you by the husband/wife team that is Adam and Allison.

Also, spoilers abound.

I’m going to talk about Warehouse 13. I really like Warehouse 13. It is an amazing bit of television. It’s amazing that it started as a science fiction show, utterly failed, and carried on to become a great fantasy show. I could talk about how it’s one of the few shows with a steampunk ethos. I could just gush about the characters. But I’m going to focus on something that’s actually amazing.

Warehouse 13 is one of the most queer friendly and feminist shows I have ever seen.

Recently we watched episode 4×17. In it, the main crew of the warehouse have to take physicals for work. We find out that Pete and Myka both have something. In Pete’s case. it’s low testosterone, while for Myka it’s ovarian cancer. These are both very gender-centric conditions but are handled in unexpected ways. For Pete, there’s a running gag of him trying to prove his manliness but the episode culminates in a situation where, in order to escape the effects of an artifact, he has to be completely honest and open. By breaking down and crying he takes control of the situation and proves that he can “man up”. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. Myka’s cancer is an interesting choice not because of what happens in this episode but because of her already established character . While she is incredibly fond of her niece, it is clear that Myka has no immediate plans for kids of her own. Giving her a disease that will most likely effect her fertility is an interesting choice. Her not being a mother now or in the future is never even mentioned. So for taking the two leads and giving Pete a condition that screams “man” and Myka one that says “woman” it was different to see the direction that the show took.

But then my wife and I realized that it wasn’t really different for Warehouse 13. During an episode where an artifact is found that grants wishes (4×5), Myka ends up pregnant. Stereotypical? No. Myka spends the whole episode freaking out, not wanting to be pregnant, and wanting her body back to its proper shape. Pete is the one who wished her pregnant. Because he wants to be with her romantically? No. Despite the male/female odd-couple partnership, they are more like siblings than anything else. It comes out that Pete just wished for that because he wants a kid. He’s the one with the ticking biological clock. And he doesn’t want to be romantically entangled with Myka. If he did he would have just wished for that and gotten a kid the regular way. No, he realizes how lonely it is to work for a secret agency and knows that Myka is indeed his partner and one of the only people he can be honest with. Who better to share your life with? The ironic gender treatment has been a constant theme to the show. There’s the standard bodyswap episode (2×8) that’s not so standard. Pete (in Myka’s body) attends Myka’s class reunion and ends up being very popular with her old crush because “Myka” seems to just fit in as one of the guys. Instead of it turning into an embarrassing situation it becomes one of frustration. At the end Myka has to essentially ask for a reset and earn a second date now that she’s herself again.

And it goes beyond just gender subversion. There are two queer characters: Steve Jinks, who is gay, and H.G. Wells, who is a bisexual woman who had to present as a man in her professional life. Sorry, let’s take a moment to unpack these characters. I’ll start with H.G. In her own time she presented as a man to be taken seriously as a writer. In reality she let her brother front for her in public. Her introduction to the show is that she’s an ex-agent for the Warehouse, a genius, and went mad over the loss of her daughter which propelled her into villainy. Already she has more depth than just an oppressed working woman or wronged mother. There’s the added bonus that she never identifies as a wife. Even when she’s identified as “mother” it’s relative to a character who’s not present, and it’s not necessarily for the better. She is always her own character and even motherhood turns her into a wolf rather than a lamb. As the show progresses she is rehabilitated and comes back as an agent. Her new emotional anchor? It’s Myka. Yes, H.G. Wells and straight-identified Myka develop a purely unaffected relationship. They have incredibly chemistry together both from their performances and through the scripts. While they never become explicitly romantic there are clear looks and conversations that show they both know that they have a connection. It’s not a clear-cut relationship but it is a strong and sincere one.

And then there’s Steve Jinks. How is he written? Perfectly. How do we know he’s gay? for the most part because he comes out to Claudia when she thinks that there might be something romantic between them. Yes, there’s another trope defused. They take the two young and photogenic characters, put them on a mission together and let the sparks fly… and fizzle. Claudia and Jinks end up with their own sibling relationship after that awkward start but it’s just another time that the show doesn’t go where the standard path would. It lets the characters grow rather than fit into a mold. So how often does Jinks’ homosexuality actually come up? Just about as often as any other character’s heterosexuality does. The gay jokes are few and far between, and we really only see it when it’s relevant. Jinks has an ex that he’s forced to work with in the field at one point. The ex is a guy. That’s really the end of it. If there’s ever an awkward moment that happens because he’s gay the only people to be made uncomfortable by it are characters. It’s never used to make the audience squirm.

And that’s the show in essence. It’s irony at its most functional, taking the set up for old tropes and standard outlines, then twisting them against expectation in service of character development. Every character on this show is nurtured, tested, and grown. The result is an organic cast that can propel the program though what would be a weak episode for any other show with deftness.  It’s that organic factor that makes it, too. Instead of these roles and orientations being used to make a point they’re used to make people.

All of this? This is just one reason why this show is great.

Somewhere along the Continuum

A while back I wrote a post on my own site about how time travel works (and doesn’t) in fiction. It’s full of all sorts of breakdowns and spoilers so read through with caution. ButI bring it up because I love time travel. I come from a physics background and while I know that the restrictions on real world time travel are severe compared to fictional methods, I absolutely adore the thought experiments one can run through with it. I love watching and reading stories about it, extrapolating the physics of their version of time travel, of picking apart the bits where they missed an opportunity or overlooked a limitation. I love that time travel stories at their best are both hard science fiction (inherent in their acknowledgment of physical laws) and great at character studies (what can be more introspective than meditations on accepting power and reshaping the world by one’s own desire and hand?). And there’s a good time travel show on television right now.

That show is Continuum.

It’s not perfect. There are some pacing issues and the tonal shift between seasons one and two is a sharp one to say the least. But it is interesting and it’s utilizing the time travel tool very well. In the future there was a large economic collapse and this time around the corporations of the world bailed out their governments. They have since (legally) taken power of Canada where the show takes place. There is a terrorist organization called Liber8 (liberate) whose aim is to overthrow the corporations and reinstate a more democratic rule. The twist is that they use terrorist tactics (they take down a skyscraper in the pilot) while the corporations stay within orderly legal means of obtaining their goals. Right there it’s a nice set up because there’s at least something on both sides that will resonate as well as put off most people. The story follows Kiera Cameron. She’s a police officer for her government/corporation SadTech. She is part of the task force that ends up taking down most of the Liber8 members and is there at their execution. Something goes wrong (or right) and instead of being executed, Liber8 jumps back in time, accidentally taking the nearby Kiera with them. She ends up in present day Canada and, due to her cybernetic implants, makes contact with a fledgling engineer who will (possibly) grow up to found SadTech.

The setup sounds like it’s aimed at reinstating the existing future with both a SadTech employee and the founder of the company working together against Liber8. One of the beautiful things about this show is that nothing stays that simple with either plot or the time travel conceit. The founder of SadTech is not yet the man he’s supposed to become and is prematurely being confronted with consequences that, as a young man, he could never foresee. Kiera is torn between wanting to return home by way of maintaining the status quo but is also a protector. With new and advanced terrorists in our present, she also feels compelled to protect people.

This show is not afraid to have people change their minds while maintaining motives. This becomes incredibly obvious by the second season. Only a few episodes into season two and you’ll see people that have changed sides, groups that have ideological schisms and people who think they are fighting the same fight they started but now using tactics they would have eschewed before. The people in this show change and sometimes they don’t even know it. While the first season seems more like plotting to make statements the real dynamics are under the surface. It becomes clear that nearly everyone is actually fighting to win over opinions both of the public and of key individuals. It’s dark and complex and a bit cynical on every side.

And then there’s the time travel. It’s used well. There’s a twist in the finale of season one that, while I caught the events, I missed the implications of. I had been so busy focusing on the plot that I didn’t realize a large piece of what had been a mystery was revealed, and only caught it while watching through a second time. What’s really spectacular is that when certain aspects of time travel come to light it doesn’t just show how their world works. It also shows how some of the characters work.

If Person of Interest is a speculative fiction of near future thought experiment in government and individual rights then Continuum is the science fiction long term version of the same concept. It’s about to finish off the second season in one more episode if you’re following the first run Canadian broadcasting. It’s currently doing a staggered broadcast on Syfy but I have no idea where that is. If you have Netflix, I believe season one is waiting there. However you want to track it down, this show is worth getting into.

Revolution number nein.

I watch Revolution. I don’t think it’s particularly good and it is one of the most frustrating shows I have ever encountered but I watch it regularly. The plot is mediocre. There’s an established world where electricity has been rendered void, though people’s nervous systems are fine, so don’t think about it. The technology that explains how this happened is laughable and, were it real, turning off power would be the absolute least it could do. Seriously, it’s akin to traveling back in time and wowing Victorian folk with your flameless light which is actually a smartphone with the screen turned white. It can do more! Oh, and every character is completely interchangeable with someone else of a similar goal. There are no personalities, only a temperament and a physical goal.

So why do I keep coming back each week to watch? Because of everything happening in the background. I’ve said that Revolution is essentially the “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” of a show that never existed. The story mainly focuses on a handful of men with family issues who try to be better to their families while killing the other guys. That’s nearly everything going on. But in the background? Atlanta is waging a war against Philadelphia, one of the side effects of the blackout is that cancer and other diseases are cured, and people are re-purposing ships to work without electricity and struggling to reopen international trade routes with only manual guidance across the seas. But we get a show about three families in a pissing contest.

So if none of those ideas are featured prominently in the show how are they presented? By our characters passing through scenes and tossing out world-building teasers like a dealer’s first baggie. This one is free, but keep coming back. And, like a hit, the promise of the high is always a cut above the actual trip. The trade routes are mentioned to give an idea of how wealthy a new city they’re passing through must be. A character shows up for a single episode to add emotional weight that maybe this blackout isn’t all bad and hey, no one has cancer anymore. One of our leads proves himself to be a great tactician and gains the trust of Atlanta, is granted control of their army and uses it just to get close to his rivals and get into a fist fight. It’s really that bad.

And that’s what this show is. The same sharks circling each other week after week while just above the surface is the Orca, manned by Quint and Brody and Hooper, with a shipment full of apricot brandy. We get a fish screensaver and miss Jaws playing out mere feet away on the other side of the firmament.

I’ve been enduring this all season but it really struck home how formulaic they use the interesting parts of the world they’ve made as teasers when this season ended. One man loses his army and the other two gain control of armies and the episode comes to a close with a fist fight. Then, in order to clear the karma of the man that caused the blackout, his wife and daughter manage to restore power by shutting down the Macguffin from a high security bunker. Big actions from small emotional stakes. But suddenly…

It’s revealed that a character who’s been doofing around for half a season is actually a patriotic secret agent. He launches (now powered) nukes at both Philadelphia and Atlanta. And he’s done this under the orders of the American President in exile, who’s holed up in the new American colony. It’s located in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and it’s protected by a fleet of pirate ships. Yes, we’ve been watching people hike across the south to get to a computer to turn on more computers when this entire time there’s been GWB commanding a pirate fleet from a conquered Cuba. Why am I not allowed to watch that show? I want that show! Everyone wants that show!

I’m sure the season premier will somehow negate the nuclear missiles already in flight in order to focus more time on Mustache Dad from the Twilight movies waving his sword around like a feather duster. Why am I sure? Because this show is constantly lowering the stakes. In writing one is supposed to push the importance and intensity as high as possible without crossing into (too much) melodrama. Revolution is a rare bird in that it will establish incredibly high stakes and then show you how uninvolved our cast is with said stakes. It’s almost postmodern in its irony.

I know it’s weird to be so invested in something I care so little for. I’m just really interested in the secret Hamlet, the “man behind the curtain”, the show that could have been “George W. Bush: Pirate King of Guantanamo Bay!” But I promise you this; my next post will be about fueled by love.

Adam Reviews: Man of Steel (2013)

This is probably the most frustrating superhero movie I have seen since Batman Forever. But where Batman Forever had no idea what it wanted to be with both production and story,Man of Steel has its production down to a fine polish. It looks grey and gritty and full of falling buildings, like a desaturated Transformers finale. But its joyless bastardization of the character and inconsistent story are all over the place when it comes to content.

The movie’s most consistent feature is the direction by Zack Snyder. It’s by no means good but it holds solid through the whole movie. The color tones are brown on Krypton and grey on Earth. While it was probably intended to reflect the worlds’ two suns (red and yellow respectively), they not only don’t match but don’t serve the planets well, either. Krypton simply looks like a future extrapolation of 300 and Earth has a clinical sterility and lack of life, even in landscape shots. There’s very little tonal shift between an arctic expedition and New York City. That, combined with Snyder’s obvious comfort in cutting things like music videos, leads to a plodding feel. The overly long and ineffectual punch-fest of a finale does nothing to lift this tone.

In fact, it’s so joyless that I don’t even get the sense that Snyder is excited about the paycheck, let alone actually making this movie. There’s no banter or conversation between characters. The one “joke” I can recall comes at the end and is possibly a bit sexist. The whole time we’re told that Clark/Kal/Superman loves his adoptive planet and that’s what drives him to do good. His flashbacks are a bit sepia-toned and always about him being comforted by his parents for being teased or a “tough, teachable moment”. Sure, these are parts of a childhood, but at no point does Clark ever have a moment of fun. He never enjoys life here. He simply survives from one moment to the next and periodically assists others in surviving. Even in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, we have casual banter between Alfred and Bruce, in fact creating some of the only moments in the later films when the character allows himself to transition from his alter ego back into his civilian state of mind.

In Man of Steel, we don’t even get to see if Henry Cavill is a good actor. He can hit the somber tone of this movie, but he’s akin to a singer holding a single note. Is there range? We’ll never know from this. Michael Shannon does have emotional range in this movie. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a good dialect coach. Watching his scenes on mute would do him better service since his slightly nasal Eastern seaboard tone undermines his presence constantly. This is strange because I looked it up and he seems to be from Kentucky, but perhaps this is a manner of speech he picked up for Boardwalk Empire and has not let go of. So instead of commanding orders, he sort of sneers and meows them out.

While it may sound like nitpicking, the internal rules of this world are completely inconsistent. Supposedly, Kryptonians get their powers on Earth from the yellow sun’s radiation, but it’s a major plot point that it’s actually from our atmosphere. This switches back and forth a few times. Likewise, we are told and shown that when not on Earth, Kryptonians are similar in abilities to humans, yet we see some arriving and are immediately jumping through buildings and tearing apart “indestructible” metal that originated on Krypton. Their technology also sometimes requires shade from our sun to work but mostly is just fine in direct light. As for the Phantom Zone, the parallel dimension that Krypton uses as a prison? It’s apparently in constant direct contact with this dimension so I’m not sure how far away and secluded it is supposed to be.

And then there’s the character of Superman. Superman is (supposed to be) a metaphorical story of an immigrant Jew. Escaping a war torn and desolated world of no hope (Nazi Germany), parents sacrifice everything they have for their child to leave and have a better life. Once in this new land of America he keeps his heritage a secret, practicing what he knows of his past and trying to balance assimilation and keeping true to himself. He comes from a culture that prizes knowledge of the sciences and goes into a career dealing with education, knowledge and words. He hopes for a day when he can come out and reveal his cultural past but in the meantime toils away to prove himself to his new adoptive homeland. He belongs to a minority that is escaping persecution and is visually indistinguishable from the majority. He is separate by choice and seeking a balance of identity and unity.

In Man of Steel, he’s Jesus. That’s it. He’s Jesus Christ, martyr and savior. That’s about as much of a bastardization as one can come up with. There are already articles circulating about this but I’ve avoided them all. I’m sure, not being Christian, that I’ve missed a number of reference points but I noticed enough. He’s explicitly 33, and has been on Earth for 33 years. He strikes the “sexy crucified” poses. A lot. He’s a miracle birth by his home world’s standards, being their first biological birth in centuries. And then there’s a painfully obvious scene that takes place between Clark Kent and a priest in a church. The shot/reverse shot framing is so that the priest has a cross over his shoulder and Clark has a stained glass image of Jesus on his for every single shot. He talks about how his father has given him to this planet and he’s here to help humanity. He knows that he must give himself up to Zod in order to save humans but isn’t sure that humans are able to be redeemed. I was groaning in the theater but afterward was told this is essentially the story of Jesus in Gethsemane, especially since the people he turns himself in to and trusts then hand him over to General Zod. Don’t worry, he forgives those people before he’s taken away. Just in case this wasn’t enough religion (and the wrong religion for the character at that) one of Zod’s minions is fighting Superman and gives a tiny monologue about how he was born without purpose but, since Kryptonians are bred and grown with a purpose to fill in society, she’s the result of evolution and evolution will always win. She’s then beaten unconscious by the personification of creationism. Subtle, Snyder. Very subtle.

With all of that out of the way, I didn’t leave the theater in a rage. Sure, I lost respect for Nolan since he gave this the green light, but I never expected much from Snyder and was thus only slightly surprised at the depths of the low points in this film. I did manage to pick out a few pleasing bits amidst the wreckage. I think that the darker but absolutely sincere Jon Kent was new and very well done. At one point, Clark saves a busload of children from drowning and Pa Kent says that he needs to remain in hiding, possibly even to the extent of letting those classmates die just to protect the person that Clark will one day become as long as he remains free and secret. While this seems incredibly harsh, his motives are shown to be noble when he makes Clark stay away as he sacrifices himself for Clark’s secret. Keeping his adopted son well and safe from captivity isn’t just his priority, it’s his life’s mission. In this case, Clark is not a foil to Zod’s single-minded devotion to his cause; Jon Kent is. The other thing I enjoyed was how they didn’t make Lois Lane an oblivious idiot when Clark comes to work for the Daily Planet and not recognize him. Those two points were refreshing and handled very well.

So what do I take away from this movie? That Zack Snyder doesn’t understand Superman or movie construction. The only other possibility is that this darker, grittier Superman isn’t supposed to embody “truth, justice, and the American way” but a new set of American ideals. That of “sponsored consumerism, bible-thumping morality, and rampant xenophobia”. Which, actually, might be the case. I just read that Man of Steel has broken the record for number of consumer product sponsorships, with over 100 corporate contracts. Now that Superman is shilling for the National Guard, Hershey’s, Carls’ Jr., Warby Parker, Gillette, Walmart, Sears, 7 11, Kellogg, Nokia, Hardee’s, and Chrysler,  maybe he’s no longer a symbol for America, but a logo.

Rating: -3.5 on a scale of -5 to +5
Post Script: the film would have garnered a -1.5 but the offensive religious points separately earn a -5 so I averaged it out to about a -3.5