Thursday 30 March 2017

Legion - Chapter 7

Tim Burton's Revenge!
Okay, so I watched this after the musical crossover episode of The Flash and Supergirl, and this is where my evening got weird.

We begin by flashing back to Cary being pulled out of the 'hospital' by Oliver. They make a plan to rescue the others and we go forward to Cary contacting Syd and then Melanie, making sure to keep hidden from the parasite, which they identify as Farouk, the Shadow King. With the help of pairs of reality filtering glasses, Syd finds the catatonic telekinetic and Kerry, while Cary, Melanie and Oliver try to alter the real world so that Syd and David aren't immediately shot when they break out. Melanie also finds the mortally wounded telekinetic, revealing that the shooter is in fact the Eye.

'Lenny' questions Amy about the man who brought David to the family and we catch a glimpse of a familiar wheelchair.

David's fightin' chalk drawings are boss.
Elsewhere in his brain, David receives the assistance of his rational, British(1) mind, which talks him through his situation. He realises through the medium of imaginary moving chalk drawings that his real father must be a telepath who confronted the parasite and defeated it, but it survived and attached itself to him in revenge, seeking to grow strong on his power and, dare he say it, rule the world as a kind of telepathic god. His connection with Syd, however, broke the creature's spell and allowed him to perceive it.

In a bravura sequence, Oliver begins conducting an elaborate psychic construct around an electronic remix of Ravel's Bolero, while Kerry and Syd navigate a black and white asylum and David breaks out of his coffin into a labyrinth of endlessly recursive doors. The Eye attacks Kerry and Syd attacks the Eye, only for the Shadow King to appear, fold the Eye up like a ventriloquist's dummy (in both astral and physical forms,) threaten Kerry and Syd, nip off to blast Oliver and then come back. David unleashes his power to tear the Shadow King's labyrinth apart and Cary drops the device which imprisons the Shadow King onto David's head. Throughout this sequence, everyone speaks in silent movie title cards, and at the end of it, David catches some bullets while the Eye keeps on folding.

"Are you British?"
"I said, I'm your rational mind."
They take the telekinetic back to Summerland, where Oliver is awake. All seems well, but Kerry is angry that Cary left her when she needed him, the Shadow King starts breaking free, and Division 3 show up to take David back and kill everyone else. Not sure how that's going to work out for them, if I'm honest.

I suspect that the fact that Legion is able to spend a good chunk of the penultimate episode of its freshman year in a silent movie sequence mashing together disparate cinematographic styles and get away with it is a solid indication of how strong an opening it has made. Witty, daring and more than a little disturbing, it may not be definitively the best superhero show on television (although it's definitely up there,) but it is utterly unique, and not just within its genre. The look and feel of the show, from the film grain to the costume to the music, are like nothing else I've ever seen, and after a wobbly start it has fully embraced the oft ignored possibility that one could – in a world where superpowers and psychic possession are real – be a superhuman, and possessed, and mentally ill.


(1) Bonus meta points for having David assay a British accent for his father, only to have his attempt scorned by his rational mind in Dan Stevens actual British accent.

The Flash - 'Duet'

The old razzle-dazzle
Okay folks, it's crossover time. Not sold? Would it help if I said musical crossover time?

J'onn and Mon-el bring Kara across to Earth-1, where our mysterious villain appears in STAR Labs. Barry and Wally confront him, but the villain apparently has super speed too. Wally, still rattled from his run-in with Savatar, gets smacked down and Barry is put under the whammy and finds himself in the club where Kara is singing 'Moon River'. It's a decent enough rendition(1), but our heroes soon learn that they are powerless nightclub singers in the employ of a gangster named Cutter Moran (who looks just like Malcolm Merlyn,) who wants them to perform original material. As they try to puzzle this out, the architect of these shenanigans – dubbed the Music Meister by Barry – pops up in somewhat intangible form. He tells them that this world was created from their minds and their shared love of musicals, and encourages them to follow the script and sing, doing his own musical number ('Put a Little Love in Your Heart') to get them in the spirit.

In the real world, J'onn joins Wally and Cisco to track down and capture the Music Meister, despite the fact that he is drawing off and using Barry and Kara's powers. Kara and Barry are recruited by Digsby Foss (Joe West) and his partner (Martin Stein) to track down their missing daughter(2) Millie (Iris). They find Millie with Tommy Moran (Mon-el), son of Cutter, and the two declare that they are in love. In order to expedite the resolution of the movie, Kara and Barry encourage the two to tell their parents how they feel. After initial anger, the three parents sing a touching number from Guys and Dolls ('More I Cannot Wish You') and then quietly declare war on each other.
 
Daddies' little girl.
The Music Meister tells Iris and Mon-el that he can't save Kara and Barry; only they can, if they love them enough. Kara and Barry prepare a jaunty original number ('I'm Your Super Friend'), but then the gang war breaks out and everyone gets shot, including Barry and Kara. In the nick of time, Cisco is able to vibe Iris and Mon-el into the dream. The dying Kara accepts Mon-el's apology and forgives him, and Barry and Iris reaffirm their love, and everyone wakes up just fine to find the Music Meister free and explaining that he just wanted to help them all realise their love, because he always roots for the good guys. Kara, Mon-el and J'onn go home, and Barry serenades Iris ('Running Home to You') before proposing for the right reasons.

I am so much in two minds about this one. Musical episodes are a crapshoot and I for one prefer original songs to jukebox in a TV show. The jukebox numbers here – 'Moon River', 'Put a Little Love in Your Heart' and 'More I Cannot Wish You' – are well done, but it's the unbridled joy of 'I'm Your Super Friend' that really works best, and I'd have liked to have seen more of the songs specifically tailored for the show. Also… I have to say that I am not loving the idea that on top of being gorgeous and the centre of their universes, Barry and Kara have some sort of extraplanar being looking out for their romantic wellbeing (or indeed that Kara is supposed to be objectively better off with Mon-el at all.)
 
Musical episode and medical drama.
The Music Meister himself is an oddity, and oddly similar in both appearance and method to Mr Mxyzptlk. In fact, with his claims to be rooting for the good guys and suggestion of extradimensional viewing of events in the lives of the characters, he's kind of like Bat-Mite, if Bat-Mite was a shipper, and I am so against the idea of introducing fifth-dimensional shippers into the Arrowverse (although I confess I kind of wanted him to go over to Star City after this and get all up in Oliver's grill about something.)

'Duet' is no 'Once More With Feeling' or 'The Bitter Suite', but it's certainly no 'Lyre, Lyre, Hearts on Fire' either. Ultimately, I think its greatest failing is that it doesn't come up to the standards set in the Batman the Brave and the Bold episode, 'The Mayhem of the Music Meister', which crowbarred in a previously unseen Batman/Black Canary/Green Arrow love triangle(3) and was still awesome as anything.

(1) It's tough to try to follow a performance which convinced three generations to blank out Mickey Rooney's egregious yellowface and some of the most dubious romantic politics of a decade when recalling Breakfast at Tiffany's.
(2) Which is a nice touch, I felt.
(3) And you know how I feel about love triangles.

Supergirl - 'Star-Crossed'

"Family's always embarrassing, isn't it."
It's been a while since Kara was fired, and all in all she's taking it pretty well.

On the other hand, I have to admit, I am not digging 'funemployed' Kara. The idea that reporting, her 'calling', the thing that defined her as Kara rather than as Supergirl, can so easily be replaced by watching musicals with a cute fella is a disservice to the character and exactly the reason I fear romance in female-led titles. I am seriously disappointed that she's not even trying to make a go of it as a news blogger.

Not that this mysteriously-funded domestic bliss lasts long. A spaceship pops up in orbit and demands that Mon-el be handed over, then picks a fight with Kara when she goes to take a look-see. Rather than allow the situation to escalate, Mon-el agrees to go with the invaders. Kara hops into the teleport beam and it turns out that the ship is commanded by Mon-el's parents, the King and Queen of Daxam (dun-dun-dun!) Big surprise, except that the 'previously on' made a point of reminding us that Kara had heard that the Prince of Daxam was 'the worst'. Over the most awkward 'meet the family' dinner ever to include only privileged white people(1), Mon-el reveals that he was economical with the actualities in describing his escape, which involved rather more ditching his girlfriend and being hurried to an escape pod by his guard, who shot a Kryptonian ambassador on the way out.

Kara blows up at Mon-el for lying to her about his fundamental identity for six months and chucks him, and as a result reluctantly pushes him to accept his parents demand that he return to the somewhat recovered Daxam and lead the reconstruction as the face of the planet's future. He decides in the end, however, that he wants to remain on Earth and learn to be a real hero and a good person, even if Kara wants nothing to do with him anymore.

"I thought you said B&D, not B&E!"
Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Lyra tricks Wynn into helping her steal a Van Gogh. Alex persuades Maggie to let Winn out on her parole for 24 hours to track the real culprit. They find Lyra, who tells Winn he was just a mark, but it turns out that she was working for a gang whom her brother owes a stack of cash. With a little help from Guardian and the DEO, Lyra is captured, but J'onn won't approve a hostage exchange on the word of a proven con artist. Winn takes a chance, however, letting Lyra out and using a forged painting to lure the art theft gang and their alien leader into a trap. The brother is rescued and Lyra agrees to stay on in National City and give things another go with Winn.

Man, I am so glad that B-plot worked out the way it did, because the slightly comic male character only ever winding up with bad seeds with an agenda and never seeing it coming is a trope that got old with Xander Harris(2). Here, they worked through the situation well, with Lyra revealing that Starhaven was destroyed and she and her brothers were refugees, forced to endure death and suffering and confinement, and probably not best positioned to trust others as a first reaction, even people that she likes. I like that he still felt able to trust her once the truth came out, and I like that she decided to take a chance on trusting him, rather than vanishing from the series like a nu Team Arrow recruit.

The A-plot was less pleasing. I'm not agin Mon-el having a redemption arc beyond just being a bit of a self-centred sleaze and becoming less of a self-centred sleaze, but I don't like Kara when she's defined by her relationships. I really hope she takes a move into citizen journalism soon.
 
And then this happened...
Oh, and in the stinger a mysterious dude shows up while Kara is discussing the transdimensional device that Cisco provided, breaks out of cuffs, puts some sort of whammy on Kara and flees through a breach while she collapses into a dream world in which she has to sing in a 1930s nightclub. So there's that.

(1) As much as I am in accord with Kara's politics, the debate over Daxam's slave policies is painfully notable for being an argument between decadent slave owners and a former and current member of the liberal elite.

(2) 'I like you, I really do, but…' is almost as terrible a phrase as 'friendzone'.

Tuesday 28 March 2017

TV Roundup: Agents of SHIELD - 'Laws of Inferno Dynamics', Emerald City - 'They Came First', Timeless - 'The World's Columbia Exposition', 'The Murder of Jesse James', 'Karma Chameleon', 'The Lost Generation' and 'Public Enemy No. 1', and Iron Fist - 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and 'Immortal Emerges From Cave'

Vengeance!
'The Laws of Inferno Dynamics'(1) brings us to the end of the Ghost Rider subset of Agents of SHIELD's fourth season. With Eli rapidly growing in power, Coulson persuades Mace to bring in the big guns: Yo-Yo, Robbie and, of course, Daisy. Eli sets a trap for them by coating the walls of a passage with caesium, but Robbie strolls through the fire to find that he has managed to create a plutonium replica of the Los Alamos 'demon core'; an atomic bomb, in other words. Also, each time he uses his powers, the world gets a little wonkier. Coulson leads a bravura assault while Daisy struggles to contain the quakes. Although badly wounded, Robbie unleashes the Rider on Eli after it becomes clear that he plans to scrub the world clean and create life anew. Aida(2) uses her Darkhold knowledge to open a gate which Eli, the bomb and the Rider drop through, and Quake is exposed to the public, obliging Mace to undisavow her and claim she's been working undercover against the Watchdogs on behalf of SHIELD. Mace also brings the LMD programme in house, but PR guy discovers that Aida has knocked out Agent May and replaced her with a duplicate, and gets his neck snapped for his trouble, which can't be a good sign.

Also, d'aww.
The Ghost Rider weirdly muddies the waters of Agents of SHIELD, because suddenly they know magic exists and Coulson has even heard of the Rider before, yet they roundly rejected Clairvoyance a season before it turned out that there was a clairvoyant Inhuman. The story has been okay, and if Eli was a little low key for a major villain, I can't help but approve of them wrapping an arc in a quarter season, given how overstretched the season-long plots have traditionally become. It's an approach that worked well for Teen Wolf's third year, and would probably have been a stronger pitch for its fourth and fifth. Similarly, it did great favours for Gotham's sophomore year, if only by ditching some of the more irritating villains (by which I mean Theo Galavan) halfway through.


Ana Ularu is okay, but I am constantly disappointed by her failure to be 12
Monkeys'
 Emily Hampshire.
In 'They Came First', Dorothy and Lucas travel to Glinda's fortress while the Wizard tries to root out witchery in the Emerald City and now-Queen Langwidere is a dick to Jack, who is apparently into that. The last of these is purely fluff so far, featuring a sexed up version of the classic 'oil can' scene, because we totally needed that. West tries to save a young witch from a mob, but shit goes down, buildings asplode and to keep order the Wizard decides it is necessary to set fire to the entire High Council of nuns, because heaven forefend we get through an episode without some institutional violence against women. It is suggested that witches are themselves the Beast Forever. Oh, and someone realises that the knife Jack nicked from Momba when Tip was rescued suggests that she is Ozma, Princess of Oz, which was either obvious AF or means nothing to you.

In the A-plot, Dorothy busts out her inner witch to save young Sylvie from wolves. Sylvie has been fitted with earplugs for… reasons, and Dorothy removes them as part of a bonding process. She also gets it on with Lucas, and suggests that they should both come back to Kansas and join her in a land which welcomes the poor, the hungry, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; especially those with violent tendencies, magical powers and no documentation. All she needs to do now is prevent Glinda's war against the Wizard, by hook or by crook. Unfortunately, as soon as they reach her fortress she's all 'memory returned' and next thing we know she's got her tongue down Lucas/Roan's throat and Dorothy is all kinds of betrayed because – title quote! – 'they came first.'

I predict that this happy domestic scenario will in no way implode.
Emerald City continues to struggle hard with, among other things, its sexual politics. I think that the idea is that women have the power in Oz and men like the Wizard fear this, but nevertheless, it is principally men who domineer and women who machinate. The transfer from a relatively children's novel to sprawling adventure epic also has the effect of leaving the protagonists – Dorothy and Lucas – unusually short on agency, with one essentially willing to uncritically undertake any course that will enable her to get home, and the other completely at the whim of his unreliable memory. They are, hands down, the least interesting characters in the show, surpassing even Jack and Langwidere, whose deeply unhealthy relationship at least has something of the grim fascination of a car crash.

Next we come to a bit of a Timeless marathon, although actually I watched them over an extended period intending to do an end-of-series review until I realised I could put them in my newly inaugurated roundup.

When you go back to the wild west and people are like 'dude, have some
respect for human life,' you should know you took a wrong turn somewhere.
'The World's Columbia Exposition' sees the show pin its colours to the mast in the War of the Currents, labelling Edison and Henry Ford as key Rittenhouse members whom Flynn sets out to murder. In order to prevent interference he decoys Team Lifeboat to a hotel transformed into a serial killer's death maze (true story) and captures Lucy, who manages to recruit assistance in the form of Harry Houdini to prevent the assassination and rescue Rufus and Wyatt. Then in 'The Murder of Jesse James', the crew travel back in time to stop Flynn saving the life of Jesse James by assisting legendary lawman Bass 'The Real Lone Ranger, but he's black' Reeves and his native American partner Grant Johnson. They discover that Flynn has no intention of letting James live; he is just using him to find someone in Indian territory; former timeship pilot and Rittenhouse oppose Emma Whitmore.


"A soldier, a scientist and a stewardess(3) walk into a bar..."
With Flynn having given Wyatt the identity of his wife's killer, Wyatt persuades Rufus to help him steal the lifeboat and prevent the killer's conception in 'Karma Chameleon'. He promises no harm, but ends up accidentally killing the man's father during a storm, only to learn that the killer was lying: He killed two other women, but not Wyatt's wife. Anthony contacts Lucy and offers to destroy the mothership if she does the same to the lifeboat, in order to keep time travel out of the grasp of Rittenhouse, but Flynn rumbles him and Anthony is killed. Lucy and Rufus realise that the man who threatened Rufus was Lucy's biodad.

Rufus is all flustered about meeting Baker, and asks Lucy not to tell his sort-
of-girlfriend Jiya, which a) is kind of tacky, and b) raises the issues of how
time travel affects a 'three for free' policy.
In 'The Lost Generation', Wyatt is arrested and replaced with the super decent Dave Baumgartner, who is killed by one of Flynn's goons as the team try to rescue Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh turns out to be a Rittenhouse legacy – like Lucy – who has been charged with becoming famous and then being a big old racist douche. With the help of Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rufus and Lucy rescue Lindbergh, who plans to ditch Rittenhouse but turns out to have stuck to that for only a short time. As Rittenhouse-controlled NSA agents take over the time machine project, Agent Christopher busts Wyatt out of chokey and together with Lucy and Rufus they undertake to continue the fight against Rittenhouse by any means necessary.


The big joke this week is that they have the wrong costumes.
Finally, in 'Public Enemy No. 1', Flynn helps Al Capone to evade his tax charges and kill Eliot Ness in exchange for abducting the Mayor of Chicago to learn when Rittenhouse will next meet up en masse. Dispatched to assassinate Flynn's mother, Lucy and Rufus tranquilise their new muscle and steal the Lifeboat, leaving a worm in the project computers. Jiya is arrested after receiving a call from Rufus, but is able to cobble together a computer with parts while in custody to ensure her friends aren't tracked. Although at first intending to save Lucy's sister, the team determine that they can't let Flynn mess with Capone's history. After Ness's death, Lucy suggests that they work with Richard Hart, a prohibition agent and secretly Capone's big brother Jimmy (true story) to gain access to Capone, who shoots Rufus before being killed by Hart. Mason asks the NSA for access to the same data the Machine uses in Person of Interest. As the team jumps out, Rufus collapses at the controls.

Timeless has done the needful and changed up its game, although the jump of the week structure was already a bit stale. Wyatt's hair-trigger temper and failure to make and execute a simple plan – there are many better ways to prevent conception via time machine than trying to cock block the future father; I came up with several during the course of the episode, some of which didn't even involve fire – prevent his failure being all that sympathetic, especially given that it involved the death of a guy who seemed pretty decent. Similarly, Rufus has not only left Jiya in the lurch, by then calling her he has dumped her right in it, so a bullet in the collar seems little more than karma. Flynn may be a monster, but he's still in the top three for most sympathetic character in the series (number one is Lucy's unrealised sister.)

Not doing yourself any favours, Danny boy.
Iron Fist struggles gamely on with 'Under Leaf Pluck Lotus' and the inevitable Claire Temple cameo. A group of posh-slutty saleswomen introduce an exciting new line in synthetic heroin to the city, and Danny determines that it is being imported via the pier the Hand wanted Rand(4) to buy. With Ward refusing to act without proof, Danny goes to Colleen for backup, bringing takeaway, which for him means ordering from his dad's favourite restaurant and paying for them to bring the food, tables and chairs to the dojo, because he's rich and clueless and so hilariously endearing, right?(5) This is where he meets Claire, who is taking private lessons from Colleen because of course she is. Danny and Colleen spy on the Hand shipment, but it turns out that they are not bringing in drugs, but the chemist who makes them. Danny 'rescues' the chemist, and I use sarcastic quote marks because this rescue involves the man being stabbed in the chest and hauled back to the dojo to be treated by Claire.

"Basically, Danny, you're just not as interesting as I am."
Moving on to 'Immortal Emerges from Cave', the Meachams move to deal with a viral video of Danny apologising for not-technically-illegal pollution from one of the company's factories and Ward is suddenly pitifully addicted to prescription-strength painkillers. One of the better scenes of the series comes when Danny basically hijacks Ward to trawl around warehouses looking for the chemist's daughter, who is being held hostage, but they find the body of the chemist's guard and an invitation to a duel. While Claire and Colleen take the chemist to hospital and the Hand swipe him from under their noses, Danny fights three battles under the watchful eye of Madame Gao. The first is against a pair of brothers,  the second an entomologist who fights using poison needles and high school seduction moves(6), and the third a psychopathic blade fetishist and karaoke enthusiast. Gao ultimately calls a halt by reminding Danny that the Hand doesn't do honour, but reveals a) that she was born in Kun Lung and b) that she is a way more ultimate a weapon than he is.

Iron Fist is struggling, and not because no-one likes a billionaire post-Trump. It's because the show fails to make Danny likeable, fails to overcome its inherent cultural appropriation (seriously, Marvel; it's cool having Method Man weigh in to Luke Cage, but if RZA is your authority on the history of Chinese martial arts, then you're in trouble,) and fails to make the conflict interesting. Danny Rand's wealth takes the fight off the streets. With Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage we saw the street-level struggle, but Iron Fist lifts us right up to the level where Elektra briefly and tediously took Daredevil and the result lacks emotional punch. We don't not care about Danny Rand because he's a billionaire, so much as because we only see him fighting for abstracts – his name, his company, Kun Lung – and not for people.

Straight up the fuck is this shit?
Also… we need to have words about the entomologist assassin, because damn that was some nineties shit right there. An Asian American ninja poisoner in a black corset and fucking chopstick buns vamping her way in close to deploy her needles o'death? The only thing more disappointing than that particular portrayal is the fact that Danny fell for it. Sweet Christmas, Rand; if a pouty chick in black shows up for a duel to the death and suggests you could just make out instead, you say no. How hard is that one to wrap your head around? And how is it that you were trained to be the destroyer of the Hand but without any preparation for the fact that some of your opponents might be women? What the hell?

Iron Fist. It's disappointing.

(1) Points for trying on the title, at least.
(2) It is apparently Aida, not Ada, which makes me a little sad.
(3) They do make the point that in the 1980s they were still called stewardesses.
(4) At this point, I kind of expect to learn that the Hand are using Rand because when they take over they only need to change one letter.

(5) Wrong.
(6) Fortunately for her, Danny has the emotional maturity of a high school freshman.

Monday 27 March 2017

Star Wars Rebels - 'Twin Suns'

"If there's a bright centre to the universe, we're on the planet that is farthest
from it."
It's time to follow the Holocrons, as Ezra answers the call of Maul one last time.

As the Rebels of Phoenix Squadron make the final preparations for their mission to retake Lothal, Ezra is troubled by nightmares of Maul and his quest for vengeance against Obi-Wan Kenobi. He feels that he ought to go to Tatooine, but Hera insists that their mission must come first. Ultimately, Ezra chooses to ignore this advice, stealing a training A-wing to fly to the world of two suns in search of the means to defeat the Sith, accompanied somewhat against his will by Chopper. On Tatooine, the Jedi holocron leads Ezra to its Sith partner. Tusken raiders destroy his ship(1) and soon the desert overcomes him, as Maul planned, and Kenobi emerges from hiding to save the boy. Obi-Wan laughs off the suggestion that he might destroy the Sith, then sends Ezra away while he faces Maul.

Despite it's brevity, this duel has more references to The Phantom Menacethan one could shake a lightsabre at.
And you know what? That's pretty much it. That's all the plot there is in this episode. No sidelines, no B-plot; just Ezra, Kenobi, and Maul, and at the end of it, the rematch that fandom has been waiting for since Maul made his canon reappearance in The Clone Wars(2). The fight itself is classic samurai/western material; lots of build up as the two shift their positions, gauge each other's strength, and then an almost laughably(3) brief, utterly decisive exchange of blows. It's a thing of beauty.

Ezra returns to Chopper Base with a fresh focus, while Obi-Wan rides out to a moisture farm where a woman is calling her young nephew in for the night.

That final scene is a thing of beauty, using the so-familiar skyscape of Tatooine, the outline of the moisture farm, and recycled audio of Aunt Beru calling for Luke to perfectly evoke the memory of the first Star Wars, before playing out the episode with the slow, melancholy strings of Luke's Tatooine theme. It's telling of how obviously important this is that when the screen pulled out to the trailers for whatever was on next, as is the wont with modern TV, Disney XD kept the music playing and muted the trailers.
 
Da-dah dah da-da-dah-dah da-da da-dah-dah da-da-dah-dah.
'Twin Suns' ultimately serves to highlight the futility of Maul's quest for revenge, and in a meta sense how little impact he has on the Star Wars universe, for all his iconic status. His quest was a distraction, for us and for Ezra, from where the real action of Rebels is taking place. Obi-Wan's story, Luke's story, are not divorced from Rebels, but neither are they intrinsically linked. Just because this is their show, they aren't suddenly at the heart of everything. Maul thought his quest was the stuff of legend, but of course it was always fated that it would fail and he would be forgotten.

(1) One review noted Ezra's failure to use his lightsabre against the Sand People, but Wookiepedia notes that, despite the visual effect, Tusken cycler rifles fire solid projectiles, which can not necessarily be deflected with a lightsabre.
(2) Full disclosure, I've not seen much of The Clone Wars, so I don't know how many rematches this makes.
(3) Almost; the actual laughs in this episode are pretty scant.

Legends of Tomorrow - 'Moonshot'

This is totally mission control. Totally.
Man, what is with all the moon stuff lately. The fiftieth anniversary isn't for another two years.

So, Rip takes the team to find Commander Steel in 1970, where he has joined NASA in order to get his patriotic hero fix. He's working in mission control for the Apollo 13 mission when they find him and he decks Rip for messing up his life, but soon they realise that they have to work together, because Houston, we don't have a problem. Eobard Thawne has impersonated backup astronaut Jack Swigert and incapacitated the rest of the crew, but other than that the mission is on course and Thawne intends to recover the flag from Tranquility Base, the pole of which contains the final section of the Spear of Destiny, because of course it does.

As an aside, I have no idea how Thawne knows this, because Rip doesn't and he lost the compass, and has not had his fellow bads torture Commander Steel, who is literally the only person who knows where the fragment is.

But anyway, the Legends pursue Apollo 13 in the Waverider and Ray manages to sneak aboard. Thawne spots him, but his Speed doesn't work in space, apparently, and Ray is able to put him down.

I also have literally no idea where this comes from, especially as it is literally space and not – as stated – zero-G, as Thawne speed still doesn't work on the Moon or in the Waverider's artificial G.  

Steel wants to go back after they finish here and be with his family, instead of them thinking that he died in Leipzig, and Nate is torn. He wants to have a proper Dad, but Amaya points out that the upbringing that he had made him the man he is, without whom the rest of the team might never have been rescued from history. Amaya is having troubles of her own, as she learns that she has her own destiny which doesn't involve long-term time travel or, apparently, self-determination. Predestination is such a tool.

One's a pathological speedster serial killer, one's a relentlessly altruistic
scientist; it's like a bloody sitcom.
Ray gets the Spear, but the landing module uses up its fuel in the descent and the Waverider is too banged up protecting the module from a meteor storm to come and collect Ray. Ray and Thawne have to work together to patch Ray's suit power into the module, and when it turns out that someone has to blow the forward airlock to decelerate the Waverider it is Commander Steel who makes the ultimate sacrifice, because that's a control you only want to be able to operate from inside the airlock.

Thawne escapes as his speed returns, but is unable to take the Spear before Black Flash is after him, noting as he departs that he designed Rip's anti-Speedster weapons. Rip confesses to feeling lost now he isn't Captain, but Sara assures him that makes him just like the rest of them. Amaya asks Gideon to show her the shitty future that constitutes her destiny.

'Moonshot' isn't a terrible episode, but is weighed down by uncertainties. How did Thawne find the Spear? Why doesn't his speed work in space and how did Ray know that? Why doesn’t the airlock have a release control on the inside of the inner door, and even if it doesn't, why can't Gideon override? It's possible something critical was damaged. Meteorites do tend to hit the worst possible thing nine times out of ten. And what did the Time Masters pay Rip Hunter for? I get that they need to establish Sara as the better captain, but as is par for the course with these things, they do it by making Rip look like a gibbering incompetent just a week after a run which presented evil Rip as a credible threat to the entire team.

Oh, and Stein, having been taken into mission control as an observer by Commander Steel - a British observer, so he and Jax do accents, although Rory, who is actually played by a man from Cheddar - doesn't - distracts attention from what is happening on Apollo 13 by singing the Banana Boat Song, which is... weird.

Friday 24 March 2017

The Flash - 'Into the Speed Force'

"So, which aspect of whose personality am I representing this time?"
Wally West is missing, presumed... gone.

Determined that no-one else suffer for his many fuck-ups, Barry determines to go into the Speed Force after Wally and bring him back. Cisco creates a tracking device and Caitlin adds biometric sensors, so that they will  be able to monitor him even in the Speed Force, tether him to the world and bring him back if he gets into trouble; no prizes for guessing which part goes wrong around the midpoint of the episode.

The Speed Force appears to Barry, as before, but this time in the form of everyone who died to save the day when he couldn't: Eddie Thawne, Original Firestorm, even Leonard Snart, who sacrificed himself to save all of time and space because he was inspired to be better by the Flash. The Speed Force is also less charitable this time around, since last time it/they returned Barry's speed on the grounds that he was over his mother's death, only for him to turn around and create Flashpoint. They tell him that Wally is trapped in the prison he created/will create for Savitar, in his own personal hell, and that to free him Barry must first escape his own hell.

Meanwhile, Jesse tries to go up against Savitar, pointing out that on her world she is the real Flash. It doesn't work that well, but she and HR are able to establish one thing: Savitar wears his frictionless, quantum indeterminate armour because underneath it he can be hurt, and in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, 'if it bleeds we can kill it.'

Oh, break my heart why don't you.
Barry finds Wally trapped in the worst moment of his life and offers to take his place, but the Speed Force ain't having it. Barry may be offering himself as a sacrifice, but they see it as an abnegation of his responsibilities. Saving Iris, stopping Savitar, that's Barry's job and nobly offering himself in exchange for Wally won't get him out of it. Fortunately, when the tether breaks, Cisco goes to Jay Garrick for help, and Jay is able to see Barry through and take Wally's place, giving the Earth-1 Flash his helmet so that when the time comes, Barry and Cisco can pull him back out.

Back home, Barry takes ownership of his actions and his blind rush to change the future by any means necessary and takes a step back from his relationship with Iris after pushing it too hard. While this will probably be presented as a mistake, it's a surprisingly grown up thing for him to do. I'm not sure that the same can be said of Jesse's sudden decision to go to Earth-3 and be their stand-in Flash, but it's better than her standing around like a third wheel the way she did last week when the writers had no idea what to do with her.

'Into the Speed Force' suffers from the fact that deep, philosophical navel gazing is not The Flash's A game, and that its ultimate moral reverses Barry's revelation of a few episodes back that he doesn't have to be the hero every time. Apparently he does have to be the hero every time; the Speed Force is big on brand identity or something. I don't like the idea of Barry as some sort of Flash Messiah.

On the other hand, next week: Singing!

Legion - Chapter 6

Pie abuse.
After last week's turn to the bizarre, Chapter 6 of Legion... gets weirder.

All of the characters - including the Eye - are apparently trapped in David's head space, which now resembles the Clockwork, having their personalities deconstructed by tough-love shrink Dr Lenny. As Miranda sought to convince David that what he took for insanity was the manifestation of his powers, Dr Lenny now leads her 'patients' to the realisation that what they thought were powers are in fact manifestations of mental illness. Yes, it's the asylum episode, but this being Legion we're going to weirder and darker places even than is usual for the trope. Syd is the first to see the door back to reality, but Davi urges her to keep quiet in case the doctors connect this to her diagnosis: Apparently she is the delusional scizophrenic in this world.

"I'm sensing a lack of professionalism here, Doctor."
Syd is numbed by music therapy after she asks too many questions, while the Eye is given license to pursue a disempowered Kerry. Miranda is contacted by the figure in the diving suit, who leads her into the world where David is about to be shot. David begins to shake the certainty of the illusion and Lenny turns aggressive, openly revealing herself as an aspect of the parasite personality and claiming to have known his real father, who tried to hide him from the parasite. As David struggles not to be overcome, the figure in the diving suit releases Syd from the sound of crickets and opens the mask to reveal, not Oliver Bird, but Cary.

Chapter 6 brings home just how dangerous and destructive David's parasite mind actually is, using his own powers to entrap the entire group, including memory expert Ptonomy. At the same time, it reveals weaknesses as well, with aspects of the illusion slipping out of control and the entity's impatience belying its claims of implacability. My main gripe is the declawing of Kerry, and I really hope we get to see her - as well as Syd and David - fight back next week.

Legends of Tomorrow - 'Land of the Lost'

"I love the smell of T-Rex urine in the morning..."
Rip Hunter has been captured by his former teammates, but he was captain of the Waverrider for a long time before he turned evil and he still has some tricks up his sleeve.

Activating crash protocols, he sends the ship plunging through time, then orders a self-destruct and smashes the compass when he is unable to escape. The ship crashes at its earliest ever destination, the cretaceous forest where Ray was being chased by a T-Rex, and the spinny deely from the front of the ship - a vital part of the timey wimey apparatus - falls off and has to be retrieved. Roary suggests that they use that Time Master technique for going inside someone's mind on Rip, which is news to everyone else, but Sara and Jax opt to do the thing and project themselves into Rip's mindscape, which for psychological and budgetary reasons looks exactly like the Waverrider, but with dimmer lighting.

Ray, Nate and Amaya head out to find the deely, which turns out to have ended up in the nest of Ray's old sparring partner, Geraldine the T-Rex, who already holds a grudge against him for nicking one of her actual eggs to make a dozen omelettes. Ray has a hell of an episode, being an adorable prehistoric boyscout with his T-Rex pee defence perimeter and little rock models of his teammates that he made to talk to while he was stranded, and then being all insightful. He tells Nate that he knows there is something between him and Amaya, but that it can't get serious because otherwise Amaya won't go back to her village in her own time, and his friend Mari will never be born to assume the mantle of Vixen and help defeat Damien Darhk. Since this also involves Mari being the only survivor of the village's destruction, it's kind of a bleak reminder of the Legends' responsibilities.

"Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself."
Sara and Jax find themselves attacked by evil versions of themselves, created by Eobard Thawne's machinations to control Rip's mind. While they are there, Roary has an unexpected heart to heart with Stein, advising him to view Jax as an equal partner, rather than a student. Sara is thrown in the brig with the weakened core of Rip's true persona, while Jax is unexpectedly aided by an unfamiliar British woman that he realises is a personification of Gideon. Sara convinced Rip that she is on his side, and that his apparent telekinetic powers are a result of this being his mind. Jax and Gideon help them to escape the brig and they confront their evil clones even as the mental construct - now revealed as such - begins to crumble. Rip finds himself, Sara and Jax bail before getting trapped, and Rip cops off with Gideon before coming to.

Didn't this same thing happen to Johnny in Killjoys?
Nate confesses to Ray that he doesn't think he can keep things casual with Amaya after seeing her stare down a T-Rex, but isn't able to break things off quickly either. Gideon hints that her personification in Rip's mind was actually her, not a mere mental projection, but it's a sweet moment rather than hugely awkward.

And in 1970, an astronaut is moved up to the Apollo 13 mission after Ken Mattingly gets sick. The camera pulls back to reveal that the doctor clearing him is Eobard Thawne.

'Land of the Lost' is a solid episode, resolving the Evil Rip subplot with a classic bit of mind-intrusion. The T-Rex is a bit of a sideshow, but Ray's intervention and mention of Mari makes the Nate/Amaya thing much more compelling, because now there are stakes and consequences and other such important narrative things relating to the romance. This is what was ultimately missing from the Ray/Kendra farrago, which had nothing more behind it that the question of Kendra's free will vs. Hawkgirl's destiny (in which destiny won, hands down, implying that Shayera is destined to have Khufu-faced yahoos show up in all her lives and be all 'Don't care who you thought you loved; soulmate in the house, yo!')

And just to say it, I loved that Ray got some character love this week. Not just his moving appeal to Nate on much more solid grounds that not fraternising, but the fact that he noticed. He's so often passed off as clueless, and it was lovely to see his bumbling around the couple revealed to be his way of making sure he didn't walk in on them. Coupled with his immediate understanding of Sara's connection with Guinevere, it shows that the writers haven't condemned him to comic relief hell just yet.

Monday 20 March 2017

The Magicians - 'The Flying Forest'

"Yes, I have wood. My shoulder is made of teak."
And this is where things get weird.

In the aftermath of the battle against the Beast, Quentin is in a bad way. His injured shoulder has been replaced with a wooden one and he is comatose, forcing Eliot and Margot to leave him and look to their other problems; like Eliot being high king of a dying land (the god dump in the wellspring is almost as bad as the Beast, but sings fewer showtunes,) and married to a horny Filorian girl who does nothing to float his boat. As a workaround for his inability to leave Filory, Margot creates a golem-Eliot, modifying the Margolem's mind-link so that Eliot can occupy his golem as an Earth body while he sleeps in Filory. Until, that is, his wife wakes him up for barely-consensual nooky(1) and sort of gets his mind wedged between the two worlds.

Penny hits the clinic, but Dr Centaur won't try to undo a curse set by the Riverwatcher. Instead, once Quentin comes to and has been a misery for a while, Penny gets him to cut his hands off again, and then they go after the White Lady, a questing beast that must grant one wish for the person who catches her. They manage to make it through the Flying Forest - so called because its atmosphere makes you high as anything - but although Penny is able to get his hands back, the White Lady can't bring Alice back to life. In fact, nothing in Filory can help him. This realisation is a key one for Quentin, who asks simply to be sent home.

It's the woman again!
Elsewhere, Julia finds Kady in a drugged stupour, having retreated into drugs over her guilt at leaving Julia to Renard, and dries her out to help fight the trickster. Kady sneaks her into Brakebills and guides her around the library to grab a particular book. As the book is tagged, Julia hides in the physical cottage to copy the text. Margot finds her, but gives her a blank to mate with the book and whelp a copy.

Had you forgotten how books in this magical library do?

From this they drew a spell to raise Marina temporarily from some kind of hellish afterlife, to tell them that 'hey, Renard was banished by a Hedge, hence his beef, so find her and she can tell you how she did it.'

Despite some lighter moments, 'The Flying Forest' is a bleak encounter overall, as Team Filory deal with Alice's death and Team Julia - which is basically Julia plus a rotating and highly ablative extra body - takes a more measured and less deal-with-the-Devil approach to god hunting. Honestly, it isn't just Quentin realising that he was shooting for easy answers. It's good to see Kady back again. She has one of the brightest relationships with Julia, which keeps the series from getting too deep in melancholy, and that's all to the good. Presumably Team Filory's quest to keep magic from dying altogether will tie back into the hunt for Renard at some point, but at the moment it's the latter that's most interesting.

(1) It's played lightly, but literally creepy AF.

TV Roundup - Emerald City, Person of Interest and Iron Fist

Man, I watch a lot of TV. Here's a summary for the shows where I'm not paying that much attention, or don't have much new to say:

"Welp; this seems valid."
'Beautiful Wickedness' was the latest episode of Emerald City, and if it sounds like the sort of title you'd see alongside a shirtless hunk on a barely safe for the underground romance novel, then you might not be too surprised at the content. West ropes Dorothy in to do wet, magic shirtless brain torture on Lucas, because his feelings for her are an anchor, or something. Langwidere sasses everyone, but especially Tip, but then someone kills her dad. West discovers that Glinda is planning rebellion and stockpiling Witches of Mass Destruction, and as Lucas was part of her conspiracy the Wizard offers Dorothy a deal: Go with Lucas to Glinda and assassinate the Witch of the North, and he will send her home. In flashback we learn that he worked with her parents on an energy project, but sabotaged it to create the portal to Oz because he was fed up of being treated as the helper monkey. He also gets Dorothy's gun and gives it to Langwidere to replicate and mass produce for Beast-shooting purposes.

The hazards of tanning.
Person of Interest continues with '6,741', in which Sameen escapes, but betrays the team to Samaritan due to brainwashing, only for it to be revealed that this is the 6,741st iteration of a simulation being run using a sophisticated VR rig and an implant in Sameen's brain to effect that very brainwashing, with each one ending with her blowing her brains out rather than complete the betrayal and kill Root (it's not clear how many times it took for her to kill Reese or Harold, although I note Bear makes it.) No number at all this week, just lots of plotty plotness. The cerebral implants are one of the more outre bits of spec fic in the world of Person of Interest and ultimately, '6,741' comes off as a darker, much less fun version of last season's 'If-Then-Else'.

A Chinese martial artist whose thing is bushido is actually pretty cool.
Having a rich, white asshole explain to her about kung fu, not so much.
And then there's Iron Fist, the final intro-to-Defenders series on Netflix. It comes on the heels of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, and in it we meet the street-level superteam's Scrappy-Doo, irritating jagoff Danny Rand. Okay, he was lost in another dimension for fifteen years after the deaths of his parents in a plane crash which was - four episodes in I'm still confident - orchestrated by his father's business partner and basically beaten with sticks until he got really good at kung fu, but a) that last bit only happened because he insisted he was going to be crystal dragon Jesus, and b) he's still an asshole. The show's breakout character is Coleen 'Daughter of the Dragon' Wing, a Chinese-American martial artist with an Irish name and a specialism in Japanese martial arts and philosophy which in one package is almost enough diversity to make up for keeping Danny Rand as the idiot white saviour of Kun-Lung after the Ancient One debacle(1). It's not devoid of merit then, but damn it's the poor sibling of the bunch (which is ironic as the character could buy and sell the rest of the Defenders a million times over if they weren't all, whether through integrity, stubbornness or principle, basically incorruptible.) I'm four episodes in ('Snow Gives Way', 'Shadow Hawk Takes Flight', 'Rolling Thunder Cannon Punch' and 'Eight Diagram Dragon Punch'; each episode is named for a martial arts move,) and note that I'm already rolling them into a single summary post.

(1) Not that she's perfect. She takes Danny to task for physically assaulting a disrespectful student, which based on her own actions means that she must draw the line just north of brutal verbal abuse.