Elegies for Past Imaginings

Time spent living in metaphor and time spent living in
time.  Hearts spent living in head.   Hearts spent on the floor.  What hearts are for.
Here, I say: I will tell you my deepest secret and it will not ruin me.
Tell me yours and we will make us.  There is the poet who longs
and there is the one who asks.  The one who smiles. 
The one whose hand is outstretched, waiting for it to be taken.
Say it.  Say it always.  Say it when you can.  Practice saying it.
The endless field of possibility is liveable, yes,
as is the finite realm of the possible from where it springs
and where it can always return.

What is in your head
what is in your heart
what is on the table
between
what is in my heart
what is in my head
what is ours together now.

I'm becoming a little disenfranchised with the current wave of zombie stories - or at least, the best of the lot. Longform storytelling devices such as video games and TV shows are finally tapping into what was previously an almost exclusively less than three hour limit.   The results are astonishingly well executed, but expose the general bleakness of the zompocalypse environment almost a little too well.  Spoilers ahead for:  The Last Of Us, The Walking Dead, and The Walking Dead the video game.

The Last of Us is a perfect game, and it has a perfect ending (assuming you didn't forget what your run button was before you booted up your last playthrough).  There's no doubt in my mind that the people doing the work on this game got across everything they wanted to with their brutal and vicious combat system and the illusion of choice at the end.  It wants to be a problematic story, and it is.

The game wants you to disagree with Joel, but it also wants you to understand him.  Unfortunately I did less of the former and more of the latter, figuring out early that Ellie was probably going to be in life-threatening danger at the end of the game and fully understanding the price I'd have to pay to get her out of it.

The argument I see postulated is that Joel is a sociopath; I think he's a product of his environment.  The Fireflies never really resolved their innate distrustworthiness with me - a running plot point from the prologue that is really only handwaved in the first chapter. When they failed to give the choice to Ellie, I don't believe that Joel had one at all, and although I toyed with the possibility of letting the lead surgeon go, it was both entirely right for the character and entirely right for the person doing the cost-benefit analysis (the risk/reward of a potential vaccine is an entirely separate rant - essentially, I doubt it's as pretty as it sounds).  Joel's flaw is actually the same as the Fireflies - he lies, he conceals - and while it spells doom for him somewhere down the line I'm left hopeful about when that girl grows up and starts making her own decisions.

The Walking Dead game is starting another round, but I didn't finish the last one after it got so far under my skin.  The story execution wasn't as clean, the characters I liked continually died, and at the end of episode four, the obvious bite that was obvious so irritated me that I didn't really feel like watching to see how it panned out.  This is the theme of all the titles with this name, be they graphic novel, show or game - hope constantly dies, and then you have to go find some new hope.  Who grows, in the end?  The flowers in the corpses, and the disease in the minds of those who are left.  They're all worth watching, but I want that happily ever after to be at least a possibility.

Iron Man 3

Spoilers ahead.  What a hot mess.

Let's start with the fact that none of the characters develop.  Tony Stark has a humorous version of PTSD and he kind of half resolves it at the end of the movie while giving up the suit but not really.  Rhodes has a funny name for his suit.  Happy is rendered comatose for being semi-competent for once and there is a joke about how he likes soap operas.  All new characters are murdered immediately.

Pepper Potts takes a break from being the mortal woman who is actually on top of things to embody multiple bad cliches about women in movies, mainly ones that involve her being gullible, petty, bewildered by hot men, and a hostage - oh, sorry, a "trophy".  She is also gifted superpowers - temporarily, of course! - twice. The first time it's almost charming.

NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS MOVIE THAT IS RELEVANT TO ANYTHING.  Tony Stark narrates.

He also makes a lot of bombs out of Christmas tree ornaments and tasers out of wool mittens.  Because it's Christmas?  Why is it Christmas?

After using a bunch of these homespun gadgets to disable guards - well, violently kill them, actually, including dropping an explosive on one who is drowning unconscious in a fountain - he picks up one of their guns and immediately begins to favor it as it is a more useful weapon than anything he brought.

Tony. At that point you could have just bought a gun.  You were in a cliched version of Tennessee, after all.

A lot of things happened in this movie!  I remember them very well because they happened in other movies first.  There's the jumping off of tall things into a suit of armor gig from the Avengers.  That happened between six and eleven hundred times.  There's the whole bit where Rhodes has his suit commandeered again.  Pepper Potts prominently displays her abs for no reason a bunch.  And despite rumors to the contrary there's an awful lot of "Tony is not at full power so he can't fight the bad guy well" going on.

Actually that is the entire movie, including the climax, when eight hundred reject suits are flying around in dull circles being torn apart by super soldiers while Tony mumbles their nicknames. Tony personally loses several of these really awful suits to a single terrible villain before having the rest explode into tiny fireworks.  The Mark 42, sort of the hallmark "this is me" suit, falls apart so many times that it is actually only interesting as a collection of pieces.  None of the suits do anything new, and WHY ARE NONE OF THEM POWERED BY TONY STARKS HEART NOW.  THAT WAS A BIG DEAL, REMEMBER.  But it's cool, I guess, because Tony Stark can now charge his suits off of a car battery in ten minutes, or the electrical grid of Tennessee in three days.  When you can do that, who needs the upgraded Arc Reactor conveniently located in his chest?

There is an exceptional amount of work that goes into protecting the Mandarin gag, leaving no clues as to what is going to happen at the midpoint.  There is absolutely no work done to make the rest of the plot interesting.  Everything else is foreshadowed in painful red letters half an hour in advance and is boring, predictable, and trite.

Which is weird, because the string of logic required to believe it requires you to bend over backwards to follow it.  Like, the Mandarin is an elaborate hoax to cover up failed science experiments by making them into terrorist attacks?  Because Homeland Security is less scary than the peer review board.  Oh also they're going to kill the president so that the Vice President will BE MARGINALLY MORE FRIENDLY TO THEIR PROJECT.  One would hope their plan also includes some supreme court justices, a large majority of congressmen, and, oh yeah.  SHIELD.  Who have, I guess, more important things to do than protect the President of the United States from a terrorist threat that can hack the entirety of television for reasons that are not remotely explained?

Seriously, how did they manage that? The villains are members of a think tank so stupid that they are operating off of a table napkin scrawl Tony Stark wrote while nursing a hangover 13 years ago that wasn't in his particular field of study and they still can't get their tech right.  The lead villain demonstrated his intelligence through a 3-D projection of his brain but, seeing as it had no relevance to the plot and also didn't look like a brain, I find it more plausible that this was actually also an elaborate hoax, albeit an unimpressive one.  How about that bit where he pointed to the hole in his brain that would allow him to be smarter but that he hadn't figured out how to fill yet?  That was pretty bland.  Also, why was he wearing a purple plaid suit?  And why did Pepper gasp and flutter at the sight of a man in a purple plaid suit?

How does being really hot regenerate flesh?  Why is the process addictive? Why is the side effect that you explode?  Why does the villain kill the person who makes him not explode?  How do temperatures that can melt metal fail to hurt people in metal suits?  Why do the two folks holding Iron Mans hand not lose their limbs when he suddenly brakes at terminal velocities?  How'd they get the metal out of Tony's chest? WHY IS HALF OF THIS MOVIE SET IN TENNESSEE?  

Never mind, though, right?  Action!  Lots of action, most of it not great, but including a big finale involving a large variety of complicated metal objects flying around in ways that are difficult for the eyes to track and oh goddammit.  

I didn't hate this so much due to the raw strength of the material it was built on, but no amount of charm can save this movie from being awful.  Bruce Banner had the right idea in falling asleep.

In my humble opinion Star Trek continues to become a better and better show as time goes on.  The chronological order quest continues for me, and I've now hit the point where TnG ends, DS9 gets good and Voyager begins.  Of the three, I'm actually becoming more and more inclined towards the adventures of Captain Kathryn Janeway and crew.  The pilot leaves a little something to be desired, but the shows infancy is entirely more satisfying than that of the two previous shows.  TnG had the best core cast, DS9 the most gravitas, but Voyager has a nice mix of the two and a brilliant concept that should get better as the central plots begin to emerge.  Both of the new shows have something that TnG didn't: a beautiful opening credit sequence with amazing music.  They're inviting, homey, regal, comfortable places to sit and rest a while.  I queue up an episode before bed even when I know I'm going to drift off immediately just to listen to the orchestra capture a little bit of the majesty of space.

Of the leads: Sisko matches well against Picard as a reserved, thoughtful, deeply scarred human being, and he has an amazing speaking voice that belays intelligence and wisdom.  Janeway, on the other hand, is more of a Kirk - aggressive and curious, principled and in charge.  Both are better characters than their counterparts and exude leadership and charisma in a way that is barely understandable - they're Captains, even the one that's a Commander.  I especially like that Janeway has an insane knack for engineering and constantly gets to step in and correct or fix problems aboard her own ship, never beholden to her chief engineer. They both seem well representative of properly constructed characters in the minorities of television and I wish there were more characters like them in modern shows.

That's it for now.

ME3 is getting pretty stellar reviews across the board, which is to be expected, not because it necessarily deserves them but because people who make high budget video games generally know how to appease the system assuming they don't make a massive screw-up. The game is gorgeous, it's well-paced and fun, the story is not nearly as atrocious as most things out there, especially for the first half - it's easy to give it good marks and even to recommend it. Still, there is a laundry list of things wrong with it and I can certainly name a few:

• Atrocious new character design. The New Illusive Man, EVA, James and Allers (ESPECIALLY those two), Javik, Kai Leng - all have hatable character models that are usually matched with hatable personalities.
• A limited character roster filled mostly with ME1 favorites means it's easy to get stuck with a squad you're not wild about.
• Much of the character development dialogue is one-shot, contains no camera work, and is easily skipped by accident.
• The Normandy is poorly constructed and has a tremendous amount of unused space over five floors, any one of which might contain new content but requires a loading screen and a hike to go check every time you complete a mission.
• The exact same goes for the Citadel.
• The lighting in the Normandy is bad and the new sound effect realism modifications make it hard to hear some dialogue.
• Filler material is bland and uninteresting, more so than any prior.
• Sidequest tracking is bad, some of the sidequests are easily broken.
• Resource gathering (Galactic Readiness) is a meaningless number, especially after you fill the green bar.
• Dream sequences are hackneyed, meaningless, and boring.
• Pacing is correct for a video game but inappropriate for the setting in which it is clearly established that the Reapers harvest no less than 1.6 million people per day - and that's just on your planet.
• Shorter than both previous titles despite advertisement to the contrary.
• Easier than both previous titles despite advertisement to the contrary (maybe that's just me).
• Multiplayer "Readiness Rating" decreases in real time, not game time. Multiplayer becomes a daily necessity for obsessive compulsives who don't have time to play the entire thing in one sitting.
• Galaxy map division and percentages are meaningless.
• No final boss.
• Lots of bad dialogue.
• Glitches.
• Origin must be installed on your computer. For me this meant loading ME3 through Origin through Steam, because fuck you I like Steam.
• Infiltrators designed to outsurvive better players and turn multiplayer matches into long, unpleasant experiences that no one is willing to leave. Vanguards have common glitch that immobilizes them and does the same thing.
• Your Shepards face doesn't load across all three games.
• The new Femshep, who has as hatable a face as any of the new characters, constantly loads her face on to your Shepards face at regular intervals.
• Maleshep still the worlds worst voice actor.
• Many bad DLC characters show up again. Many regular characters expected to show up again do not.
• In the best possible run, all of my favorite characters die.
• A mission that only ends when you run out of ammo, and thus never ends if you're playing a competent biotic.
• Blatant thematic copying from other source material without effectively transcribing the emotional value of the material copied. (notable: Winter on Mars, the Miranda Complex from Firefly, all of the terrible games where you chase mystery children through forests in slow motion, and firmly sticking to the flawed proposition that Shepard=some sort of mass-murdering Jesus )
• The ending. That one gets a post all to itself.

Despite all of this Mass Effect 3 is an incredibly fun experience. For all the story inadequacies the gameplay is just short of perfect, so much so that I eventually found myself enjoying the co-op horde mode more than I enjoyed the single-player, which I had to force myself through. It's empty fare where it should be rich, but it's so goddamn delicious it's kinda hard to care.

Star Trek: The Trekkening

he mad quest continues. To date, the rabbit hole goes as deep as season one of The Next Generation, which is quite a ways from where we left off. I've seen six movies, two of which were bizarrely off-kilter and kind of charming because of it. I've been through all of third season of the original, most of which is unequivocally bad, but with a few solid gems. Probably the most singularly memorable episode featured a mad prison gambit by a former Starfleet officer who, in addition to being a cooler version of Kirk in the past, was a cooler version of Kirk in the present. Probably the most terrible episode featured Abraham Lincoln wrestling a Klingon. All in all, there are good times to be had.

TnG hasn't grown the beard yet, so what I'm getting is supposed to be a mixed bag. Nonetheless, I was startled by the episode "Coming of Age", which a) features Wesley Crusher in a completely not-hatable plotline of his own, and b) features Captain Picard at his finest. The episode hints at a grand plot of conspiracy at Starfleet, which is so much cooler than any external crisis threatening humanity. Real characters here. Real intrigue. God do I hope they run with it.

Currently TnG's only running web of recurrence is Q - who is interesting only in that he's the most charming form of god-creature to grace the set - so it's nice to have this floating on the horizon. Also, Picard dons a Starfleet topcoat-thing in this episode, and it's a hundred times cooler than any other costume the military has yet designed. Represent!

I, Mudd

When this is done I hope to have a list of essential Star Trek episodes, in addition to good ones. I am kind of surprised to find "I, Mudd" makes the list on both counts. Harcourt Fenton Mudd, the recurring character in this episode, had little appeal in his previous episode apart from his awesome name, and I very nearly skipped this episode when I saw he'd be making a second appearance.

However, this episode is deliberately light, and unlike previous attempts, it actually succeeds at being funny. Young Shatner, whose acting I believed to be pretty much beyond repair at this time, actually nails comic timing. Pretty much the entire cast gets a line or two of character development and a moment of crowning glory.

And then they all go insane. Literally every character of importance on the Enterprise, of their own free will, acts like a ninny for a full twenty minutes for LEGITIMATE STORY PURPOSES. It's glorious.

They do, however, abandon Harry Mudd on a planet to fend for himself at the end, similar to the events in Space Seed. So where's Star Trek XII: The Wrath of Mudd?