We open in
the cold, grey halls of Dragonstone, where Danaerys is conferring with her
commanders and allies. She confronts Viserys with the fact that he has
betrayed, like, all of the kings he
has previously worked for, and he tells her that this is true, and he will
absolutely do the same to her if she becomes a tyrant. This seems to be the
right answer.
Melisande
turns up, having now settled on Danaerys as her Prince that was Promised(1) on
account of all the rest of her options falling through. Dany then talks strategy
with her commanders and allies, most of whom are all for a direct assault on
King's Landing. Tyrion counsels against this - also dropping some sass on Ellaria by telling her that they 'don't poison little girls' - and Dany agrees that she doesn't
want to be 'queen of the ashes', which she will inevitably become once she lets
the dragons off the chain over a major population centre. Instead, she
determines to follow the Tyrion plan of besieging King's Landing with Dornish
and Highgarden troops, while the Unsullied and Dothraki fuck up the Lannister
seat of Casterly Rock.
Olenna warns
her against being too kindly. Margaery was more beloved than any Queen in
history, and she got imprisoned, tortured and incinerated for her efforts. "The nobles are
sheep," she tells Dany, "but you are a dragon. Be a dragon."
"It's this or Luke Evans."
Before he
leaves, Missande comes to Grey Worm and they get all sexy, but this scene
raises so many questions. Mostly, if these characters have come to freezing,
storm-tossed Dragonstone from the sweltering heat of Essos, why aren't they
wearing more layers? It is much speculated that this encounter will also spell doom for Grey Worm.
In King's
Landing, Cersei paints a picture of Dany as a marauding psychopath to the
nobles – including Tyrell's bannermen – to persuade them to support her. You'd
think Cersei might have learned a lesson or two about glass houses after the
whole Sparrow debacle, but anyway. Jaime makes an impassioned plea to Sam's dad
not to back Olenna's vengeance, and Qyburn explains to Cersei that the only
thing that can kill a dragon is a black arrow from a windlance (I guess because
he's seen the movie of The Hobbit,
but not read the book.) Fortunately, he's had one built, and demonstrates it on the largest skull in the catacombs.
She's not a tame wolf.
In the
North, Jon gets an invitation from Tyrion to parlay with Danaerys – omitting her
demand that he bend the knee – and is inclined to go. Fire kills wights,
dragons make fire; he's done the maths and the solution is a happy face. The
nobles of the North are not keen, but when Sam sends word of the dragonglass
mountain, Jon is determined and he and Ser Davos head south, after roughing up
Littlefinger for being a creeper. I can't imagine that leaving a disgruntled Littlefinger in
Winterfell is going to go well, but I still hope that Sansa is going to come
good and either push him off a wall or sic Arya on him, because after learning from
Hotpie – still working at the Pig and Plot Drop – that the Starks are in charge
of Winterfell, she's heading north again. Well, she was until she ran into
Nymeria and her wolf pack. He former pet turns her back on Arya, but doesn't
eat her, so that's not nothing, right(2)?
Sam determines
to cure Ser Jorah's greyscale, since he couldn't save Jeor Mormont. This is...
icky, and flies in the face of the advice of the Archmaester, who points out that the maester who described the cure for greyscale died... of greyscale.
This man looks like he should be breaking kneecaps in a Mockney thriller and reveling in the nickname 'Smasher'(4).
Yara
transports Ellaria and the Sand Snakes back to Dorn to muster their troops, but
is ambushed en route by Euron's fleet (apparently his gift to Cersei is to be her daughter's
killer.) Yara and Theon get to be pretty badass, but Euron is some sort of
indestructible monster(3), capturing Yara, Ellaria and one of the Snakes, and
killing two others. He taunts Theon to come at him, but Theon jumps in the water
instead.
'Stormborn'
is a troubled episode. The Missande/Grey Worm scene feels like padding,
adorable as they are, and Ellaria and Yara have a moment of pure fanservice
right before Smasher's fleet – which... I don't know where that came from, in any
sense, considering that Yara and Theon are supposed to have nicked all the good
ships in the Iron Fleet, and they were in the middle of the ocean so apparently
Euron was guided by plot (or, charitably, a traitor in the fleet) - pops out of
nowhere like an iceberg at the Titanic. Smasher manages to be even more
pointlessly nasty than Ramsey, and the deaths of the Sand Snakes lack punch because
I never really cared about them, whereas I'm obviously supposed to since the
final image of the episode is their corpses on the prow of the burning ship. Overall, it's an episode with a lot of sexy filler, which tends to reflect a lack of significant plot or character development (we knew Missande and Grey Worm were into each other, and we knew that Yara and Ellaria would shag anything that didn't run fast enough.)
We cut from this to the Pig and Plot Drop, thus doing for pies what Ramsey Bolton did for sausages.
Also, the
weird spatio-temporal nature of Westeros strikes again, with Jon receiving word
from Tyrion a mere cut scene after Dany tells him to send it, but not getting the message from Sam - sent last week - until some time after. And never mind how long it's taking word to
reach him that Bran has come over the Wall, or indeed for Bran to reach him. Is Castle Black out of ravens after all those
messages for people to send help?
(1) Missande
points out that, punchy as the translation is, the noun is actually ungendered
in High Valyrian, so should be read as 'prince or princess.'
(2) It has been point out that Arya's response to this 'That's not you,' mirrors her statement when offered a future of marriage and family 'That's not me.' If Nymeria would come to her paired Stark like a lapdog, she wouldn't be paired with Arya.
(3) Straight
up, I swear he is all over cuts from the Sand Snakes, but completely
untroubled.
(4) I think I'll call him 'Smasher' Greyjoy from here out.
Like a particularly indiscriminate Darth Vader with fabulous hair.
As we saw
last week, Johnny is back, although he needs to get his return approved by the
RAC internal affairs type who was introduced in episode 3.1. She tries to lean
on him to give up Dutch, which seems but probably isn't a bit random, but he
points out that if she wants the other missing Killjoys to come back, throwing
the first returner into a hole for not selling out his captain isn't a smart
move.
Johnny, let
us remember in what follows, knows a smart move. This is important because Dutch
and D'av – the latter loving that for once Johnny bailed and he had to be the
responsible one – introduce him to Zeph, and they do not get on. Johnny feels
replaced, and seems threatened whenever Zeph's thinking moves ahead of him, or
maybe he's just feeling down because IA made him lose the laser finger.
They open up
one of the Hullen ships, although they aren't sure how, and Zeph realises that
it's a little bit organic. She also detects a radiation signature which
suggests that it went somewhere pretty irradiated, and recently. Dutch decides
that they should follow the trail and overrides the boys' concerns, slapping
D'av's hand onto the control to return to its last location, a planet under a
bright star which bathes the surface in solar radiation. Dutch and D'av are taken
in by the Unseeing, a group of mole people who worship and wait for the
Undying. Since they arrived in a Hullen ship, the Unseeing take them for the
Undying, but their leader, the Last Seer, notices their empathy for rebellious
young Unseeing Quin and has them imprisoned.
In the kingdom of the blind, the man with regenerating eyeballs is king.
Johnny is
abandoned by Zeph, but rescues D'av while Dutch is getting out of the Seer that
this planet was used as a training camp where Hullen learned to act human.
Khlyen wound the place up and told him to keep the former slaves waiting, and
when Dutch reveals that Khlyen isn't coming back he sets the Unseeing on her as
a false prophet, in order to maintain his power. Quin helps D'av and Johnny and tells them that D'av came in a ship a week ago, looking for something called 'the remnant', which she thinks she can lead them to. It turns out to be a mysterious orb stored in 'the room that sings', the main server farm for the facility.
Zeph returns to rescue the
team, having worked out that she needed to use a sample of Dutch's DNA from the control surfaces to prime the ship. Johnny chews her out anyway for
working stuff out alone instead of talking to people. He tells her that Dutch and D'av rely on them and they
have to communicate with them,
constantly and in ways that they understand.
Elsewhere,
Delle Sayah gets snooty with the help and learns an important lesson about her
place in the Hullen plan when she tells Aneela that her father is dead. Aneela
flips out and murders a bunch of goons, whereupon her aide tells Sayah this us
on her and forces her to clean up the mess. Still, you can't keep a good
schemer down, and Sayah is soon pushing her luck to forge a bond of common
vengeance with Aneela in the name of self-promotion.
'The Hullen
Have Eyes' does a lot of set up work, properly introducing Aneela and her
erratic personality, as well as hinting at a kind of plasmic elitism when she
tells Sayah that she has moved her from cheap plasma to her own reserve. It
also shows something of the scale of the Hullens' plan, with the training camp
for infiltrators, and reveals that D'av getting into the Hullen ship was due to
some sort of contingency plan set up by Khlyen, which included using D'av's DNA
as the key to all of the ships they found. So, they have a part of an army, an uncrewed
armada, and maybe at some point a bunch of pissed off cyborgs on their side,
while Aneela has a legion of indestructible warriors and a battle fleet. I
almost feel sorry for her.
Let's make last year's one off into an annual tradition, as I present my run down of the new trailers from SDCC, starting with the offerings from Netflix.
Stranger Things 2 – and yes, they are
trailing it as a numbered sequel – promises more of the same glorious eighties
retro horror that the first season gave us, with Will Byers' mind still
half-trapped in the Upside Down, and thus able to see some vast, Cthuloid
horror looming over the town of Hawkins Indiana. The trailer confirms that Eleven
will be returning, alongside our other young heroes, and of course Hop the
inexplicably badass, whom we will probably spend another entire season
expecting to die horribly. I hope he doesn't. There's little sign of any human
antagonists, but I suspect that there will be some.
Also,
'Thriller'. Vincent Price, still doing the business almost a quarter of a
century after his passing. If that isn't a fitting tribute to a horror actor, I
don't know what is.
Also in the
field of original urban horror/fantasy (although definitely less original and
more fantasy) is Bright, a sort of
mashup of Alien Nation, any film
where a group of ostensibly respectable protagonists find a fortune in hostile
territory(1), and Shadowrun(2), with
Will Smith as an LAPD veteran assigned the first orc cop as his partner in a
world where humans live alongside fantasy races (presumably due to relatively
recent shenanigans given the otherwise now-ness of the world.) From the looks
of it, orcs have fallen into the lower class, while elves have joined the 1%,
because fucking elves, dude.
Will and Orc
arrest an elf carrying a magic wand, described as 'a nuclear weapon that grants
wishes.' Several of their fellow cops appear to want the wand to 'disappear'
into their pockets, and there are elves and all sorts after it, with our heroes
trying to get it safely to... somewhere. So there's a bit of the Warriors in the old CNA(3) as well.
It looks kind of mad, although a bit as if it might have benefited from a
miniseries rather than a movie to be contentiously released only through
Netflix. I mean, I'd pay out to see this at the cinema.
The latest
trailer for The Defenders shows our
team somewhat less united than they might once have appeared, with basically
everyone but Danny Rand opposed to either a team up or Chinese food. From this
brief glimpse I already feel more sympathy for Danny, as he's so obviously the
little kid with the bad solo series situation who just wants to hang out with
the cool kids and pretend he has a fanbase that love him. There are also some
signs of him doing something more interesting with his chi powers than just
punching really hard. However, most of what we get from this trailer is Sigourney
Weaver's Alexandra and her plans for Manhattan, which feel distinctly League of
Shadows. We see her coaching Elektra on war, goading our heroes on how they
suck, and holding her own in a glowering contest with Madame Gao, which is no
small feat.
There was
also a character teaser, which ended with the Punisher putting in an
appearance.
From there,
let's jump to non-Netflix Marvel TV shows.
After a deeply
underwhelming first trailer, Marvel's
Inhumans (henceforth Inhumans) got
a longer reveal with some added SFX, in particular Medusa's hair doing its
thing. Also of significant note is a scene of Iwan Rheon getting some man of
the people vibes, as well as being sassed for being 'only human.' As of now, I've
got to say that I'm on team Maximus. Inhumans
joins Agents of SHIELD on ABC and for
my money looks to have the same slick production values and hints of the same
lack of truly engaging characters. Black Bolt is a barely expressive beefcake,
which is not a good start for a character who can't talk. There's a lot of work
to doing that character well, and just looking noble and stoic doesn't cut it.
Anyway, I probably
ought to get caught up on Agents of
SHIELD at some point.
From the
non-MCU side of things we get a longer trailer for The Gifted, Fox's upcoming offering within the X-Men multiverse
(presumably a slightly different corner thereof than Legion.) It's your classic brother and sister mutants are hunted by
the agency that once employed their father scenario, with said father reaching
out to a group of other mutants – canon X-Men characters Thunderbird, Blink and
Polaris, and light-bending newbie Eclipse – to help the family disappear.
What's really interesting about this one is that, alongside Agents of SHIELD and a few other shows,
it defies the unwritten convention that representation means 20-25% female cast
and one minority. The Gifted has 50%
female cast in its protagonist group (half of the established mutants, one of
the newbies, one of the parents,) and Native American, Chinese and Hispanic
characters in the lead group(4).
It's
probably telling that my other takeaway from this is not the action, the
effects or the poignant and tragic tale of vampire export Stephen Moyer trying
to recreate the existential dilemma of Horn-Rimmed Glasses in the good season
of Heroes, but that a male and female
character are shown discussing relationships with no apparent UST.
From Marvel
to DC now, and let's start where the CW started, with Arrow.
We open with
a recap of the end of Season 5 and the explosion of Lian Yu. New footage shows
that Will is haunted by what happened, and as he is seemingly living with
single dad Oliver we can assume Mum didn't make it off the island. No sign of
Felicity yet, or Diggle, but Echo Kellum shows up in some of the marketing, so
we can hope that they're not burying the gay guy yet. The other confirmed survivors
are the Dinahs Lance and Drake, apparently engaging in a protracted feud, and
Slade Wilson, last seen leaving the rest of the team in the lurch (although a
scene of him shaking hands with Oliver tells against him having gone full heel
again.)
I'll be
honest, I came out of this a little unclear who the villain of the series might
be, and I'm worried it's going to be existential angst and that Arrow Season 6 is going to turn out to
be Arrow's Buffy Season 6, all pain and misery and crushing mundanity. On the
other hand, I could go for a proper musical episode(5).
The Flash goes into Season 4 lacking a
certain... Flash. Barry is still stuck in the Speed Force, leaving Iris to
coordinate the emotionally battered members of the team, including Caitlin, who
appears to be going with a freeze ray look this season, but not Julian
apparently. It pitches us a massive samurai dude as our major villain, although
that might just be a lever for bringing Barry home. We get even less hint of
the overall plot than with the other shows – this makes sense; most of their
episodes probably haven't filmed yet, so we've only got some early episode
stuff to show – but it's a sadder and a wiser world on display, and... well, I
miss Season 1's sense of fun.
Also lacking
somewhat in her habitual joie de vivre is Supergirl,
who is moping over the loss of Mon-el and deciding to 'retire' Kara Danvers to
be a full time Supergirl. Now, Mon-el grew on me as a character, and I like the
juxtaposition of Kara's self-sacrifice with Superman's commitment to personal
relationships, but seriously if the moping goes on for more than a couple of
weeks I may flip a table. It's not just that I like my happy Supergirl, because
I accept that it's not unreasonable that the kind of shit superheroes deal with
would wear you down, but that I don't want to see her brung low by love of a
man. Mourn, mope, move on(6).
Anyway, we
also get a glimpse of Adrian Pasdar as an evil businessman threatening to get
all up in Lena Luthor's grill, Alex and Maggie being alternately adorable and
badass as all hell, and Supergirl heat visioning the shit out of something.
Again, no substantial sign of our big bad yet(7).
If I was
worried that the Arrowverse was going into complete angst overload, Legends of Tomorrow drops a season 3
trailer to soothe my worries, with dinosaurs in LA and Mick Rory going after a
clown wielding a giant hammer. With anachronisms all across history as a result
of their Spear of Destiny shenanigans, modern-day Vixen's dead evil sister
popping up, and some sort of time feds getting all up in Sara's face about her
team's ability to handle a super-secret rising darkness situation, our band of
misfits look to be saddling up for another season of balls to the wall goofball
action and occasional moments of poignancy, more in keeping with its glorious
sophomore year than its rocky beginnings.
As bad as
the head-pasties were, I kind of got used to them, and I can't help finding the
Kelvinverse Klingons a little offputting(8). Presumably we’ll see somewhere in
this series the genetic accident that produces the Original Series Klingons,
before they reverted to the movie/Next Gen appearance.
Where was I?
Right; so
the new Star Trek: Discovery trailer
promises action, thrills and war, and it's all our slightly gung-ho
protagonist's fault. I strongly suspect, looking at this, that Michelle Yeo's
character won't make it past the early episodes before being replaced by Lucius
Malfoy, which is a bit of a shame, but it is as it is. All in all, the look is
very Kelvinverse – not just the Klingons – even if the continuity isn't. I
wonder if the show is going for more of a serial vibe than previous Star Trek
series, which tended to be more a collection of individual stories than a
single arc.
We open with
William Hartnell morphing seamlessly into David Bradley, which is really uncanny.
I assumed at first they just reshot with Bradley and showed the first bit in
black and white. It seems to confirm that we're opening at the point where the First
Doctor is about to regenerate, although what follows with its 'frozen moment'
looks more like WWI. Mark Gatiss is a wide-eyed army officer known only as 'The
Captain' at this point. Time Lord? Psychic projection of the Doctor's fear of
being an officer? Lethbridge-Stewart senior, perhaps(9)? A reappearance for
Bill as a physical being suggests to me that a lot of this is going to be in
the Doctors' mind, which is not to say that I find it unlikely that
super-powerful water-being Bill could find her way into such a construct.
Not much to
go on here, but apparently we're looking at the adventures of Catherine
Langford, action schoolgirl. Interestingly, if this is supposed to be in
continuity with SG-1 and she goes through the Gate at all, then she was
presumably lying through her teeth to Daniel and the others for years. On the
other hand, perhaps the Stargate won't ever be opened; who can say.
Again, very
little specific here. We see the hosts - led by Delores and her faithful Teddy - purging the park of tourists, and what
looks to be a push back from the company, as well as the pianola being upgraded
to juke box mode. Most intriguingly, we have the Man in Black still around. I
kind of want to go back and remind myself where he was shot...
Okay, movie time.
It's
obviously early days on production of the Pacific
Rim sequel, with this teaser trailer featuring little footage and instead
taking the form of a mock recruiting ad for the Jaeger programme, featuring a
voice over by GLaDOS (once more, Ellen McCain's filters are at full GLaDOS for
the trailer.) I want McCain to do a song for the credits on this one, I really
do.
Steven
Spielberg's much-anticipated adaptation of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One gets its first showing in this teaser, which is as
packed with 1980s retro imagery as you would expect, from Duke Nukem to the
Iron Giant.
The astute
among you will of course have noted that both Duke Nukem and (the movie version
of) The Iron Giant are from the 1990s, and this is indicative of a general
problem with the movie. It's not 80s enough by a long stretch. The Oasis is a highly sophisticated simulated
reality, yes, and much of it is no doubt super-futuristic and impossible high
def, but especially those parts of it designed by Halliday really ought to look
more eighties, and in these days of Stranger
Things, Far Cry: Blood Dragon and
even Thor: Ragnarok, there's little
excuse for mucking this one up.
Now, don't
get me wrong, I recognise that there is a huge step to be taken in adapting a
novel much of which consists of the protagonist playing cabinet arcade games or
being inserted into seminal eighties nerd movies, and the giant Hot Wheels
track race is a great image, but overall it just looks too... 2017, and has too
much from the 90s in it. Apparently retro-futurism – or is this
future-retroism? – ain't what it used to be.
Kingsman was a divisive film in a lot of
ways. I found it to be interesting, but flawed. From the looks of things, this
sequel has managed to slim down the concept a lot by jettisoning the interest
and keeping the flaws. Roxy/Lancelot, who got only a single shot in the
original trailer, here has... nothing. She's gone. Eggsy, meanwhile, continues
to be boorish, arrogant and rude, and yet his mentor seems to be questioning
the American Statesman organisation's understanding of the creedo 'Manners
Maketh Man.' At this point, I'm really more interested in Statesman.
The times
they are a changing, and no better sign of that – in this rundown at least –
than the shift in Justice League's
focus from Batman to Wonder Woman in this trailer as compared to last year's
SDCC trailer. It's not that Batman has gone, but Wonder Woman is front and
centre here, as befits the most experienced warrior, not just in the Justice
League, but pretty much in the entire world, if Themiscyra really is going to
be the first place destroyed by Steppenwolf. There's a reference to the
Lanterns, and a few hints that Superman will turn up (because that would be a
shocker at this point, right?) although I would punch the air if it turns out
that our super-costumed cavalry was Kara Zor-el. There is also a shift to the
Wonder Woman colour palette, and a few Whedonisms thrown in for good measure
(most notably 'They really just vanished. That's rude.')
Other
thoughts: The trailer is playing up the Flash's doubts to the point that I
suspect they will remember that he is basically the most powerful of them all,
since on his A game he's untouchable, unstoppable, and could phase a brick into
Superman's heart if he really wanted to. Plus, time travel. I strongly suspect
that we'll see him be pivotal to the final save in the film, and quite possibly
getting lost in time as a consequence.
Also, boom tube!
I wonder if they'll call it that in the movie?
And finally,
on top of their TV shows, Marvel dropped a new trailer for Thor: Ragnarok which is epic AF. We get to see the actual Team Thor
– sadly, Darryl doesn't seem to get a look in – with a prominent role for Bruce
Banner/Hulk, as well as more scenes of Hela dominating the Asgardian forces. The
rest of Team Thor is filled out by frenemies Valkyrie and Loki, with sadly
little sign of recurring favourites, unless that's Sif leading the flying horse
cavalry that Hela's winding up to slaughter. I hope they don't kill off Sif. It
would be a poor lookout for all of the sub-franchise's supporting female
characters to end up dead or absent. The other thing I noted was the bit at the end where he appears to have internalised the powers previously only granted by Mjolnir, which makes a certain amount of sense given that it was always described as 'the power of Thor.'
Of course,
the really notable thing is that this trailer is way, way more eighties than anything in Ready Player One, from the music to the title card(10). It's a high
risk design strategy, but one that seems to be paying off to judge by the
response.
So that's
this year's trailers. Of course there are others, but mostly for stuff I don't
or won't watch, so I don't have much to say on that front.
(1) I'm
thinking Three Kings, I'm thinking Trespass...
(2) And with
shades of Defiance in its pale, fancy
elves.
(3)
Cinematic Nucleic Acid, the building blocks of film.
(4) After
that it's pretty much Caucasians, all the way down, but progress is progress.
(5)
Disappointingly, the Flash/Supergirl musical crossover only had one
original number, tellingly the highlight of the episode.
(6) With
life. I'm not advocating she get a new boyfriend straight away. If I haven't
made it clear before, I would be more than happy with the character
establishing herself as okay outside the bounds of a relationship.
(7) Not
Doomsday, but a character actually called Reign, which I would have known if I
were more of a DC nerd.
(8)
Especially as this series is set in the Prime Timeline.
(9)
Grandfather, rather than father.
(10) Even if
not like this, there is no excuse for the title card for Ready Player One not looking
like an arcade game ready screen.
Another double-bill of God-seeking and bloody violence this week, as I
catch up on two episodes of Preacher.
"There are three lights. Well, one."
Cassidy is worried about Tulip, who went off and hasn't come back.
Jesse assures him that this is what she does when they fight, and is more
interested in the secret society who seem to be taking an interest in his
business; or at least in business that he considers his. Then Cassidy sees an
infomercial about the aftermath of Katrina, featuring actors including the
false God who appeared on the angel phone in the church. They track him down by
pretending to be casting for Game of
Thrones, but discover that his agent lost touch after he got the part as
God. They watch his audition tape, which concludes with his execution in order
to allow him to transition to heaven and take up the job. This is a dead end,
but the coincidence of this happening in New Orleans intrigues Jesse.
Meanwhile, Tulip meets crime boss Viktor and is invited to take some
time to consider her options. She tries to talk to his goons, the staff and
even his daughter, but they all treat her as if she were the scum of the Earth;
even Viktor's torturer gets all holier than thou. Finally, she beats us a
henchman, steals his gun and tries to force Viktor to 'let [her] go,' but he
refuses and she is recaptured. When she continues to be a no-show, Cassidy
confesses the reasons for his concern to Jesse, who storms off to rescue her.
Jesse busts into Viktor's place, freezing all the guards with the Word
before getting into a brutal fight with the torturer, who likes to work with
headphones in(1). He attacks Viktor, but Tulip tells him to let go, because
Viktor is her husband.
And so to 'Dallas', in which we see the aftermath of Carlos' betrayal,
with Jesse and Tulip living a rough life on the straight and narrow (in Dallas,) only for
Jesse to discover that Tulip is still doing crimes, and is on the pill while he
believes they are trying for another child. He opts to return to his father's
church and she eventually hooks up with Viktor, only to abandon him when their
former handler locates Carlos.
Yeah... this isn't going to last.
In the present day, Jesse strings Viktor up in the torture room, while
Tulip – unable to intercede, thanks to the Word(2) – takes Viktor's daughter to
visit Cassidy and their reluctant host. After much soul-searching and an
intervention by Cassidy as the most unlikely conscience ever, Jesse opts to
release Viktor, who goes home to rea with his daughter. Of course, this is not
a happy ending for them, since Jesse's careless throwing about of the Word
attracts the Saint, who shoots up the house and murders Viktor, but the
daughter tells him that she knows where to find the Preacher.
So, Jesse continues to be a dick, while Tulip and Cassidy struggle to
keep him on some sort of even keel. The fact that an unrepentant contract
killer and a largely shameless vampire hedonist are the voices of his
conscience is a concern that seems slow to impinge on Jesse’s peace of mind,
and all in all I’m not convinced he was a very good preacher. Of course, it’s
part of the point that he is a melding of good and evil, a man with both light
enough and dark enough in his soul to coexist with the awesome power of Genesis
without exploding. It’s interesting that neither of his companions represents
the light in him – the nearest anyone came to an angel on his shoulder is
currently shouting ‘zieg heil’ and kicking Hitler in the nards – and also that
the combination of righteousness and rage manifests so specifically as a sort
of smug, angry dickishness. He’s a monumentally unlikeable protagonist, and yet
remains compelling, or at least involving enough you can be bothered to want to
slap him instead of just hoping for him to take a bullet from the Saint.
(1) Speaking as someone who painfully tugs his own earphones out at
least once a week, I want that guy's earphones, which did not come out once
during the course of said brutal fight, even when impaled on a rail from a
foosball table.
Back in my childhood, The
Transformers: The Movie introduced something new and a bit baffling to the
Transformers universe. Not that double definite article, although that was a
head scratcher, but Arcee, the first (I think, more or less, anyway) female
Transformer.
Why should that be confusing? Well, I suspect that it's closely related
to the reason why the new Doctor is such a hot button topic for many people.
The Transformers, like the Time Lords, are alien beings, and many would argue
that they are, effectively, genderless. The thing is, by 'genderless', they –
perhaps unconsciously – mean 'all dudes.' I suspect that many of these critics
are legitimately weirded out by the fact that suddenly the Transformers are
split between boy robots and girl robots(1), but the reason that a female
transformer brings this to the fore is that they – that we – had been, consciously or not, screening out the fact that
every other Transformer was coded male. Even if we never heard them speak with
a male voice they had traditionally masculine proportions – broad chest(2), narrow
hips, big arms – if they were largely humanoid, and were universally referred
to as 'he' within the narrative.
"We're going with pink then?"
It's confusing, people argued, because robots don't have sex. Well,
probably not; it's essentially a kids' toy line we're talking about. It's certainly true that, wrecking ball scrota aside, Transformers are as sexless as a Ken doll, but that doesn't mean that they
don't have gender. They do, and almost all of them are coded male (12 in 13 in the
current Unified Continuity, I believe, reflecting that only one of the 13
Primes was female(3),) both in voice acting and in their physical and character design. What people usually mean by arguing that the originals don't have gender is that, as long as all
of the Transformers on screen are coded male, we can kid ourselves that actually no,
they're genderless. We just use he for convenience; Optimus Prime isn't a dude(4),
honest. As soon as one of them demonstrably isn't a dude, however, all of the others are. A
distinction appears on screen and now you can't deny it; they're all dudes,
except her.
Strongarm. Not pink.
The other problem in Transformers, of course, is that the original female
Autobot was Arcee, who was pink and very, very girly, and basically killed any
chance of increasing female representation in the franchise for the next ten years,
before Blackarachnia and Airazor made their debuts in Beast Wars. She made a brief appearance in Revenge of the Fallen, in which she was unceremoniously killed off.
Outside of the live action movies, female Transformers are becoming more
prevalent (at least 1 in 13) and less... femme. Arcee returned in Transformers: Prime as a two-wheeled
badass with a heart of gold under a forbidding frown and a crisp, dark blue
paint job. She wasn't in the follow up, Robots
in Disguise, but that had Strongarm, a tough and eager, if somewhat by the
book, cadet with a much more conventional Autobot frame, including four wheels,
angular body panels and those narrow, gunfighter hips, and just a hint of lippy
(and a female voice actor) to code her as feminine. The nature of
representation is, however, a completely different topic, for another time,
perhaps.
The dissonance caused by the sudden presence of a female exemplar in a
formerly all-male world doesn't just annoy your actual, card-carrying chauvinists.
It also means that those fans who self-identify as liberal feminists while they
nestle snuggly into their male-dominated media are suddenly confronted with the
fact that, as much as they may not be active
sexists, they live in a world filled with passive, institutionalised sexism. People
deal badly with discovering that something they love is riddled with ingrained
prejudice, and pointing it out to them – whether actively or as a side-effect
of casting against that prejudice – tends to get a defensive reaction. In the
former case, they will often angrily defend the intentions of the creators,
which is all well and good, but good intentions only go so far. The latter is
viewed as a betrayal, because the beloved itself is telling them that it was
sexist before.
It's a manifestation of the backlash effect, of course. "If we cast a woman as the Doctor now, then all the times we didn't might have been - gasp - sexist. Well, I'm not going to stand by and hear Doctor Who derided as sexist! If the other Doctors were men, that must have been right and proper, because that means Doctor Who was never sexist." (And then there are your card-carrying douchebags, but what can you ever do about them except proper education funding?)
I mean, does this look like someone with two hearts to you?
Female Transformers still mess with people's heads, and the female Doctor
raises the same issue in people's minds, with some arguing that making the
Doctor female is wrong because the Doctor is an alien and has no gender. The
same argument is advanced whenever someone suggests casting a person of colour
in the role of the Doctor. It's political correctness gonne madde! The Doctor
isn't a white man, he's an alien, so why do you have to drag race/gender into
it? If the Doctor is black, they argue, you're corrupting the alien purity of
the character with a racial agenda. They argue thusly because black is a race. Likewise,
if the Doctor is female, then the Doctor has gender, because female is a gender.
White and male on the other hand are not a gender or a race; they're a default. This is, of course, why it is
important to cast a woman as the Doctor, or a person of colour(5), because
unless it is challenged then white and male will continue to be viewed as the
neutral setting, and they just aren't. I for one am glad to see Doctor Who finally stepping up on this.
They're also dark skinned, by the way.
I couldn't find this image attributed; if you can point me to the artist, I will
acknowledge.
It's this perception that makes the Imperial Radch series so interesting.
The Radch is an ungendered society, not differentiating at all between male and
female. Citizens of the Radch are somewhat androgynous, but also do not code
for gender cues, so that they struggle to recognise gender even in outsiders.
In the text of the novels, this is represented by using female pronouns for all characters, save for a few instances in the
first novel in which Breq, the narrator-protagonist, has to communicate with
non-Radch in a gendered language(6). The impact of shifting the default setting
is profound, not least in that it barely affects the narrative, but provokes
the reader to examine their own expectations. It makes no difference to the
story if any given character is male or female, but you catch yourself assuming
they are all women until you realise that is... if not impossible, given the
setting, then at least unlikely.
A similar effect can be excited in white readers by any novel in which
black is considered the default, and only white characters are referred to by
race. (White) authors Neil Gaiman and Ben Aaronovich both use this deliberately,
in Anansi Boys and the Rivers of London series respectively. It's
always a bit of an eye opener when your brain parses the dissonance of someone
actually being described as a white
man, instead of just a man. To my considerable shame, I don't think I've read
enough black literature to know how prevalent this is there; I'm taking steps in
that direction as part of this year's reading challenge, because there's no
worth in identifying a lack and allowing it to continue.
You know you'e reaching when Michelle Yeoh isn't tough enough for you.
For further proof of the blinkered insistence in white male normalcy,
one need look little further than the reaction to the early trailers for Star Trek: Discovery, which angrily
denounced the idea of putting a woman in charge of a starship, let alone giving
one the lead in a Star Trek series, and never mind a Chinese woman! Do these showrunners not understand Star Trek? Do
they think that Gene Roddenberry created the original series in order to show
women and non-white characters fully integrated into a multiracial, egalitarian
society(7)? Honestly, I suspect that the only reason we don't have record of a
similar outrage over the casting of Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko is that DS9 came out shortly before the internet
exploded, so he was an established fact by the time a critical mass of
aggrieved white men had access to proper forums.
I hope that the new Doctor will challenge the concept of genderless.
She shouldn't be the female Doctor, or even 'the Doctor as female' particularly.
She should simply be the Doctor, and
like any other Doctor 90% of her lines should work for any other Doctor with minimal rewriting(9). If her personality has
feminine affects, they should not be in any form so tangible as to be easily
describable. She shouldn't be markedly more empathic and nurturing, at least
not outside the usual bounds of regenerative variation. She should be
compassionate, as the Doctor always should. Even the 12th Doctor,
who has been broadly characterised as an insensitive ass, is compassionate. She
definitely shouldn't be getting into a relationship with a companion, male or
female, any more than her predecessors did (and less than some of the more
recent ones,) and the same definitely goes for crashing the TARDIS(10).
I suppose what I really want the show to prove over the next few
seasons is that in the last 12-14(11) regenerations the Doctor was truly not
defined by his gender, by not defining the new Doctor by hers.
No regeneration posters with 13 yet, given that she doesn't have a look, so let's finish with some ponies.
(1) And what is the purpose of sexual dimorphism, indeed of sex, in
robots? Don't ask, and definitely don't
Google.
(2) Optimus Prime's truck windscreen has always turned into his pecks.
(3) The one who died of a tragic love story, incidentally. They're
trying, but with mixed results. In fairness, she was also the weaponsmith of the 13.
(4) I love Optimus, but he is so
a dude.
(5) Full disclosure, I am still committed to British, but I'm trying to
escape that.
(6) Which incidentally means that the only major character whose assigned
biological sex is known is Breq's defrosting
ice queen sidekick; who is male.
(7) I'll be the first(8) to admit that Roddenberry was often hamfisted
and misguided in his attempts to depict his post-scarcity, post-prejudice
utopia, but he certain wasn't deliberately creating white man adventures in
space. It just... came out that way sometimes.
(8) Okay, I won't, because this subject is waay old and loads of people
have already done it.
(9) When Colin Baker took over from Jon Pertwee in The Ultimate Adventure, they basically changed one 'polarity of the
neutron flow' and made a fight scene less aikido-y.
(9) Although, fair play, I've played LEGO Dimensions and I've stacked the TARDIS into just about
anything and everything in the world.
We're going back to Westeros, and winter is here as we begin the first
episode of seven in Season 7 of Game of Thrones with what I think is
only the second cold open in the show's history. The last revealed that the
Hound was still alive; this one that Walder Frey is surprisingly vertical and
upbeat, gathering his leather-capped kinfolk for a feast to thank them for the
murder of the Starks at the Red Wedding with a rousing toast and a generous cup
of hemlock before ripping off his face a la the late Martin Landau to reveal
the cherubic features and sinister smile of my daughter's namesake: Arya Stark.
Leaving a message with a Frey woman (daughter, wife; it's hard to tell with
Walder's household) that 'the North remembers,' she then heads south, where she
runs into singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.
Now, this cameo has aroused considerable ire, presumably from people
who dislike Sheeran on principle, because while nothing especially noteworthy,
it isn't inherently offensive to my eyes, as someone whose life has yet to be
impacted by the artiste's music. He's an okay actor, and mostly is required to
sing(1) a song about ladies and hands of gold in a scene which seems intended
to open Arya's eyes to the possibility that the Lannister troops may not be her
enemies, even if Cersei is. She tells them she's going to King's Landing –
which they describe basically as 'worse than Detroit' – to kill the Queen. They
all have a good laugh, none of them try to rape her and no-one gets murdered.
It's all rather sweet and it's perhaps disturbing that we've reached the point
that I'm kind of moved that no-one commits a major felony over dinner.
In King's Landing, Cersei is redecorating, but her floor map mostly
proves that she's short on actual kingdoms under her rule. Surrounded by foes,
she nevertheless intends to overcome through sheer spite, and dismisses
Tommen's suicide as a betrayal. Even Jaime seems to be working out that she is
batshit insane at this point. Nonetheless, she is able to hold her own in
negotiations with Euron Greyjoy, who offers her his part of the Iron Fleet in
exchange for marriage. When she refuses, on the grounds that he's a dodgy
bastard, he offers to return with a great gift, and I'm thinking he's planning
to kidnap Tyrion.
Conscience.
In the North, the Brotherhood – still accompanied by the Hound – stop at
an abandoned farmhouse, where the owner and his daughter have died. Of course,
this is the family that Sandor Clegane robbed while travelling with Arya, but
now his pragmatic douchebaggery seems to be crumbling under the weight of guilt
and fire-born revelations of the approaching Army of the Dead, and Thoros finds
him digging a grave for the family in the bitter cold of the night.
Jon decides that women are going to train to fight the White Walkers –
with a storming endorsement from Lady Lyanna 'Don't Fuck with Me' Mormont – and
then once more defies Sansa's advice and restores the Umbers and the Karstarks
to their castles under the command of their spotty, teenaged lords. Sansa is
livid that he doesn't use those lands to pay off loyal northerners, and I think
that Jon missed a trick in not pointing out to her that, in addition to not winding
up the houses with more executions – which is what got Robb betrayed – he's
placing them back in control of, as they have just discussed, ground zero of an
impending White Walker invasion. He receives a raven from Cersei telling him to
come to King's Landing and bend the knee or face destruction, but his eyes are
on the north. Sansa is watching his back so far, and giving Littlefinger the
coldest shoulder she feels she can get away with, delivering a sick burn that
you couldn't have imagined from the Sansa of even a couple of seasons ago when
she tells him not to bother trying to get the last word. "I'll just
assume it was something clever."
Up at the Wall, Meera Reed brings Bran to the gates, where they are
admitted after Bran is all uncanny at Jon's buddies. Further north still, the
army of the dead – now including giant wights, because that was necessary – advances.
In Oldtown, Sam is doing drudgework, mostly involving shit, and damn little Sam is growing fast. Sam
asks his Archmaester – Jim Broadbent getting his Dumbledore on – for access to
the Library's restricted section. The Archmaester believes that he has seen the
Army of the Dead, and explains that the Maesters of the Citadel are the memory
of the Seven Kingdoms; the wisdom and the foresight that keeps men from acting
like animals. He assures Sam that the Wall will always stand, but maybe it's
just me, but I'm sure that talk about foresight was a kind of nod for Sam to do
what he does, which is to break into the restricted section and make a few
withdrawals. Back at his lodgings, Gilly finds reference to the mountain of
dragon glass on Dragonstone which Stannis mentioned, and he sends word to Jon.
Then he is accosted by Jorah Mormont, currently resident in a leper cell in the
Citadel, who asks if the Queen has come yet.
In Westeros, black - or at least dark - is the new black.
Down at Dragonstone, the Queen indeed arrives, sweeping into the
abandoned fortress of Stannis Baratheon to reclaim her birthplace and ask her
advisers rhetorically: "Shall we begin?"
Yes. Let us begin, if not the beginning, then the beginning of the end.
It feels as if the dummies are played out now, and the real players all
revealed. Cersei, Jon and Danaerys; Sansa, Littlefinger and Tyrion; Euron and
Yara; the Mountain and the Hound. Events are moving towards a conclusion, even
if not a definite one, although I am trying to brace myself for some
devastating reversal in episode 7.7 where everyone dies but a few babies and Season
8 is Little Sam and Lady Mormont in Game
of Thrones: The Next Generation.
Next week(2): plans, plots, girl-on-girl action and the return of the
direwolf in 'Stormborn'.
I say army; it's more of a logistical support corps.
With Johnny still on the lam and a data retrieval mission going bad due
to lack of technical savvy, Turin decrees it is time to get a new brain. Thus
he digs up three of the RAC's finest lab rats and sends them on a mission with
Team Dutch to determine if they've got the stuff. The mission in question takes
them into a facility where a contagion is on the loose. With all five infected
and terminal sterilisation protocols in effects, the nerd squad will have to
come good to get them out alive.
Meanwhile, Johnny gets Olli checked out – after asking the barkeep
those pointed questions - and finds that her 'kill switch' was triggered. Learning
that the false-faced assassin had received treatment from a rejuvenation
clinic, our intrepid pair infiltrate and learn that the clinic is killing and
skinning hackmod owners, in order to allow mods to wear their skins. The skins
are preserved with plasma, which is of course of great interest to Johnny. Clara's
friend Yuki, who works at the plant, warns them off, revealing that Olli is Clara, with her memory blocked and
her face changed due to scheduling conflicts. They meet with Yuki later, but
one of her mods emits a pulse that disables all of the hackmods in the bar,
leaving Johnny to be captured so that Niko can infiltrate the RAC by giving
someone his face.
Dutch's mission goes further south when bio-nerd Zeph sacrifices
herself to complete the mission objective. The whole thing is revealed to be a
simulation, and Zeph alone fails Turin's test by not getting out alive. She
insists that she knew it was a simulation, but Turin is not interested,
dismissing her and recruiting the two tech nerds to the fight. Dutch, however,
finds Zeph at the Royale and tells her that she needs biologists to fight the
Hullen.
"Let me tell you about my mother..."
Niko reveals to Johnny that she plans to destroy the hackmod owners and
their factory using her skin-grafted infiltrators and the properties she is
discovering in the plasma. Olli busts into the clinic and fights Niko. It's a
close fight, but Johnny escpaes the surgical chair using his laser finger and
calls in the other hackmods to shut Niko down. Johnny retrieves Niko's list of
plasma sources and heads back to the Quad, leaving Clara/Olli to continue the
fight for a hackmod homeland at the far end of the Jay.
As Dutch welcomes Johnny home, Delle Seyah revives in a ship, where she
is taken to meet Aneela.
I have to say, I'm not loving that Karma Houdini at the end, although from
her attitude Delle Sayah knows that she's not come up smelling of roses.
Normally in control of every situation, faced with Aneela she's basically bricking
it, and that's something. Olli/Clara is a pretty fair replacement for Stephanie
Leonidas, and Niko subverts the classic femme fatale tropes of her look by
being her own brains and muscle. Zeph
looks like being a good addition to the team, although her male competitors are
pretty forgettable. Also, she might be a mole; always so hard to say.
All of which pales beside the heartfelt reunion of Johnny and the team
(I would say Johnny and Dutch, as the Brothers Jaqobis are sort of 'sup', but
there's also Lucy to consider, who informs Jonny that if she could cry, she
would be rusting.) Yay!
