Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things

A man must beg a pardon for the slow update schedule.

In Winterfell, Bran has a dream. Get used to this dream. You'll be seeing it a few more times. A three-eyed crow is leading him down into the crypts. He wakes up, and the mythical Pokemon Hodor carries him downstairs to say hi to Tyrion, who has designed a contraption for Bran to ride around with a little more dignity.  Pretty nice for the guy who supposedly tried to assassinate Bran, yes?

Before he leaves, Tyrion talks to Theon and we finally get his backstory.  It'll be important next season, but basically Theon's a glorified hostage so his father doesn't try to start another rebellion.

Next up, we're at the Wall. A brave and noble protagonist is given a fat, cowardly sidekick named Samwell. How original! Sam was kicked up north because his dad thought he was less than worthless. Specifically, Samwell's options were "go to the Wall" or "suffer a hunting accident." Hey! What other fat idiot could possibly suffer a hunting accident on this show?

I'm gonna pause right here and go on a little bit of a rant: how the hell did this not happen to Tyrion? Until the second book, Tyrion's skill set appears to consist of Mouthing Off At People and Spending Daddy's Money. The only Lannister who cares at all about him is Jaime, and it's not like he gets any say in family policy. So don't tell me that Tyrion didn't get shipped off to the Wall because Tywin Lannister cares about the Imp. You might be thinking that Tywin keeps him around because he needs a male heir and Jaime disqualified himself when he joined the Kingsguard, but I certainly don't get the impression Tywin is even considering turning Casterly Rock over to Tyrion (update: they specifically have this conversation in A Storm of Swords and yeah, Tyrion ain't getting the Rock). So that's out.

Anyway...

So the other boys are mean to Sam until Jon makes them be nice, with an assist from an ever-growing direwolf.  Alliser Thorne, the meanie-head that every military unit in fiction has, continues to make unkind comments about Sam and the recruits' chances of not dying horribly when winter finally gets here. What a cheerful man.

Meanwhile over in the desert, Viserys and Doreah have sex and talk about things. Dany and Jorah do not have sex, but they also talk about things. We learn that the Targaryens used to ride dragons, a few of said dragons' names, the Iron Throne is made of swords because why not, the Dothraki are not about to cross the sea because they fear water, Viserys is never going to conquer the Seven Kingdoms, and Jorah used to sell slaves. Later on, Viserys throws another hissy fit and Dany smacks him with a golden belt or something. Good times all around.

 Down in King's Landing, Sansa gets a look at the place where her grandfather and uncle were brutally murdered, but she's looking at the Iron Throne. You know, that place where the first boy she pops out will one day sit. 

Eddard discovers that Jon Arryn was reading up on genealogy right before he died. He also discovers that Cersei, Varys and Littlefinger have littered one specific garden with spies. "No, My Lady, the Hand did not come through today. Nothing to report." Littlefinger tells Ned to send a flunky to talk to Ser Hugh, but Ser Hugh will not talk to flunkies. Convenient, that. Then Ser Hugh jousts in a tourney and takes a lance to the neck. Also convenient, that.

Finally, Tyrion stops at an inn. So does Cat. Continuing her streak of tactical brilliance, Cat decides to ask a bunch of sellswords to take the the son of the richest man in the Seven Kingdoms hostage. The episode ends.

Filed under "it just bugs me"

So the Mass Effect games are set in the future. And still the sniper rifles only have one shot per clip.

You'd think that would be like the number-one thing they'd work on fixing. 

No, wait, it was all working fine in the first game... they just took forever between shots. Why? Because that's how sniper rifles work in video games. Otherwise they'd be stupid overpowered. And thus not at all like the Adepts in the first game, right?

B5: Confessions and Lamentations

This is the Dr. Franklin episode for the back half of Season 2. It is remarkably similar to that earlier one with the sick kid, only remarkably less preachy.

So the good Doctor has this friend named Dr. Lazarus Lazeren. He's a Markab, which is a word my spell-checker is recognizing to my considerable surprise. And four Markabs have died within the last week, which is extraordinarily suspicious, apparently. This leads me to ask exactly how many Markabs are on the station.

It turns out that there's this plague that apparently means all the Markabs are sinners. The B5 crew doesn't want to isolate and ostracize them, but the Markabs take care of that by isolating themselves. A little Markab kid loses his daddy. Delenn is sad.

Delenn has Sheridan over for dinner. There's an incredibly long running gag about how the food must be prepared and then eaten in a very specific way. Sheridan is remarkably slow to take the hint. But he appears to be trying.

Well anyway it's not clear whether the disease can spread to other species, so all the Markabs decide to isolate themselves and pray, because prayer always works in these situations, right? (This is why I compare it to that episode with the sick kid and the Luddite parents.) Delenn decides to go into the quarantine room to comfort the dying Markabs. Lennier goes with her because come on. Sheridan tries to talk her out of it, telling her that they're not her people. "I did not know that similarity was a requirement for compassion," says the woman who became half-human in order to forge a better understanding between two species.

So she and Lennier go into the quarantine room to watch the aliens die comfort them in their final hours. That alien boy from earlier (actually per the credits, the character's played by a girl, but I couldn't tell and am apparently a sexist prick. Look, the kid hasn't hit puberty yet, is never assigned a gender on-screen, and is buried underneath a layer of latex. How should I know?) can't find her mother. Delenn sends Lennier off to find the mother. What's her name? "Mama." Lennier gets a fancy new mantra: "Faith manages." You need it, buddy. Well surprise surprise, he somehow manages to find the mother (maybe her name actually is Mama), just in time for the kid to keel over. Because in case you haven't figured it out yet, JMS hates kids.

Well, another alien drops dead from the disease, so Dr. Lazeren decides to go in and do the autopsy himself. He catches the disease. Or maybe he had it before, but that was never addressed. He and Franklin are old friends. You can tell because he keeps calling Franklin "Stephen," and calling him on his stim habit. They go off on some discussion about how the Bubonic Plague was carried by rats, and the people killed the cats that were chasing the rats off because they were religious stupid. Lazeren says something that might make you think that this episode's going to resolve itself on a counter-intuitive solution, but nope, Franklin Sciences the Science, but not before Lazeren dies. Oh well.

Down to the quarantine room to administer the cure to the Markabs. No, wait, first we have to whip up a batch of vials of cure. That might not have taken so long, except that Dr. Franklin destroyed most of the vials in the medlab in a fit of grief after Lazeren died. By the time that's done, the only two people left alive in the quarantine room are, surprise surprise, the two in the opening credits.

Everyone is sad. Except for some a-hole bartender. The end.

On Certain Other Shows, it'd be just about acceptable to introduce a new character and establish his relationship with one of the regulars by having the new guy call the regular by his first name. It seems strangely out of place here.

I can't really say that much positive about the episode itself, since the plague comes out of nowhere and is resolved by the time the episode ends. The arc stuff is nicely worked in, though. Sheridan and Delenn are getting bored by each other's customs to know each other better. Keffer's obsessed with whatever he saw in hyperspace. Franklin's addicted to stims.

Sneaking a peak at my episode guide, this is the last "standalone" of Season 2, so "meh" is kind of acceptable. It has to remind you of where the characters are in their relationships with themselves and each other (and if I ever have to write a phrase as full of philosophical vomit as that, please take away my internet connection). It does that. Meh.

If EA wants ideas for Mass Effect 4

Make it a prequel. Options include:

Rachni Wars
Krogan Rebellions
The Morning War
You Are Urdnot Wrex

Omega

In honor of this week's DLC, here's a track from the best Iron Maiden album Iron Maiden didn't make.

Omega Review

The first thing to say is that this is an obvious attempt to make Lair of the Shadow Broker, Part 2.

You have the asari you met in the previous game who spends the entirety of this game lounging around in the most decadent part of the explorable galaxy suddenly deciding to get off her blue butt and kick some. She's all "revenge, revenge, revenge," and it's up to you whether to support her all the way through or not.

The second thing to say is that the attempt to make Lair of the Shadow Broker, Part 2 was an abject failure.

Shadow Broker was personal, funny, epic. Omega was none of these things. And ironically, the very thing that I'd badly wanted to show up in Mass Effect 3 (getting to re-visit a location from the previous game and see it torn to shreds by the war) was undermined by the fact that I just didn't recognize a few stretches of brown hallway.

On the subject of things from the previous games, how the hell come Harrot suddenly looks extraordinarily different?

And on the subject of things being obviously phoned in, Aria's first speech is so full of glitches that it's just impossible to imagine I just paid $15 for this.

Full review below the jump (because my blog has jumps now! I'm so professional) but as a reminder, here's how all the ME1, 2, and 3 DLC (that I've played) stacks up (note: the rubric I used takes cost into account.  That's why Zaeed is so high).

Shadow Broker
Leviathan
Zaeed
Overlord
Bring Down the Sky
Omega
From Ashes
Kasumi
Arrival

Curiosity II

So I'm watching this video and I'm getting near the end and thinking, "hey, Gordon Freeman shouldn't be singing. He's the world's most famous mute!"

And then, as if to prove me right, something very funny happens.

Let's just say that this is now my theory for why Gordon never opens his mouth anymore.

You know what? It's not the weekend and I don't care

I've been really, really bad at posting weekend songs these last... two? weekends.  And anyway, to celebrate my latest obsession, as well as my defection to House-Our-First-Major-Contribution-to-the-Story-is-to-Push-a-Seven-Year-Old-Out-a-Window, here's a weekend song in the middle of the week.

Why am I rooting for the Lannisters now? Because I'll take evil over stupid any day. (That said, Arya Stark is still 10 pounds of awesome in a 5-pound bag.)

Today I Learned I

that Matt Smith got his look from Bill Nye.

Omega pre-view

Trailer:

Rant:

First of all, does anyone else think that room Aria's giving her speech in reminds them of that main gathering room from Alien 3?

(Second of all, I had to stop myself from calling her "Arya," which should tell you exactly where my mind is right now.)

One of the (many) things I found disappointing (but not game-breakingly bad) about Mass Effect 3 was the fact that Aria's sidequest was so unbelievably lame. That and the entirety of Act 2. For basically the same reasons, namely that you could dodge the tough moral choices by taking a third option.  (This is why I love Act 1 so much, because there was no happy ending. Either you screwed over the entire krogan species, or Mordin died.  Well, that, and you actually cared about these characters; I never cared about any of the geth - not even Legion, because they were so late to the party in Mass Effect 2, and the only quarian I cared about was Tali.  Well, her and Zaal'Koris.  And Reegar, but he died off-screen on me.)

Anyway, that whole sidequest was stupid. First you recruited the Blood Pack by walking into a room and triggering a cutscene.  Yippee.  Then you recruited Eclipse by either freeing their leader and then promptly shooting her, or by convincing her spineless second-in-command to let her rot. Then the Blue Suns guy wanted you to assassinate a guy who was always called Septimus in the first game but suddenly goes by Oraka now (okay, okay, he calls himself Septimus Oraka, once). But you can get around that by pinging some random mud-ball on the galaxy map.  Zzzz.  Yawn.  Boring.

So let me be clear about my expectations for Omega. I want Aria to launch herself gleefully off the slippery slope. And if you don't follow her, you get no war assets.  Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. In fact, you get less than none, because Aria decides to repay you with blood. Ideally, Shepard will meet some new, incredibly likeable character, someone the character and the player can easily bond with. This is BioWare, so it won't be that difficult. And then Aria will shoot that character in the back during the endgame. And in order for this whole thing to not have been a colossal waste of time, Shepard still needs to side with Aria. And they hate themselves for that.

Now you might be saying that paragons need to get something too.  Oi. You did all the legwork to get a huge krogan score, both the quarian and geth fleets, and every other little perk. Just once, I want a paragon option that completely blows up in your face. (And no, Kelly Chambers does not count.)

Lord Snow

Previously on Game of Thrones: Dany and Drogo had sex, her way (that right there is a Babylon 5 reference). Sansa was an airhead, Joffrey was a prick, Robert abdicated responsibility, Cersei was a bitch, and Eddard did the dirty work. I wonder if anything will be different this week?

So we arrive in King's Landing and learn that one of Ned's guards is called Jory. I wonder if he'll last longer than his Dragon Age counterpart. We see the Iron Throne, which is a bunch of swords melted down and forged into a really uncomfortable chair. Apparently the first Targaryen king thought that a king should never be too comfortable on his own throne There is no explanation for why it was done like this. (From now on in the re-caps for this show, stuff that's crossed out is stuff that was only in the books.)

There's not much of an explanation for what Jamie Lannister is doing there, chillin' in front of the Iron Throne, but he's actually serving two useful purposes. He's a member of the king's bodyguard group helpfully known as the Kingsguard, so he's guarding the throne (as opposed to the king's body), and he's also dispensing snark. Since he slew the last king, I'm going to say he's better at snarking than he is at being a Kingsguard member.

Next we meet the Small Council, which includes Aiden Gillen, Julian Glover, and a bald dude who somehow manages to give off more "I'm obviously evil" vibes than either of them, but that's only because Glover looks so frail that a stiff breeze would do him in (though the season finale shows he's just acting) and Gillen's character is still playing his cards close to his chest. Gillen is Littlefinger, who runs whorehouses by day and serves as the court treasurer by night. Or maybe it's the other way around, but we see a lot more of him doing the former, for some reason, I can't imagine what. The bald dude is a eunuch, and lord of the spies. He is also a eunuch. In case you didn't know, they mention that he's a eunuch in pretty much every scene he's in. So you'll never forget that the man does not have balls. Finally, Julian Glover is Grand Maester Pycelle, which I think means he's the only member of the Small Council who actually went to college. I'm sure the Crown is in good hands.

Or rather, it would be if Robert didn't just ignore the counsel of... the Small Council and run things himself. As a result, the country is sixty million dragons in debt. And there aren't any more dragons, so that's a problem. (The backup joke for this paragraph was a reference to the US national debt. Count your blessings.)

Next we get the first clue that the Lannisters are the Corleones of Westeros. This will become even more obvious by the time Episode Eight rolls around, but for now Cersei gives Joff a quick less on on federalism and then tells him that yes, the Starks are our enemies. Everyone who isn't with us is our enemy. Thankfully, Joff does not respond with "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" or anything quite as inane. For once he actually appears to be listening. Although that might be because about two minutes earlier his mother was telling him he could have any woman he wanted once he became King, regardless of who the Queen was. I don't think he quite caught the bitterness in her voice, because that would require him to think about someone else for a fraction of a second.

Ned finds out Arya has a sword. He lets her keep it because 1) Arya is ten pounds of awesome in a five-pound bag, and 2) Ned's having an off-day, so he's actually employing foresight for once.

Back at Winterfell, Bran mopes and tells anyone who'll listen that he'd rather be dead. This episode is dedicated to the actress who played his caretaker, as she is now dead. I'll pass up the opportunity for a tasteless joke and take us back to King's Landing, where Littlefinger is taking Ned to meet his wife in a brothel, and Ned understandably thinks this is a tasteless joke.  It turns out that after telling Ned not to go to the snake pit that is King's Landing, Cat decided to go to the snake pit that is King's Landing. They discover that the dagger the assassin used to try to kill Bran belongs to Tyrion Lannister. The Imp, in case you forgot.  Both Cat and Ned think trusting Littlefinger, a man who's lusted after Cat since long before she was married, is a smart idea.

That was actually two scenes in one, but I wanted to get my "tasteless joke" joke in.  In between those scenes, Jon's completely owning the other recruits at sword-fighting, because he's a BAMF. Or rather, as Tyrion points out, because he's the only one who actually got any training. So later Jon continues to own the other recruits, but rather than be a showoff about it, he teaches them what they're doing wrong. This takes several scenes, during which Tyrion continues to be awesome.

Cersei and Jaime are alone, together. Surprisingly they are not naked, maybe because the last time that happened, Jaime threw a kid out a window. Cersei's upset about that for some reason, but she's also concerned that Bran might remember something. Jaime finally reveals Cersei's name to the audience. That took long enough.

Robert and Ser Barristan are talking about first times. First kills that is. Robert calls Jaime in to mock him some, but Jaime kills the mood by explaining that he killed the Mad King after the Mad King ordered King's Landing burnt to the ground. Gee, if only you'd said that often and loudly immediately after the fact, maybe they would mean "Kingslayer" as a compliment.

Over in Horse Country, Dany stops the entire not-Mongol horde to go for a walk. Viserys freaks out and tries to attack her, only to nearly get killed for his trouble. I'm sure he'll learn from that, right? Right? Later, after a bit of boob-grabbing, Dany's handmaiden finds out she's preggers.

Despite the fact that he's the best swordsman seen thus far (now admittedly, that's only because the Kingslayer hasn't been in a fight yet), Jon is still a raw recruit, so he won't be going out with Uncle Benjen.  Then Benjen and Tyrion have an argument about whether the Others White Walkers are real, and then Tyrion decides to go on a road trip to King's Landing with another Black Brother, Yoren. But not before he gets the chance to take a whiz off the top of the wall. Which he does.

Arya meets Syrio Forel, or if you prefer, not-Inigo-Montoya-honest. They hit their wooden swords together a lot. He keeps "killing" her, but this doesn't seem to deter her at all. Because Arya is awesome.

The Kingsroad

Last time on Game of Thrones: We wasted about a fifth of our screentime watching three guys who didn't even have names running around a snowy forest before they all died various horrible deaths.  The last Hand of the King lay in state while the people who (probably) murdered him talked about what he knew without actually saying what he knew. The King asked Sean Bean to be the new Hand, so I'm thinking he's running some sort of life insurance scam. Sean Bean's bastard son decided to go live at the Wall.  That creepy actor who was previously Son-Of-Mine in a Doctor Who episode felt up his sister before selling her off to not-Genghis-Khan-honest. The queen's brother had sex with the queen and then pushed a ten-year-old out the window when they were discovered.

Now it's Dany's turn to get it doggy-style, and it doesn't look like she's enjoying it. Also, Father Octavian is Son-Of-Mine's retainer, so the Doctor Who reunion continues.

Back in Winterfell, Tyrion slaps Joffrey for ten minutes straight while "Achilles Last Stand" plays. No, wait, sorry, that's YouTube, not Winterfell. Tyrion then orders breakfast and trades some jabs with his brother Jaime about cripples and bastards. It looks like the kid Jaime pushed out a window is going to live after all. Jaime and Queen Not-Important-Enough-To-Be-Named-Yet seem disturbed about this for some reason. Around this time, Tyrion decides to go to the Wall with Jon, but just to visit.

Then Queen Not-Important Cersei (protip: reading the book helps immensely) visits Bran and tells a really inspiring story about how her first son died. Thanks for that. Jon Snow also visits and gets an icy reception from Catelyn. Can't imagine why. Then Jon gets a visit from Jaime, who snarks at him, because apparently saying really unhelpful things is a Lannister trait (or at least a Lannister Twin trait, if you think "be proud of the fact that you're a bastard" is helpful advice).  Then Jon visits Arya and gives her a sword, thus making him the coolest older half-brother/possibly cousin ever (I'm going with my theory about Jon's parentage until proven wrong). She very nearly takes his eye out giving him a hug, but it's still all sweet.

Enough visiting. Time for departures. Eddard dodges a point-blank question from Jon about his mother. With evasive skills like that, he just might fit in at King's Landing. On the road, Robert also presses Ned about the issue (I submit this as my entry for "worst pun of the year"). Ned gives some mumbled answer about "Wylla," but that probably means nothing (although every piece of evidence that R+L=J is missing from the TV adaptation... and the producers know the truth). Anyway, some timely information about Dany lets us glimpse Robert's hatred of the Targaryens.

Catelyn is so busy tending to Bran that she's ignoring the rest of Winterfell (including that four-year-old boy of hers who never got properly introduced). Robb calls her out on it, but he's distracted; seems somebody set up a screen elsewhere in the castle displaying some truly awful CGI fire. Robb goes to kick the anachronism out, and an assassin comes in to kill Bran. Catelyn, demonstrating the sound tactics that will serve her so well in coming episodes, grabs the assassin's blade with both hands. Eventually Bran's direwolf comes in and rips the assassin's throat out. We're still fairly early on in the season, so the violence is still rather tasteful.

Next we find ourselves in a frozen wasteland. Tyrion and Jon finally see The Wall; Tyrion waves a cigarette lighter during the solo to "Comfortably Numb," but nobody sees it because he's so short.*

Back in Winterfell, Catelyn finds a single golden hair in the tower where Bran fell and thus assumes that the Lannisters are responsible for Bran's fall because only Lannisters have golden hair. (Hey, maybe she should tell her lord husband that when she sees him next, and we can all skip forward four episodes.)

Across the narrow sea, Dany asks her handmaiden to help her seduce Khal Drogo. The show's target audience takes a quick break to wash their hands, and then we are very abruptly introduced to Ser Ilyn Payne, who won't have anything important to do for the next six episodes, but apparently he warrants being named before the Queen.  Sansa is being an airhead (I apologize for the redundancy), and Joffrey is being a prick (again, apologies for the redundancy). Arya is being a tomboy- okay, skipping past all the redundancy, Joff ends up with a few well-deserved wolf bites on his arm. Robert abdicates responsibility (redundancy), Sansa and Arya nearly start tearing each other's hair out (redundancy), Cersei decides to be an utter bitch (redundancy), and Ned handles an execution himself (redundancy). Sansa is upset, but to be perfectly blunt, her direwolf would probably still be alive if she'd just told the truth about what a complete prick Joff is.

The camera focuses on Sean Bean's face while there's a slicing sound and a dog whimpers. For whatever reason, people apparently thought they'd actually killed a dog. Viewers are morons.

Back in Winterfell, Bran finally wakes up. He does his best not to smile, because he's literally slept through a week's worth of work and still gotten paid for it.

By now everything's introduced (except Cersei's name) and a casual viewer (read: someone who did not come to this series armed with an 800-page book) can probably follow along. So good for that. Not wasting seven minutes at the beginning of the episode setting up a threat that remains very much in the background for the entire series is apparently a smart move.

*I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I did this entire post just for that one joke.

Elementary, Dear George

So I'm one book into A Song of Ice and Fire and already I think I know who Jon Snow's mother is. I'm probably wrong, but I'm saying this here so I can have bragging rights if I'm proved right. (Of course, a quick visit to A Wiki of Ice and Fire to look for one reference point tells me that I'm hardly alone in thinking this.)

So the primary reason Eddard Stark joined Robert's Rebellion is because Prince Rhaegar Targaryen kidnapped Eddard's sister Lyanna.  He doesn't find her until the end of the war. In the meantime, King's Landing is sacked and Lord Tywin orders the brains bashed out of every Targaryen child he can find. Robert Baratheon is a-okay with this; Eddard is not. Throughout the book, we see that Eddard is unwilling to harm children (even bastards and Targaryens), and that he is willing to lie to save them.

When he finally finds Lyanna, she's dying on a bed of blood (and protected by three members of the Kingsguard) and makes Ned promise her something. Then Mr. Honor Before Reason shows back up at Winterfell with a bastard in tow, whom he raises as a member of his family, something that is traditionally not done.

So I'm thinking - and again, this is hardly an original theory, but I'm proud of myself for figuring it out on my own - that Jon is actually the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen.

Evidence against this theory: Bran and Jon both think in their POV chapters that Jon is Eddard's son. (But Eddard's POV chapters carefully avoid the topic.) The Appendix lists Jon as Eddard's son. (But the Appendix lies; see Aemon Targaryen.)

UPDATE: One other thing, probably circumstantial. Jon's is the only direwolf with white fur (hair). What color is Targaryen hair?

Winter is Coming

Or, "let's not waste seven whole minutes dicking around with three guys who will all be dead before the second chapter ends."

Whoopsie, I kind of gave the game away there.  And then I made an awful awful pun. Shoot me now.

Speaking of shooting, the first important scene of the episode sees seven ten-year-old Bran Stark trying to shoot a target while two older boys look on.  One is fifteen seventeen-year-old Robb Stark, heir to Winterfell, and the other is Jon Snow, Lord Eddard Stark's bastard son. (Do not ask about the last names. Just... don't.) The fact that one of them gets a withering look from Mrs. Stark is probably a pretty good hint as to who's who, but then you have Theon Greyjoy riding around, and he's not even named, nor is his presence explained in this episode.

Anyway, the target is eventually hit, spot-on, by Bran's sister Arya (who I think is finally named about halfway through the episode), who's a) also aged up, b) not an archer in the books, and c) standing about twice as far away from the target as he is and could very easily have wounded him.  Ah well, I'm sure that's the entire quota for danger that Bran can be put in during this episode, right?

All joking aside, while I like how the titles laid out the geography, how about spoon-feeding us the rest of the backstory while you're at it?  Hey, remember the movie Serenity? The entire 'verse's backstory was told via a classroom instruction (which then turned into a nightmare for the character backstory, but that's a whole different can of crazy). How about, rather than start with Waymar Royce (not named) and his band of merry, unnamed, and soon-to-be-dead men, start with somebody giving Bran a history lesson?  "Fourteen seventeen years ago, your father rode out with Robert Baratheon to end the reign of the Mad King," and so on and so forth. 

If you'll permit me to go off on this tangent, Will's death had a much larger impact in the book than it did in the show.  That's because we're dealing with separate mediums here.  Generally - not always - viewpoint characters aren't expected to bite it. In contrast, you put three guys played by actors nobody recognizes in a show you know has Boromir as the main character (because Sean Bean always lives... right?) and you can kind of assume those guys aren't going to last very long.  And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Others White Walkers are not the central focus of this season.

Now, yes, Eddard Stark personally executing the deserter is an important moment for his character. But it doesn't matter who that deserter is.  So ultimately what I'm saying is this: save the reveal of the Wall for when Jon finally sees it, and spend those seven minutes instead explaining who everyone is. And maybe why the Starks and Lannisters hate each other.

Meanwhile, Son-of-Mine from one of the better Doctor Who Series 3 episodes is busy whoring his sister out to a barbarian king. The knight protecting her is Father Octavian from a Doctor Who Series 5 episode, so go figure there.  His sister is thirteen sixteen and also the reason why all the kids are aged up; her nipples are visible more often than not.  Are you surprised?  This is HBO, which I assume stands for Hot Boobalicious Orgies.  So she has to be aged up to avoid a little thing called child pornography, and that means all the other kids have to be aged up too in order to fit the new timeline.

All right. This is one of the things that frustrates me about the book.  Dany doesn't actually get to Westeros in the book. It's a bit odd to have a TV show where three main cast members never interact with the rest. Even Battlestar Galactica got Helo off Caprica within the first 20 episodes, and they were making it up on the fly. Now, yes, some of her scenes are being used for exposition, that's certainly true.  But at this point I don't think there's any justification for putting the wedding scene in this episode instead of the next (unless Episode 2 was way over the titty quotient already and this one was not).

Okay, okay, I'm griping. The main players are all introduced, and they're all well-written and well-acted enough that you can figure out who they are and what's going on provided that you pick up on every clue and every bit of "as you know" dialogue sprinkled throughout. 

I'm having trouble comparing this to anything else. Battlestar Galactica had a much less complicated backstory. Babylon 5 had fewer characters. The Lord of the Rings put most of the introductions on hold until the second half of the first movie.

Final verdict: as it should be obvious, this is not how I would have done it. (Then again, I wouldn't rehabilitate a character whose first contribution to the story is to chuck a seven-year-old out a window after boinking his sister.) However, all the really important details are at least mentioned (some more clumsily than others), so in that respect it does its First Episode duty.

Grr argh

So the election is a week behind us, but the right-wing finger-pointing lingers on, there's something like a love pentagon going on over in D.C. (and if you think that pun is lame, wait until they discover another participant), Israel and Palestine are pretty much officially at war with each other, and I'd lay 2-to-1 odds that we're going to waltz right over the fiscal cliff at the end of the year.

But look on the bright side, folks.  Twilight is finally over.

Why isn't there another BSG

asks io9.

Now admittedly, I don't watch TV. I mean, other than Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, Doctor Who (classic), Doctor Who (2005-), Battlestar Galactica (reimagined), and Babylon 5. None of which I saw while they were originally on the air, with Dollhouse (kind of) and New Who being the exceptions (and even then I have yet to see anything from Season 33/Series 7 yet, because Season 32/Series 6 was so bad I went out and bought the entire Battlestar Galactica boxset halfway through just to get some good science-fiction and I haven't found Doctor Who worth watching since then).

So I might not be in the best position to comment on this. But here's my guess.

1) You Blew It.

Let's take a look at Dollhouse, because I can pretty safely say that Whedon was trying to make his own BSG. And no, not just because Helo was in the cast and Apollo and Tigh were guest stars. But you've got this whole backstory to unravel, and the fact that pretty much any character can be a Doll. (Though actually with "Epitaph One," you could say that there's more than a bit of B5 influence on this show, too.) Now I'm certainly not going to claim that BSG was in any way good with its Cylon reveals. Four of the first seven Cylons to be revealed were revealed in their first episode; the other three were unmasked in their second. It got to the point where just about any new character who wasn't the Baddie of the Week had a 50/50 chance of being a Cylon. And don't get me started on the faces-on-a-dartboard method of determining the Final Five. But despite that, one thing BSG really had going for it was that there were only 12 Cylons. (Blah blah red herring blah blah Starbuck blah blah Daniel blah blah.) With Dollhouse, there's no limit. And because there's no limit, it feels more stale. With Battlestar you could at least kid yourself into thinking the writers had the whole thing planned out from the beginning, and with a massive cast you knew that there would still be a huge number of people who weren't Cylons.

Or look again (God forbid) at Doctor Who's attempt to do Battlestar-type episodes. You can interpret this to mean are-you-real-or-not episodes like "The Rebel Flesh" or Arc Episodes like "A Good Man Goes to War." These were both tremendous mistakes, but not because the writers were trying to graft something else onto Doctor Who. Doctor Who's entire history has been nothing but that. They were mistakes because Battlestar had done it first and best. (Unless you count Blade Runner or Babylon 5 respectively.) The first two seasons of Battlestar were such a high-water mark for science fiction storytelling that it's practically impossible to top.

So the attempt to make another Battlestar Galactica was silly from the beginning, and not just for that reason. Let's be honest, Battlestar's finale kind of ruined everything for everyone. Never again would we trust a showrunner who promised that everything was plotted out in advance.

2) There Can Be Only One.

So back in the 1990s there was exactly one show that was doing the sort of thing that Battlestar would be doing. Babylon 5, the show that nobody thought would last five years.  Then during Battlestar's run there was only Battlestar. Now, according to io9, it's Game of Thrones.  Why is there only one show like this at a time? Because there is a very limited number of people who a) like science fiction and fantasy, and b) are willing to patiently wait for a story to unfold week after week.  These people have lives, believe it or not. There's not that big a market for those kinds of stories. (By the way, if there were, Christopher Nolan would be famous for Momento, Inception, and The Prestige instead of the Batman films, and the Star Trek reboot would be pitched at Star Trek fans instead of mainstream audiences who vaguely remember the original show, and the Star Wars prequels would never have been finished because Episode 1 would have been a box-office flop.)

There's a reason it's called "genre" fiction, folks.

Belated Weekend Song

You're not surprised, are you?

Want to cheaply test for cancer?

Borrow your girlfriend's pregnancy test.

What a world.

Can Neil Gaiman restore the Cybermen to their former glory?

Asks io9.

The answer is, "is zero a number?"

Let me break this down real quick: every single Cyberman story ever with the exception of The Invasion for reasons I'll get to momentarily sucked.

The closest any Cyberman story aside from The Invasion came to being good was Tomb of the Cybermen, which was good for two episodes before it completely fell apart. You know, right when the Cybermen finally actually appeared and started talking, and you discovered that, as clever as their trap was, it was a really stupid trap disguised as a really clever trap. To break down the three stupidest elements of this trap really quickly...

1) The idea of the logic games to get into the tombs is to weed out the stupid people so that the smart ones can be upgraded into Cybermen. But the only person the Cybermen ever upgrade is Toberman, the dumb muscle. So... why did they make it so hard for dumb people to get there? They obviously could use dumb people as cannon fodder...

2) The Cybermen very politely leave a Cyberman-killing gun lying around upstairs for the humans to find.

3) The tombs are downstairs. The revitalizing unit is upstairs. There's a giant hatch between the two levels that can only be opened from upstairs.

And really every Cyberman story except for The Invasion is about as stupid as that one. The Invasion works for the exact same reason that Genesis of the Daleks works. The familiar monsters are relegated to the background, and a far more interesting villain is allowed to steal the spotlight.

And Moffat's quote disturbs me too. The Cybermen were almost never presented as an "awesome military force." The Moonbase featured a tiny strike force. Tombs featured the last remnants of a defeated civilization. Both Revenge of the Cybermen and Earthshock saw the... last remnants of a defeated civilization try one last time to get revenge. Furthermore, the scariest thing about them was not that "they could be right behind you without you knowing it," but that you could be turned into one of them.

Three years ago I couldn't imagine myself asking this, but does Moffat even understand Doctor Who?

Lair of the Shadow Broker Part 2

is what I thought of when I saw this promotional image for Mass Effect 3: Omega.

Seriously, Disney, just make the Thrawn films

So popular opinion seems to be that Disney's not going to adapt the Thrawn books and instead make something original, possibly involving the next generation of Skywalkers and Solo-Skywalkers so that we can have the original actors back (because re-casting beloved characters is always a recipe for disaster, right?)

So let me be clear: when Disney makes a new Star Wars film, I'm going to review it on this blog. And I will automatically deduct half the points if Thrawn is not in it.

Because here's the thing: as much as Episodes II and III sucked, George Lucas at least listened to us and reduced Jar Jar Binks to a cameo.  In a completely different franchise, BioWare finally caved an gave us a better ending to Mass Effect 3. We are, for better or worse, in the Era of the Entitled Fanboy. And Disney would do well to acknowledge that.

Besides all of that, here is one very solid reason why the Episode VII should be titled Heir to the Empire.

The fans kind of have the Thrawn trilogy on a special pedestal. We know the plot's a bit iffy, but it's the smartest jumping-off point that currently exists, and it won't require the fans to take a massive leap of faith.

It would be a much bigger risk, in light of the prequels, to go off to another generation for adventures. Understand that Episode VII will be a) the first Star Wars film made by Disney, and b) assumed to be the first Star Wars film made by someone other than George Lucas (I direct you to my earlier post on this matter, although I recant on a different point there; I'd cast Fillion as Han Solo and Mark Sheppard as Karrde).

With that in mind, this is the time to play it safe. I don't want to say "Do what Star Trek the Star Trek did," but do what Star Trek the Star Trek did. Strip everything back down to its basics so that the dumb mainstream audience can follow along, but tell a story you know the fans will love.

In short, make the frakking kriffing Thrawn films.

Star Disney Wars 3

So I just remembered... Toy Story 2 has Vader Breath and an "I am your father" gag.

I would not have guessed

...that fans of Battlestar Galactica are more likely to vote Obama than fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But apparently this chart says otherwise.

And according to this thingy, I'm only 57% likely to vote Romney on Tuesday. Go figure.

Finally, according to this chart, fans of the Atlas Shrugged movie are just as partisan as fans of RENT (not surprising), but are much more likely to vote (kind of surprising).

Weekend soundtrack exerpt

This seems appropriate.

Make an informed decision on Tuesday, folks.

And here I thought

that Dragon Age was heavily inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire.  Hello, Skyrim.

When You Wish Upon a Death Star...

I assumed this was a hoax until pretty much everyone confirmed it.

Holy crap. Disney owns Star Wars.

Holy crap. They're making Episode VII.

There are two things that need to be said at the outset.  One, even if Episode VII is the worst thing since bagpipes, it won't do more damage to the Star Wars brand than Lucas inflicted circa 1999-2005.  At this point, the franchise is buried so badly that any further digging would actually make it pass the planet core and start heading back towards the surface.  Two, even if the prequels didn't suck, there is already proof that people other than George Lucas can write and direct a good Star Wars film. And that proof is the best Star Wars film, which was directed by Irvin Kershner and written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan.

Now, if I were the top Disney exec, the first thing I'd do is get Timothy Zahn on the line, grab the film rights to the Thrawn trilogy, and then get either Christopher Nolan or J.J. Abrams to do a pass on the script. I'd specifically look for those two because we've seen from Batman and Star Trek what they can do with stale, worn-out franchises.

Then I'd cast Nathan Fillion as Talon Karrde and Christoph Waltz as Grand Admiral Thrawn. And then, while the internet exploded, I would plaster the Death Star all over Space Mountain.

B5: Acts of Sacrifice

"If peace on this station is the only way to win the war at home, then peace we will give them!"
-G'Kar, in a way that text on a screen can't do justice.

First off, an explanation of how these reviews are going: as I work my way through Season 2, episodes that I think are "Arc" episodes will get their own reviews.  On days that I watch a standalone,* I'll go back and re-cap a stretch of earlier episodes until I'm caught up. I could say that the reason I'm doing this is because a lot most of the standalone episodes have stuff planted in them that only becomes relevant later on, but the real reason is because I neglected to do reviews as I went along, and this is the easiest way for me to catch up.

*Yes, there is no such thing as a standalone episode, because see my above comment about all the Chekhov's Guns.

So the first thing that needs to be said about "Acts of Sacrifice" is that it's the episode that convinced me that Andreas Katsulas was the best actor on the show. He's got a lot of competition, because almost everyone is pitch-perfect. Yes, I ragged on Mira Furlan's accent and how I thought it took Richard Biggs a while to figure out how to play Dr. Franklin, but Biggs had gotten it down pat by the time Season 2 rolled around (seriously, compare his performance in the scene where he turns out to be the leader of the underground psychic railroad in "A Race Through Dark Places" to his first scene in "Infection" and you'll see what I mean), and Furlan's accent is only distracting when she's yelling at someone (and skipping words like "the") - and most of the time she's being the Spock to one character's McCoy and another character's Worf.

(Hey, I know I'm not supposed to mention DS9 in these reviews, but I can mention TOS and TNG characters, right? Oh frak me, Worf was on DS9 after TNG wrapped.)

Where was I? Oh right, Proud Warrior Race Guy with a massive grudge against one of the other major species because, among other things, they killed his father.

Now, I never saw The Gathering, so there was really only one episode ("Midnight on the Firing Line") where G'Kar was blatantly the bad guy.  Since then, he's slowly become more sympathetic, while Londo... Remember back in my review of "Midnight on the Firing Line" when I said Londo was a Sicilian?  Well, he has his own Godfather II moment here where he realizes that his newfound power has cost him his friends, and now he's all alone. (There is another possibility here, but I somehow doubt that Londo has fond memories of going sledding as a kid.)

But just because Londo's becoming an evil bureaucrat who's trapped in a Faustian bargain doesn't mean that G'Kar automatically becomes a good guy. Delenn points out that eventually, the Narns will regain their war footing and it'll be the Centauri who need help; the two sides just really want the other one dead no matter what, and that can make life difficult for someone dedicated to peace.

Speaking of making life difficult, Ivanova's Big Delegated Task this week is to seal an alliance with... I forgot the name of their species, so I'm just going to call them the Darynan. Why? Because they're a bunch of social darwinists and Darynan is the best anagram of "Ayn Rand" that I could come up with in 30 seconds. Okay, excuse me, they're the Lumati. As I said, they're a bunch of social darwinists who basically think it's a-okay to completely ignore the suffering of inferior people. (Gee, way back in "Midnight on the Firing Line," Ambassador Kosh told Sinclair to ignore the Centauri-Narn conflict because "they are a dying people." Hmm...) But they agree to an alliance once they see that B5's social safety net is basically a big neon sign that says "this way to the slums" - which they accomplish by visiting one of the slums, where all parties are involved are apparently a-okay with the slum being treated as a zoo. I swear, this is the most bizarre thing I've seen on this show, and that includes Londo's Season 1 haircut. I'm trying to imagine walking down the streets of Chicago and talking very loudly about how wonderful a place it is because the worthless people are reduced to begging for money. Are the bums of the future all medicated so that they never cause any major diplomatic incidents?

Speaking of major diplomatic incidents, there's a whole Capulets-and-Montagues thing going on with the Centauri and Narn commoners, which ends up getting a jerk Centauri (whom I'll call Tybalt) killed. G'Kar knows that a) those Centauri jerks have it coming, and b) actually getting revenge on them will have disastrous consequences for his attempts to elicit support from the humans and Mimbari.  This is where Andreas Katsulas shines. He's trapped under more prosthetics than any of the other major players, and I've seen Doctor Who documentaries where the actors under prosthetics say they have to over-act in order for their facial expressions to transmit through all that... whatever-it-is. But in the shouting match between G'Kar and Sheridan, Katsulas manages to convey everything he needs to without out-melodrama-ing Bruce Boxleitner. Later on, he tries to calm the Narn commoners' Occupy B5 and manages to be both nakedly emotional and utterly reptilian in the same scene.

If you've read a lot of my reviews, you know I don't ever go on this much about acting. That's how impressed I am with Katsulas's performance in this episode. Granted, this is a bit undermined by the ridiculous fight scene at the end... but only a bit.

(I'd also like to note that this is the second episode in a row where a B5 ambassador is told that they're not truly representative of their species anymore because they've been tainted by the humans. Let's see if that goes somewhere...)

Speaking of being tainted by humans, there's the rest of Ivanova's B-plot. It turns out the Lumati seal their negotiations by having sex. Now, this aired on PTEN, not HBO, so you can already guess that it ain't gonna happen... but after Ivanova realizes that the Lumati rep has no idea what human sex is like, she gets him to agree to do it "human-style," which (in her version) involves her doing a dance where she acts like a stereotypical womanizer, blowing off a lot of steam about past one-night stands (okay I'm making that up - we haven't seen any evidence that she sleeps around) and then faking it during a really good handshake.This is either hilarious or completely over-the-top. Take your pick.

(Yeah, I disagree with the decision to make Ivanova funny. I thought she was plenty funny when she was the station's resident no-nonsense ice queen with a great pessimistic streak.)

Sheridan and Delenn work under the table to get a tiny bit of support for the Narns. This isn't want G'Kar wanted, (he wanted public military support, not covert supplies and a bit of refugee-evacuating) but he realizes that it's all he can get.  (I'd also like to note that only Sheridan, not Delenn, is capable of looking G'Kar in the eye during this scene. May or may not be significant.)

Finally, Londo completely ignores the chance to cause more trouble by not making a big issue of Tybalt's death. In return, Garibaldi has a drink with Londo. D'aaaaw, he has his friend back.

The relationship dynamic on B5 has shifted somewhat since Sinclair left, and that might be part of the reason why JMS wanted to write the character out. (Everyone involved in that decision - including actor Michael O'Hare - wanted Sinclair to leave the show, and I'm not going to get into that right now.) While Garibaldi is still on much better terms with Londo than with G'Kar, Sheridan came onto the scene right when Londo started down the slippery slope, and his experience with the two ambassadors is untainted by G'Kar's Season 1 antagonism. We see this dynamic in effect after Tybalt's corpse has been discovered; Garibaldi jumps to the (logical) conclusion that he was killed by a Narn because of his friendship with Londo, whereas Sheridan wants to wait until they actually have all the facts.

"The Coming of Shadows" painted both G'Kar and Londo in unflattering lights. G'Kar was plotting to publicly assassinate the Centauri Emperor; Londo targeted a Narn colony for obliteration in order to further his own political power. Now, even though Londo and G'Kar are both seen being voices of reason - Londo basically ignoring a dead Centauri provocateur and G'Kar trying to stop a bunch of Narn provocateurs - and even though we do sympathize at least a bit with Londo when Garibaldi barely gives him the time of day, our sympathies in general are more with G'Kar this time.  (Maybe Londo's new black coat has something to do with it.)

Because I like to do things like this.

Whenever somebody mentions the song "Phantom of the Opera," I always pretend they're talking about the relatively obscure Iron Maiden song. When they say "the Andrew Lloyd Webber" song, I say, "Oh, you mean 'Echoes' by Pink Floyd?"

By the way, the Iron Maiden song is freaking awesome.

Telepaths (and B5: "All Alone in the Night")

In 1963, a guy named Sidney Newman asked some other folks to come up with ideas for an affordable science-fiction show. Their response: telepaths or time-travel.

History records that he picked time-travel. But did you know that one of the first companions (as in, there were three original companions and this was one of them) was the Doctor's own semi-telepathic grand-daughter?

She got dumped from the show when the writers decided they didn't like the character/the actress thought she wasn't getting any character development.

I mention this because I just saw the Babylon 5 episode "All Alone in the Night," which ends with Sheridan & Co. founding a conspiracy against EarthGov. EarthGov is supported by the Psy Corps, which is made up of telepaths.

So I have two questions: how long can that conspiracy possibly remain a secret, and two, why do writers keep throwing telepaths into their stories? (And three: why does my spell-check not seem to want to make up its mind about whether or not "telepaths" is a real word?)

This post will focus on the second question, because, well, I haven't seen the entire show and I'm not entirely sure how my spell-check works, so I'm not qualified to answer either of the others.

If you're doing a series about an evil, intrusive police state (and B5 is certainly setting EarthGov up as that), then having evil, intrusive mind-readers seems like a good idea. Nobody wants their private thoughts scanned, after all. But then you start your heroes off on their quest to overthrow the government, and eventually you're going to get to a point where the audience is asking, "hey, how come the telepaths aren't catching that one?"

Yes, it's a cliche of writing that the Evil Empire needs to be big and bad and scarily efficient... until it's hunting down the good guys, at which point it's staffed entirely by graduates of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Or that the Overlord's plan goes off completely without a hitch... only he overlooked one tiny technical detail when he was building his giant Death Star. Or that an evil Empire with enough resources to build two Death Stars couldn't bother to repeat its trick in the first film of sticking a tracking device on one particular ship to lead them right to-

Okay you get the point, moving on.

Any audience is smart. A science-fiction/fantasy audience, which has to take into account all sorts of new rules that don't apply in our world, has to be even smarter. They are going to spot the loose thread at the edge of your carefully-constructed tapestry... and if it's a big enough thread, they're going to pull the whole thing apart. (To go back to Star Wars again, how could a hyperdrive-less Millennium Falcon get from one star system to another in Empire before the cast aged to death? Or insert-logical-contradiction-from-the-prequels-here.)

Bluntly, telepaths do not work in conspiracy stories. Yes, yes, JMS set this thing up about how "deep scans" - the useful ones - are technically inadmissible as evidence. Like that's going to stop an evil government run by a man who assassinated his predecessor.

Now I'm gonna pivot and dissect "All Alone" a bit more. The A-plot is what I'm gonna call Standard Sci-Fi Schlock - the same sort of thing we saw last season in, say, "Infection." The idea of taking representatives of different species and making them fight either just for the evulz or for the purposes of launching an invasion has been done just a few times before. And given all the balls in the air already, I'd be kind of surprised if we saw those folks again.

The B-plot sees Delenn being kicked out of the Grey Council and replaced by a member of the Warrior Caste. This is bad because it signifies that the Grey Council is getting more militant and reactionary. The militant thing isn't necessarily bad, but they kinda do need to make an alliance with the humans in order to win the Great War that the opening narration has been promising us all season. So yeah, this is very much significant to the overall story... problem is, Delenn's accent just makes it hard for me to take her seriously when she's supposed to be making a desperate, impassioned argument. That's just me.

Oh, and Lennier agrees to get his career permanently stalled because really, the poor guy is second only to DS9's Odo in the "hopelessly obsessed with one particular woman who's way out of his reach" category inevitably going to get compared to somebody on That Show You Shouldn't Mention In The Presence Of A Diehard B5 Fan.

And in the middle of his story, Sheridan gets some sort of vision that'll probably pay off.

And then the last five minutes finally reveal why Sheridan's been kind of a jerk so far this season. (What do I mean by that? Compare the amount of stuff he delegates to Ivanova and Garibaldi to what Sinclair did.) He's been watching them to determine if they're loyal. At least, I assume that's why he's been doing it. Cuz otherwise he's just this guy who wants to make his second-in-command do everything while he goes off in his starfighter to have adventures.

Thank you The Onion

This is the most hysterical thing I've read in years.

HITtWW: the Electoral College Debate

I've noticed a trend

So there's this old rule where if a novel has a dog on the cover art as well as an award stamped on the cover, the dog's going to bite it at some point during the novel.

I've got my own rule: if the book has the word "game" in the title, a kid is going to go through hell.

Just sayin'.

Presidential resumes

So during the Republican primary, I asked myself "how long has it been since a Republican was elected to the highest office in the land without having Vice-President, Governor, or Supreme Allied Commander on his resume?" (Answer: 84 years.)

And that question eventually prompted this chart.

Click to enlarge.

Some notes: Vice-Presidents who assumed the role of the President after the incumbent died/resigned are only present if they went on to win re-election. Therefore Coolidge and LBJ are present; Andrew Johnson and Gerald Ford are not. Also, only the highest office a person held prior to becoming President is listed (ergo Coolidge is only listed under Vice-President, not VP and Governor). "Since 1945" does not include FDR.

One thing I learned from making this chart: Cabinet members (Taft, Hoover, and above all Buchanan) make awful Presidents.

How I think the world works

Welcome to a new segment on this blog, "How I Think the World Works," where I post random, slapped-together graphs and charts that are almost certainly factually inaccurate, but nevertheless demonstrate how I think the world works.

And here are the first two.

Note. Not all of these will be politically themed. Click on the pictures for the big version.

There is nothing I can say

to make this picture more awesome than it already is.

Oh lookie another Photoplasty contest

Yes, yes, Cracked's readership overlaps with various porn sites by about 110% (I was an English major, so that math adds up to me), and yes, the one immediately after the entry I'm dedicating this post to wins the Grand Prize for Stupidest Photoshop Contest Entry Ever, but number thirteen made me laugh. Because it's so true.

However.

Because I am honor-bound to snark at the embarrassing efforts of Cracked Photoshop Contest entrants, I must point out that the addition of the silver, lightning-spewing mushroom cloud atop the Electoral College very nearly ruins the whole thing for me, in much the same way that the Ewoks almost managed to make Return of the Jedi suck.

Turn to Stone

For whatever reason I hear that line as "burn the world."  I wonder why that is...

Pacing Your Arc

First of all, a note to my Facebook friends who are reading this: this post does contain spoilers for Battlestar Galactica (massive spoilers for season 1 and some small details from the other seasons) and Babylon 5 (seasons 1 and 2). Yes, both those shows have been over for years, but as I'm in the process of showing two of you BSG, I thought I'd warn you in advance.

From TvTropes:

• Babylon 5 has slowly seemed less and less innovative as the traits it pioneered or popularized spread among sci-fi shows:
  • It was the first major sci-fi show, not counting anime, to have major long-term story arcs planned in advance. Babylon 5 was written from a full outline for all five seasons, nearly unheard of at the time.
  • It was the first sci-fi series (and one of the first, if not the first, series of any genre) to be filmed in widescreen.
  • It gave the Darker and Edgier future and Used Future, in contradiction to Star Trek's utopia, a heavy boost of popularity (though it was nowhere near first with these).
  • It intentionally avoided (former trope) "Cute Kids And Robots." In fact, the term was coined in reference to B5 in order to describe what J. Michael Straczynski was declaring war on within TV sci-fi.
  • It pioneered the use of CGI effects, especially for anything involving spaceships. To put it in perspective: the producers of Deep Space Nine scoffed at B5's CGI and proudly announced that they would continue to use models; when Voyager launched, it not only used CGI, but used the same production house as B5 to make it.

 Now, given that I've referred to a certain other show as "the greatest television show of all time," and that show has long-term story arcs, a widescreen aspect ratio, a darker and edgier story featuring an antique bucket, and a lack of cute kids or cute robots (unless you count Skinjobs as robots, and even then I'd use "hot" instead of "cute" except for one particular Six look)... well...

Furthermore, both Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica end their first seasons with an assassination attempt that upends the power structure and puts a regular in a coma. Just sayin'.

Now when pointing out the differences between the shows, it's easy to just jump in and go, "oh, B5 was planned out from the start, so it never forced any absurd plot twists on the audience, like Hot Dog abruptly becoming a father," or "BSG doesn't have anyone over-acting from behind a rubber mask."  No, I'm going to talk about something different.

Pacing.

Given the above-mentioned similarities between B5's "Chrysalis" and BSG's "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II" (hereafter shortened as "Gleaming"), I thought I'd start with those two episodes and then move out to a comparison of the pacing in the two shows overall.

"Gleaming" ends with Adama being shot, whereas the presidential assassination takes place roughly two-thirds of the way through "Chrysalis."  The writers on BSG were going for shock value, whereas JMS was more interested in how the assassination would affect the characters. When we cut back to CIC at the beginning of Season 2, everybody's still frantic because Adama just got shot. You're there, in the moment. In contrast, President Santiago did the big firework 10.5 light-years away. Santiago is not a character on the show. His death is not personal for you, the audience member; you might feel shocked that the Heroes didn't Save The Day, but you're probably empathizing more with the characters on the show. Santiago's like President Adar back in BSG's miniseries. He's like President Kennedy. (A note for young people: President Kennedy's assassination was your parents' 9/11. And while we're on that subject, Roslin's inauguration in the BSG miniseries is not a reference to Clark's inauguration in "Chrysalis." They're both references to LBJ's inauguration in Real Life.)

But go beyond that. The B-plot to "Chrysalis" is Londo Mollari's deal with the devil and the first seeds of next season's Narn-Centauri war. There's a grim sense of inevitability to these proceedings as Mr. Morden snares Londo in his web.  In contrast, the B-plot to "Gleaming" (or at least one of them; I'll get to Starbuck's arc later) is Gaius Baltar having the first Opera House Vision. We can make some educated guesses about what "the face of the shape of things to come" is or represents; we know that Caprica-Sharon is pregnant, for example, but we have no idea what Baltar's role will be. Basically what I'm trying to say is that Battlestar was going more for shock value, excitement and mystery, whereas B5 was more about an inexorable slide into darkness.

Now for the overall pacing. Okay, that's not entirely accurate; I'm only halfway through B5's second season. But that's okay because BSG was at its best during its first season-and-a-half, so we'll just work with what we've got.  Now, it's true that both shows were great at hiding their Chekhov's Guns. For example, in Battlestar Galactica's "Act of Contrition," the main point of the card game scene is to show that Starbuck is completely caught up in her memories of Zack to function. But that's also the conversation where Boomer learns that Baltar has a Cylon-detector (and then Boomer visits Baltar in a later episode, Head-Six convinces Baltar to lie about the results of his tests... and if you know who the final Cylon is, you know where this is going). Then in "You Can't Go Home Again," Starbuck gets her hands on a Cylon Raider than then sits on Galactica's hangar deck until the end of the season.  And then both Boomer's angst about maybe being a Cylon and the Cylon Raider pay really important roles in the season finale. But this starts to not happen from Season 2 on. Yes, there was that mandala in Starbuck's apartment, but that almost feels like something the writers came back to after the fact. The Season 2 finale awkwardly disposed of both the Pegasus copy of Six as well as Baltar's nuke. The two focal episodes of Season 3 were "Unfinished Business," the episode that filled in the "missing year" gap and explained why everyone was suddenly acting differently, and "Maelstrom," which tied off the mandala/Eye of Jupiter thing in an extraordinarily awkward way. Most of the rest of that season (barring the first four and last three episodes) was pointless filler.

Babylon 5 had some pretty awful filler in its first season... except that "Soul Hunter" introduces just how important the Mimbari consider their souls to be (this is, er, incredibly significant later on),"Infection" is the episode that first mentions the war a thousand years ago, the B-plot in "Deathwalker" would have had ramifications down the line if not for one of the show's many cast changes, etc. It's more interesting to spot the threads developing on B5 because they're woven into the backstory. We're not examining the characters' behavior and going "Hmm, is Billy a Cylon?"  We're thinking, "okay, Morden came back from the rim, Anna Sheridan died out on the rim, G'Kar was looking for Z'Ha'Dum on the rim, that cryo-freeze ship was reprogrammed to head to Z'Ha'Dum... gee willikers, I think something might be happening out on the rim at Z'Ha'Dum!" (And wouldn't-c'ha-know-it, there's an episode later in Season 2 called "In the Shadow of Z'Ha'Dum"... three guesses what that's about.)

BSG basically operated on short bursts of things happening frantically, separated by long intervals of things not happening. (For a truly excruciating example, watch Season 4.0 the way viewers originally saw it, in weekly installments; "Have we found Earth yet?" "No." "Do we know who the final Cylon is yet?" "Not unless it really is Starbuck." "Do we know what the deal is with Starbuck yet?" "No." "Do we know what the deal is with the Final Four yet?" "No") In contrast, B5's plot was pretty much always unfolding, slowly, steadily, methodically.

So... knowing the destination makes the journey more enjoyable?

Tonight's debate drinking game

Yeah yeah, go to the other blog for real political stuff. This one's not serious:

Drink when any of the following things are mentioned (if the question does not pertain to it, but the candidate brings it up in his answer anyway):

Bain Capital
ObamaCare
Solyndra
The Same Failed Policies That Got Us Into This Mess
47%
Libya
Outsourcing
     The difference between outsourcing and offshoring
My Opponent's Tax Returns
Paul Ryan's budget
The Senate's (lack of a) budget
Small businesses
The Middle Class
Pay Your Fair Share
Balanced Approach
Big Bird
Any Republican president
     (drink twice if Obama mentions Bush or Romney mentions Reagan)
Bipartisanship
Operation Fast and Furious
The Constitution
You Said We'd Be At 5.6% Unemployment Now If We Passed the Stimulus

Also drink if:
Romney mentions that Obama had four years to fix the economy
Obama claims the Republicans stopped him
Romney claims that half of all recent college graduates are living with their parents
Obama claims Social Security/Medicare is/are fiscally sound
The candidates start arguing about the merits of a study of one of their budget proposals
Obama claims he can balance the budget without raising taxes on the middle class
Either candidate spends more than ten seconds saying how happy they are to be here
Either candidate is asked a question along the lines of "how will you get me back to work?"

And now a word about plot twists

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of going about The Reveal.  You can either have it come out of bat-frak nowhere, or you can slowly put little tiny clues throughout the story for the attentive audience member to piece together. I prefer the latter approach, myself, but the two most famous reveals in history are both examples of the former.

(This is my way of telling you that you owe it to yourself to see The Prestige if you haven't already. If you have already, see it again.)

So there I am, playing Dragon Age: Origins

And this happens:

Damn it, BioWare, I've already had my share of obnoxious ghost children!

(Yes, my rogue is using a sword-and-dagger combo. This is before I learned how that was a no-no.)

Y'know

Sometimes we let the political stuff distract us from what's really important. So while my alter ego launches a gazillion tweets related to the Ryan/Biden debate, here's a question for us internet nerds:

Gravity gun vs Portal gun?

The most idiotic photoshop contest Cracked has ever done

Is available here, and by God it is terrible.

Let's start with just the basic concept.  Mundane photos. Not famous photos, works of art, scenes from films, etc. Nothing where we'd be expected to know the original. No, the entire joke here is something "creepy" is just flung into a random, low-resolution photo of what-the-frak-ever.  I'll highlight some of my favorites.

#24: A clown in a mirror. Because clowns are creepy, I guess. If this were the only "little girl stalked by horror movie cliche" picture in this competition, I'd probably let it slide. But it's not, dear reader. No, it's not.

#23: A fish with hands. That's creepy?

#22: Death is chillin' in the background watching a bungee jumper jump.  This guy got the "easter egg" thing right, because it took me a while to notice it.  Whether a blurry guy in a robe with a blurry scythe is actually creepy or not is something I'll let you judge.

#21: One of the only decent entries in this entire list.

#20: I applaud the guy's photoshop skills. Reflections can't be easy to fake. But... this is a mundane photo?  Really?

#19: I genuinely do not know what I'm supposed to be looking at here. It looks like something is wrong with the kid's right hand, but I have no idea what it's supposed to be because... oh. My bad. The easter egg is on the bottom right of the frame. But seriously, look at that kid's hands!

#18: I get it. But the image quality is so poor it looks like everything was photoshopped.

#17: See #24.

#16: I had to look in the comments to figure this one out. That's how frakking stupid and not-creepy it is.

#15: See #21.

#14: I'm at a total loss. I mean, the last time the Weeping Angels were scary was 2007. (Disclaimer: unless "The Angels Take Manhattan" was actually good. I haven't seen it yet.)

#13: Look another monster clown. The horror. The horror.

#12: Thank you Cracked. Finally one where the photoshop is so bad it's immediately obvious, and kinda creepy to boot.

#11: Decent.

#10: See, you cleverly hid a perfectly crisp hanged man in the blurry portion of the picture. Illusion ruined. (Why the sodding hell would you use a blurry picture in the first frakking place? See also #19.)

#s 9-7: Okay, I guess.

#6: What... the... hell?

#s 5, 4: Okay, I guess.

#3: I... I have no comment.

#2: GODWIN'S LAW!

#1: What the hell is that splotch of red? Seriously, #21 was creepier than this one.

So thanks, Cracked. Now never do it again.

Hmmm

So the internet has clued me in to the fact that Sovereign's theme from Mass Effect is pretty much the theme from Dune...

...but watching a certain something else has clued me in to this one.  Am I the only one hearing this?

It's Getting Dangerous

by Thin Lizzy

Signs and Portents, part 1

Okay, so as you know, I've started watching Babylon 5 finally.  And as you may know, that is an extraordinarily arc-driven show.  All of about five episodes into the show I found myself scoffing at the quality of the filler episodes realized that a standard episode review in the style of, say, my Doctor Who reviews would be completely lunatic.

So I've already done episode 1, "Midnight on the Firing Line" and episode 3, "Born to the Purple," and the only important thing you need to know about episode 2, "Soul Hunter" is that we find out that Delenn is... important, somehow.  So this blog post is going to cover the season from episode 4, "Infection," through episode 10, "Believers."

Okay, the other thing you need to know about "Soul Hunter" is that we introduced Dr. Franklin there. "Infection" is his first focus episode.  It's Star Trek on a space station. Sorry, but that's what it is. Franklin's less... annoying here (another reason I skipped the "Soul Hunter" review was because doing it would mean having to comment extensively on how awful my first impression of the character was), maybe because the actor found his footing, or maybe because the writers decided to give him a proper character for his episode. Not a lot actually happens, and the episode is largely skippable, although it does tell us that a) Sinclair seems to have a death wish, and b) there are pro-human hate groups popping up.

"Parliament of Dreams" introduces Catherine Sakai, Sinclair's... "old flame" is probably not accurate. "Periodic bedmate" understates the genuine feelings they have for each other. It's also got a bizarre revenge/assassination plot against G'Kar that's ultimately thwarted by his new assistant, and they get to lighten the mood considerably in their last scene with the assassin. Neither one of these could accurately be called the "A-plot" of the episode, given that this is the first time we see G'Kar in a sympathetic light, and the Sinclair/Sakai stuff is too brief. That said, neither of these is the "C-plot," which involves a religious celebration festival, to showcase the beliefs of each species. And once again, humans are the only ones with multiple different religious systems.

"Mind War" introduces mind-reading Nazi Pavel Chekov Bester and is a Talia Winters episode. The Psi Corps are, well, a more realistic, darker version of the Jedi. They have supernatural abilities, answer to pretty much no-one, and are immensely secretive. Talia gets a psychic boost at the end which has yet to pay off by the end of the season, and Sakai finds a) a monster alien ship, and b) that G'Kar is not entirely a selfish prick. This is also the episode where Garibaldi finally gets elbowed in the stomach because his brain can't stop hitting on Talia.

"The War Prayer" isn't focused on any one character specifically. While Ivanova probably has the most important role, Londo's side-plot contains the episode's best moments. Those pro-human hate groups I mentioned earlier are looking for a foothold on the station, using Ivanova's old flame as their spokesman. Meanwhile, Londo softens up and gets two of Vir's friends out of their arranged marriages to other people. Because he has forgotten how to dance. No, it's not a euphemism, Doctor Who fans. Just watch it yourself; it's the best standalone episode in the first half of the season.

In "And the Sky Full of Stars," Sinclair gets subject to a mind probe (I'll wait, Doctor Who fans) by a guy who was absent the day they taught subtlety in acting school. Which is a shame because this is a supremely important episode. The Earth-Mimbari war ended because Delenn found something out about Sinclair. This further confirms that Delenn is crazy important. Oh, and she's been ordered to kill Sinclair if he ever remembers... what he just remembered.

"Deathwalker" sees a pair of plot devices that have been done to death a gazillion times (although admittedly, most of the examples I can think of come from after this episode aired, so it might have been more original then): War criminal scientists, and medical vampirism.  A war criminal scientist has found the cure for immortality, but it involves draining the life force from other people. Any sort of moral debate is quashed by Kosh blowing her ship up, but evidently the idea of transferring life-force from one person to another stuck with the writers; see the end of this season. Oh, and Kosh scanned Talia's mind for some reason. Still waiting to see what comes of that.

"Believers" is a) a Franklin episode, and b) a "religion versus medicine" episode. The first part isn't as bad as I'd feared, since the actor and writers have the character down pat now, and he's allowed to show a wider range of emotion.  The second part is fairly grating. Offscreen, Ivanova pwns an entire squadron of raiders. I'd be lying if I said anything arc-centric happened in this episode.

I'm going to stop there because the next one is a rather complicated Garibaldi episode, and I've got a lot to say about the two after that. Until next time.

Random Confessions

Mass Effect
I was annoyed that Shepard has to argue with Zaeed when he sets the refinery on fire. My Shepard let Kate Bowman die under nearly identical circumstances; he's not about to give a fig about some refinery workers.

After the Thessia mission, it's impossible for me to like any of the asari. The asari in general because they kept that beacon a secret, and Liara because she won't shut up about the Banshees. Hey, tentacle-head, Shepard's had to deal with human zombies for three freakin' years now! Get over it!

Was I the only person who was confused as to why Shepard was locked up while Jack was made a freaking teacher between Mass Effect 2 and 3?

Dragon Age: Origins
The more I learn about the Chantry the more I'm convinced it's an oppressive dictatorship that needs to be put down. I'm mildly religious and I feel this way, so it kind of baffles me that other people don't.

I gave my female Warden Dalish armor. I keep telling myself that it's for the dexterity bonuses, not the limited coverage. I don't believe me yet.

"Broken Circle" from Dragon Age: Origins was recycled as "Ardat-Yakshi Monastery" in Mass Effect 3. Just sayin'.

And then there's the voice acting, which has led to Zaeed Massani (Experienced Male Warden) hitting on Matriarch Aethyta (Morrigan). That is... special.

I have never wanted to slit a video game character's throat within two seconds of meeting them... until I met Cullen. His introduction starts out exactly the same way as Liara's (trapped in a forcefield, thinking you're a hallucination)... and then he starts ranting about killing everyone who's different. If I could have left that Hitler Youth wannabe in his forcefield for the rest of the game, I bloody well would have.

It took me a while to realize that Isolde wasn't married to Teagan. Because they are totally boinking each other.

Immediately before I quit for the night, I found a tier 7 bow when most of the item drops are in the 3-4 range. It's like the game is teasing me to continue.

My female Warden was romancing Alistair, but after seeing his Nexus fantasy dream in the Fade, she's having second doubts.

Law School
Notre Dame's online class resource thingy is called Sakai. I find this funnier than a Babylon 5 fan should.

Today in the 7th Circuit oral arguments, Judge Posner looked about as tired as I felt.

Judge Sykes reminds me of Laura Roslin.

The liberals on the Supreme Court could learn a thing or two about epic rants from Justice Scalia. Of course, the liberals on the Supreme Court could also learn a thing or two about the Constitution from Justice Scalia.