Now, I'll be the first person to say that Star Trek the Star Trek also known as Star Trek Square Bracket Two Thousand and Nine Square Bracket or "The Star Trek reboot" or Star Trek 11 was a glitzy whizz-bang cash-in without a lot of heart. It just happened to be a particularly well-made glitzy whizz-bang cash in without a lot of heart.
I mention this because Star Trek 11 is the only other JJ Abrams film I've seen, and thus the only thing that I can compare it to. Now, what do I mean by "without a lot of heart?" That's a legitimate question. In between setting up seven characters (as if the audience had never heard of Star Trek) and doling out tons of 'splosions, there wasn't really time to go beneath the surface. For example, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a film with a bunch of 'splosions, but it's also about Kirk's midlife crisis. Inception is a film with a bunch of zero-gravity fights, but it's also about a guy who may or may not have killed his wife, and how screwed-up his head is because of that. Wall-E, which I maintain is one of the best sci-fi films this decade (this decade hell, it's one of the best sci-fi films since The Empire Strikes Back) is a film with a bunch of cute robots, but it's also got cute robot love. Star Trek 11 just has Kirk do the tried and true Joseph Campell's Hero's Journey thing. Spock's homeworld does the firework and his mother dies, but he's an emotionless half-alien so we can't really relate to him. That's what I mean by "without a lot of heart." And for the record, Star Trek 11 was a really good glitzy cash-in. It just didn't have a lot of heart.
Now, is Star Trek 11 better than Super 8? Oh hell yes.
Okay, so where do I begin? Let's start with the locket. In Super 8 our hero carries around a locket containing a picture of his dead mother. Now, since it doesn't play a creepy-as-hell little tune, it is automatically not the coolest locket-containing-a-picture-of-a-dead-person in film history. Since I brought that up, let's take a look at it.
In For a Few Dollars More, Colonel Douglas Mortimer carries around a locket of his dead sister. Oh, by the way, SPOILER ALERT. Okay, so anyway, one of our heroes has this locket. We don't see it nearly as prominently as we do the villain's locket, which he gets out and plays every time he kills someone. Mortimer's in it for revenge (hint: his sister ain't alive no mo'), so when that theme plays at the end, it's personal as hell. This is because Sergio Leone really knows what he's doing. And one of the few things I really liked about the third Pirates of the Carribean film was that they also had the two musical lockets that really signified something.
Now, in Super 8, it's just a picture of his mother. I guarantee you it's not the only picture he has of her, since he's got a whole film reel that he shows to Elle Fanning halfway through for no real reason except that JJ Abrams has a film fetish (no, really! The whole reason why the kids are filmmakers is because JJ Abrams either loves leaning on the fourth wall, or has a film fetish, or both). And he carries it around with him. The army guys take it away from him, and he takes it back. Then the alien takes it away using a magnet (while at the same time not taking Elle Fanning's drunken father's necklace), and our hero just lets it go. Throughout the film, it's clearly been built up as this important thing, but then he decides to let it go for some reason. Someone please explain to me the reason, or what made him change his mind, because I don't get it.
There may very well be some symbolism here, but symbolism seems kind of out-of-place in a film where, earlier on, a bunch of kids stood right next to an implausible train wreck and they all escaped unscathed. This is clearly not a film that wants you to think very much, as evidenced by the fact that a bunch of kids stood right next to an implausble train wreck...
This brings me directly to point #2. Hopefully I don't need to explain the words "suspension of disbelief." Let's say you put a character in a building and then you blow that building up. If the character survives and isn't Superman, you need to come up with a way for them to survive, and no, "he's the main character" is not a reason. Your brain is telling you that that character should be mincemeat, and it's up to the storyteller to come up with a compelling reason why they're not. Abrams doesn't do that here. One-ton freight cars steamroll everything around the kids but leave them completely untouched. Later on, the army randomly starts shooting up the town, and the only thing that happens is one of the kids gets a broken leg (because remember, this ain't Battlestar; you can't go around killing children here). An alien who can communicate telepathically by touching you has been eating people - which I assume involves touching them, in fact you can see it grab one or two people during the cave sequence - but it's magically calmed down by our hero because he's our hero. Basically things happen because the plot demands that they happen, not because they make any sort of logical sense.
Still on the subject of trains... There was a time when I thought this movie wouldn't suck. It was that space of time between the point where I realized that all the kids could act, and the point where the train crash occured. But take a look at the way that scene is set up. They're out there at the train station (because the plot demands they be there) and they do a rehearsal that is quiet, low-key, and generally perfect. Then the director-kid spots a train in the background coming towards them. He shrieks something about "production values" and insists that they shoot the scene with the train thundering by. For one brief happy minute I thought Abrams was poking fun at the Michael Bay School of 'Splosions, but then... well... you know.
The train was transporting an alien and its magic atom-bricks that are apparently capable of turning into anything it needs them to be. Why was the government transporting an alien across the country? How did Professor Bleeding Heart get his hands on the train schedule? How did Professor Bleeding Heart get his hands on enough magic to derail that entire train and still not instantly die?
After a couple of days of searching for it, the government decides to just burn down the town and evacuate everyone. They set a massive fire that's set to burn down the town in four hours. At least four hours elapse between that point and the end of the movie, but the town's still standing. Did they put the fire out off-camera? Would it have hurt to have a single line of dialogue discussing that?
Then they go around the town randomly shooting. At least, I think they're randomly shooting. What exactly was the plan at this point? Were they gonna burn down the houses, or weren't they? If so, why did they put out the fire? And if not, how were they going to explain away all the 'splosion damage?
Meanwhile the alien sets about repairing its ship and eating people. It turns the water tower into a spaceship (gee, that would suck if the townies needed water in a hurry, y'know, like if there was a massive fire on their front doorstep) and starts stealing car engines. Of course, it knows exactly whose cars to steal engines from, so that Sheriff Dad can still drive around and Alcohol Dad can nearly get himself killed.
(By the way, when the alien's finishing his ship and everything made of metal is flying at it, notice how nobody's reacting. You'd think Steven Spielberg, who once shot golf balls past his actors' heads so they'd know where the dinosaurs were in Jurassic Park, would understand that you have to have your actors react to CGI. But then, he wasn't the director, he was just along for the ride.)
And did I mention that the alien ate people? Because it did; in fact, it eats the police chief twice just to be on the safe side. It was even gonna eat Elle Fanning before she could get to hold hands with our hero at the end. But the film's too busy shoving in pointless symbolism with the locket to address this issue. In accordance with simple Hollywood morality, the alien has carte blanche to eat as many civilians as it wants because it was previously tortured by the guv'ment, I guess. But wait! Didn't Professor Bleeding Heart say that the alien was in him and he was in the alien? Doesn't that mean that the alien already knows that most of mankind doesn't actually mean it any harm? Or is Professor Bleeding Heart a big misanthropic jerkwad who wants to see a bunch of people get eaten?
So the plot is resolved when the alien joins minds with a little boy. Now, any real little boy who just lost his mother and is so hung up on her that he takes that locket with him everywhere is probably going to have some grief issues. Add to that the fact that his dad and his girlfriend's dad hate each other and each other's offspring, and he almost certainly has emotional issues. Maybe the angst is what made the alien leave. But that's probably not what Abrams et al intended to have happen. Instead they have this scene were the alien gains innate knowledge of the kid's incorruptible pure pureness and decides not to eat him. I was really hoping that it was gonna possess Elle Fanning or something and actually use one of the characters as a mouthpiece, but because that would require actually explaining its actions, I can see why they didn't go with that idea.
Conclusion: it's appalling that anyone could assemble a team of child actors who can actually act and then force them to be in a story this poorly thought out.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
People who annoy me:
People who ask "have you no decency" when they have none themselves.
People who say "I'm sick of you questioning my patriotism," when they have none.
People who say "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" when they have none.
People who insist on "tolerance" when they have none.
People who insist that one group of people must "learn to live within their means" while enabling another group to do the exact opposite.
People who "invest in the future" by borrowing money from it.
People who took their iPods to Occupy Wall Street.
People who tout "triumphs of democracy" over the rule of law, at any point in America since Reconstruction.
Republicans who vote to increase spending (I would say all politicians, but come on, hating a Democrat for increasing spending is like hating rain for being wet).
People who tailgate, people who slow down to see the car wreck, and people who stay in a merging lane well after the time to merge.
People who ask me to take stupid online quizzes.
People who say "I'm sick of you questioning my patriotism," when they have none.
People who say "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" when they have none.
People who insist on "tolerance" when they have none.
People who insist that one group of people must "learn to live within their means" while enabling another group to do the exact opposite.
People who "invest in the future" by borrowing money from it.
People who took their iPods to Occupy Wall Street.
People who tout "triumphs of democracy" over the rule of law, at any point in America since Reconstruction.
Republicans who vote to increase spending (I would say all politicians, but come on, hating a Democrat for increasing spending is like hating rain for being wet).
People who tailgate, people who slow down to see the car wreck, and people who stay in a merging lane well after the time to merge.
People who ask me to take stupid online quizzes.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Neither a review nor a defense of Battlestar Galactica's finale
It seems that every time anyone out there on the internet has ever brought up RDM BSG since the finale aired, they always preface the substance of their post/article/whatever with "yeah the finale sucked, but remember when the show was awesome?"
Or, "whatever your feelings on the finale..."
In my opinion, this sort of nonsense is completely unnecessary.
Now, this is not a defense of the finale, which other than the Luddite thing (and the fact that the "dying leader" prophecy simply doesn't come to pass) was actually pretty decent. Now, you could argue that "the Luddite thing" was the main point of the finale, since there was that tacked-on coda/epilogue that hammered it home, blah blah blah.
As I said, this is not a defense of the finale. This is just a request for the internet to stop going out of its way to mention its collective dislike of the finale as a requirement for holding any discussion whatsoever about the positive aspects of Battlestar Galactica.
I mean, we all hate "The Woman King" too - hell, I hate "Epiphanies" more than "Black Market" and "The Woman King" put together, but that's just my opinion. (Magic Cylon baby blood < Mr. Rule-of-Law killing a criminal in cold blood or everyone being stupid racist towards the Sagittarons.)
The thing is, "The Woman King," "Black Market," "Epiphanies," and yes, even "Daybreak, Part III" are all just episodes of a show.
And on the whole, that show was awesome.
I mean, hell, if "Daybreak, Part III" disgusts you so much, pretend the show ended on "Sometimes a Great Notion." (The other thing I didn't particularly like about "Daybreak" was that it undid the "holy crap, we are Cylons" wham that "Notion" had implied.)
I can hypothesize that people hate "Daybreak" extra-much because it was the finale, and it was supposed to be this grand concluding statement to the show and sum up the show's morals and values, and those morals and values evidently ended up being "technology is no good." Well, no, the moral of the show is "It's not enough to survive; one also must be worthy of survival." That's been the case ever since Adama said pretty much those words in the Miniseries.
It would be like me hating "Dirty Hands" because I thought the whole political subtext was a tad ham-fisted (or, hell, any time Lee says "hope" or "change" in Season 4.0 - or, to stretch a point, the fact that right around that time they put Roslin in a wig to make her look less like an older Sarah Palin. Don't lie, you were thinking it). The political subtext was a tad ham-fisted, I didn't wholly agree with it... but I still liked the episode. The political subtext of "Sine Qua Non" was absurdly ham-fisted if you buy into the Lee/Obama analogy (which, by the way, is simply ludicrous; to cite one example, as a former CAG and onetime commander of the Pegasus, Lee had more executive experience than Obama did in 2008), but to me, that was the point where the show got out of its slump, and everything from there to the finale was a thundering chourus of awesome. And the messages of those episodes were not necessarily the message of the show as a whole.
Now, maybe the finale should be treated differently. Well, from the start, you have to admit that this finale is completely different to pretty much anything else. Compare it to, say, The End of Time over on Doctor Who and it's almost like examining two entirely different media (although they do both spend way too much time at the end trying to wrap everything up and put a big bow on top). But even if The End of Time was the worst thing Rusty ever wrote, would we be trashing his entire tenure as Who's showrunner?
Point is, the quality of the finale should not color your opinion of the entire show.
And hell, if you wanna complain about the show ending on a sour note, are you forgetting The Plan or did you just wipe that from your memory?
I mean, for my money, The Plan, which came out after the finale, was worse than the finale... but so what? That doesn't change the fact that for 4+ years, Battlestar Galactica was the best damn thing on television.
So, please, internet in general, please stop prefacing all your comments about Battlestar with "no matter what we thought of the finale" or anything along those lines. Leave that to us; when we hook our family and friends on the show, we'll drop that caveat somewhere early on. You don't need to remind us what you thought of the finale; we'd much rather consider the show as a whole, and the show as a whole was awesome.
Or, "whatever your feelings on the finale..."
In my opinion, this sort of nonsense is completely unnecessary.
Now, this is not a defense of the finale, which other than the Luddite thing (and the fact that the "dying leader" prophecy simply doesn't come to pass) was actually pretty decent. Now, you could argue that "the Luddite thing" was the main point of the finale, since there was that tacked-on coda/epilogue that hammered it home, blah blah blah.
As I said, this is not a defense of the finale. This is just a request for the internet to stop going out of its way to mention its collective dislike of the finale as a requirement for holding any discussion whatsoever about the positive aspects of Battlestar Galactica.
I mean, we all hate "The Woman King" too - hell, I hate "Epiphanies" more than "Black Market" and "The Woman King" put together, but that's just my opinion. (Magic Cylon baby blood < Mr. Rule-of-Law killing a criminal in cold blood or everyone being stupid racist towards the Sagittarons.)
The thing is, "The Woman King," "Black Market," "Epiphanies," and yes, even "Daybreak, Part III" are all just episodes of a show.
And on the whole, that show was awesome.
I mean, hell, if "Daybreak, Part III" disgusts you so much, pretend the show ended on "Sometimes a Great Notion." (The other thing I didn't particularly like about "Daybreak" was that it undid the "holy crap, we are Cylons" wham that "Notion" had implied.)
I can hypothesize that people hate "Daybreak" extra-much because it was the finale, and it was supposed to be this grand concluding statement to the show and sum up the show's morals and values, and those morals and values evidently ended up being "technology is no good." Well, no, the moral of the show is "It's not enough to survive; one also must be worthy of survival." That's been the case ever since Adama said pretty much those words in the Miniseries.
It would be like me hating "Dirty Hands" because I thought the whole political subtext was a tad ham-fisted (or, hell, any time Lee says "hope" or "change" in Season 4.0 - or, to stretch a point, the fact that right around that time they put Roslin in a wig to make her look less like an older Sarah Palin. Don't lie, you were thinking it). The political subtext was a tad ham-fisted, I didn't wholly agree with it... but I still liked the episode. The political subtext of "Sine Qua Non" was absurdly ham-fisted if you buy into the Lee/Obama analogy (which, by the way, is simply ludicrous; to cite one example, as a former CAG and onetime commander of the Pegasus, Lee had more executive experience than Obama did in 2008), but to me, that was the point where the show got out of its slump, and everything from there to the finale was a thundering chourus of awesome. And the messages of those episodes were not necessarily the message of the show as a whole.
Now, maybe the finale should be treated differently. Well, from the start, you have to admit that this finale is completely different to pretty much anything else. Compare it to, say, The End of Time over on Doctor Who and it's almost like examining two entirely different media (although they do both spend way too much time at the end trying to wrap everything up and put a big bow on top). But even if The End of Time was the worst thing Rusty ever wrote, would we be trashing his entire tenure as Who's showrunner?
Point is, the quality of the finale should not color your opinion of the entire show.
And hell, if you wanna complain about the show ending on a sour note, are you forgetting The Plan or did you just wipe that from your memory?
I mean, for my money, The Plan, which came out after the finale, was worse than the finale... but so what? That doesn't change the fact that for 4+ years, Battlestar Galactica was the best damn thing on television.
So, please, internet in general, please stop prefacing all your comments about Battlestar with "no matter what we thought of the finale" or anything along those lines. Leave that to us; when we hook our family and friends on the show, we'll drop that caveat somewhere early on. You don't need to remind us what you thought of the finale; we'd much rather consider the show as a whole, and the show as a whole was awesome.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Who Review: Voyage of the Damned
I had the pleasure of watching this one with my good friend Tom, who once upon a distant time wrote a post or two for this blog. It was the first time he'd seen it, so I've taken the luxury of adding a few of his comments throughout this review.
The Titanic crashes through the TARDIS just cuz, and then it's not the Titanic, it's the starship Titanic, because the people in charge of this interstellar cruise line know nothing about history and it's kind of funny. (I also noticed that the tour guide thinks that human beings worship "the great god Santa," a good three years before Steven Moffat put it in an episode and I made it a running gag in my reviews.)
All right, it's time to meet our cast of characters this time around. Tom's comments are highlighted.
Astrid Peth - serving wench in an outfit that, as I recall, caused quite a stir. First time any companion's shown any cleavage while Rusty was at the helm!
Two fat people - comic relief. Wow, they're fat and they're eating.
A rich jerk - Yup, he's rich, so he's a jerk, what a surprise.
The aforementioned tour guide - Aaaargh, something that reminds me of Revelation of the Daleks!
Bannakaffalatta - Mini-Satan! Awesome!
They go down to Earth, which they can do because everyone's evacuated London because bad stuff always happens on Christmas. Hey, they finally realized that. But the honeymoon doesn't last long because this is Doctor Who and we didn't come to see everything go perfectly right.
Asteroids hit the ship and everything goes to hell, and angels start killing people (so it's Tron now). The Doctor maneuvers his company through a clogged stairwell. Hey, make the fat people go last. Hey, the rich guy said it! Why do I always agree with the rich jerks? The angels (excuse me, "Host") do this thing where they say "Information" at the beginning of every sentence. Information: kill. Hey, I called it! Oh, please, let Mini-Satan take down at least one of these things. Then I will be satisfied.
Then they get to that big wobbly bridge over a pit of death, because every ship has to have a big wobbly bridge over a pit of death. It's either that or chompy crushy things. There was a distinct lack of big wobbly bridges over pits of death in the Mass Effect games, but they made up for that with lots of fire, a horde of bad guys, and limited cover.
Fat person #1 abruptly falls to his death. Holy crap. I did not see that coming. Bannakaffalatta self-destructs, murdering the crap out of all the nearby Host. I believe Tom actually punched the air at this point. Fat person #2 ties herself to the one remaining Host and jumps to her death. Man, they're dropping like flies.
So then the Doctor leaves the rich guy, the tour guide, and the serving wench to go fight the villain himself because the plot demands it. Come on, Doctor, you need some more cannon fodder. At least take the rich guy with you...
So he meets the villain, who owns the cruise line, except not, so he's destroying the ship and the planet Earth as a means of revenge. He comes across as an unsatisfactory mix of Doctor Evil and Davros, and so Astrid grabs a forklift (aw, nothing along the lines of "get away from her, you bitch") and shoves him into a big fiery pit of doom. Okay, you better get out now... Only the brakes are gone so Astrid tumbles in as well.
The Doctor does the usual day-saving routine, which Tom kind of bought. And then he turns Astrid's ghost into atoms and leaves the inept tour guide on the planet with a million pounds. The end.
Satisfying, but not spectacular.
6 out of 10.
The Titanic crashes through the TARDIS just cuz, and then it's not the Titanic, it's the starship Titanic, because the people in charge of this interstellar cruise line know nothing about history and it's kind of funny. (I also noticed that the tour guide thinks that human beings worship "the great god Santa," a good three years before Steven Moffat put it in an episode and I made it a running gag in my reviews.)
All right, it's time to meet our cast of characters this time around. Tom's comments are highlighted.
Astrid Peth - serving wench in an outfit that, as I recall, caused quite a stir. First time any companion's shown any cleavage while Rusty was at the helm!
Two fat people - comic relief. Wow, they're fat and they're eating.
A rich jerk - Yup, he's rich, so he's a jerk, what a surprise.
The aforementioned tour guide - Aaaargh, something that reminds me of Revelation of the Daleks!
Bannakaffalatta - Mini-Satan! Awesome!
They go down to Earth, which they can do because everyone's evacuated London because bad stuff always happens on Christmas. Hey, they finally realized that. But the honeymoon doesn't last long because this is Doctor Who and we didn't come to see everything go perfectly right.
Asteroids hit the ship and everything goes to hell, and angels start killing people (so it's Tron now). The Doctor maneuvers his company through a clogged stairwell. Hey, make the fat people go last. Hey, the rich guy said it! Why do I always agree with the rich jerks? The angels (excuse me, "Host") do this thing where they say "Information" at the beginning of every sentence. Information: kill. Hey, I called it! Oh, please, let Mini-Satan take down at least one of these things. Then I will be satisfied.
Then they get to that big wobbly bridge over a pit of death, because every ship has to have a big wobbly bridge over a pit of death. It's either that or chompy crushy things. There was a distinct lack of big wobbly bridges over pits of death in the Mass Effect games, but they made up for that with lots of fire, a horde of bad guys, and limited cover.
Fat person #1 abruptly falls to his death. Holy crap. I did not see that coming. Bannakaffalatta self-destructs, murdering the crap out of all the nearby Host. I believe Tom actually punched the air at this point. Fat person #2 ties herself to the one remaining Host and jumps to her death. Man, they're dropping like flies.
So then the Doctor leaves the rich guy, the tour guide, and the serving wench to go fight the villain himself because the plot demands it. Come on, Doctor, you need some more cannon fodder. At least take the rich guy with you...
So he meets the villain, who owns the cruise line, except not, so he's destroying the ship and the planet Earth as a means of revenge. He comes across as an unsatisfactory mix of Doctor Evil and Davros, and so Astrid grabs a forklift (aw, nothing along the lines of "get away from her, you bitch") and shoves him into a big fiery pit of doom. Okay, you better get out now... Only the brakes are gone so Astrid tumbles in as well.
The Doctor does the usual day-saving routine, which Tom kind of bought. And then he turns Astrid's ghost into atoms and leaves the inept tour guide on the planet with a million pounds. The end.
Satisfying, but not spectacular.
6 out of 10.
Who Review: Utopia
I'm glad I haven't gotten around to reviewing this one yet. The first time I burned through my Series Three boxset, I was more interested in watching John Simm's version of the Master go insane in the next two episodes than in watching this episode and paying enough attention to it.
And since yesterday marked the first time I'd seen this episode since... wait for it... I'd gotten hooked on Battlestar, I was highly amused by the very subtle BSG nod in "Utopia." No, not the whole plot about the last humans in existence trying to find a mythical haven, because there aren't enough clear parallels so I'm willing to give Rusty the benefit of the doubt on that one. No, I'm talking about the Memorial Wall. You see it for all of two seconds and its nowhere near as impressive as the one on Galactica, but it's still there, and I got the reference.
I like to give Rusty a lot of crap for his end-of-season shenanigans, and to be sure "Last of the Time Lords" and its Tinkerbell-Jesus conclusion is a clusterfrak. This is sad, considering the attention to detail he pays elsewhere. As I said in my review for The End of Time, when he juggles his balls correctly, the result is impressive. "Utopia" plays to these strenghths. You don't need to know that he's spent an entire season on Torchwood teasing Captain Jack's immortality; you don't even need to know who Captain Jack is. John Barrowman plays off David Tennant like they've been a double-act for years, even though this is the first time they've appeared together. Their conversation about why Jack is immortal is woven into the plot perfectly; while the Doctor's giving us exposition, he's also triggering Professor Yana's memories.
Professor Yana is also particularly well done (although You Are Not Alone is unnecessary). Derek Jacobi does a wonderful job with a character who is deliberately not very fleshed out. The fob watch chain is visible from very early on, but it's part of his anachronistic costume so you completely ignore it. Somewhat less impressive is his idiosyncratic assistant Chan'tho, but she's really just there to be a foil for Yana (and occasionally Martha), so we'll give her a pass as well.
And then there's the Doctor's hand, Chekov's Gun extraordinaire. It gets cleverly maneuvered into the TARDIS, where it will stay for an entire season, right under everyone's noses. For all his faults, Rusty is a master at moving puzzle pieces around and dropping them into place without you noticing.
The plot is fairly straightforward: it's the end of the Universe, and the Doctor fixes a rocket so the last remnants of humanity can escape Mad Max Vampire World. The guy who was fixing the rocket before the Doctor showed up turns out to be the Master, who escapes with the TARDIS and leaves the Doctor stranded at the end of the Universe (but fortunately he has Plot Coupon Captain Jack with him, so all's well).
The problem with the three-part season finale is that this episode gets cast aside as the "prelude" chapter. Let's face it, the John Simm version of the Master is just more fun to watch than an amnesiac Derek Jacobi. But the plot of "Drums/Time Lords" explodes into lunacy, whereas this episode is a nice, neat, relatively cheap bit that ties in so much that has come before - the chameleon watches, Captain Jack, Rose - without ever feeling dull or repetitive.
8 out of 10.
And since yesterday marked the first time I'd seen this episode since... wait for it... I'd gotten hooked on Battlestar, I was highly amused by the very subtle BSG nod in "Utopia." No, not the whole plot about the last humans in existence trying to find a mythical haven, because there aren't enough clear parallels so I'm willing to give Rusty the benefit of the doubt on that one. No, I'm talking about the Memorial Wall. You see it for all of two seconds and its nowhere near as impressive as the one on Galactica, but it's still there, and I got the reference.
I like to give Rusty a lot of crap for his end-of-season shenanigans, and to be sure "Last of the Time Lords" and its Tinkerbell-Jesus conclusion is a clusterfrak. This is sad, considering the attention to detail he pays elsewhere. As I said in my review for The End of Time, when he juggles his balls correctly, the result is impressive. "Utopia" plays to these strenghths. You don't need to know that he's spent an entire season on Torchwood teasing Captain Jack's immortality; you don't even need to know who Captain Jack is. John Barrowman plays off David Tennant like they've been a double-act for years, even though this is the first time they've appeared together. Their conversation about why Jack is immortal is woven into the plot perfectly; while the Doctor's giving us exposition, he's also triggering Professor Yana's memories.
Professor Yana is also particularly well done (although You Are Not Alone is unnecessary). Derek Jacobi does a wonderful job with a character who is deliberately not very fleshed out. The fob watch chain is visible from very early on, but it's part of his anachronistic costume so you completely ignore it. Somewhat less impressive is his idiosyncratic assistant Chan'tho, but she's really just there to be a foil for Yana (and occasionally Martha), so we'll give her a pass as well.
And then there's the Doctor's hand, Chekov's Gun extraordinaire. It gets cleverly maneuvered into the TARDIS, where it will stay for an entire season, right under everyone's noses. For all his faults, Rusty is a master at moving puzzle pieces around and dropping them into place without you noticing.
The plot is fairly straightforward: it's the end of the Universe, and the Doctor fixes a rocket so the last remnants of humanity can escape Mad Max Vampire World. The guy who was fixing the rocket before the Doctor showed up turns out to be the Master, who escapes with the TARDIS and leaves the Doctor stranded at the end of the Universe (but fortunately he has Plot Coupon Captain Jack with him, so all's well).
The problem with the three-part season finale is that this episode gets cast aside as the "prelude" chapter. Let's face it, the John Simm version of the Master is just more fun to watch than an amnesiac Derek Jacobi. But the plot of "Drums/Time Lords" explodes into lunacy, whereas this episode is a nice, neat, relatively cheap bit that ties in so much that has come before - the chameleon watches, Captain Jack, Rose - without ever feeling dull or repetitive.
8 out of 10.
two quick thoughts
Thought #1: Whenever anyone praises anything as a "triumph of democracy," especially in America, my first thought is always, "triumph over what?" "Fiscal sanity" and "the rule of law" are two things democracy should not triumph over.
Thought #2: The first episode of Doctor Who Series 7 is going to be called (Blank) of the (Blank). What a completely original title.
Thought #2: The first episode of Doctor Who Series 7 is going to be called (Blank) of the (Blank). What a completely original title.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Time to dive headfirst into the mess that is the Republican Primary...
Those of you adverse to right-wing insanity can just wait until tomorrow for "Utopia" and "Voyage of the Damned." I promise this time.
It's with considerable trepidation that I even approached news of Republican primary debates at all. This is mostly for the same reason that I stay away from live entertainment: I really don't like seeing people screw up. But at this point it's pretty much inevitable: those of us who lean to the right need to find someone to go head-to-head against Obama in 2012.
I never for one second thought that Palin would be in the running, and sure enough, she's not. Everyone's opinion of her, mine included, is somewhat tainted by her abysmal performance as John McCain's running mate three years ago. (Then there are the lunatics who think she cost McCain the election. That's simply not true. McCain's doubly-abysmal strategy of neither attacking Obama nor securing a conservative base during the primary - which forced him to spend the entire election cycle pandering to the right instead of the center - cost him the election.)
I had a discussion with a friend of mine right at the start of the campaign season. My general impression is that my friend Bill was for Romney right from the start, because, and I quote, "he'll run America like a business."
I was less sure. I thought Romney was the right choice in 2008, as far as the center-right-moderate-with-an-iffy-record-but-a-solid-message-and-great-communication-skills category goes. (Not that it would have mattered; a potted plant could have run against the Republicans and won. Actually, a potted plant could have run a better campaign than McCain.) But given the slew of attacks against Romney from the right, I figured we'd probably end up with a more conservative.
Some conservative pundit once said that every time the Republican candidate distinguishes himself from the Democrat - that is, every time the Republican tacks right - he wins, and every time he doesn't, he loses. Look at Reagan. Look at what happened to Bush I. Bush II doesn't count, seeing as he lost the popular vote to a global warming liar and then ran for re-election against a man who had less charisma than my desk. Look at what happened to McCain.
Now, the fact of the matter is, there's a glass ceiling when it comes to the presidency. Sarah Palin probably did considerable damage to female (vice-)presidential hopefuls (and this from a guy who voted for her). I'm not that excited about another shrill caricature* running around the campaign trail. And even if Michelle Bachmann hadn't imploded a while back, she just threw away her last chance to be VP at the most recent debate when she threw out a number of at-best-misleading-and-at-worst-blatantly-untrue "facts" about Gingrich and Romney. I never really had high hopes for her in the first place, although my father apparently did.
*Hyperbole.
When Bill - my Romney-supporting friend - asked who I'd want for President, my first thought was "gee, it's a shame Paul Ryan's too young." This is the guy who's spent the most time going toe-to-toe with Obama's policies at the legislative stage. He's the guy who punched holes in every plan the President came up with and came up with fiscally sane alternatives. I don't know too much about his other politics, but if you want someone to nail Obama to the wall... well, it's a shame Paul Ryan's too young.
I never took Cain seriously, and even less so once it became obvious that his entire agenda was "9-9-9, I refuse to take Foreign Policy 101." Huntsman who? And Santorum was the only candidate at last weekend's debate that I didn't recognize on sight. It's not going to be him, although he's apparently brown-nosing for Gingrich's VP slot.
Rick Perry looked like a contender, but he completely dropped the ball on illegal immigration, and when he ran away from his liberal position, it was too little too late. His other policies would be good, but this country isn't about to elect another inarticulate Texan (by "inarticulate" I do not mean that he cannot string two words together without the aide of a teleprompter but rather that he seems to have a really hard time communicating what he means; Santorum made better use of his floor time in the most recent debate).
A nice word to use in describing Ron Paul would be "cantankerous." "Abrasive," "crank," "lunatic," or "nutty libertarian gasbag* with a foreign policy worse than Obama's" would also be accurate, but considerably less kind. Frankly, if not for his dogmatic adherence to the Constitution, he'd belong squarely in the other tent. His announcement that he'll run as a third-party candidate in a year where any vote that's not for the Republican candidate is a vote for Obama essentially amounts to treason.*
*Hyperbole, but much less so than above.
Let's be honest here, at this point it's Romney or Gingrich. At various other points, it's been Romney or Bachmann, or Romney or Perry, or Romney or Cain, but in each of those cases the anti-Romney went and self-destructed. Gingrich is way too smart to do that. Republicans - especially Tea-Party Republicans - are desperate to nominate anyone but Romney, and after their first three heroes, it's hard to see why. Gingrich is considerably better, but he doesn't come baggage-free either.
Conservative author/pundit/troll* (delete according to personal taste) Ann Coulter wrote a highly controversial column that basically amounted to an endorsement of Romney. Her argument was essentially: "Don't vote for Gingrich because he's a center-right moderate with a lot of baggage. Vote for Romney, even though he's a center-right moderate with (admittedly considerably less) baggage." I didn't exactly buy it, and neither did most of the rest of us on this side of the aisle.
*Hyperbole. I read her stuff, but I take it with a massive grain of salt.
So over the weekend, Santorum, Perry, Romney, Gingrich, Paul and Bachmann gathered together for various purposes. First and foremost, everybody except for Romney and Gingrich were invited so they'd bring in their supporters, who could then decide between Romney and Gingrich because that's what it's down to at this point in the game. But there were other reasons as well:
Santorum was there to ingratiate himself to Camp Gingrich, because he really wants to be Gingrich's VP. (If that's not what his strategy was, he needs to fire his strategist immediately.)
Bachmann was there to demonstrate her utter lack of political acumen; she wasted an entire question sniping at Santorum, who is never going to be the nominee, and most of the rest of her time sniping at Romney and Gingrich. Since the nominee is going to be one of those two people, she just blew her last chance at being VP.
Perry was likewise there because he thought he still had a horse in the race. The whole "moderate president, conservative VP" didn't work last time around, but that's also because the presidential candidate refused to go on the offensive while the vice-presidential candidate refused to do her homework. It'll never happen for a number of reasons, but it would be nice to see Perry show up in the number-two slot on the ticket.
Ron Paul was there so that Mitt Romney could use words like "federalism" and phrases like "Article I, Section 8" without being the Constitution's biggest cheerleader on the stage. He was also there to churn out pithy slogans like "we can't have a government that'll save us from ourselves," which other, smarter candidates (I'm thinking mostly Romney here) were able to turn into actual talking points. Seriously, you could probably run an entire campaign just by listening to what Ron Paul says about the Constitution and then watering it down for a more moderate, sensible audience. I'm not saying you would win, but you could certainly do it...
Gingrich was there because his campaign lives and dies based on his debate performance. Also, suddenly being the front-runner helped. And Romney was there because he's going to get the nomination if Gingrich loses any traction... which, by the way, is exactly what Perry, Bachmann, and yes, even Paul were all trying to accomplish.
Romney and Gingrich were there to differentiate themselves from each other, which makes it all the more alarming that Romney stumbled when he was asked to... differentiate himself from Gingrich! The horror! I really couldn't see that one coming! Talk about blindsiding a candidate with a trick question! I assume he went home and fired someone after the debate. Somebody dropped the ball there, and as someone running against a man who rarely makes mistakes, Romney can't afford any.
Now, the number-one issue in this country is what Joe Biden thinks is a three-letter word: jobs. However, the number-one issue in this election cycle is not jobs. Those will come later. The number-one issue this election cycle is ObamaCare, which will, incidentally, make the economy much worse and will therefore destroy jobs. Since both Romney and Gingrich have previously been in favor of the individual mandate - the most flagrantly unconstitutional part of ObamaCare - they have a lot of 'splainin' to do.
There was a lot of talk about this. Romney made an politically unwise but economically sound $10,000 bet that he didn't endorse the individual mandate in his book, and that seems to be about the only thing anyone took away from this debate, which is a shame.
Both Romney and Gingrich were asked about their past support of the mandate, and they both responded with the time-honored "yes but..." For Romney, it was "yes but, under Federalism, each state gets to decide what's best for that state, so if other states don't like the mandate, they don't have to take it." For Gingrich, it was "yes but, it was better than HillaryCare."
Now, I know that Gingrich is a master deb... um, he's very good at debating, but frankly, this was not his strongest moment. The fact that Romney's dodge included a nod to federalism endeared him to me a lot more than Gingrich's allusion to a failed piece of legislation from 18 years ago.
I expected that Romney's mention of federalism was just a clever political calculation, meant to endear him to that wing of the party that gives a rat's about the Constitution (oh, hello*). But after poking around on his website for a little bit, it appears that he's serious: federalism and states' rights are actual planks in his platform, or are at least the fibers woven into those planks.
*The fact that I give a rat's about the Constitution is the number-two reason I'm a conservative. The number-one reason is that I once took an Economics course and aced everything except the section on Keynesian economics. Keynesian economics struck me as being a lot like everything I had to memorize in Biology: made-up, nonsensical, illogical, and useless. Mild hyperbole.
But look at those answers. Romney: "yes, but X, and here's a brief explanation of X." Gingrich: "yes, but Y." X is federalism, as in "the political philosophy our nation was founded on." Y is a piece of failed legislation from 18 years ago. I would hope that the average voter knows more about the former than the latter. (I don't know, maybe it came up in the Bam-Hil debates back in 07.)
So, yes, Romney fumbled his way through the "what do you and Newt disagree on" question. Yeah, he made a $10,000 bet when the average American is tightening their belt. I still thought he was able to make a number of valid points, whereas Gingrich had to spend most of the time on the defensive. Yeah, I know he was the frontrunner and all, so everyone ganged up on him, but that's just how the cookie gets stepped on and obliterated.
It's with considerable trepidation that I even approached news of Republican primary debates at all. This is mostly for the same reason that I stay away from live entertainment: I really don't like seeing people screw up. But at this point it's pretty much inevitable: those of us who lean to the right need to find someone to go head-to-head against Obama in 2012.
I never for one second thought that Palin would be in the running, and sure enough, she's not. Everyone's opinion of her, mine included, is somewhat tainted by her abysmal performance as John McCain's running mate three years ago. (Then there are the lunatics who think she cost McCain the election. That's simply not true. McCain's doubly-abysmal strategy of neither attacking Obama nor securing a conservative base during the primary - which forced him to spend the entire election cycle pandering to the right instead of the center - cost him the election.)
I had a discussion with a friend of mine right at the start of the campaign season. My general impression is that my friend Bill was for Romney right from the start, because, and I quote, "he'll run America like a business."
I was less sure. I thought Romney was the right choice in 2008, as far as the center-right-moderate-with-an-iffy-record-but-a-solid-message-and-great-communication-skills category goes. (Not that it would have mattered; a potted plant could have run against the Republicans and won. Actually, a potted plant could have run a better campaign than McCain.) But given the slew of attacks against Romney from the right, I figured we'd probably end up with a more conservative.
Some conservative pundit once said that every time the Republican candidate distinguishes himself from the Democrat - that is, every time the Republican tacks right - he wins, and every time he doesn't, he loses. Look at Reagan. Look at what happened to Bush I. Bush II doesn't count, seeing as he lost the popular vote to a global warming liar and then ran for re-election against a man who had less charisma than my desk. Look at what happened to McCain.
Now, the fact of the matter is, there's a glass ceiling when it comes to the presidency. Sarah Palin probably did considerable damage to female (vice-)presidential hopefuls (and this from a guy who voted for her). I'm not that excited about another shrill caricature* running around the campaign trail. And even if Michelle Bachmann hadn't imploded a while back, she just threw away her last chance to be VP at the most recent debate when she threw out a number of at-best-misleading-and-at-worst-blatantly-untrue "facts" about Gingrich and Romney. I never really had high hopes for her in the first place, although my father apparently did.
*Hyperbole.
When Bill - my Romney-supporting friend - asked who I'd want for President, my first thought was "gee, it's a shame Paul Ryan's too young." This is the guy who's spent the most time going toe-to-toe with Obama's policies at the legislative stage. He's the guy who punched holes in every plan the President came up with and came up with fiscally sane alternatives. I don't know too much about his other politics, but if you want someone to nail Obama to the wall... well, it's a shame Paul Ryan's too young.
I never took Cain seriously, and even less so once it became obvious that his entire agenda was "9-9-9, I refuse to take Foreign Policy 101." Huntsman who? And Santorum was the only candidate at last weekend's debate that I didn't recognize on sight. It's not going to be him, although he's apparently brown-nosing for Gingrich's VP slot.
Rick Perry looked like a contender, but he completely dropped the ball on illegal immigration, and when he ran away from his liberal position, it was too little too late. His other policies would be good, but this country isn't about to elect another inarticulate Texan (by "inarticulate" I do not mean that he cannot string two words together without the aide of a teleprompter but rather that he seems to have a really hard time communicating what he means; Santorum made better use of his floor time in the most recent debate).
A nice word to use in describing Ron Paul would be "cantankerous." "Abrasive," "crank," "lunatic," or "nutty libertarian gasbag* with a foreign policy worse than Obama's" would also be accurate, but considerably less kind. Frankly, if not for his dogmatic adherence to the Constitution, he'd belong squarely in the other tent. His announcement that he'll run as a third-party candidate in a year where any vote that's not for the Republican candidate is a vote for Obama essentially amounts to treason.*
*Hyperbole, but much less so than above.
Let's be honest here, at this point it's Romney or Gingrich. At various other points, it's been Romney or Bachmann, or Romney or Perry, or Romney or Cain, but in each of those cases the anti-Romney went and self-destructed. Gingrich is way too smart to do that. Republicans - especially Tea-Party Republicans - are desperate to nominate anyone but Romney, and after their first three heroes, it's hard to see why. Gingrich is considerably better, but he doesn't come baggage-free either.
Conservative author/pundit/troll* (delete according to personal taste) Ann Coulter wrote a highly controversial column that basically amounted to an endorsement of Romney. Her argument was essentially: "Don't vote for Gingrich because he's a center-right moderate with a lot of baggage. Vote for Romney, even though he's a center-right moderate with (admittedly considerably less) baggage." I didn't exactly buy it, and neither did most of the rest of us on this side of the aisle.
*Hyperbole. I read her stuff, but I take it with a massive grain of salt.
So over the weekend, Santorum, Perry, Romney, Gingrich, Paul and Bachmann gathered together for various purposes. First and foremost, everybody except for Romney and Gingrich were invited so they'd bring in their supporters, who could then decide between Romney and Gingrich because that's what it's down to at this point in the game. But there were other reasons as well:
Santorum was there to ingratiate himself to Camp Gingrich, because he really wants to be Gingrich's VP. (If that's not what his strategy was, he needs to fire his strategist immediately.)
Bachmann was there to demonstrate her utter lack of political acumen; she wasted an entire question sniping at Santorum, who is never going to be the nominee, and most of the rest of her time sniping at Romney and Gingrich. Since the nominee is going to be one of those two people, she just blew her last chance at being VP.
Perry was likewise there because he thought he still had a horse in the race. The whole "moderate president, conservative VP" didn't work last time around, but that's also because the presidential candidate refused to go on the offensive while the vice-presidential candidate refused to do her homework. It'll never happen for a number of reasons, but it would be nice to see Perry show up in the number-two slot on the ticket.
Ron Paul was there so that Mitt Romney could use words like "federalism" and phrases like "Article I, Section 8" without being the Constitution's biggest cheerleader on the stage. He was also there to churn out pithy slogans like "we can't have a government that'll save us from ourselves," which other, smarter candidates (I'm thinking mostly Romney here) were able to turn into actual talking points. Seriously, you could probably run an entire campaign just by listening to what Ron Paul says about the Constitution and then watering it down for a more moderate, sensible audience. I'm not saying you would win, but you could certainly do it...
Gingrich was there because his campaign lives and dies based on his debate performance. Also, suddenly being the front-runner helped. And Romney was there because he's going to get the nomination if Gingrich loses any traction... which, by the way, is exactly what Perry, Bachmann, and yes, even Paul were all trying to accomplish.
Romney and Gingrich were there to differentiate themselves from each other, which makes it all the more alarming that Romney stumbled when he was asked to... differentiate himself from Gingrich! The horror! I really couldn't see that one coming! Talk about blindsiding a candidate with a trick question! I assume he went home and fired someone after the debate. Somebody dropped the ball there, and as someone running against a man who rarely makes mistakes, Romney can't afford any.
Now, the number-one issue in this country is what Joe Biden thinks is a three-letter word: jobs. However, the number-one issue in this election cycle is not jobs. Those will come later. The number-one issue this election cycle is ObamaCare, which will, incidentally, make the economy much worse and will therefore destroy jobs. Since both Romney and Gingrich have previously been in favor of the individual mandate - the most flagrantly unconstitutional part of ObamaCare - they have a lot of 'splainin' to do.
There was a lot of talk about this. Romney made an politically unwise but economically sound $10,000 bet that he didn't endorse the individual mandate in his book, and that seems to be about the only thing anyone took away from this debate, which is a shame.
Both Romney and Gingrich were asked about their past support of the mandate, and they both responded with the time-honored "yes but..." For Romney, it was "yes but, under Federalism, each state gets to decide what's best for that state, so if other states don't like the mandate, they don't have to take it." For Gingrich, it was "yes but, it was better than HillaryCare."
Now, I know that Gingrich is a master deb... um, he's very good at debating, but frankly, this was not his strongest moment. The fact that Romney's dodge included a nod to federalism endeared him to me a lot more than Gingrich's allusion to a failed piece of legislation from 18 years ago.
I expected that Romney's mention of federalism was just a clever political calculation, meant to endear him to that wing of the party that gives a rat's about the Constitution (oh, hello*). But after poking around on his website for a little bit, it appears that he's serious: federalism and states' rights are actual planks in his platform, or are at least the fibers woven into those planks.
*The fact that I give a rat's about the Constitution is the number-two reason I'm a conservative. The number-one reason is that I once took an Economics course and aced everything except the section on Keynesian economics. Keynesian economics struck me as being a lot like everything I had to memorize in Biology: made-up, nonsensical, illogical, and useless. Mild hyperbole.
But look at those answers. Romney: "yes, but X, and here's a brief explanation of X." Gingrich: "yes, but Y." X is federalism, as in "the political philosophy our nation was founded on." Y is a piece of failed legislation from 18 years ago. I would hope that the average voter knows more about the former than the latter. (I don't know, maybe it came up in the Bam-Hil debates back in 07.)
So, yes, Romney fumbled his way through the "what do you and Newt disagree on" question. Yeah, he made a $10,000 bet when the average American is tightening their belt. I still thought he was able to make a number of valid points, whereas Gingrich had to spend most of the time on the defensive. Yeah, I know he was the frontrunner and all, so everyone ganged up on him, but that's just how the cookie gets stepped on and obliterated.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Random Dr. Who and Star Trek rumors
Okay, been out of the loop, lied about doing S3 reviews last week, bad me. Expect "Utopia" either today or tomorrow, just cuz.
Right, so, first things first. There's talk that Star Trek the Star Trek 2 will involve Khan. In other words, it will be yet another remake of Star Trek II: The Best Star Trek Film Ever Made. For those of you who were late to the party, Star Trek the Star Trek (which is what I'm calling the 2009 film to differentiate it from the Trek franchise as a whole) was essentially a remake of Star Trek Nemesis, which was a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. What do I mean by that? Well, Khan and Nemesis both involve a villain who spent the last decade in an inhospitable environment nursing a grudge against the captain of the Enterprise. Eventually he breaks free and gets ahold of a powerful ship and a superweapon. A battle takes place in a nebula, where the Enterprise has trouble seeing the other ship. When his ship is too badly damaged, the villain activates the superweapon, requiring a Heroic Sacrifice on the part of the Asperger's character to save the day. Then Nemesis and The Star Trek both involved Romulans, hyperpowerful ships, superweapons, ships ramming other ships, and oh, yeah, a villain who had a grudge against one of the Enterprise crew.
Look, Khan has only been decently remade once, and that was as First Contact. (2009 was different enough for me not to call it a remake.) And First Contact was clever enough to change the paradigm so that the Captain Ahab character was the good guy this time around. Beyond that, Khan is easily the best Star Trek film ever (the only real competition being The Undiscovered Country). This is ironic, given the sheer number of things that could have gone wrong with it. (Note to self: write a separate blog post entitled The Sheer Number of Things that Could Have Gone Horribly Wrong with Star Trek II.) But just trying to recapture that magic seems like a horrible mistake.
This is, of course, from the same guy who thought re-casting Kirk was a stupid thing to do and that Star Trek the Star Trek would just be a heartless cash-in. I certainly didn't think it was the greatest science-fiction film of the last decade (I'd nominate the Battlestar Galactica minseries if I could bend the rules a little bit, but otherwise it's Inception or Wall-E), but it was still about ten times better than I thought it would be, and better than seven of the other ten films with Star Trek in the title to boot. So what do I know? They might surprise me.
Okay, next up is the David Yates Doctor Who film. There are essentially four things you could do: Doctor Who and the Daleks, The Enemy Within, Star Trek Generations, or Battlestar Galactica Razor. Here's what I mean by that:
Doctor Who and the Daleks was a 60s film that had absolutely nothing to do with the show's continuity. Doctor Who was the real name of a human who built a Tardis in his backyard. Then they re-enact The Daleks on the big screen. That's about it. I'm not saying that Yates should re-do City of Death or something, but that is one possibility: just cast a completely different Doctor and acknowledge that the film has nothing to do with the show's continuity. This will piss off the least number of fans.
The Enemy Within was the unofficial name of the 1996 Doctor Who telemovie. You know, the one starring Withnail's flatmate as the Doctor, while Eric Roberts drezzed for the occasion. The one that was made by people on the wrong side of the Atlantic with an aim to continue the show, which had been cancelled back in 1989. It was an absolute disaster. We all kind of pretend that it didn't happen. Yes, Paul McGann was the 8th Doctor, but he had a bunch of adventures we didn't get to see. Very sad. Even if Yates were to do a Who movie, it's unlikely that he would take this approach, for the very simple reason that the show isn't cancelled right now and isn't likely to be any time in the near future.
Star Trek Generations was the first attempt to put the crew of Star Trek TNG on the big screen. It was co-written by Ron Moore, and his failure to make it as good as his later output on some other show is the main reason why I rank it worse than Star Trek I on my overall list (which goes 2, 6, 8, 11, 3, 4, 1, 7, 5, 9, 10, in case you were wondering). It also served as the death knell for the TNG show, but that was for reasons other than the film's lackluster quality. As in The Enemy Within, somebody died as a means of passing the torch on, although I honestly couldn't tell you whose death was more ignoble. Since The Moff has categorically denied any plans to do a film, I think it's safe to rule out both the Enemy and Generations models.
Battlestar Galactica Razor was made just before Season 4 but set at the end of Season 2, and as long as you don't mind the minor spoiler that a certain death near the end of Season 3 isn't exactly permanent, you might as well watch it just before the end of Season 2. Though it more or less fails as a stand-alone film because it tries to tie in too many plotlines (which, come to think of it, is probably Moore's greatest fault as a storyteller), it could have worked. Eccleston's out, Tennant's probably running away, but my understanding is that McGann would still be game provided he didn't have to wear a wig. Of course, I say the words "Doctor Who film starring McGann" and everyone runs away. I'm speculating here. Basically, you could use this opportunity to tell the lost Doctor Who story, the one that you couldn't do on the show's budget or which just wouldn't work in the show's regular format.
Frankly, I'd like to see the Doctor on the big screen. I actually thought that last year's Christmas special (which I shouldn't have to remind you is in my opinion the best thing the show's ever given us since City of Death) could be adapted really easily to a film. (So there I go saying you could do stuff you couldn't do on the show in a movie, then I say that the Christmas special should have been a movie... but the Christmas special was a special instead of a regular episode. So there.)
So, should Star Trek 2 be a remake of Star Trek II? No. Should David Yates make a Doctor Who film? Why not?
Right, so, first things first. There's talk that Star Trek the Star Trek 2 will involve Khan. In other words, it will be yet another remake of Star Trek II: The Best Star Trek Film Ever Made. For those of you who were late to the party, Star Trek the Star Trek (which is what I'm calling the 2009 film to differentiate it from the Trek franchise as a whole) was essentially a remake of Star Trek Nemesis, which was a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. What do I mean by that? Well, Khan and Nemesis both involve a villain who spent the last decade in an inhospitable environment nursing a grudge against the captain of the Enterprise. Eventually he breaks free and gets ahold of a powerful ship and a superweapon. A battle takes place in a nebula, where the Enterprise has trouble seeing the other ship. When his ship is too badly damaged, the villain activates the superweapon, requiring a Heroic Sacrifice on the part of the Asperger's character to save the day. Then Nemesis and The Star Trek both involved Romulans, hyperpowerful ships, superweapons, ships ramming other ships, and oh, yeah, a villain who had a grudge against one of the Enterprise crew.
Look, Khan has only been decently remade once, and that was as First Contact. (2009 was different enough for me not to call it a remake.) And First Contact was clever enough to change the paradigm so that the Captain Ahab character was the good guy this time around. Beyond that, Khan is easily the best Star Trek film ever (the only real competition being The Undiscovered Country). This is ironic, given the sheer number of things that could have gone wrong with it. (Note to self: write a separate blog post entitled The Sheer Number of Things that Could Have Gone Horribly Wrong with Star Trek II.) But just trying to recapture that magic seems like a horrible mistake.
This is, of course, from the same guy who thought re-casting Kirk was a stupid thing to do and that Star Trek the Star Trek would just be a heartless cash-in. I certainly didn't think it was the greatest science-fiction film of the last decade (I'd nominate the Battlestar Galactica minseries if I could bend the rules a little bit, but otherwise it's Inception or Wall-E), but it was still about ten times better than I thought it would be, and better than seven of the other ten films with Star Trek in the title to boot. So what do I know? They might surprise me.
Okay, next up is the David Yates Doctor Who film. There are essentially four things you could do: Doctor Who and the Daleks, The Enemy Within, Star Trek Generations, or Battlestar Galactica Razor. Here's what I mean by that:
Doctor Who and the Daleks was a 60s film that had absolutely nothing to do with the show's continuity. Doctor Who was the real name of a human who built a Tardis in his backyard. Then they re-enact The Daleks on the big screen. That's about it. I'm not saying that Yates should re-do City of Death or something, but that is one possibility: just cast a completely different Doctor and acknowledge that the film has nothing to do with the show's continuity. This will piss off the least number of fans.
The Enemy Within was the unofficial name of the 1996 Doctor Who telemovie. You know, the one starring Withnail's flatmate as the Doctor, while Eric Roberts drezzed for the occasion. The one that was made by people on the wrong side of the Atlantic with an aim to continue the show, which had been cancelled back in 1989. It was an absolute disaster. We all kind of pretend that it didn't happen. Yes, Paul McGann was the 8th Doctor, but he had a bunch of adventures we didn't get to see. Very sad. Even if Yates were to do a Who movie, it's unlikely that he would take this approach, for the very simple reason that the show isn't cancelled right now and isn't likely to be any time in the near future.
Star Trek Generations was the first attempt to put the crew of Star Trek TNG on the big screen. It was co-written by Ron Moore, and his failure to make it as good as his later output on some other show is the main reason why I rank it worse than Star Trek I on my overall list (which goes 2, 6, 8, 11, 3, 4, 1, 7, 5, 9, 10, in case you were wondering). It also served as the death knell for the TNG show, but that was for reasons other than the film's lackluster quality. As in The Enemy Within, somebody died as a means of passing the torch on, although I honestly couldn't tell you whose death was more ignoble. Since The Moff has categorically denied any plans to do a film, I think it's safe to rule out both the Enemy and Generations models.
Battlestar Galactica Razor was made just before Season 4 but set at the end of Season 2, and as long as you don't mind the minor spoiler that a certain death near the end of Season 3 isn't exactly permanent, you might as well watch it just before the end of Season 2. Though it more or less fails as a stand-alone film because it tries to tie in too many plotlines (which, come to think of it, is probably Moore's greatest fault as a storyteller), it could have worked. Eccleston's out, Tennant's probably running away, but my understanding is that McGann would still be game provided he didn't have to wear a wig. Of course, I say the words "Doctor Who film starring McGann" and everyone runs away. I'm speculating here. Basically, you could use this opportunity to tell the lost Doctor Who story, the one that you couldn't do on the show's budget or which just wouldn't work in the show's regular format.
Frankly, I'd like to see the Doctor on the big screen. I actually thought that last year's Christmas special (which I shouldn't have to remind you is in my opinion the best thing the show's ever given us since City of Death) could be adapted really easily to a film. (So there I go saying you could do stuff you couldn't do on the show in a movie, then I say that the Christmas special should have been a movie... but the Christmas special was a special instead of a regular episode. So there.)
So, should Star Trek 2 be a remake of Star Trek II? No. Should David Yates make a Doctor Who film? Why not?
Friday, December 2, 2011
In praise of a good photoplasty contest for once
For whatever reason, this time Cracked's photoplasty contest is actually quite amusing from the word go. Maybe it's because they limited it to only 13 entries, or maybe because the subject matter is better. I don't know. Anyway, here they are.
#13: Waldo as a missing person. That got a little chuckle.
#12: Bad text message rap as poetry. More a sad reflection on our culture than anything else.
#11: This one took me a moment because I didn't immediately look at the picture. I'm weird like that. As soon as I got the joke, I was giggling hysterically. Go see it yourself; I can't do it justice with a description.
#10: WWII as told by a WWII shooter. Yeah, there are too many WWII shooters out there (mostly because WWI and 'Nam don't make good shooters; in one you're just hunkering in your trench until you're ordered over the top, and then you die, while the other can't do better than Apocalypse Now). Eh.
#9: Uh... okay... If I were going to do a joke about pop culture and the Berlin Wall, I'd do The Wall.
#8: Dongs. Moving on.
#7: Moving on.
#6: I don't get it.
#5: Uh... the Lolcat meme as ancient art? I guess? How do these people judge these things?
#4: World War Two as told by an insane Wikipedia editor. "Occupation of Wall Street by USSR" is a nice touch.
#3: Historians are jokes. Or comics. Or something.
#2: Boobs. Moving on.
#1: Santa Claus is the father of us all, as evidenced by the sheer number of family pictures he's in. It's kind of funny, I guess.
Biggest missed opportunity: Pink Floyd's Berlin Wall.
#13: Waldo as a missing person. That got a little chuckle.
#12: Bad text message rap as poetry. More a sad reflection on our culture than anything else.
#11: This one took me a moment because I didn't immediately look at the picture. I'm weird like that. As soon as I got the joke, I was giggling hysterically. Go see it yourself; I can't do it justice with a description.
#10: WWII as told by a WWII shooter. Yeah, there are too many WWII shooters out there (mostly because WWI and 'Nam don't make good shooters; in one you're just hunkering in your trench until you're ordered over the top, and then you die, while the other can't do better than Apocalypse Now). Eh.
#9: Uh... okay... If I were going to do a joke about pop culture and the Berlin Wall, I'd do The Wall.
#8: Dongs. Moving on.
#7: Moving on.
#6: I don't get it.
#5: Uh... the Lolcat meme as ancient art? I guess? How do these people judge these things?
#4: World War Two as told by an insane Wikipedia editor. "Occupation of Wall Street by USSR" is a nice touch.
#3: Historians are jokes. Or comics. Or something.
#2: Boobs. Moving on.
#1: Santa Claus is the father of us all, as evidenced by the sheer number of family pictures he's in. It's kind of funny, I guess.
Biggest missed opportunity: Pink Floyd's Berlin Wall.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
and now a few words on internet ads
Nobody reads this site. Therefore I do not make money off of any ads on this site. Therefore there are no ads on this site. Should the very first sentence ever cease to be true, I will be guilty of massive hypocrisy and all the liberals out there can say "I told you so."
There are three points that I, in my ad-less blog post, wish to make. First and foremost, no ads that are hidden at the bottom of the page should have sound on them. Yes, it's true that I only listen to music when I'm surfing the web because if I ever get rid of that distraction and focus all my attention on the content of various web pages, I will break down and cry, having lost all faith in the human race. However, if this persists I may resort to browsing with my computer muted, and just listen to music off my iPod instead. It seems more complicated that way, which makes me sad, because technology is supposed to be about making our lives easier.
The second point is that every website that loads the ads before it loads the actual content should be shot. This is because I do not go to any web site out there to view the ads front and center. I go to every web site out there to view the ads out of the corner of my eye, pretending they can't see me and that I'm actually interested in the other content on the screen (which, as I previously mentioned, would make me break down and weep for the future if I actually paid it any attention). This is remarkably like how I behaved during that one semester of college where I had a roommate, but that had more to do with the fact that his girlfriend had a remarkably lax attitude towards dressing and undressing no matter who else was in the room.
The topic of half-naked girls brings me directly to the third and final point. No ad on the internet should rely on half-naked girls actually getting people's attention. After all, this is the internet. All the porn lives here.
Over and out.
There are three points that I, in my ad-less blog post, wish to make. First and foremost, no ads that are hidden at the bottom of the page should have sound on them. Yes, it's true that I only listen to music when I'm surfing the web because if I ever get rid of that distraction and focus all my attention on the content of various web pages, I will break down and cry, having lost all faith in the human race. However, if this persists I may resort to browsing with my computer muted, and just listen to music off my iPod instead. It seems more complicated that way, which makes me sad, because technology is supposed to be about making our lives easier.
The second point is that every website that loads the ads before it loads the actual content should be shot. This is because I do not go to any web site out there to view the ads front and center. I go to every web site out there to view the ads out of the corner of my eye, pretending they can't see me and that I'm actually interested in the other content on the screen (which, as I previously mentioned, would make me break down and weep for the future if I actually paid it any attention). This is remarkably like how I behaved during that one semester of college where I had a roommate, but that had more to do with the fact that his girlfriend had a remarkably lax attitude towards dressing and undressing no matter who else was in the room.
The topic of half-naked girls brings me directly to the third and final point. No ad on the internet should rely on half-naked girls actually getting people's attention. After all, this is the internet. All the porn lives here.
Over and out.
"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" as a political model
One day, in that terrifying thing we call the future, I will have children. And inevitably there will be two topics that can't be answered with the very satisfying "when you're older." The first will be sex, a topic that will be covered by showing my children their tuition bills and then telling them that unless they have that much money, they'd better keep it in their pants.
The second topic is politics. Hopefully, as I did, my children will have a course on the Constitution before they give any serious thought to Democrats and Republicans and all the rest. Bill Clinton was bad because my dad said so, and since I couldn't vote that was good enough for me.
Now, I promised myself that this post would not become "why I believe what I do about politics." You don't really need me to tell you that. And I couldn't really do it in any way that Milton Friedman couldn't do better. No, I'm here to talk about politics in general.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people: those with loaded guns and those who dig. No, wait, I got ahead of myself. There are two kinds of people in America. One the one hand are those who are partisan, or policy wonks, or political science junkies, or vote the party line all the way down the ballot year after year after year, or have strong feelings about how everything is just fine/terrible. We'll call them "the people who care."
On the other hand are the people who say "well, that W fellow can't string two words together, so I won't vote for him," or "John Kerry is a flip-flopper! I don't know what he flip-flopped on, but I sure won't vote for him," or "I'm not going to vote for a black man no matter how articulate he is," or "I'm not going to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency." These are the "apathetic twits." They don't really have the time to understand politics and will generally vote for the most amenable candidate with the whitest teeth and the most realistic smile (did you see any of McCain's or Obama's pictures during the campaign? It was all half-hearted grins from McCain and trust-me-I'm-a-used-car-salesman from Obama).
Now, contrary to what I said in my previous post, Barack Obama did not spend $6.65 per person getting "the people who care" to vote for him. Some of them (the registered Democrats) would, and others (the registered Republicans) would not. Barack Obama spent significantly more than $6.65 getting the "apathetic twits" to vote for him. Not that it was a very tough job given the utter inability of his real opponent to point out that Obama was running against him and not against an incumbent who wasn't on the ballot.
There's not much more I can say about the "apathetic twits." They're apathetic and they're not really twits, but they're the primary reason for all those nasty attack ads you see every fourth October. They're the ones who actually win the elections. There aren't enough party faithful - I mean "people who care" - on either side to do it alone. This is because there aren't that many "people who care." A lot of "apathetic twits" are apathetic because they have better things to do, or because they honestly believe that other people can run their lives better than they can. Come to think of it, a lot of Democrats believe the latter too, as do a depressing number of Republicans.
I guess here I should mention that there is a third group, made up of statists or libertarians. I hesitate to call "the people who care" good, although they're the only ones who usually know what they're talking about, and I even hesitate to call the "apathetic twits" bad, but I don't really have any qualms about calling this third group ugly. Or rather The Ugly. Statists tend to be socially conservative but economically liberal; no, you can't marry your brother and nor can you keep your money. Libertarians are the exact opposite; drugs for everyone, but you're the one who has to pay for your drugs. Statists who are more economically liberal than they are socially conservative will tend to vote Democrat anyway, but they may cross the line in some cases.
The Reagan Democrats were a mix of the "apathetic twits" and the statist/libertarian weirdoes. ("Weirdoes" is a term I'm comfortable with, and I described myself as a "right-leaning libertarian" for about three years.) This is one of the reasons why Republicans tend to chuckle whenever they're reminded that Reagan raised taxes that one time. Because when the Bad and the Ugly put you in office, sometimes you have to make decisions that are Bad or Ugly.
So that's We The People, nicely divided up into the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But the same can be done with political parties.
Naturally, to "the people who care," the Good is their party, right or wrong, even if that party nominates a gibbering moron or a senile centrist incapable of running a national campaign. The Bad is the other party, even if they nominate and elect a quasi-centrist who will cross the aisle occasionally and then get caught doing inappropriate things with a cigar (sorry, dad). The Ugly is that third-party candidate who steals all the votes for the Good and tips the election to the Bad. Greens, Libertarians, Constitutionalists, Socialists, that's you.
The "apathetic twits" see the Good as... well, they see the Good as "that nice old veteran, who looks like he'd have a heart attack if he tried to be as evil as Bush" or "that nice articulate black man who will solve all our problems for us." The Bad to these people are "that crazy witch from Alaska who can see Russia from her house" or "the guy who doesn't know that 'jobs' is a four-letter word." The Ugly? Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. Always. "Well, I'd give them a chance if I thought they had a chance."
And finally you have the weirdoes. I'm going to focus on the libertarian weirdoes here because I honestly know jack about the statists or why anyone would be one. So the Good for the libertarians? Ron Paul. Yes, that Ron Paul, the one who's the Ugly for both the "people who care" and the "apathetic twits." The Bad is the statist candidate for the libertarians and the libertarian candidate for the statists. And the Ugly are the candidates from both major parties.
Hopefully now you understand why American politics are so messed up. Having explained all this to my future children, I will give them Milton Friedman to read. And if that doesn't work, I will then go on to display their tuition bill again and ask them if I can buy their vote for that much money, not just a measly $6.65.
The second topic is politics. Hopefully, as I did, my children will have a course on the Constitution before they give any serious thought to Democrats and Republicans and all the rest. Bill Clinton was bad because my dad said so, and since I couldn't vote that was good enough for me.
Now, I promised myself that this post would not become "why I believe what I do about politics." You don't really need me to tell you that. And I couldn't really do it in any way that Milton Friedman couldn't do better. No, I'm here to talk about politics in general.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people: those with loaded guns and those who dig. No, wait, I got ahead of myself. There are two kinds of people in America. One the one hand are those who are partisan, or policy wonks, or political science junkies, or vote the party line all the way down the ballot year after year after year, or have strong feelings about how everything is just fine/terrible. We'll call them "the people who care."
On the other hand are the people who say "well, that W fellow can't string two words together, so I won't vote for him," or "John Kerry is a flip-flopper! I don't know what he flip-flopped on, but I sure won't vote for him," or "I'm not going to vote for a black man no matter how articulate he is," or "I'm not going to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency." These are the "apathetic twits." They don't really have the time to understand politics and will generally vote for the most amenable candidate with the whitest teeth and the most realistic smile (did you see any of McCain's or Obama's pictures during the campaign? It was all half-hearted grins from McCain and trust-me-I'm-a-used-car-salesman from Obama).
Now, contrary to what I said in my previous post, Barack Obama did not spend $6.65 per person getting "the people who care" to vote for him. Some of them (the registered Democrats) would, and others (the registered Republicans) would not. Barack Obama spent significantly more than $6.65 getting the "apathetic twits" to vote for him. Not that it was a very tough job given the utter inability of his real opponent to point out that Obama was running against him and not against an incumbent who wasn't on the ballot.
There's not much more I can say about the "apathetic twits." They're apathetic and they're not really twits, but they're the primary reason for all those nasty attack ads you see every fourth October. They're the ones who actually win the elections. There aren't enough party faithful - I mean "people who care" - on either side to do it alone. This is because there aren't that many "people who care." A lot of "apathetic twits" are apathetic because they have better things to do, or because they honestly believe that other people can run their lives better than they can. Come to think of it, a lot of Democrats believe the latter too, as do a depressing number of Republicans.
I guess here I should mention that there is a third group, made up of statists or libertarians. I hesitate to call "the people who care" good, although they're the only ones who usually know what they're talking about, and I even hesitate to call the "apathetic twits" bad, but I don't really have any qualms about calling this third group ugly. Or rather The Ugly. Statists tend to be socially conservative but economically liberal; no, you can't marry your brother and nor can you keep your money. Libertarians are the exact opposite; drugs for everyone, but you're the one who has to pay for your drugs. Statists who are more economically liberal than they are socially conservative will tend to vote Democrat anyway, but they may cross the line in some cases.
The Reagan Democrats were a mix of the "apathetic twits" and the statist/libertarian weirdoes. ("Weirdoes" is a term I'm comfortable with, and I described myself as a "right-leaning libertarian" for about three years.) This is one of the reasons why Republicans tend to chuckle whenever they're reminded that Reagan raised taxes that one time. Because when the Bad and the Ugly put you in office, sometimes you have to make decisions that are Bad or Ugly.
So that's We The People, nicely divided up into the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But the same can be done with political parties.
Naturally, to "the people who care," the Good is their party, right or wrong, even if that party nominates a gibbering moron or a senile centrist incapable of running a national campaign. The Bad is the other party, even if they nominate and elect a quasi-centrist who will cross the aisle occasionally and then get caught doing inappropriate things with a cigar (sorry, dad). The Ugly is that third-party candidate who steals all the votes for the Good and tips the election to the Bad. Greens, Libertarians, Constitutionalists, Socialists, that's you.
The "apathetic twits" see the Good as... well, they see the Good as "that nice old veteran, who looks like he'd have a heart attack if he tried to be as evil as Bush" or "that nice articulate black man who will solve all our problems for us." The Bad to these people are "that crazy witch from Alaska who can see Russia from her house" or "the guy who doesn't know that 'jobs' is a four-letter word." The Ugly? Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. Always. "Well, I'd give them a chance if I thought they had a chance."
And finally you have the weirdoes. I'm going to focus on the libertarian weirdoes here because I honestly know jack about the statists or why anyone would be one. So the Good for the libertarians? Ron Paul. Yes, that Ron Paul, the one who's the Ugly for both the "people who care" and the "apathetic twits." The Bad is the statist candidate for the libertarians and the libertarian candidate for the statists. And the Ugly are the candidates from both major parties.
Hopefully now you understand why American politics are so messed up. Having explained all this to my future children, I will give them Milton Friedman to read. And if that doesn't work, I will then go on to display their tuition bill again and ask them if I can buy their vote for that much money, not just a measly $6.65.
Monday, November 28, 2011
For people who think there's too much money in politics...
Barack Obama spent $513,557,218 to get 69,456,897 people to vote for him back in 2008. John McCain spent $346,666,422 to get 59,934,814 people to vote for him. (Source: Wikipedia.) I punched those four numbers into my calculator to find out how much the average vote cost in 2008. (I didn't include independent expenditures or votes, because we all know that those dollars and votes were wasted when they could have been put to much better use, like paying homeless people to occupy Wall Street.)
So it turns out that in 2008, your vote sold for... ready?
$6.6482129, or about $6.65.
I could buy a hamburger and a large fry for that. And that's what your vote is worth, apparently.
Now, I hesitate before I put a price tag on my vote, because someday someone might offer to pay me that much... or will pay someone else much less to forge my vote. But I will say that my vote is worth more than a hamburger and a large fry.
Hell, depending on where in the US you live, the minimum wage is between $7.25 and $9.04 (source: Wikipedia). So assuming you work, your vote is being bought for less than you make in an hour.
Here's the part where I get distracted and complain about how it takes me nearly an hour to pay for a lunch I can eat in five minutes, which always struck me as one of the strangest and most perverse things about the job I had last summer (the job paid more than minimum wage, but there wasn't a McDonald's in walking distance).
Here's the part where I get back on track, after quickly pausing and spell-checking and finding, to my considerable amusement, that the spell-checking program doesn't recognize "Wikipedia" as a word. I for one could stand to see a lot more money wasted during campaign season. I'm frankly insulted to think that my vote, my party-line-all-the-way-down-the-ballot-for-the-last-three-elections-running vote, is worth less than an hour's worth of work or a quarter-pounder and a large fry.
Come to think of that, the fact that your vote is worth less than an hour's worth of work means that no candidate ever has spent an hour of his life trying to get you to vote for him. And candidates generally don't work for minimum wage.
So it turns out that in 2008, your vote sold for... ready?
$6.6482129, or about $6.65.
I could buy a hamburger and a large fry for that. And that's what your vote is worth, apparently.
Now, I hesitate before I put a price tag on my vote, because someday someone might offer to pay me that much... or will pay someone else much less to forge my vote. But I will say that my vote is worth more than a hamburger and a large fry.
Hell, depending on where in the US you live, the minimum wage is between $7.25 and $9.04 (source: Wikipedia). So assuming you work, your vote is being bought for less than you make in an hour.
Here's the part where I get distracted and complain about how it takes me nearly an hour to pay for a lunch I can eat in five minutes, which always struck me as one of the strangest and most perverse things about the job I had last summer (the job paid more than minimum wage, but there wasn't a McDonald's in walking distance).
Here's the part where I get back on track, after quickly pausing and spell-checking and finding, to my considerable amusement, that the spell-checking program doesn't recognize "Wikipedia" as a word. I for one could stand to see a lot more money wasted during campaign season. I'm frankly insulted to think that my vote, my party-line-all-the-way-down-the-ballot-for-the-last-three-elections-running vote, is worth less than an hour's worth of work or a quarter-pounder and a large fry.
Come to think of that, the fact that your vote is worth less than an hour's worth of work means that no candidate ever has spent an hour of his life trying to get you to vote for him. And candidates generally don't work for minimum wage.
Photoplasty commentary No. 1
I hate these things, and now I'm going to rant about why.
Yup, Cracked.com put out another photoplasty contest, but fortunately this one actually had a couple of good entries. Not the first page, of course, that’s just bongs and dongs, your usual immature unfunny pig slop that constitutes most of Cracked.com’s guest output.
So I’m just starting on the second page with number nine. Yup, it’s another bong. Next!
Number eight: Alf has been photoshopped into… something. I admit that I don’t recognize the source photo. I’m lost a lot when they do pop-culture crap because the only TV I watch involves British time-travelers or an incredibly dysfunctional family re-enacting of the Book of Exodus/Mormon in space. But if you’re doing a “famous photograph” and I can identify all the other ones on this list, but not this one, you’re doing something wrong. Moving on.
Number seven: Oh look, a bear is flying a stealth fighter. Why a stealth fighter and not a spaceship, I’ll never know but there you have it. Bears can be amusing; this one is not.
Number six: More like it! Buzz Aldrin sees the TARDIS on the moon. I nominate this one for the number one slot. Aldrin is not inherently funny; the TARDIS is not inherently funny; the moon is not inherently funny. But somehow when you slap the three of them together, you get something that even I managed to giggle at. See, this is a thing where all the elements work perfectly. You have to have Aldrin and the moon or else you wouldn’t have this picture. You could do something stupid to Aldrin’s face, but that wouldn’t be funny. Then the item he sees has to be perfectly chosen. It wouldn’t be as funny if it were, say, a big black obelisk, a wrecked Viper, or even a generic alien spaceship (now, the underside of a Star Destroy might just work). Granted, you have to know about a certain British TV show to really appreciate this one, but it’s so obviously the cream of the crop that the fact that it’s back in sixth is just all kinds of offensive.
Number five: Darth Nixious zaps someone with lightning. Not as funny as the one on the previous page about him giving everyone the finger. Also, I’d bet this one was a zillion times easier to do. Nixon’s been done to death, folks, and so has Force Lightning.
Number four: Planet of the Martian Apes. Frak you.
Number three: Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder was staged. For… some reason. Also Jack Ruby has a swastika tattoo and JFK’s hanging out in the background. There’s way too much going on here and none of it is funny. Why is Kennedy even in the frame if this is the angle from which his alleged murderer’s death is going to be staged? If he and his handlers were that stupid, the world would have ended in 1962. Why does the actor playing Jack Ruby have a clearly visible swastika tattoo? Why is the slate (that little “clapper” thing with the words “Oswald Assass” scrawled on it) in the shot once the action has started? Did nobody order a second take? Then again, as far as photoshopping Oswald’s death goes, nothing tops the time they put guitars in everyone’s hands.
Number two: Nixon is getting tattooed. You stole that idea from Jon Stewart and this is at least the third photo that uses Nixon. Getting a tad blah here.
Number one: Look, another dong. It turns out that the Loch Ness Monster is actually Stalin’s dick. Why is this funny? Is it because it’s Stalin? Would it be less funny if it were Hitler’s? How about Mao’s? And if you look at it for more than about a second, the photoshop job is terrible. Stalin’s head is grafted onto somebody else’s, the picture of the guy in the water has been grafted onto the Loch Ness pic with absolutely no subtlety, and it frankly looks like the Monster’s growing out of Stalin’s right thigh.
Yup, Cracked.com put out another photoplasty contest, but fortunately this one actually had a couple of good entries. Not the first page, of course, that’s just bongs and dongs, your usual immature unfunny pig slop that constitutes most of Cracked.com’s guest output.
So I’m just starting on the second page with number nine. Yup, it’s another bong. Next!
Number eight: Alf has been photoshopped into… something. I admit that I don’t recognize the source photo. I’m lost a lot when they do pop-culture crap because the only TV I watch involves British time-travelers or an incredibly dysfunctional family re-enacting of the Book of Exodus/Mormon in space. But if you’re doing a “famous photograph” and I can identify all the other ones on this list, but not this one, you’re doing something wrong. Moving on.
Number seven: Oh look, a bear is flying a stealth fighter. Why a stealth fighter and not a spaceship, I’ll never know but there you have it. Bears can be amusing; this one is not.
Number six: More like it! Buzz Aldrin sees the TARDIS on the moon. I nominate this one for the number one slot. Aldrin is not inherently funny; the TARDIS is not inherently funny; the moon is not inherently funny. But somehow when you slap the three of them together, you get something that even I managed to giggle at. See, this is a thing where all the elements work perfectly. You have to have Aldrin and the moon or else you wouldn’t have this picture. You could do something stupid to Aldrin’s face, but that wouldn’t be funny. Then the item he sees has to be perfectly chosen. It wouldn’t be as funny if it were, say, a big black obelisk, a wrecked Viper, or even a generic alien spaceship (now, the underside of a Star Destroy might just work). Granted, you have to know about a certain British TV show to really appreciate this one, but it’s so obviously the cream of the crop that the fact that it’s back in sixth is just all kinds of offensive.
Number five: Darth Nixious zaps someone with lightning. Not as funny as the one on the previous page about him giving everyone the finger. Also, I’d bet this one was a zillion times easier to do. Nixon’s been done to death, folks, and so has Force Lightning.
Number four: Planet of the Martian Apes. Frak you.
Number three: Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder was staged. For… some reason. Also Jack Ruby has a swastika tattoo and JFK’s hanging out in the background. There’s way too much going on here and none of it is funny. Why is Kennedy even in the frame if this is the angle from which his alleged murderer’s death is going to be staged? If he and his handlers were that stupid, the world would have ended in 1962. Why does the actor playing Jack Ruby have a clearly visible swastika tattoo? Why is the slate (that little “clapper” thing with the words “Oswald Assass” scrawled on it) in the shot once the action has started? Did nobody order a second take? Then again, as far as photoshopping Oswald’s death goes, nothing tops the time they put guitars in everyone’s hands.
Number two: Nixon is getting tattooed. You stole that idea from Jon Stewart and this is at least the third photo that uses Nixon. Getting a tad blah here.
Number one: Look, another dong. It turns out that the Loch Ness Monster is actually Stalin’s dick. Why is this funny? Is it because it’s Stalin? Would it be less funny if it were Hitler’s? How about Mao’s? And if you look at it for more than about a second, the photoshop job is terrible. Stalin’s head is grafted onto somebody else’s, the picture of the guy in the water has been grafted onto the Loch Ness pic with absolutely no subtlety, and it frankly looks like the Monster’s growing out of Stalin’s right thigh.
Friday, November 25, 2011
The upcoming Christmas Special
So my general train of thought on pretty much everything Steven Moffat's done over the last two seasons went something like this:
1, approximately one month before the episode in question aired: this is a stupid idea and it will never work.
2, immediately after seeing the episode in question: well, that flew in the face of common sense a zillion times and I spotted the source material a mile away, but it wasn't as terrible an idea as I thought.
3, some time later: Steven Moffat is the best thing to happen to Doctor Who since Tom Baker!
So when I found out that the Christmas Special this year is called The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, naturally my first thought was along the lines of #1. Now, full confession time. I haven't read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and probably never will. I know, I know, there's a massive hole in my childhood somewhere, terrible terrible me.
More to the point, Doctor Who is profoundly athiestic. (Maybe that's because my good friend Tom often derides a certain Series 2 two-parter as "the one with freaking Satan in it" and the people at the BBC agreed that said episodes were an awful joke.) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Not so much. This seems only slightly less offensive than adapting the New Testament into a Doctor Who two-parter, or having the Doctor rejuvenated by faith...
Speaking of, the Series 3 reviews start next week.
1, approximately one month before the episode in question aired: this is a stupid idea and it will never work.
2, immediately after seeing the episode in question: well, that flew in the face of common sense a zillion times and I spotted the source material a mile away, but it wasn't as terrible an idea as I thought.
3, some time later: Steven Moffat is the best thing to happen to Doctor Who since Tom Baker!
So when I found out that the Christmas Special this year is called The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe, naturally my first thought was along the lines of #1. Now, full confession time. I haven't read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and probably never will. I know, I know, there's a massive hole in my childhood somewhere, terrible terrible me.
More to the point, Doctor Who is profoundly athiestic. (Maybe that's because my good friend Tom often derides a certain Series 2 two-parter as "the one with freaking Satan in it" and the people at the BBC agreed that said episodes were an awful joke.) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Not so much. This seems only slightly less offensive than adapting the New Testament into a Doctor Who two-parter, or having the Doctor rejuvenated by faith...
Speaking of, the Series 3 reviews start next week.
Raving Wingnut Thought of the Day
It's the day after Thanksgiving and all, which probably makes this sound all the more heartless, but...
Let's make foreign aid conditional on the recipient voting our way in the UN.
Yup, we'd be paying for votes and corrupting the sacred* democratic process, but frankly that's better than pouring tons of money into anti-American cabals. I mean, it's not like the taxpayers need that money or anything.** It's also not like we have a massive recession that could be eased somewhat by spending less money*** and our debt is clearly under control**** so sure, keep up the good work.
*Sarcasm.
**Massive sarcasm.
***Extra massive sarcasm.
****Sarcasm with cheese and a large fry.
Let's make foreign aid conditional on the recipient voting our way in the UN.
Yup, we'd be paying for votes and corrupting the sacred* democratic process, but frankly that's better than pouring tons of money into anti-American cabals. I mean, it's not like the taxpayers need that money or anything.** It's also not like we have a massive recession that could be eased somewhat by spending less money*** and our debt is clearly under control**** so sure, keep up the good work.
*Sarcasm.
**Massive sarcasm.
***Extra massive sarcasm.
****Sarcasm with cheese and a large fry.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Wait... did they count Nirvana as a "good" band?
Anyone responsible for any part of this, you have just lost the right to vote. Forever.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Several ways Bryan Singer can (and will) annoy the BSG fanbase
So, David Yates is making a Doctor Who film. It's not going to be set in the show's canon, which did a lot to assuage the fears of any fan old enough to remember 1996.
So, Bryan Singer is making a Battlestar Galactica film. It's not going to be set in the most recent show's cannon...
...but here are a number of reasons why a second BSG reimagining is a terrible, terrible idea.
1) Shepard Syndrome
For those of you who have never played or heard of Mass Effect, let me explain in slightly more detail: in Mass Effect, there's a very prominent character whose most commonly-used name begins with the letter S. Depending on your preferred version of canon, this character could either be a man or a woman. Now in total contrast, in Battlestar Galactica there's a very prominent character who... oh, you get the picture.
Is Starbuck a man or a woman? Is Boomer a man or a woman? (What race is Boomer? What species is Boomer?) Either way, you're not going to be able to please everyone.
2) How much of the RDM version do you keep?
Directly related to number 1 above, but I felt like highlighting the Starbuck issue in particular. Among other things, will there be: a President Roslin, a Chief Tyrol, a Dee, a Helo, a Gaeta, a political dissident played by the former Apollo, humanoid Cylons (including Number Six), flight pods that close, Raptors, DRADIS, etc? How about stuff from the original show that didn't make it into the RDM version? Will there be Boxey, Cassiopia, Sheba, Muffit, Athena? Which version of the Cylon Raiders and Baseships will you use?
3) Deus ex Machina
Let me just reiterate before going any further that I still love the RDM BSG, despite its less-than-perfect ending, its disappointing prequel, and whatever the frak Blood and Chrome is going to turn out to be. That said, I am very much aware that most BSG fans hated the finale a great deal more than I did. The thing is, the original BSG was essentially the Book of Mormon in space; I've never read it, but my guess is God's involved somehow. So if you don't want religion in your science fiction*, this was never really the show for you in the first place.
*This is completely off-topic, but I'm amused that some Mass Effect fans hated Ashley because she was into God. Then the ME producers turned right around and hired BSG's resident Angel of God to play HAL in the second game. That just struck me as hilarious.
The problem is, RDM BSG had an extremely (literal) deus ex machina ending, and Singer might want to backpedal as far away from that as he can. This, in my opinion, would be a fantastic mistake. The religious angle was far from the only thing that made BSG so unique, but it was an integral part of the show.
4) Doesn't the franchise need a break?
If I were a studio executive looking at the backlash from Daybreak and the atrocious viewing figures for Caprica, I'd be extremely hesitant before I signed off on a very expensive (because space opera always is) feature film. Try to imagine J.J. Abrams's Star Trek film getting green-lit in the immediate aftermath of Enterprise's cancellation. If memory serves, five years elapsed between the time Enterprise was cancelled and Star Trek the Star Trek came out. In contrast, George Lucas has been churning out Star Wars stuff for an entire decade, but we've all stopped caring. It's been two years since BSG wrapped, one years since Caprica went down in flames, and Blood and Chrome hasn't even aired yet.
Now, I know that Singer's not looking to piggyback onto a commercially successful franchise, because he's been planning this movie since before Ron Moore upstaged him back in 2003. But that's part of the problem. David Yates (who has just come off of four Harry Potter films) is almost certainly making a Doctor Who film because there's money to be made from it. With certain other directors, I'd complain, but Yates seems fairly compentent and determined to do right by the show. Singer may be as well, but here's the difference: there is a market for a Doctor Who feature film. The show is popular here in America in a way it never was during the last century. I'm not at all convinced that a similar market exists for Battlestar.
5) Yeah, I went there.
When the original Galactica was cancelled, there was an attempt to get something with the Battlestar Galactica name back on the air as quick as possible. The result was... Galactica 1980, a show everyone pretends never existed.
So, Bryan Singer is making a Battlestar Galactica film. It's not going to be set in the most recent show's cannon...
...but here are a number of reasons why a second BSG reimagining is a terrible, terrible idea.
1) Shepard Syndrome
For those of you who have never played or heard of Mass Effect, let me explain in slightly more detail: in Mass Effect, there's a very prominent character whose most commonly-used name begins with the letter S. Depending on your preferred version of canon, this character could either be a man or a woman. Now in total contrast, in Battlestar Galactica there's a very prominent character who... oh, you get the picture.
Is Starbuck a man or a woman? Is Boomer a man or a woman? (What race is Boomer? What species is Boomer?) Either way, you're not going to be able to please everyone.
2) How much of the RDM version do you keep?
Directly related to number 1 above, but I felt like highlighting the Starbuck issue in particular. Among other things, will there be: a President Roslin, a Chief Tyrol, a Dee, a Helo, a Gaeta, a political dissident played by the former Apollo, humanoid Cylons (including Number Six), flight pods that close, Raptors, DRADIS, etc? How about stuff from the original show that didn't make it into the RDM version? Will there be Boxey, Cassiopia, Sheba, Muffit, Athena? Which version of the Cylon Raiders and Baseships will you use?
3) Deus ex Machina
Let me just reiterate before going any further that I still love the RDM BSG, despite its less-than-perfect ending, its disappointing prequel, and whatever the frak Blood and Chrome is going to turn out to be. That said, I am very much aware that most BSG fans hated the finale a great deal more than I did. The thing is, the original BSG was essentially the Book of Mormon in space; I've never read it, but my guess is God's involved somehow. So if you don't want religion in your science fiction*, this was never really the show for you in the first place.
*This is completely off-topic, but I'm amused that some Mass Effect fans hated Ashley because she was into God. Then the ME producers turned right around and hired BSG's resident Angel of God to play HAL in the second game. That just struck me as hilarious.
The problem is, RDM BSG had an extremely (literal) deus ex machina ending, and Singer might want to backpedal as far away from that as he can. This, in my opinion, would be a fantastic mistake. The religious angle was far from the only thing that made BSG so unique, but it was an integral part of the show.
4) Doesn't the franchise need a break?
If I were a studio executive looking at the backlash from Daybreak and the atrocious viewing figures for Caprica, I'd be extremely hesitant before I signed off on a very expensive (because space opera always is) feature film. Try to imagine J.J. Abrams's Star Trek film getting green-lit in the immediate aftermath of Enterprise's cancellation. If memory serves, five years elapsed between the time Enterprise was cancelled and Star Trek the Star Trek came out. In contrast, George Lucas has been churning out Star Wars stuff for an entire decade, but we've all stopped caring. It's been two years since BSG wrapped, one years since Caprica went down in flames, and Blood and Chrome hasn't even aired yet.
Now, I know that Singer's not looking to piggyback onto a commercially successful franchise, because he's been planning this movie since before Ron Moore upstaged him back in 2003. But that's part of the problem. David Yates (who has just come off of four Harry Potter films) is almost certainly making a Doctor Who film because there's money to be made from it. With certain other directors, I'd complain, but Yates seems fairly compentent and determined to do right by the show. Singer may be as well, but here's the difference: there is a market for a Doctor Who feature film. The show is popular here in America in a way it never was during the last century. I'm not at all convinced that a similar market exists for Battlestar.
5) Yeah, I went there.
When the original Galactica was cancelled, there was an attempt to get something with the Battlestar Galactica name back on the air as quick as possible. The result was... Galactica 1980, a show everyone pretends never existed.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Oh look, another permanent beta
Before I start ranting too much, let me get something out of the way: I adore Steam. Sure, it's a big virtual hole in my wallet, but I love the fact that in this day and age you can order video games right over the internet and they will download right onto your computer and you will never have to worry about losing the CDs.
That said, there are these occasional boxes that pop up on the side of my computer: "Steam has finished downloading Team Fortress 2" is probably the most repetitive one. This is because Team Fortress 2 gets updated approximately twice a month. They're always giving you new weapons, or tweaking your new weapons so they're not Haxxor-uberbuffed, or giving you new hats. Every once in a while, there's a new map, which is nice.
The fascinating thing about TF2 is that so far, you haven't had to pay for any of this (unless you really want to, but items drop often enough that you don't have to). It's DLC in the sense that it downloads, but you have no control over it and it doesn't cost you a dime. (It'd be nice if they fixed the backstab mechanic so that a Spy in front of me can't kill me while I'm ducking, but that's really just a minor complaint.)
I'm not really here to complain about TF2. Nor do I have any intention of complaining about, say, the DLC for Mass Effect 2. The game is complete without Zaeed or Kasumi or the Shadow Broker or half a dozen extra guns. Those are what we call "extras." If you want to shell out money to give Miranda more clothes, that's your problem. (The fact that the final DLC, "Arrival," is essentially an "interquel" for ME3 is a little bit annoying, but I'll let it pass. I'll especially let it pass if it comes bundled with ME3, but I kinda doub it will - besides, that'd piss off the people who already bought it.)
But these patches, updates and DLC are both the symptoms and the cause of the problem; now that it's possible to update a video game after it's been released, quality control is going away, fast. While I'm very happy that Skyrm is finally out and I will no longer be subjected to the poor-man's-Howard-Shore* they seem to employ for the music in all their commercials, the fact of the matter is that everything I've read about it seems to imply that a patch is already on the way.
Okay, so you blew the whole quality control thing. At least you can still give the fans what they want, right? I mean, it's not like there's a game out there where appeasing one section of the fanbase in your latest patch will completely alienate another section...
And this brings us back to StarCraft II, which was the first game where I encountered this problem. My units do less damage this week than they did last week because enough people who play as a different race complained. My powers work differently now because they decided that they actually liked the way things worked before the patch that immediately preceeded my purchase of the game. They're not going to suddenly change the Soldier's health in TF2, nor are they going to change his running speed (and frankly, as long as the latter remains "slower than the Spy," I don't care one way or the other).** They're not going to suddenly decide that Miranda was overbuffed in ME2 and take away one of her powers.
The other thing is that I was reading some of the old patch notes for SC2, and it seems like the game was crashing a lot for no good reason back after it first came out. Again, did you not bother to beta-test it?
Then there's the dark side to DLC, which is what you get when you pay $10 for the first part of a video game, and $5 for each sucessive part. Believe me, it's coming. It's coming for the exact same reason that everything costs $X.99 instead of $(X+1). You think you're saving money.
And one day, the worst will come to pass: a permanent beta that you have to pay money to fix. And the day I'm tricked into buying that will be the day I swear off video games forever.
*I have nothing against Howard Shore. I just thought the music in the Skyrm commercials was crap.
**Yes, they do change various unlockable weapons from time to time, like giving the Backburner a compression blast. Doesn't really affect gameplay.
That said, there are these occasional boxes that pop up on the side of my computer: "Steam has finished downloading Team Fortress 2" is probably the most repetitive one. This is because Team Fortress 2 gets updated approximately twice a month. They're always giving you new weapons, or tweaking your new weapons so they're not Haxxor-uberbuffed, or giving you new hats. Every once in a while, there's a new map, which is nice.
The fascinating thing about TF2 is that so far, you haven't had to pay for any of this (unless you really want to, but items drop often enough that you don't have to). It's DLC in the sense that it downloads, but you have no control over it and it doesn't cost you a dime. (It'd be nice if they fixed the backstab mechanic so that a Spy in front of me can't kill me while I'm ducking, but that's really just a minor complaint.)
I'm not really here to complain about TF2. Nor do I have any intention of complaining about, say, the DLC for Mass Effect 2. The game is complete without Zaeed or Kasumi or the Shadow Broker or half a dozen extra guns. Those are what we call "extras." If you want to shell out money to give Miranda more clothes, that's your problem. (The fact that the final DLC, "Arrival," is essentially an "interquel" for ME3 is a little bit annoying, but I'll let it pass. I'll especially let it pass if it comes bundled with ME3, but I kinda doub it will - besides, that'd piss off the people who already bought it.)
But these patches, updates and DLC are both the symptoms and the cause of the problem; now that it's possible to update a video game after it's been released, quality control is going away, fast. While I'm very happy that Skyrm is finally out and I will no longer be subjected to the poor-man's-Howard-Shore* they seem to employ for the music in all their commercials, the fact of the matter is that everything I've read about it seems to imply that a patch is already on the way.
Okay, so you blew the whole quality control thing. At least you can still give the fans what they want, right? I mean, it's not like there's a game out there where appeasing one section of the fanbase in your latest patch will completely alienate another section...
And this brings us back to StarCraft II, which was the first game where I encountered this problem. My units do less damage this week than they did last week because enough people who play as a different race complained. My powers work differently now because they decided that they actually liked the way things worked before the patch that immediately preceeded my purchase of the game. They're not going to suddenly change the Soldier's health in TF2, nor are they going to change his running speed (and frankly, as long as the latter remains "slower than the Spy," I don't care one way or the other).** They're not going to suddenly decide that Miranda was overbuffed in ME2 and take away one of her powers.
The other thing is that I was reading some of the old patch notes for SC2, and it seems like the game was crashing a lot for no good reason back after it first came out. Again, did you not bother to beta-test it?
Then there's the dark side to DLC, which is what you get when you pay $10 for the first part of a video game, and $5 for each sucessive part. Believe me, it's coming. It's coming for the exact same reason that everything costs $X.99 instead of $(X+1). You think you're saving money.
And one day, the worst will come to pass: a permanent beta that you have to pay money to fix. And the day I'm tricked into buying that will be the day I swear off video games forever.
*I have nothing against Howard Shore. I just thought the music in the Skyrm commercials was crap.
**Yes, they do change various unlockable weapons from time to time, like giving the Backburner a compression blast. Doesn't really affect gameplay.
Who Review: The Runaway Bride
Immediately after Rose is left alone on a beach (and by "alone" I mean "with her hyper-rich and alive father, her mother, and that other guy"), Donna Noble gets beamed aboard the TARDIS by magic.
She accuses him of kidnapping her, finds out that they're in space, and then takes a moment to realize that he just might be an alien. "Martian boy" humor ensues.
I'm not really going to comment too much on Donna's character; either you love her or you hate her. I found her tolerable.
There's an extended freeway chase. Trees that look far too green for it to be christmas zip by in the background. The Doctor controls the TARDIS with just a bit of string, somehow. That's got to be clever trick. I can't do that in any video game, and I usually only have to work in two dimensions. Kids scream at Donna to jump, but mercifully, we can't hear them.
Then we go to a reception for a wedding that never happened. The Doctor learns that Donna and her almost-hubby, Lance, worked for a subsidiary of Torchwood and were secretly doing experiments with Huon particles. A Christmas tree bombs them but hardly slows them down and, magically, no-one dies. Probably. Donna says something about needing to help the wounded. The Doctor's response is something along the lines of "lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal people, sometimes execute dangerous criminals. Either way helps."
Down beneath the Thames Flood Barrier, they find Giant Spider-Lady, Empress of the Rachnoss (not the Rachni, honest), as well as Lance, who turns out to be a traitor. He gets his just desserts and is fed to a bunch of hungry spiders. Y'see, it turns out that in addition to the Silurians, the Sea Devils, that goop from Inferno, the other goop from Fury From the Deep, three different Atlantises and half a dozen other threats, the Rachnoss are buried at Earth's core. In fact, they are Earth's core; the entire planet was actually formed around the last Rachnoss Basestar in order to hide it.
That (plus City of Death) really puts things in perspective. You only exist because the Rachnoss needed a place to hide and so they created your planet. (Then the Jagarroth needed a place to hide, but they blew themselves up by accident and the radiation from the explosion started all life on Earth.)
Sadly, none of this is commented on at all. Instead the Doctor goes in and bombs the Rachnoss base all to hell, drowning the children and leaving the Empress to die in a fire. +50 Renegade points.
This is commented on.
Bear in mind that this is the first episode of Nu Who that doesn't star Rose Tyler. This is why this episode focuses on the Doctor's actions rather than the companion's culture shock.
For once, the Doctor outright kills the alien threat, but this is so out-of-character (as compared to when Pertwee did it without comment in The Sea Devils) that the whole episode is about how out-of-character this is (despite the fact that all the problems in the last two episodes were caused because a bunch of pansies wanted to give Cybermen rights).
So. The Doctor goes underground to confront a threat that has been hibernating since the dawn of time, and ultimately solves his problems through violence. It's a lot faster than The Silurians, but that's about the only improvement. For once the villain of an RTD script isn't stopped through magic, which is nice.
7 out of 10, which is... exactly the same score Doctor Who and the Silurians got.
She accuses him of kidnapping her, finds out that they're in space, and then takes a moment to realize that he just might be an alien. "Martian boy" humor ensues.
I'm not really going to comment too much on Donna's character; either you love her or you hate her. I found her tolerable.
There's an extended freeway chase. Trees that look far too green for it to be christmas zip by in the background. The Doctor controls the TARDIS with just a bit of string, somehow. That's got to be clever trick. I can't do that in any video game, and I usually only have to work in two dimensions. Kids scream at Donna to jump, but mercifully, we can't hear them.
Then we go to a reception for a wedding that never happened. The Doctor learns that Donna and her almost-hubby, Lance, worked for a subsidiary of Torchwood and were secretly doing experiments with Huon particles. A Christmas tree bombs them but hardly slows them down and, magically, no-one dies. Probably. Donna says something about needing to help the wounded. The Doctor's response is something along the lines of "lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal people, sometimes execute dangerous criminals. Either way helps."
Down beneath the Thames Flood Barrier, they find Giant Spider-Lady, Empress of the Rachnoss (not the Rachni, honest), as well as Lance, who turns out to be a traitor. He gets his just desserts and is fed to a bunch of hungry spiders. Y'see, it turns out that in addition to the Silurians, the Sea Devils, that goop from Inferno, the other goop from Fury From the Deep, three different Atlantises and half a dozen other threats, the Rachnoss are buried at Earth's core. In fact, they are Earth's core; the entire planet was actually formed around the last Rachnoss Basestar in order to hide it.
That (plus City of Death) really puts things in perspective. You only exist because the Rachnoss needed a place to hide and so they created your planet. (Then the Jagarroth needed a place to hide, but they blew themselves up by accident and the radiation from the explosion started all life on Earth.)
Sadly, none of this is commented on at all. Instead the Doctor goes in and bombs the Rachnoss base all to hell, drowning the children and leaving the Empress to die in a fire. +50 Renegade points.
This is commented on.
Bear in mind that this is the first episode of Nu Who that doesn't star Rose Tyler. This is why this episode focuses on the Doctor's actions rather than the companion's culture shock.
For once, the Doctor outright kills the alien threat, but this is so out-of-character (as compared to when Pertwee did it without comment in The Sea Devils) that the whole episode is about how out-of-character this is (despite the fact that all the problems in the last two episodes were caused because a bunch of pansies wanted to give Cybermen rights).
So. The Doctor goes underground to confront a threat that has been hibernating since the dawn of time, and ultimately solves his problems through violence. It's a lot faster than The Silurians, but that's about the only improvement. For once the villain of an RTD script isn't stopped through magic, which is nice.
7 out of 10, which is... exactly the same score Doctor Who and the Silurians got.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Stuff from ME2 I hope comes back to haunt you in ME3
So the reason I haven't been updating this blog for half a month is the same reason as why there's a $50 hole in my wallet - Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2. On the suggestion of my best friend, who once a long long time ago wrote for this very blog, I got swept up in this absurdly immersive retro-80s space opera and in the process, I killed Worf, let Oz fly me around the galaxy, took orders from Bishop and the President, gave Six the access codes to my ship's mainframe, and listened while Colonel Tigh made a Hitchhiker's reference. (Oh, and I shot Holtz in the head. Repeatedly.)
Overall, I was disappointed how my ME1 decisions largely resulted in cosmetic changes; it didn't affect gameplay one jot whether Wrex, the rachni, or the Council died, and neither did it matter much who you left on Virmire. Just about the only difference is whether or not you can be reinstated as a spectre, and even that only opens up one dialogue option during an optional sidequest. This may be because they had to keep you on the rails for ME2, but they've been pretty clear about how ME3 is the end of the trilogy, so hopefully the endings can branch out depending on what you've done.
So here's a list of all the choices that you can make in the first two games that I hope have dire consequences in the third.
Killing/sparing the Rachni Queen
I noticed that if you just start a new ME2 game without importing an ME1 character, it assumes you let as many people/races die as possible to generally give you the worst universe. Still, despite the fact that the rachni were part of the most generally frustrating level of ME1, I hope they make a return appearance if you spared them.
Killing/sparing the Council
Again, saving them granted you one extra cutscene in ME2, but you had to go out of your way to get it. Let's have something more substantial next time around.
Killing/sparing Wrex
This was another choice that didn't affect gameplay at all, but it's clear from Wreav's comments that the krogan are headed in a different direction under him. Hopefully this plays out.
How you handled Tali's and Legion's loyalty missions
This is so obviously flagged as a massive choice that it's going to be insulting if it doesn't have a massive effect (yuk yuk) on the third game. If your morality score isn't high enough, you either have to get Tali exiled or balkanize the rag-tag fugitive fleet. And then later on you can either re-write or kill the renegade Dal- er, geth, and then the choices you have as Tali and Legion's conflict play out are clearly going to have consequences. Will the quarians and the geth make peace, or will the quarians have to run off to their mythical thirteenth colony, only to find that it's a nuclear wasteland? (To be fair, I thought the quarians were nuts to be talking about re-taking their homeworld until I learned that, in contrast to Battlestar's 50,293 survivors, the quarian fleet has about 17 million refugees. So yeah, there are some differences.)
Who died
Given that Tali and Garrus are supposed to be squad members in the third game, obviously their deaths at the end of ME2 will affect ME3. The others I'm less sure about. (Hmm... can you get everyone killed except for them?)
Destroying the Collector base
Of my three complete ME2 runthroughs, I've only left the base intact once, and it's pretty clear from the discussion with the Illusive Man that no, this was a bloody stupid thing to do.
Basically what I'm saying is that I want the choices you made in ME2 to have consequences to the story of ME3, rather than just triggering tiny events, like an asari thanking you for sparing the rachni.
Overall, I was disappointed how my ME1 decisions largely resulted in cosmetic changes; it didn't affect gameplay one jot whether Wrex, the rachni, or the Council died, and neither did it matter much who you left on Virmire. Just about the only difference is whether or not you can be reinstated as a spectre, and even that only opens up one dialogue option during an optional sidequest. This may be because they had to keep you on the rails for ME2, but they've been pretty clear about how ME3 is the end of the trilogy, so hopefully the endings can branch out depending on what you've done.
So here's a list of all the choices that you can make in the first two games that I hope have dire consequences in the third.
Killing/sparing the Rachni Queen
I noticed that if you just start a new ME2 game without importing an ME1 character, it assumes you let as many people/races die as possible to generally give you the worst universe. Still, despite the fact that the rachni were part of the most generally frustrating level of ME1, I hope they make a return appearance if you spared them.
Killing/sparing the Council
Again, saving them granted you one extra cutscene in ME2, but you had to go out of your way to get it. Let's have something more substantial next time around.
Killing/sparing Wrex
This was another choice that didn't affect gameplay at all, but it's clear from Wreav's comments that the krogan are headed in a different direction under him. Hopefully this plays out.
How you handled Tali's and Legion's loyalty missions
This is so obviously flagged as a massive choice that it's going to be insulting if it doesn't have a massive effect (yuk yuk) on the third game. If your morality score isn't high enough, you either have to get Tali exiled or balkanize the rag-tag fugitive fleet. And then later on you can either re-write or kill the renegade Dal- er, geth, and then the choices you have as Tali and Legion's conflict play out are clearly going to have consequences. Will the quarians and the geth make peace, or will the quarians have to run off to their mythical thirteenth colony, only to find that it's a nuclear wasteland? (To be fair, I thought the quarians were nuts to be talking about re-taking their homeworld until I learned that, in contrast to Battlestar's 50,293 survivors, the quarian fleet has about 17 million refugees. So yeah, there are some differences.)
Who died
Given that Tali and Garrus are supposed to be squad members in the third game, obviously their deaths at the end of ME2 will affect ME3. The others I'm less sure about. (Hmm... can you get everyone killed except for them?)
Destroying the Collector base
Of my three complete ME2 runthroughs, I've only left the base intact once, and it's pretty clear from the discussion with the Illusive Man that no, this was a bloody stupid thing to do.
Basically what I'm saying is that I want the choices you made in ME2 to have consequences to the story of ME3, rather than just triggering tiny events, like an asari thanking you for sparing the rachni.
BtVS: Some Assembly Required
After burning through the entire first season with my aunt, I realized it would be a good idea to get back to reviewing this show. And since we're getting through one episode a night (usually), it means I'll have plenty of blogging material.
"Some Assembly Required" is the 2nd episode of Season 2, which effectively means it's still Season 1 pretending to be Season 2 because the number has changed (in much the same way that the 50s didn't really become the 60s until Kennedy was dead and the Beatles were popular). Unlike a bunch of Season 1 filler episodes, though, this plot doesn't get re-used later on. So at least there's that.
Here's the plot in a nutshell: two members of the nerd squad have resurrected Nicer Nerd's brother, Daryl (Darryl? Daryll? We see his grave at the end and I remember being confused by the spelling). Now they're busy making Bride of Frankenstien for him. As we'll see in Season 3's "The Zeppo," resurrection is a hella lot easier by magic than by science. There was a car crash recently, and the nerd squad harvested the bodies of the three cheerleaders who died, picking and choosing the best bits. However, none of the heads were viable because the mortuary used formaldehyde, which froze their brains or something. So Evil Nerd wants to take some living girl's head, and wouldn't you know, that just happens to be Cordelia.
So having busted their humps explaining why they couldn't use any of the three dead heads (aside from the possibility that Darryl doesn't share their taste in music), the writers then completely gloss over the fact that Darryl died mountain climbing. I somehow doubt Nicer Nerd got to him before the coroner did, unless it was a family vacation or something. But if he brought him back right away, why would Mom be all catatonic?
Also, the big thing about creating a Bride of Frankenstein is that Darryl is now covered in hideous scars and has a metal plate stuck in his arm for some reason. If his head were caved in from the fall, that would be understandable, but unless a wild bear got to him before the coroner did, I don't understand all the scars. The scarring is the justification for why Darryl doesn't just move somewhere else, take a different name, and find a girlfriend. It's pretty important from a storytelling perspective, but the explanation for it either never existed to begin with, or was left on the cutting room floor, and unlike Battlestar, we don't have the luxury of seeing deleted scenes.
Now because Buffy's relationship with Angel is evolving, you'd think the writers would try to insert some deeper subtext into the whole "mortal/undead" relationship issue involving Darryl, but that never really happens. He decides he wants his zombie girlfriend to have Cordelia's head, because they were dating while he was alive. The fact that she has a complete body and a pulse at the moment is a minor inconvenience to Evil Nerd, who dutifully kidnaps her. She protests that she could just keep her head and stay with Darryl anyway. Yeah, she's probably lying - this is the girl who was more concerned with airbrushing her Prom date's bruises out of their photographs than with her Prom date's health, after all. But Darryl's response is all manner of icky. See, he knows she'll just run away unless she's as hideous as he is.
Whereas Angel seems really hesitant to do what his blood tells him and get involved with a mortal, Darryl's attitude is all "hang the consequences, me me me me me." Wait, what am I saying? Cordy's perfect for him.
But then the lab gets set on fire for no real reason and Darryl nearly kills Buffy but instead goes and jumps on his headless bride and burns to death, thus bringing this bizzare and not-at-all thought-out tale to a close.
There's a sort of b-plot to this episode, involving Giles and Jenny Calendar having their first date, which is all manner of funny. But then, their relationship always seems to be the b-plot in the b-movie episodes (cf. "I Robot... You Jane"). Fortunately, the next episode that involves their relationship ("Dark Age") is good. Whew.
Buffy has a smaller body of work than Doctor Who, so it should be relatively easy to grade each episode on a ten-point scale. The problem is, Buffy also fluctuates drastically in quality between seasons. For a Season 2 episode, especially with "School Hard" just around the corner, this one's pretty lousy and probably ranks about a 2 (and that's only because I don't give out zeroes, and only give ones to episodes that are either pointlessly dumb or blatantly offensive polemics... again, "I Robot... You Jane" springs to mind). But given what Season 1 was like, and some of the awful dreck to come in later seasons, I'll bump this one up to a final score of 3 out of 10.
(As a side note, rating Buffy is going to be easier than rating Doctor Who. For a start, there are only two episodes - "Innocence" and "Hush" - that are getting perfect scores, and only a handful more that are getting nines, whereas in Doctor Who I often had trouble differentiating between an 8/10 and a 9/10 serial. Further notes on my rating system: because I don't give out zeroes, five out of ten means "slightly below average" and six out of ten means "slightly above average." 8 and even 7 generally mean "good, but others are better.")
"Some Assembly Required" is the 2nd episode of Season 2, which effectively means it's still Season 1 pretending to be Season 2 because the number has changed (in much the same way that the 50s didn't really become the 60s until Kennedy was dead and the Beatles were popular). Unlike a bunch of Season 1 filler episodes, though, this plot doesn't get re-used later on. So at least there's that.
Here's the plot in a nutshell: two members of the nerd squad have resurrected Nicer Nerd's brother, Daryl (Darryl? Daryll? We see his grave at the end and I remember being confused by the spelling). Now they're busy making Bride of Frankenstien for him. As we'll see in Season 3's "The Zeppo," resurrection is a hella lot easier by magic than by science. There was a car crash recently, and the nerd squad harvested the bodies of the three cheerleaders who died, picking and choosing the best bits. However, none of the heads were viable because the mortuary used formaldehyde, which froze their brains or something. So Evil Nerd wants to take some living girl's head, and wouldn't you know, that just happens to be Cordelia.
So having busted their humps explaining why they couldn't use any of the three dead heads (aside from the possibility that Darryl doesn't share their taste in music), the writers then completely gloss over the fact that Darryl died mountain climbing. I somehow doubt Nicer Nerd got to him before the coroner did, unless it was a family vacation or something. But if he brought him back right away, why would Mom be all catatonic?
Also, the big thing about creating a Bride of Frankenstein is that Darryl is now covered in hideous scars and has a metal plate stuck in his arm for some reason. If his head were caved in from the fall, that would be understandable, but unless a wild bear got to him before the coroner did, I don't understand all the scars. The scarring is the justification for why Darryl doesn't just move somewhere else, take a different name, and find a girlfriend. It's pretty important from a storytelling perspective, but the explanation for it either never existed to begin with, or was left on the cutting room floor, and unlike Battlestar, we don't have the luxury of seeing deleted scenes.
Now because Buffy's relationship with Angel is evolving, you'd think the writers would try to insert some deeper subtext into the whole "mortal/undead" relationship issue involving Darryl, but that never really happens. He decides he wants his zombie girlfriend to have Cordelia's head, because they were dating while he was alive. The fact that she has a complete body and a pulse at the moment is a minor inconvenience to Evil Nerd, who dutifully kidnaps her. She protests that she could just keep her head and stay with Darryl anyway. Yeah, she's probably lying - this is the girl who was more concerned with airbrushing her Prom date's bruises out of their photographs than with her Prom date's health, after all. But Darryl's response is all manner of icky. See, he knows she'll just run away unless she's as hideous as he is.
Whereas Angel seems really hesitant to do what his blood tells him and get involved with a mortal, Darryl's attitude is all "hang the consequences, me me me me me." Wait, what am I saying? Cordy's perfect for him.
But then the lab gets set on fire for no real reason and Darryl nearly kills Buffy but instead goes and jumps on his headless bride and burns to death, thus bringing this bizzare and not-at-all thought-out tale to a close.
There's a sort of b-plot to this episode, involving Giles and Jenny Calendar having their first date, which is all manner of funny. But then, their relationship always seems to be the b-plot in the b-movie episodes (cf. "I Robot... You Jane"). Fortunately, the next episode that involves their relationship ("Dark Age") is good. Whew.
Buffy has a smaller body of work than Doctor Who, so it should be relatively easy to grade each episode on a ten-point scale. The problem is, Buffy also fluctuates drastically in quality between seasons. For a Season 2 episode, especially with "School Hard" just around the corner, this one's pretty lousy and probably ranks about a 2 (and that's only because I don't give out zeroes, and only give ones to episodes that are either pointlessly dumb or blatantly offensive polemics... again, "I Robot... You Jane" springs to mind). But given what Season 1 was like, and some of the awful dreck to come in later seasons, I'll bump this one up to a final score of 3 out of 10.
(As a side note, rating Buffy is going to be easier than rating Doctor Who. For a start, there are only two episodes - "Innocence" and "Hush" - that are getting perfect scores, and only a handful more that are getting nines, whereas in Doctor Who I often had trouble differentiating between an 8/10 and a 9/10 serial. Further notes on my rating system: because I don't give out zeroes, five out of ten means "slightly below average" and six out of ten means "slightly above average." 8 and even 7 generally mean "good, but others are better.")
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Quote of the Day: 11-8-11 edition
Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is, well, utterly massive. My favorites are those books that deal with the City Watch, led by a deeply cynical but still Lawful Good ex-alcoholic copper named Sam Vimes. And my favorite Watch book is Night Watch, in which Vimes gets sent back 30 years in time to the eve of a violent street revolution. The whole scenario is a time-travelling riff on Les Mis, but you don't really need to know that to enjoy the book (which, fair warning, is pretty grim).
Anyway, being about a revolution, the book has plenty of wonderful cynical quotes about revolutions. Here's one of the best:
"There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots [...] who were on the side of what they called "The People." Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People."
And a bonus one:
"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."
Anyway, being about a revolution, the book has plenty of wonderful cynical quotes about revolutions. Here's one of the best:
"There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots [...] who were on the side of what they called "The People." Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People."
And a bonus one:
"Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."
Friday, November 4, 2011
I just finished a video game wherein a character voiced by Colonel Tigh made a Hitchhiker's Guide reference.
And yes, it was awesome.
(Mass Effect 2)
(Mass Effect 2)
Monday, October 17, 2011
The Quest for Caprica
The nine episodes beginning with "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I" and ending with "Home, Part II" make up a fairly tightly-knit arc that it doesn't make a great deal of sense to separate them by individual episodes, but rather to spend a blog post devoted to each of the three or four stories that unfold during this time; Starbuck's quest back to Caprica, the FUBAR ground mission on Kobol, the double whammy of Roslin's arrest and Adama's near-death, and finally the Home episodes where everyone reunites on the surface of Kobol.
With that in mind, this particular blog is going to focus on the character of Starbuck (and to a lesser extent, Helo) from the episode "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I" through "The Farm." And yeah, I think I already did a post dedicated solely to "The Farm," but I want to revisit it now that I know how the entire series played out.
So here's a quick re-cap of the important things that happened to Starbuck in the first eleven episodes of Season 1.
-She finally 'fessed up about her role in Zak Adama's death, only to be forgiven about 48 hours later.
-She broke her knee, putting her out of the cockpit for a very long time and causing her to miss the big Star Wars episode.
-She hijacked a Cylon Raider, which she learned how to fly. (Curiously, Tyrol couldn't, despite the fact that he probably built the thing in the first place.)
-She got a big lecture on destiny from a Cylon she was torturing.
-She flirted openly with Apollo, but when he repeatedly failed to act, she shacked up with Baltar instead.
Okay, that last one isn't exactly what happened, and you can see the Baltar/Starbuck thing with the benefit of hindsight. But at the beginning of KLG, when she was in bed with someone, we all assumed it was Lee, and the last-second actor swap to Baltar kind of rang a bit hollow.
Kobol's Last Gleaming
A Raptor team finds Kobol, but when a Cylon Baseship appears, Starbuck immediately starts to draft another certified out-of-the-box Kara Thrace original. This, combined with the fact that she frakked Baltar instead of him, royally pisses off Lee. Well, it probably has almost everything to do with the "frakking Baltar" thing and very little to do with the "you went over my head" thing, because this is the only time in the history of the show that he complains about it.
They punch each other, but then Starbuck storms out before the sexual tension reaches the breaking point and causes a hull breach. Roslin summons her and tells her to defy orders and go back to Caprica to get the Arrow of Apollo because scripture told her to.
Starbuck does. She disobeys orders from a man who has looked the other way at least twice; once when she struck a superior officer in the Mini, and once in regards to the whole Zak thing. Bill Adama is the closest thing she has to a father (not that we know the specifics about her parents yet, but it's true nonetheless). She is part of the family. (Ron Moore's Season 4 comment about Adama, Apollo and Starbuck being the Father, Son and Holy Ghost resonates all the way back here, even though Kara's not a ghost yet.)
Why does she betray Adama? Part of it is the same reason she gives for why she slept with Baltar: she's a worlds-class frakup. But there are other factors that help justify it as well. Adama lied about knowing where Earth is (that scene is great). Leoben's whole special-destiny thing is still gnawing at her. And now she knows what only two other people in the fleet know: Roslin is the dying leader foretold in the prophecies of Pythia (yes, two: Roslin herself, and Elosha. Cottle and Apollo don't know about Pythia, and Billy's clearly agnostic at best). Suddenly, Roslin, not Adama, is the fleet's best chance at finding Earth. And Starbuck is going to take it. Frak the consequences.
Starbuck's decision to steal the Raider, and in so doing endanger the team stuck on Kobol's surface, kicks off a political struggle that will get a separate blog post later this week. But she makes it to Caprica no worse for the wear (she looks like the jump gave her a headache, but I'm sure she's had far worse hangovers). Conveniently, the Arrow of Apollo is in the Delphi Museum, and the Cylons never bothered to remove it. (And yet, per "Home, Part I," the Cylons know all about the Tomb anyway... go figure.)
Starbuck gets into a hand-to-hand fight with a Six, and she only survives because of a lucky bit of rebar that manages to impale Six but not harm her at all, even though they both fall on it. That's when Helo and Athena-to-be show up. Starbuck cottons on to the whole "Sharon's a Cylon" thing, but Helo won't let her kill Sharon because she's pregnant.
The Helo's Journey
Helo's been stuck on Caprica ever since the writers decided not to kill him off off-screen in the Mini and instead bring him back for the show. He's been accompanied by Athena-to-be, whom he only recently found out is a) technically not the Boomer he knew from Galactica, b) a Cylon, and c) pregnant by him. That's enough to seriously screw up anyone's worldview, and Helo handles it rather well. By which I means he shoots Sharon in the shoulder, and then he lets her hijack Starbuck's ride.
So now Starbuck and Helo are stuck wandering around on Caprica, but fortunately Starbuck's old apartment is nearby. This set makes a couple of surprise reappearances in Seasons 3 and 4; the mandala painting is present, but when Starbuck plays a tape of her dad, it's Bear McCreary covering Phillip Glass instead of "All Along the Watchtower." Oh well. Now, in general, the "Meanwhile, on Cylon-Occupied Caprica" scenes tend to feel like filler. There aren't that many significant events that take place there, and yet the planet appears at least once in seventeen of the first eighteen episodes of the show. But this scene always felt different. It was our first real glimpse of who Starbuck was.
It's true that we knew about the hotshot Viper jock with the attitude problem. It's true that we knew about Zak. It's true that we knew a little bit about her mother. But going back to Starbuck's house, seeing her paintings, learning that the apartment runs on batteries because she never paid the power bill... even hearing her dad's music, all of these things tell us so much more about the character. It was in this scene that Starbuck stopped being a hypercharged badass maverick and became a real person, at least to me.
These episodes are also rife with irony, as Helo must endure endless ribbing about how he fell in love with a toaster, when Starbuck's about to do the same thing. And that brings us straight to Anders. Re-watching the entire show from start to finish with my family, I found it jarring how many times Helo or Sharon insisted that they were the only two people left on Caprica, only for Anders and fifty-odd resistance members (suddenly bumped up to ninety-odd in The Plan for some reason) to show up out of nowhere.
Once you get past the initial shock and realize that no, they're not revealing all eight extant Cylon models at once, the first Anders scene plays out fairly nicely. His team have spotted some skin-jobs, so they're going to go take them out. Only problem is, it's actually Starbuck and Helo, and whatever else Destiny Girl and Toasterfrakker are, they're not skin-jobs (look in a mirror, Anders).
So they do the whole "shoot at each other" thing until that somehow resolves into a Mexican standoff, and then Helo and Anders manage to convince Starbuck that the resistance is made up of humans and everybody conveniently forgets that Starbuck and Helo haven't proved their identities. Some obvious questions ensue, such as why the resistance let Starbuck and Helo pull out extra guns, and why they never had to answer any difficult questions ("Starbuck, how many times have you been mistaken for a Cylon and nearly killed for it?" "Only two so far, but I'll have two more opportunities later on this season").
Then Starbuck and Anders play Pyramid, which is foreplay for them. One thing leads to another, and before you can ask why Starbuck keeps needing band-aids on her left shoulderblade, they're frakking. (The band-aid thing gets especially hilarious in "Scar," as the episode cuts between two similar scenes of Starbuck with her shirt off.)
And then we have "The Farm," where Starbuck gets abducted and, per the "What the Frak" special, "gets taken to a creepy baby factory where Simon the Cylon steals her ovary." We get more hints about her past (and again from a Cylon) before she finally manages an escape. She leaves Anders to die on Caprica but promises to come back for him one day, even though that Heavy Raider Athena-to-be stole could probably fit him and a couple of others. Oh well.
She re-joins the fleet in the following episode, and we'll be picking that story up on Thursday. For now, look at the way Starbuck's story unfolds; she disobeys orders for a good reason, but ends up finding out horrible truths about Boomer and enduring a terrible ordeal at the Farm. She finds a new love interest, but has to leave him behind on a radioactive rock. Starbuck's past comes up twice; at her apartment, where she plays her father's music, and at the Farm, when Simon asks about her broken fingers. The Cylons she's encountered so far all seem to know things about her that they shouldn't. Leoben and Simon knew about her mother. Sharon knows all about her because she has Boomer's memories. It's a shame that for the rest of the season the only Cylon threat she faces is the airborne variety, because the psychological damage the Cylons were doing to her looked like it was going somewhere. By the time Leoben reappears, it's almost too late.
With that in mind, this particular blog is going to focus on the character of Starbuck (and to a lesser extent, Helo) from the episode "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I" through "The Farm." And yeah, I think I already did a post dedicated solely to "The Farm," but I want to revisit it now that I know how the entire series played out.
So here's a quick re-cap of the important things that happened to Starbuck in the first eleven episodes of Season 1.
-She finally 'fessed up about her role in Zak Adama's death, only to be forgiven about 48 hours later.
-She broke her knee, putting her out of the cockpit for a very long time and causing her to miss the big Star Wars episode.
-She hijacked a Cylon Raider, which she learned how to fly. (Curiously, Tyrol couldn't, despite the fact that he probably built the thing in the first place.)
-She got a big lecture on destiny from a Cylon she was torturing.
-She flirted openly with Apollo, but when he repeatedly failed to act, she shacked up with Baltar instead.
Okay, that last one isn't exactly what happened, and you can see the Baltar/Starbuck thing with the benefit of hindsight. But at the beginning of KLG, when she was in bed with someone, we all assumed it was Lee, and the last-second actor swap to Baltar kind of rang a bit hollow.
Kobol's Last Gleaming
A Raptor team finds Kobol, but when a Cylon Baseship appears, Starbuck immediately starts to draft another certified out-of-the-box Kara Thrace original. This, combined with the fact that she frakked Baltar instead of him, royally pisses off Lee. Well, it probably has almost everything to do with the "frakking Baltar" thing and very little to do with the "you went over my head" thing, because this is the only time in the history of the show that he complains about it.
They punch each other, but then Starbuck storms out before the sexual tension reaches the breaking point and causes a hull breach. Roslin summons her and tells her to defy orders and go back to Caprica to get the Arrow of Apollo because scripture told her to.
Starbuck does. She disobeys orders from a man who has looked the other way at least twice; once when she struck a superior officer in the Mini, and once in regards to the whole Zak thing. Bill Adama is the closest thing she has to a father (not that we know the specifics about her parents yet, but it's true nonetheless). She is part of the family. (Ron Moore's Season 4 comment about Adama, Apollo and Starbuck being the Father, Son and Holy Ghost resonates all the way back here, even though Kara's not a ghost yet.)
Why does she betray Adama? Part of it is the same reason she gives for why she slept with Baltar: she's a worlds-class frakup. But there are other factors that help justify it as well. Adama lied about knowing where Earth is (that scene is great). Leoben's whole special-destiny thing is still gnawing at her. And now she knows what only two other people in the fleet know: Roslin is the dying leader foretold in the prophecies of Pythia (yes, two: Roslin herself, and Elosha. Cottle and Apollo don't know about Pythia, and Billy's clearly agnostic at best). Suddenly, Roslin, not Adama, is the fleet's best chance at finding Earth. And Starbuck is going to take it. Frak the consequences.
Starbuck's decision to steal the Raider, and in so doing endanger the team stuck on Kobol's surface, kicks off a political struggle that will get a separate blog post later this week. But she makes it to Caprica no worse for the wear (she looks like the jump gave her a headache, but I'm sure she's had far worse hangovers). Conveniently, the Arrow of Apollo is in the Delphi Museum, and the Cylons never bothered to remove it. (And yet, per "Home, Part I," the Cylons know all about the Tomb anyway... go figure.)
Starbuck gets into a hand-to-hand fight with a Six, and she only survives because of a lucky bit of rebar that manages to impale Six but not harm her at all, even though they both fall on it. That's when Helo and Athena-to-be show up. Starbuck cottons on to the whole "Sharon's a Cylon" thing, but Helo won't let her kill Sharon because she's pregnant.
The Helo's Journey
Helo's been stuck on Caprica ever since the writers decided not to kill him off off-screen in the Mini and instead bring him back for the show. He's been accompanied by Athena-to-be, whom he only recently found out is a) technically not the Boomer he knew from Galactica, b) a Cylon, and c) pregnant by him. That's enough to seriously screw up anyone's worldview, and Helo handles it rather well. By which I means he shoots Sharon in the shoulder, and then he lets her hijack Starbuck's ride.
So now Starbuck and Helo are stuck wandering around on Caprica, but fortunately Starbuck's old apartment is nearby. This set makes a couple of surprise reappearances in Seasons 3 and 4; the mandala painting is present, but when Starbuck plays a tape of her dad, it's Bear McCreary covering Phillip Glass instead of "All Along the Watchtower." Oh well. Now, in general, the "Meanwhile, on Cylon-Occupied Caprica" scenes tend to feel like filler. There aren't that many significant events that take place there, and yet the planet appears at least once in seventeen of the first eighteen episodes of the show. But this scene always felt different. It was our first real glimpse of who Starbuck was.
It's true that we knew about the hotshot Viper jock with the attitude problem. It's true that we knew about Zak. It's true that we knew a little bit about her mother. But going back to Starbuck's house, seeing her paintings, learning that the apartment runs on batteries because she never paid the power bill... even hearing her dad's music, all of these things tell us so much more about the character. It was in this scene that Starbuck stopped being a hypercharged badass maverick and became a real person, at least to me.
These episodes are also rife with irony, as Helo must endure endless ribbing about how he fell in love with a toaster, when Starbuck's about to do the same thing. And that brings us straight to Anders. Re-watching the entire show from start to finish with my family, I found it jarring how many times Helo or Sharon insisted that they were the only two people left on Caprica, only for Anders and fifty-odd resistance members (suddenly bumped up to ninety-odd in The Plan for some reason) to show up out of nowhere.
Once you get past the initial shock and realize that no, they're not revealing all eight extant Cylon models at once, the first Anders scene plays out fairly nicely. His team have spotted some skin-jobs, so they're going to go take them out. Only problem is, it's actually Starbuck and Helo, and whatever else Destiny Girl and Toasterfrakker are, they're not skin-jobs (look in a mirror, Anders).
So they do the whole "shoot at each other" thing until that somehow resolves into a Mexican standoff, and then Helo and Anders manage to convince Starbuck that the resistance is made up of humans and everybody conveniently forgets that Starbuck and Helo haven't proved their identities. Some obvious questions ensue, such as why the resistance let Starbuck and Helo pull out extra guns, and why they never had to answer any difficult questions ("Starbuck, how many times have you been mistaken for a Cylon and nearly killed for it?" "Only two so far, but I'll have two more opportunities later on this season").
Then Starbuck and Anders play Pyramid, which is foreplay for them. One thing leads to another, and before you can ask why Starbuck keeps needing band-aids on her left shoulderblade, they're frakking. (The band-aid thing gets especially hilarious in "Scar," as the episode cuts between two similar scenes of Starbuck with her shirt off.)
And then we have "The Farm," where Starbuck gets abducted and, per the "What the Frak" special, "gets taken to a creepy baby factory where Simon the Cylon steals her ovary." We get more hints about her past (and again from a Cylon) before she finally manages an escape. She leaves Anders to die on Caprica but promises to come back for him one day, even though that Heavy Raider Athena-to-be stole could probably fit him and a couple of others. Oh well.
She re-joins the fleet in the following episode, and we'll be picking that story up on Thursday. For now, look at the way Starbuck's story unfolds; she disobeys orders for a good reason, but ends up finding out horrible truths about Boomer and enduring a terrible ordeal at the Farm. She finds a new love interest, but has to leave him behind on a radioactive rock. Starbuck's past comes up twice; at her apartment, where she plays her father's music, and at the Farm, when Simon asks about her broken fingers. The Cylons she's encountered so far all seem to know things about her that they shouldn't. Leoben and Simon knew about her mother. Sharon knows all about her because she has Boomer's memories. It's a shame that for the rest of the season the only Cylon threat she faces is the airborne variety, because the psychological damage the Cylons were doing to her looked like it was going somewhere. By the time Leoben reappears, it's almost too late.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
10 reasons why it would suck to live aboard the Battlestar Galactica
I adore that show, but I don't think I'd like to live there. Here's why.
10) Almost everyone you care about is dead. You will now spend the next 4 years cooped up in a metal box with people you hate.
9) Rule of law replaced by a joint dictatorship comprised of a tired old man and a former schoolteacher who slowly becomes a tyrant. Often times they'll make stupid decisions, like wasting half the fleet's fuel looking for Starbuck, or not bothering to court-martial the guy who just cost humanity half their firepower (good job, Apollo) or the other guy who just sabotaged the plan to win the war (thanks for that, Helo). Even when it functions properly, a former terrorist is trying to undermine it for his own ends. At various times, said joint dictatorship replaced by an insane Admiral, a drunk XO, a terrorist-turned-demagogue (and his idealistic, one-legged co-mutineer), or the guy who can't stop talking to his imaginary girlfriend and is partially responsible for #10.
8) Said joint dictatorship takes the better part of four years to realize that the old political system doesn't work anymore - and in the meantime, we have to suffer through President Baltar, Vice-President Zarek, and half a dozen minor political crises. Issues that were once limited just to the Gemenons or the Sagittarons suddenly become fleet-wide issues. In short, the death of federalism (which in turn leads to the rise of demagogues like Zarek).
7) Realization that you're stuck with 24,000 moronic fraks who voted for President Baltar.
6) Algae for breakfast, algae for lunch, algae with a side order of algae and algae on top for dinner.
5) Slave labor. Even if they do compensate you, what are you going to buy? The only things the fleet seems to produce are munitions, booze, and suits (I don't think Apollo or Zarek brought theirs with them). Oh, and peg-legs.
4) 1 in 5 odds you'll die before you reach Earth. (50,293 down to 38K and change by the end.)
3) ...and if you do get to Earth, they outlaw technology. Goodbye, sanitation.
2) Your best friend might be a Cylon.
1) You might be a Cylon. Madam President hasn't fulfilled her airlocking quota this year.
10) Almost everyone you care about is dead. You will now spend the next 4 years cooped up in a metal box with people you hate.
9) Rule of law replaced by a joint dictatorship comprised of a tired old man and a former schoolteacher who slowly becomes a tyrant. Often times they'll make stupid decisions, like wasting half the fleet's fuel looking for Starbuck, or not bothering to court-martial the guy who just cost humanity half their firepower (good job, Apollo) or the other guy who just sabotaged the plan to win the war (thanks for that, Helo). Even when it functions properly, a former terrorist is trying to undermine it for his own ends. At various times, said joint dictatorship replaced by an insane Admiral, a drunk XO, a terrorist-turned-demagogue (and his idealistic, one-legged co-mutineer), or the guy who can't stop talking to his imaginary girlfriend and is partially responsible for #10.
8) Said joint dictatorship takes the better part of four years to realize that the old political system doesn't work anymore - and in the meantime, we have to suffer through President Baltar, Vice-President Zarek, and half a dozen minor political crises. Issues that were once limited just to the Gemenons or the Sagittarons suddenly become fleet-wide issues. In short, the death of federalism (which in turn leads to the rise of demagogues like Zarek).
7) Realization that you're stuck with 24,000 moronic fraks who voted for President Baltar.
6) Algae for breakfast, algae for lunch, algae with a side order of algae and algae on top for dinner.
5) Slave labor. Even if they do compensate you, what are you going to buy? The only things the fleet seems to produce are munitions, booze, and suits (I don't think Apollo or Zarek brought theirs with them). Oh, and peg-legs.
4) 1 in 5 odds you'll die before you reach Earth. (50,293 down to 38K and change by the end.)
3) ...and if you do get to Earth, they outlaw technology. Goodbye, sanitation.
2) Your best friend might be a Cylon.
1) You might be a Cylon. Madam President hasn't fulfilled her airlocking quota this year.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Or... y'know, just no prequels ever
Yes, two posts in one day. All because this got me thinking, and I needed some way to celebrate.
So... why do we have prequels at all? No, seriously, what do they bring to the table? From "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force" to "The Cylons were created by Man," anything and everything we need to know about a film or TV show's background has been given to us in plain, simple terms. (Note: Caprica > Star Wars Prequels.)
You already know who's going to be alive at the end.
The audience has got to care about your characters. As Joss Whedon finally found out on Dollhouse, people have a hard time getting invested in your characters if they think they're gonna die. Now, Whedon's problem was his penchant for killing fan-favorite characters. Prequels have a slightly different problem.
From the moment it became clear that his younger, whinier sidekick was Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn was a dead man walking. We all knew he was going to die. It was only a question of when. Same goes for literally every person who picks up a lightsaber who is not Anakin or Obi-Wan. Same goes for Padme. We were hoping that the same went for the cartoon rabbit. And we knew that Anakin was going to get dropped into a volcano and put inside a sci-fi gimp suit. So what happened in the Star Wars prequels that we didn't see coming?
While you're pondering that, consider Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. We know from fairly early on that a) Hugh Jackman's character is going to die, and b) that sometime prior to this, he's going to injure his leg very, very badly. Now I'll argue later on that The Prestige is the exception that proves the rule, but for now just consider the fact that you probably started wincing each time Jackman went down that trapdoor. In a nutshell, this is because The Prestige is one self-contained piece; the chronologically-scrambled narrative is here used as a means of foreshadowing. If each of the three acts of the film had been separate films, and those three films were not released in chronological order, it would have been a different story.
Now, Caprica does its best to subvert this. One, it is set more than 50 years before the events of BSG and features a cast of characters who never show up on BSG, plus one character who has the same name as a BSG character, presumably to mislead you into thinking they're the same so that when the character dies, you go "what the frak???"
Still, Caprica has to overcome the big massive hurdle of a fact that everybody will be dead in 57 years at the outset. Now, yes, everyone dies eventually, but it's hard to care about the characters and the society in Caprica since we'd spent four years on BSG getting over the fact that everyone our heroes knew back home were dead and gone. It's like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Everyone's already dead, so why does any of it matter?
To its credit, not that it deserves much, Star Trek Enterprise is set way before the Kirk era, and there's not a young Kirk or Spock running around getting in the way. On paper, therefore, you'd think that Enterprise would have a better shot than either Caprica or The Phantom Menace.
You have to reduce the amount of cool technology.
Star Trek had shot its bolt on technological wizardry, and the sane thing to do in order to get a show that wasn't just about a bunch of techno-wizards in space solving all their problems with technobabble would be to do a prequel. But did it have to be so far back in time? The holodeck had, for better or worse, been a staple of Star Trek since 1987, and it suddenly disappeared. We were stuck following the adventures of a guy nobody had ever heard of before in a version of the Enterprise that was conspicuously absent from Picard's collection.
Hell, there are about 75 years between where the Original Series films end and where TNG picks up. We know virtually nothing about that time. You'd lose site-to-site transporting, holodecks, hyper-capable cloaking devices... and, the original show was very rarely about technobabble. So yeah, you'd still have shields, phasers, torpedoes, and that all-important magic-wand-shaped-like-a-deflector-dish. As long as you stayed away from Young Picard, I'd watch a Star Trek show set between TOS and TNG. (Okay, now I'm fantasizing about a Caprica-style Trek show featuring the creation of the holodeck.)
Ron Moore famously took a different approach, qutting Star Trek in general to make Battlestar Galactica, a show in which there are no deflector shields or techno-wizardry. But was that because he wanted to avoid technobabble, or because the Miniseries budget was already stretched to the breaking point? Caprica has oodles of fancy-pants magitech that was never so much as alluded to in BSG. Yeah, yeah, First Cylon War, whatever. (In Star Trek: Holodeck, there is no big calamity at the beginning of TNG to wipe out all our characters and technology. It'd be a hard task to navigate all the continuity and still be accesible to the average fan, but it could probably be done.)
Now in the Star Wars prequels, Lucas tries to have his techno-cake and eat it too. On the one hand, there are no Death Stars. Jedi Starfighters don't have hyperspace capability (gee, it would have been nice if this were a plot point, ever). There are some obvious "precursors" to tech in the classic trilogy, especially throughout Revenge of the Sith.
But on the other hand, despite the 20-year-gap between Sith and Hope, there really aren't that many changes. There's a Death Star, yes. They can now make fake flesh so that Mark Hamill doesn't have to wear a blue glove all the time... I mean, Luke can have a normal-looking hand. The changes are largely cosmetic, except for the Death Star, and don't really affect the story as a whole. How can a 20-year-old droid hack a state-of-the-art trash-compactor?
So, um, what I'm saying here is that the Star Wars prequels actually did a good job with the tech thing...
(The author has a sudden recollection of R2-D2's rocket thrusters.)
Frak.
"How we got here" is not as interesting as "what do we do now?"
Take the superhero genre for a second. Do you care how Thomas Wayne made that fortune that his son squandered on Bat-themed suits, cars, weapons, floodlights, etc? I don't. Or what Superman's dad was up to before Krypton did the big firework? Nah.
Likewise, I don't wanna know how Galactica got constructed or what life was like aboard it prior to the Cylon attack. We saw enough of that in the Miniseries. Not that what we did see was bad, mind you, but it served its purpose as part of a larger story. Here's a quick description of the BSG backstory: "A society a hella lot like ours gets flash-fried by our own robotic creations. The last survivors go on the run. Paranoia, intrigue, and fantastic character-driven storytelling ensue."
Star Trek Enterprise tries to show us what the creation of the Federation was like. Even George Lucas wasn't stupid enough to show us the formation of the Galactic Republic.
Stories should be self-contained. They should start at their beginning and end at their end.
I like that Battlestar even took the extra step of ensuring that there could be no continuation by destroying the Galactica in the finale. To me that sent a very clear message: "we're done here. We've said all we came to say. There will never be more. We promise not to wreck this for you with a sequel. (And if you really want one, just watch Blade Runner.)" It's an entirely self-contained story that doesn't need Caprica. Nor does it need Blood & Chrome. We know everything we need to know.
Now take someone who's notorious for not telling his stories in chronological order. Christopher Nolan has taken the chronologically-scrambled story and turned it into an art form. But note that, aside from his Batman films, which will be discussed in just a moment, each of his films are self-contained. It's true that they don't begin at their chronological beginning, but Nolan builds mystery and suspense by showing things to his audience out of order. The best example of this is, in my opinion, The Prestige. Now, I know I'm part of a pretty small minority when I say that The Prestige is my favorite Nolan film. But I love the fact that once you know Christian Bale is playing twins, it's a whole different story. You'd lose that element if you were given that information at the very beginning. In fact, part of the reason I love The Prestige so much is the fact that you can watch it twice and see a very different film the second time (I rooted for Hugh Jackman pretty much the entire way through the first time, and it was only on second viewing that one of Bale's characters became much more sympathetic).
But imagine if The Prestige only contained the second and third acts. That is, imagine if the story was told in chronological order beginning with Jackman's journey to Colorado and ending with Bale's reunion with his daughter. All you heard about their friendship and early rivalry would be related to you by the other characters. This might just about work, incidentally, though you'd lose a lot. And then later, somebody tried to make the first act into a prequel. Would that be marketable? Would that stand up on its own? I kind of doubt it.
Now the Batman films are a bit different, but they still have self-contained stories to them, with a beginning, middle, end, and in the case of The Dark Knight, an extra end. They're told in chronological order. But would Batman Begins really be a film that could have been made after The Dark Knight? I doubt it. What would be the point?
Why, in short, do filmmakers go backwards after the fact?
See, storytelling is an art. The storyteller has to decide which details to include and which ones to leave out. You're a lot more constrained in television, because every episode has to be 40 minutes and change (and there are a ton of deleted Battlestar scenes I wish had been re-integrated into the DVD episodes, but that's just me).
Star Trek: Holodeck
Now, let's return to my hypothetical idea about a Star Trek show set at roughly 2350 (about 15 years prior to TNG, because if memory serves, the holodeck was a relatively new piece of technology). It'd be set either on or close to Earth and be a character piece - incorporating elements of DS9 and Caprica. No character from TNG, DS9 or Voyager would show up and do anything important. (N.B: the 24th-century Trek shows all had this thing where one character from the previous show would turn up at the beginning in a glorified cameo. I'd be okay with that, so long as it was fleeting enough that it wouldn't lead to a plot hole on the other show.) The only thing that this show would pass on to its sucessors would be the holodeck.
See, the Dominion War isn't really on the same scale as the Nuking of the Colonies in Battlestar, so the whole "everybody's going to die" thing won't really be an issue. As far as cool technology, this would be a show about the creation of the holodeck, the coolest bit of Trek tech ever. I don't know that the holodeck has ever really been used to its full potential. It's been the focus of some comedy episodes on TNG and Voyager, and some "breather" episodes on DS9, and it played an important role in, ugh, Insurrection. The point is that there's a lot of untapped potential here.
There would have to be some conflict, obviously, but it would have to be minor and low-key, to the extent that future/past shows never have/had cause to mention it (something involving Section 31, that secret organization that was introduced on DS9, perhaps). It would in effect be a drama, which is something Trek has never really tried.
Could it work? Maybe, but not under the Star Trek label; drama fans wouldn't watch, and Trek fans would hate it. (Caprica had the same problem.)
So Paramount decided to revive its Trek franchise, but with a "prequel" that knocked everything else out of continuity. Brand recognition, a fresh start, and no continuity problems. Definitely the way to go.
So why do people still think they can make prequels?
So... why do we have prequels at all? No, seriously, what do they bring to the table? From "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force" to "The Cylons were created by Man," anything and everything we need to know about a film or TV show's background has been given to us in plain, simple terms. (Note: Caprica > Star Wars Prequels.)
You already know who's going to be alive at the end.
The audience has got to care about your characters. As Joss Whedon finally found out on Dollhouse, people have a hard time getting invested in your characters if they think they're gonna die. Now, Whedon's problem was his penchant for killing fan-favorite characters. Prequels have a slightly different problem.
From the moment it became clear that his younger, whinier sidekick was Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn was a dead man walking. We all knew he was going to die. It was only a question of when. Same goes for literally every person who picks up a lightsaber who is not Anakin or Obi-Wan. Same goes for Padme. We were hoping that the same went for the cartoon rabbit. And we knew that Anakin was going to get dropped into a volcano and put inside a sci-fi gimp suit. So what happened in the Star Wars prequels that we didn't see coming?
While you're pondering that, consider Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. We know from fairly early on that a) Hugh Jackman's character is going to die, and b) that sometime prior to this, he's going to injure his leg very, very badly. Now I'll argue later on that The Prestige is the exception that proves the rule, but for now just consider the fact that you probably started wincing each time Jackman went down that trapdoor. In a nutshell, this is because The Prestige is one self-contained piece; the chronologically-scrambled narrative is here used as a means of foreshadowing. If each of the three acts of the film had been separate films, and those three films were not released in chronological order, it would have been a different story.
Now, Caprica does its best to subvert this. One, it is set more than 50 years before the events of BSG and features a cast of characters who never show up on BSG, plus one character who has the same name as a BSG character, presumably to mislead you into thinking they're the same so that when the character dies, you go "what the frak???"
Still, Caprica has to overcome the big massive hurdle of a fact that everybody will be dead in 57 years at the outset. Now, yes, everyone dies eventually, but it's hard to care about the characters and the society in Caprica since we'd spent four years on BSG getting over the fact that everyone our heroes knew back home were dead and gone. It's like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Everyone's already dead, so why does any of it matter?
To its credit, not that it deserves much, Star Trek Enterprise is set way before the Kirk era, and there's not a young Kirk or Spock running around getting in the way. On paper, therefore, you'd think that Enterprise would have a better shot than either Caprica or The Phantom Menace.
You have to reduce the amount of cool technology.
Star Trek had shot its bolt on technological wizardry, and the sane thing to do in order to get a show that wasn't just about a bunch of techno-wizards in space solving all their problems with technobabble would be to do a prequel. But did it have to be so far back in time? The holodeck had, for better or worse, been a staple of Star Trek since 1987, and it suddenly disappeared. We were stuck following the adventures of a guy nobody had ever heard of before in a version of the Enterprise that was conspicuously absent from Picard's collection.
Hell, there are about 75 years between where the Original Series films end and where TNG picks up. We know virtually nothing about that time. You'd lose site-to-site transporting, holodecks, hyper-capable cloaking devices... and, the original show was very rarely about technobabble. So yeah, you'd still have shields, phasers, torpedoes, and that all-important magic-wand-shaped-like-a-deflector-dish. As long as you stayed away from Young Picard, I'd watch a Star Trek show set between TOS and TNG. (Okay, now I'm fantasizing about a Caprica-style Trek show featuring the creation of the holodeck.)
Ron Moore famously took a different approach, qutting Star Trek in general to make Battlestar Galactica, a show in which there are no deflector shields or techno-wizardry. But was that because he wanted to avoid technobabble, or because the Miniseries budget was already stretched to the breaking point? Caprica has oodles of fancy-pants magitech that was never so much as alluded to in BSG. Yeah, yeah, First Cylon War, whatever. (In Star Trek: Holodeck, there is no big calamity at the beginning of TNG to wipe out all our characters and technology. It'd be a hard task to navigate all the continuity and still be accesible to the average fan, but it could probably be done.)
Now in the Star Wars prequels, Lucas tries to have his techno-cake and eat it too. On the one hand, there are no Death Stars. Jedi Starfighters don't have hyperspace capability (gee, it would have been nice if this were a plot point, ever). There are some obvious "precursors" to tech in the classic trilogy, especially throughout Revenge of the Sith.
But on the other hand, despite the 20-year-gap between Sith and Hope, there really aren't that many changes. There's a Death Star, yes. They can now make fake flesh so that Mark Hamill doesn't have to wear a blue glove all the time... I mean, Luke can have a normal-looking hand. The changes are largely cosmetic, except for the Death Star, and don't really affect the story as a whole. How can a 20-year-old droid hack a state-of-the-art trash-compactor?
So, um, what I'm saying here is that the Star Wars prequels actually did a good job with the tech thing...
(The author has a sudden recollection of R2-D2's rocket thrusters.)
Frak.
"How we got here" is not as interesting as "what do we do now?"
Take the superhero genre for a second. Do you care how Thomas Wayne made that fortune that his son squandered on Bat-themed suits, cars, weapons, floodlights, etc? I don't. Or what Superman's dad was up to before Krypton did the big firework? Nah.
Likewise, I don't wanna know how Galactica got constructed or what life was like aboard it prior to the Cylon attack. We saw enough of that in the Miniseries. Not that what we did see was bad, mind you, but it served its purpose as part of a larger story. Here's a quick description of the BSG backstory: "A society a hella lot like ours gets flash-fried by our own robotic creations. The last survivors go on the run. Paranoia, intrigue, and fantastic character-driven storytelling ensue."
Star Trek Enterprise tries to show us what the creation of the Federation was like. Even George Lucas wasn't stupid enough to show us the formation of the Galactic Republic.
Stories should be self-contained. They should start at their beginning and end at their end.
I like that Battlestar even took the extra step of ensuring that there could be no continuation by destroying the Galactica in the finale. To me that sent a very clear message: "we're done here. We've said all we came to say. There will never be more. We promise not to wreck this for you with a sequel. (And if you really want one, just watch Blade Runner.)" It's an entirely self-contained story that doesn't need Caprica. Nor does it need Blood & Chrome. We know everything we need to know.
Now take someone who's notorious for not telling his stories in chronological order. Christopher Nolan has taken the chronologically-scrambled story and turned it into an art form. But note that, aside from his Batman films, which will be discussed in just a moment, each of his films are self-contained. It's true that they don't begin at their chronological beginning, but Nolan builds mystery and suspense by showing things to his audience out of order. The best example of this is, in my opinion, The Prestige. Now, I know I'm part of a pretty small minority when I say that The Prestige is my favorite Nolan film. But I love the fact that once you know Christian Bale is playing twins, it's a whole different story. You'd lose that element if you were given that information at the very beginning. In fact, part of the reason I love The Prestige so much is the fact that you can watch it twice and see a very different film the second time (I rooted for Hugh Jackman pretty much the entire way through the first time, and it was only on second viewing that one of Bale's characters became much more sympathetic).
But imagine if The Prestige only contained the second and third acts. That is, imagine if the story was told in chronological order beginning with Jackman's journey to Colorado and ending with Bale's reunion with his daughter. All you heard about their friendship and early rivalry would be related to you by the other characters. This might just about work, incidentally, though you'd lose a lot. And then later, somebody tried to make the first act into a prequel. Would that be marketable? Would that stand up on its own? I kind of doubt it.
Now the Batman films are a bit different, but they still have self-contained stories to them, with a beginning, middle, end, and in the case of The Dark Knight, an extra end. They're told in chronological order. But would Batman Begins really be a film that could have been made after The Dark Knight? I doubt it. What would be the point?
Why, in short, do filmmakers go backwards after the fact?
See, storytelling is an art. The storyteller has to decide which details to include and which ones to leave out. You're a lot more constrained in television, because every episode has to be 40 minutes and change (and there are a ton of deleted Battlestar scenes I wish had been re-integrated into the DVD episodes, but that's just me).
Star Trek: Holodeck
Now, let's return to my hypothetical idea about a Star Trek show set at roughly 2350 (about 15 years prior to TNG, because if memory serves, the holodeck was a relatively new piece of technology). It'd be set either on or close to Earth and be a character piece - incorporating elements of DS9 and Caprica. No character from TNG, DS9 or Voyager would show up and do anything important. (N.B: the 24th-century Trek shows all had this thing where one character from the previous show would turn up at the beginning in a glorified cameo. I'd be okay with that, so long as it was fleeting enough that it wouldn't lead to a plot hole on the other show.) The only thing that this show would pass on to its sucessors would be the holodeck.
See, the Dominion War isn't really on the same scale as the Nuking of the Colonies in Battlestar, so the whole "everybody's going to die" thing won't really be an issue. As far as cool technology, this would be a show about the creation of the holodeck, the coolest bit of Trek tech ever. I don't know that the holodeck has ever really been used to its full potential. It's been the focus of some comedy episodes on TNG and Voyager, and some "breather" episodes on DS9, and it played an important role in, ugh, Insurrection. The point is that there's a lot of untapped potential here.
There would have to be some conflict, obviously, but it would have to be minor and low-key, to the extent that future/past shows never have/had cause to mention it (something involving Section 31, that secret organization that was introduced on DS9, perhaps). It would in effect be a drama, which is something Trek has never really tried.
Could it work? Maybe, but not under the Star Trek label; drama fans wouldn't watch, and Trek fans would hate it. (Caprica had the same problem.)
So Paramount decided to revive its Trek franchise, but with a "prequel" that knocked everything else out of continuity. Brand recognition, a fresh start, and no continuity problems. Definitely the way to go.
So why do people still think they can make prequels?
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